Old Crow Part 24

So these two, with all the forces of probability and beckoning fortune pus.h.i.+ng them together, could not approach even within hailing distance.

It was the hideous irony of a world bent on disorder. He walked in on them with a consciously grave aspect of recalling them to their more reasonable selves.

"What are you two sc.r.a.pping for?" he inquired, and Nan looked at him humbly. She hated to have him bothered by inconsiderable persons like herself and d.i.c.k. "Don't you know you've got the universe in your fists for the last time you'll ever have it? You're young----"

There he stopped awkwardly in the enumeration of their presumable blessedness. It was Nan's face that stopped him. It had paled out into a gravity surprising to him: a weariness he had often expected to see on it after her work abroad, but had not yet found there.

"Yes," she said, in a tone that matched her tired face, "we're young enough, if that's all."

The talk displeased her. Nan never liked people to be dull and smudgy with disorderly moods. She kept a firm hand on her own emotions and perhaps she could not remember a time when they had got away from her under other eyes. Aunt Anne was partly responsible for that, and partly the proud shyness of her type.

"No, Rookie," she said, "we won't fight. Not here, anyway. Not in your house."

She held out a careless hand to d.i.c.k, who looked at it an instant and then turned sulkily away. "Young cub!" Raven thought. He should have kissed it, even gone on his knees to do it, and placated her with a laughing extravagance. He recalled the words he had caught from her lips when he was coming in and flushed to his forehead over the ringing warmth of them. He bent to the fine hand about relaxing to withdrawal, after d.i.c.k's flouting, drew it to his own lips and kissed it: not as he would have had d.i.c.k do it but yet with all his heart. As he lifted his head he smiled into her eyes, and their look smote him. It was as if he had somehow hurt her.

"O Rookie!" she said, under her breath.

And at the instant, while they stood awkwardly in the rebound from emotions not recognized, Amelia came out from her bedroom, perfected as to hair and raiment, but obviously on edge and cheerfully determined on not showing it. Evidently she liked Old Crow's room no more than she might have guessed.

"O Lord!" said Raven ruefully to his inner self, "we're going to have a cheerful house-party, now ain't we?"

XVII

The afternoon went off moderately well. Nan forgot the late unpleasantness between her and d.i.c.k and a.s.sumed they were on their usual terms, a fas.h.i.+on of making up more exasperating to him than the quarrel itself. He was too often, he suspected, out of the picture of her immediate mind. But it was most unproductive to sulk. When she forgot and he reproached her for it, she forgot that also; and now when she suggested a walk he got his cap with a degree of cheerfulness and they went out, leaving Raven and his sister together by the fire, for what proved to be one of the rich afternoons of Raven's life. Amelia sat down at the hearth and put her perfectly shod feet to the blaze.

"Now, John," she said crisply, while he was fidgeting about, wondering whether he dared offer her a book and take himself out of doors, "sit down and tell me all about it."

Raven went to the fire, but stood commanding it and her. He might, he thought, as well meet the issue at once.

"What?" he asked. "What do you want to know?"

"You mustn't think I can't sympathize," she informed him, in the clear tone he recognized as the appropriate one for an advanced woman who sees a task before her--"d.a.m.ned meddlers," he was accustomed to call them in his sessions of silent thought--"you mustn't think I'm not prepared.

I've heard lectures on it, and since d.i.c.k sent me your letter I've read more or less."

"My letter!" groaned Raven. "If ever a chap was punished for a minute's drunkenness----"

"Drunkenness?" interrupted Amelia incisively.

"Oh, drunkenness of feeling--irresponsibility--don't you know? Didn't you ever hear of a chap's killing himself in a minute of acute discontent because he couldn't stand the blooming show an instant longer? Well, I didn't kill myself. I did something worse. I wrote a letter, and, by an evil chance, it was mailed, and d.i.c.k, like a fool, sent it on to you."

"d.i.c.k did absolutely right," said d.i.c.k's mother conclusively. "We won't discuss that. We'll go into the thing itself."

"What the deuce is the thing?" Raven inquired. "The letter, or my bursting into tears, like a high-strung maiden lady, and calling d.i.c.k in to be cried over?"

