Old Crow

								

mysterious conclave.
It was mysterious. Nan herself had made it so. Her face, on Dick's
going, had fallen into a grave repose, and she turned at once to Raven,
saying:
"You see, Dick ran in on the way over here, and when he told me you'd
sent for him, I said I'd come along, because I'd got to see you instead.
Was that cheeky? I really have got to. Couldn't the other thing wait?"
"Perfectly well," said Raven, with a ready cheerfulness he was aware she
could not understand. How should she? He had not been in the habit of
troubling Dick, or indeed any one, with his vaporings. He had lived, of
late years, as a sedate, middle-aged gentleman should, with no
implication of finding the world any less roseate than his hopes had
promised. As to Dick, the very sight of him had shown him beyond a doubt
how little disposed he was to take the lad into that area of tumultuous
discontent which was now his mind. "Fire away," he bade her. "You in
trouble, dear? You want patriarchal advice?"
Nan might not have heard. She was looking, with a frowning gravity, into
the fire. How should she begin? He saw the question beating about in her
mind and hoped he could give her a lead. But she found the way for
herself. She turned to him with a sudden lovely smile.
"Aunt Anne," she said, "has done something beautiful."
He felt his heart shrinking within him as he combated the ungracious
feeling which, it seemed, would not down: that he was never to be done
with Aunt Anne's deeds, so often demanding, as they did, a reciprocal
action from him. What he wanted, he realized grimly, was to have his
cake and eat it, if he might use so homespun a simile for a woman who
had persistently lived for him and in him and then had made clear spaces
about him by going away in the dignity of death. He wanted to breathe in
the space she had left, and he also wanted to be spared the indecency of
recognizing his relief. But Nan, studying the fire persistently, to
allow his eyes all possible liberty of searching her face while she
generously avoided his, was going on in what was evidently a
preconceived task of breaking something to him.
"Yes, she's done something beautiful, and done it for you."
Raven's heart had shrunk so now that he wondered it could weigh so
heavily. How could a woman, his rebellious intelligence asked him,
manage to pursue a man with her benefits even from the grave? All his
grown-up life he had fought them, but still they hung about him him like
shackles. When he tore them off from one member--always wounding himself
only, and scrupulously sure of never, except by the inevitability of his
refusals, hurting her--they fastened on him somewhere else. When he was
under twenty--for he was fourteen years younger than she--had come the
question of her endowing him for the period of his apprenticeship to
literature, that he might write with a free mind. He had, tempting as
that was and safe as it seemed to his arrogant youth, found the decency