Chapter 11

She opened the door just before he could put out his hand to it, passed him without a look, and came in. He shut the door and followed her. Raven got up from his chair and stood, glancing at her with what he hoped was a casual attention. Tenney came back and, when she had thrown off the blanket, took it from her hand and dropped it on a chair. He was all trembling eagerness. That act, the relieving her of the blanket, was incredible to Raven. The man had wanted to kill her (or, at the least, to kill his child), and he was humbly inducting her into the comforts of her home. She had not looked toward Raven. With a decorum finer, he thought, than his own, she would not play the game of diplomacy. She knew him and she could not deny him, even to save her life. Suddenly Tenney, brushing past to draw up a chair for her at the stove, became aware of him. Raven believed that, up to the moment, he had, to the man's absorbed gaze, been invisible. Now Tenney seemed to recognize the decencies toward even an unbidden guest.

"She's all beat out," he said, in uncouth apology. "It's my woman."

Raven turned to her, waiting for her cue. Would she take a hand at the game, as it imposed itself on him? Her silence and aloofness were his answer. She was sitting forward in her chair, to get the baby's feet nearer the warmth. But since she would not speak, Raven did.

"I should think any one would be beat out, a night like this," he said, as casually as he could manage, "carrying a baby, too, in such a storm. You'd better be careful of the child, at least," he added curtly, turning to Tenney, "if you want to keep him. Out in this cold and sleet! You don't want their deaths on your hands, do you?"

Tenney stared back at him in a wildness of apprehension.

"Be you a doctor?" he managed to ask.

Raven remembered the words: "Their tongue cleaved to the roof of their mouth." That seemed to be what Tenney's tongue was doing now.

"No," said he, "I'm not a doctor, but I've seen a good deal of sickness in the War. Get them warm," he added authoritatively, "both of them. Put the child into warm water."

"Yes," said Tenney, in an anguished sort of haste. Then to his wife he continued, in a humility Raven noted as her best guaranty of at least temporary safety, "I'll bring you the foot tub, an' whilst you're doin' it, I'll warm the bed."

"Yes," she said quietly, but with a composure of mastery in her voice. "So do."

Raven got up and made his way to the door. Then he bethought himself that he had not given any reason for coming and that Tenney might remember it afterward and wonder.

"I thought I'd run up," he said, "and pay you for your week's work."

Tenney was darting about with a small tin tub, filling it from the kettle and trying the temperature with his hand.

"No," he answered absorbedly, "I can't bother with that to-night. Let it be till another time."

He had drawn a chair to his wife's side and set the tub on it, and now she also tried the temperature while he watched her anxiously. And at once the baby who, in his solemnity of silence, had seemed to Raven hitherto little more than a stage property, broke into a lusty yelling, and Tenney put out his hands to him, took him to his shoulder and began to walk the floor, while the woman poured more water into the tub. Neither of them had a look for Raven, and he went out into the blustering night with a picture etched so deeply on his brain that he knew it would always be there while he, in his flesh, survived: the old picture of the sacred three, behind the defenses of their common interests, the father, mother and the child.

XIV

All that night Raven, through his light sleep, had a consciousness of holding on to himself, refusing to think, refusing angrily to fear. The sleep seemed to him like a thin, slippery coating over gulfs unplumbed; it was insecure, yet it failed to let him down into blessed depths of oblivion below. But he would not think to no purpose (he had a dread of the wild, disordered clacking of the wheels in unproductive thought), and he would not invite again the strange humiliation, the relief tinged by aversion, that came over him when he felt, on leaving them, the inviolability of the three in their legal bond. She had looked to him so like heaven's own, he had upborne her in his thought almost to the gate of heaven itself; and yet she was walled in by a bond she would not repudiate with the brute who persecuted her. In spite of her uncouth speech, in spite of her ignorance of delicate usage, she seemed to him a creature infinitely removed from the rougher aspects of this New England life; yet there she was in one of the most sordid scenes of it, and she was absorbed by it, she fitted it as a Madonna fits a cave. And what business had he, he asked angrily, to weave about her the web of a glorifying sympathy, exalting her only from that pernicious habit of his of being sorry? Yet, as he thought it, he knew she was different from the ordinary country woman afraid of her man, and that any fine mantle he wove for her could not equal the radiance of her pure courage and undaunted truth.

