At this, Raven found he was so unreasonably tired of her that he had to call himself to order and wonder if he really could be disgusted with Amelia, old Milly who was such a sophisticated fool and yet meant so well by everybody that you had to keep reproving yourself when you were tempted to consign her--elsewhere.

"Milly," he said, in the tone he always had toward her at her worst, a tone of recalling her, bidding her remember she was a nice ordinary woman, not an arbiter of social destinies, "Milly, sometimes you're an awful idiot. Don't you know you are? Don't you see it won't do to keep hitting me on the raw? I sha'n't stand it, you know. I shall have to take Nan under my arm and get out and leave you the house to yourself.

It's all very well for you to call down alienists on me, and get me to put myself under restraint, but Nan's rather sacred to me. You can't meddle with Nan, and if you weren't so wrapped up in your own conceit, you'd see you couldn't."

Amelia seemed to be reflecting on something which resulted in shocking her into a further uneasiness.

"And the thing she said! I heard it with my own ears. She adored you!

That's what she said, adored you. To d.i.c.k, too, of all people, d.i.c.k she's virtually engaged to."

Raven remembered a scene in a play where a drunken man lifts a chair and then, aware of his own possibilities, gently sets it down again. He wanted to lift a chair. Only he wanted to complete the act and smash it.

"Milly," he said gently, "I tell you Nan is a child. Doesn't that show she's a child--the pretty extravagance of it! Why, I'm 'old Rookie' to Nan. What else do you think I could possibly be?"

"Heaven knows," said Amelia, tightening her lips. "I can't imagine what her Aunt Anne would have said. John, wasn't it wonderful her leaving you practically all her money? And just what might have been expected. She was bound up in you."

"O Lord!" said Raven.

But Amelia, once started, knew no bounds.

"And that's what I say, John. If you take hold of yourself now and get into shape again, you've a great many years before you, and Anne's money with yours--well, I don't see why you shouldn't look forward to a great deal."

Raven went over to the window and sat down there staring at the black bare branches and the clear sky. It seemed to him unspeakably desolate and even, in its indifference to his own mood, cruel. So was Amelia, he thought. In spite of her plat.i.tudes about enjoying a great deal, she had him dead and buried. He became absurdly conscious that he was afraid, but of one thing only: to hear her voice again. Upon that, thinking how it would actually sound, he turned about and ignominiously left the room. And since there was no spot in the house where she might not follow him he took his hat and jacket from the kitchen and went out through the shed. Charlotte was washing dishes at the sink, but she did not, according to her custom, look up to pa.s.s the time of day. A cloud rested even on her brown hair and splendid shoulders. Amelia had brought the cloud. She'd have to get out, even if he had to tell her so.

With no intention, but an involuntary desire to be where Amelia would not find him (and also, it was possible, where that other quietest of women could be found) he went down the road to the maples, and then plunged into the woods and up the hill. He had first gone along the road to mislead Amelia, if she chanced to be looking out. He couldn't have her following, and she was equal to it, pumps and all. Halfway up the hill, making his way through undergrowth where the snow packed heavily, he turned off at his left and so got into the wood road. And then, his breath coming quick from haste and the vexation of the clogged way, he did not slacken to cool off in the relief of easier going, but, breathless as he was, began to run, and got more breathless still. Tira was up there in the hut. He was sure of it. And for those first hurried minutes he forgot her presence there meant only added misery, but dwelt upon his own need of such a spirit as hers; the strength, the poise, the ready coolness.

At the door he felt rebuffed, it looked so inhospitable, so tight against him. He tapped and waited. No one came. Then he tried it and found it locked and the revulsion was bitter. He was about turning away when it came to him that at least he might go in. The key would be under the stone. He put his hand into the hollow and found it there, and only when he was setting it in the lock realized that this meant a deeper loneliness. It would be easier to think she was there, the key turned against him, but still in his house, than to find the house itself void of her presence. He shook himself, in anger at the incomprehensible way the whole thing was moving him. Why should it move him? Then, finding it cold, the deserted room, he made himself busy and laid the fire and set the two chairs hospitably by the hearth. He did not light the fire. It must be ready for her if she came. After it was in order (her house, it seemed to him now, with a fatalism of belief he accepted and did not dwell upon) he sat down by the cold hearth and tried to think. But never of himself. He thought of her: beautiful, l.u.s.trous, caged bird with the door of her prison open, and who yet would not go. His mind went back to Milly, waiting there at home to apply scientific remedies to his diseased spirit, and he laughed a little, Milly seemed of such small consequence. But the thought of the misery of mind that had brought him here gave him a new sense of the cruelty of the world. For it had been the sad state of the whole world he had fled away from and here, as if all misery had converged to a point, he had taken a straight path to the direst tragedy of all: a mother trying against hope to save her child, the most beautiful of women pursued by s.e.x cruelty, the gentlest threatened by brute force. How could he save her? He could not, for she would not be saved. He sat there until the dark in the corners crept toward him like fates, their mantles held up in shadowy hands, to smother him, and then suddenly remembering Nan and hospitable duties down below, he got up, chilled, went out, and locked the hut behind him.

