Old Crow Part 16

Then he took his lamp and turned to go. He was as much surprised at himself as she could have guessed. For some reason--and he did not know the reason--he could not bear to leave her there in the dark with the silent witness standing by to cry out against him. Yet this he did not think. He only knew he must get the cradle out of the room and do it quickly. When he had reached the door to the enclosed staircase, her voice halted him so abruptly that the light quivered in his hand.

"Isr'el," it called, "you're real good. Don't you be cold. There's a blanket on the foot."

But though he hesitated another minute, the voice had nothing more for him, and he went slowly up to bed. As he undressed, his thoughts down there with her, he wondered how her voice could have sounded so gay.

In the middle of the night, Tira woke suddenly, with the sense of something near. There was the moon flooding the little room, and in the doorway stood a figure.

"That you, Isr'el?" she called clearly.

"Yes," he said, and then hesitated, "you all right?"

"Yes," she answered, in the same clear voice, with something commanding in it now. "We're all right. You go back to bed, so's to git your sleep.

I'll call you if I'm up first."

Tenney turned away, and she heard his hesitating step through the kitchen and on the stairs. Then, as if this had been as commonplace an interlude in her night as the baby's waking and drowsing off again, she felt herself surging happily away to sleep.

XII

Raven, tired to lethargy by the morning's turmoil, stayed in the house until after dinner. He sat by the library fire, a book on his knee, chiefly to convince Charlotte, who would inevitably detect his drop in responsive liveliness, that he was merely absorbed and not moping. Once or twice she did appear at the door, plainly to look at him, but, finding he kept his eyes on the page, she did not speak. The life had gone out of him. He wondered at himself for being so f.a.gged. Yet it had been a good deal of a strain, that anguish of a creature he was not allowed to help; it was exacting a heavy penalty. He found his mind dwelling on it, look by look, word by word, and finding no relief except in the thought of Tenney in the river pasture, chopping. If that came to pa.s.s, the woman would be safe for hours she could count upon.

That afternoon, Jerry reported that Tenney had been over and promised to appear next morning with his axe. Then Raven went off for a walk along the road skirting the base of the mountain. Possibly he chose it because it led to the woman's old home, and the thought of her was uppermost in his mind. The road itself was still and dark, subdued to a moving silence, it might almost seem, by the evergreens, watchers on the high cliff at the left, and the quiet of the river, now under ice, on the other side below. He kept on to the stepping stones, at the verge of the scattered settlement of Mountain Brook. They were rough granite at regular distances apart, only the tops of them visible above the ice, and they made the concluding stage of the walk across lots from Wake Hill to Mountain Brook. In spring the water swirled about them madly, and it was one of the adventures of boyhood for a squad to go over to the stepping stones and leap from one to another without splashing into the foam below. This was "playing Moosewood," the Indian who had been found there drowned, whether by his own act because the local palefaces had got his hill-top, over beyond, or from prolonged fire-water, no one knew. But always he was a n.o.ble red man and one boy acted his despairing part, and the others hunted him across the stones. In the game, he always escaped and "shinnied" up the cliff opposite, by fissures the boys of every generation knew, and struck a pose among the evergreens above, whooping down defiance.

Raven stopped there and gave a thought to the boy he had been, and then to Anne, who had once taken the walk across lots with him, and who, when he told her how they used to play Moosewood, insisted on crossing, though he had tried to dissuade her, noting her foolish shoes, and aware that she had no adroitness of eye and muscle. But she had a will of steel in these matters, as well as those of the spirit, and would not be prevailed on. Three of the daring leaps she made from one stone to another and at the fourth she slipped and he caught and held her, the delicate slenderness of her, in his arms. He had felt awkward merely and sorry for her, she so overprized doing things superlatively well, and when they reached the bank she was flushed and shaken, and again he was sorry, it seemed so slight a thing to care about. But as he looked down there now he was thinking really about her he called "the woman" in his mind. She would not slip. She was as perfectly adapted in every tempered muscle to the rough conditions of natural life as the pioneer women who helped their men clear the wilderness and set hearthstones. It darkened between the firs and they began to stir a little, as if a wind were coming up, and he turned back home, again growing uneasy about her, shut up there with her tormentor and walled about by the dark.

