Tira forced herself to look at him, and the anguished depths of her eyes were moving to him only because they seemed to mourn over his having found her out.

"No, Isr'el," she said quietly. "He wa'n't comin' in. He drew up because he see you, an' he knew 'twould be wormwood to both of us to have him do just what he done."

Tenney laughed, a little bitter note. Tira could not remember ever having heard him laugh with an unstinted mirth. At first, when he came courting her, he was too worn with the years of work that had brought him to her, and after that too wild with the misery of revolt. She was sorry for that, with an increasing sorrow. Tira could bear no unhappiness but her own.

"Wormwood!" he repeated, as if the word struck him curiously. "D'he think 'twas goin' to be wormwood for a woman to find a man comin' all fixed up like courtin' time, to steal a minute's talk? You make me laugh."

He did laugh, and the laugh, though it might have frightened her, made her the more sorry. She had the sense of keeping her hand on him, of holding him back from some rushing course that would be his own destruction.

"Yes," she answered steadily. "'Twould be nothin' but wormwood for me, an' well he knows it. He don't--love me, Isr'el."

She hesitated before the word, and with it the thought of Raven came to her, as she saw him, unvaryingly kind and standing for quiet, steadfast things. "He hates me."

"Hates ye," he repeated curiously. "What's he hate ye for?"

"Because," said Tira, bound to keep quietly on in this new way of reason with him, "I left him. An' I left him 'fore he got tired o' me. He never'd overlook that."

"You left him, did ye?" he repeated. "Then that proves you was with him, or ye couldn't ha' left him."

"Why, Isr'el," said she, her clear gaze on his turbid answering one, "I told you. I told you long 'fore you married me. First time you ever mentioned it, I told you, so's to have things fair an' square. I told you, Isr'el."

He said nothing, but she knew the answer at the back of his mind, and it seemed to her wise now to provoke it, to dare the accusation and meet it, not as she always had, by silence, but a pa.s.sionate testimony.

"You said," she continued, "it shouldn't make no difference, what I'd done 'fore you married me. You said we couldn't help the past, but we could what's comin' to us. An' I thought you was an angel, Isr'el, with your religion an' all. Not many men would ha' said that. I didn't know one. An' we were married an' you--changed."

"Yes," he said. His hands were shaking as they did at the beginning of his rages, but Tira, embarked on a course she had long been coming to, was the more calm. "Yes, I changed, didn't I? An' when d' I change? When that"--he paused and seemed to choke down the word he would have given the child--"when that creatur' in there turned into the livin' pictur'

of the man that drew up here this day. Can you deny he's the image of him?"

"No," said Tira, looking at him squarely. "He is the image of him."

"What do folks think about it?" he asked her. "What do you s'pose the neighbors think? What'll it be when it grows worse an' worse? What'll the school children say when he's old enough to go to school? They'll see it, too, the little devils. The livin' image, they'll say, o' 'Gene Martin."

Tira laid her work on the table in front of her. The moment of restraining him had failed her, but another moment had come. This she had seen approaching for many months and had pushed away from her.

"Isr'el," she said, "I guess you won't have that to worry over. There's no danger of his goin' to school. He--ain't right."

He stared at her a long moment, puzzling instances acc.u.mulating in his mind, evidences that the child was not like other children he had seen.

Then he began to laugh, a laugh full of wildness and despair.

"O my Lord!" he cried. "My Lord G.o.d! if I wanted any evidence I hadn't got, You've give it to me now. You've laid Your hand on her. You've laid Your hand on both of 'em. He can't ride by here an' see a red-headed b.a.s.t.a.r.d playin' round the yard an' laugh to himself when he says, 'That's mine.' You've laid Your hand on 'em."

Tira rose from her chair and went to him. She slipped to the floor, put her head on his unwelcoming shoulder and her arms about his neck.

"Isr'el," said she, "you hear to me. If you can't for the sake o' me, you hear to me for the sake o' him,--sleepin' there, the pitifullest little creatur' G.o.d ever made. How's he goin' to meet things, as he is?

'Twould be hard enough with a father 'n' mother that set by him as they did their lives, but you half-crazed about him--what'll he do, Isr'el?

What'll the poor little creatur' do?"

Tenney sat rigid under her touch, and she went on, pouring out the mother sorrow that was the more overwhelming because it had been locked in her so long.

"Isr'el, I could tell you every minute o' my life sence you married me.

If 'twas wrote down, you could read it, an' 'twould be Bible truth. An'

if G.o.d has laid His hand on that poor baby--Isr'el, you take that back.

It's like cursin' your own flesh an' blood."

"I do curse him," he muttered. "I curse him for that--not bein' my flesh an' blood." With the renewed accusation, his anger against her seemed to mount like a wave and sweep him with it, and he shook himself free of her. "Jezebel!" he cried. "Let go o' me."