"Don't evade it," she charged him, with unabated gravity. "We mustn't, either of us. You know what I mean--_cafard_."

"_Cafard!_" Then he remembered d.i.c.k also had caught up the word, like a missile, and pelted him with it. He gulped. Ordinary speech wasn't going to be adequate. She belonged to this infernal age that lived by phrases.

If he told her he was still of the opinion that the world was a disordered place of torment you could only exist in by ignoring its real complexion, she would merely consign him to a cell more scientifically padded, and stand gazing at him through the bars, in solemn sympathy.

"So I've gone _cafard_," he said slowly, looking down at the fire and wondering how to answer a fool according to her folly. Or was she incredibly right? Had he some creeping sickness of the brain, the very nature of which implied his own insensitiveness to it? "Or do you say 'got' _cafard_? And what's your personal impression of _cafard_, anyway?"

She had her answer ready. From the little bag in her lap she took out a small sheaf of folded papers, memorandum slips, they seemed to be, and whirled them over in capable fingers.

"It ought to be here," she said absorbedly. "Yes, here it is. No, it isn't either. It must be among my club notes. What Galsworthy says about it, you know. He makes it so clear. Just what they mean by it, the French, how you simply go to pieces. You know, John. Of course you know."

"Yes," said Raven drily, "I heard of it remotely among the boys."

"No wonder it happened to you. Really, you know, John, you ought not to have gone over there at all, not at your age. It was fine of you. I'm not denying that. But there were lots of things you could have done at home: dollar a year men and all that. However, we must take it as we find it. You've got _cafard_, and we must make sure you have the best thing done for you. Do you see?"

"And what," inquired Raven, curiously, "is the best thing?"

"My idea," she said, pelting on in her habitual manner of manipulation without much regard to the material she was working on, "would be for you to see an alienist."

"I thought," he was beginning mildly, and paused, with a sense of danger. He must, he saw, forego the fun of chaffing her from his awareness that the professional gentleman was to have been sprung on him to-day, and that he knew equally the infliction could only be deferred.

But how, she would have questioned, did he get his news? Not, he would have to convince her, through Nan. He amended his attack. "Why didn't you scare one up and bring him along?"

She frowned. Amelia was always restive under raillery.

"We needn't," she said, "go into that. I did hope to arrange it, but d.i.c.k upset things frightfully. He has behaved badly, very badly indeed.

I hope now to persuade you to call in Doctor Brooke yourself. I should suppose he'd recommend your going into a sanitarium. However, we can't judge till we see what he says. Only, John"--and here she looked at him with some appearance of anxiety, as not knowing how he would take it--"you must give yourself into our hands."

"Whose hands?" asked Raven. "Yours? d.i.c.k's?"

"Oh, dear, no, not d.i.c.k's." Again she mentally champed her bit.

Evidently d.i.c.k had exhausted her forbearance on the way up. "He's behaved like a----" Invention failed her. "I do wish," she ended plaintively, "the modern young man and woman had a vestige of respect left--only a vestige--for their elders. They're queerness itself. Now Nan! there's Nan. What's she posting off up here for and settling herself in your house"--in the west chamber, Raven's inner mind ironically supplied--"and acting as if you couldn't pry her out?"

"You can't," said Raven. "Nan's here and I'm going to keep her, all winter, if she doesn't get bored."

Amelia gave a little staccato shriek.

"All winter? I can't stay here all winter."

"Dear old Milly, no," said Raven, with the utmost gentleness. "I wouldn't have you for the world. It's Nan that's going to stay."

"Why," said Amelia, "it isn't decent. You're not an old man, John.

Sometimes you don't even look middle-aged."

"You said I was," he reminded her. "You said I was so old I went and got _cafard_."

"Besides," said Amelia, clutching at her vanis.h.i.+ng argument, "age has nothing to do with it. The older you are the more ridiculous they get over you, these romantic girls. And you'd cut in and take her away from d.i.c.k, right under his nose."

Raven suddenly tired of it.

"Amelia," he said, "don't be a fool. And don't say that sort of odious thing about Nan. I won't have it. Nan's a child."

"Oh, no," said Amelia, shaking her waved head with an air of doom.

"Nan's no child. Don't make any mistake about that. She's no child."