Nan was very tired. She went to bed soon after dark and slept deeply.
But she woke with the first dawn, roused into a full activity of mind
that in itself startled her. There was the robin outside her window--was
it still that one robin who had nothing to do but show you how bravely
he could sing?--and she had an irritated feeling he had tried to call
her. Her room was on the east and the dawn was still gray. She lay
looking at it a minute perhaps after her eyes came open: frightened,
that was it, frightened. Things seemed to have been battering at her
brain in the night, and all the windows of her mind had been closed, the
shutters fast, and they could not get in. But now the light was coming
and they kept on battering. And whatever they wanted, she was
frightened, too frightened to give herself the panic of thinking it
over, finding out what she was frightened about; but she got up and
hurried through her dressing, left a line on her pillow for the maid and
went downstairs, out into a dewy morning. She had taken her coat, her
motor cap and gloves. Once in the road she started to run, and then
remembered she must not pass Tenney's running, as if the world were
afire, as things were in her mind. But she did walk rapidly, and
glancing up when she was opposite the house, saw the front door open as
Tira had left it, and a figure in one of the back rooms outlined against
the window of the front one where she and Tira had sat. That would be
Tenney. He must be accounting to himself for the lonesome house, though
indeed Tira would have left some word for him. When she went up the path
to Raven's door she was praying to the little imps of luck that Amelia
might not be the first to hear her. She tapped softly, once, twice, and
then Raven's screen came up and he looked down at her. They spoke a word
each.
"Hurry," said Nan.
"Wait," he answered, and put down the screen.
When he came out, Nan met him on the top step where she had been
sitting, trying harder still not to be frightened. But he, too, was
frightened, she saw, and that this, to him also, meant Tira.
"Get your coat," she said. "She's gone. Over to Mountain Brook."
Raven's face did not alter from its set attention.
"Yes," said Nan, "the car. I'll tell you the rest of it on the way."
He got his coat and cap, and they went down to the garage together.
Shortly, they were slipping out of the yard, and she, with one oblique
glance, saw Amelia at a window in her nightie, and forgot to be
frightened for the instant while she thought Amelia would be accounting
for this as one of her tricks and compressing her lips and honorably
saying nothing to Dick about it. Raven turned down the road and Nan
wondered if she had even spoken the name of Mountain Brook.
"Let her out," said she.
Raven did let her out. He settled himself to his driving, and still he
had not questioned her. Nan turned her face to him and spoke incisively
against the wind of their going:
"The baby died. Tira lay on it in her sleep. That was Monday. It was
buried yesterday. At Mountain Brook. Tira went back to Mountain Brook
yesterday afternoon, to carry the baby some flowers"--the moment she
said this she saw how silly it was and wondered why she had not seen it,
why she had been such a fool as not to be frightened sooner. "She said
she would spend the night with those Donnyhills." But had Tira thrown in
the Donnyhills to keep Nan from being frightened?
Raven gave no sign of having heard. They were speeding. The east behind
them was a line of light, and the mists were clearing away. When they
turned into the narrow river road, the gray seemed to be there waiting
for them, for this was the gorge with the steep cliff on one side and
the river on the other, always dark, even at midday, with moss patches
on the cliffs and small streams escaping from their fissures and
tumbling: always the sound of falling water.
"The Donnyhills?" Raven asked. "Don't I remember them? Sort of gypsy
tribe, shif'less."
"Yes, that's it. She must have known them when she lived over there,
before she married."
"That's where we go, is it?"
"No," said Nan, and now she wondered if she could keep her voice from
getting away from her. "Stop where the cross cut comes out! Old
Moosewood's stepping stones. She was going to cross by them, where old
Moosewood----" There she stopped, to get a hand on herself, knowing she
was going to tell him, who knew it before she was born, the story of
Moosewood, the Indian, found there dead.
