Old Crow Part 29

To-night she looked it in the face. Aunt Anne was jealous. That was the first count. All her own life, too, Nan had been vaguely irritated by Raven's not marrying Aunt Anne. He was her property, wasn't he, in a queer way, never questioned, never, on his part, rebelled against? Yet it was a bondage. And if the real reason was that Aunt Anne wouldn't have him, why didn't he play the man and batter down her scruples, even that barrier of the years between them? But after that sudden look into Raven's eyes, the night she told him about the will, she had never been able to think of him as loving Aunt Anne at all. It was that horrible compa.s.sion of his, she believed, that obedience of the male to the weaker (and yet the stronger) principle of the demanding opposite. He had always been in bondage through his affections, first to his mother, then Aunt Anne, and then suddenly, terrifyingly, but most gloriously because this was the only wildly spontaneous thing of all, to the strange woman in the hut. He was innocent there, he was unthinking, he didn't know what tale his eyes told of him. It wasn't earthly pa.s.sion they told. She had seen many things in her tumultuous life of the last few years, this woman he called a child. The eyes told how his soul was going down in a wreckage of worship of the charm that blooms in a few women only, translated to him through the pity of this woman's wretched state. Should she interpret him to himself? She could, without offending. Rookie was sensitive to see, and she found her hand steady to hold the torch. But there she saw herself slipping into Aunt Anne's mandatory att.i.tude, choking, dominating, sapping him, heart and brain.

It mustn't be done. It shouldn't. Rookie had had enough of spiritual government. Above all, she wanted him to have his life: not the sterile monotony of a man who renounced and served and deferred to managing females.

Had the woman any soul in her? If Rookie kidnaped her (and the child, it would have to be, the doubtful child) would she pay in love for love, or only an uncomprehending worship? One thing Nan had determined on, the minute she opened her door to him this night and saw the quick concern in his face and heard his tone in greeting: Rookie should feel there was somebody in this disordered world who plainly adored him. If he could believe that the better for her putting her cheek on his and loving him to death, he should have it. Rookie should feel warm. As for her, she was cold. She shivered there by the window and knew it was the inner tremor of her nerves, for the fire still leaped and the room was pulsing. "The amount of it is," said Nan to herself, "my heart's broken.

Oh, hang Aunt Anne!" Then she remembered Aunt Anne was dead. But she would not have recalled the little missile hurled at the impalpable ghost through the shade of removedness that enveloped her. Nan was inexorable in standing for what she saw.

In the morning she found the fires burning below stairs and her tray set out, with cup and plate. Charlotte had gone. Nan felt the mounting of spirit due a healthy body, with the new day, and made her toast and her coffee with a great sense of the pleasure of it all. There was one drawback. It was distinctly "no fair" to let Charlotte come over to companion her at night when there was so much to do with the exigent Amelia on board. But that must settle itself. If she could get Tira (whom she also called "the woman" in her thoughts) to run away with her to town, it could hardly be done too quickly. So immediately after her breakfast she put on coat and hat and went "over to Tenney's," as the country folk would put it. This was a day brightly blue, with mounting warmth, the road a smoothness of packed snow. When she reached the house, Tenney was just driving up to the side door in the sleigh, and she rejoiced. It made her errand easier. He was going to town, and she could see the woman alone. But immediately Tira, carrying the baby, a little white lump in coat and hood, came out and stepped into the sleigh. She, too, was going. Tenney waited while she settled herself and tucked the robe about her. He was not solicitous, Nan saw, but the typical country husband, soberly according her time to get herself and the child "well fixed." Nan, waiting, her eyes on them, still halted until they drove out, and nodded her good morning. Tenney drew up. His sharp eyes signaled her.

"I've got it in mind," he announced, "to have a prayer-meetin', come Wednesday. I'm goin' to put up a notice in the post-office."

He turned a reminding look on Tira who responded by what seemed to Nan an unwilling confirmation:

"You're invited to come."

"You're all invited," said Tenney harshly, as if Tira had lagged in urgency. "All on ye."

