Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; New England -- Fiction; Psychological fiction
Raven, waiting for him, speculated on the tone. What did it mean? It was
a breathless tone, though not in any manner like the woman's. It was as
if he had run and stumbled and caught himself up, and all the time been
strangled from within by rage or some like madness. The woman's
breathlessness had simply meant life's going out of her with sheer
fright. Now the man was coming up the slope, bent at the shoulders, as
if he carried a heavy load or as if almost doubling himself helped him
to go the faster. He was a thin man with long arms and he carried an
axe. Raven called to him:
"Hullo, there! Take a look as you come along and see if you can find my
knife."
The man stopped short, straightened, and looked at him. Meantime Raven,
bending in his search, went toward him, scrutinizing the road from side
to side. He had a good idea of the fellow in the one glance he gave him:
a pale, thin face, black eyes with a strange spark in them, a burning
glance like the inventor's or the fanatic's, and black hair. It was an
ascetic face, and yet there was passion of an unnamed sort ready to
flash out and do strange things, overthrow the fabric of an ordered life
perhaps, or contradict the restraint of years. He stood motionless until
Raven, still searching, had got within three feet of him. Then he spoke:
"Who be you?"
He had a low voice, agreeable, even musical. Raven concluded he must
have been strangely moved to break into that mad "Hullo." It had been
more, he thought, that wild repetition with the echo throwing it back,
like the Gabriel hounds. But Raven took no notice of the question. He
spoke with a calculated peevishness.
"I'm willing to bet my knife is within three feet, and see how the
confounded thing's hidden itself. It was right along here. Let me take
your axe and I'll blaze a tree."
The man, without a word, passed him the axe and Raven notched a sapling.
Then, still holding the axe, he turned to the man with a smile. No one
had ever told him what a charming smile it was. Anne used to wonder, in
her dignified anguishes of love forbidden, if she could ever make him
understand how he looked when he smiled.
"Well," said Raven, "who may you be?"
"My name's Tenney," said the man, in the low, vibrant voice.
"Oho!" said Raven, remembering Charlotte's confidences. Then, as Tenney
frowned slightly and glanced at him in a questioning suspicion, he
continued, "Then we're neighbors. My name's Raven."
The man nodded.
"They said you were comin'," he remarked.
He held out his hand for the axe. Raven, loath to give it to him, yet
saw no excuse for withholding it. After all, she was safely locked in.
So he tossed the axe and Tenney caught it lightly, and was turning away.
But he stopped, considered a moment, looking down at the ground, and
then, evidently concluding the question had to be put, broke out, and,
Raven thought, shamefacedly:
"You seen anything of her up here?"
"Her?" Raven repeated, though he knew the country shyness over family
terms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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