Old Crow

								

uncle inwardly blessed him. Raven had got so restive by this time over
the position he had himself won through Anne's generalship that he felt
the curse was going down through the family, and that Dick, if he should
come in, would wake up at forty-odd and find himself under the too heavy
shade of the Hamilton benevolence.
"Not on your life," said Dick, when he was halfheartedly offered the
chance of battening on wool, "not while Mum's got the dough. There's
only one of me, and she's bound to keep me going."
"You couldn't marry on it," said Raven.
For that also Dick was cheerfully prepared.
"By the time Nan's ready," he said, having at that point asked her
intermittently for several years, "I shall be getting barrelfuls out of
my plays."
"'If,'" quoted Raven, "'Medina Sidonia had waited for the skin of the
bear that was not yet killed, he might have catched a great cold.'"
"That's all right," said Dick. "You needn't worry, not till it begins to
worry me. The only thing that gets me is not pinning Nan down."
"Yes," said Raven, "she's a difficult person to pin."
And saying it, he had a vision of a bright butterfly with "dye-dusty
wings" in stiff, glass-covered brittleness. He wondered if marrying
might pin Nan down like that.
Another thought troubled him a little: whether Dick had built even
obscurely in his own mind on the money Nan would have from Aunt Anne,
and the more modest sum she had now from her dead father and mother. He
concluded not. He hadn't got to worry about that. Dick had lived in the
atmosphere of money and he took its permanence for granted.
But we are keeping Nan looking at the fire and trying to get her news
out adequately, waiting a long time for these explanatory excursions
into past history. Raven also was waiting, a good deal excited and
conscious of his apprehensive heart. And when she spoke, in a studied
quietude, he found the words were the very last he expected to hear:
"I wanted to be the one to tell you. We've found her will."

II

They sat there silent for several minutes. Raven was keeping desperate
clutch on the inner self lashed by his hurrying heart, and telling it
there was no danger of his saying any of the things it was hounding him
on to say. He wanted to break out with an untempered violence:
"Of course you've found it. And of course she's left a lot of it to me."
He did not really believe that: only it so linked up with the chain of
her unceasing benevolences toward him that it seemed the only thing to
complete them adequately. And Nan, as if his premonition had prompted
her, too, was saying, after the minute she had left him to get his pace
even with hers, as if to assure him that, although she knew so much more
than he, she wouldn't hurry ahead:
"Rookie, dear, she's left it all to you."
Raven felt himself tighten up, every nerve and sinew of him, to do
something before it should be too late. He bent forward to her and said,