Old Crow Part 18

"And you were left alone with Tenney," said Raven quietly. "There! don't tell me any more."

She smiled upon him, giving him an ineffable sense that she had, in telling him, somehow dropped her burden. Now she said, with as calm a resolution as that of the martyr marching to the fire he is sure his Lord has called him to:

"I'll go down along."

She went over to the couch, took up the child, and began to tuck about him the folds of her enveloping blanket. Raven moved to her side. He had an overwhelming sense of their being at one in the power of their resolution. If she would yield to his deliberate judgment! if only their resolutions could coincide!

"No," he said, "you're not going down there. I won't have it."

She looked at him and faintly smiled.

"I've got to," she said. "If I stay away all night an' he don't know where, there wouldn't be any way o' piecin' on."

And suddenly he knew, if she was to persist in "piecing on," she was right.

"Wait," he said. "Let me think."

There must be some way, he reflected, some means, by violence or diplomacy, to help her fulfill the outer rites of her bargain until he could persuade her to be taken beyond the reach of persecution. He wanted to fight for her; but if that was not the way, if his fists would only bruise her as well as Tenney, he was ready to lie. He had his idea.

It might be good, it might not, but it was an emergency idea.

"I'll go down," he said. "I'll go over to your house and offer to pay him for his week's work. You follow. Give me time enough to go into my house on the way and get some money. Then you come while I'm talking to him and I'll stay a bit, as long as I can. When you come, we can see how he is. If he's violent to you--if he looks it, even--you've got to come away."

"Oh, no," she cried sharply, "I can't do that. You must see I can't."

"I'll take you to my house," he said. "You know Charlotte. She'll be nice to you. Why, if Charlotte found out a thing like this was going on in the neighborhood, she'd go for him tooth and nail."

"No," said she, in a dull decision. "I can't. It would all come on you."

He understood. The madman would drag him into that range of jealous fury and because he was a man.

"I can look out for myself," he said roughly, "and you, too."

Again she shook her head.

"No," she said, "he might kill you. Anyways, he'd burn your barn."

"He won't kill me," said Raven, "and I don't care a hang about my barn.

Let him burn. Good thing. I'll clap him into jail and you'll know where he is. Now!" He looked at the clock on the mantel. "I'm going. In just twenty minutes you start and come along as fast as you want to. I'll be at your house."

She had begun to speak, but he paid no attention. He turned up his collar and stepped out into the storm.

"Lock the door," he called back to her. "Keep it locked till you go."

The road down the slope was scarcely clogged at all. The firs, waving now and interlocking their branches in that vague joy or trouble of the winter wind, were keeping off the powdery drift. When he got to his house he saw Jerry on the way to the barn, but he did not hail him.

Possibly Jerry had paid Tenney for his week, and although Raven's own diplomacy would stick at nothing, he preferred to act in good faith, possibly so that he might act the better. He smiled a little at that and wondered, in pa.s.sing, if he were never to be allowed any arrogance of perfect behavior, if he had always got to be so sorry for the floating wisps of humanity that seemed to blow his way as to go darting about, out of his own straight course, to pluck them back to safety. There were serious disadvantages, he concluded, as he often had before, in owning a feminine vein of temperament. He went in at the front door and up the stairs, took a roll of money from his desk and ran down again. Charlotte had not seen him. She was singing in the kitchen in a fragmentary way she had when life went well with her, and the sound filled Raven with an unreasoning anger. Why should any woman, even so dear and all deserving as Charlotte, live and thrive in the warmth and light while that other creature, of as simply human cravings, battled her way along from cliff to cliff, with the sea of doom below, beating against the land that was so arid to her and waiting only to engulf her? That, he thought, was another count in his indictment against the way things were made.

The Tenney house, when he approached it, was cold in the darkness of the storm. The windows were inhospitably blank, and his heart fell with disappointment. He went up to the side door looking out on the pile of wood that was the monument to Tenney's rages, and knocked sharply. No one came. He knocked again, and suddenly there was a clatter within, as if some one had overturned a chair, and steps came stumbling to the door. A voice came with them, Tenney's voice.

"That you?" he called.

He called it three times. Then he flung open the door and leaned out and, from his backward recoil, Raven knew he had hoped unreasonably to find his wife, knocking at her own door. Raven kicked his feet against the step, with an implication of being snow-clogged and cold.

"How are you?" he said. "Let me come in, won't you? It's going to be an awful night."

