Nan was actually shy now.

"Why, my darling," said Raven, in a tone so moved she was almost sorry she had brought it all about. It made too many responsibilities. Which Nan was she going to be? ("But no kissing!" she reminded herself.) "You've come back to me."

"I haven't been away," said Nan, recovering herself and treating him to a cool little nod, "not actually. Like it, Charlotte?" For Charlotte had come in with a platter, and Nan turned about, peac.o.c.king before her unsurprised gaze. "I found it up attic."

"It's real pretty," said Charlotte. "Them scant things they're wearin'

now, they ain't to be thought of in the same day."

Then, having given the room a last glance (almost a caressing touch Charlotte had, a little anxious, too, because all comforts were so important) she went out, and Nan was sitting opposite Raven at the table, demure, self-contained, yet playing her wildest. It was a game she knew she was to have entirely alone. The game was that she and Rookie were living here in this house in some such potency of possessive bliss that nothing could separate them. She was careless over the terms of it. She was a child, she was a woman, she was everything Rookie wanted her to be. Here they were together, and the universe, finding the combination, Nan and Rookie, too strong to fight against, had given up the losing battle, turned sulkily and left them alone.

They were hungry and in high spirits, and they ate and talked a great deal. Nan meant to remember what they talked about. Even the words were so dear to her she would have liked to set them down in a book to keep for her old age that was to be as desolate as Aunt Anne's. But it shouldn't be as conventional. There should be waves on that sea. Then Charlotte had come in to clear the table and afterward, by Raven's invitation, sat ten minutes or so by the fire and talked of neighborhood things, and they were left alone again, and he was suddenly grave. Was the game over, Nan wondered, and then went on into a more unbridled speculation whether he was finding himself reminded of the old scruples, the old withholdings when Aunt Anne, unable to keep up with their galloping horses of fun, restrained them delicately but with what a hand of steel! And suddenly she realized he was not thinking of her. Was the grim house over the rise of the road calling to his anxious heart?

"Nan," he said, as if he had suddenly made up his mind, "I've got something to show you."

He left the room and she heard him running upstairs. Presently he was back, carrying the mottled book. Instantly it had a vivid interest for her, he held it so reverently and, it seemed, so tenderly. She was at the fire and he told her to get up and take the other chair. It would bring the light at her back. With the book still in his hand, he sat down before the fire and began to tell her the story of Old Crow. Nan had known it, in its outer eccentricities; but had Old Crow been unhappy? That was new to her. She had heard of him as queer, the country oddity who, being frenzied over G.o.d or love, had madly incarcerated himself in the loneliness of his own eccentricity.

"At odds with life as he found it," Raven concluded, "not actually able to bear it. That's how it looked to the rest of us. Now, this is how it looked to him."

"Is it a journal?" Nan asked.

She had forgotten her game. She was no child now, but a serious woman with an intensely frowning glance.

"Yes. This is his journal. Want to read it, or me read it to you?"

"Oh, you," said Nan.

"I'd better, I guess. His punctuation's queer, and so's his spelling sometimes. But I wish I could write as good a fist."

So he began. Nan sat perfectly still while the reading lasted. Once getting up to tend the fire, she went back to a higher chair and sat tense, her hands clasped about her knees. Old Crow seemed to have entered the room, a singularly vital figure with extraordinary things to say. Whether you believed the things or not, you had to listen, Old Crow believed them so tremendously. He was like a shock, an a.s.sault from the atmosphere itself. He affected Nan profoundly. Her perched att.i.tude in the chair was, in an unreasoned way, her own tribute of strained attention. She was not combating him, but she had to tune herself up high not to be overwhelmed. When Raven had finished, he turned and laid the book on the table behind him, but lingeringly as if, Nan thought, he had an affection for it.

"Well," he asked, "what do you think?"

XXVII

"What do I think?" Nan repeated. "About Old Crow, or his religion? It is that, isn't it, Rookie? It is a religion."

"It's a religion, all right," said Raven. "And curiously, Nan, it's given me a tremendous boost."

"Because you think----"

"Not because I think anything. I've an idea that with religions you'd better not think. You'd better believe."

"If you can," said she.

"But don't you believe?" he asked her, out of an impetuosity like her own. "I never thought to wonder what you believed. I remember though, one time."

"Yes," said Nan. A deeper red ran into her cheeks, and her brows came down a little over her eyes. Raven could see she was visualizing something. "You're going back to the time when I wouldn't be confirmed."

"I remember. Mighty disagreeable, that was."

"Yes. I was in disgrace. She looked at me as if she'd been frozen. And you brought me a peach. Do you remember that peach?"

