Old Crow Part 17

"Why," said Charlotte, "I s'pose she does 'em, same's I do when I'm alone. 'Tain't no great of a job, 'specially if the hay's pitched round beforehand."

Raven, sitting down to his breakfast, thought it a good deal of a task for a woman made for soft, kind ways with children and the small domestic animals by the hearth. And then he did have the humor to laugh at himself a little. It showed how she had unconsciously beguiled him, how she had impressed him with her curious implication of belonging to things afar from this world of homespun usages. She was strong and undeniably homespun herself, in every word and look. Let her fodder the cattle. Perhaps they would add to the lonesome tranquillity of her day, with their needs and their sweet-breathed satisfactions.

XIII

For a week it was hard, clear weather, with a crystal sky and no wind.

Tenney appeared in the early mornings and he and Jerry went off to their chopping. Raven's relief grew. By the last of the week he found his apprehension really lessening. Every hour of her safety gave him new rea.s.surance, and he could even face the nights, the long hours when Tenney was at home. Tenney he took pains not to meet. He distinctly objected to being pressed into a corner by the revivalist cant of a man he could not wisely offend. Nor did he see her whom he called "the woman." Sometimes in the early dusk after Tenney had got home, he was strongly moved to walk past the house and see if their light looked cheerful, or if he could hear the sound of voices within. Smile at himself as he might, at the childishness of the fancy, he alternately thought of her as being pursued out of the house by a madman with an axe and exhorted to save herself by the blood of the Lamb. And, Tenney being what he was, the last was almost as disquieting as the actual torment.

Every morning he went up to the hut to find no slightest sign of her having been there. If he stayed long enough to build a fire, he went back, after it had time to die, and laid another, so that she might light it without delay.

On the Sat.u.r.day night of that week the wind veered into the east and the clouds banked up. The air had a grayness that meant snow. He had been up at the hut all the afternoon. He had pulled out an old chest, the sea-chest of a long dead Raven who had been marked with sea longing, as it sometimes happens to those bred in the hills, and had run away and become mate and captain. Raven had always been vaguely proud of him, and so, perhaps, had other Ravens, for Old Crow, when he moved up here, had brought the sea-chest with him, and his own books also were stowed away in it. Old Captain Raven's were entirely consistent with his profession--charts, a wonderful flat volume full of the starry heavens and more enchanting to Raven than any modern astronomy; but Old Crow's, in their diverse character, seemed to have been gathered together as it happened, possibly as he came on them, in no sense an index of individual taste. There were poets (strange company they made for one another!) Milton, Ossian, Byron, Thompson, Herrick, and the Essays of Montaigne, the Confessions of Rousseau. Also, the Age of Reason, which, on the testimony of uncut leaves, had not been read. And there was a worn, dog-eared Bible. Raven had never wanted to appropriate the books so far as to set them with his own on the shelves. They seemed to him, through their isolation, to keep something of the ident.i.ty of Old Crow.

He believed Old Crow would like this. It was precious little earthly immortality the old chap had ever got beyond the local derision, and if Raven could please him by so small a thing, he would. He had them all out on chairs and sat on the floor beside the chest, looking them over idly until it began to grow dark and, realizing how early it was, he glanced up at the windows and saw the veil of a fine falling snow. He got up, left his books in disorder, and lighted the lamp. The fire had been dying down and he kicked the sticks apart. It must die wholly so that a fresh one would run no chance of catching the coals. Yet it was unlikely she would come to-night. Tenney would be tired with his week's work.

And just as he was making himself reasons, in a mechanical way, while he put the room in order, there was a knock, quick, imperative, the door was thrown open and there she was. She was about to shut the door, but he ran before her. He did it and turned the key. Then he pa.s.sed her and hurried to the fire and with both hands heaped on cones and kindling until it flared. While he did this she stood as still as a stone and when, having his fire, he turned to her, he saw she had nothing on her head and that the fine snow had drifted into the folds of her clothing and was melting on her hair. She looked more wildly disordered than when he had seen her before, for she had wrapped a blanket about her, and the child was under it, covered so closely that Raven wondered how he could breathe. He tried to take the blanket from her, but she held it desperately. It seemed as if, in unreasoning apprehension, she dared not let the child be seen. But he laid his hand on hers, saying, "Please!"

authoritatively, and she let him unclasp the tense fingers, remove the blanket, and then take the child. Raven had had no experience with babies, but this one he took, in the heat of his compa.s.sion, with no doubt that he should know what to do with him. He felt the little feet and hands and, finding them warm, drew forward an arm-chair for her, and, when she sank into it, set the child in her lap.

"Put your feet to the fire," he said. "Your shoes are all snow. Better take them off."

She shook her head. She stretched her feet almost into the blaze and the steam rose from them. Raven went to the cupboard at the side of the fireplace and took down a bottle of chartreuse. But she shook her head.

"I da.s.sent," she said. "He'll smell it."

Raven came near breaking into an oath. Did the beast own her, that he should be able, after this new outrage, to get her sweet breath?

"I ain't cold," she a.s.sured him, "not now. No, I won't drink any"--for he was about to pour it for her--"I never took much stock in them things. I've seen too much of 'em."

Then Raven remembered that Charlotte had told him all the boys drank--her brothers--and he seemed to have turned another page in her piteous life. He set back the bottle and, to give her time to recover herself, resumed his task of straightening the room. At her voice, he was at once beside her.

