The Branding Iron
by Katharine Newlin Burt · English · Gutenberg #25835 · 365,024 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Branding Iron
Author: Katharine Newlin Burt
Release date: June 19, 2008 [eBook #25835]
Most recently updated: January 3, 2021
Language: English
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THE BRANDING IRON
----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE BRANDING IRON
BY
KATHARINE NEWLIN BURT
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
BY ARRANGEMENT WITH HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
----------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY KATHARINE N. BURT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CL
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
Book One
THE TWO-BAR BRAND
I. Joan Reads by Firelight 3
II. Pierre Lays his Hand on a Heart 12
III. Two Pictures in the Fire 21
IV. The Sin-Buster 25
V. Pierre Becomes Alarmed about his Property 32
VI. Pierre Takes Steps to Preserve his Property 42
VII. The Judgment of God 51
VIII. Delirium 56
IX. Dried Rose-Leaves 61
X. Prosper Comes to a Decision 72
XI. The Whole Duty of Woman 80
XII. A Matter of Taste 91
XIII. The Training of a Leopardess 100
XIV. Joan Runs Away 105
XV. Nerves and Intuition 116
XVI. The Tall Child 124
XVII. Concerning Marriage 133
Book Two
THE ESTRAY
I. A Wild Cat 151
II. Morena's Wife 161
III. Jane 170
IV. Flight 182
V. Luck's Play 191
VI. Joan and Prosper 205
VII. Aftermath 215
VIII. Against the Bars 227
IX. Gray Envelopes 236
X. The Spider 255
XI. The Clean Wild Thing 266
XII. The Leopardess 284
XIII. The End of the Trail 300
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THE BRANDING IRON
Book One
THE TWO-BAR BRAND
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CHAPTER I
JOAN READS BY FIRELIGHT
There is no silence so fearful, so breathless, so searching as the
night silence of a wild country buried five feet deep in snow. For
thirty miles or so, north, south, east, and west of the small,
half-smothered speck of gold in Pierre Landis's cabin window, there
lay, on a certain December night, this silence, bathed in moonlight.
The cold was intense: below the bench where Pierre's homestead lay,
there rose from the twisted, rapid river, a cloud of steam, above
which the hoar-frosted tops of cottonwood trees were perfectly
distinct, trunk, branch, and twig, against a sky the color of iris
petals. The stars flared brilliantly, hardly dimmed by the full moon,
and over the vast surface of the snow minute crystals kept up a steady
shining of their own. The range of sharp, wind-scraped mountains,
uplifted fourteen thousand feet, rode across the country, northeast,
southwest, dazzling in white armor, spears up to the sky, a sight,
seen suddenly, to take the breath, like the crashing march of
archangels militant.
In the center of this ring of silent crystal, Pierre Landis's logs
shut in a little square of warm and ruddy human darkness. Joan, his
wife, made the heart of this defiant space--Joan, the one mind living
in this ghostly area of night. She had put out the lamp, for Pierre,
starting townward two days before, had warned her with a certain
threatening sharpness not to waste oil, and she lay on the hearth, her
rough head almost in the ashes, reading a book by the unsteady light
of the flames. She followed the printed lines with a strong, dark
forefinger and her lips framed the words with slow, whispering
motions. It was a long, strong woman's body stretched there across the
floor, heavily if not sluggishly built, dressed rudely in warm stuffs
and clumsy boots, and it was a heavy face, too, unlit from within, but
built on lines of perfect animal beauty. The head and throat had the
massive look of a marble fragment stained to one even tone and dug up
from Attic earth. And she was reading thus heavily and slowly, by
firelight in the midst of this tremendous Northern night, Keats's
version of Boccaccio's "Tale of Isabella and the Pot of Basil."
The story for some reason interested her. She felt that she could
understand the love of young Lorenzo and of Isabella, the hatred of
those two brothers and Isabella's horrible tenderness for that young
murdered head. There were even things in her own life that she
compared with these; in fact, at every phrase, she stopped, and,
staring ahead, crudely and ignorantly visualized, after her own
experience, what she had just read; and, in doing so, she pictured her
own life.
Her love and Pierre's--her life before Pierre came--to put herself in
Isabella's place, she felt back to the days before her love, when she
had lived in a desolation of bleak poverty, up and away along Lone
River in her father's shack. This log house of Pierre's was a castle
by contrast. John Carver and his daughter had shared one room between
them; Joan's bed curtained off with gunny-sacking in a corner. She
slept on hides and rolled herself up in old dingy patchwork quilts and
worn blankets. On winter mornings she would wake covered with the snow
that had sifted in between the ill-matched logs. There had been a
stove, one leg gone and substituted for by a huge cobblestone; there
had been two chairs, a long box, a table, shelves--all rudely made by
John; there had been guns and traps and snowshoes, hides, skins, the
wings of birds, a couple of fishing-rods--John made his living by
legal and illegal trapping and killing. He had looked like a trapped
or hunted creature himself, small, furtive, very dark, with long
fingers always working over his mouth, a great crooked nose--a hideous
man, surely a hideous father. He hardly ever spoke, but sometimes,
coming home from the town which he visited several times a year, but
to which he had never taken Joan, he would sit down over the stove and
go over heavily, for Joan's benefit, the story of his crime and his
escape.
