Old Crow Part 51

Then, as he did not speak, she looked at him and meeting the cold unresponsiveness in his face her composure broke and she stretched out her hands to him in a wildness of entreaty.

"Oh, don't you look like that," she cried. "If you turn from me 'twill be my death."

He was not cold now. He bent to her and took her hands in his.

"Tira," he said, "come away with me. You can't bear this any longer.

Take the child and come. You'd be safe. You'd be happy, if you weren't afraid. Don't go back there for another minute. Stay here over night, and to-morrow I'll take you away."

He was looking at her, his eyes holding hers as his hands held her hands. And, whatever he had meant, the strangest, swiftest retribution of his life came to him through the change in her face. How could flesh and muscle bring about such an alteration in human line and texture, the Mother of Sorrows transformed to a Medusa head? Her lips parted, trembling over words they could not bring themselves to say. Her eyes widened into darkness. Her brows drew together in a pitiful questioning.

And her voice, when she did speak, was a vibrating protest against what her eyes knew and her mind.

"You don't mean," she said, "_that_?"

Raven dropped her hands as if they had struck him. The question was a rus.h.i.+ng commentary on his life and hers. Was he, she meant, only another actor in this drama of man's hunger and savagery? Was he a trader in the desire of beauty, that tragic dower nature had thrown over her like a veil, so that whoever saw it with a covetous eye, longed to possess and rend it? Probably Tira never did what would be called thinking. But her heart had a vital life of its own, her instinct was the genius of intuition. He had been kind to her, compa.s.sionate. She had built up a temple out of her trust in him, and now he had smoked the altar with the incense that was rank in her nostrils. He had brought, not flowers and fruits, but the sacrifice of blood. And he, on his part, what did he think? Only that he must save her.

"No, Tira," he said, "I don't mean that. I mean--what you want me to mean. You can't understand what it is to a man to know you're afraid, to know you're in danger and he can't help you. I didn't ask you as I ought. I asked you to come away with me. I ask you again. Come away with me and I'll take you to the best place I know. I'll take you to Nan."

He had not guessed he was going to say this. Only, as he spoke, he knew in his inner mind the best place was Nan. Suddenly she seemed to be in the room with them. What was it but her cool fragrant presence? And she understood. Tira might not. She might feel these turbid waves of his response to he knew not what: the beauty and mystery of the world, the urge of tyrant life, all bound up in the presence of this one woman. She was woman, hunted and oppressed. He was man, created, according to the mandate of his will, to save or to undo her. But the world and the demands of it, clean or unclean, could not be taken at a gulp. He must get hold of himself and put his hand on Tira's will. For she could only be saved against her own desire. Whatever he had seemed to ask her, or whatever his naked mind and rebellious lips had really asked, he could not beg her to forgive him. He must not own to a fault in their relation, lest he seem, as he had at that moment, an enemy the more.

"That's exactly what you must do," he said. "You must let me take you to Nan."

A soft revulsion seemed to melt her to an acquiescence infinitely grateful to her.

"That," she said, "was what I had in mind. If she'd take him--the baby--an' put him somewhere. She said there were places. She said so herself. I dunno's you knew it, but she talked to me about him. She said there was ways folks know now about doin' things for 'em when they ain't right, an' makin' the most you can of 'em. She told me if I said the word, she'd come here an' carry him back with her."

"But," said Raven, "what about you? I'm ready to stand by the child, just as Nan is. But I'm doing it for your sake. What about you?"

"Oh," said Tira, with a movement of her eloquent hands, as if she tossed away something that hindered her, "tain't no matter about me. I've got to stay here. Mr. Raven"--her voice appealed to him sweetly. He remembered she had not so used his name before--"I told you that. I can't leave him."

The last word she accented slightly, and Raven could not tell whether the stress on it was the tenderness of affection, or something as moving, yet austere. And now he had to know.

"You want to stay with him"----he began, and Tira interrupted him softly, looking at him meantime, as if she besought him to understand:

"I promised to."

Raven sat there and looked into the fire, thinking desperately. At that moment, he wanted nothing in the world so much as to s.n.a.t.c.h her away from Tenney and set her feet in a safe place. But did he want it solely for her or partly for himself? What did it matter? Casuistry was far outside the tumult of desire. He would kick over anything, law or gospel, to keep her from going back there this night. Yet he spoke quietly:

"We'll go up and get the baby, and I'll call Charlotte, and you'll stay here to-night. To-morrow we'll go."

"No," said Tira, gently but immovably, "I couldn't have Charlotte an'

Jerry brought into it. Not anyways in the world."

"Why not?" asked Raven.

"I couldn't," she said. "They're neighbors. They're terrible nice folks, but folks have to talk--they can't help it--an', 'fore you knew it, it'd be all over the neighborhood. An' he's a professin' Christian. 'Twould be terrible for him."

Sometimes he only knew from the tone of her voice, in this general vagueness of expecting him to understand her, whether she meant Tenney or the child.

"What I thought was," she went on timidly, "if she'd come an' git him"--and here "him" evidently meant the child--"'twould be reasonable she was takin' him back where he could be brought up right. She'd just as soon do it," she a.s.sured him earnestly, as if he had no part in Nan.

"Some folks are like that. They're so good."

