"Don't arrest him. No end of talk."
"No," said Raven. "It wasn't you he was out for."
The restless eyes turned on Nan.
"Go to bed," said Dick.
Her hand had been on his and she took it gently away, and got up.
"I'm not sleepy," she said. "I'll camp in the library a while."
When she had gone Raven, sitting there by Dick, who did not speak again, listened for the murmur of voices from the library. Would they keep companionable vigil, the two women, heartening each other by a word, or would they sit aloof, each wrapped in her own grief? There was not a sound. They were falling in with that determination of the house to maintain its sinister stillness, its air of knowing more than it would tell.
XXXIX
Tenney, not finding the key of the hut, and increasingly alive to the anguish flaring in his foot, went home by the back way. Tira was waiting at the door. She saw him coming, and, for that first moment, he could ignore the pain in a savage recognition of her plight. She had, he thought, having missed the key, not even tried the door. But this brief summary of her guilty folly angered him for the moment only. He was suddenly tired, and his foot did ache outrageously. He gave way to the pain of it, and limped heavily. As he neared the house, however, his face did relax into a mirthless smile. There were tracks under the kitchen window. She had hoped to get in that way and had found the window fastened. And all the time there was the door, ready for a confident hand. But the ill chance of it amused him for not much more than the instant of its occurrence. His mind recoiled upon his own miserable state. He had gone out in search of justice, and he had come home in terror of what he had himself unjustly done. If he had been imaginative enough to predict the righteous satisfaction he expected from his vengeance on Raven, he might have foreseen himself coming back to bring Tira the evil news, and smiling, out of his general rectitude, at her grief and terror. Perhaps he would have been wrong in those unformulated assumptions. Perhaps he would not have been calm enough for satisfaction in the completed deed, since the mind does, after a red act, become at once fugitive before the furies of inherited beliefs and fears. Perhaps it would have shrunk cowering back from the old, old penalty against the letting of blood, as it did now when he was faced with the tragic irony of the deed as it was. He had shed blood and, by one of the savage mischances of life, the blood of a man innocent of offense against him. After the first glance at Tira, he did not look at her again, but passed her, threw open the door, and went in. His thoughts, becoming every instant more confused, as the appalling moments in the woods beat themselves out noisily, seemed to favor closing the door behind him. It was she who had brought him to this pass. It was she who had locked his door upon herself and, in her wantonness, as good as thrown away the key. Let her stay outside. But he was not equal to even that sharpness of decision and Tira, after she found the door swinging free, went in.