Old Crow Part 61

No, Raven told her, he hadn't been there for days. They crossed the road and began the ascent into the woods.

"So you don't know whether she's been there?" Nan asked. She stopped to breathe in the wood fragrances, coming now like a surprise. She had almost forgotten "outdoors."

"Yes," said Raven. "I know. Sometimes I fancy she won't need to go there again. Tenney's a wreck. He sits there in the kitchen and doesn't speak.

He isn't thinking about her. He's thinking of himself."

"How do you know? You haven't been over?"

"Yes, I went over the morning after the shooting. I intended to tell Tira to get her things on and come down to the house. But when I saw him--saw them--I couldn't."

"You were sorry for him?" Nan prompted.

They had reached the hut, and Raven took out the key from under the stone. Close by, there was a velvet fern frond ready to unfurl. He unlocked the door and they went in. Her last question he did not answer until he had thrown up windows and brought out chairs to the veranda at the west. When they were seated, he went on probing for his past impression and speaking thoughtfully.

"No, I don't know that I was particularly sorry for him. But somehow the two of them there together, with that poor little devil between them--well, it seemed to me I couldn't separate them. That's marriage, I suppose. Anyhow it looked to me like it: something you couldn't undo because they wouldn't have it undone."

Nan turned on him her old impetuous look.

"You simpleton!" she had it on her tongue to say. "She doesn't want it undone because anybody that lifts a finger will get you--not her--deeper into the mire." But she did say: "I don't believe you can even guess what she wants, chiefly because she doesn't want anything for herself.

But if you didn't ask her to leave him, what did you do?"

"I told him to hold himself ready for arrest."

"You're a funny child," commented Nan. "You warn the criminal and give him a chance to skip."

"Yes," said Raven unsmilingly. "I hoped he would. I thought I was giving her one more chance. If he did skip, so much the better for her."

"How did she look?" asked Nan, and then added, tormenting herself, "Beautiful?"

"Yes, beautiful. Not like an angel, as we've seen her. Like a saint: haggard, with hungry eyes. I suppose the saints hunger, don't you? And thirst." He was looking off through the tree boles and Nan, also looking, found the distance dim and felt the sorrow of youth and spring.

"Everything," said Raven, "seems to be in waves. It has its climax and goes down. Tenney's reached the climax of his jealousy. Now he's got himself to think about, and the other thing will go down. Rather a big price for d.i.c.k to pay, to make Tira safe, but he has paid and I fancy she's safe." He turned to her suddenly. "Milly's very nice to you," he a.s.serted, half interrogatively.

He saw the corner of her mouth deepen a little as she smiled. Milly had not, they knew, been always nice.

"Yes," she agreed, "very nice. She gives me all the credit she doesn't give you about doctors and nurses and radiographs and d.i.c.k's hanging on by his eyelids. She says I've saved him."

"So you have," said Raven. "You've kept his heart up. And now you're tired, my dear, and I want you to go away."

"To go away?" said Nan. "Where?"

"Anywhere, away from us. We drain you like the deuce."

"No," said Nan, turning from him and speaking half absently, "I can't go away."

"Why can't you?"

"He'd miss me."

"He'd know why you went."

Her old habit of audacious truth-telling constrained her.

"I should have to write to him," she said. "And I couldn't. I couldn't keep it up. I can baby him all kinds of ways when he's looking at me with those big eyes. But I couldn't write him as he'd want me to. I couldn't, Rookie. It would be a promise."

"Milly thinks you have promised." This he ventured, though against his judgment.

"No," said Nan. "No, I haven't promised. Do you want me to?"

"I don't know," Raven answered, without a pause, as if he had been thinking about it interminably. "If it had some red blood in it, if you were--well, if you loved him, Nan, I should be mighty glad. I'd like to see you living, up to the top notch, having something you knew was the only thing on earth you wanted. But these half and half things, these falterings and doing things because somebody wants us to! G.o.d above us!

I've faltered too much myself. I'd rather have made all the mistakes a man can compa.s.s, done it without second thought, than have ridden up to the wall and refused to take it."

"Do you think of her all the time?" she ventured, in her turn, and perversely wondered if he would think she meant Tira and not Aunt Anne.

