XIV
All that night Raven, through his light sleep, had a consciousness of holding on to himself, refusing to think, refusing angrily to fear. The sleep seemed to him like a thin, slippery coating over gulfs unplumbed; it was insecure, yet it failed to let him down into blessed depths of oblivion below. But he would not think to no purpose (he had a dread of the wild, disordered clacking of the wheels in unproductive thought), and he would not invite again the strange humiliation, the relief tinged by aversion, that came over him when he felt, on leaving them, the inviolability of the three in their legal bond. She had looked to him so like heaven's own, he had upborne her in his thought almost to the gate of heaven itself; and yet she was walled in by a bond she would not repudiate with the brute who persecuted her. In spite of her uncouth speech, in spite of her ignorance of delicate usage, she seemed to him a creature infinitely removed from the rougher aspects of this New England life; yet there she was in one of the most sordid scenes of it, and she was absorbed by it, she fitted it as a Madonna fits a cave. And what business had he, he asked angrily, to weave about her the web of a glorifying sympathy, exalting her only from that pernicious habit of his of being sorry? Yet, as he thought it, he knew she was different from the ordinary country woman afraid of her man, and that any fine mantle he wove for her could not equal the radiance of her pure courage and undaunted truth.
Once he rose from his bed and began to dress hastily, with what he recognized at the same moment as the wild purpose of slipping out of the house and going up to Tenney's, to see if there was a light or to listen for the catamount voice. But that, he realized immediately, was folly. Suppose Tenney saw him. What reason could he plant in the man's inflamed mind, except one more hostile to her peace? So he went back to bed, chilled, and was savagely glad of his discomfort. It gave him something, however trivial, to think about besides the peril of a woman who looked like motherhood incarnate, and so should have been heir to all the worship and chivalry of men. With the first light he was up and had built his fire, and Charlotte, hearing him, got, sooner than was her wont, out of her warm bed. Charlotte owned to liking to "lay a spell" in winter, to make up for the early activities of summer mornings when you must be "up 'fore light" to keep pace with the day. For after nine o'clock "the day's 'most gone." She looked up at him as he came into the kitchen where she was brashing her fire for a quick oven, and he found her eyes clearly worried in their questioning.
"No toast, Charlotte," he said. He wondered if even his voice was trembling in his haste. "No biscuits. I'm going up to the hut."
Charlotte nodded and seemed to settle into understanding. She had a sympathetic, almost a reverent tolerance for the activities of pen and ink. To her, Raven was a well-beloved and in no wise a remarkable being until he stepped into the clouded room of literary activity. There she would have indulged him in any whim or unaccountable tyranny. Charlotte had never heard of temperament, but she believed in it. Once only did she speak to him while he was drinking his coffee:
"You got any ink up there?"
He started and looked at her a moment, dazed. Nothing was further from his mind than ink. Other liquids, tears, waters of lethe, lakes of fire and brimstone would not have sounded foreign to his thought. But ink! how incalculably far was the life of the written word from this raw anguish of reality he was caught in to-day! He recovered himself instantly.
"I've got my pen," he told her, "my stylograph."
And presently he had put on his coat, bidden her a hasty good-by and was plunging up the slope. Somehow, though the crest of the wave had been reached the night before and that usually, Tira had assured him, meant a following calm, he was certain of seeing her to-day. It was not that he wanted to see her, but an inner conviction, implacably fixed as the laws of nature that are at no point subject to the desires of man, told him she would come. The hut must be warm for her. The fire must be relaid. And, he told himself grimly, the apex had been reached. The end of the thing was before them. He must not yield to her again. He must command her, persuade and conquer her. She must let him send her away.
At the hut he almost expected to see her footprints in the light snow by the door. But the exquisite softness lay untouched. The day was a heaven of clearness, the shadows were deep blue and the trees beginning the slow waving motion of their majestic secrecies. He took out the key from under the stone, went in and made his fire with a hand too practiced to lose in efficacy from its haste. Presently it was roaring upward and, after a glance about to see that the room was not in any disorder too great for him to remedy quickly, he walked back and forth, and whenever it died down enough to let him, fed the fire. It began to seem to him as if he were going to be there days feeding the fire to keep her warm, but it was only a little before ten when he heard a step and his heart choked him with its swelling of relief. At once he was also calmer. A moment ago even, he would have wondered how he could meet her, how keep the storm of entreaty out of his voice if he was to beg her to let him save her. But now he knew he should be himself as she had briefly known him and though he must command, he should in no sense offend. He stood still by the fire, half turning toward the door, to wait. It was an unformulated delicacy of his attitude toward her that she should not find him going forward to meet her as if she were a guest. She should enter as if the house were her own. But she did not enter. There was a hand at the door. It knocked. Then he called: