"I can't understand her," he said. "I believe I have understood her, up to now. But to say the child's got to bear it with her! Why, a woman's feeling about her child! It's as old as the world. A woman will sacrifice herself, but she won't sacrifice her child."

He looked at her with such trouble in his face that Nan had to turn away. He understood her too well. Could he read in her eyes what her mind had resolved not to tell him? Yet she would tell him. He shouldn't grope about in the dark among these mysteries. She wanted, as much as Old Crow wanted it, to be a light to his feet.

"She would," she told him quietly, "sacrifice herself in a minute. Only she can't do it the way we've offered her, because now you've come into it."

"I've been in it from the first," frowned Raven. "Ever since the day I found her up there in the woods."

"Yes, but then that poor crazy idiot was jealous only of him, the creature that sat down by her at prayer-meeting; and now he's jealous of you. And she's saving you, Rookie. At any risk. Even her own child."

Nan thought she could add what had been in her mind, keeping time to every step of the way home: "For now she loves you better than the child." But it proved impossible to say that, and she went out of the room, not looking at him, and only waiting to put away her hat and coat in the hall. She went upstairs with the same unhurried step and shut the door of her room behind her. She stood there near the door, as if she were guarding it against even the thoughts of any human creature. They must not get at her, those compa.s.sionate thoughts, not Charlotte's, certainly not Raven's. For at that moment Nan found herself a little absurd, as many a woman has who knows herself to be starving for a man's love. She began to tremble, and remembered Tira shaking there by the door that morning that seemed now years away. The tremor got hold of her savagely and shook her. It might have been shaking her in its teeth.

"Nervous chill!" said Nan to herself, insisting on saying it aloud to see if her teeth would actually chatter and finding they did. She had seen plenty of such nervous whirlwinds among her boys and helped to quiet them. "I'm an interesting specimen," chattered Nan. "Talk about _cafard_!"

All that forenoon, d.i.c.k fretted about the house, waiting for her, hoping she would go to walk, let him read to her--d.i.c.k had a persistent habit of reading verse to you when he found you weren't likely to get into the modern movement by yourself--but no Nan. At dinner, there she was, rather talkative, in a way that took Amelia into the circle of intimacy, and seemed to link up everybody with everybody else in a nice manner.

Nan had the deftest social sense, when she troubled herself to use it.

Aunt Anne would have been proud of her.

x.x.xVI

Then everything, so far as Raven and Nan were concerned, quieted to an unbroken commonplace, and the four--for Amelia and d.i.c.k held to their purpose of "standing by"--again settled down to country life, full of the amenities and personal abnegations of a house party likely to be continued. Charlotte was delighted, in her brooding way, and ascribed the emotion to Jerry who, she said, "liked somethin' goin' on." Nan and d.i.c.k had vaulted back to their past: the old terms of a boy and girl intimacy in robust pursuits admitting much laughter and homespun talk.

They went snowshoeing over the hills, Raven, though Nan begged him to come, electing to stay at home with Amelia, who would stand at the door to see them off, half persuaded she was up to going herself and, indeed, almost feeling she had gone, after considering it so exhaustively, and then retreating to the library where she was cramming for next year's economics. Raven was very good to her. He would sit down by the blazing hearth, listening with an outward interest to her acquired formulae of life, and then, after perfunctory a.s.sent or lax denial, retire to his own seclusion over a book. But he seldom read nowadays. He merely, in this semblance of studious absorption, found refuge from Amelia. He was mortally anxious for Tira, still face to face with brute irresponsibility, and when the mental picture of it flamed too lividly and could not be endured, he threw down his book and hurried up to the hut, to find her. She never came. The fire, faithfully laid for her, was unlighted. The room breathed the loneliness of a place that has known a beloved presence and knows it no more. Nearly every day he and Nan had a word about her, and often he saw Nan going "up along" and knew she was, in the uneasiness of no news, bent on walking past the house, if only for a glance at the windows and the sight of Tira's face. Three times within a few weeks Tenney had driven past, and each time Nan, refusing d.i.c.k's company, hurried up the road. But she came back puzzled and dispirited, and called to Raven, who, in a fever of impatience, had gone out to meet her:

"No. The door is locked."

She would put a hand on his arm and they would walk together while she told him her unvarying tale. When she had knocked persistently, Tira would appear at the chamber window, and shake her head, and her lips seemed to be saying, "No! no! no!" And each time Tenney returned shortly, and they were sure his going was a blind. He never went to the street, and even Charlotte remarked the strangeness of his short absences.

"What under the sun makes Isr'el Tenney start out an' turn round an'

come back ag'in?" she inquired of Jerry. "He ain't gone twenty minutes 'fore he's home."