Joan always told herself that she would not listen, whatever he said
she would stop her ears, but always the story fascinated her, held
her, eyes widened on the figure by the stove. He had sat huddled in
his chair, gnomelike, his face contorting with the emotions of the
story, his own brilliant eyes fixed on the round, red mouth of the
stove. The reflection of this scarlet circle was hideously noticeable
in his pupils.
"A man's a right to kill his woman if she ain't honest with him," so
the story began; "if he finds out she's ben trickin' of him, playin'
him off fer another man. That was yer mother, gel; she was a bad
woman." There followed a coarse and vivid description of her badness
and the manner of it. "That kinder thing no man can let pass by in his
wife. I found her"--again the rude details of his discovery--"an' I
found him, an' I let him go fer the white-livered coward he was, but
her I killed. I shot her dead after she'd said her prayers an' asked
God's mercy on her soul. Then I walked off, but they kotched me an' I
was tried. They didn't swing me. Out in them parts they knowed I was
in my rights; so the boys held, but 'twas a life sentence. They tuk me
by rail down to Dawson an' I give 'em the slip, handcuffs an' all.
Perhaps 'twas only a half-hearted chase they made fer me. Some of them
fellers mebbe had wives of their own." He always stopped to laugh at
this point. "An' I cut off up country till I come to a smithy at the
edge of a town. I hung round fer a spell till the smith hed gone off
an' I got into his place an' rid me of the handcuffs. 'Twas a job, but
I wasn't kotched at it an' I made myself free." Followed the story of
his wanderings and his hardships and his coming to Lone River and
setting out his traps. "In them days there weren't no law ag'in'
trappin' beaver. A man could make a honest livin'. Now they've tuk an'
made laws ag'in' a man's bread an' butter. I ask ye, if 't ain't wrong
on a Tuesday to trap yer beaver, why, 't ain't wrong the follerin'
Tuesday. I don't see it, jes becos some fellers back there has made a
law ag'in' it to suit theirselves. Anyway, the market fer beaver hides
is still prime. Mebbe I'll leave you a fortin, gel. I've saved you
from badness, anyhow. I risked a lot to go back an' git you, but I
done it. You was playin' out in front of yer aunt's house an' I come
fer you. You was a three-year-old an' a big youngster. Says I, 'What's
yer name?' Says you, 'Joan Carver'; an' I knowed you by yer likeness
to _her_. By God! I swore I'd save ye. I tuk you off with me, though
you put up a fight an' I hed to use you rough to silence you. 'There
ain't a-goin' to be no man in yer life, Joan Carver,' says I; 'you an'
yer big eyes is a-goin' to be fer me, to do my work an' to look after
my comforts. No pretty boys fer you an' no husbands either to go
a-shootin' of you down fer yer sins.'" He shivered and shook his head.
"No, here you stays with yer father an' grows up a good gel. There
ain't a-goin' to be no man in _yer_ life, Joan."
But youth was stronger than the man's half-crazy will, and when she
was seventeen, Joan ran away.
She found her way easily enough to the town, for she was wise in the
tracks of a wild country, and John's trail townwards, though so rarely
used, was to her eyes plain enough; and very coolly she walked into
the hotel, past the group of loungers around the stove, and asked at
the desk, where Mrs. Upper sat, if she could get a job. Mrs. Upper and
the loungers stared, for there were few women in this frontier country
and those few were well known. This great, strong girl, heavily
graceful in her heavily awkward clothes, bareheaded, shod like a man,
her face and throat purely classic, her eyes gray and wide and as
secret in expression as an untamed beast's--no one had ever seen the
like of her before.
"What's yer name?" asked Mrs. Upper suspiciously. It was Mormon Day in
the town; there were celebrations and her house was full; she needed
extra hands, but where this wild creature was concerned she was
doubtful.
"Joan. I'm John Carver's daughter," answered the girl.
At once comprehension dawned; heads were nodded, then craned for a
better look. Yes, the town, the whole country even, had heard of John
Carver's imprisoned daughter. Sober and drunk, he had boasted of her
and of how there was to be "no man" in her life. It was like dangling
ripe fruit above the mouths of hungry boys to make such a boast in such
a land. But they were lazy. It was a country of lazy, slow-thinking,
slow-moving, and slow-talking adventurers--you will notice this
ponderous, inevitable quality of rolling stones--and though men talked
with humor not too fine of "travelin' up Lone River for John's gel,"
not a man had got there. Perhaps the men knew John Carver for a coward,
that most dangerous animal to meet in his own lair.
Now here stood the "gel," the mysterious secret goal of desire, a
splendid creature, virginal, savage, as certainly designed for man as
Eve. The men's eyes fastened upon her, moved and dropped.
"Your father sent you down here fer a job?" asked Mrs. Upper
incredulously.
