Old Crow Part 27

"Back to Boston. Walked to the station. Took the milk train. Charlotte says she simply walked out and said she wasn't coming back."

"Your mother or--you don't mean Nan?"

"Nan, yes. Do you see mother walking five miles to a train?" But if d.i.c.k was unsettled, this was not his surly mood of the night before. "If I drove her away"--he began, and then ended with an appealingness to be remembered of the d.i.c.k who had not been nettled by life, "Jack, I wish she wouldn't."

"I'll ask Charlotte," said Raven. "Your mother out yet? No? Well, don't bring her into it."

He went off to the kitchen where Charlotte was just setting little silver pots on a damask-covered tray. She glanced up at him, not absently, because Charlotte always seemed so charged with energy that she could turn from one task and give full attention to another.

"For Mrs. Powell," she explained, setting her hands to the tray, as if she expected him to make whatever remark he would without delaying her.

"She's havin' her breakfast in bed."

"d.i.c.k tells me----" he began, and she nodded.

"Yes, she's gone. Nan, you was inquirin' about, wa'n't you? It's all right. I shouldn't ask any questions, if I was you: not yet anyways.

I've got a kind of an idea d.i.c.k'll be takin' the noon back to Boston.

Maybe his mother, too. But there!"

This last was as if it were too much to hope for, and she lifted the tray and hurried away with it to Old Crow's room. Raven went thoughtfully back to the hall where d.i.c.k stood waiting, gnawing at his lip, and looking curiously like the d.i.c.k who had been a boy and come to Uncle Jack to have his fortunes mended as they affected kite or ball.

"Yes," said Raven, "she's gone. Don't take it that way, old man. Nan knows what's best for her."

"Walked to the station," said d.i.c.k bitterly. "Just plain cut stick and ran. Probably carried a bag. All because I made it so sickening for her she couldn't stay."

Raven thought of the things Nan had carried in the work of the last years--supplies, babies born on retreats. She had seen the fortunes of war. But there was no need of bracing d.i.c.k by telling him he could testify she hadn't any bag. If the boy could be melted into a pa.s.sion of ruth over Nan, instead of a pa.s.sion of resentment, so much the better for him.

"Come and have breakfast," he said. "Charlotte's bringing it in."

They went together, and when d.i.c.k had bolted his coffee and egg he said:

"Of course I've got to take the 11.03."

"Of course," said Raven. He knew if he were a young lover who had offended Nan and driven her away, that was what he should do: follow and humble himself before her. "Jerry'll drive you down."

So it happened that when Amelia, carefully dressed, came out of her room at noon, d.i.c.k had left without a word to her and her dignified resentment was only diverted by hearing Nan, too, had gone.

"John," said she, disposing herself by the fire, "I should like to know how you account for that girl?"

"For Nan?" said Raven absently. He was wishing Nan had found it easy to tell him she was going. "I don't account for Nan. I don't have to."

"So unexpected," said Amelia. "So absolutely impervious to everything we've brought them up to reverence. It's all of a piece. Depend upon it, no young girl could go over there and do the things she did and not feel the effects of it: for life, absolutely for life. You yourself feel the effects in one way, the young ones in another."

Raven was very considerate of her, left stranded there with him. But after the noon dinner, when they settled again by the fire, he began to realize the magnitude of his task. He was simply saddled with Amelia.

She hadn't been able to get her alienist up here, but she had const.i.tuted herself a psychic detective on her own account. At first he didn't mind, she was so "simple honest" in her expedients. It was amusing, to a moderate degree, to evade them. How did he sleep? Did he dream? Did he know anything about the psychology of dreams? There was Freud.

"Yes," Raven interpolated. "Nasty fellow. Peeps and botanizes on his mother's grave."

Did the world still seem to him as hopeless as it did at the time of his writing the letter? That gave him an idea.

"Where is that letter?" he asked, cutting across the track of her calculated approaches. "What became of it?"

She did not evade him. She was too surprised.

"I gave it," she owned, "to one of our doctors at home. For a medical congress."

"The devil you did!" Raven permitted himself. "Milly, sometimes I think you advanced women--O Lord!"

"What else could I do?" Milly inquired, with her deliberate fair-mindedness, which was, he miserably knew, a part of her culture.

"Surely, you wouldn't suppress evidence. And it won't be traced to you.

You're simply Mr. X."

Raven was silent. He was thinking what a fool he had been to unpack his heart with words, and that if he told Milly so he should simply be unpacking it some more. He looked at the clear winter day occupying itself out there without him, and wondered why the deuce he couldn't put on snowshoes and tramp off his discontent leaving her to fight her boredom by the fire. She'd brought it on herself, hadn't she? n.o.body wanted her to come. Was there some hidden force in women, their apparent vulnerability to the harsh world conditions that were bound to crush out even them in the end? They seemed so weak you had, in mercy, to reenforce them and then they proved so horribly strong, and used their strength against you, depleted as you were by fighting for them. Anyway, if he could get Milly's blood to moving and pump some of this hill air into her she, too, might be a more wholesome citizen of even an unfeeling earth.