He was insatiate in his desire to understand her.

"And you mean," he said, with a directness he was willing to tincture with a cruelty sharp enough to serve, "to send the child off somewhere where he will be safe, and then live here with this brute, have more children by him----"

"No! no!" she cried sharply. "Not that! don't you say that to me. I can't bear it. Not from you! My G.o.d help me! not from you."

He understood her. She loved him. He was set apart by her overwhelming belief in him, but she was in all ways, the ways of the flesh as well as the spirit, consecrated to him. Her body might become the prey of man's natural cruelty, and yet, while she wept her tears of blood in this unreasoning slavery, she held one wors.h.i.+p. There he would be alone. The insight of the awakened mind told him another thing: that, in spite of her despairing loyalty, he could conquer her scruples. He could, by the sheer weight of a loving will, force her to follow him. A warm entreaty, one word of his own need, and she would answer. And while he thought, the jungle feeling came upon him, hot, hateful to his conscious mind, the feeling of the complexity of it all, strange beasts of emotion out for prey, the reason drugged with nature's sophistries. The jungle! That was what Nan had called it, this welter of human misery. Who else had been talking to him about it? Why, Old Crow! He had not called it the jungle, but he had been lost in its tortuous ways. This prescience to Old Crow brought a queer feeling, as if a cool air blew on him. The jungle feeling pa.s.sed. Almost he had the vision of an eternal city, built up by the broken but never wholly failing strength of man, and Old Crow there beckoning him into it and telling him he'd kept a place for him. And the cool breeze which was Old Crow told him that although Tira must be rescued, if it could be brought about, it must not be through any of the jungle ways. She must not be drugged by jungle odors and carried off unwillingly, even to the Holy City itself, by that road. He and Tira--yes, he and Tira and Nan--would march along together with their eyes open. He hastened to speak, to commit himself to what he must deliberately wish:

"Then we'll telephone Nan."

She looked at him, all grat.i.tude. Her friend had gone away into strange dark corners of life where only her instinct followed him, and here he was back again.

"No," she said, "don't you telephone. Somebody'd listen in. You write. I guess mebbe nothin'll happen right off, even if I did burn the crutch. I guess I got kinder beside myself to-night. I ain't likely to be so ag'in."

"I'll walk up to the hut with you," said Raven, rising as she did, "and see you safe inside."

"No," said she, "I couldn't let you no ways. It's bad enough as 'tis."

By this she meant the paragraph in the paper which had laid an insulting finger on him; but he had not seen it and did not understand. Only it was plain to him that she would not let him go. She drew her hood up, and made it secure under her chin. Then she looked at him and smiled a little. She had to smile, her woman's instinct told her, to rea.s.sure him. She opened the door, and though he followed her quickly, had slipped through the outer door as softly and was gone. He stood there on the sill watching her hurrying to the road. When she had turned to the right, she began to run, and he went down the path after her to look up the road, lest she had seen something pursuing her. But the night was still. There was no sound of footsteps on the snow, and the far-off barking of a fox made the silence more complete. She was only hurrying, because her mother heart had wakened suddenly to the loneliness of the child up there among the pillows, torturing herself with wonders that she could leave him. He went out into the road and continued on her track, until he saw her turn into the woods. Then, waiting until she should be far enough in advance not to catch the sound of his pursuit, he suddenly heard footsteps on the road and turned. A man was coming rapidly. It was d.i.c.k.

x.x.xIII

In his relief--for, in spite of the man's lameness, he had made sure it was Tenney--Raven laughed out. At once he sobered, for why was d.i.c.k here but to spy on him?

"Well," he inquired brusquely, "what is it?"

They turned together, and d.i.c.k did not speak. When they had gone in and Raven closed the hall door and glanced at him, he was suddenly aware that the boy had not spoken because he could not trust himself. His brows were knit, his face dark with reproachful anger.

"Think the old man shouldn't have gone out in the cold without his hat and m.u.f.fler?" asked Raven satirically.

"Yes," said d.i.c.k, in a quick outburst. "I think just that. It's a risk you've no business to take. In your condition, too. Oh, yes, I know you do look fit enough, but you can't depend on that. Besides--Jack, who's that woman? What's she going up into the woods for? She's not going to the hut? Is that why----?"

Raven stood looking at him, studying not so much his face as the situation. He turned to the library door.

"Come in, d.i.c.k," he said. "We'll talk it out. We can't either of us sleep."

d.i.c.k followed him in and they took their accustomed chairs. Raven reached for his pipe, but he did not fill it: only sat holding it, pa.s.sing his thumb back and forth over the bowl. He was determining to be temperate, to be fair. d.i.c.k could not forget he was old, but he must force himself not to gibe at d.i.c.k for being young.

"Do you feel able," he said, "to hear a queer story and keep mum over it? Or do you feel that a chap like me, who ought to be in the Psychopathic, hasn't any right to a square deal? When you see me going off my nut, as you expect, shall you feel obliged to give in your evidence, same as families do to the doctor and the clergyman if a man's all in?"

d.i.c.k was straight.

"I'll do my best," he said. "But a woman--like that--and you meeting her as you did! It's not like you, Jack. You never'd have done such a thing in all your born days if you weren't so rattled."