If the stab of her disclosures drew blood from Raven she could not have
told. The road was narrower still, and rougher. Nan had forgotten where
the stepping stones came out. He was slackening now. She knew the curve
and the point where the cliff broke on the left, for the little path
that continued the cross cut on the other side of the road. He got out
without a glance at her, stepped to the water side of the roadway, and
she followed him. And it was exactly what her fear had wakened her to
say. There was no sign of Tira, but, grotesquely, her hat was lying on
one of the stepping stones, as if she had reckoned upon its telling
them. Raven ran down the path and into the shallow water near the bank,
and again Nan followed him, and, at the edge of the water, stopped and
waited. When the water was above his waist, he stooped, put down his
arms and brought up something that, against the unwilling river, took
all his strength. And this was Tira. He came in shore, carrying her, and
walking with difficulty, and Nan ran up the bank before him. He laid
Tira's body on the ground, and stood for an instant getting his breath,
not looking at her, not looking at Nan.
"It's over," he said then quietly. "It's been over for hours." That was
the instant of reaction, and he shook himself free of it. "Where do they
live?" he asked Nan brusquely. "Yes, I know. We'll take her there. I'll
hold her. You drive."
He lifted Tira again, put her into the car as if a touch might hurt her,
and sat there holding her, waiting for Nan. And Nan got in and drove on
to the Donnyhills'.
All that forenoon was a madness of haste and strangeness. It is as well
to look at it through the eyes of Nan, for Raven, though he seemed like
himself and was a model of crisp action, had no thoughts at all. To Nan
it was a long interval from the moment of stopping before the little
gray Donnyhill house (and rousing more squalid Donnyhills than you would
have imagined in an underground burrow of wintering animals), through
indignities they had to show Tira's body, the hopeless effort of rousing
it again to its abjured relations with an unfriendly world. And while
they worked on the tenant-less body, the Donnyhill boy, a giant with a
gentle face, said he could drive, and was sent with Raven's car to the
farmer who had a telephone, and the doctor came and Nan heard herself
explaining to him that she woke up worried over Tira, because Tira had
spoken of the stepping stones. The doctor shook his head over it all.
The woman had been almost beside herself after the child's death.
Perfectly quiet about it, too. But that was the kind. Nan didn't think
she had any intention--any design?--and Nan hastened to say Tira had
told why she was going, told it quite simply. She had forgotten to give
the child any flowers. Of course, that did show how wrought up she was.
And there were the stepping stones. They were always tricky. Here the
doctor brought up old Moosewood, and said there were queer things. When
you came to think of it, New England's a queer place. Suicide? No!
Inquest? No! He guessed he knew. Then he went away and promised to send
the other man who would be the last to meddle with the body of Tira.
The Donnyhill house was still, for all the children, with consolatory
chunks of bread in hand, had been sent off into the spacious playing
places about them. Mrs. Donnyhill, who looked like a weather-worn gypsy,
went about muttering to herself passionately sorrowful lamentations:
"God help us! poor creatur'! poor soul!" and she and Nan bathed Tira's
body--somehow they were glad to wash off the river water--and put on it
a set of clothes Nan suspected of being Mrs. Donnyhill's only decent
wear. For the folded garments were all by themselves in the bedroom
bureau, and it was true that the women in this region had forethought
for a set to be buried in. When this was over and before the coming of
the other man who was to have rights over Tira's body, Mrs. Donnyhill
remembered Raven and Nan might not have breakfasted, and gave them bread
and strong tea--brewed over night, it seemed to have been. They ate and
drank, and she moved about tucking children's tyers and sweaters into
holes of concealment and making her house fitting for Tira's majesty,
all the time muttering her pleas to God.
About noon, when Tira was lying in the front room, in her solitude, no
more to be touched until she was put into her coffin, Raven came in from
his steady walk up and down before the house and went to Nan, where she
sat by the window in the other front room. The strength had gone out of
her. She sat up straight and strong, but her lips were ashen. As they
confronted each other, each saw chiefly great weariness. Raven's face,
Nan thought, was like a mask. It was grave, it was intent, but it did
not really show that he felt anything beyond the general seriousness of
the moment.
"Get your things," he said to her. "We'll go back. Tenney's got to be
told, and I suppose Charlotte or somebody will have to do something to
his house."
They both knew the strange commotion attendant here on funerals.
Sometimes houses were upturned from top to bottom and cleaned, even to
the paint. Nan put out a hand and touched his arm.
"Don't do that, Rookie," she said, "don't take her back there. She
mustn't go into that house again. She wouldn't want it."
Raven considered a moment. His face did not lose its mask-like calm.
