Читать книгу Old Crow - Alice Brown - Страница 4

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They sat there silent for several minutes. Raven was keeping desperate clutch on the inner self lashed by his hurrying heart, and telling it there was no danger of his saying any of the things it was hounding him on to say. He wanted to break out with an untempered violence:

"Of course you've found it. And of course she's left a lot of it to me."

He did not really believe that: only it so linked up with the chain of her unceasing benevolences toward him that it seemed the only thing to complete them adequately. And Nan, as if his premonition had prompted her, too, was saying, after the minute she had left him to get his pace even with hers, as if to assure him that, although she knew so much more than he, she wouldn't hurry ahead:

"Rookie, dear, she's left it all to you."

Raven felt himself tighten up, every nerve and sinew of him, to do something before it should be too late. He bent forward to her and said, a sharp query:

"Who found it?"

"Why," said Nan, smiling as if she couldn't ask anything better, "I found it, in a perfectly innocent looking envelope with some old deeds and mortgages."

"You haven't got it here, have you?" he pelted on. "You didn't bring it with you?"

His eyes interrogated her with his voice, and she shook her head, wondering at him.

"Nothing to you?" he asked sharply. "I'm the sole legatee?"

"Oh, I have the house, of course," said Nan, "the one here and the place at Wake Hill. She had those only for her lifetime, you know. Yes, you're the sole legatee."

"You haven't told anybody, have you?" he asked, in a despairing haste, as if he were seeking about for ways to suppress the document.

She broke into an amused giggle, the note he sometimes fancied she kept for him alone.

"Why, yes," she said, "of course I have. I telephoned Mr. Whitney, and he was in a great state over it. He came round, and I gave it to him."

"A lawyer!" said Raven, in disgust. "A damned accurate, precedent-preaching lawyer! Well, the fat's in the fire now. What did you have to be so confounded previous for?"

Nan was smiling at him as if she found herself wiser than he.

"You didn't think you could tear it up, did you, Rookie?" she inquired. "You can't, you know, except in stories."

"I don't know what I thought," he said. "Only I wish it hadn't been done, that's all. It's a"—he ended blankly—"a mistake."

She was looking at him now in a warm, sweet way, to tell him she understood and thanked him.

"You're afraid I sha'n't have enough," she said. "I shall. I'd ever so much rather you had it, Rookie."

"It isn't a question," said Raven curtly, in his disaffection, "of how much you're worth. It's simply yours, that's all, and you've got to have it. Well, I can refuse it, I suppose. Only that's so boorish. It drags everybody out into the open. What made her! Oh, what made her!"

"I think it's nice," said Nan comfortably. "It seems to make everything so right. As to other people—why, it's telling them, don't you know, you really were the one she cared most about, though she couldn't care quite in the way you wanted her to."

He sat staring at her. What did she mean? What had she made up, in her adequate mind, about his relation to Aunt Anne? She couldn't know how he had fought off the yearly increasing benefits Anne had showered him with, unless indeed Anne had told her. And it wasn't like her. Anne was dignity itself. She kept her own counsel. She took her stately course without the least recognition that there were peculiarities in the pace she kept or the road she chose. She had the unconscious arrogance of her class, a class perhaps, except as surviving in individuals, almost extinct. She never accounted for herself, because it could not have forced its way into her mind, from birth to death, that there was anything in her conduct save the inevitable best, as ordered as the stars. So, Raven knew, she had probably never talked over his nebulous relation with her to Nan; but he was suddenly alive with curiosity to know. He couldn't coax Nan into betraying that confidence, but he was nevertheless set on getting at it somehow. He wondered if it might be decent to do it by direct attack.

"Nan," said he, "just what was my relation to your Aunt Anne? What do you assume it to have been?"

She looked at him as if in reproach, a hurt pride flushing her cheek and giving a sort of wounded appeal to her glance.

"Why," she stumbled, "I know. Of course I know. Everybody did that heard how long you'd been devoted to her."

