Old Crow Part 53

"Come on in," he said. "Charlotte's b.u.t.tered the toast."

d.i.c.k followed him, and they sat down to their abundant tea, Charlotte pausing a moment to regard them with her all-enveloping lavishment of kindliness. Were they satisfied? Could she bring something more?

"The trouble with you, d.i.c.k," said Raven, after his third slice of toast, b.u.t.tered, he approvingly noted, to the last degree of drippiness, "is poverty of invention. You repeat your climax. Now, this sending for Milly: it's precisely what you did before. That's a mistake the actors make: repeated farewells."

d.i.c.k made no answer. He, too, ate toast prodigiously.

"Now," said Raven, when they had finished, "do I understand you mean to put your mother wise about what I told you last night? Yes or no?"

"I shall do----" said d.i.c.k, and at his pause Raven interrupted him.

"No, you won't," said he. "You won't do what you think best. Take it from me, you won't. What I told you wasn't my secret. It's poor Tira's.

If you give her away to your mother--good G.o.d! think of it, Milly, with her expensive modern theories and her psychiatry--got it right, that time!--muddling up things for a woman like her! Where was I? Well, simply, if you play a dirty trick like that on me, I'll pack you off, you and your mother both. I don't like to remind you but, after all, old man, the place is mine."

The blood came into d.i.c.k's face. He felt misjudged in his affection and abused.

"You can't see," he said. "I don't believe it's because you can't. You won't. It isn't Nan alone. It's you. You're not fit. You're no more fit than you were when Mum was here before. And you can pack me off, but, by thunder! I won't go."

"Very well," said Raven, with a happy inspiration. "You needn't. I'll go myself. And I'll take Nan with me." A picture of Nan and her own vision of happy isles came up before him, and he concluded: "Yes, by George!

I'll take Nan. And we'll sail for the Malay Peninsula, or an undiscovered island, and wear Mother Hubbards and live on breadfruit, and you and your precious conventions can go to pot."

So, having soothed himself by his own intemperance, he got up, found his pipe and a foolish novel he made a point of reading once a year--it would hardly do to tell what it was, lest the reader of this true story fail to sympathize with his literary views and so with all his views--and sat down to await his guests in a serviceable state of good humor. He had brought d.i.c.k to what Charlotte would call "a realizing sense." He could afford a bit of tolerance. d.i.c.k got up and flung out of the room, finding Raven, he told himself, in one of his extravagant moods. Nine times out of ten the moods meant nothing. On the other hand, in this present erratic state of a changed Raven, they might mean anything. For himself, he was impatient, with the headlong rush of young love. Nan was coming. She was on the way. Would she be the same, distant with her cool kindliness, her old lovely self to Raven only, or might she be changed into the Nan who kissed him that one moment of his need?

He s.n.a.t.c.hed his hat and tore out of the house, and Raven, glancing up from his novel, saw him striding down the path and thought approvingly he was a wise young dog to walk off some of his headiness before Nan came. As for him, he would doze a little over his foolish book, as became a man along in years. That was what Charlotte would say, "along in years." Was it so? What a devil of an expression, like all the rest of them that were so much worse than the thing itself: "elderly,"

"middle-aged," what a grotesque vocabulary! And he surprised himself by throwing his foolish book, with an accurate aim, at a s.p.a.ce in the shelves, where it lodged and hung miserably, and getting up and tearing down the walk at a pace emulating d.i.c.k's, but in the opposite direction: the result of these athletic measures being that when Amelia and Nan drove up with Jerry, the station master's pung following with two small trunks that seemed to wink at Raven, with an implication of their compet.i.tive resolve to stay, two correctly clad gentlemen were waiting on the veranda in a state of high decorum. As to the decorum, it didn't last, so far as Raven was concerned. Messages of a mutual understanding pa.s.sed between his eyes and Nan's. He burst into sudden laughter, but Nan, more sagely alive to the dangers of the occasion, kept her gravity.

"Well," said Amelia, as Raven, still laughing, solicitously lifted her out, "you seem to be in a very happy frame of mind. I'm glad you _can_ laugh."

x.x.xIV

Thereafter they all behaved as if they had separated yesterday and nothing was more natural than to find themselves together again. Amelia, with bitterness in her heart, accepted the room she again longed to repudiate, and Nan, with a lifted eyebrow at Raven, as if wondering whether she'd really better be as daring as he indicated, followed Charlotte up the stairs. At supper they talked decorously of the state of the nation, which Raven frankly conceived of as going to the dogs, and Amelia upheld, from an optimism which a.s.sumed Raven to be amenable to only the most hopeful of atmospheres. After supper, when they hesitated before the library door, Nan said quite openly, as one who has decided that only the straight course will do:

"Rookie, could I see you a minute? In the dining-room?" She took in Amelia with her frank smile. "Please, Mrs. Powell! It's business."