He had his supper early, and he did not again invite Charlotte and Jerry to eat with him. Now, he felt, he should need all the solitude he could get to think out this thing he seemed to have taken upon himself, and keep a grip on his anxiety. After supper he asked Charlotte for blankets and a pillow. She did not look at him, but he was clearly aware that she was worried and would not let him read it in her eyes.

"It's all right, Charlotte," he a.s.sured her. "I just want some things up there at the hut, for the couch, that's all."

"You ain't goin' to sleep up there, be you?" she asked quietly.

Charlotte, he knew, had felt his mood. She saw he was on edge.

"No," he said, "I shall be right back. Only I want to get them up there.

To-morrow I shall be carrying books and things."

She got the blankets without a word, venturing only, as she gave them to him:

"Jerry'll be as mad as fire with me for not sendin' him up to lug 'em."

Raven smiled at her and went off with his load. He carried also his electric torch, and traversing the dark between the moving trees, creaking now and complaining, at the door of the hut he flashed on the light and lifted the stone. The key was there. That gave him a momentary relief. She had understood and done her part toward his task of defending her. He went in, tossed the things over a chair, and lighted one of the candles on the mantel. The hearth was cold and he piled logs and kindling. Then he put the pillow in its place on the couch and spread the blankets. That was to show her she was to make herself comfortable. The match-box he placed on the mantel, where it seemed likely her hand would touch it, if she thought to feel there, and beside it his torch. It might be a momentary defence against the impalpable terrors of the night. But he was not sure she would feel any terrors, save of the defined and tangible. That he considered absorbedly as he went down the path after placing the key under the stone. It was not that she was insensitive. He felt in her the alert readiness of a perfectly acting nervous system. It showed itself in her self-control, her readiness of courage, her persistent calm. She would not thrill with apprehension over the tapping of those boughs against the walls: only at a voice or a human tread.

When he went in at his own door Charlotte appeared, with a quick step, from the kitchen. She was relieved, he saw. Dear Charlotte! she did not know how his anxieties were mounting, but she did feel the uneasiness he had brought with him. He tried to throw her off the track of her silent interrogations.

"I'm dog tired," he told her. "I believe I'll go to bed."

"That's right," said she. "Your fire's been blazed up quite a while."

"Don't you know," he called back to her from the stairs, "how we always sleep when we first come? I suppose it's the alt.i.tude."

"Yes," said Charlotte. "So 'tis, anyhow accordin' to Jerry."

Raven carried the look of her anxious, warm-colored face with him. It was all motherly. Yet she had no children. Jerry lived under the daily chrism of that soft well-wishing. And there was the woman up the road, looking like a spiritual mother of men and strangely, mysteriously, also like the ancient lure that makes men mad, and she had to fight like a tigress for the mere life of her child. The contrast leaped into the kaleidoscopic disorder he saw now as life like a brilliant, bizarre fragment to make the whole scheme (if the scheme could be even estimated by mortal minds) more disorderly still. But he was tired and he slept.

It would be good, he had thought for many weeks now, when he felt himself drifting off, to sleep forever. To-night he did not want that everlasting sleep. He wanted life, life to its full of power and probity, to stand between the woman and her terror. Suddenly he woke, and lay, his heart beating hard at the sound of the pines in the grove.

Charlotte had done her best to put the breadth of the house between him and their lamenting, but their voices crept round the corner and into his open windows, and invaded his mind. He lay there, the wind on his face and that sighing melancholy of theirs calling him to an answering sadness of his own. And now it was not his inexplicable panic of disaffection toward the earth as G.o.d had made it, but a pageant of darkness where formless terrors moved, all hostile to the woman. At this moment, she seemed to him the point of blinding pain about which the general misery of the world revolved. She was beauty in the flesh. She led the mind to the desire of holy things. At least, that was where she had led his mind.