"No," he said then, "she mustn't. She must come to my house--or yours."
"No," said Nan again, still keeping her hand on his arm, and aching so
with pity that she was humbly grateful to him for letting her touch his
sleeve, "she mustn't do that either. It would be queer, Rookie. It would
'make talk.' She wouldn't like that. Don't you see?"
He did see. He gave a concurring motion of the head and was turning away
from her, but Nan rose and, still with her hand on his arm, detained
him.
"We'll leave her here," she said. "That woman--she's darling. We can
make up to her afterward. But you mustn't appear in it again, except to
tell Tenney, if you'd rather. Though I could do that. Now, let's go."
He was ready. But when he had reached the little entry between this room
and the one where Tira's body lay, she ran to him.
"Rookie," she said, "Mrs. Donnyhill's out there with the children. Don't
you want to go in and see Tira?"
Raven stood for a minute, considering. Then he crossed the entry and
Nan, finding he could not, for some reason, put his hand on the latch,
opened the door for him, and he went in. But only a step. He stood
there, his eyes on the poor bed where Tira lay, and then, as if he were
leaving a presence, he stepped back into the entry, and Nan understood
that he was not even carrying with him the memory of her great majesty
of beauty. She thought she understood. Even Tira's face was to be left
covered. She was to be inviolate from the eyes of men. In a few minutes
he had brought round the car, Nan had arranged things with Mrs.
Donnyhill, and they drove out into the day--blazing now, like
midsummer--and so home. And all the way they did not speak, until,
passing Tenney's, the door open and the house with a strange look of
being asleep in the sun, Nan said:
"Leave me here. I'll see him and then go on."
Raven did not answer. He drove past, to her own gate, and Nan,
understanding she was not to move further in any direction, got out.
Raven, perhaps feeling his silence had been unmerciful to her, spoke
quietly:
"Run and get a bath and a sleep. I'll see him. I'll come for you if
you're needed."
He turned the car and drove back, and Nan went in to her waiting house.
Raven stopped before Tenney's and, since the front door was open, halted
there and knocked. No answer. Then he went round to the side door and
knocked again, and called out several times, and the sound of his voice
brought back to him, like a sickness, the memory of Tenney's catamount
yell when he had heard it that day in the woods. No answer. The house
was asleep and a calf blared from the barn. He went back to the car,
drove home, and found Jerry waiting in the yard and Charlotte at the
door. Dick was in his chair down under the trees, his mother beside him,
reading. It was so unusual to see Amelia there that Raven wondered
idly--not that it mattered--he could meet a regiment of Amelias with
this callousness upon him--if Dick had beguiled her away so that she
might not pounce on him when he returned. He got out of the car stiffly.
He was, he felt at that instant, an old man. But if physical ineptitude
meant age, Jerry and Charlotte were also old, for Jerry was bewildered
beyond the possibility of speech and Charlotte shaken out of her calm.
"You come into the kitchen," she said, and Raven followed her, and sank
into a chair, set his elbows on the table, and leaned his head in his
hands. He was very tired, but Mrs. Donnyhill's boiled tea was inexorably
keeping him up. Charlotte, standing above him, put her hand on his
shoulder.
"Johnnie," she said, "Isr'el Tenney's been here. He wants you to give
him back his gun."
"Oh," said Raven, taking his head out of his hands and sitting up. "His
gun?"
"He says," Charlotte continued, her voice shaking, "Tira's run away. I
told him the last I see o' Tira was yesterday afternoon standin' in her
own door, an' he asked if she had her things on an' I didn't know what
to say. An' he said somebody down the road said you went by 'fore light,
drivin' like blazes. An' you had a woman in the car. An' Tira'd run
away."
Raven was looking up at her, a little smile on his lips, but in his eyes
such strange things that Charlotte caught his head to her and held it
against her breast.
"Yes," he said, "yes, Charlotte, Tira has run away. She went yesterday,
over to Mountain Brook. She tried to cross the stepping stones. She's
over at the Donnyhills' now. She's going to stay there till she's
buried. I'll go and tell him. Where do you think he is?"
Charlotte still held his head against her warm heart.
"You don't s'pose," she whispered, "you don't believe she done _that_?"