"No. I come." Joan's grave gaze was unchanging. "I'm tired of it up
there. I ain't a-goin' back. I'm most eighteen now an' I kinder want a
change."
She had not meant to be funny, but a gust of laughter rattled the
room. She shrank back. It was more terrifying to her than any cruelty
she had fancied meeting her in the town. These were the men her father
had forbidden, these loud-laughing, crinkled faces. She had turned to
brave them, a great surge of color in her brows.
"Don't mind the boys, dear," spoke Mrs. Upper. "They will laff, joke
or none. We ain't none of us blamin' you. It's a wonder you ain't run
off long afore now. I can give you a job an' welcome, but you'll be
green an' unhandy. Well, sir, we kin learn ye. You kin turn yer hand
to chamber-work an' mebbe help at the table. Maud will show you. But,
Joan, what will dad do to you? He'll be takin' after you hot-foot, I
reckon, an' be fer gettin' you back home as soon as he can."
Joan did not change her look.
"I'll not be goin' back with him," she said.
Her slow, deep voice, chest notes of a musical vibration, stirred the
room. The men were hers and gruffly said so. A sudden warmth enveloped
her from heart to foot. She followed Mrs. Upper to the initiation in
her service, clothed for the first time in human sympathies.
CHAPTER II
PIERRE LAYS HIS HAND ON A HEART
Maud Upper was the first girl of her own age that Joan had ever seen.
Joan went in terror of her and Maud knew this and enjoyed her
ascendancy over an untamed creature twice her size. There was the
crack of a lion-tamer's whip in the tone of her instructions. That was
after a day or two. At first Maud had been horribly afraid of Joan. "A
wild thing like her, livin' off there in the hills with that man, why,
ma, there's no tellin' what she might be doin' to me."
"She won't hurt ye," laughed Mrs. Upper, who had lived in the wilds
herself, having been a frontierman's wife before the days even of this
frontier town and having married the hotel-keeper as a second venture.
She knew that civilization--this rude place being civilization to
Joan--would cow the girl and she knew that Maud's self-assertive
buoyancy would frighten the soul of her. Maud was large-hipped,
high-bosomed, with a small, round waist much compressed. She carried
her head, with its waved brown hair, very high, and shot blue glances
down along a short, broad nose. Her mouth was thin and determined, her
color high. She had a curiously shallow, weak voice that sounded
breathless. She taught Joan impatiently and laughed loudly but not
unkindly at her ways.
"Gee, she's awkward, ain't she?" she would say to the men; "trail like
a bull moose!"
The men grinned, but their eyes followed Joan's movements. As a matter
of fact, she was not awkward. Through her clumsy clothes, the
heaviness of her early youth, in spite of all the fetters of her
ignorance, her wonderful long bones and her wonderful strength
asserted themselves. And she never hurried. At first this apparent
sluggishness infuriated Maud. "Get a gait on ye, Joan Carver!" she
would scream above the din of the rough meals, but soon she found that
Joan's slow movements accomplished a tremendous amount of work in an
amazingly short time. There was no pause in the girl's activity. She
poured out her strength as a python pours his, noiselessly, evenly,
steadily, no haste, no waste. And the men's eyes brooded upon her.
If Joan had stayed long at Mrs. Upper's, she would have begun
inevitably to model herself on Maud, who was, in her eyes, a marvelous
thing of beauty. But, just a week after her arrival, there came to the
inn Pierre Landis and for Joan began the strange and terrible history
of love.
In the lives of most women, of the vast majority, the clatter and
clash of housewifery prelude and postlude the spring song of their
years. And the rattle of dishes, of busy knives and forks, the quick
tapping of Maud's attendant feet, the sound of young and ravenous jaws
at work: these sounds were in Joan's bewildered ears, and the sights
which they accompanied in her bewildered eyes, just before she heard
Pierre's voice, just before she saw his face.
It was dinner hour at the hotel, an hour most dreadful to Joan because
of the hurry, the strangeness, and the crowd, because of the
responsibility of her work, but chiefly because at that hour she
expected the appearance of her father. Her eyes were often on the
door. It opened to admit the young men, the riders and ranchers who
hung up their hats, swaggered with a little jingle of spurs to their
chairs; clean-faced, clean-handed, wet-haired, murmuring low-voiced
courtesies,--"Pass me the gravy, please," "I wouldn't be carin' fer
any, thank you,"--and lifting to the faces of waiting girls now and
again their strange, young, brooding eyes, bold, laughing, and afraid,
hungry, pathetic, arrogant, as the eyes of young men are, tameless and
untamable, but full of the pathos of the untamed. Joan's heart shook a
little under their looks, but when Pierre lifted his eyes to her, her
heart stood still. She had not seen them following her progress around
the room. He had come in late, and finding no place at the long,
central table sat apart at a smaller one under a high, uncurtained
window. By the time she met his eyes they were charged with light;
smoky-blue eyes they were, the iris heavily ringed with black, the
pupils dilated a little. For the first time it occurred to Joan,
looking down with a still heart into his eyes, that a man might be
beautiful. The blood came up from her heart to her face. Her eyes
struggled away from his.
