"Yes," said Raven, "of course he can. We'll be down to breakfast, tell Charlotte."
Tenney offered no preference or opinion. He sat there, his key—the key Tira had lost, he did remember vaguely—on the table before him. Nan, with the air of there being no more to do, wafted Dick away with her. And Raven and Tenney spent the night together in the hut. Raven did not sleep. He had an impression that Tenney did not, either. It seemed to him a watch with the dead.
XLV
In that darkest minute when it seems as if dawn will never come or, if it does, to bring with it a deeper chill, Raven, for the first time in weeks, found his old enemies upon him: the fear of life, the terrible distaste for continuance in a world where there is no escape, even in going on. Was this grief for Tira? Her needs had pulled him out from his own sickness of mind, and now that she would never need anything again, must he return to the dark dwelling of his mental discontent and crouch there whimpering as Tenney had whimpered when he came to him here a few hours ago? And slowly, achingly, his mind renewedly accepted the iron necessity which is living. There was no giving up. There was no escape. He had to live because the other choice—was it the fool's choice or the coward's?—was not only unthinkable, but it did no good. There was no escape. And side by side with the sickness of distaste for life as he found it, was another distaste, as strong: for this malady of nostalgia itself. He could not abide it another instant. It was squalid, it was unclean, and he found his mind crying out: "Help me! for God's sake help me!" But it was not to God he cried. It was to Old Crow. And Old Crow heard. Indubitably he heard. For there was an answer. "Yes! yes!" the answer kept beating in his mind. He would help.
And what of Tira? Was she resolved into the earth that made her? Or would she also help? He wondered why she had died. Was it because she had been unable to face the idea of the little boy who was not right taking his maimed innocence into some other state alone? No. Tira had her starkly simple faith. She had her Lord Jesus Christ. She would, as simply as she believed, have trusted the child to Him. Did she so fear to face her life with Tenney—the hurtling, blind, elemental creature with blood on his hands—that she took herself away? No. Tira was no such person. There was a wild, high courage in her that, the more terrible the challenge, responded the more valiantly. Why did she take herself away? And what was she in these walls that had been dedicated to her safety? Was she existent, like Old Crow? Was she here with Raven when his mind clamored for peace? Did she, too, answer "Yes, yes!" She had, he concluded, gone. It seemed as if she had withdrawn herself, by her own will, for some inexorable reason. He remembered threnodies that saw the beloved dead absorbed into the course of nature: the dawn, the sunset, the season's round, the flowers that spring ever renewed to deck the laureate hearse. And as his mind sought her in the night breeze that came in to fan him and Tenney alike, in the sky where the stars, through arboreal spaces, never looked so piercingly bright, he did seem to be aware of an actual intelligence. But it was assuredly not Tira and it was not Old Crow. It was Anne.
Whether his mind had been so occupied by these other more immediate things that she could not get the connection between her will and his, whether she now found him, bereft of Tira, free to do her unchanged bidding, he could not see. But Anne was there. At least, the knowledge of her was in his mind, insisting on being heard, and insisting as it never had in this present life. For whereas then her attack had been subtly organized, Anne herself, the directing general, behind almost invisible potencies of suggestion and finesse, now here she was in the open, plainly commanding him, as if this might be the only fight she should be able to manage, and it must be to the finish. And what she wanted was plain obedience touching the disposal of her trust. It was not his love she was asking for now. That, he concluded, though without bitterness, might not look desirable to her any more. Or perhaps she had learned how futile it was to ask it. Or, indeed, was all love futile beyond the grave? No, for he loved Tira withdrawn into her impenetrable seclusion—but that he must not think of. The fight was on, the conclusive fight with Anne. And he seemed to be battling for the integrity of his own soul, the freedom of his will. He sat up on his couch, and heard himself say aloud:
"No. I won't do it. You can't make me."
Was this the way to speak to Anne, to whom all the reticences and delicacies of life were native air? But she was not Anne now so much as the enemy of sane conduct here in this world and of his struggling will.
"D'you speak?" called Tenney from the next room.