Old Crow Part 23

They stood looking at each other gravely in the silence of the gaily flowered room with the great blaze rushing up the chimney. It might have seemed that they were measuring each other. Yet they were inadequately matched, for though Raven knew Nan, it was not especially in her relation to him, and she knew herself and him intimately, in their common bond. The woman was the more intuitive, but the man was no less honest. She thought a moment now, her gaze unseeingly following the pattern of the rug at her feet.

"Very well," she said. "I'll go over to the house and get some things, and I'll stay."

There were, they both knew, bureau drawers full of Aunt Anne's things, doubtless in the perfect order that was a part of her exquisite mastery of life. She disliked traveling with a c.u.mbersome outfit, even from the city to this ancestral foothold. Everything possible was left behind her in each place.

"I'll go with you," said Raven. She should not poke into the cold house alone for the first time since she had inherited it, and encounter the desolation of change.

They went downstairs and out into the road, Charlotte looking from the window after them and wondering if they were bound on some jaunt that would leave her to encounter Mrs. Powell undefended. Nan's spirits always came up in the out-of-doors. She was a normal creature, needing to be quickened only by full air. She began to laugh.

"Rookie," she said, "I could tell you something funny."

"Fire away," said Raven.

"It's about my staying. I didn't bring any real things, because I knew I could come over here and get some, but my toothbrush is right here in my coat pocket. Don't you see, Rookie? I was going to stay if you made me, but not if you didn't, and you weren't to know I so much as thought of it."

"Humbug!" said Raven. "I might ha' knowed."

They came to the house, a great yellow square, well back from the road, and there being no path through the snow, Nan boasted of her boots and laughed at him for ordering her to wait until he went back for a shovel.

So he strode ahead and broke a path and she followed, and he was not really concerned for her because she looked so fit; it seemed unlikely the natural conditions of nature would hurt her, however hostile. She opened the door with the key produced from her coat pocket and stepped into the great hall, darkened from the obscurity of the rooms on each side where shades had been drawn, and a winter coldness reigned. Nan gave herself no time to shiver over the chill of her homecoming, but ran up the stairs as if she expected to find the sun at the end, and Raven stood in the hall, waiting, and the presence of Anne seemed suddenly beside him, and something he tried to think of as the winter cold (though it was far more penetrating and ethereal) struck him with a chill. Anne, the poignant memory of her, was certainly there with him as he stood absently following with his eyes the bridge-crossed road of the old landscape paper and thinking how different it used to look when the summer sunlight struck it through the open door; and Anne was beating, with her beautiful hands, at his unwilling heart, crying:

"Let me in! let me in to crowd Nan and that common woman out!"

Nan, coming down with a roll under her arm, glanced at him, perturbed.

He had, she judged, been seeing ghosts. They went out and locked the door behind them (locking in, Nan silently hoped, the ghosts also), and hurried back along the road. And when they had gone into his house again, Raven told her to run upstairs and put her things in the west chamber.

"Scatter 'em all over the place," said he. "Amelia'll fight for that room. She'll fight tooth and nail. I sha'n't let her have it, not even if you give it up. Understand?"

"But what is she going to have?" Nan asked, from the stairs.

"She's going to sleep down here, back of the dining-room," said Raven perversely, "in the room they made over for Old Crow when they were going to get him to give up the hut and come down here to die. Amelia's scared out of her boots in the country, unless she hears voices on every side of her. I know Amelia. Cut along and come down again and help me set the scene."

They did set the scene, with an exhilaration that played back and forth between them like a heady atmosphere. Charlotte was bidden to make the bed in Old Crow's room and while Raven built the fire, Nan helped Charlotte. And when the pung drove up from the station at the moment Nan had foreseen, she and Raven were sitting before the dining-room fire, apparently deep in talk. Whether Charlotte took her cue from them they did not know, but she was too busy in the back of the house to appear at once, and Mrs. Powell and d.i.c.k came in unheralded, turning first to the dining-room. There sat the two, absorbed. The visitors began, on an according note.

"John!" cried Amelia, and "Nan!" d.i.c.k cried, in an identical voice.

Raven and Nan had the same effect of unison. They laughed, it was so exactly what they had known it would be, and Raven came forward, put his hands on his sister's shoulders, and gave her a little shake.

"Now, Milly," he said, "what the d.i.c.kens are you up here for?"

Nan, having alienists on her mind, and finding none, was plumping her question at d.i.c.k:

"Where's Doctor Brooke?"

d.i.c.k evaded it by the self-evident statement that he hadn't come, and ended in a mora.s.s of frowning confusion.