This gave him so sharp a pang that it might almost have seemed she had been told off to avenge some of Aunt Anne's wrongs of omission suffered at his hands. He had never been devoted to her, even with his decent show of deference in return for the benefits he had to reject. And now Nan was accusing him of having kept up the relation he had been all his life repudiating, and since Aunt Anne was gone (in the pathetic immunity that shuts the lips of the living as it does those of the dead), he could not repudiate it any more. Nan was looking at him now in her clear-eyed gravity, but still with that unconscious implication of there being something in it all to hurt her personally. The words came as if in spite of her, so impetuously that she might easily not have seen how significant they were:

"There's nothing to be ashamed of in not getting the woman you want, especially with that reason. She adored you, Rookie. I know she did. And it was pretty heroic in her to keep her mind fixed on all those years between you. I wouldn't, I can tell you. Do you s'pose I'd let a matter of fourteen years keep me from the only man? No, sir. Not me."

They sat gazing at each other, she as self-willed as her words and he abjectly afraid of her finding out. Why? He could not have told. But it did seem as if he must protect Anne, in the shadows where she lived now, from the flashing directness of this terrible young glance. It was all he could do for her. It was bad enough to have Nan build up a beautiful dream house of eternal love and renunciation. It was infinitely worse to be the cause of her demolishing it. And as his eyes, in sheer terror of leaving her to reflect any more astutely and productively on this, held hers, and hers answered back, suddenly he saw a new knowledge dawn in their clear depths. She had somehow read him, underneath his evasions. She knew. And before she could turn that involuntary discovery of hers over in her mind and blur it with some of the discretions he was trying to maintain, she burst out, in the extremity of her wonder:

"Good heavens! I don't believe it was so at all. You weren't in love with her. She was with you, and that was the only way she——" Here she saw the morass her crude candor was leading them both into, and stopped, but not soon enough for him to miss the look of eager relief sprung into her eyes. He turned from her and spoke roughly:

"We don't know what we're talking about. Going into things now—why, it's the merest folly. Haven't we enough to worry over in the matter of the will? That's the thing we've got to meet next."

She had now, he saw, the consciously sweet and warming smile she had for him when she wanted to coax him into doing something or ignoring something she had done.

"I'm in hopes," she said, "you may feel differently after you've read her letter."

"Her letter?" he repeated, as if that were a superadded shock. "What letter?"

"It was in the envelope," said Nan soothingly, "with the will."

"Who's it to?"

He was a writer of English, but his extremity was such that only the briefest slovenliness would serve.

"To you," she said, unclasping her little bag and bringing it out, the familiar superscription uppermost and the very size and texture of the envelope so reminiscent of Anne's unchanging habits that he felt again the pressure of her fine indomitable hand on his.

"Have you," he asked bleakly, "shown that to Whitney?"

"Why, no," said she, in a clear-eyed surprise. "Of course not. It's addressed to you."

She held it out to him and, after a perceptible pause, he took it from her and sat holding it, looking over it into the fire, as if he saw his fate there, or as if he should determine it for himself by tossing the letter in, to be devoured. Then he became aware that Nan was gathering herself up to go. It was rather a mental intimation than anything tangible. She was tight furled, like all the women of that moment of fashion, and had no flying draperies to collect. But he felt her flitting and knew at the same instant that he could not lose her, since, determined as he was to bar her out of the inner recesses of his unfurnished mental prison, where he and the memory of Aunt Anne dwelt so miserably together, it was still a comfort to keep her human presence within call.

"Don't go," he implored her, and she, surprised, settled back, saying:

"No, of course not, if you don't want me to. I thought you'd like to read it straight off. Wouldn't it be easier to read it alone?"

"I don't know whether I can ever read it," said Raven, and then, seeing what a great booby he must sound, he ended savagely: "I'll read it now."

Nan took a paper-knife from the table and offered it to him. Evidently she felt an unformulated tenderness there, a guess that if he tore it open it would seem as if he were somehow tearing at Aunt Anne's vanished and helpless delicacies. Then, as he did not accept the knife, or, indeed, seem to see it, she took the letter from his hand, ran the blade noiselessly under the flap, withdrew the folded sheets, and gave them to him. Raven, with a little shake of the head, as if he were reminding himself not to be a fool, opened the letter, fixed his attention on it and, without looking up, hurried through the closely written pages. Nan sat as still as an image of silence, and when he had done and she heard him folding the sheets and putting them back into the envelope, she did not look up.