"What?" he answered, and then her meaning came to him as his first hint
of what Tira might have done. He drew himself away from the kind hand
and sat up straight. "No," he said sharply. "It was an accident. She
never meant"--it had come upon him that this was what she had meant and
what she had done. But it must not be told of her, even to Nan. "Where's
Tenney?" he said. "Where do you think he is?"
Charlotte hesitated.
"He's up there," she said, after a moment while Raven waited, "up to the
hut. He said he's goin' to git his gun out o' there if he had to break
an' enter. He said he see it through the winder not two days ago. An'
Jerry hollered after him if he laid hand to your property he'd have the
law on him. Jerry was follerin' on after him, but you went by in the car
an' I called on him to stop. O Johnnie, don't you go up there, or you
let Jerry an' me go with you. If ever a man was crazed, that man's
Isr'el Tenney, an' if you go up there an' stir him up!"
"Nonsense!" said Raven, in his old kind tone toward her, and Charlotte
gave a little sob of relief at hearing it again. "I've got to see him
and tell him what I've told you. You and Jerry stay where you are.
Tenney's not dangerous. Except to her," he added bitterly to himself, as
he left the house. "And a child in its cradle. My God! he was dangerous
to her!" And Charlotte, watching from the window, saw him go striding
across the road and up the hill.
Raven, halfway up, began to hear an unexpected sound: blows, loud and
regular, wood on wood. When he had passed the turning by the three firs
he knew, really before his eyes confirmed it. Tenney was there at the
hut, and he had a short but moderately large tree trunk--almost heavier
than he could manage--and was using it as a battering ram. He was
breaking down the door. Raven, striding on, shouted, but he was close at
hand before Tenney was aware of him and turned, breathless, letting the
log fall. He had actually not heard, and Raven's presence seemed to take
him aback. Yet he was in no sense balked of his purpose. He faced about,
breathless from his lifting and ramming, and Raven saw how intense was
the passion in him: witnessed by the whiteness of his face, the burning
of his eyes.
"I come up here," said Tenney, "after my gun. You can git it for me an'
save your door."
Raven paid no attention to this.
"You'd better come along down," he said. "We'll stop at my house and
talk things over."
This he offered in that futile effort the herald of bad news inevitably
makes, to approach it slowly.
"Then," said Tenney, "you hand me out my gun. I don't leave here till I
have my gun."
"Tenney," said Raven, "I've got bad news for you."
"Yes," said Tenney blankly. "She's run away. You carried her off this
mornin'. You don't need to tell me that."
"I didn't carry her off," said Raven, speaking slowly and clearly, for
he had a feeling that Tenney was somehow deaf to him. "Tira went over to
Mountain Brook yesterday. Nan knew she was going, and this morning she
was worried, because she got thinking of Tira's crossing the stepping
stones. She asked me to take her over there. We found her. She was
drowned."
Tenney's eyes had shifted from Raven's face. The light had gone out of
them, and they clung blankly to the tree spaces and the distance.
"Have it your own way," said Tenney, in as blank a tone. "Settle it
amongst ye."
"We shall go over to-morrow," said Raven. "Will you go with us?"
"No," said Tenney.
"Drownded herself," he said, at length. "Well, that's where it led to.
It's all led to that."
"She slipped," said Raven roughly. "Don't you understand? Anybody could,
off those wet stones."
"You open that door," said Tenney, "an' gimme my gun."
But Raven went on talking to him, telling him quietly and reasonably
what they had judged it best to do, he and Nan. If Tira had wanted the
baby buried over there by her mother, wouldn't she want to be buried
there herself?
"Very well, then. We'll arrange things. The day after"--he could not
bring himself to put the bare ceremonial that would see her out of the
world into the words familiar to the country ear--"that will be the day.
We shall go over. We'll take you with us."
"No," said Tenney, "you needn't trouble yourselves. I sha'n't go over
there. Nor I sha'n't keep nobody else from goin'."
By this Raven judged he meant that he would not interfere with their
seeing Tira out of the world in their own way. The man had repudiated
her. It was a relief. It seemed to leave her, in her great freedom, the
more free.
"Come down now," said Raven, "to my house. We'll have something to eat."
That was all he could think of, to keep the stricken creature within
sound of human voices.