Tenney stepped back, let him enter, and closed the door behind him. They stood together in the darkness of the entry. Raven concluded he was not to be told which way to go.

"Smells warm in here," he said, taking a step to the doorway at the left. "This the kitchen?"

Tenney recovered herself.

"Walk in," he said. "I'll light up."

Raven, standing in the s.p.a.cious kitchen, all a uniform darkness, it was so black outside, could hear the man breathe in great rasping gulps, as if he were recovering from past emotion or were still in its grasp. He had taken a lamp down from the high mantel and set it on the table. Now he was lighting it, and his hand shook. The lamp burning and bringing not only light but a mult.i.tude of shadows into the kitchen, he turned upon Raven.

"Well," he said, harshly. "Say it. Git it over."

Raven heard in his voice new signs of a tremendous, almost an hysterical excitement. It had got, he knew, to be quieted before she came.

"If you'll allow me," he said, "I'll sit down. I'm devilish cold."

"Don't swear," said Tenney, still in that sharp, exasperated voice, and Raven guessed he was nervously afraid, at such a crisis, of antagonizing the Most High.

The vision of his own grandmother came up before him, she who would not let him read a child's book in a thunder shower lest G.o.d should consider the act too trivial in the face of elemental threatening and strike him dead. He took one of the straight-backed chairs by the stove and leaned forward with an absorbed pretense of warming his chilled hands. But he was not rea.s.suring Tenney. He was still more exasperating him.

"Say it, can't you?" the man cried to him piercingly. "Tell it an' git it over." Then, as Raven merely looked at him in a civil inquiry, "You've got suthin' to break, ain't ye? Break it an' leave me be."

Raven understood. The man's mind was on his wife, fled out into the storm. His inflamed imagination was picturing disaster for her. He was wild with apprehension. And it was well he should be wild. It was a pity she was likely to come so soon. Raven would have been glad to see his emotions run the whole scale from terror to remorse before she came, if come she would, to allay them.

"No," he said quietly, "I haven't anything to break. But it's going to be an awful night. I guess there will be things to break about the folks that are out in it."

Tenney came up to him and peered down at him in blank terror.

"Who's out in it?" he asked. "Who've you seen?"

Raven laughed jarringly. It did seem to him grimly amusing to be dallying thus with a man's fears. He was not used to playing games with the human creature's destiny. He had always looked too seriously on all such drama, perhaps because he had been so perplexed by drama of his own. If his life was too puzzling a thing to be endured, was not all life, perhaps, equally puzzling and therefore too delicate a matter to be meddled with? But now the game was on, the game of sheer diplomacy.

The straight and obvious path wouldn't do if he was to save a woman who handicapped him in advance by refusing to let herself be saved.

"The night?" he repeated. "Who's out in it? Why, I'm out in it myself; at least, I have been. But now I'm here by this stove, I don't know when you'll get rid of me. Put in a stick, won't you, Tenney? These big rooms have a way of cooling off before you know it."

Tenney did put in a stick and more. He crammed the stove with light stuff and opened draughts. Raven noted, in the keen way his mind had taken up, of s.n.a.t.c.hing at each least bit of safety for the woman, that the tea kettle was boiling. She would be chilled. She would need hot water. And suddenly he felt the blood in his face. There was a hand at the latch of the side door. Tenney, too, heard it. He threw back into the box the stick of wood he had selected and made three strides to the entry. Again he called, in that voice of sharp anxiety:

"That you?"

She opened the door just before he could put out his hand to it, pa.s.sed him without a look, and came in. He shut the door and followed her.

Raven got up from his chair and stood, glancing at her with what he hoped was a casual attention. Tenney came back and, when she had thrown off the blanket, took it from her hand and dropped it on a chair. He was all trembling eagerness. That act, the relieving her of the blanket, was incredible to Raven. The man had wanted to kill her (or, at the least, to kill his child), and he was humbly inducting her into the comforts of her home. She had not looked toward Raven. With a decorum finer, he thought, than his own, she would not play the game of diplomacy. She knew him and she could not deny him, even to save her life. Suddenly Tenney, brushing past to draw up a chair for her at the stove, became aware of him. Raven believed that, up to the moment, he had, to the man's absorbed gaze, been invisible. Now Tenney seemed to recognize the decencies toward even an unbidden guest.

"She's all beat out," he said, in uncouth apology. "It's my woman."