Tira rose and went back to her chair. But she did not sit down. She stood there, looking out of the window and wondering. What to do next?

With a man beside himself, what did a woman do? He was talking now, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair and looking at her.

"Sometimes," he said, "when it all comes over me, I think I'll shet you up. I'll leave him asleep in there an' lock you in, up chamber, an' you can hear him cry but you can't git to him. An' mebbe you can work it out that way. He'll be the scapegoat goin' into the wilderness, cryin' in there alone, an' you'll be workin' out your punishment, hearin' him cry."

Tira stood listening and thinking. This was a new danger. If he shut her away from the child (and he might do it easily, when his foot would serve him again) n.o.body would hear. They were too far away. He was frightening her. She would frighten him. She walked up to him and stood looking down on him.

"Isr'el," said she quietly, "don't you git it into your head you could shet me up."

"Yes," said he, and his tone was as ominous as her own, "I guess I could shet you up all right."

"Yes," said Tira, "mebbe you could. But if you do, I'll break out. An'

when I've broke out"--she towered over him--"I'll break your neck."

Tenney, looking up and seeing in her eyes the mother rage that sweeps creation from man to brute, was afraid, and Tira knew it. She looked him down. Then her gaze broke, not as if she could not have held his forever, but haughtily, in scorn of what was weaker than herself.

"I've been a true wife to you, Isr'el," she said. "You remember it now, 'fore it's too late. For as G.o.d's my witness, if you turn your hand ag'inst a little child--whether it's your own or whether it ain't--an'

that baby in there is yourn an' no man but you has got part nor lot in him--if you turn ag'inst him, I turn ag'inst you. An' when I've done that, you'll find me as crazy as you be, an' I can't say no worse."

She went into the bedroom and he heard her crooning there, defiantly he thought, even through the low sweetness of her voice. But her pa.s.sion had shaken him briefly. For the moment, the inner self in him could not help believing her. He went back to his newspaper, trying, though the print was dim before him, to recover his hold on the commonplace of the day. He, too, would be unmoved; she should see he was not afraid of her tantrums. But he had not read half a column before an evil chance drew his eyes to a paragraph in the gossip from the various towns about. This was under the caption of his own town:

"A certain gentleman appeared last week with a black eye, gained, it is said, in a sc.r.a.p with a non-resident interested in keeping the peace in country towns. It is said both combatants bore themselves gallantly, but that suit for a.s.sault and battery is to be brought by the party attacked."

Tenney sat staring at the words, and his mind told him what a fool he was. That meant the encounter at his gate. He had ignored that. He had been deflected from it simply because he had cut his foot and let himself be drawn off the track of plain testimony by his own pain and helplessness. Was Raven in it, too? Was there a shameless a.s.sault of all the men about on Tira's honesty? While he was the dupe of Martin, was Martin Raven's dupe? Did such a woman bring perpetual ruin in her path?

This he did not ask himself in such words or indeed through any connected interrogation. It was pa.s.sion within him, disordered, dim, but horrible to bear. He got up presently, took her scissors, cut out the paragraph and laid it on her basket where her eyes must fall upon it.

When he had gone back to his chair, she appeared from the bedroom and went up to him. He did not look at her, but her voice was sweeter, gentler than the song had been, with no defiance in it, and, in spite of him, it moved his sick heart, not to belief in her, or even a momentary rest on her good intent toward him, but to a misery he could hardly face. Every nerve in him cried out in revolt against his lot, his aching love for her, his pa.s.sion forever unsatisfied because she was not entirely his, the anguish of the atom tossed about in the welter of elemental life.

"Isr'el," said she, "there's one thing we forgot when we spoke so to each other as we did a minute ago."

She waited, and he looked up at her, and the hunger of his eyes was as moving to her as if, like the child they had fought over, he was himself a child and "not right."

"We forgot," she said, in a soft shyness at having to remind him who was a professing Christian of what he knew far better than she, "Who was with us all the time: the Lord Jesus Christ."

She turned away from him, in a continued timidity at seeming to preach to him, and seated herself again by the other window. The newspaper clipping arrested her eye. She took it up, read it over slowly, read it again and Tenney watched her. Then she crumpled it in her hand and tossed it on the table. She glanced across at Tenney and spoke gravely, threading her needle with fingers that did not tremble.

"That's jest like him," she said. "Anybody 't knew him 'd know 'twas what he'd do. He's hand in glove with Edson that carries on that paper.

They go to horse-trots together. He's willin' to call attention to himself, black eye an' all, if he can call attention to somebody else, same time. That's wormwood, too, Isr'el. We're the ones it's meant for, you an' me."

x.x.xI