Old Crow Part 52

There were arguments at the back of his mind he could not, in decency, use. He remembered Raven's look when he drew her in, and the tragic one that mirrored it: pa.s.sionate entreaty on the woman's face, on the man's pa.s.sionate welcome. As usual, it was the real witnesses of life standing dumb in the background that alone had the power to convict. But they could not be brought into court. Custom forbade it, the code between man and man. Yet there they were, all the same.

"Well!" said Raven. He had responded with only a little whimsical lift of the eyebrows to this last. "If you won't trust me, I must you. That's all there is about it. The woman is our neighbor. Israel Tenney's wife, and she's in danger of her life from her husband, and she won't leave him."

d.i.c.k stared as at the last thing he had expected. He shook his head.

"Too thin," he said. "I've seen Tenney and I've heard him spoken of.

He's a psalm-singing Methody, or something of that sort. Why, I met him one day, Jerry and I, and he stared at me as if he wanted to know me again. And Jerry said afterward he was probably going to ask me if I'd found the Lord; but he changed his mind or something. No, Jack, don't you be taken in. That woman's pulling your leg."

"d.i.c.k," said Raven, "I've been told you have a very vivid sense of drama in your narrative verse. You couldn't, by any possibility, apply it to real life?"

"Oh, I know," said d.i.c.k, "New England's chock full of tragedy. But I tell you I've seen Tenney. He's only a kind of a Praise-G.o.d Barebones.

Put him back a few hundred years, and you'd see him sailing for Plymouth, for freedom to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d. (Obstinate, too, like the rest of 'em. He wouldn't wors.h.i.+p anybody else's G.o.d, only the one he'd set up for himself.) If his wife didn't mind him, he might pray with her or growl over the dinner table, but he wouldn't bash her head in.

Understand, Jack, I've seen Tenney."

"Yes," said Raven drily, "I've seen Tenney, too. And seen him in action.

Now, d.i.c.kie, you put away your man-of-the-world att.i.tude toward battle, murder, and sudden death, and you let me tell you a few things about Tenney."

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 d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k'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 d.i.c.k, 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."

d.i.c.k's eyes enlarged to such an extent, his mouth opened so vacuously, that Raven laughed out. Evidently d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k. "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, d.i.c.k, you never'll get Nan by bullying her.

Don't you know you won't?"

d.i.c.k, 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. d.i.c.k 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 p.r.o.nounce----"

d.i.c.k, 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 d.a.m.nable 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 d.i.c.k 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 rea.s.suring 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 d.i.c.k'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 rea.s.suring.

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

"G.o.d 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 d.i.c.k:

"Nan's coming to-night."

"Nan!" said d.i.c.k. "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 d.i.c.k, "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 n.o.ble Red Man you can be."

d.i.c.k turned away, guiltily, Raven thought, as if he had plans of his own. What the deuce did he mean to do? But their day pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.k uneasily tramping the veranda.

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

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

"It's no use, Jack," d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k 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 circ.u.mstance thrusts the human creature out of his enveloping customs and sends him into battle. He thought of d.i.c.k'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.