But the cruelty of creation was not content with setting her loose in the world of created things with the gift of beauty and holiness in her hand. It had veiled her also with the mysterious magic that was simple enough and directly compelling enough to rouse the beast of jealousy, the beast of mastery, in the hearts of men. She did not seem to him an Aphrodite, bearing in her hand the cup of love. There was something childlike about her, something as virginal as in Nan. He could believe she would be endlessly pleased with simple things, that she could be made to laugh delightedly over the trivialities of daily life. But the hand of creation having made her, the brain of creation (that inexorable force bent only on perpetuation) saw she was too good a thing to be lost, too innocently persuasive to the pa.s.sion of men. So it had thrown over her the veil of mystery and p.r.o.nounced against her the ancient curse that she should be desired of many and yet too soft of her heart, too weak in her defenses, even to foresee the pitfalls that awaited her wandering feet and would sometime break her bones.

This was the worst of all the sleepless hours he had had, and in the morning he was up and out before Charlotte was ready for him. Jerry had breakfasted, when Raven came on him in the barn. He expected Tenney to go chopping, and he wanted the ch.o.r.es done, to get off early. Raven went in then and told Charlotte he would not have his own breakfast until Jerry had gone. He wanted to say a word to him as to the gray birches.

But actually he could not down his impatience to know whether Tenney was coming at all. So he hung about and hindered Jerry with unnecessary talk for a half hour or so, and while they were standing in the yard together, looking down toward the river pasture, and Raven was specifying, with more emphasis than he felt, that a fringe of trees should be kept along the mowing, Tenney came. Jerry at once said he'd go in and get his dinner pail and Raven waited for Tenney. This was not the man of yesterday. He carried his axe and dinner pail. He walked alertly, as if his mind were on his day's work, and the pale face had quite lost its livid excitement. It was grave and even sad. Raven, seeing that, wondered if the fellow could feel remorse, and was conscious of a lift in the cloud of his own anxiety. Tenney, not waiting to be addressed, walked straight up to him. He spoke, as soon as he was within hearing distance of a tone of ordinary volume, and what he said surprised Raven even more than the catamount calls of yesterday:

"Be you saved?"

Raven knew the salient country phrases, but, so alien was the question to his conception of the man, that he answered perplexedly:

"What do you mean by saved?"

Tenney set down his dinner pail, as if it hampered him, and began rhythmically, in the voice of the exhorter:

"Saved by the blood of the Lamb."

Raven stepped back a pace.

"No," he said coldly, "not that I'm aware of."

Tenney came forward a step and Raven again backed. There was something peculiarly distasteful in being exhorted by a fellow of unbridled temper and a b.e.s.t.i.a.l mind.

"You are a sinner," said Tenney. "If you reject the great atonement, you are lost. Don't you know you be?"

"No," said Raven. He was on the point of turning away, when he remembered it was an ill-judged impetuosity he could not afford. It was more important, in this world of persecution and unstable defense, to keep your antagonist busy, cutting gray birches.

"Do you reject Him?" Tenney, too, had his day's work on his mind and he spoke rapidly, with a patent show of getting his exhortation done in time to fall into step with Jerry, appearing, at the moment, axe in hand. He picked up his dinner pail. "Do you reject Him?" he repeated, in his former singsong. "Do you reject Christ crucified?"

And in spite of the prudence his inner self had counseled, Raven found he was, perhaps only from force of habit augmented by his distaste for the man, answering truthfully:

"Yes," he said, "as you mean it, I do."

Jerry, in the road, had halted and was looking back inquiringly. Tenney started after him. Instead of being rebuffed by Raven's att.i.tude, he seemed to be exhilarated. Raven concluded, as he saw the light of a perhaps fanatical zeal playing over his face, that the fellow took it for a challenge, an incentive to bring one more into the fold. It was something in the nature of a dare.

When he went in, Charlotte was about her tasks at the kitchen stove.

"You're not going to fodder the cattle, you know," he said to her, pa.s.sing through. "I'll see to that. Jerry showed me the mow he is using from."

"I always do," said Charlotte, "when he's away all day. I admire to git out there an' smell the creatur's and hear 'em rattlin' round the stanchils till they see the hay afore 'em."

"Never mind," said Raven. "I'll do it to-day." Then a thought struck him. "I wonder," he said, "who Tenney leaves to do his ch.o.r.es."