"I don't know," said he. "But I've got to. I may not be able to get at her, but she must be able to get at me. She's got to. She's got to listen and understand I'm doing my best for her and what she wants. Old Crow understands me. And when Anne does—why, then I shall feel free."
And while he implied it was freedom from the tyranny of the bequest, she knew it implied, too, a continued freedom from Aunt Anne. Would he ever have set his face so fixedly toward that if he had not found Tira? And what was Tira's silent call to him? Was it of the blood only, because she was one of those women nature has manacled with the heaviness of the earth's demands? Strangely, she knew, nature acts, sometimes sending a woman child into the world with the seeds of life shut in her baby hand, a wafer for men to taste, a perfume to draw them across mountain and plain. The woman may be dutiful and sound, and then she suffers bewildered anguish from its potency; or she may league herself with the powers of darkness, and then she is a harlot of Babylon or old Rome. And Tira was good. Whether or not Raven heard the call of her womanhood—here Nan drew back as from mysteries not hers to touch—he did feel to the full the extremity of her peril, the pathos of her helplessness, the spell of her beauty. She was as strong as the earth because it was the maternal that spoke in her, and all the forces of nature must guard the maternal, that its purpose may be fulfilled. Tira could not speak the English language with purity, but this was immaterial. She was Tira, and as Tira she had innocently laid on Raven the old, dark magic. Nan was under no illusion as to his present abandonment of Tira's cause. That he seemed to have accepted the ebbing of her peril, that he should speak of it with something approaching indifference, did not mean that he had relaxed his vigilance over her. He was not thinking of her with any disordered warmth of sympathy. But he was thinking. Suddenly she spoke, not knowing what she was going to say, but out of the unconscious part of her:
"Rookie, you don't want anything really, do you, except to stand by and give us all a boost when we're down?"
Raven considered a moment.
"I don't know," he said, "precisely what I do want. If you told me Old Crow didn't want anything but giving folks a boost, I'm with you there. He actually didn't. You can tell from his book."
"I can't seem to bear it," said Nan. She was looking at the darkening woods and her wet eyes blurred them more than the falling dusk. "It isn't healthy. It isn't right. I want you to want things like fury, and I don't know whether I should care so very much if you banged yourself up pretty well not getting them. And if you actually got them! O Rookie! I'd be so glad."
"You're a dear child," said Raven, "a darling child."
"That's it," said Nan. "If you didn't think I was a child, perhaps you'd want me. O Rookie! I wish you wanted me!"
Into Raven's mind flashed the picture of Anne on her knees beside him saying, in that sharp gasp of her sorrow, "You don't love me." This was no such thing, yet, in some phase, was life going to repeat itself over and over in the endless earth journeys he might have to make, futilities of mismated minds, the outcry of defrauded souls? But at least this wasn't his cowardly silence on the heel of Anne's gasping cry. He could be honest here, for this was Nan.
"My darling," he said, "you're nearer to me than anything in this world—or out of it. Don't you make any mistake about that. And if I don't want things 'like fury,' as you say, it's a matter of the calendar, that's all. Dick wants them like fury. So do you. I'm an old chap, dear. You can't set back the clock."