Old Crow Part 32

"Who was there?" Raven prompted her, and the immediate reply staggered him.

"Jesus Christ."

He temporized.

"I've no doubt he believed it," he said, unwilling to speak Tenney's name. It was doubly hateful to him at the moment of her being so patently undone. He could only think she was trying to reconcile the ugly contrast between her husband's expressed faith and his insane action. "I'm sure he thought so."

"That ain't what I mean," she hesitated, and he began to see how her mind was striving in an anguish of interrogation. "What he thinks--that's neither here nor there. What I want to know is whether it's _so_. If there's Somebody"--she clasped her hands on her knees and looked up at him, mutely imploring him who was so wise in books and life to help her striving mind--"if there's Somebody that cares--that died over it, He cared so much--if He's round here everywhere--if He sees it all--an' feels terrible, same as we do ourselves--why, then it's different."

"What's different?" Raven asked, out of his fog.

She was demanding something of him and he felt, in a sickness of despair, that it was something he couldn't give her because he hadn't it himself. Tenney could read her the alphabet of comfort, though he was piling on her those horrors of persecution that made her hungry for it.

"Why," she said, and the light and a bloom of something ineffable swept over her face, changing its tragic mystery from the somberness of the Fates to the imagined youthful glory of the angels, "if He's here all the time, if He's in the room when things happen to us, an' wishes He could stop it an' can't because"--again her mind labored and she saw she had come up against the mysterious negatives of destiny--"anyways, He would if He could--an' He knows how we feel inside when we feel the worst, an' cares, cares same as----" here she was inarticulate. But she turned for an instant toward the couch where the child lay, and her face was the mother face. She meant, he knew, as she cared for her child.

"Why, then," she continued, "there wouldn't be anything to fret about, ever. You never'd be afraid, not if you was killed, you wouldn't. You'd know there was Somebody in the room."

This was the most deeply considered speech of her whole life. The last words, ingenuous as a child's unconscious betrayal, tore at him as, he suddenly thought, it would be if he saw a child tortured and in fear: as if he saw Nan. They told him how desperately lonesome and undefended she had felt.

"An' don't you see," she concluded, with the brightness of happy discovery, "even if you was killed, what harm would it do you? He'd be waitin'. You'd go with Him. Wherever it is He lives, you'd go."

Raven turned abruptly, walked to a window and stood there looking into the dark. The challenge of her face was impossible to bear. Suppose she asked him again if he believed it? Did he believe in a G.o.d made man? By no means. He believed in one G.o.d, benevolent, he had once a.s.sumed, but in these latter years too well hidden behind His cloud for man to say.

Did the old story of a miraculous birth and an atonement move him even to a desire to believe? It repelled him rather? What, to his honest apprehension, was the G.o.d made man? An exemplar, a light upon the path of duty, as others also had been. Had the world gone wrong, escaped from its mysterious Maker, and did it need to be redeemed by any such dramatic remedy? No, his G.o.d, the G.o.d who made, could not botch a job and be disconcerted at the continuing bad results of His handiwork. The only doubt about his G.o.d was whether He was in any degree benevolent.

When he reflected that He had made a world full to the brim of its cup of bitterness, he sometimes, nowadays, thought not. All this swept through his mind in a race of thoughts that had run on that course before, and again he heard her and knew she was pulling him back to the actual issue as it touched herself.

"You tell me," she was calling him. Her voice insisted. He did not turn, but he knew her face insisted even more commandingly. "You know. There's nothin' you don't know. Is it true?"

Nothing he didn't know! The irony of that was so innocently piercing that he almost broke into a laugh. Nan was right then. Tira did regard him, if not as an archangel, as something scarcely less authoritative.

He turned and went back to the fire, threw on an armful of sticks, and stood looking into the blaze.

"What makes you say that?" he asked her. "What makes you think I know?"

"Why," said she, in a patent surprise, "'course you know. I've always heard about you, writin' books an' all. An' that's the kind you be, too.

You're"--she paused to marshal her few words and ended in an awed tone--"you're that way, too. When folks are in trouble, you're so sorry it 'most kills you."

This was a blow staggering enough to hit his actual heart and stop it for a beat. What if he should say to her: "Yes, I do care. I care when you are hurt. I don't know about the G.o.d made man, but isn't my caring enough for you?"

Then bitter certainties cut in and told him it wouldn't do. She had learned her world lesson too terribly well. It would be only another case of man's pursuing, promising--what had they promised in the past?

And after all, he thought recklessly, what did the private honor of his testifying yes or no amount to anyway? What moral conceit! To save his own impeccable soul by denying a woman the one consolation that would save her reason.

"Yes, Tira," he said quietly, and did not know he had used her name, "it's all true."

She gave a little sound, half sob, half ecstatic breath, and he saw she had not been sure he would yield her the bright jewel she had begged of him.

"True!" she said, in the low tone of an almost somnolently brooding calm. "All of it! Everywhere!"

