Thereafter they all behaved as if they had separated yesterday and
nothing was more natural than to find themselves together again. Amelia,
with bitterness in her heart, accepted the room she again longed to
repudiate, and Nan, with a lifted eyebrow at Raven, as if wondering
whether she'd really better be as daring as he indicated, followed
Charlotte up the stairs. At supper they talked decorously of the state
of the nation, which Raven frankly conceived of as going to the dogs,
and Amelia upheld, from an optimism which assumed Raven to be amenable
to only the most hopeful of atmospheres. After supper, when they
hesitated before the library door, Nan said quite openly, as one who has
decided that only the straight course will do:
"Rookie, could I see you a minute? In the dining-room?" She took in
Amelia with her frank smile. "Please, Mrs. Powell! It's business."
"Certainly," Amelia said, rather stiffly. "Come, Dick. We'll keep up the
fire."
They had evidently, she and Dick, resolved, though independently of each
other, to behave their best, and Dick, in excess of social virtue, shut
the library door, so that no wisp of talk would float that way and
settle on them. Nan confronted Raven with gayest eyes.
"Did you ever!" she said, recurring to the Charlottian form of comment.
"At the last minute, if you please, when I was taking the train. There
she was behind me. We talked all the way, 'stiddy stream' (Charlotte!)
and not a thing you could put your finger on. Did he send for her?"
"I rather think so," said Raven, giving Dick every possible advantage.
Then, rallied by her smiling eyes, "Well, yes, of course he did. Don't
look at me like that. I have to turn myself inside out, you she-tyrant!"
"Does Dick know?" she hastened to ask. "About Tira?"
"Yes."
"Know what I'm here for?"
"Yes."
"Given his word not to blab? Hope to die?" That was their childish form
of vow, hers and Dick's.
"I hope so," said Raven doubtfully. "I represented it to him as being
necessary."
"I'll represent it, too," said Nan. "Now, Rookie, I'm going over there,
first thing to-morrow morning. I'm going to see Tenney."
"The deuce you are! I'm afraid that won't do."
"Nothing else will," said Nan. "Tenney's got to give his consent. We
can't do any kidnaping business. That's no good."
She said it with the peremptory implication of extinguishing middle-aged
scruples, and Raven also felt it to be "no good."
"Very well," said he. "You know best. I'll go with you."
"Oh, no, you won't. There are too many men-folks in it now. I'm going
alone. Now, come back and talk to the family. Oh, I hope and pray
Dick'll be good! Doesn't he look dear to-night, all red, as if he'd been
logging? Has he? Have you? You look just the same. Oh, I do love Dick! I
wish he'd let me, the way I want to."
Meantime Charlotte had come in, and Nan went to her and put her hands on
her shoulders and rubbed cheeks, as she used to do with Raven.
"Come on," she said to him. "Time!"
So they went into the library and conversed, with every conventional
flourish, until Amelia set the pace of retirement by a ladylike yawn.
But she had a word to say before parting, reserved perhaps to the last
because she found herself doubtful of Raven's response. If she had to be
snubbed she could simply keep on her way out of the room.
"John," said she, at the door, with the effect of a sudden thought, "how
about Anne's estate? Are they getting it settled?"
Raven hesitated a perceptible instant. He somehow had an idea the estate
was an affair of his, not to say Nan's.
"I suppose so," he answered, frowning. "Whitney's likely to do the right
thing."
Amelia was never especially astute in the manner of danger signals.
"I suppose," she said, "you've made up your mind what to invest in. Or
are the things in pretty good shape? Can you leave them as they are?"
Dick was standing by the hearth, wishing hard for a word with Nan. She
had smiled at him once or twice, so peaceably! The next step might be to
a truce and then everlasting bliss. Now, suddenly aware of his mother,
he ungratefully kicked the fire that was making him such pretty dreams,
went to her, took her by the arm and proceeded with her across the hall.
"You talk too much," said Dick, when he had her inside her room. "Don't
you know better than to drag in Miss Anne? He's touchy as the devil."