Once he rose from his bed and began to dress hastily, with what he recognized at the same moment as the wild purpose of slipping out of the house and going up to Tenney's, to see if there was a light or to listen for the catamount voice. But that, he realized immediately, was folly. Suppose Tenney saw him. What reason could he plant in the man's inflamed mind, except one more hostile to her peace? So he went back to bed, chilled, and was savagely glad of his discomfort. It gave him something, however trivial, to think about besides the peril of a woman who looked like motherhood incarnate, and so should have been heir to all the worship and chivalry of men. With the first light he was up and had built his fire, and Charlotte, hearing him, got, sooner than was her wont, out of her warm bed. Charlotte owned to liking to "lay a spell" in winter, to make up for the early activities of summer mornings when you must be "up 'fore light" to keep pace with the day. For after nine o'clock "the day's 'most gone." She looked up at him as he came into the kitchen where she was brashing her fire for a quick oven, and he found her eyes clearly worried in their questioning.

"No toast, Charlotte," he said. He wondered if even his voice was trembling in his haste. "No biscuits. I'm going up to the hut."

Charlotte nodded and seemed to settle into understanding. She had a sympathetic, almost a reverent tolerance for the activities of pen and ink. To her, Raven was a well-beloved and in no wise a remarkable being until he stepped into the clouded room of literary activity. There she would have indulged him in any whim or unaccountable tyranny. Charlotte had never heard of temperament, but she believed in it. Once only did she speak to him while he was drinking his coffee:

"You got any ink up there?"

He started and looked at her a moment, dazed. Nothing was further from his mind than ink. Other liquids, tears, waters of lethe, lakes of fire and brimstone would not have sounded foreign to his thought. But ink! how incalculably far was the life of the written word from this raw anguish of reality he was caught in to-day! He recovered himself instantly.

"I've got my pen," he told her, "my stylograph."

And presently he had put on his coat, bidden her a hasty good-by and was plunging up the slope. Somehow, though the crest of the wave had been reached the night before and that usually, Tira had assured him, meant a following calm, he was certain of seeing her to-day. It was not that he wanted to see her, but an inner conviction, implacably fixed as the laws of nature that are at no point subject to the desires of man, told him she would come. The hut must be warm for her. The fire must be relaid. And, he told himself grimly, the apex had been reached. The end of the thing was before them. He must not yield to her again. He must command her, persuade and conquer her. She must let him send her away.

At the hut he almost expected to see her footprints in the light snow by the door. But the exquisite softness lay untouched. The day was a heaven of clearness, the shadows were deep blue and the trees beginning the slow waving motion of their majestic secrecies. He took out the key from under the stone, went in and made his fire with a hand too practiced to lose in efficacy from its haste. Presently it was roaring upward and, after a glance about to see that the room was not in any disorder too great for him to remedy quickly, he walked back and forth, and whenever it died down enough to let him, fed the fire. It began to seem to him as if he were going to be there days feeding the fire to keep her warm, but it was only a little before ten when he heard a step and his heart choked him with its swelling of relief. At once he was also calmer. A moment ago even, he would have wondered how he could meet her, how keep the storm of entreaty out of his voice if he was to beg her to let him save her. But now he knew he should be himself as she had briefly known him and though he must command, he should in no sense offend. He stood still by the fire, half turning toward the door, to wait. It was an unformulated delicacy of his attitude toward her that she should not find him going forward to meet her as if she were a guest. She should enter as if the house were her own. But she did not enter. There was a hand at the door. It knocked. Then he called:

"Come in."

The door opened, under what seemed to him, in his first surprise, a halting hand and a woman stepped in. It was Nan. She came a hesitating pace into the room and stood looking at him, after the one interested glance about her, smiling a little, half quizzically, as if aware she had brought a surprise and yet not in doubt of its being welcome. Raven stared back at her for one bewildered minute and then, so instant and great was the revulsion, burst into a shout of laughter. Nan stood there and laughed with him.

