"That's it," said Nan. "If you didn't think I was a child, perhaps you'd want me. O Rookie! I wish you wanted me!"

Into Raven's mind flashed the picture of Anne on her knees beside him saying, in that sharp gasp of her sorrow, "You don't love me." This was no such thing, yet, in some phase, was life going to repeat itself over and over in the endless earth journeys he might have to make, futilities of mismated minds, the outcry of defrauded souls? But at least this wasn't his cowardly silence on the heel of Anne's gasping cry. He could be honest here, for this was Nan.

"My darling," he said, "you're nearer to me than anything in this world--or out of it. Don't you make any mistake about that. And if I don't want things 'like fury,' as you say, it's a matter of the calendar, that's all. d.i.c.k wants them like fury. So do you. I'm an old chap, dear. You can't set back the clock."

But he had pushed her away, as his aloofness had pushed Anne. He had thrown Anne back upon her humiliated self. He had tossed Nan forward into d.i.c.k's generation and hers. But here was the difference. She wasn't going to cry out, "You don't love me." Instead, she turned to him, shivering a little and drawing her scarf about her shoulders.

"We'd better go down," she said. "It's getting cold. d.i.c.k'll be wondering."

They got up and Raven set the chairs inside the hut and took his glance about to see if all was in order: for he did not abandon the unwilling hope that Tira might sometime come. As they went down the hill the talk turned to the hylas and the spring, but when they reached the house Nan did not go in to d.i.c.k. She went to her own room and lay down on her bed and thought pa.s.sionately of leaving Rookie free. How was it possible?

Could he be free while she was bound? Sometimes of late she had been so tired that she could conceive of no refuge but wild and reckless outcry.

And what could he think she meant when she said: "I wished you wanted me"?

XLI

Spring came on fast and Nan, partly to a.s.sure Milly she wasn't to be under foot forever, talked of opening her house and beginning to live there, for the first time without Aunt Anne. But she predicted it, even to Milly, with no great interest, and Raven, though he had urged her to run away from the cloudy weather Milly and d.i.c.k made for her, protested against her living alone. d.i.c.k was now strong enough to walk from his room to the porch, and Raven, watching him, saw in him a greater change than the languor of low vitality. He had the bright-eyed pallor of the man knocked down into the abyss and now crawling up a few paces (only a few, tremulous, hesitating) to get his foothold on the ground again. He was largely silent, not, it sometimes seemed, from weakness, but the torpor of a tired mind. He was responsive to their care for him, ready with the fitting word and look and yet, underneath the good manners of it all, patently acquiescent.

Then Nan found herself rested, suddenly, in the way of youth. One morning she got up quite herself again, and wrote her housekeeper to a.s.semble servants and bring them up, and told Raven he couldn't block her any longer. She had done it for herself, and she quoted the over-worked commonplace of the psychological moment. He, also believing in the moment, refrained from argument and went over to open doors and windows. He was curiously glad of a word with her house, not so much to keep up old acquaintance as to ask its unresponsiveness whether it was going to mean Nan alone for him hence-forth or whether, at a time like this when he stood interrogating it, Anne Hamilton also stood there, in her turn interrogating him. Was she there to-day? Everything spoke mutely of her, the wall-paper she had prized for its ancient quaintness, the furniture in the lines of grace she loved. At that desk she had sat, slender figure of the gentlewoman of a time older than her own. Was her presence so etched in impalpable tracery on the air that he ought to feel it? Was she aching with defeated hopes because she might almost be expecting him, not only to remember but even to hear and see? No death could be more complete than the death of her presence here. He could not, even by the most remorseful determination, conjure up the living thought of her. Somehow it had seemed that here at least he might explain himself to her, feel that he had made himself clear. He did actually speak to her:

"I can't do it, Anne. Don't you see I can't?"

This was what he had meant when he told Nan he must get hold of her.

What place could be so fortunate as this, full of the broken threads of her personality? They only needed knitting up by his pa.s.sionate challenge, to be Anne. He called upon her, he caught the fluttering fringes of her presence in his trembling hands. But he could not knit them up. They broke, they floated away. It seemed, from the dead unresponsiveness of her house, as if there had never been any Anne. So he gave it up, and, in extreme dullness of mind, went about opening windows, and as the breeze idled in and stirred the waiting air and the sunlight rushed to it, he seemed to be sweeping the last earthly vestiges of her from the place that had known her best. And at once it appeared to him that he had done an inexorable, perhaps even a cruel thing, and he hurried out, leaving the air and sun to be more merciful than he.

