When he went in, Charlotte was about her tasks at the kitchen stove.
"You're not going to fodder the cattle, you know," he said to her, passing through. "I'll see to that. Jerry showed me the mow he is using from."
"I always do," said Charlotte, "when he's away all day. I admire to git out there an' smell the creatur's and hear 'em rattlin' round the stanchils till they see the hay afore 'em."
"Never mind," said Raven. "I'll do it to-day." Then a thought struck him. "I wonder," he said, "who Tenney leaves to do his chores."
"Why," said Charlotte, "I s'pose she does 'em, same's I do when I'm alone. 'Tain't no great of a job, 'specially if the hay's pitched round beforehand."
Raven, sitting down to his breakfast, thought it a good deal of a task for a woman made for soft, kind ways with children and the small domestic animals by the hearth. And then he did have the humor to laugh at himself a little. It showed how she had unconsciously beguiled him, how she had impressed him with her curious implication of belonging to things afar from this world of homespun usages. She was strong and undeniably homespun herself, in every word and look. Let her fodder the cattle. Perhaps they would add to the lonesome tranquillity of her day, with their needs and their sweet-breathed satisfactions.
XIII
For a week it was hard, clear weather, with a crystal sky and no wind. Tenney appeared in the early mornings and he and Jerry went off to their chopping. Raven's relief grew. By the last of the week he found his apprehension really lessening. Every hour of her safety gave him new reassurance, and he could even face the nights, the long hours when Tenney was at home. Tenney he took pains not to meet. He distinctly objected to being pressed into a corner by the revivalist cant of a man he could not wisely offend. Nor did he see her whom he called "the woman." Sometimes in the early dusk after Tenney had got home, he was strongly moved to walk past the house and see if their light looked cheerful, or if he could hear the sound of voices within. Smile at himself as he might, at the childishness of the fancy, he alternately thought of her as being pursued out of the house by a madman with an axe and exhorted to save herself by the blood of the Lamb. And, Tenney being what he was, the last was almost as disquieting as the actual torment. Every morning he went up to the hut to find no slightest sign of her having been there. If he stayed long enough to build a fire, he went back, after it had time to die, and laid another, so that she might light it without delay.
On the Saturday night of that week the wind veered into the east and the clouds banked up. The air had a grayness that meant snow. He had been up at the hut all the afternoon. He had pulled out an old chest, the sea-chest of a long dead Raven who had been marked with sea longing, as it sometimes happens to those bred in the hills, and had run away and become mate and captain. Raven had always been vaguely proud of him, and so, perhaps, had other Ravens, for Old Crow, when he moved up here, had brought the sea-chest with him, and his own books also were stowed away in it. Old Captain Raven's were entirely consistent with his profession—charts, a wonderful flat volume full of the starry heavens and more enchanting to Raven than any modern astronomy; but Old Crow's, in their diverse character, seemed to have been gathered together as it happened, possibly as he came on them, in no sense an index of individual taste. There were poets (strange company they made for one another!) Milton, Ossian, Byron, Thompson, Herrick, and the Essays of Montaigne, the Confessions of Rousseau. Also, the Age of Reason, which, on the testimony of uncut leaves, had not been read. And there was a worn, dog-eared Bible. Raven had never wanted to appropriate the books so far as to set them with his own on the shelves. They seemed to him, through their isolation, to keep something of the identity of Old Crow. He believed Old Crow would like this. It was precious little earthly immortality the old chap had ever got beyond the local derision, and if Raven could please him by so small a thing, he would. He had them all out on chairs and sat on the floor beside the chest, looking them over idly until it began to grow dark and, realizing how early it was, he glanced up at the windows and saw the veil of a fine falling snow. He got up, left his books in disorder, and lighted the lamp. The fire had been dying down and he kicked the sticks apart. It must die wholly so that a fresh one would run no chance of catching the coals. Yet it was unlikely she would come to-night. Tenney would be tired with his week's work.