Mrs. Powell turned to her with a surprised interrogation, a doubtful warmth. It tried subtly to convey an entire acceptance of her as an individual, combined with disapproval of finding her in the spot she had no excuse for seeking. And while they were exchanging civil commonplaces veiling unspoken implications, Raven was looking at his sister and thinking, in a whimsical terror, what a very large grain of sand she was likely to prove in the machinery of his daily life, and how little she had changed during his absence from America. Here she was, so indomitable in every particular that you could almost believe she was going to be as lasting as the processes that went to her equipment. She had, you learned to know, tackled life as a servant to be governed, an enemy to be downed. If it had antidotes, she would lose no moment in equipping herself with them. If circ.u.mstance proved unfriendly, she would ignore it and forge ahead. She was, Raven had always recognized, the feminine replica of his father's special type. As to her looks, she was a thin, whip-like woman, who gave an impression of wiry endurance and serviceable resiliency. You would expect her to be hard to the touch, mental or moral, and yet she could double, evade, rebound. Put her in a hole, and she soon proved to you that its obscurity was the last place where she proposed to stay. She looked the latest thing evolved by the art of man. Her clothes were the prevailing fantastic creation, and yet, on her, they were not illogical. They were the plumage of an eccentric bird hatched to look that way. Her face, in its sandy monotone of color, fitted the art of her wonderful and yet not too noticeable hat, and her gloves and veil were the last word of style.

Amelia had begun making herself, Raven used to think, long before G.o.d stopped making her. As a girl, she had gone after strange G.o.ds of culture and aestheticism, forsaking them, when they toppled, for newer G.o.ds still; but always she was undaunted, always persisting in her determined pose of governing the situation and her own att.i.tude toward it. And Amelia, he knew, could hang on like grim death.

"But Nan!" she was exclaiming, "who'd have expected to find you here?"

"Well," said Nan, in the shock of realizing she hadn't quite remembered what Amelia was like, and ranging herself to fight on Rookie's side, "who'd have expected you, Mrs. Powell?"

d.i.c.k stood frowning at them impartially and twisting his hat in his hands like a sulky boy.

"Have you opened your house?" Amelia persisted. "You're not staying----"

"She's staying here," said Raven. "Nan's taken pity on me and come up for a visit. Oh, Charlotte! here you are. Show Mrs. Powell to her room, will you?"

Charlotte appearing, white-ap.r.o.ned, in the doorway, looking like the beneficent G.o.ddess of home, Mrs. Powell greeted her urbanely and asked appropriate questions. Was she well, as well as she looked? And how was her husband? Always well, she remembered. Yes, she would go to her room, please. But she'd go up by herself. She knew the way. She should think so, indeed! And her reminiscent laugh endowed them with the picture of the little girl she had been, born and brought up in this very house.

"Oh, but it isn't up," said Raven cheerfully. "It's the west bedroom."

"Not----" she began, and he nodded, taking her coat from the chair.

"Yes, Old Crow's room. What was going to be his if he hadn't given 'em the slip. I put Nan into the west chamber. You'll be awfully comfortable in that room, Milly. I'll take in your bag."

Amelia, immediately circ.u.mspect when she did not see her way, did follow him, but she was in as great a state of suppressed dudgeon as a civilized lady, living by the latest rules, allows herself to be. d.i.c.k and Nan, left alone in the dining-room, turned upon each other like two young furies.

"You came up here," said d.i.c.k, in a tone of ill-suppressed ire, "to tell him we were coming. I call it a mean trick."

"What about you?" inquired Nan. "You'd better not talk about tricks. Can you think of a meaner one than giving him away to the entire middle west?'"

"The middle west!" echoed d.i.c.k bitterly. "I told my mother."

"Yes, you told your mother. And she comes up here with her alienists."

"You'll notice," said d.i.c.k icily, "the alienist didn't come."

"I a.s.sume," said Nan, "he's expected on the next train. Or he's going to pounce some time when Rookie isn't prepared."

"You little beast!" said d.i.c.k. "You don't deserve it, but I'll inform you he isn't coming at all. I choked him off. I told him mother's the one that's dotty or she wouldn't have called him in, and Uncle Jack wasn't a patient and never'd consent if he knew. And he was an awfully decent fellow and said nothing would induce him to come."

"You did, did you?" said Nan ungratefully. "Well, you'd better. You've made enough mischief for one not very inventive young person, don't you think? And wouldn't it seem to you you'd better use your influence with your mother to-morrow morning and get out of here?"

"Out of here?" repeated d.i.c.k. "Out of my uncle's house. You act----" here he paused.

"Yes," said Nan, "I do act precisely that way. I act as if I had more right here than you. And I have. For I adore Rookie. And that gives me a right to stay with him and fight for him, and die for him, if I want to.

And you don't care a sixpence, or you wouldn't have brought this on him."

d.i.c.k, the man, cooled sooner than she. He paled, and stood looking at her. Then he spoke in a voice dulled by wonder:

"I believe you do adore him."

"Of course I do," cried Nan, all her anger of impatience thrilling in her voice. "I love him more than anything in this world or the next and I always did and I always shall."

This Raven, coming back through the hall, heard.

"Good Lord!" he said to himself. "Good Lord!"