"What's yer name, gel?" murmured Pierre.
"Joan Carver."
"You run away from home?" He too had heard of her.
"Yes."
"Will your father be takin' you back?"
"I won't be goin' with him."
She was about to pass on. Pierre cast a swift look about the
table--bent heads and busy hands, eyes cast down, ears, he knew,
alert. It was a land of few women and of many men. He must leave in
the morning early and for months he would not be back. He put out a
long, hard hand, caught Joan's wrist and gave it a queer, urgent
shake, the gesture of an impatient and beseeching child.
"Will you be comin' home with me, gel?" asked Pierre hurriedly.
She looked at him, her lips apart, and she shook her head.
Maud's voice screamed at her from the kitchen door. Pierre let her go.
She went on, very white.
She did not sleep at all that night. Her father's face, Pierre's face,
looked at her. In the morning Pierre would be gone. She had heard Maud
say that the "queer Landis feller would be makin' tracks back to that
ranch of his acrost the river." Yes, he would be gone. She might have
been going with him. She felt the urgent pressure of his hand on her
arm, in her heart. It shook her with such a longing for love, for all
the unknown largesse of love, that she cried. The next morning, pale,
she came down and went about her work. Pierre was not at breakfast,
and she felt a sinking of heart, though she had not known that she had
built upon seeing him again. Then, as she stepped out at the back to
empty a bucket, there he was!
Not even the beauty of dawn could lend mystery to the hideous,
littered yard, untidy as the yards of frontier towns invariably are,
to the board fence, to the trampled half-acre of dirt, known as "The
Square," and to the ugly frame buildings straggled about it; but it
could and did give an unearthly look of blessedness to the bare,
gray-brown buttes that ringed the town and a glory to the sky, while
upon Pierre, waiting at his pony's head, it shed a magical and tender
light. He was dressed in his cowboy's best, a white silk handkerchief
knotted under his chin, leather "chaps," bright spurs, a sombrero on
his head. His face was grave, excited, wistful. At sight of Joan, he
moved forward, the pony trailing after him at the full length of its
reins; and, stopping before her, Pierre took off the sombrero, slowly
stripped the gauntlet from his right hand, and, pressing both hat and
glove against his hip with the left hand, held out the free, clean
palm to Joan.
"Good-bye," said he, "unless--you'll be comin' with me after all?"
Joan felt again that rush of fire to her brows. She took his hand and
her fingers closed around it like the frightened, lonely fingers of a
little girl. She came near to him and looked up.
"I'll be comin' with you, Pierre," she said, just above her breath.
He shot up a full inch, stiffened, searched her with smouldering eyes,
then held her hard against him. "You'll not be sorry, Joan Carver,"
said he gently and put her away from him. Then, unsmiling, he bade her
go in and get her belongings while he got her a horse and told his
news to Mrs. Upper.
That ride was dreamlike to Joan. Pierre put her in her saddle and she
rode after him across the Square and along a road flanked by the ugly
houses of the town.
"Where are we a-goin'?" she asked him timidly.
He stopped at that, turned, and, resting his hand on the cantle of his
saddle, smiled at her for the first time.
"Don't you savvy the answer to that question, Joan?"
She shook her head.
The smile faded. "We're goin' to be married," said he sternly, and
they rode on.
They were married by the justice, a pleasant, silent fellow, who with
Western courtesy, asked no more questions than were absolutely
needful, and in fifteen minutes Joan mounted her horse again, a ring
on the third finger of her left hand.
"Now," said Pierre, standing at her stirrup, his shining, smoke-blue
eyes lifted to her, his hand on her boot, "you'll be wantin' some
things--some clothes?"
"No," said Joan. "Maud went with me an' helped me buy things with my
pay just yesterday. I won't be needin' anything."
"All right," said he. "We're off, then!" And he flung himself with a
sudden wild, boyish "Whoopee!" on his pony, gave a clip to Joan's
horse and his own, and away they galloped, a pair of young, wild
things, out from the town through a straggling street to where the
road boldly stretched itself toward a great land of sagebrush, of
buttes humping their backs against the brilliant sky. Down the valley
they rode, trotting, walking, galloping, till, turning westward, they
mounted a sharp slope and came up above the plain. Below, in the heart
of the long, narrow valley, the river coiled and wandered, divided and
came together again into a swift stream, amongst aspen islands and
willow swamps. Beyond this strange, lonely river-bed, the cottonwoods
began, and, above them, the pine forests massed themselves and strode
up the foothills of the gigantic range, that range of iron rocks,
sharp, thin, and brittle where they scraped the sky.
At the top of the hill, Pierre put out his hand and pulled Joan's
rein, drawing her to a stop beside him.
"Over yonder's my ranch," said he.
Joan looked. There was not a sign of house or clearing, but she
followed his gesture and nodded.
"Under the mountains?" she said.
"At the foot of Thunder Canyon. You can see a gap in the pines.