He shook his head. But he did remember, though he said nothing, his mind on the poor little girl chilled by Aunt Anne's frozen look.

"It was the most beautiful peach," said Nan, looking into the fire, and continuing to hug her knees. "It wasn't that I didn't have peaches.

There were plenty to be eaten like a lady with a silver knife, or even stolen off the sideboard and gobbled in the garden with the juice squshing over your white frock. But this one--you slipped it into my hand and I knew it was because you were sorry for me. And I took it out of the room and went into the garden with it. And what do you s'pose I did then, Rookie?"

"Ate it, I hope," said Raven. He felt his eyes hot with angry sorrow over her. "That's the only thing I know of to do with a peach."

"I went round behind the lilacs, where the lily bed is, and stood there and cried like--like a water spout, I guess, and I kissed the peach. I kissed it and kissed it. It was like a rough check. And then I buried it among the lilies because the dirt there looked so soft."

"Did it come up?"

He wanted, though so late, to turn it into childish comedy. Nan laughed out.

"No," she said ruefully, "not the way you'd expect. It did come up. I saw her troweling there the next morning. She'd called me to bring her other gardening gloves. She'd found a hole in one she had on. You know how exquisitely she kept her hands. And just as I came, she turned up the peach, and looked at it as if it had done something disgraceful to get there, and tossed it into her basket."

"Now," said Raven, "you can't make me think anybody"--he couldn't allow himself to say Aunt Anne--"went hunting out your poor little peach."

"No," said Nan, bending on him a limpid gaze. "Of course not, consciously. Only there was something----" But even she, with all her recklessness, could not follow this out. To her own consciousness was the certainty that deep in Aunt Anne, deep as the principle of life itself, was an intuition which led her will to the evidence it needed for its own victories. "And the queer thing about it was," she ended, "I didn't refuse to be confirmed because I doubted things. I refused because I believed. I believed in G.o.d; I believed so hard I was afraid."

"What of?"

"Afraid of standing in with what I didn't like. Afraid I couldn't carry it through, and if I didn't, there'd be ginger for me somewhere. So queer, Rookie, like all the things that keep happening to us. Little ironies, you know, that sort of thing. For she thought I was behaving shockingly toward G.o.d. And really, Rookie, it was because I was so afraid of Him. I believed in Him so much I couldn't say I believed in a way I didn't."

"Like Old Crow," said Raven. "Only you didn't go far enough. You didn't say it's only a symbol."

"I tried not to think much about it, anyway," she owned. "I couldn't believe what she did. But I couldn't go into it. I can't now. Don't you know, Rookie, there are things you can't talk about? It's bad manners."

"I wish the learned divines thought so," said Raven. "Dear Nan!" he added, his mind returning to her. "I didn't know you so very well, after all. I must have seen you were having a beast of a time, or I mightn't have b.u.t.ted in with the peach, but I didn't know how deep it went."

"Oh, it always goes deep with children," said Nan, carelessly, as if the child he was pitying being snowed under by the years, it made no great difference about her, anyway. "You get gashed to the bone and the scars are like welts. But so far as I see, it has to be, coming into a world you don't even know the rules of till they're banged into you."

"You wouldn't be willing," said Raven, spurred on by a mounting curiosity over her, the inner mind of her he seemed never to have touched before, "you wouldn't be willing to tell me what it was in the church you didn't like?"

"Yes," said Nan decisively, "I should mind. Oh, I'd tell you, Rookie, if I could anybody. But I can't. Maybe I could if I hadn't seen it working: over there, you know--seen boys clinging to it so at the end--confession--the crucifix. (The vestments, do you remember? over that faded horizon blue!) I couldn't do it, Rookie, what they did, not if I died this minute. Only," she added, struck by a thought, "I might want it to remind me. I might touch the crucifix, you know, or look at something or feel the holy water on my forehead. I might be too far gone to think up to G.o.d but--yes, it might remind me."

"Symbols," said Raven, profoundly moved by the vision of the bright spirit in her mortal beauty flickering out. "Old Crow."

"And when I said," she hesitated, anxious to give him everything he asked of her, "the things I didn't like, I meant the things they tell us, Rookie. You know: facts, details. And then you think of G.o.d and--no use, Rookie, no use!"

"Yes," said Raven, "that's where Old Crow was up against it. But picture writing, because it's the only kind of writing we can read--picture writing, Nan, because we're savages--he could take that and not wince."

"Anyway," said Nan, "I'm happiest not thinking of it. I say my prayers: G.o.d bless Rookie. G.o.d bless me. That's all."