Old Crow Part 31

"Anything," said he, "to oblige a lady."

Nan sat down and Raven and Martin took the seats by the door. There, too, Martin had advantage of a sort. He could stare down Tenney at short range, and this he did with a broad smile. Tenney, Raven concluded, was down and out. His comb was cut. Whatever pa.s.sions might stir in him later--however, in reviewing the scene, he might rage over the disturber of his peace--now his spiritual leadership had pa.s.sed from him and the prayer-meeting itself was quashed. An air of curiosity hung over it. Two or three of the older men and women in the other room offered testimony and one man, the old clock-mender from the other side of the mountain, who swore with a free tongue about his secular affairs, but always wept when he went through the observance he called approaching the throne, knelt and prayed in a high voice through sobs. This lightened the atmosphere. No one ever regarded this performance seriously. He was the comic relief. On his Amen, Nan (blessed Nan! thought Raven) proposed:

"Let's sing again."

"No!" said Tenney. He had got back his self-a.s.sertiveness. Raven could guess his jealous anger, the tide of fury coming, flooding the stagnant marshes of his soul. "I want to hear one more testimony. Thyatira Tenney, get up and tell what G.o.d has done for you."

Tira gave a start so violent that the blue scarf fell from her shoulders and one end of it lay over Nan's arm. She did get up. She rose slowly and stood there looking straight before her, eyes wide and dark, her hands clasped. Her stiff lips moved. She did piteously, Raven saw, try to speak. But she could not manage it and after the long moment she sank back into her seat. Nan placed the blue scarf about her shoulders, carefully, as if the quiet concern of doing it might tell the woman something--that she was companioned, understood--and, one hand on the knot of Tira's clasped fingers, began to sing. She sang the Doxology, and after that, through unbreakable custom, the meeting was over and you had to go home. Men and women came to their feet, there were greetings and good nights and about Nan gathered a group of those who remembered her. But she kept her left hand on Tira's, and after the others had gone she said something quickly to the woman who stood, looking dead tired, uttering mechanical good nights. Martin, with a jovial good night to Tenney, had hurried off at once.

"See you later," he called back to him at the door, and Tenney looked after him with the livid concentration of a man who sends his curse forward to warn where it is not yet time for a blow. A laughing group followed Martin. There were girls who, horrified at the implications that hung about his name, were yet swayed by his dashing gallantry, and young men who sulkily held the girls back, swearing under their breath.

Tira broke loose from Nan and went, fast as running water, through the room, to the back of the house. Raven made no pretense of saying good night to Tenney. He forgot it, forgot Tenney, save as an element of danger to be dealt with later. On the doorstep he stopped with Nan, in the seclusion of the moment while the others were bringing out horses and putting them into the sleighs.

"We can't leave her here with him," he said.

"What was the matter?" Nan returned as quickly. "What happened? That man?"

"Yes. The one he's jealous of. We can't leave her here."

"No use," said Nan. "She won't go. I asked her, told her I was living over at the house alone, wanted company. No use. She wouldn't go."

"She must go."

"She won't, I tell you. Then I asked if she'd let me stay over here and she said no. She said----"

"What?" urged Raven when she stopped.

"I almost can't tell, it's so pathetic. Just a word--three words: 'You don't know.' Then she stopped. Just that: 'You don't know.'"

Raven gave a little sound she could not bear, a breath, a curse--what was it? Anyway, the breaking impatience of a helpless man. He did not stir. He meant, she saw, to stay there, doggedly stay, on the step, to await what happened. She put her hand through his arm.

"Come," she said authoritatively, "let's walk up the road and drop in again when they've all gone. It's no use staying now."

That, he saw, was wise, and they went out into the road, waited a moment for the sleighs just starting, and then walked away from home. Some of the people were singing "camp-meeting hymns," and there was one daring burst of "Good night, ladies," and a chorused laugh. Prayer-meeting at Tenney's was not, Raven concluded, regarded much more seriously than Charlotte had foreseen. The bells jingled off into the distance. The horses were bent on home. As if the sound only had torn up the night into shreds of commotion, so now the bits of silence drew together into a web and the web covered them. Nan, in spite of the perplexed question of Tira, could have settled under the web, there with Raven, as under wings. But he was hot with impatience. They had gone half a mile perhaps, when he stopped.