"Then he must get over it," said Amelia, in her best manner of the
intelligent mentor. "Of course, she was a great loss to him."
"Don't you believe it," said Dick conclusively. "She had her paw on him.
What the deuce is it in him that makes all the women want to dry-nurse
him and build him up and make him over?"
Then he wondered what Nan was saying to Raven at the moment, remembered
also Raven's injunction to play a square game with her and, though his
feet were twitching to carry him back to the library, sat doggedly down
at his mother's hearth and encouraged her to talk interminably. Amelia
was delighted. She didn't know Dick had so earnest an interest in the
Federation of Clubs and her popular course in economics. She was
probably never more sustainedly intelligent than in that half hour,
until Dick heard Nan going up to bed, sighed heavily, and lost interest
in the woman citizen.
Nan and Raven, standing by the fire, in their unexpected minute of
solitude, looked at each other and smiled in recognizing that they were
alone and that when that happened things grew simple and straight. To
Raven there was also the sense of another presence. Anne had somehow
been invoked. Amelia, with her unfailing dexterity in putting her foot
in, had done it: but still there Anne was, with the unspoken question on
her silent lips. What was he going to do? He knew her wish. Presently he
would have her money. He caught the interrogation in Nan's eyes. What
was he going to do?
"I don't know, Nan," he said. "I don't know."
"Never mind," said Nan. "You'll know when the time comes."
And he was aware that she was still in her mood of forcing him on to
make his own decisions. But, easily as he read her mind, there were many
things he did not see there. It was a turmoil of questions, and of these
the question of Aunt Anne was least. Did he love Tira? This headed the
list. Did he want to tear down his carefully built edifice of culture
and the habit of conventional life, and run away with Tira to elemental
simplicities and sweet deliriums? And if he did love Tira, if he did
want to tear down his house of life and live in the open, she would help
him. But all she said was:
"Good night, Rookie. I'm sleepy, too."
To leap a dull interval of breakfast banalities is to find Nan, on a
crisp day, blue above and white below, at the Tenneys' door. Tira,
frankly apprehensive, came to let her in. Tira had had a bad night. The
burning of the crutch fanned a fire of torment in her uneasy mind. She
had hardly slept, and though she heard Tenney's regular breathing at her
side, she began to have a suspicion it was not a natural breathing. She
was persuaded he meant now to keep track of her, by night as well as
day. It began to seem to her a colossal misfortune that the crutch was
not there leaning against the foot of the bed, and now its absence was
not so much her fault as a part of its own malice. Nan, noting the worn
pallor of her face and the dread in her eyes, gathered that Tenney was
at home. She put out her hand, and Tira, after an instant's hesitation,
gave hers. Nan wondered if she were in a terror wild enough to paralyze
her power of action. Still, she had given her hand, and when Nan stepped
up on the sill, with a cheerful implication of intending, against any
argument, to come in, she stood aside and followed her. But at the
instant of her stepping aside, Nan was aware that she threw both hands
up slightly. It was the merest movement, an unstudied gesture of
despair. Tenney was sitting by the kitchen stove, and Nan went to him
with outstretched hand.
"I thought I should find you if I came early enough," she said. "How's
your foot?"
She had a direct address country folk liked. She was never "stand-off,"
"stuck-up." It was as easy talking with her as with John Raven.
"Some better, I guess," said Tenney. He eyed her curiously. Had Raven
sent her, for some hidden reason, to spy out the land?
"You get round, don't you?" pursued Nan.
She took the chair Tira brought her and regarded him across the shining
stove. Tira withdrew to a distance, and stood immovable by the scullery
door, as if, Nan thought, she meant to keep open her line of retreat.
"No," said Tenney grimly, "I don't git about much. Three times a day I
git from the house to the barn. I expect to do better, as time goes on.
I've got my eye on a cord wood stick, an' I'm plannin' how I can whittle
me out a crutch."
Nan, glancing at Tira, caught the tremor that went over her and
understood this was, in a veiled way, a threat. She came, at a leap, to
the purpose of her call.