When he went into his own yard he saw d.i.c.k sitting under the western pines, where Raven had set a couple of chairs and had a hammock swung.

d.i.c.k had ignored the hammock. He scarcely sat at ease, and Raven had an idea he was meeting discomfort halfway, with the idea of making himself fit. He did say a word of thanks for the chairs.

"Only," he added, "don't let it look too sociable. That'll be as bad as the porch." He laughed a little, and concluded: "I don't mean you, Jack.

You know that, don't you?"

Raven guessed he was allowing himself the indulgence of avoiding his mother. For now Milly, as he recovered, had struggled hard for her lost poise and regained it, in a slightly altered form, it is true; but still she had it pretty well in hand, she was unweariedly attentive to him and inexorably self-sacrificing in leaving Nan the right of way. Her life had again become a severely ritualistic social enterprise, but now she was just far enough lacking in spontaneity to fail in playing her game as prettily as she used. It was tiring to watch, chiefly because you could see how it tired her to play.

Raven went down the little foot-path to d.i.c.k, and he thought anew how illness had ravaged him. He had the tired eyes, the hollow cheek of ineffective youth.

"Hoping you'd come," said d.i.c.k. "Now, where's Tenney?"

"Tenney," said Raven, "is at home, so far as I know. I saw him last night."

"Go up there?"

"Yes."

"What for?"

Raven smiled a little, as if he found himself foolish or at best incomprehensible.

"Well," he said, "I gave him every chance to skip. I hoped he would.

That would be the simplest way out. But when I found he wasn't going to, I began to go there every night to let him see I was keeping an eye on him. I don't go in. I just call him out and we stare over each other's heads and I inform him you're better or not so well (the probation dodge, you know) and he never hears me, apparently, and then I go away.

I've got used to doing it. Maybe he's got used to having it done. Maybe it's a relief to him. I don't know."

"Does he still look like a lunatic at large?"

"More or less. His eyes are less like infuriated shoe b.u.t.tons, but on the whole he seems to have quieted a lot."

"You don't suppose," said d.i.c.k, "you've put the fear of G.o.d into him?"

"Not much. If anybody has, it was you when he saw you topple over and knew he'd got the wrong man."

"He was laying for you, then," said d.i.c.k.

"Why, yes," said Raven. "Tira was there, telling me he'd set up a gun, and she'd got to the point of letting Nan take her away, when he fired.

What the d.i.c.kens were you up there for, anyhow?" he ended, not quite able to deny himself rea.s.surance.

"I'd heard he was out with a gun," said d.i.c.k briefly. "Charlotte told me. And I gathered from your leaving word for Nan that the Tenney woman was there--at the hut, you know."

"Don't say 'the Tenney woman,'" Raven suggested. "I can't say I feel much like calling her by his name myself, but 'the Tenney woman' isn't quite----"

"No," said d.i.c.k temperately. "All right, old man, I won't."

"Awfully sorry you got it instead of me," said Raven, apparently without feeling. He had wanted to say this for a long time. "Wish it had been the other way round."

"I don't, then," said d.i.c.k, gruffly in his turn. "It's been an eye-opener, the whole business."

"What has?"

"This." He evidently meant his own hurt and the general viewpoint induced by it. "I'm not going to stay round here, you know," he continued, presenting this as a proposition he had got to state abruptly or not at all.

"Why not?"

"I don't believe I could say," d.i.c.k temporized, in a way that suggested he didn't mean to try. "There's Mum, you know. She's going to be at me again to go in for my degree. Oh, yes, she will, soon as she thinks I won't come unglued. Well, I don't want it. I simply don't. And I don't want what she calls a profession: any old thing, you know, so long as it's a profession. I couldn't go in for that either, Jack. If I do anything, it's got to be on my own, absolutely on my own. Fact is, I'd like to go back to France."

"Reconstruction?" Raven suggested, after a minute.

"Maybe. Not that I'm specially valuable. Only it would be something to get my teeth into."

Was this, too, Raven wondered, an aftermath of the War? Had it shaken the atoms of his young purpose too far astray for them ever to cohere again? d.i.c.k had had one purpose. Even that didn't seem to be surviving, in any operative form.

"Writing?" he suggested. "Oxford--and poetry?"

d.i.c.k shook his head.

"Well," said Raven, "if it's France then, maybe I'll go with you."

d.i.c.k smiled slightly. Did his lip tremble?