Jerry didn't know. He "'sposed Isr'el forgot suthin'."

How was Tira? Raven asked after Nan had seen her at the window, and she did not spare him. Pale, she said, paler than ever, a shadow of herself.

But Nan had faith that her courage would hold. It was like the winter and the spring. Tenney stood for the forces of darkness, but the spring had to come in the end. Also she owned that her great reason for believing in Tira's endurance was that Tira was not alone. She had, like Old Crow, her sustaining symbol. She had, whatever the terrifying circ.u.mstance of her daily life, divine companionship. She had her Lord, Jesus Christ.

"I believe," said Raven abruptly, one day when they were tramping the snowy road and she was answering the panic of his apprehensive mind, "you swear by Old Crow's book."

"I do," said Nan simply, "seem to be hanging on to Old Crow. I've read it over and over. And it does somehow get me. Picture writing! And human beings drawing the lines and half the time not getting them straight!

But if there's something to draw, I don't care how bad the drawing is.

If there's actually something there! There is, Rookie. Tira's got hold of it because she's pure in heart. It's something real, and it'll see her through."

Raven was not content with its seeing her through until he could be told what the appointed end was likely to be. If Tira was to fight this desperate battle all her mortal life, he wasn't to be placated by the rewarding certainty of a heavenly refuge at the end.

"I can never," he said, "get over the monstrous queerness of it all.

Here's a woman that's got to be saved, and she's so infernally obstinate we can't save her. When I think of it at night, I swear I'm a fool not to complain of the fellow in spite of her, and then in the morning I know it can't be done. She'd block me, and I should only have got her in for something worse than she's in for now."

"Yes," said Nan, "she'd block you. Wait, Rookie. Something will happen.

Something always does."

Yes, Raven thought, something always does, and sometimes, in country tragedies, so brutal a thing that the remorseful mind shudders at itself for not preventing it. But Nan, equably as she might counsel him, was herself apprehensive. She expected something. She had a sense of waiting for it. d.i.c.k must be prepared. He must be found on their side. Whatever the outcome, Raven must not suffer the distrust and censure of his own house.

d.i.c.k had been reading to her by the fire while Raven was taking Amelia for a sober walk. Nan wished d.i.c.k wouldn't read his verse to her. It made her sorry for him. What was he doing, a fellow who had seen such things, met life and death at their crimson flood, pottering about in these bizarre commonplaces of a literary jog-trot? They sounded right enough, if you stood for that kind of thing, but they betrayed him, his defective imagination, his straining mind. He didn't see the earth as it was. He was so enamored of metaphorical indirection that he tried to see everything in the terms of something else. But to-day she had her own thoughts. She sat staring into the fire, her cheeks burned by the leaping heat, and d.i.c.k, looking up at her, stopped on an uncompleted line.

"You haven't," he said, "heard a word."

"Not much of it," said Nan. She looked at him disarmingly. When her eyes were like that, d.i.c.k's heart was as water. "I was thinking about Tira."

He had to place this. Who was Tira?

"Oh," said he, "the Tenney woman. Jack needn't have dragged you into that. It's a dirty country story."

"Not dirty," said Nan. "You'd love it if you'd thought of it yourself.

You'd write a play about it."

d.i.c.k frowned.

"Well, I didn't think of it," said he, "and if I had, I shouldn't be eating and sleeping it as you and Jack are. Whatever's happening up there, it isn't our hunt. It's hers, the woman's. Or the authorities'.

The man ought to be shut up."

Nan began telling him how it all was, how they wanted definitely to do the right thing and how Tira herself blocked them. d.i.c.k listened, commended the drama of it, and yet found it drama only.

"But it's a beastly shame," he commented, "to have this come on Jack just now when he isn't fit."

Nan had her sudden hot angers.

"Do you mean to tell me," she countered, "you believe that now, now you've lived with him and seen he's exactly what he used to be, only more darling--you believe he's broken, dotty? Heavens! I don't know what you'd call it."

d.i.c.k did not answer. He scarcely heard. One word only hit him like a shot and drew blood.

"Stop that!" he ordered.

They faced each other with eyes either angry or full of a tumultuous pa.s.sion an onlooker would have been puzzled to name.

"Stop what?"

"Calling him darling. I won't have it."

Nan found this truly funny, and broke into a laugh.

"Do you know," she said, "how every talk of ours ends? Rookie! It always comes round to him. I call him darling and you won't have it. But you'll have to."

"No," said d.i.c.k, "I won't have it. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

You little devil! I believe you do it to work me up. That's all right if it stopped there. But it won't. Some day he'll hear you and then----!"

She was flaming again.