"Mr. Tenney," she said, "I'm an awfully interfering person. I've come to
ask you and your wife to let me do something."
Tenney was staring at her with lacklustre eyes. In these latter days,
the old mad spark in them had gone.
"Your baby," said Nan, feeling her heart beat hard, "isn't right. I know
places where such poor little children are made--right--if they can be.
They're studied and looked after. I want you to let me take him away
with me and see if something can be done. His mother could go, too, if
she likes. You could go. Only, I'll be responsible. I'll arrange it
all."
Tenney still stared at her, and she found the dull gaze disconcerting.
"So," he said at length, not even glancing at Tira, "so she's put that
into your head."
"So far as that goes," said Nan boldly, "I've put it into hers. I saw he
wasn't right. I told her I'd do everything in my power, in anybody's
power, to have him"--she hesitated here for a homely word he might take
in--"seen to. And now (you're his father) I've come to you."
Tenney sat a long time, motionless, his eyes on the window at the end of
the room where a woodbine spray was tapping, and again Nan became
conscious of the increased tremor in Tira's frame. For now it seemed to
have run over her and strangely to keep time to the woodbine spray
outside. One would have said the woodbine, looking in, had, in a mad,
irritating way, made itself the reflex of these human emotions within
the room. Tenney spoke, drily yet without emphasis:
"Then he put ye up to this?"
"Who?" asked Nan.
For some obscure reason he would not mention Raven's name. But he spoke
with a mildness of courtesy surprising to her and evidently the more
alarming to Tira, for she shook the more and the vine appallingly knew
and kept her company.
"I'm obleeged to ye," said Tenney. "But I don't want nothin' done for me
nor mine. He's mine, ye see. He's in there asleep"--he pointed to the
open bedroom door--"an' asleep or awake, he's mine, same's any man's
property is his. An' if he ain't right, he ain't, an' I know why, an'
it's the will o' the Lord, an' the Lord's will is goin' to be fulfilled
now an' forever after, amen!"
The tang of scripture phrasing led him further to the channel his mind
was always fumbling for.
"Do you," he asked Nan, not with any great show of fervor, but as if
this were his appointed task, "do you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ
yet? Be ye saved?"
"Mr. Tenney," said Nan, "I don't care a scrap whether I'm saved or not,
if I can make this world swing a little easier on its hinges." That
seemed to her a figure not markedly vivid, and she continued. "It needs
a sight of oiling. Don't you see it does? O, Mr. Tenney, think of the
poor little boy that's got to live along"--the one phrase still seemed
to her the best--"not right, and grow to be a man, and you may die and
leave him, and his mother may die. What's he going to do then?"
"No," said Tenney quietly, with the slightest glance at Tira in her
tremor there by the door, "I ain't goin' to die, not this v'y'ge. If
anybody's goin' to, it ain't me."
"O Isr'el!" said Tira. Her voice rose scarcely above a whisper and she
bent toward him in a beseeching way as if she might, in another instant,
run to him. "You let him go. You an' me'll stay here together, long as
we live. There sha'n't nothin' come betwixt us, Isr'el." In this Nan
heard a hidden anguish of avowal. "But you let him go."
Tenney did not regard her. He spoke, pointedly to Nan:
"I'm obleeged to ye." He rose from his chair. He was dismissing her. His
action approached a dignity not to be ignored, and Nan also rose.
"I sha'n't give it up," she said. "I shall come again."
She tried to smile at him with composure, including Tira in the
friendliness of it, but Tira, oblivious of her, was staring at Tenney,
and Nan found herself outside, trouble in her mind. Tira had not gone to
the door with her. She had staid still staring, in that fixed
interrogation, at Tenney. He looked at her now, met her eyes, and gave a
little grimace. He had done well, the movement said. He had seen through
it all. He was pleased with himself. Now he spoke to her, so affably
that she frowned with perplexity at finding him kind.
