Chapter 27

He began with the day when he had found Tira in the woods. He touched on the facts briefly, omitting to confess what the woman looked to his dazzled eyes. It was a drawing austerely black and white. Could he tell anyone--anyone but Nan--how she had seemed to him there, the old, old picture of motherhood, divine yet human? It was too much to risk. If he did lay his mind bare about that moment which was his alone, and Dick met it with his unimaginative astuteness, he could not trust himself to be patient with the boy. He said little more than that he had given her the freedom of the hut, and that he meant always to have it ready for her. Then he came to this last night of all, when she had run away from Tenney, not because he had been violent, but because he had "kept still." That did take hold on Dick's imagination, the imagination he seemed able to divorce from the realities of life and kept for the printed page.

"By thunder!" he said. "Burned the crutch, did she? That's a story in itself, a real story: Mary Wilkins, Robert Frost. That's great!"

"Sounds pretty big to me," said Raven quietly. "But it's not for print. See you don't feel tempted to use it. Now, here we are with Tira up against it. She's got to make a quick decision. And she's made it."

"Do you call her by her first name?" asked Dick, leaping the main issue to frown over the one possibly significant of Raven's state of mind.

"Yes," said Raven steadily, "I rather think I call her by her first name. I don't know whether I ever have 'to her head,' as Charlotte would say, but I don't seem to feel like calling her by Tenney's name. Well, Tira's decided. She's going to give her baby to Nan."

Dick's eyes enlarged to such an extent, his mouth opened so vacuously, that Raven laughed out. Evidently Dick wasn't regarding the matter from Tira's standpoint, or even Raven's now, but his own.

"Nan!" he echoed, when he could get his lips into action. "Where does Nan come in?"

"Oh," said Raven, with a most matter-of-fact coolness, "Nan came in long ago. I told her about it, and it seems she went to see Tira off her own bat, and offered to take the baby."

"She sha'n't do it," proclaimed Dick. "I simply won't have it, that's all."

"I fancy," said Raven, "Nan'll tell you you've got nothing whatever to do with it. And really, Dick, you never'll get Nan by bullying her. Don't you know you won't?"

Dick, having a perfectly good chance, turned the tables on him neatly.

"That'll do," said he, remembering how Raven had shut him up when he dragged in Anne Hamilton. "We won't discuss Nan."

Now it was Raven's turn to gape, but on the heels of it, seeing the neatness of the thrust, he smiled.

"Right, boy," he said. "Good for you. We won't discuss Nan, and we won't discuss Tira. But you'll hold your tongue about this business, and if you find me opening the door of my house at midnight, you'll remember it's my business, and keep your mouth shut. Now I'm going up the hill to see she's safe, and if you follow me, in your general policy of keeping on my trail, I don't quite know what will happen. But something will--to one of us."

He got up, went into the hall and found his cap and leather jacket. Dick meantime stood in the library door regarding him from so troubled a mind that Raven halted and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Cut it out, boy," he said, "all this guardian angel business. You let me alone and I'll let you alone. We're both decent chaps, but when you begin with your psychotherapy and that other word I don't know how to pronounce----"

Dick, having, at this period of his life only an inactive sense of humor, mechanically supplied it: "Psychiatry."

"What a beast of a word! Yes, that's it. Well, they're red rags to me, all these gadgets out of the half-baked mess they've stirred up by spying on our insides. I can't be half decent to you. But I want to be. I want us to be decent to each other. It's damnable if we can't. Go to bed, and I'll run up and see if poor Tira's safe."