The house he found was a blaze of windows. Charlotte had lighted lamps and candles all over it. He was half amused by that, it gave such an air of fict.i.tious gayety. He did not know Nan had whispered her to make it bright because he would see it, coming up the road.

The three were in the library by the fire. Amelia had dressed for supper in chiffon absurdly thin and curtailed, neck and hem, so that d.i.c.k had, without being told, brought her fur coat and put it about her shoulders.

That was just like her, Raven thought, as he went in upon them, to go by the clock and, because winter evenings necessitated evening dress, ignore the creeping cold of a country house. Nan wore her gown of the morning, and her stout shoes. Indeed she had to, Raven reminded himself, when he was about to commend her for good taste. She had brought only her little bag. Nan was now sweet reasonableness itself. No sleepiest kitten, claws in drawn, could have been softer. Amelia was baiting her, asking her, with a reproving implication that she ought not to have been in a position to know, about the life over seas, and Nan was answering by the card, compliantly, sincerely.

She had determined, Raven could see, that there should be no more ructions in his house. When he came in, they looked up at him, frankly pleased, and Amelia as patently relieved.

"I'm so glad you've come back," she said, getting up so that d.i.c.k could set another chair, and Raven join them in the conventional family circle. "I've been trying to send d.i.c.k out after you, but he wouldn't go. John, you mustn't get into the habit of wandering off alone like that. You really mustn't."

Raven grimaced as he took the properly adjusted chair, and wondered whether he'd got again to invite Milly to shut up. But d.i.c.k did it, in an honest despair that seemed entirely adequate.

"Ain't mother the limit?" he remarked, to no one but perhaps his own wondering mind.

Raven gave a little bark of laughter, and Amelia betrayed no sign of having heard. But Raven caught the grateful tribute of Nan's tone.

"My hanky," she said, "d.i.c.kie, dear."

He saw it dropped, saw d.i.c.k dart for it, and Nan, accepting it, give his fingers a little squeeze. Evidently d.i.c.k, who flushed red, was being paid for having briefly illuminated mother. Supper was got through successfully, Raven and d.i.c.k doing active service. Raven talked about thinning out the lower woods and d.i.c.k played up beautifully, taking it with the greatest attention and answering at length. Mother was to be shunted imperceptibly from _cafard_. And when they had finished and returned again to the library fire, Nan, after perhaps half an hour of desultory talk, yawned rudely and asked if she might go to her bed.

Raven suspected her. He noted how she half closed the library door behind her; so he took the chair she had lately left, commanding the crack of it. In about the time he expected, he heard her in the hall.

She had come down the back stairs, he judged, and was now putting on her hat and coat, with scarcely a rustle, the sly one!

"Draught from this door?" he suggested, got up and closed it.

At least d.i.c.k shouldn't know she was going. If anybody stole behind her in the friendly "outdoors" it should be he, to guard her from her own foolhardiness. These roads were paths of peace, but Nan was equal to adventure more extended. She might have s.n.a.t.c.hed snowshoes, in her stealthy preparation, to go off wood wandering. She might brave the darkness where, to country minds, lurked the recurring legend of the "lucivee." There was no actual danger, but Pan might be wandering.

"These old windows are draughty, too," said Raven. He paused at one of them, fumbling with the catch. Really he was watching the path. There she was, at the left, going toward her own house. He pulled down the shade and lounged back to his seat by the fire.

"You probably feel the cold," said Milly drowsily. The fur coat and blazing logs were beginning to do their blessed work. "Your vitality is low."

