But he had pushed her away, as his aloofness had pushed Anne. He had thrown Anne back upon her humiliated self. He had tossed Nan forward into Dick's generation and hers. But here was the difference. She wasn't going to cry out, "You don't love me." Instead, she turned to him, shivering a little and drawing her scarf about her shoulders.
"We'd better go down," she said. "It's getting cold. Dick'll be wondering."
They got up and Raven set the chairs inside the hut and took his glance about to see if all was in order: for he did not abandon the unwilling hope that Tira might sometime come. As they went down the hill the talk turned to the hylas and the spring, but when they reached the house Nan did not go in to Dick. She went to her own room and lay down on her bed and thought passionately of leaving Rookie free. How was it possible? Could he be free while she was bound? Sometimes of late she had been so tired that she could conceive of no refuge but wild and reckless outcry. And what could he think she meant when she said: "I wished you wanted me"?
XLI
Spring came on fast and Nan, partly to assure Milly she wasn't to be under foot forever, talked of opening her house and beginning to live there, for the first time without Aunt Anne. But she predicted it, even to Milly, with no great interest, and Raven, though he had urged her to run away from the cloudy weather Milly and Dick made for her, protested against her living alone. Dick was now strong enough to walk from his room to the porch, and Raven, watching him, saw in him a greater change than the languor of low vitality. He had the bright-eyed pallor of the man knocked down into the abyss and now crawling up a few paces (only a few, tremulous, hesitating) to get his foothold on the ground again. He was largely silent, not, it sometimes seemed, from weakness, but the torpor of a tired mind. He was responsive to their care for him, ready with the fitting word and look and yet, underneath the good manners of it all, patently acquiescent.
Then Nan found herself rested, suddenly, in the way of youth. One morning she got up quite herself again, and wrote her housekeeper to assemble servants and bring them up, and told Raven he couldn't block her any longer. She had done it for herself, and she quoted the over-worked commonplace of the psychological moment. He, also believing in the moment, refrained from argument and went over to open doors and windows. He was curiously glad of a word with her house, not so much to keep up old acquaintance as to ask its unresponsiveness whether it was going to mean Nan alone for him hence-forth or whether, at a time like this when he stood interrogating it, Anne Hamilton also stood there, in her turn interrogating him. Was she there to-day? Everything spoke mutely of her, the wall-paper she had prized for its ancient quaintness, the furniture in the lines of grace she loved. At that desk she had sat, slender figure of the gentlewoman of a time older than her own. Was her presence so etched in impalpable tracery on the air that he ought to feel it? Was she aching with defeated hopes because she might almost be expecting him, not only to remember but even to hear and see? No death could be more complete than the death of her presence here. He could not, even by the most remorseful determination, conjure up the living thought of her. Somehow it had seemed that here at least he might explain himself to her, feel that he had made himself clear. He did actually speak to her:
"I can't do it, Anne. Don't you see I can't?"
This was what he had meant when he told Nan he must get hold of her. What place could be so fortunate as this, full of the broken threads of her personality? They only needed knitting up by his passionate challenge, to be Anne. He called upon her, he caught the fluttering fringes of her presence in his trembling hands. But he could not knit them up. They broke, they floated away. It seemed, from the dead unresponsiveness of her house, as if there had never been any Anne. So he gave it up, and, in extreme dullness of mind, went about opening windows, and as the breeze idled in and stirred the waiting air and the sunlight rushed to it, he seemed to be sweeping the last earthly vestiges of her from the place that had known her best. And at once it appeared to him that he had done an inexorable, perhaps even a cruel thing, and he hurried out, leaving the air and sun to be more merciful than he.
When he went into his own yard he saw Dick sitting under the western pines, where Raven had set a couple of chairs and had a hammock swung. Dick had ignored the hammock. He scarcely sat at ease, and Raven had an idea he was meeting discomfort halfway, with the idea of making himself fit. He did say a word of thanks for the chairs.