He did not wait for an answer, but went out at the front door, and Dick heard him whistling down the path. The whistle seemed like an intentional confirmation of his being in a cheerfully normal frame of mind, not likely to be led too far afield by premonitions of New England tragedy. Perhaps that was why he did whistle, for when he reached the road he stopped and completed the first half of the ascent in silence. Then, as the whistle might mean something reassuring to Tira, he began again with a bright loudness, bold as the oriole's song. He reached the hut, whistling up to the very door, and then his breath failed him on a note, the place looked so forbiddingly black in the shadow, the woods were so still. It did not seem possible that a woman's warm heart was beating inside there, Tira's heart, home of loves unquenchable. He put his hand down under the stone. The key was there, and rising, he felt his mind heavy with reproaches of her. She had gone back to Tenney. The night's work was undone. What was the use of drawing her a step along the path of safety if she turned back the instant he trusted her alone? He went down the hill again in a dull distaste for himself. It seemed to him another man might have managed it better, swept her off her feet and bound her in an allegiance where she would obey. When he reached his own house, he was too discontented even to glance at Dick's window and wonder whether the boy was watching for him. The place was silent, and he put out the lights and went to bed.

Next morning he had got hold of himself and, with that obstinate patience which is living, went to the library after breakfast and called up Nan. It was wonderful to hear her fresh voice. It broke in upon his discouragements and made them fly, like birds feeding on evil food. Would she listen carefully, he asked. Would she translate him, because he couldn't speak in any detail. And when he had got thus far, he remembered another medium, and began the story of last night in French. Nan listened with hardly a commenting word, and when he had finished her bald answer was ridiculously reassuring.

"Sure!" said Nan. "I'll be there to-night. Send Jerry for me. Eight o'clock."

"God bless you!" said Raven. "You needn't bring any luggage. It'll probably be wiser to go right back."

Nan said "Sure!" again, no doubt, Raven thought, as indicating her view of her errand as a homespun one there was no doubt of her carrying out with the utmost simplicity. Then he went to tell Jerry he was to meet the evening train, and on the way he told Dick:

"Nan's coming to-night."

"Nan!" said Dick. "Not----"

"Yes," said Raven. "I telephoned her. Buck up, old man. Here's another chance for you, don't you see? We're in a nasty hole, Tira and incidentally Nan and I. Play the game, old son, and help us out."

"What," inquired Dick, "do you expect me to do?"

"Chiefly," said Raven, "keep out. It's my game and Nan's and Tira's. But you play yours. Don't sulk. Show her what a noble Red Man you can be."

Dick turned away, guiltily, Raven thought, as if he had plans of his own. What the deuce did he mean to do? But their day passed amicably enough, though they were not long together. Raven went up to the hut and stayed most of the afternoon. It was not so much that he expected Tira to come as that he felt the nearness of her there in the room she had disarranged with barricading chairs and pillows and then put in order again before she left. He could see her stepping softly about, with her deft, ordered movements, making it comely for him to find. She had left pictures of herself on the air, sad pictures, most of them, telling the tale of her terror and foreboding, but others of them quite different. There were moments he remembered when, in pauses of her talk with him, she glanced at the child, and still others when she sat immobile, her hands clasped on her knee, her gaze on the fire. Henceforth the hut would be full of her presence, hers and Old Crow's. And, unlike as they were, they seemed to harmonize. Both were pitiful and yet austere in their sincerity; and for both life had been a coil of tangled meanings. He stayed there until nearly dark, and his musings waxed arid and dull with the growing chill of the room. For he would not light the fire. It had to be left in readiness.

When he went down he found Dick uneasily tramping the veranda.

"Charlotte wants us to have a cup of tea," said Dick. "She said supper's put off till they come."

"They?" inquired Raven. "Who's they?"

"It's no use, Jack," Dick broke forth. "I might as well tell you. I s'pose if I didn't you'd kick up some kind of a row later. I telephoned Mum."

"You don't mean," said Raven, in a voice of what used to be called "ominous calm," before we shook off the old catch-words and got indirections of our own, "you don't mean you've sent for her!"

"It's no use," said Dick again, though with a changed implication, "you might as well take things as they are. Nan can't come up here slumming without an older woman. It isn't the thing. It simply isn't done."

Raven, through the window, saw Charlotte hovering in the library with the tea tray. He watched her absently, as if his mind were entirely with her. Yet really it was on the queerness of things as they are in the uniform jacket of propriety and the same things when circumstance thrusts the human creature out of his enveloping customs and sends him into battle. He thought of Dick's philosophy of the printed word. He thought of Nan's desperate life of daily emergency in France. Yet they were all, he whimsically concluded, being squared to Aunt Anne's rigidity of line. But why hers? Why not Old Crow's? Old Crow would have had him rescue Tira, even through difficult ways. He opened the door.

