Old Crow Part 20

"Because d.i.c.k sent her your letter. They both a.s.sume you've broken down, and she's called in an alienist to come up here and eye you over, and d.i.c.k'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 d.i.c.k wrote her, she made up her mind like a shot. She had to put you in a pigeon hole. Sh.e.l.l 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 d.i.c.k 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 a.s.sume it's the other way about. That is, when it's d.i.c.k. 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 d.i.c.k."

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 d.i.c.k? I'm bound to nothing, with any man, d.i.c.k 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. d.i.c.k 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 rea.s.sure 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.