There's a waterfall just above--that white streak. Now you've got it.
Where you come from 's to the south, away yonder."
Joan would not turn her head. "Yes," said she, "I know."
Suddenly tears rushed to her eyes. She had a moment of unbearable
longing and regret. Pierre said nothing; he was not watching her.
"Come on," said he, "or your father will be takin' after us."
They rode at a gallop down the hill.
CHAPTER III
TWO PICTURES IN THE FIRE
The period which followed had a quality of breathless, almost
unearthly happiness. They were young, savage, simple, and their love,
unanalyzed, was as joyous as the loves of animals: joyous with that
clear gravity characteristic of the boy and girl. Pierre had been
terribly alone before Joan came, and the building-up of his ranch had
occupied his mind day and night except, now and again, for dreams. Yet
he was of a passionate nature. Joan felt in him sometimes a savage
possibility of violence. Two incidents of this time blazed themselves
especially on her memory: the one, her father's visit, the other, an
irrelevant enough picture until after events threw back a glare upon
it.
They had been at Pierre's ranch for a fortnight before John Carver
found them. Then, one morning, as Pierre opened the door to go out to
work, Joan saw a thin, red pony tied to the fence and a small figure
walking toward the cabin.
"Pierre, it's Father!" she said. And Pierre stopped in his tracks,
drew himself up and waited, hands on his cartridge belt.
How mean and old and furtive her father looked in contrast to this
beautiful young husband! Joan was entirely unafraid. She leaned
against the side of the door and watched, as silent and unconsulted as
any squaw, while the two men settled their property rights in her.
"So you've took my gel," said John Carver, stopping a foot or two in
front of Pierre, his eyes shifting up and down, one long hand
fingering his lips.
Pierre answered courteously. "Some man was bound to hev her, Mr.
Carver, soon or late. You can't set your face ag'in' the laws of
natur'. Will you be steppin' in? Joan will give you some breakfast."
Carver paid no heed to the invitation. "Hev you married her?" said he.
The blood rose to Pierre's brown face. "Sure I hev."
"Well, sir, you hev married the darter of a ----" Carver used a
brutal word. "Look out fer her. If you see her eyes lookin' an'
lookin' at another man, you kin know what's to come." Pierre was
white. "I've done with her. She kin never come to me fer bite or bed.
Shoot her if you hev to, Pierre Landis, but when she's kotched at her
mother's game, don't send her back to me. That's all I come to say."
He turned with limber agility and went back to his horse. He was on it
and off, galloping madly across the sagebrush flat. Pierre turned and
walked into the house past Joan without a word.
She still leaned against the door, but her head was bent.
Presently she went about her housework. Every now and then she shot a
wistful look at Pierre. All morning long, he sat there, his hands
hanging between his knees, his eyes full of a brooding trouble. At
noon he shook his head, got up, and, still without word or caress, he
strode out and did not come back till dark. Joan suffered heartache
and terror. When he came, she ran into his arms. He kissed her, seemed
quite himself again, and the strange interview was never mentioned by
either of them. They were silent people, given to feelings and to
action rather than to thoughts and words.
The other memory was of a certain sunset hour when she came at
Pierre's call out to the shed he had built at one side of their cabin.
Its open side faced the west, and, as Joan came, her shadow went
before her and fell across Pierre at work. The flame of the west gave
a weird pallor to the flames over which he bent. He was whistling, and
hammering at a long piece of iron. Joan came and stood beside him.
Suddenly he straightened up and held in the air a bar of metal, the
shaped end white hot. Joan blinked.
"That's our brand, gel," said Pierre. "Don't you fergit it. When I've
made my fortune there'll be stock all over the country marked with
them two bars. That'll be famous--the Two-Bar Brand. Don't you fergit
it, Joan."
And he brought the white iron close so that she felt its heat on her
face and drew back, flinching. He laughed, let it fall, and kissed
her. Joan was very glad and proud.
CHAPTER IV
THE SIN-BUSTER
In the fall, when the whole country had turned to a great cup of gold,
purple-rimmed under the sky, Pierre went out into the hills after his
winter meat. Joan was left alone. She spent her time cleaning and
arranging the two-room cabin, and tidying up outdoors, and in
"grubbing sagebrush," a gigantic task, for the one hundred and fifty
acres of Pierre's homestead were covered for the most part by the
sturdy, spicy growth, and every bush had to be dug out and burnt to
clear the way for ploughing and planting. Joan worked with the
deliberateness and intentness of a man. She enjoyed the wholesome
drudgery. She was proud every sundown of the little clearing she had
made, and stood, tired and content, to watch the piled brush burn,
sending up aromatic smoke and curious, dull flames very high into the
still air.
She was so standing, hands folded on her rake, when, on the other side
of her conflagration, she perceived a man. He was steadily regarding
her, and when her eyes fell upon him, he smiled and stepped forward--a
tall, broad, very fair young man in a shooting coat, khaki
riding-breeches, and puttees. He had a wide brow, clear, blue eyes and
an eager, sensitive, clean-shaven mouth and chin. He held out a big
white hand.