"What is it, Rookie?" she asked, coming forward to him. "I'm funny, I suppose, but not so funny as all that. What's the joke?"

She was a finished sort of creature to come into his wood solitude, and yet an outdoor creature, too, with her gray fur cap and coat. She looked younger, less worn than when he saw her last, perhaps because her cheeks were red from the frosty air and her eyes bright at finding him.

"Let me have your coat," he said. "Come to the fire."

She took off her coat and he dropped it on the couch. He pulled a chair nearer the hearth (it was his own chair, not Tira's), and motioned her to it. She did not sit. She put out her thickly shod foot to the blaze and then withdrew it, for she was all aglow from her plunge up the hill, and turned to him, her brows knitted, her eyes considering.

"What is it, Rookie?" she asked. "Something's up and you wish I hadn't come. That it?"

"I haven't had time to wish you hadn't come," he said. He had to be straight with her. "I never was more surprised in my life. You were the last person I expected to see."

"But why d'you laugh, Rookie?" she persisted, and then, as he hesitated, evidently considering exactly why he did and what form he could put it in, she concluded: "I know. You were taken aback. I've done the same thing myself, often. Well!" She seemed to dismiss it as unimportant and began where she had evidently meant to begin. "Now I'll tell you what I'm here for."

"Sit down, Nan," he bade her.

Now that his first derangement was over, he was glad to see her. Tira might not come. If she did, he could do something. He could even, at a pinch and with Tira's consent, put the knowledge of the tawdry business into Nan's hands. But she would not sit down. Plainly she had received a setback. She was refusing to accept his hospitality to any informal extent. And he saw he had hurt her. He was always reading the inner minds of people, and that was where his disastrous sympathy was forever leading him: to that pernicious yielding, that living of other people's lives and not his own.

"It was only," he said, trying to pick up the lost thread of her confidence, "that I didn't expect you. I couldn't have dreamed of your coming. How did you come so early?"

"Took the early train," said Nan curtly.

"Not the beastly old thing that starts before light?"

She nodded.

"What for?"

"To get ahead of them," she answered, still curtly.

"Them? Who?"

"Dick and his mother and Doctor Brooke."

"Dick and Amelia? What's Amelia on here for?"

He had half expected her and yet, in the new turmoil about him, he had actually forgotten she might come.

"Because Dick sent her your letter. They both assume you've broken down, and she's called in an alienist to come up here and eye you over, and Dick's pretty sick over the whole business; so he's coming along, too. He was prepared for mother, I fancy, but not the alienist."

"But what's it all for?"

"Why, you know, Rookie. You've broken down."

Raven stared at her. Then he laughed.

"Well," he said, "let 'em come. Charlotte'll give 'em some dinner and they can look at the mountain and go back on the six to-night."

"That's precisely what they won't do," said Nan, her lips tightening. "At least your sister. She's going to stay."

"The deuce she is," said Raven. "What for?"

Then Nan did break out of the stiffness that seemed to have held her like an armor since the momentary setback of her coming. Her own laugh ran over her face and creased it into delighted merriment.

"Why, don't you see?" she asked him. "To brighten your life."

Raven's eyes met hers with a rueful terror. He reached, at a leap, the motive for her coming.

"And you rushed off up here to tell me," he said. "Dear Nan! Good child! But you don't mean they're actually coming to-day?"

"Of course I do," she said impatiently. "Didn't I tell you so? They were going to take the nine. They're well on the way. They'll get a pung or something at the station and be driving up to the house presently, and your sister'll give Charlotte the hamper of provisions she brought and tell her there'll be four to dinner. There'll be five, though. She didn't know that. She didn't hear about me. I s'pose you'll ask me to stay."

