Old Crow Part 69

Tenney came in, not so much limping as stumbling. He seemed to be shorter in stature. His head was bent, his body had sagged together as if not a muscle of it had strength to do its part. Raven pulled forward a chair, and he sank into it.

"What do you s'pose," he began--and the voice was so nearly a whimper that Raven was not surprised to see tears on his cheeks--"what do you s'pose I wanted my gun for? To use on you? Or him? No. On me. But I don't know now as I've got the strength to use it. I'm done."

This was his remorse for the past as he had made it, and Raven had no triumph in it, only a sickness of distaste for the man's suffering and a frank hatred of having to meet it with him.

"You know," said Tenney, looking up at him, sharply now, as if to ascertain how much he knew, "she didn't do it. The baby wa'n't overlaid.

G.o.d! did anybody believe she could do a thing like that? She slep' like a cat for fear suthin' would happen to him."

"What," asked Raven, in horror of what he felt was coming, and yet obliged to hear, "what did happen to him?"

Tenney stretched out his hands. He was looking at them, not at Raven.

"I can't git it out o' my head," he continued, in a broken whisper, "there's suthin' on 'em. You don't see nothin', do you? They look to me----"

There he stopped, and Raven was glad he did not venture the word. What had Raven to say to him? There seemed not to be anything in the language of man, to say. But Tenney came alive. He was shaking with a great eagerness.

"I tell you," he said, "a man don't know what to do. There was that--that--what I done it to--he wa'n't mine."

He looked at Raven in a hunger of supplication. He was almost dying to be denied.

"Yes," said Raven steadily. "He was yours."

"How do you know?" shrieked Tenney, as if he had caught him. "She talk things over?"

Raven considered. What could he say to him?

"Tenney," he said at last, "you haven't understood. You haven't seen her as she was, the best woman, the most beautiful----"

Here he stopped, and Tenney threw in angrily, as if it were a part of his quarrel with her:

"She was likely enough. But what made her," he continued violently, "what made her let a man feel as if her mind was somewheres else? Where was her mind?"

That was it, Raven told himself. Beauty! it promised ineffable things, even to these eyes of jealous greed, and it could not fulfil the promise because everything it whispered of lay in the upper heavens, not on earth. But Tenney would not have heard the answer even if Raven could have made it. He was broken. He bent his head into his hands and sobbed aloud.

"Good? 'Course she was good. Don't I know it? An' she's gone. An'

me--what be I goin' to do?"

Somehow Raven understood that he was not thinking of his desolate house and lonesome mind, but of himself in relation to the law he had broken and the woman's heart, broken, too. Grotesquely almost, came to his mind Tira's grave reminder: "He's a very religious man." And Tenney seemed to have come, by some path of his own, round to the same thing.

"If there was a G.o.d----"

"Oh, yes," Raven threw in, moved by some power outside himself, "there is a G.o.d."

"If there was," said Tenney, "he couldn't forgive me no more'n He could Cain. There's _that_ on my hands. When there's that----"

He stopped before the vision of the man G.o.d had scourged into exile for the shedding of blood. To Raven there was suddenly a presence beside them: not a Holy Presence, such as they might well have invoked, but Old Crow. And he remembered how Old Crow had eased the mind of Billy Jones.

"Tenney," he said, "don't you remember what Tira believed in? She believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. She believed He could forgive sins."

"Do you believe it?" Tenney hurled at him. "Can He forgive--that?"

Again he stretched out his hands.

"Yes," said Raven. "He can forgive that."

"An' I be," Tenney continued, in his scriptural phrasing, "whiter than snow?"

Raven found himself halting. There were, behind this vision of the symbol by which G.o.d made Himself manifest to man, reserves of strict integrities.

"Tenney," he said, "you've killed a child. Your child. You're a criminal. The only thing you can do to get back among men is to give yourself up. To the law. And take your medicine."

"O my G.o.d!" cried Tenney. "Tell it? Tell that? Bring it up afore judge an' jury how I thought----"

"Don't tell me what you thought," said Raven sharply. "You've said it once. You were crazy, and you killed your child."

"An' what if----" he began, and Raven finished for him:

"What if they hang you? We can't go into that. There's your first step.

Give yourself up."

The next instant he was sorry for the brutality of this. But Tenney did not find it brutal. Strangely it seemed to him a way out, the only way.

He was brooding. Suddenly he looked up.

"You told me," he said, apparently in wonder, "you didn't believe."

What to say? "I believe in G.o.d Who is letting me--tenderly, oh, with such pity for my human foolishness--seize whatever crutch I can to help you over this dark mortal way?" Could he say that? No, it was true, but somehow it couldn't be said.

"Yes," he answered gravely, "I believe."

"Then," said Tenney eagerly, "you pray with me."

Raven, thinking on this afterward, knew he did pray, in what words he never could recall, and that the substance of it was Forgiveness: Forgive our sins. And that when he had finished Tenney completed his faltering close with "For Christ's sake. Amen!" And that because Tenney looked at him for confirmation, he, Raven, repeated it after him, humbly and with sincerity. And when, shaken both of them beyond the possibility of speech, they rose from their knees, they heard a voice outside, Nan's voice:

"Rookie, let me in."

Raven opened the door, and found her there, and d.i.c.k was with her.

"You shouldn't have come up here," he said to d.i.c.k. "You're not supposed to climb hills."

"He had to," said Nan. "I came up and listened and I heard voices. So I went back again and asked Charlotte for sandwiches. And d.i.c.k would come.

But I carried the basket." She had gone past him into the room and was unpacking food. "No, Mr. Tenney, you stay. They're for you, too. We're all tired out, you know. Let's keep together all we can. We're so lonesome. Tira! but she's the only one that isn't lonesome. _She's_ gone to heaven. Look! hot coffee, too. Now you eat, both of you. There's nothing like grub."

In the midst of this, d.i.c.k had gone round the table and put out his hand to Tenney and said:

"H' are you, Tenney?" and Tenney, dazed, had given his.

Raven found he was hungry and began to eat, and Nan somehow saw to it that Tenney also ate. And Raven, at least, felt in the breath of the spring night, something ebbing there in the hut. What was it: waves of wild human turmoil finding a channel where they could flow equably? Nan and d.i.c.k went out on the veranda while the two finished, and Raven noted the murmur of their voices and wondered a little, idly, whether they were better friends--lovers or only better friends. Presently Nan was back again. She brushed up their crumbs and packed the dishes into the basket.

"Now, Mr. Tenney," she said, "this is what we've done. When I found you were both up here, I had Jerry go over and get your cows. He milked and I strained the milk. I locked up the house, too. Here's your key. What makes you go back to-night? It'll be easier by daylight. Rookie, couldn't he sleep up here?"