"Thank you," said Nan, with a cheerful decisiveness. "I'll come."

Tenney slapped the reins and they went on, to a jingling of bells thinly melodious in the clear air, and Nan turned back to her house. How beautiful she was, the strange woman, she thought, with a renewal of her wonder over Tira, the calm majesty of her, the way she sat erect in the old red sleigh as if she were queen of a triumphal progress, the sad inscrutability of her wonderful eyes, the mouth with its evasive curves; how would an artist indicate them delicately enough so that you kept them in your memory as she saw herself doing, and were yet not able to say whether it was the indented corner or the full bow? She found herself remembering poetic lines about Grecian Helen, and then recalling herself to New England and the unlikelihood of such bewitchingness.

There couldn't be a woman so compact of mystery and unconsidered aloofness, and yet beauty, beauty to the bone.

When the Tenneys drove by Raven's, each with face set forward, not looking at the house, Raven was in the kitchen consulting Charlotte about supplies. Jerry, also, was going to town, for, imperious even in her unspoken needs, Amelia would have to be delicately fed. Charlotte, hearing the bells, glanced absently at the window and Raven's eyes followed. He felt his heart give a little added start, of relief, he knew. At least Tenney wouldn't stop the horse and brain his wife on the road.

"There's the Tenneys," said Charlotte. "That's a queer kind of a woman, that wife he's got."

"Why is she?" Raven demanded.

Whatever Charlotte felt, he must pluck it out of her. It was sure to be true.

She spoke thoughtfully, as if reviewing what was not altogether clear in her own mind.

"I dunno's I know. But she's so kind o' quiet. Pleasant enough, but you al'ays feel as if she's a mile off."

Yes, Raven owned to himself, Charlotte was right. That was the way he felt, only it was not one mile but many miles off.

"That baby, too," said Charlotte, her brows knitted, as if the whole thing troubled her. "The baby ain't right."

Just what Nan said. What witchery women had!

"What's the matter with the baby?" he asked, and was nettled at the roughness of his voice.

Charlotte shook her head and seemed to shake off perplexed imaginings.

"I dunno," she said again. "But suthin' is. An' that's the queer part on't. You never'd know whether Mis' Tenney knows it or whether she don't. But there!" Then her mind settled to its task. "No, you couldn't git sweet-breads this time o' year, up here anyways. They don't kill."

Raven, after the consultation was over and Charlotte had explained the ease with which she could pack a hamper of hot dishes to carry over to Nan, "come one o'clock," went to his social task in the library where Amelia sat at the drowsy rite of warming her toes. He had a more or less relaxed feeling with Amelia now; she had shot her bolt and sprung her mine and could hardly have more in hiding. But she had, the completest shock possible. She sat with her eyes fixed on the doorway, waiting, and her question was ready:

"John, what do you know about Uncle John? Great-uncle, of course I mean."

Raven advanced into the room and chose a seat by the window. Amelia, still thinly clad above and ineffectually baking herself, made him irrationally want to get away from fires.

"Old Crow?" he asked.

"Why, yes, if you want to call him that. I suppose that's what the country people did call him."

"Why," said Raven slowly, getting his recollections in order, prepared to give her what was good for her and no more, "I suppose there's no doubt he was an eccentric. He built the hut up there and moved into it and finally went over the countryside doctoring, in an unscientific way--and praying--and finally hauled in Billy Jones, a sort of old rake they thought of sending to the poor farm, and took care of him till he died. Billy was a tank. When we were little, there used to be stories we got hold of about the way Billy's legs swelled. One of the boys 'down along' told me he'd been up there and looked into the hut and Billy sat there in a chair with his legs bandaged and the water dripping through to the floor. We all wished our legs would drip. We thought it was great. Mother wouldn't let me go up there after old Billy went into residence. But we boys kept on hearing about him. I've no doubt we got most of the salient points."

He was giving her more than was good for her, after all. Amelia wouldn't like this. She didn't like it.

"Shocking!" she commented, shaking her head in repudiation.