"I ain't hungry," said Tenney. "An' if I was"--here he stopped an
instant and a spasm shot across his face--"she left me cooked up."
"All right," said Raven. "Then you go home now, and later in the day
I'll come over and see if you've thought of anything else."
He believed the man should not, in his despairing frame of mind, be left
alone. Tenney turned, without a look at him, and went off down the
slope. Raven watched him round the curve. Then he took out the key from
under the stone, remembering it need never be put there again, went in
and locked the door. Suddenly he felt deadly sick. He went to the couch,
lay down and closed his eyes on the blackness before them. If he had a
wish, in this infinitude of desolation, it was that he might never open
them again on the dark defiles of this world. It was dusk when he did
open them, and for a minute he had difficulty in remembering why he was
there and the blow that had struck him down to such a quivering
apprehension of what was coming next. Then, before he quite found out,
he learned what had waked him. There was a voice outside--Tenney's
voice, only not Tenney's as he had known it--whimpering, begging in a
wild humility:
"You there? You let me in. You there? For God's sake let me in."
Raven was at once clearly awake. His mind was, after its interlude of
darkness, ready. He got up, and opened the door.
"Come in," he said. "Yes, leave the door open. I've been asleep. It's
close in here."
Tenney came in, not so much limping as stumbling. He seemed to be
shorter in stature. His head was bent, his body had sagged together as
if not a muscle of it had strength to do its part. Raven pulled forward
a chair, and he sank into it.
"What do you s'pose," he began--and the voice was so nearly a whimper
that Raven was not surprised to see tears on his cheeks--"what do you
s'pose I wanted my gun for? To use on you? Or him? No. On me. But I
don't know now as I've got the strength to use it. I'm done."
This was his remorse for the past as he had made it, and Raven had no
triumph in it, only a sickness of distaste for the man's suffering and a
frank hatred of having to meet it with him.
"You know," said Tenney, looking up at him, sharply now, as if to
ascertain how much he knew, "she didn't do it. The baby wa'n't overlaid.
God! did anybody believe she could do a thing like that? She slep' like
a cat for fear suthin' would happen to him."
"What," asked Raven, in horror of what he felt was coming, and yet
obliged to hear, "what did happen to him?"
Tenney stretched out his hands. He was looking at them, not at Raven.
"I can't git it out o' my head," he continued, in a broken whisper,
"there's suthin' on 'em. You don't see nothin', do you? They look to
me----"
There he stopped, and Raven was glad he did not venture the word. What
had Raven to say to him? There seemed not to be anything in the language
of man, to say. But Tenney came alive. He was shaking with a great
eagerness.
"I tell you," he said, "a man don't know what to do. There was
that--that--what I done it to--he wa'n't mine."
He looked at Raven in a hunger of supplication. He was almost dying to
be denied.
"Yes," said Raven steadily. "He was yours."
"How do you know?" shrieked Tenney, as if he had caught him. "She talk
things over?"
Raven considered. What could he say to him?
"Tenney," he said at last, "you haven't understood. You haven't seen her
as she was, the best woman, the most beautiful----"
Here he stopped, and Tenney threw in angrily, as if it were a part of
his quarrel with her:
"She was likely enough. But what made her," he continued violently,
"what made her let a man feel as if her mind was somewheres else? Where
was her mind?"
That was it, Raven told himself. Beauty! it promised ineffable things,
even to these eyes of jealous greed, and it could not fulfil the promise
because everything it whispered of lay in the upper heavens, not on
earth. But Tenney would not have heard the answer even if Raven could
have made it. He was broken. He bent his head into his hands and sobbed
aloud.
"Good? 'Course she was good. Don't I know it? An' she's gone. An'
me--what be I goin' to do?"
Somehow Raven understood that he was not thinking of his desolate house
and lonesome mind, but of himself in relation to the law he had broken
and the woman's heart, broken, too. Grotesquely almost, came to his mind
Tira's grave reminder: "He's a very religious man." And Tenney seemed to
have come, by some path of his own, round to the same thing.
"If there was a God----"
"Oh, yes," Raven threw in, moved by some power outside himself, "there
is a God."