"Well," said he, his voice so harsh and dry that now she did glance at him in a quick inquiry, "it's as bad as it can be. No, it couldn't very well be worse."

Harrying thoughts raced through her mind. Had Aunt Anne reproached him for any friendliness unreturned, any old hurt time had never healed? No, Aunt Anne was too effectually armored by an exquisite propriety. She would have been too proud to make any egotistical demand for herself during life. Assuredly she could not have done it after death. Raven may have guessed what she was thinking.

"No," he said, in the same tone of dry distaste. All at once it seemed he could be definitely allowed to treat himself to a little wholesome rebuttal of Anne and her ways. "It's nothing you could possibly imagine. She leaves the money to me to be used for a certain purpose. She doesn't leave it to any association of the people that think as she does, because she doesn't absolutely trust them never to divert it into some channel she wouldn't approve. She leaves it to me to administer because I know precisely what she means and I'd feel bound to do it in her way and no other."

"But what is the purpose?" Nan asked him. She was thoroughly surprised and very curious. "So it's for a cause. Aren't you glad, Rookie? A minute ago you didn't want it. What is the cause?"

"The cause," said Raven, with infinite distaste, as if it galled him even to say it, "is the cause of Peace."

"Good Lord!" said Nan breathlessly. "O my stars!" She thought of it a moment, and he thought also, and then she gathered herself hopefully. "But, Rookie dear, you believe in peace. You don't have to carry it out in her way. You can carry it out in yours—and mine—and Dick's—we that have seen things over there. Why, bless you, Rookie, it's a great idea. It's a chance: Liberty enlightening the world! a big educational fund, and you to administer it. Cheer up, Rookie dear. It's a chance."

"Oh, no, it's not a chance," said Raven bitterly. "She's seen to that. She's tied me up, hand and foot. It's got to be done in her way, the way she'd been doing it herself since 1914."

"The acutely sentimental?" asked Nan ruthlessly. Then the misery of his face—a look, too, of mortification as if somebody had put him to public shame—hurt her so that she spoke with an impetuous bitterness of her own: "It was a cruel thing to do. Well, it was like her."

Raven put in heavily:

"She never meant to be cruel."

"No," said Nan, "but the whole thing—all the things she had to do with—came out of her being absolutely stupid and absolutely sure she was right."

Raven thought apathetically for a moment. His mind went plodding back over the years of his acquaintance with Anne, as he had never meant it should again. There had been moments, of late, when he wondered if he need ever go back to that guiding hand of hers on his unresponsive life. Of herself, he would have protested, he must have the decency to think. Just now, recurring to that also, he wondered, with a grim amusement, whether he had perhaps meant to set apart a day for it, say Thursdays from ten to twelve, to think gratefully of Anne. But here he was again at war with her, and the curious part of it seemed to be that he couldn't undertake the warfare with the old, steady, hopeless persistence he had got used to in their past; the mere thought of it had roused him to a certain alarming wildness of revolt.

"Well," he found himself saying to Nan, because there might be a propriety in curbing her impetuous conclusions, "she had a way of being right—conventionally, you might say."

"Was she right about the War?" Nan threw back at him.

"No," he felt obliged to own.

"Is she right about this, trying to fetter you, hand and foot, against what she knew you believed, and banking on your doing it because she's crowded you and rushed you so many times and you've never failed her?"

"Oh, yes," said Raven miserably, "I've failed her often enough."

"But answer me that: was she right when she left you her money to do this fool thing and give the world another kick down hill where the sentimentalists are sending it? Now I ask you, Rookie, was she right?"

"No," he owned again.

"Then," said Nan triumphantly, "you mean she's right about teas and dinners and women's clubs and old portraits and genealogy and believing our family tree was the tree of life. That's what you mean, isn't it, Rookie?"

Raven looked at her, an unhappy smile dawning. He was moderately sure, in his unspoken certainties, that this was what he did mean. She had been the perfect product of a certain form of civilization, her proprieties, her cruelties even—though, so civilized were they, they seemed to rank only as spiritual necessities.