"Want to go to walk, Milly?" he suggested seductively, and she looked at him pleasantly, grateful for the tone, at least.

"No," she said, "we're so cozy here."

Cozy! it might be cozy, if that meant being choked. But he thought he could stand a little more of it, and then he would at least drop asleep and snore. The indiscretions of the body were terrible to Amelia. And he did fall into a hopeless lethargy, and only about five o'clock, when the early dark had come, threw it off and got to his feet.

"'Bye," he said. "I'll be back for supper."

Before she could answer, he was gone. Now he was afraid she might say, with an ill-timed acquiescence, that after all she would have a little walk, and he knew he simply couldn't stand it. By the fire, making an inexorable a.s.sault on his senses, the calm, steady beat of her futile talk could be borne. You bore it by listening through a dream. But out of doors, when the crisp air had waked you, you'd simply have to swear or run. He did run, s.n.a.t.c.hing his hat as he went, up the road toward Tenney's. It was not a reasoned flight, but he did want to calm himself by the light burning through their windows, perhaps a glimpse of Tira moving about. The night was going to be clear and not too cold for pleasant lingering. Over beyond the rising slope opposite Nan's house he heard an owl hooting and, nearer, the barking of a fox. He turned that way and stood facing the dark slope. He knew what those trees were in spring, pink and light brown in the marshes at the foot of the rise, running up into a mist of sunshine with islands of evergreen. Then, turning to go on, he cast a glance at the house and stopped with a word of surprise. There was a light. Somebody had broken in (an incredible happening here) and was beguiled by loneliness and silence into an absurd security. He turned into the path and went softly up to the front door, lifted the latch and was stepping in when some one came. It was Nan. She was in the hall, a pile of blankets in her arms. Seeing him, she did not start, only laughed a little, all the mischief of her face running into it and waking it like the sun on moving water.

"Nan," said Raven, "Nan, my darling, why are you here?"

Nan did the incredible thing. She laid her pile of blankets in a chair, came back to him and deliberately put arms over his shoulders and about his neck. Her face, beautifully sweet in its new flush, was close to his. It might well be flushed, for he had called her darling, and Nan, feeling lorn and bewildered in losing the Rookie she used to think she knew, felt for the instant that she had got home again. She had lost him, she felt, when she saw the shaken look he gave the strange beautiful woman up in the hut. Now here he was again, quite the same, only it was true that she had not seemed to be, for years, what he called her now.

"Rookie, my darling," said Nan, seeing no reason why she shouldn't give him the precious thing back again, "I'm terrible glad you've come.

Charlotte tell you?" She put her cheek against his for a minute, took her arms away and turned into the west sitting-room where a fire was leaping and making soft, living shadows on the ceiling. In the middle of the room she stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Look at the shadows,"

she said, in a low voice, as if they might hear and flee away. "It's exactly as if they lived here all the time and waited for us to come back to them. Look at the ones behind those candlesticks. They've always been just like this, little old scholarly gentlemen in queer hats walking along a London street. I used to think they were going to old second-hand shops to buy old second-hand books. I wouldn't have those candlesticks moved by half an inch for fear the shadows would get mad and go with them. Sit down, Rookie, there where you used to read to me.

I'll light up, so we can see each other."

He did sit down without waiting for her, on the little squat, old-fashioned sofa, and Nan went about the room with her match and dotted it with candles. Raven looked after her in her housewifely progress; he was still concerned, still grave over her leaving his house for this. She had on her walking suit, whatever frills she might have discovered upstairs, and she looked ready for outdoor enterprise. What a hardy child she was, slender and supple, but taut for action in the homespun service of the day! She threw her match into the fire and came to him, sat down beside him and, like the Nan of a hundred years ago, her childhood and his youth, put her head down on his shoulder.

"Nan," said he, abandoning what he sometimes considered the heavy father att.i.tude and jamming the silky head down into its hollow, "what did you do it for? Didn't you like my house?"

"Yes, Rookie darling," she said, in a tone of drowsy happiness. "I meant to stay--truly I did--and cut in when Mrs. Powell tried to get you to give yourself away so she could tell her alienists how crazy you are.

But if I had, d.i.c.k would have stayed, too. He never'd have gone, never in the world. And he's so quarrelsome."

"How do you know he's gone?" Raven asked.

"Why, of course he has. He would, the minute he thought I had. Hasn't he?"

"Yes," said Raven, "he has. Nan, why the d.i.c.kens do you treat him so?

You mean to take him in the end."

"Do I?" asked Nan, still most contentedly. "Rookie, what a lot you know.

Wake me if you hear a step."