"Yes," said Raven piously. He would have sworn to anything. "Just so."

He went on talking to d.i.c.k, and d.i.c.k caught the ball neatly, so that presently they could glance at each other in a community of understanding. "She's off!" said Raven's face, and d.i.c.k's returned, "Right you are!" while he droned on about "popple," the local word for poplar, and the right month for peeling and whether it really paid to cut it if you had to hire. Raven loved d.i.c.k at times like these, when he was neither sulky over Nan's aloofness nor didactic about democracy and free verse. Amelia choked and came awake.

"Did I," she ventured, fearing a too frank reply, "did I--make a noise?"

"No, dear," said Raven mellifluously.

If Milly had been cleverer she would have remembered that when he was deceiving her he spoke, "as if b.u.t.ter wouldn't melt," as if his vocal arrangements dropped oil and balm.

"d.i.c.k and I are talking out this lumber question. Don't you bother. You don't know anything about popple."

Milly, rea.s.sured, dropped her cheek, with a little breath, and closed her eyes. "Gone?" d.i.c.k telegraphed Raven, who nodded "Gone!" took a step to the door, opened it, and was himself away. He s.n.a.t.c.hed, haphazard, at a hat and coat on the great chest in the hall. d.i.c.k had a way of throwing things down and leaving them where they fell. Yes, they were d.i.c.k's, and Raven hastily shoved himself into them, judging it was better, if d.i.c.k decided to go roaming, to keep him looking for them.

Then he went out and down the path and along the road where Nan had gone. He came to her house and stopped, interrogating it. There was no light. Still she might be in the back part, hunting about for something she perversely couldn't wait for over night. He went up the path and tried the front door. It was fastened and he called to her. But there was no Nan, and he went back to the road and walked up and down, waiting. If she wanted a run alone in the dark, she must have it. After he had been pacing for what seemed to him a long time, he heard voices and the crunch of snow. One voice was hers, and he went on to meet it.

The other, a man's, short-syllabled, replied at intervals. Nan seemed to be holding forth. They were coming on briskly, Nan and a tall figure at the other side of the road. She had seen Raven and called, clearly, though not with any implication of relief:

"That you, Rookie?"

He came up to them and saw, with a surprise out of all proportion to the event, in this neighborhood where anybody might join anybody else in familiar intercourse, that it was Tenney. They stopped, Tenney a step behind her. It looked as if he understood he had fulfilled his civility to her and could be dismissed.

"I've been calling on Mrs. Tenney," said Nan, "and I asked Mr. Tenney to walk home with me. Thank you, Mr. Tenney. Good night. Think it over, won't you?"

Tenney turned, without a word, and went back along the road, with his habitual look, Raven had time to note, in the one glance he cast after him, of being blown by a hurrying wind. Raven faced about with Nan and asked at once, in the excess of his curiosity:

"Now what are you up to, calling on the Tenneys?"

Nan answered seriously. There was trouble in her voice.

"Well, I got thinking about them so I knew I shouldn't go to sleep, and I just went up by, without any real plan, you know. The woman had such an effect on me. I couldn't keep away from her."

Raven was struck with the inevitableness of this. Yes, she had that effect. You couldn't keep away from her.

"I'd no idea of going in," said Nan. "And I did want a run. Isn't the air heady? But just as I got to the house, she opened the door. She was coming out, I suppose. She had the baby. The baby was all wrapped up.

She wasn't, though. She had just an ap.r.o.n on her head. And when the door opened, I could hear him yelling inside. I don't know whether he was driving her out or whether she'd started to run for it."

"Well?" prompted Raven harshly. Why should she be so slow about it?

"What then?"

"I went up the path," said Nan, in a half absent way, as if what she was telling seemed far less important than the perplexing issues it had bred in her. "I said good evening to her. I went by her: I think I did. I must have got into the kitchen first. And there he was. He's a striking fellow, isn't he, Rookie? Like a prophet out on the loose, foaming at the mouth and foretelling to beat the band. He'd got something in his hands. It was little and white; it might have been the baby's cap. He was tearing it to rags. You ought to have seen him at it."

"You shouldn't have gone in," said Raven angrily. "The fellow's dotty.

Don't you know he is? Did he speak to you?"

Nan gave a little laugh. Suddenly the incongruity of it came over her.