"I'd rather see a monkey climbing our family tree," said Nan, with a rash irrelevance she hoped might shock him into the reaction of a wholesome disapproval, "than all those stiffs she used to hold up for me to imitate."

"Don't!" said Raven involuntarily. "It would hurt her like the mischief to hear you say a thing like that."

"Why, Rookie," said Nan, with a tenderness for him alone, he saw, not for Aunt Anne, "you act as if she might be—in the room." She kept a merciful restraint on herself there. She had almost said: "You act as if you were afraid she might be in the room."

He sat staring at her from under frowning brows. Was it possible, his startled consciousness asked itself, that the spell of Anne's tenacity of will had not lifted in the least and he did think she might be in the room? Not to intimidate him: he had never feared her. He had been under the yoke, not only of his decent gratitude, but his knowledge of the frightful hurts he could deal her. He wondered what Nan would say if he could tell her that, if he could paint for her the most awful hour in his remembrance, more terrible even than that of seeing his mother suffer under mortal disease, when Anne had actually given way before him, the only time in her ordered life, and accused him of the cruelty of not loving her. This had not been the thin passion of the family portraits smiling down on them from her walls, but the terrible nerve-destroying anguish of a woman scorned. That was one of the things in his life he never allowed himself to think about; but it would, in moments of physical weariness, come beating at the door. He would hear it leave the threshold while he sat, hands clenched and lips shut tight, and go prowling round the house, peering in at him through the windows, bidding him waken and remember. And when he did find himself forced to remember before he could get out of doors and walk or ride, it was always with an incredulous amazement that he had, in that moment of her downfall, found the courage to withstand her. When the implacable ghost of remembrance flashed on his mind the picture of her, face wet with streaming tears, hands outstretched to him—beautiful hands, the product of five generations of idleness and care—why did he not meet her passion with some decency of response, swear he did love her, and spend the rest of his life in making good? Would a lifetime of dogged endurance be too much for a man to give, to save all this inherited delicacy of type from the ruin of knowing it had betrayed itself and was delicate no more?—the keenest pang it could feel in a world made, to that circumscribed, over-cultured intelligence, for the nurture of such flowers of life. He felt, as he stood there looking despairingly upon her, as if he had seen all the manufactured expensiveness of the world, lustrous silks, bloom of velvet, filigreed jewels, in rags and ruin. Yet there was more, and this it was that had brought enduring remorse to his mind. It was pride. That was in ruins. If she had assaulted him with the reproaches of an unfed passion, there would have been some savage response of rebuttal in him, to save them both from this meager sort of shame. But what could heal in a man's mind the vision of a woman's murdered pride, as deep as the pride of queens, in the days when the world itself bowed its neck for queens to set their feet on? Nan was looking at him curiously. He became aware of it, and returned to himself with a start. He must, he judged, have been acting queerly. It had never happened before that he had been under other eyes when the vision rose to plague him.

"You've been such a long time without speaking," said Nan gently. "What is it, Rookie dear?"

He shook his head. His forehead was damp with the sweat of his renewed remorses.

"There's such a lot of things, Nan," he answered, "that can't be said."

"Yes," she agreed, "that's true. Want me to go home?"

He didn't want her to go home. He caught at her dear presence. Almost he wished he might tell her how horrible it was, not only to repudiate Anne's last request of him, but to feel he was repudiating it on the heels of that other refusal years ago.

"No, dear," he said, "not yet. I'll go with you when you must."

"I don't believe," Nan ventured, "it's as bad as you think. She did do some foolish things," she meditated, "these last years."

"She did some hideous things," said Raven, "because they weren't normal. They weren't decent. And so they weren't right."

"Maybe I don't know so much as you do about them," said Nan. "You see she was so furious with me for going to France——"

"Oh, don't say she was furious," urged Raven, still out of that sense of her being in the room. "It would hurt her so confoundedly."

"Well, she was, you see," said Nan. "I thought you knew about it. But I remember, you'd gone. And when I told her I was going over, she was furious. Oh, she was, Rookie! You can't say anything else. I know Aunt Anne."

