Thyatira—this was her name, and she was called Tira—passed her husband apparently without a glance. Nevertheless she had, in approaching, become adequately aware of his disordered look, and the fact of it calmed her to a perfect self-possession. She could always, even from one of these fleeting glimpses, guess at the stage his madman's progress had reached, and the present drop in temperature restored her everyday sense of safety. With it came a sudden ebbing of energy and endurance. The "spell" was over for the time, but her escape from the shadow of it left her nerveless and almost indifferent to its returning; apathetic, too, to her tormentor. Going in, she closed the door behind her, apparently not noticing that he followed her, and when he opened it and came in, she was sitting in his great chair by the fire, taking off the baby's coat, and, with the capable, anxious mother motion, feeling the little hands. Tenney came up to her and the child, turning at his step, looking up at him solemnly. Tira's heart seemed to contract within her. This was the very glance, "lookin' up kinder droll," that had brought on the storm. But for Tenney it evidently meant something now that fitted his mood of passionate anxiety to get back into the warm security of domestic peace.
"You lemme take him," he said, "whilst you git off your things. You'll ketch your death o' cold, carryin' on so."
The last he had to add. She was, his defensive inner mind told him, all wrong in flying out of the house "like a crazed creatur'" when she might have stayed and told him, just told him, whether she was the kind of woman he, at these unheralded mad moments, thought she was. That was the undercurrent always in his mind: if she wouldn't be so still and hateful, if she would only tell him. She might have some pity on a man, that defensive inner mind advised him, when she saw him all worked up. But the minute he warned her the devil of doubt was again tempting him, she began to freeze up and wouldn't speak to him at all. No wonder, with that devil inside whispering to him and hounding him on—no wonder he said things and—he trembled here and dared not follow out that thought—and was afraid he might do things. But she shook her head, at his offer of taking the child.
"You might go an' cut a slice o' ham," she said wearily. "It's 'most dinner time. We might's well have that as anything."
But the baby reached out and closed his little fingers about Tenney's thumb. Tenney stood there, his heart swelling within him at the contrast between the child's forgivingness and her cruelty. Now she had the child's outer things off, and she rose with them in one hand, carrying the child on the other arm, and it was her movement that dragged the little fingers away and broke that significant clasp on Tenney's thumb. How hateful she could be, he thought, his heart swelling more and more. He stood where she left him, and she went to the low couch and set the baby down there, and put into his hand a formless doll she wanted him to love. He never really noticed it, but she felt he would sometime love the doll. Then she glanced, with the air of being recalled to a wearisome routine, at the table in the middle of the floor; it meant ham and eggs. It seemed also to occur to her that she had not taken off her cloak, and she hung it on its nail behind the door. Soon, as Tenney, still motionless there by the stove, seemed mutely accusing her, mutely imploring her not to be cruel, she did turn and look at him. The thought of Raven was uppermost in her mind. It had been there every minute since she had gone into his house in the woods, but now it roused compellingly, stronger than even her present apprehension. Most of all, she was penetrated by a wonder almost greater than any emotion she had ever felt, at having laid before him at once and without persuasion, the story of her life. Why should she have told him? She would have said no decent woman could betray her husband to another man. It was entirely mysterious, and she gave it up. But there was, behind the wonder, a dazzling sense that he was different. As he had told her that strange thing she hardly dared think of now, because it seemed as if she must have misunderstood him—the thing about her looking so good and wonderful when he came upon her—so he, in his kindness and compassion, his implication of assuming a mysterious responsibility for her, seemed unbelievably good, not a citizen of this bleak neighborhood—or even the world (her mind, though stumblingly, ran as far as that) and, more astounding still, the real miracle was that he had been sent for this: to save her. And at that moment of dazed reflection, it all meant the passionate necessity of obeying him. He had bade her show her husband how she loved him. Seeing the man was jealous, he had pitied him. Perhaps she had not thought, since these last apprehensive days with Tenney, whether she loved him or not. He had simply, at the times of recurrent tragedy, been the terror within the house, and she had lived a life of breathless consecration to the one task of saving the child. Did she love him? Raven had assumed she did, and in her devotion to him she must, in some form, obey. Almost it seemed to her there would be shame in not loving her husband, if Raven expected it of her. None of these things were formulated in her mind. They were only shadowy impulses, like the forces of nature, persuading, impelling her. She had no words; she had scarcely, as to the abstractions she dimly felt and never saw, any reasoned thought. But she did have an unrecognized life of the emotions, and this was surging in her now.
She stood for a second looking at Tenney, the distended beauty of her eyes like a question, a challenge. She seemed, though this neither of them could know, to be beseeching him to tell her what treatment he deserved of her, or what would make their case whole. They were simple people, these two, but she had leaped, without knowing it herself, to a new plane of life. She was still with Raven in the hut, trying to speak his language, follow out his thought for her. She gave a little quick rush across the room and, to Tenney's overwhelming surprise, her hands were on his shoulders, her face so close to his that her sweet breath fanned him. He had never seen her so. She had to be pursued, coaxed, tired out with persuasion before she would even accept the warmth he too often had for her.
"Isr'el," she said, "Isr'el Tenney! if you ever ag'in, so long as you live, think wrong o' that baby there, you'll be the wickedest man on God's earth."
His arms closed about her and she stood passive. Yet she wanted to free herself. Did she love him? The question Raven had seemed to illuminate kept beating on in her tired head. Did she love him? And as Tenney's arms clung closer and his lips were on hers, she threw back her head and cried violently:
"No, I don't."
"Don't what?" he asked, releasing her slightly, and she drew away from him and, still obeying Raven, made one disordered effort at assurance.