"Come on in," he said. "Charlotte's buttered the toast."

Dick followed him, and they sat down to their abundant tea, Charlotte pausing a moment to regard them with her all-enveloping lavishment of kindliness. Were they satisfied? Could she bring something more?

"The trouble with you, Dick," said Raven, after his third slice of toast, buttered, he approvingly noted, to the last degree of drippiness, "is poverty of invention. You repeat your climax. Now, this sending for Milly: it's precisely what you did before. That's a mistake the actors make: repeated farewells."

Dick made no answer. He, too, ate toast prodigiously.

"Now," said Raven, when they had finished, "do I understand you mean to put your mother wise about what I told you last night? Yes or no?"

"I shall do----" said Dick, and at his pause Raven interrupted him.

"No, you won't," said he. "You won't do what you think best. Take it from me, you won't. What I told you wasn't my secret. It's poor Tira's. If you give her away to your mother--good God! think of it, Milly, with her expensive modern theories and her psychiatry--got it right, that time!--muddling up things for a woman like her! Where was I? Well, simply, if you play a dirty trick like that on me, I'll pack you off, you and your mother both. I don't like to remind you but, after all, old man, the place is mine."

The blood came into Dick's face. He felt misjudged in his affection and abused.

"You can't see," he said. "I don't believe it's because you can't. You won't. It isn't Nan alone. It's you. You're not fit. You're no more fit than you were when Mum was here before. And you can pack me off, but, by thunder! I won't go."

"Very well," said Raven, with a happy inspiration. "You needn't. I'll go myself. And I'll take Nan with me." A picture of Nan and her own vision of happy isles came up before him, and he concluded: "Yes, by George! I'll take Nan. And we'll sail for the Malay Peninsula, or an undiscovered island, and wear Mother Hubbards and live on breadfruit, and you and your precious conventions can go to pot."

So, having soothed himself by his own intemperance, he got up, found his pipe and a foolish novel he made a point of reading once a year--it would hardly do to tell what it was, lest the reader of this true story fail to sympathize with his literary views and so with all his views--and sat down to await his guests in a serviceable state of good humor. He had brought Dick to what Charlotte would call "a realizing sense." He could afford a bit of tolerance. Dick got up and flung out of the room, finding Raven, he told himself, in one of his extravagant moods. Nine times out of ten the moods meant nothing. On the other hand, in this present erratic state of a changed Raven, they might mean anything. For himself, he was impatient, with the headlong rush of young love. Nan was coming. She was on the way. Would she be the same, distant with her cool kindliness, her old lovely self to Raven only, or might she be changed into the Nan who kissed him that one moment of his need? He snatched his hat and tore out of the house, and Raven, glancing up from his novel, saw him striding down the path and thought approvingly he was a wise young dog to walk off some of his headiness before Nan came. As for him, he would doze a little over his foolish book, as became a man along in years. That was what Charlotte would say, "along in years." Was it so? What a devil of an expression, like all the rest of them that were so much worse than the thing itself: "elderly," "middle-aged," what a grotesque vocabulary! And he surprised himself by throwing his foolish book, with an accurate aim, at a space in the shelves, where it lodged and hung miserably, and getting up and tearing down the walk at a pace emulating Dick's, but in the opposite direction: the result of these athletic measures being that when Amelia and Nan drove up with Jerry, the station master's pung following with two small trunks that seemed to wink at Raven, with an implication of their competitive resolve to stay, two correctly clad gentlemen were waiting on the veranda in a state of high decorum. As to the decorum, it didn't last, so far as Raven was concerned. Messages of a mutual understanding passed between his eyes and Nan's. He burst into sudden laughter, but Nan, more sagely alive to the dangers of the occasion, kept her gravity.

"Well," said Amelia, as Raven, still laughing, solicitously lifted her out, "you seem to be in a very happy frame of mind. I'm glad you _can_ laugh."

XXXIV

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.