"Should you just as soon," she asked quietly, as if the question were of no moment, "I'd stay up here all night?"

"Of course you're to stay all night." It seemed to him too beautiful a thing to have happened, to know she was here in safety with the trees and the snow. "I'll go down and get some milk and things for him"--he was indicating the baby who, under the ecstasy of warmth, was beginning to talk strange matters, standing on his mother's knee--"I'll tell Charlotte I'm staying up here all night."

But now he saw, in surprise (for he had failed to guess how his words would strike her) that she was terrified, perhaps more by him than she had been by Tenney.

"No," she cried violently. "You can't do that. You mustn't. If you stay, I've got to go."

"I can't have you up here in the woods alone," he reasoned.

She gave a little laugh. The quality of it was ironic. It made him wonder what her laughter would be if she were allowed to savor the quaintness of sheer fun. She spoke obliquely, yet accounting for the laugh.

"What do you s'pose'd happen to me?"

"Nothing," he owned, comparing, as she meant him to, the safety of her state up here, surrounded by the trees and the wind, and her prison with the madman down below. "But I can't have it. Do you suppose I can go down there and sleep in my bed?" He paused and began to coax. Charlotte could have told her how beguiling he was when he coaxed. "I'll stay in the other room and keep an eye out. I sha'n't sleep. I won't even disturb you by tending the fire. You can do that. Come, is it a bargain.

It's the only safe thing to do, you know. Suppose he should come up here in the night?"

"That's it," she said quietly. "S'pose he should? Do you want I should be found up here with a man, any man, even you?"

He was silent, struck by her bitter logic. His heart, in the actual physical state of it, ached for her. She would not let him save her, he thought despairingly; indeed, perhaps she could not. For she alone knew the noisome perils of her way. He relinquished his proposition, without comment, and he could see at once what relief that gave her.

"Very well," he said, "I'll go down. But I shall certainly come back and bring you some milk. Something to heat it in, too. Old Crow used to have dishes, but they're gone. Lock the door after me. I'll call when I come."

But she rose from her seat, put the baby on the couch and took the blanket from the chair where he had spread it. There were still drops on it, and she went to the other side of the room, at a safe distance from the baby, and shook it. She had settled into a composure as determined as his own.

"It's no use talkin'," she said. "I've got to go back."

"Go back?" He stared at her.

"Yes. What we've just said shows me. Nothin's more likely than his comin' up here. He might reason it out. He knows I wouldn't go to any o'

the neighbors, an' he'd know I wouldn't let baby ketch his death, a night like this, the storm an' all. An' if he found me here locked in, even if there wa'n't n.o.body here with me, I dunno what he'd do. Burn the house down, I guess, over my head."

The last she said absently. She was arranging the blanket about her with an anxious care, evidently making it so secure that she need not use her hands in holding. They would be given to the baby.

"Burn my house down, will he? Let him try it," said Raven, under his breath.

She looked at him in a calm-eyed reproach that was all motherly.

"We mustn't have no trouble," said she. "I dunno what I should do if I brought that on you."

"What does the man mean," Raven broke out, chiefly to attract her attention and keep her there under shelter, "by going dotty half the time and the other half b.u.t.ting in and asking people if they're saved?"

"Did he ask you?" she inquired. She nodded, as if it were precisely what might have been expected. "I s'pose he thinks he has to. He's a very religious man."

"Religious!" Raven muttered. "Does he have to do the other thing, too: go off his nut?"

She was looking at him gravely. Suddenly it came to him he must be more sympathetic in his att.i.tude. He must not let her feel rebuffed, thinking he did not understand.

"I dunno's I blame him," she said slowly, as if she found it a wearingly difficult matter and meant to be entirely just. "You see he had provocation." The red came flooding into her cheeks. "He come home from work an' what should he see but the man, the one I told you----"

She stopped, and Raven supplied, in what he hoped was an unmoved manner:

"The one that looks up kinder droll?"

For his life he could not have helped repeating the words as she had given them to him. He had found them too poignant in their picturesque drama to be paraphrased or forgotten.

"Yes," she said eagerly. She was relieved to be helped. "He drove up in his sleigh, about fifteen minutes 'fore Isr'el come home. He come up to the house. I went to the door. 'What do you want?' I says. Then he begun to say things, foolish things same's he always did----"

She stumbled there, as if in shame, and Raven knew what kind of things they were: things about her eyes, her lips, insulting things to an honest wife, taunting things, perhaps, touching the past. More and more she seemed to him like a mother of sorrows, a child unjustly scourged into the dark mysteries of pa.s.sion and pain.

"Never mind," he said rea.s.suringly. "Don't try to tell me. Don't think of them."

But she would tell him. It seemed as if she had to justify herself.

"He told me he wanted to come in. 'You can't,' says I, 'not whilst I live.' An' he laughed an' stood there an' dug his heel into the snow an'

waited, kinder watchin' the road till Isr'el hove in sight with his dinner pail. An' then I see it all. He'd drove along that way an' see Isr'el an' Jerry comin' acrost from their work an' he meant to stan'

there drivin' me out o' my senses till Isr'el see him. An' soon as he was sure Isr'el did see him, he turned an' run for the sleigh an' got in an' give the hoss a cut, an' he was off same's he meant to be."