"I've thought since," said Raven, partly in musing recollection and perhaps a little to show her what she got by fishing for old memories, "Billy had cirrhosis of the liver. As I said, Billy was a tank."

"We needn't go into the question of Jones," said Amelia, with dignity.

"He doesn't concern us. It was a perfectly unjustifiable thing for Uncle John to do, this taking him into his own house and nursing him.

Perfectly. But it only shows how unbalanced Uncle John really was."

"Call him Old Crow, Milly," Raven interrupted her, resolved she should accept the picture as it was if she were bent on any picture at all.

"Everybody knew him by that: just Old Crow. At first, I suppose it was the country way of trying to be funny over his name, as soon as he got funny to them with his queerness. And then, after he'd gone round nursing the sick and praying with the afflicted, they may have put real affection into it. You can't tell. You see, Milly, Old Crow was a practical Christian. From all I've heard, he was about the only one you and I've ever met."

"He was certainly not normal," said Amelia ingenuously, and while Raven sat rolling that over in his delighted mind and getting the full logic of it, she continued: "Do you know, John, he was a very commanding man, very handsome really? You look like him."

"Much obliged, Milly," said Raven. He was smiling broadly at her. His eyes--the crinkles about them multiplied--withdrew in a way that always made her uneasy, she was so unlikely, at such times, to guess what he was thinking about. In another instant he was to inform her. It all came over him, in a wave. He gasped under the force of it and then he roared with laughter. "By George, Milly," he cried, "I've got you. As the Scotch say (or are said to say) I hae it noo. Old Crow was dotty and my nose is like Old Crow's. So I'm dotty, too."

"I think," said Amelia, with dignity, "any specialist, if you could only be persuaded to put your case into his hands, would inquire very closely into family traits. And you and I, John, ought to help him by tabulating everything we can."

"Sure!" said Raven, relapsing into a vulgarism likely to set her teeth on edge and possibly, in the spasm of it, close them momentarily on reminiscence. "I'm willing to let you in for all I know about Old Crow.

To tell the truth, I'm rather proud of him myself."

Charlotte was pa.s.sing through the hall and Amelia called to her.

"Charlotte, a minute, please. You know our uncle, Mr. John Raven."

"Old Crow, Charlotte," Raven reminded her, seeing she needed prompting, not yet guessing where the question was to lead. Curiously, he thought, it was Milly's exasperating fate to put everybody on guard. But it was inevitable. When you had a meddler in the family, you never knew where you'd have to head her off.

"What," continued Amelia, "has become of Uncle John's books?"

"His books?" interrupted Raven, himself off the track now, "what the deuce do you want with Old Crow's books?"

"Where are they?" Amelia continued, now turning to him. "There's something somewhere--a book--I know it perfectly well--and we've got to have it. It came to me in the night."

"What was it?" asked Raven. "Old Crow was rather a bookish chap, I fancy, in a conventional way. I've got some of his stuff up in the hut: rather academic, the kind daguerreotyped young men with high stocks used to study by one candle. What do you suspect--a will, or a love-letter slipped in behind a cover and forgotten? It can't be a will. Old Crow didn't have anything to leave."

Amelia's hands trembled a little. A brighter rose had encircled the permanent red of her cheeks. She was, Raven saw with curiosity, much excited.

"There was certainly a book," she said, "a mottled blank book a third full of writing. It was a sort of journal. I was in the room when mother brought it from the hut and pa.s.sed it to father to look at. He'd just come down from your room. You were ill, you know: diphtheria. Mother pa.s.sed it to him without a word, the way people do when there are children in the room. He looked at it and then at her, and they nodded.

I was little, you know, but I saw it was important, and I listened. And father said: 'No, it won't do to have it lying around. I'll carry it up attic and put it in the red chest.' That's what I mean, Charlotte," she continued, turning to Charlotte, who stood with a frown of concentration on her smooth forehead. "You know that old red chest, the one where uncle's book was put."

"Oh, yes," said Charlotte. "I know the old chest."