"If there was," said Tenney, "he couldn't forgive me no more'n He could
Cain. There's _that_ on my hands. When there's that----"
He stopped before the vision of the man God had scourged into exile for
the shedding of blood. To Raven there was suddenly a presence beside
them: not a Holy Presence, such as they might well have invoked, but Old
Crow. And he remembered how Old Crow had eased the mind of Billy Jones.
"Tenney," he said, "don't you remember what Tira believed in? She
believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. She believed He could forgive sins."
"Do you believe it?" Tenney hurled at him. "Can He forgive--that?"
Again he stretched out his hands.
"Yes," said Raven. "He can forgive that."
"An' I be," Tenney continued, in his scriptural phrasing, "whiter than
snow?"
Raven found himself halting. There were, behind this vision of the
symbol by which God made Himself manifest to man, reserves of strict
integrities.
"Tenney," he said, "you've killed a child. Your child. You're a
criminal. The only thing you can do to get back among men is to give
yourself up. To the law. And take your medicine."
"O my God!" cried Tenney. "Tell it? Tell that? Bring it up afore judge
an' jury how I thought----"
"Don't tell me what you thought," said Raven sharply. "You've said it
once. You were crazy, and you killed your child."
"An' what if----" he began, and Raven finished for him:
"What if they hang you? We can't go into that. There's your first step.
Give yourself up."
The next instant he was sorry for the brutality of this. But Tenney did
not find it brutal. Strangely it seemed to him a way out, the only way.
He was brooding. Suddenly he looked up.
"You told me," he said, apparently in wonder, "you didn't believe."
What to say? "I believe in God Who is letting me--tenderly, oh, with
such pity for my human foolishness--seize whatever crutch I can to help
you over this dark mortal way?" Could he say that? No, it was true, but
somehow it couldn't be said.
"Yes," he answered gravely, "I believe."
"Then," said Tenney eagerly, "you pray with me."
Raven, thinking on this afterward, knew he did pray, in what words he
never could recall, and that the substance of it was Forgiveness:
Forgive our sins. And that when he had finished Tenney completed his
faltering close with "For Christ's sake. Amen!" And that because Tenney
looked at him for confirmation, he, Raven, repeated it after him, humbly
and with sincerity. And when, shaken both of them beyond the possibility
of speech, they rose from their knees, they heard a voice outside, Nan's
voice:
"Rookie, let me in."
Raven opened the door, and found her there, and Dick was with her.
"You shouldn't have come up here," he said to Dick. "You're not supposed
to climb hills."
"He had to," said Nan. "I came up and listened and I heard voices. So I
went back again and asked Charlotte for sandwiches. And Dick would come.
But I carried the basket." She had gone past him into the room and was
unpacking food. "No, Mr. Tenney, you stay. They're for you, too. We're
all tired out, you know. Let's keep together all we can. We're so
lonesome. Tira! but she's the only one that isn't lonesome. _She's_ gone
to heaven. Look! hot coffee, too. Now you eat, both of you. There's
nothing like grub."
In the midst of this, Dick had gone round the table and put out his hand
to Tenney and said:
"H' are you, Tenney?" and Tenney, dazed, had given his.
Raven found he was hungry and began to eat, and Nan somehow saw to it
that Tenney also ate. And Raven, at least, felt in the breath of the
spring night, something ebbing there in the hut. What was it: waves of
wild human turmoil finding a channel where they could flow equably? Nan
and Dick went out on the veranda while the two finished, and Raven noted
the murmur of their voices and wondered a little, idly, whether they
were better friends--lovers or only better friends. Presently Nan was
back again. She brushed up their crumbs and packed the dishes into the
basket.
"Now, Mr. Tenney," she said, "this is what we've done. When I found you
were both up here, I had Jerry go over and get your cows. He milked and
I strained the milk. I locked up the house, too. Here's your key. What
makes you go back to-night? It'll be easier by daylight. Rookie,
couldn't he sleep up here?"
"Yes," said Raven, "of course he can. We'll be down to breakfast, tell
Charlotte."
Tenney offered no preference or opinion. He sat there, his key--the key
Tira had lost, he did remember vaguely--on the table before him. Nan,
with the air of there being no more to do, wafted Dick away with her.
And Raven and Tenney spent the night together in the hut. Raven did not
sleep. He had an impression that Tenney did not, either. It seemed to
him a watch with the dead.