Chapter 28

"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."

XXXV

The next day Raven saw Tenney driving by, probably to the street where all the neighbors went for supplies. Up to this time Jerry had offered, whenever he was going, to do Tira's "arrants," and Tenney had even allowed him to bring home grain. Raven at once summoned Nan. It was their chance. Tira must be taken by storm. Let her leave the house as it was and run away. Nan hurried on her things, and they went up the road.

"There she is," said Nan, "at the window."

Raven, too, saw her white face for the moment before it disappeared. She was coming, he thought, making haste to let them in. He knocked and waited. No one came. He knocked again, sharply, with his stick, and then, in the after silence, held his breath to listen. It seemed to him he had never heard a house so still. That was the way his mind absurdly put it: actively, ominously still.

"She was at the window," said Nan, in a tone that sounded to him as apprehensive as the beating of his own heart. "I saw her."

He knocked again and, after another interval, the window opened above their heads and Tira leaned over the sill.

"You go away," she said quietly, yet with a thrilling apprehension. "I can't let you in."

They stepped back from the door and looked up at her. She seemed even thinner than when Nan had seen her last, and to Raven all the sorrows of woman were darkling in the anguish of her eyes. He spoke quietly, making his voice reassuring to her.

"Why can't you? Have you been told not to?"

"No," said Tira, quick, he thought, to shield her persecutor, "nobody's said a word. But they've gone off, an' you can't be certain when they'll be back."

"Hasn't he gone to the street?" Raven asked her, and now her voice, in its imploring hurry, could not urge him earnestly enough.

"He said he was goin'. You can't tell. He may turn round an' come back. An' I wouldn't have you here--either o' you--for anything in this world."

But though she said "either of you," her eyes were on Raven, beseeching him to go. He did not answer that. In a few words he set forth their plan. She was to take the child and come. It was to be now. But she would hardly listen.

"No," she called, in any pause between his words. "No! no! no!"

"Don't you want to save the child?" Raven asked her sternly. "Have you forgotten what may happen to him?"

She had her answer ready.

"It's his," she said. "He spoke the truth, though it wa'n't as he mean it. But the baby's his, an' baby as he is, an' _as_ he is, he's got to fight it out along o' me. You go now, an' don't you come a-nigh me ag'in. An' if you stay here knockin' at my door, I'll scream so's I sha'n't hear you."

She withdrew her head from the window, but instantly looked out again.

"God Almighty bless you!" she said. "But you go! you go!"

"Tira!" called Raven sharply, "don't you know you're in danger? Don't you know if anything happens to you it'll----" He paused, and Nan wondered if he meant to say, "It will break my heart!" and scarcely felt the pain of it, she was so tense with misery for them both.

Tira leaned out again and seemed to bend even protectingly toward them. She smiled at them, and the softening of her face was exquisite.

"I ain't in danger," she said. "I've said things to him. He's afraid."

"Threatened him?" Raven asked.

"I've kep' tellin' him," said Tira, in that same tone of tender reasonableness such as mothers use when they persuade children to the necessities of things, "he must remember we ain't alone. An' somehow it seems to scare him. He don't see Him as I do: the Lord Jesus Christ."

She shut the window quietly, and Raven and Nan went away. They walked soberly home without a word, but when Nan was taking off her hat she heard bells and went to the library window. Raven was standing by the table, trying to find some occupation to steady his anxious mind.

"Look!" said Nan.

It was Tenney, and he was "whipping up."

"She knew, didn't she?" commented Nan, and he answered:

"Yes, she knew."

Here his trouble of mind broke forth. He had to be enlightened. A woman must guess what a woman thought.

"I can't understand her," he said. "I believe I have understood her, up to now. But to say the child's got to bear it with her! Why, a woman's feeling about her child! It's as old as the world. A woman will sacrifice herself, but she won't sacrifice her child."

He looked at her with such trouble in his face that Nan had to turn away. He understood her too well. Could he read in her eyes what her mind had resolved not to tell him? Yet she would tell him. He shouldn't grope about in the dark among these mysteries. She wanted, as much as Old Crow wanted it, to be a light to his feet.

"She would," she told him quietly, "sacrifice herself in a minute. Only she can't do it the way we've offered her, because now you've come into it."

"I've been in it from the first," frowned Raven. "Ever since the day I found her up there in the woods."

"Yes, but then that poor crazy idiot was jealous only of him, the creature that sat down by her at prayer-meeting; and now he's jealous of you. And she's saving you, Rookie. At any risk. Even her own child."