"Mrs. Landis," he said, in a crisp voice of an accent and finish
strange to the girl "I wonder if you and your husband can put me up
for the night. I'm Frank Holliwell. I'm on a round of parish visits,
and, as my parish is about sixty miles square, my poor old pony has
gone lame. I know you are not my parishioners, though, no doubt, you
should be, but I'm going to lay claim to your hospitality, for all
that, if I may?"
Joan had moved her rake into the grasp of her left hand and had taken
the proffered palm into her other, all warm and fragrantly stained.
"You're the new sin-buster, ain't you?" she asked gravely.
The young man opened his blue and friendly eyes.
"Oh, that's what I am, eh? That's a new one to me. Yes. I suppose I
am. It's rather a fine name to go by--sin-buster," and he laughed very
low and very amusedly.
Joan looked him over and slowly smiled. "You look like you could bust
anything you'd a mind to," she said, and led the way toward the house,
her rake across her shoulder.
"Pierre," she told him when they were in the shining, clean log house,
"is off in the hills after his elk, but I can make you up a bed in the
settin'-room an' serve you a supper an' welcome."
"Oh, thanks," he rather doubtfully accepted.
Evidently he did not know the ways and proprieties of this new
"parish" of his. But Joan seemed to take the situation with an
enormous calm impersonality. He modeled his manner upon hers. They sat
at the table together, Joan silent, save when he forced her to speak,
and entirely untroubled by her silence, Frank Holliwell eating
heartily, helping her serve, and talking a great deal. He asked her a
great many questions, which she answered with direct simplicity. By
the end of dish-washing, he had her history and more of her opinions,
probably, than any other creature she had met.
"What do you do when Landis is away?"
She told him.
"But, in the evenings, I mean, after work. Have you books?"
"No," said Joan; "it's right hard labor, readin'. Pa learned me my
letters an' I can spell out bits from papers an' advertisements an'
what not, but I ain't never read a book straight out. I dunno," she
added presently, "but as I'd like to. Pierre can read," she told him
proudly.
"I'm sure you'd like to." He considered her through the smoke of his
pipe. He was sitting by the hearth now, and she, just through with
clearing up, stood by the corner of the mantel shelf, arranging the
logs. The firelight danced over her face, so beautiful, so unlighted
from within.
"How old are you, Joan Landis?" he asked suddenly, using her name
without title for the first time.
"Eighteen."
"Is that all? You must read books, you know. There's so much empty
space there back of your brows."
She looked up smiling a little, her wide gray eyes puzzled.
"Yes, Joan. You must read. Will you--if I lend you some books?"
She considered. "Yes," she said. "I'd read them if you'd be lendin' me
some. In the evenings when Pierre's away, I'm right lonesome. I never
was lonesome before, not to know it. It'll take me a long time to read
one book, though," she added with an engaging mournfulness.
"What do you like--stories, poetry, magazines?"
"I'd like real books in stiff covers," said Joan, "an' I don't like
pictures."
This surprised the clergyman. "Why not?" said he.
"I like to notion how the folks look myself. I like pictures of real
places, that has got to be like they are"--Joan was talking a great
deal and having trouble with her few simple words--"but I like folks
in stories to look like I want 'em to look."
"Not the way the writer describes them?"
"Yes, sir. But you can make up a whole lot on what the writer
describes. If he says 'her eyes is blue'; you can see 'em dark blue or
light blue or jest blue. An' you can see 'em shaped round or what not,
the way you think about folks that you've heard of an' have never
met."
It was extraordinary how this effort at self-expression excited Joan.
She was rarely self-conscious, but she was usually passive or stolid;
now there was a brilliant flush in her face and her large eyes
deepened and glowed. "I heerd tell of you, Mr. Holliwell. Fellers come
up here to see Pierre once in a while an' one or two of 'em spoke your
name. An' I kinder figured out you was a weedy feller, awful
solemn-like, an' of course you ain't, but it's real hard for me to
notion that there ain't two Mr. Holliwells, you an' the weedy
sin-buster I've ben picturin'. Like as not I'll get to thinkin' of you
like two fellers." Joan sighed. "Seems like when I onct get a notion
in my head it jest sticks there some way."
"Then the more wise notions you get the better. I'll ride up here in a
couple of weeks' time with some books. You may keep them as long as
you will. All winter, if you like. When I can get up here, we can talk
them over, you and Landis and I. I'll try to choose some without
pictures. There will be stories and some poetry, too."
"I ain't never read but one pome," said Joan.
"And that was?"
She had sat down on the floor by the hearth, her head thrown back to
lean against the cobbles of the chimney-piece, her knees locked in her
hands. That magnificent long throat of hers ran up to the black coils
of hair which had slipped heavily down over her ears. The light edged
her round chin and her strongly modeled, regular features; the full,
firm mouth so savagely pure and sensuous and self-contained. The eyes
were mysterious under their thick lashes and dark, long brows. This
throat and face and these strong hands were picked out in their full
value of line and texture from the dark cotton dress she was wearing.