"Certainly," Amelia said, rather stiffly. "Come, d.i.c.k. We'll keep up the fire."

They had evidently, she and d.i.c.k, resolved, though independently of each other, to behave their best, and d.i.c.k, in excess of social virtue, shut the library door, so that no wisp of talk would float that way and settle on them. Nan confronted Raven with gayest eyes.

"Did you ever!" she said, recurring to the Charlottian form of comment.

"At the last minute, if you please, when I was taking the train. There she was behind me. We talked all the way, 'stiddy stream' (Charlotte!) and not a thing you could put your finger on. Did he send for her?"

"I rather think so," said Raven, giving d.i.c.k every possible advantage.

Then, rallied by her smiling eyes, "Well, yes, of course he did. Don't look at me like that. I have to turn myself inside out, you she-tyrant!"

"Does d.i.c.k know?" she hastened to ask. "About Tira?"

"Yes."

"Know what I'm here for?"

"Yes."

"Given his word not to blab? Hope to die?" That was their childish form of vow, hers and d.i.c.k's.

"I hope so," said Raven doubtfully. "I represented it to him as being necessary."

"I'll represent it, too," said Nan. "Now, Rookie, I'm going over there, first thing to-morrow morning. I'm going to see Tenney."

"The deuce you are! I'm afraid that won't do."

"Nothing else will," said Nan. "Tenney's got to give his consent. We can't do any kidnaping business. That's no good."

She said it with the peremptory implication of extinguis.h.i.+ng middle-aged scruples, and Raven also felt it to be "no good."

"Very well," said he. "You know best. I'll go with you."

"Oh, no, you won't. There are too many men-folks in it now. I'm going alone. Now, come back and talk to the family. Oh, I hope and pray d.i.c.k'll be good! Doesn't he look dear to-night, all red, as if he'd been logging? Has he? Have you? You look just the same. Oh, I do love d.i.c.k! I wish he'd let me, the way I want to."

Meantime Charlotte had come in, and Nan went to her and put her hands on her shoulders and rubbed cheeks, as she used to do with Raven.

"Come on," she said to him. "Time!"

So they went into the library and conversed, with every conventional flourish, until Amelia set the pace of retirement by a ladylike yawn.

But she had a word to say before parting, reserved perhaps to the last because she found herself doubtful of Raven's response. If she had to be snubbed she could simply keep on her way out of the room.

"John," said she, at the door, with the effect of a sudden thought, "how about Anne's estate? Are they getting it settled?"

Raven hesitated a perceptible instant. He somehow had an idea the estate was an affair of his, not to say Nan's.

"I suppose so," he answered, frowning. "Whitney's likely to do the right thing."

Amelia was never especially astute in the manner of danger signals.

"I suppose," she said, "you've made up your mind what to invest in. Or are the things in pretty good shape? Can you leave them as they are?"

d.i.c.k was standing by the hearth, wis.h.i.+ng hard for a word with Nan. She had smiled at him once or twice, so peaceably! The next step might be to a truce and then everlasting bliss. Now, suddenly aware of his mother, he ungratefully kicked the fire that was making him such pretty dreams, went to her, took her by the arm and proceeded with her across the hall.

"You talk too much," said d.i.c.k, when he had her inside her room. "Don't you know better than to drag in Miss Anne? He's touchy as the devil."

"Then he must get over it," said Amelia, in her best manner of the intelligent mentor. "Of course, she was a great loss to him."

"Don't you believe it," said d.i.c.k conclusively. "She had her paw on him.

What the deuce is it in him that makes all the women want to dry-nurse him and build him up and make him over?"

Then he wondered what Nan was saying to Raven at the moment, remembered also Raven's injunction to play a square game with her and, though his feet were twitching to carry him back to the library, sat doggedly down at his mother's hearth and encouraged her to talk interminably. Amelia was delighted. She didn't know d.i.c.k had so earnest an interest in the Federation of Clubs and her popular course in economics. She was probably never more sustainedly intelligent than in that half hour, until d.i.c.k heard Nan going up to bed, sighed heavily, and lost interest in the woman citizen.