"But just cut out some of the adjectives," said Raven, still with that sense of Anne's being in the room and the unsportsmanlike business of putting her in her place when she could not, even from her place, defend herself. "She never was furious. She simply didn't believe in war and she wouldn't join any relief work and didn't want you to."

"She wouldn't join any relief work," said Nan, relentlessly rehearsing. "She said the most frightful things and said them publicly. She ought to have been arrested, only they didn't take the trouble. She wasn't a Quaker. There was nothing inbred to excuse her. We're decent folks, Rookie, we Hamiltons. But she stood for non-resistance. She said Belgium shouldn't have resisted, and England shouldn't have gone in, and France shouldn't have lifted a finger or thrown a bomb, and when you told her—that is, I told her—she was crazy, she said something awful."

Raven was startled out of his determination to show no curiosity.

"What did she say?" he asked. "What was it that was awful?"

Nan seemed to have paled a little under the rose-leaf texture of her cheek.

"Why, you know," she said, "what they all come back to. Whatever they believe, they come back to that. I don't see how they can. I couldn't, it scares me so. They tell you what He said—Christ."

Raven sat looking at her, wondering absently, in the unregarded depths of his mind, how they could go on with a talk that was ploughing deeper and deeper and yet could get nowhere in the end. For certainly they were both mercifully bent on saving Anne, and Anne, under this shadow of her latest past, herself would not let them.

"She absolutely forbade my going to France," said Nan, this with no special feeling, but as if she had dwelt on it until there was no emotion left to put into it. "She said it was notoriety I wanted. I told her I'd scrub floors over there, if they wanted me to. It proved I did, too, you know. I did it remarkably well. And then she said she forbade me, and I reminded her I was of age and had my own money. And I went."

Raven nodded. He thought they had said enough, but Nan's calm impartiality did rest him. It was something he could not himself attain.

"And now," said Nan, "she wants you to keep on doing the fool things she'd have done then, if they'd let her. She probably wants to get up a big scheme of propaganda and put it into the schools. And every blessed boy and girl in this country is to be taught not to serve the truth and do his job but—safety first."

"Yes," said Raven, drearily "I suppose that's about it."

"But actually," said Nan, suddenly aware that he had not told her, "what does she say? Does she specify? What does she say?"

"She says," Raven answered, in a toneless voice, glancing at the letter but making no movement toward sharing it with her more definitely, "that her money is to build a Palace of Peace—she doesn't say where—for lectures, demonstrations of the sort I know she approves, all the activities possible in the lines she has been following—for the doctrine of non-resistance and the consequent abolishment of war."

Again he ended drearily.

"Well," said Nan, "what are you going to do about it? going to spend your life and the lives of a lot of more or less intelligent pacifists teaching children to compute the number of movies they could go to for the money spent on one battleship——"

"But, good God, Nan!" Raven broke in, "you and I don't want to preach war."

"No," said Nan, "but we can't let Aunt Anne preach peace: not her brand, as we've seen it. O Rookie! what's the use of taking the world as it isn't? Why don't we see if we can't make something of the old thing as it is and has been? and blest if I don't believe as it always will be?"

Raven looked at her in a maze of interrogation. Was this the fragility of girlhood speaking, or was it womanhood, old as time itself, with the knowledge of good and evil? She answered the look.

"No," she said, "I'm not a kid. Don't think it. I suppose it's because I've seen—life."

The pause before the last word, the drop on the word itself was not from bitterness, he knew. But it was sad.

"Well," he said irrepressibly, "you've seen life, and what do you think of it?"

She hesitated. Then she put out her hand and touched the petal of a rose, one of a great dome of splendor in a bowl.

"I like—roses," she said whimsically.

She looked at him with that most moving look of a lovely face: the knitted brows of rueful questioning, the smiling lips. Raven, staring back at her, felt a sudden impulse to speak, to tell. It was the form of her reply that invited him.

"I don't believe, Nan," he said, "I even care about roses. I don't care about the whole infernal scheme. That's what I sent for Dick for—to tell him. Practically, you know I should have to tell Dick. And I haven't done it and now I'm telling you."