Raven put out his hand and stroked her sleeve. This was the first time she had seemed to him a woman grown. When she came back from school, those years ago, she had changed to girlhood. It was the girl always even when she came home from France with a world of hideous memories sealed away in her heart and brain. They had not, these memories, seemed so much as to scar her, she had obliterated them so carefully by the decorum of her desire to make the world no sadder by her knowledge. But now, at some call, the call of his personal extremity perhaps, she looked suddenly forceful and mature, as if her knowledge of life had escaped her restraining hand and burst out to the aid of a knowledge of him.

"I don't exactly know," he said, "what to do with them. I don't mind the alienist of course; but what do you suppose put it into her head--Amelia's--to bring him along?"

"Why," said Nan, "it's precisely the thing she would do. Don't you see? She does everything by rule, by theory, the most modern, most advanced. When Dick wrote her, she made up her mind like a shot. She had to put you in a pigeon hole. Shell shock, _cafard_! So the next thing was to set a specialist on the job. And there you are."

Raven grinned. The whole thing was more and more fantastic to him.

"I wonder how Dick likes the hornet's nest," he reflected, "now he's stirred it up."

"I can tell you," said Nan, a little white coming round her lips, as it did when she was excited, "how he liked me. He told me the whole business last night and I went for him. I told him he was a fool, a plain downright fool, and he'd seen his last of me till he got us out of the mess he'd got us into: you, me, and incidentally himself."

"It is mighty nice of you to come into it," said Raven.

"Well, how could I help it?" she asked impetuously, "when you're in? Why, Rookie, wouldn't you----"

There she stopped, and Raven answered the implication.

"You bet I would. What concerns you concerns me. But I'd no business to assume it's the other way about. That is, when it's Dick. You're bound, you know," he said, in a tentative way he thought he ought to venture and yet not quite sure of it, "to stand by Dick."

Nan turned a little, to look at him fully. She seemed to be angry now, and well it became her.

"Why am I?" she demanded. "Why am I bound to stand by Dick? I'm bound to nothing, with any man, Dick least of all, if he won't devote some of his surplus energy to growing up. So I've told him. He's got to grow up." But suddenly she seemed to recall herself to another question, put her personal anger aside and veered to that. "Rookie," she said, "what about Aunt Anne's will?"

"Anne's will?" he repeated, staring at her. "Well, what about it?"

"You've had notice of it, haven't you?" she asked. "Official notice, that is?"

"Oh, yes," he said, "before I left town. Whitney went over the whole ground." But he said it as if it did not interest him to any degree. And yet, as she amazedly thought, it had, the last time she saw him, interested him to the exclusion of everything else.

"I thought I'd remind you," she said, "that it's been in the papers. You are Miss Anne Hamilton's residuary legatee. Dick knows it. So does your sister. She'll ask you things. I thought if you'd made up your mind to refuse it or, in short, anything about it, you'd want to be prepared for her. Those questions of hers--you can't evade them. They go to the bottom of your soul--and then some."

"Oh," said Raven dazedly, recalling himself to a complexity he had all but forgotten. "So they do. I dare say she will ask me. But I don't--Nan, to tell the truth, I haven't thought of it at all."

The inevitable comment sprung up in Nan's mind, as if his words had touched a spring, releasing it:

"What have you been thinking then?"

And as if in exact comment upon that, came a sound at the door, a knock, a hand on the latch and Tira stepped in. Nan turned sharply, and Raven had only to lift his eyes to see the picture his mind had painted for him. There she was, a little color in her cheeks from the air, her eyes heavy, as if she had not slept. She carried the child in his little white coat and cap, showing, Raven concluded, that she had not been forced to leave the house in desperate haste. For an instant she confronted Nan; the life in her face seemed to go out and leave her haggard. Then, before Raven could take more than the one step forward to meet her, she had turned and shut the door behind her.

"Wait for me," he threw back over his shoulder at Nan and ran out.

XV

Tira was hurrying through the snowy track, ankle deep at every step. Raven, bareheaded, ran after. In a minute he had overtaken her.

"Stop!" he called, breathless, more from his emotion than from haste. "Stop! I tell you."