"Yes," said Raven steadily, "everywhere."

"Over there where He was born, here!" That seemed to amaze her to a glory of belief. "Why, if He's everywhere, He's here, too."

"Yes," said Raven. He loved his task now. He was putting her sorrows to sleep. "He's here, too."

At that moment, incredibly, it seemed to him that a difference pervaded the place, or at least that his eyes had been opened to a something unsuspected, dwelling in all things. Did he, his unchanged mind asked him, actually believe what he had not believed before? No, the inner core of him signaled back to his mind. His belief had not changed. Yet indubitably something had happened and happened blessedly, for it brought her peace. Tira gave a little laugh, a child's laugh of surprised content. He glanced at her. She was looking into the fire and the haggardness of her face had softened. It was even, under the warmth of the flames and her own inner delight, absorbed and dreamy. And Raven knew he must wake her, and, he hoped, without flawing the dream, to present action.

"Now," he said, "I want you to come with me down to Nan's"--still he dared not put her off a step from the intimacy of neighborly relations by presenting Nan more formally--"and spend the night there. In the morning, you'll go back to Boston with her. I shall enter a complaint against your husband."

It wasn't so hard to give Tenney the intimacy of that name, now she looked so sweetly calm. She started from her dream, glanced up at him and, to his renewed discomfort, broke into a little laugh. It was sheer amus.e.m.e.nt, loving raillery too, of him who could give her the priceless gift of a G.o.d made man and then ask her to forsake the arena where the beasts were harmless now because she no longer feared them.

"Why, bless your heart," she said, in a homespun fashion of address that might have been Charlotte's, "I wouldn't no more run away! An' if you should have him before the judge, I'd no more say a word ag'inst him! I wouldn't git you into any trouble either," she explained, in an anxious loyalty. "I'd say you was mistaken, that's all."

Something seemed to break in him.

"What do you mean?" he asked roughly. "What do you think you mean? I suppose you're in love with him?"

Tira looked at him patiently. She yielded to a little sigh.

"Why," she said, "that's where I belong. I don't," she continued hesitatingly, in her child's manner of explaining herself from her inadequate vocabulary, "I guess I don't think about them things much, not same as men-folks think. But there's one or two things I've got to look out for." Here she gave that quick significant glance at the little mound on the couch. "An' there ain't no way to do it less'n I stay right there in my tracks."

Raven, his hand gripping the mantel, rested his forehead on it and dark thoughts came upon him. They quickened his breath and brought the blood to his face and his aching eyes. It was all trouble, it seemed to him, trouble from the first minute of his finding her in the woods. She might draw some temporary comfort from his silent championship, in the momentary safety of this refuge he had given her. But he could by no means cut her knot of difficulty. She was as far from him as she had been the moment before he saw her. She was speaking.

"It ain't," she said, in a low voice, "it ain't that I don't keep in mind what you've done for me, what you're doin' all the time. But I guess you don't see what you've done this night's the most of all. Now you've told me you know it's true"--here she was shy before the talk of G.o.d-head--"why, I know it's so, too. An' I sha'n't ever be afraid any more. I sha'n't ever feel alone."

"But Tira," he felt himself saying to her weakly, "I feel alone."

Did he actually say it, he wondered. No, for he lifted his face from his shielding hand and turned miserable eyes upon her, and her eyes met him clearly. Yet they were deeper, softer, moved by a sad compa.s.sion. There was something patiently maternal in them, as if she had found herself again before the old sad question of man's uncomprehended desires. She spoke, strangely he thought then, and afterward he wondered if she actually had said the thing at all.

"There's nothin' in the world I wouldn't do for you, not if 'twas anyways right. But----" and again she gave that fleeting glance of allegiance to the child.

He tried impatiently to pull himself together. She must see there was something hideous in his inability to make her safe, something stupid, also.

"Tira," he said, "you don't understand. Sometimes I think you don't realize what might happen to you. And it's silly to let it happen, foolish, ignorant. If some one told you there was a man outside your door and he wanted to kill you, you'd lock the door. Now there's a man inside your house, inside your room, that wants to kill you. Yes, he does," he insisted, answering the denial in her face, "when he's got one of his brain storms. Is there anything to pride yourself on in staying to be killed?"

She answered first with a smile, the sweet rea.s.surance of a confident look.

"He won't," she said, "he won't try to kill me, or kill him"--she made a movement of the hand toward the couch--"no, not ever. You know why? I'm goin' to remind him Who's in the room."

"Why didn't you remind him this time?" Raven queried, pushed to the cynical logic of it. "You could have turned his own words against him.

It wasn't an hour since he'd said it himself."

"Because," she answered, in a perfect good faith, "then I didn't know 'twas so."

"Didn't know 'twas so? Why didn't you?"

Her eyes were large with wonder.

"Because," she said, "then you hadn't told me."

Raven stared at her a full minute, realizing to the full the exact measure of his lie coming back to him.