"It's a pome on a card what father had, stuck ag'in' the wall." She
began to recite, her eyes fixed upon him with childlike gravity. "'He
maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the
still waters.... Yea, though I walk through the valley of shadows,
thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.'"
Holliwell had taken the pipe from between his teeth, had straightened
up. Her deep voice, the slight swinging of her body to the rhythm she
had unconsciously given to her lines, the strange glow in her eyes ...
Holliwell wondered why these things, this brief, sing-song recitation,
had given a light thrill to the surface of his skin, had sent a
tingling to his fingertips. He was the first person to wonder at that
effect of Joan's cadenced music. "The valley of the shadow--" she had
missed a familiar phrase and added value to a too often repeated line.
"Joan! Joan!" said the "sin-buster," an exclamation drawn from him on
a deep breath, "what an extraordinary girl you are! What a marvelous
woman you are going to be!"
Joan looked at him in a silence of pure astonishment and that was the
end of their real talk.
CHAPTER V
PIERRE BECOMES ALARMED ABOUT HIS PROPERTY
The next time Holliwell came, he brought the books, and, finding
Pierre at home, he sat with his host after supper and talked men's
talk of the country; of game, of ranching, a little gossip, stories of
travel, humorous experiences, and Joan sat in her place, the books in
her lap, looking and listening.
John Carver had used a phrase, "When you see her eyes lookin' and
lookin' at another man--" and this phrase had stuck in Pierre's
sensitive and jealous memory. What Joan felt for Holliwell was a sort
of ignorant and respectful tenderness, the excitement of an intelligent
child first moved to a knowledge of its own intelligence; the gratitude
of savage loneliness toward the beautiful feet of exploration. A
consciousness of her clean mind, a consciousness of her young, untamed
spirit, had come slowly to life in her since her talk with Holliwell.
Joan was peculiarly a woman--that is, the passive and receptive being.
Pierre had laid his hand on her heart and she had followed him; now
this young parson had put a curious finger on her brain, it followed
him. Her husband saw the admiration, the gratitude, the tender
excitement in her frank eyes, and the poison seed sown by John Carver's
hand shot out roots and tiny, deadly branches.
But Joan and Holliwell were unaware. Pierre smoked rapidly, rolling
cigarette after cigarette; he listened with a courteous air, he told
stories in his soft, slow voice; once he went out to bring in a fresh
log and, coming back on noiseless feet, saw Joan and her instructor
bent over one of the books and Joan's face was almost that of a
stranger, so eager, so flushed, with sparkles in the usually still,
gray eyes.
It was not till a week or two after this second visit from the clergyman
that Pierre's smouldering jealousy broke into flame. After clearing away
the supper things with an absent air of eager expectation, Joan would
dry her hands on her apron, and, taking down one of her books from their
place in a shelf corner, she would draw her chair close to the lamp and
begin to read, forgetful of Pierre. These had been the happiest hours
for him; he would tell Joan about his day's work, about his plans, about
his past life; wonderful it was to him, after his loneliness, that she
should be sitting there drinking in every word and loving him with her
dumb, wild eyes. Now, there was no talk and no listening. Joan's
absorbed face was turned from him and bent over her book, her lips
moved, she would stop and stare before her. After a long while, he would
get up and go to bed, but she would stay with her books till a restless
movement from him would make her aware of the lamplight shining
wakefulness upon him through the chinks in the partition wall. Then she
would get up reluctantly, sighing, and come to bed.
For ten evenings this went on, Pierre's heart slowly heating itself,
until, all at once, the flame leaped.
Joan had untied her apron and reached up for her book. Pierre had been
waiting, hoping that of her free will she might prefer his company to
the "parson feller's"--for in his ignorance those books were jealously
personified--but, without a glance in his direction, she had turned as
usual to the shelf.
"You goin' to read?" asked Pierre hoarsely. It was a painful effort to
speak.
She turned with a childish look of astonishment. "Yes, Pierre."
He stood up with one of his lithe, swift movements, all in one
rippling piece. "By God, you're not, though!" said he, strode over to
her, snatched the volume from her, threw it back into its place, and
pointed her to her chair.
"You set down an' give heed to me fer a change, Joan Carver," he said,
his smoke-colored eyes smouldering. "I didn't fetch you up here to
read parsons' books an' waste oil. I fetched you up here--to--" He
stopped, choked with a sudden, enormous hurt tenderness and sat down
and fell to smoking and staring, hot-eyed, into the fire.
And Joan sat silent in her place, puzzled, wistful, wounded, her idle
hands folded, looking at him for a while, then absently before her,
and he knew that her mind was busy again with the preacher feller's
books. If he had known better how to explain his heart, if she had
known how to show him the impersonal eagerness of her awakening
mind--! But, savage and silent, they sat there, loving each other,
hurt, but locked each into his own impenetrable life.