Nan thought she could add what had been in her mind, keeping time to every step of the way home: "For now she loves you better than the child." But it proved impossible to say that, and she went out of the room, not looking at him, and only waiting to put away her hat and coat in the hall. She went upstairs with the same unhurried step and shut the door of her room behind her. She stood there near the door, as if she were guarding it against even the thoughts of any human creature. They must not get at her, those compassionate thoughts, not Charlotte's, certainly not Raven's. For at that moment Nan found herself a little absurd, as many a woman has who knows herself to be starving for a man's love. She began to tremble, and remembered Tira shaking there by the door that morning that seemed now years away. The tremor got hold of her savagely and shook her. It might have been shaking her in its teeth.

"Nervous chill!" said Nan to herself, insisting on saying it aloud to see if her teeth would actually chatter and finding they did. She had seen plenty of such nervous whirlwinds among her boys and helped to quiet them. "I'm an interesting specimen," chattered Nan. "Talk about _cafard_!"

All that forenoon, Dick fretted about the house, waiting for her, hoping she would go to walk, let him read to her--Dick had a persistent habit of reading verse to you when he found you weren't likely to get into the modern movement by yourself--but no Nan. At dinner, there she was, rather talkative, in a way that took Amelia into the circle of intimacy, and seemed to link up everybody with everybody else in a nice manner. Nan had the deftest social sense, when she troubled herself to use it. Aunt Anne would have been proud of her.

XXXVI

Then everything, so far as Raven and Nan were concerned, quieted to an unbroken commonplace, and the four--for Amelia and Dick held to their purpose of "standing by"--again settled down to country life, full of the amenities and personal abnegations of a house party likely to be continued. Charlotte was delighted, in her brooding way, and ascribed the emotion to Jerry who, she said, "liked somethin' goin' on." Nan and Dick had vaulted back to their past: the old terms of a boy and girl intimacy in robust pursuits admitting much laughter and homespun talk. They went snowshoeing over the hills, Raven, though Nan begged him to come, electing to stay at home with Amelia, who would stand at the door to see them off, half persuaded she was up to going herself and, indeed, almost feeling she had gone, after considering it so exhaustively, and then retreating to the library where she was cramming for next year's economics. Raven was very good to her. He would sit down by the blazing hearth, listening with an outward interest to her acquired formulae of life, and then, after perfunctory assent or lax denial, retire to his own seclusion over a book. But he seldom read nowadays. He merely, in this semblance of studious absorption, found refuge from Amelia. He was mortally anxious for Tira, still face to face with brute irresponsibility, and when the mental picture of it flamed too lividly and could not be endured, he threw down his book and hurried up to the hut, to find her. She never came. The fire, faithfully laid for her, was unlighted. The room breathed the loneliness of a place that has known a beloved presence and knows it no more. Nearly every day he and Nan had a word about her, and often he saw Nan going "up along" and knew she was, in the uneasiness of no news, bent on walking past the house, if only for a glance at the windows and the sight of Tira's face. Three times within a few weeks Tenney had driven past, and each time Nan, refusing Dick's company, hurried up the road. But she came back puzzled and dispirited, and called to Raven, who, in a fever of impatience, had gone out to meet her:

"No. The door is locked."

She would put a hand on his arm and they would walk together while she told him her unvarying tale. When she had knocked persistently, Tira would appear at the chamber window, and shake her head, and her lips seemed to be saying, "No! no! no!" And each time Tenney returned shortly, and they were sure his going was a blind. He never went to the street, and even Charlotte remarked the strangeness of his short absences.

"What under the sun makes Isr'el Tenney start out an' turn round an' come back ag'in?" she inquired of Jerry. "He ain't gone twenty minutes 'fore he's home."

Jerry didn't know. He "'sposed Isr'el forgot suthin'."

How was Tira? Raven asked after Nan had seen her at the window, and she did not spare him. Pale, she said, paler than ever, a shadow of herself. But Nan had faith that her courage would hold. It was like the winter and the spring. Tenney stood for the forces of darkness, but the spring had to come in the end. Also she owned that her great reason for believing in Tira's endurance was that Tira was not alone. She had, like Old Crow, her sustaining symbol. She had, whatever the terrifying circumstance of her daily life, divine companionship. She had her Lord, Jesus Christ.

"I believe," said Raven abruptly, one day when they were tramping the snowy road and she was answering the panic of his apprehensive mind, "you swear by Old Crow's book."

"I do," said Nan simply, "seem to be hanging on to Old Crow. I've read it over and over. And it does somehow get me. Picture writing! And human beings drawing the lines and half the time not getting them straight! But if there's something to draw, I don't care how bad the drawing is. If there's actually something there! There is, Rookie. Tira's got hold of it because she's pure in heart. It's something real, and it'll see her through."

Raven was not content with its seeing her through until he could be told what the appointed end was likely to be. If Tira was to fight this desperate battle all her mortal life, he wasn't to be placated by the rewarding certainty of a heavenly refuge at the end.