"Come back," he said. "I've got to know."

Nan turned with him and they went on in silence but very fast. Once or twice she was about asking him not to take such long steps, but she set her teeth and swung forward. In front of Tenney's they stopped. The rooms were lighted. The house was still. Raven drew a deep breath. What he had expected he did not know, whether calls for help or Tenney's voice of the woods shouting, "Hullo!" This, at any rate, was a reprieve.

"Come on," he said. "I'll take you home and then come back."

Again Nan stepped out in time. No use, she thought, to beg him to let her come, too. But she could come back. Women were useful, she knew, with their implied terrors and fragility, in holding up certain sorts of horror. Nan was willing to fight, if need were, with all the weapons of her s.e.x. In the road in front of her own house, was Charlotte, waiting for them. Nan left Raven, put a hand on Charlotte's arm, and called her "Ducky."

"You won't come in?" she said to Raven. "Don't you think you'd better.

Half an hour or so?"

"Not a minute," said Raven. "Good night."

He left them and after a few striding steps was aware of Charlotte, calling him. She came up and spoke his name.

"I've just met that woman."

"What woman?" he asked impatiently.

"Tira Tenney. With the baby. This time o' night."

"Where?"

"Front o' the house, just as I come out."

"Then she was coming there," he burst forth. "Too bad! too bad! Didn't you know that? Didn't you ask her in?"

"Yes," said Charlotte, "I asked her in an' she said no, she was goin'

down along. An' I stood an' watched her an' she turned off up the rise into the woods."

So it had begun, the terror, the flight. She was going to the hut and, for some reason, not the back way.

"There's somethin' 'tain't right," Charlotte was beginning, but he seized her wrist and held it. To keep her attention, or to feel the touch of something kindly and warm?

"Yes," he said, "something's wrong. Don't tell, Charlotte. Not a word--not to Nan or Jerry or--above all not to Tenney. I'll see to it."

He left her and hurried loping along the road, almost at a run, and Charlotte went in to Nan.

XXI

Raven pa.s.sed his house and turned into the wood road. There he did not slacken, but took the rise at a great gait. He was at the hut a moment after Tira: she had had time for neither light nor fire.

"It's Raven," he called. She did not come, and he added: "I'm alone. Let me in."

Waiting there at the door, he had time to note the stillness of the woods, the creak of a branch now and then, and the half-drawn sigh from the breeze you hardly felt. At the instant of his beginning to wonder whether she might have fallen there from a hurt or whether she was even terrified of him, he heard the sound of the key and the door opened. He stepped in and her hand was at once on the key. She turned it and melted noiselessly into the dark of the room, and he followed her.

"No fire!" he reproached her, or perhaps himself, for it seemed, in the poignancy of his tenderness, as if he should have had it burning night and day. He set a match to the kindling and the flame answered it. She had taken one of the chairs at the hearth and he saw, in the leaping light, that she had put the child on the couch and covered him. She was shuddering all over, shaking horribly, even her lips, and he went into the bedroom, came back with a blanket and wrapped it about her. She held it close, in that humble way she had of trying to spare him trouble, indeed to make no confusion in the world she found so deranged already.

He remembered the chartreuse she had once refused and took it down from the high cupboard, poured a little and set the gla.s.s in her shaking hand, and, when the muscles did not answer, put it to her lips.

"It won't hurt you," he said. "Down it."

She drank, and the kindly fire of it warmed her. She looked up at him, and what she said was more unexpected than anything he could have imagined:

"Do you believe it?"

"Believe what?"

He could only guess she meant something connected with Tenney's madness of suspicion and the devil of a man.

"What he said." She was looking at him with intensity, as if life and death lay in his answer. "He said He was there to-night, there in the room. Do you believe that?"