She did stop, and he came up with her. Now, at last, there were tears in her eyes, and he thought angrily that he had been the one to overthrow her control more absolutely than the danger she apprehended. He had, he thought, in this unreasoning anger, promised her asylum in the hut and she found it invaded. But curiously he did not think of Nan, who had come uninvited and scared the poor fugitive away. Nan, child and woman, was always negligible, too near him to be dealt with. But he had offered this woman the safety of a roof and walls, and she had fled out of it. At sight of his face, its contrite kindliness, her own set again into its determined composure. She seemed to see that she could not count on aid outside herself and returned again uncomplainingly to her old equilibrium of endurance.

"Come back," he said. "She's going down to the house with me. Besides, if she did stay, you'd like her. You'd love her. That's only Nan."

He said "Nan" of set purpose. It was the custom of this country folk, when they talked among themselves, to call all alike by their Christian names, even when they scrupulously used the surname in direct address. He meant to reassure her. It was a way of bringing Nan into a friendly nearness.

"You've heard of her," he said, "Miss Hamilton's niece. She owns the next house to mine, the Hamilton house. She'll be here this summer. You'll be neighbors. Come back and speak to her."

"No," said Tira, in a gentle obstinacy. "I guess I'll be gittin' along toward----"

Here she stopped. She did not know what the direction or the end of her journey was to be.

"You're not going off the place," said Raven bluffly. "That's flat. The place is mine and you're safe on it. Do you want to go traipsing round the woods in this snow"--he fell purposely into the country habit of speech--"and get wet to your knees and have a cold?"

"I sha'n't have a cold," she said, smiling dimly at him and looking, as he realized, like a mother who was sorry her son could not have all he grasped at, but still remained immovable. "I don't hardly remember havin' one since I was little."

The child had resumed the rôle of Buddhistic calm temporarily abandoned last night when he screamed out his distaste for earthly complications, and Raven, glancing at the solemn blue eyes, saw that the only hope of moving her lay in him.

"Do you want," he shot at random, "to have the baby get chilled--and hungry?" There he broke off, though he saw that did move her. He had to know from what extremity she fled. "Has this been going on all night?" he asked.

"No," she said, with the same air of gently reassuring him. "I slept 'most all night. So did he, Mr. Tenney, I guess. An' we started out all right this mornin'. But after he'd read the chapter an' prayed, it all come over him ag'in, an' I had to go."

"After he'd read his chapter," said Raven. "And prayed! God!"

The invocation sounded as if he also prayed.

"This time," she continued, "he--he seemed to have a realizin' sense."

She paused a perplexed moment. In the little she had said to Raven, he had noted from the first that she was often blocked by a difficulty in finding words she thought adequate. "He seemed to know what was comin'," she said. "He give me warnin'."

"Warning?"

"Yes. He come in an' he says to me, 'You don't want to go traipsin' round in this snow.'"

Raven noted the word and smiled slightly. He and Tenney were at one in their care for her.

"'You go up chamber,' he says, 'an' have a fire in the air-tight an' turn the key. I dunno,' he says, 'what's goin' to happen, this day. I dunno.'"

"Why didn't you?" asked Raven.

"I didn't hardly dast to," she said, with her clear look at him. "I knew if he knew I's up there he never could stan' it till he--broke in the door."

Raven could only look at her.

"Besides," she said, "even if I be safer in the house, I don't feel so, somehow. I've always lived a good deal out door."

"So you came away," said Raven quietly. "You came here." The words really were, "You came to me," but he would not say them.

"I did lock the chamber door," she said, "jest as he said. But I locked it on the outside an' took away the key. I thought he'd think I was there an' it might keep him out a spell, an' when he did git in, it'd give him a kind of a shock an' bring him to. It does," she added simply. "It always gives him a shock, not findin' me. He's asked me over 'n' over ag'in, when he come to, not to make way with myself, but I never'd answer. He's got it before him, an' that's about all there is in my favor, far as I can see."

The gentle monotony of her voice was maddening to Raven; it brought him such terrible things, like a wind carrying the seeds of some poisonous plant that, if they were allowed to spring up, would overrun the world of his hopes for her.