But he knew. "No," he said, "I give you my word she's farther away from me than she ever was in her life. For a while she was here, at my elbow, asking me what I was going to do about her Palace of Peace. But suddenly--I don't know whether it's because my mind has been on d.i.c.k--suddenly I realized she was gone. It's the first time." Here he stopped, and Nan knew he meant it was the first time since his boyhood that he had felt definitely free from that delicate tyranny. And being jealous for him and his dominance over his life, she wondered if another woman had crowded out the memory of Aunt Anne. Had Tira done it?

"And you haven't decided about the money."

"I've decided," he surprised her by saying at once, "to talk it out with Anne."

She could only look at him.

"One night," he continued, "when d.i.c.k was at his worst, I was there alone with him, an hour or so, and I was pretty well keyed up. I seemed to see things in a stark, clear way. Nothing mattered: not even d.i.c.k, though I knew I never loved the boy so much as I did at that minute. I seemed to see how we're all mixed up together. And the things we do to help the game along, the futility of them. And suddenly I thought I wouldn't stand for any futility I could help, and I believe I asked Old Crow if I wasn't right. 'Would you?' I said. I knew I spoke out loud, for d.i.c.k stirred. I felt a letter in my pocket--it was about the estate, those bonds, you remember--and I knew I'd got to make up my mind about Anne's Palace of Peace."

Nan's heart was beating hard. Was he going to follow Aunt Anne's command, the poor, pitiful letter that seemed so generous to mankind and was yet so futile in its emotional tyranny?

"And I made up my mind," he said, with the same simplicity of hanging to the fact and finding no necessity for explaining it, "to get hold of Anne, put it to her, let her see I meant to be square about it, but it had got to be as I saw it and not as she did. Really because I'm here and she isn't."

Her eyes filled with tears, and as she made no effort to restrain them, they ran over and spilled in her lap. She had thought hard for him, but never so simply, so sternly as this.

"How do you mean, Rookie," she asked humbly, in some doubt as to her understanding. "How can you get hold of Aunt Anne?"

"I don't know," said he. "But I've got to. I may not be able to get at her, but she must be able to get at me. She's got to. She's got to listen and understand I'm doing my best for her and what she wants. Old Crow understands me. And when Anne does--why, then I shall feel free."

And while he implied it was freedom from the tyranny of the bequest, she knew it implied, too, a continued freedom from Aunt Anne. Would he ever have set his face so fixedly toward that if he had not found Tira? And what was Tira's silent call to him? Was it of the blood only, because she was one of those women nature has manacled with the heaviness of the earth's demands? Strangely, she knew, nature acts, sometimes sending a woman child into the world with the seeds of life shut in her baby hand, a wafer for men to taste, a perfume to draw them across mountain and plain. The woman may be dutiful and sound, and then she suffers bewildered anguish from its potency; or she may league herself with the powers of darkness, and then she is a harlot of Babylon or old Rome. And Tira was good. Whether or not Raven heard the call of her womanhood--here Nan drew back as from mysteries not hers to touch--he did feel to the full the extremity of her peril, the pathos of her helplessness, the spell of her beauty. She was as strong as the earth because it was the maternal that spoke in her, and all the forces of nature must guard the maternal, that its purpose may be fulfilled. Tira could not speak the English language with purity, but this was immaterial. She was Tira, and as Tira she had innocently laid on Raven the old, dark magic. Nan was under no illusion as to his present abandonment of Tira's cause. That he seemed to have accepted the ebbing of her peril, that he should speak of it with something approaching indifference, did not mean that he had relaxed his vigilance over her.

He was not thinking of her with any disordered warmth of sympathy. But he was thinking. Suddenly she spoke, not knowing what she was going to say, but out of the unconscious part of her:

"Rookie, you don't want anything really, do you, except to stand by and give us all a boost when we're down?"

Raven considered a moment.

"I don't know," he said, "precisely what I do want. If you told me Old Crow didn't want anything but giving folks a boost, I'm with you there.

He actually didn't. You can tell from his book."

"I can't seem to bear it," said Nan. She was looking at the darkening woods and her wet eyes blurred them more than the falling dusk. "It isn't healthy. It isn't right. I want you to want things like fury, and I don't know whether I should care so very much if you banged yourself up pretty well not getting them. And if you actually got them! O Rookie!

I'd be so glad."

"You're a dear child," said Raven, "a darling child."