"'Tain't so terrible hard," said Tenney, "to see through folks, once ye
set your mind on it. He started her out on that, he an' you together,
mebbe. ''F I git rid o' the young one,' you says, 'I shall have more
freedom to range round, outdoor.' Mebbe you said it to him. Mebbe he
said it to you. Mebbe 'twas t'other one--Martin--that said it an' you
took it up. No, 'tain't so hard to see through folks, once ye git a
start."
He turned and took, with a difficulty half assumed, the few steps to the
wood-box, selected a couple of sticks and, with a quiet deftness that
seemed to indicate a mind bent only on the act itself, put them in the
stove. Tira watched him, fascinated by him, the strength in abeyance,
the wayward will. When he set on the stove cover, it seemed to break the
spell of her rigidity and she turned, hurried into the scullery and came
back. She had, he saw, a knife. That was not alarming. It was a small
kitchen knife, but he recognized it as the one she made a great fuss
about, asking him to sharpen it often and keeping it for special use.
But she gripped it strangely. Besides, there was the strangeness of her
face.
"Here! here!" he said. "What you doin' o' that knife?"
Tira was not thinking of him. She had gone, with her quick, lithe step,
to the window where the vine was tapping, and thrown it up.
"Here!" he called again, his uneasiness shifting; whatever a woman was
doing, with a face like that, she must be stopped. "What you openin'
winders for, a day like this, coldin' off the room?"
Tira reached out and seized the woodbine spray, cut it savagely and then
shut the window. She came back with the spray in her hand, took off the
stove cover and thrust it in, twining and writhing as if it had life and
rebelled against the flame.
"There!" she said. "I ain't goin' to have no vines knockin' at winders
an' scarin' anybody to death."
Then she went into the scullery and put the knife in its place, blade up
in a little frame over the sink, and came back into the bedroom where
the child was whimpering. She stayed there a long time, and Tenney stood
where she left him, listening for her crooning song. When it began, as
it did presently, he gave a nod of relief and started moving about the
room. Once he went into the scullery, and Tira heard him pumping. But
when she had got the child dressed, and had gone out there herself, to
prepare the vegetables for dinner, she put her hand mechanically,
without looking, on the rack above the sink. The hand knew what it
should find, but it did not find it. The knife was gone. Tira stood a
long time looking, not at the empty place, but down at her feet. It was
not alarming to miss the knife. It was reassuring. It was not to be
believed, yet she must believe it. Tenney was taking precautions. He was
afraid.
Nan, halfway home, met Raven. He had been walking up and down, to meet
her. Defeat, he saw, with a glance at her face.
"Yes," said Nan, coming up with him. "No go, Rookie. He was civil. But
he was dreadful. I don't know whether I should have known it, but it's
the way she looked at him. Rookie, she was scared blue."
Raven said nothing. He felt a poor stick indeed, to have brought Nan
into it and given her over to defeat.
"Can't we walk a spell?" said she. "Couldn't we take the back road to
the hut? I do so want to talk to you."
They turned back and passed the Tenneys' at a smart pace. Raven gave the
house a swift glance. He was always expecting to hear Tira cry out, she
who never did and who, he knew, would endure torture like an Indian.
They turned into the back road where the track was soft with the latest
snow, and came into the woods again opposite the hut. When they reached
it and Raven put down his hand for the key, Nan asked:
"Does she come here often?"
"Not lately," he said, fitting the key in the lock. "She had rather a
quiet time of it while he was lame."
They went in and Nan kept on her coat while he lighted the fire and
piled on brush.
"Rookie," she said, when he had it leaping, "it's an awful state of
things. The man's insane."
"No," said Raven, "I don't feel altogether sure of that. We're too ready
to call a man insane, now there's the fashion of keeping tabs. Look at
me. I do something outside the ordinary--I kick over the traces--and
Milly says I'm to go to the Psychopathic. Dick more than half thinks so,
too. Perhaps I ought. Perhaps most of us ought. We deflect just enough
from what the majority are thinking and doing to warrant them in
shutting us up. No, I don't believe you could call him insane."
They talked it out from all quarters of argument. Nan proposed emergency
activities and Raven supplied the counter reason, always, he owned,
going back to Tira's obstinacy. Nan was game to kidnap the child, even
from Tira's arms. Couldn't be done, Raven told her. Not longer ago than
yesterday, Tira would have consented, but now, he reminded her, Tenney's
crazy mind was on him. Yes, it was a crazy mind, he owned, but Tenney
was not on that account to be pronounced insane. He couldn't be shut up,
at least without Tira's concurrence. And she never would concur. She
had, if you could put it so, an insane determination equal in measure to
Tenney's insane distrust, to keep the letter of her word. Then, Nan
argued, Tira and the child together must go back with her. To Tenney,
used only to the remote reaches of his home, the labyrinth of city life
was impenetrable. He couldn't possibly find them. He wouldn't be
reasonable enough, intelligent enough, to take even the first step. And
Raven could stay here and fight out the battle. Tenney wouldn't do
anything dramatically silly. Tira was "'way off" in fearing that. He
would only fix Raven with those unpleasant eyes and ask if he were
saved. Very well, Raven agreed. It was worth trying. They must catch the
first chance of seeing Tira alone.
Then, though his mind was on Tira, it reverted to Anne. Again she seemed
to be inexorably beside him, reminding him, with that delicate touch of
her invisible finger, that he was not thinking of her, not even putting
his attention uninterruptedly on what she had bidden him do: her last
request, he seemed to hear her remonstrating, half sighing it to
herself, as if it were only one more of the denials life had made her.
Even if he did not agree with her, in his way of taking things (throwing
away his strength, persuading young men to throw away theirs, that the
limited barbarism called love of country might be served) could he not
act for her, in fulfilling her rarer virtue of universal love?
"I tell you what, Nan," he said, with a leap from Tira to the woman more
potent now in her unseen might than she had ever been when her subtle
ways of mastery had been in action before him, "it's an impossible
situation."
How did she know he was talking, not of Tira but of Anne? Yet she did
know. There had been a moment's pause and perhaps her mind leaped with
his.
It was, she agreed, impossible. Yet, after all, so many things weren't,
that looked so at the start. Think of surgery: the way they'd both seen
men made over. Well! He didn't remind her that they had also seen a
mountain of men, if fate had piled their bodies as high as it was piling
the fame of their endeavor, who couldn't be made over.
"If we refuse her," he said--and though Nan was determined he should
make his decision alone, she loved him for the coupling of their
intent--"we seem to repudiate her. And that's perfectly devilish, with
her where she is."
It was devilish, Nan agreed. Her part here seemed to be acquiescence in
his attitude of mind, going step by step with him as he broke his path.
"And," said Raven, lapsing into a confidence he had not meant to
make--for would Anne in her jealous possessiveness, allow him to share
one intimate thought about her, especially with Nan?--"the strange part
of it is, I do seem to feel she's somewhere. I seem to feel she's here.
Reminding me, you know, just as a person can by looking at you, though
he doesn't say a word. Have you felt that? Do you now?"
"No," said Nan, with her uncalculated decisiveness that made you sure
she was not merely speaking the truth as she saw it, but that she did
see it clearly. "I have felt it, though, about other people. About two
or three of the boys over there, you know. They were the ones I knew
rather well. And Old Crow! up here, Rookie, alone with you, I have that
sense of Old Crow's being alive, very much alive. Is it the thoughts
he's left behind him, written on the air, or is it really Old Crow?"
"The air's been changed a good many times since he was here," said Raven
lightly. It was not good for little girls to be wrestling forever with
things formless and dark.
"Oh," said she, "but there's something left. Our minds make pictures.
They don't get rubbed out. Why, I can see old Billy Jones sitting here
and Old Crow bandaging his legs, and your mother and little Jack coming
up to bring things in a basket. You can say that's because Old Crow told
it so vividly I can't get it out of my mind. But that isn't all. Things
don't get rubbed out."