After that, Joan changed the hours of her study and neglected
housework and sagebrush-grubbing, but, nonetheless, were Pierre's
evenings spoiled. Perfection of intercourse is the most perishable of
all life's commodities. Now, when he talked, he could not escape the
consciousness of having constrained his audience; she could not escape
her knowledge of his jealousy, the remembrance of his mysterious
outbreak, the irrepressible tug of the story she was reading. So it
went on till snow came and they were shut in, man and wife, with only
each other to watch, a tremendous test of good-fellowship. This
searching intimacy came at a bad time, just after Holliwell's third
visit when he had brought a fresh supply of books.
"There's poetry this time," he said. "Get Pierre to read it aloud to
you."
The suggestion was met by a rude laugh from Pierre.
"I wouldn't be wastin' my time," he jeered.
It was the first rift in his courtesy. Holliwell looked up in sharp
surprise. He saw a flash of the truth, a little wriggle of the green
serpent in Pierre's eyes before they fell. He flushed and glanced at
Joan. She stood by the table in the circle of lamplight, looking over
the new books, but in her eagerness there was less simplicity. She
wore an almost timorous air, accepted his remarks in silence, shot
doubtful looks at Pierre before she answered questions, was an
entirely different Joan. Now Holliwell was angry and he stiffened
toward his host and hostess, dropped all his talk about the books and
smoked haughtily. He was young and over-sensitive, no more master of
himself in this instance than Pierre and Joan. But before he left
after supper, refusing a bed, though Pierre conquered his dislike
sufficiently to urge it, Holliwell had a moment with Joan. It was very
touching. He would tell about it afterwards, but, for a long time, he
could not bear to remember it.
She tried to return his books, coming with her arms full of them and
lifting up eyes that were almost tragic with renunciation.
"I can't be takin' the time to read them, Mr. Holliwell," she said,
that extraordinary, over-expressive voice of hers running an octave of
regret; "an' someway Pierre don't like that I should spend my evenin's
on them. Seems like he thinks I was settin' myself up to be knowin'
more than him." She laughed ruefully. "Me--knowin' more'n Pierre! It's
laughable. But anyways I don't want him to be thinkin' that. So take
the books, please. I like them." She paused. "I love them," she said
hungrily and, blinking, thrust them into his hands.
He put them down on the table. "You're wrong, Joan," he said quickly.
"You mustn't give in to such a foolish idea. You have rights of your
own, a life of your own. Pierre mustn't stand in the way of your
learning. You mustn't let him. I'll speak to him."
"Oh, no!" Some intuition warned her of the danger in his doing this.
"Well, then, keep your books and talk to Pierre about them. Try to
persuade him to read aloud to you. I shan't be back now till spring,
but I want you to read this winter, read all the stuff that's there.
Come, Joan, to please me," and he smiled coaxingly.
"I ain't afeared of Pierre," said Joan slowly. Her pride was stung by
the suggestion. "I'll keep the books." She sighed. "Good-bye. When I
see you in the spring, I'll be a right learned school-marm."
She held out her hand and he took and held it, pressing it in his own.
He felt troubled about her, unwilling to leave her in the snowbound
wilderness with that young savage of the smouldering eyes.
"Good-bye," said Pierre behind him. His soft voice had a click.
Holliwell turned to him. "Good-bye, Landis. I shan't see either of you
till the spring. I wish you a good winter and I hope--" He broke off
and held out his hand. "Well," said he, "you're pretty far out of
every one's way here. Be good to each other."
"Damn your interference!" said Pierre's eyes, but he took the hand and
even escorted Holliwell to his horse.
Snow came early and deep that winter. It fell for long, gray days and
nights, and then it came in hurricanes of drift, wrapping the cabin in
swirling white till only one window peered out and one gabled corner
cocked itself above the crust. Pierre had cut and stacked his winter
wood; he had sent his cows to a richer man's ranch for winter feeding.
There was very little for him to do. After he had brought in two
buckets of water from the well and had cut, for the day's consumption,
a piece of meat from his elk hanging outside against the wall, he had
only to sit and smoke, to read old magazines and papers, and to watch
Joan. Then the poisonous roots of his jealousy struck deep. Always his
brain, unaccustomed to physical idleness, was at work, falsely
interpreting her wistful silence--she was thinking of the parson,
hungry to read his books, longing for the open season and his coming
again to the ranch.
In December a man came in on snowshoes bringing "the mail"--one letter
for Pierre, a communication which brought heat to his face. The Forest
Service threatened him with a loss of land; it pointed to some flaw in
his title; part of his property, the most valuable part, had not yet
been surveyed.... Pierre looked up with set jaws, every fighting
instinct sharpened to hold what was his own.
"I hev put in two years' hard work on them acres," he told his
visitor, "an' I'm not plannin' to give them over to the first fool
favored by the Service. My title is as clean as my hand. It'll take
more'n thievery an' more'n spite to take it away from me."
"You better go to Robinson," advised the bearer of the letter; "can't
get after them fellers too soon. It's a country where you can easy
come by what you want, but where it ain't so easy to hold on to it. If
it ain't yer land, it's yer hosses; if it ain't yer hosses, it's yer
wife." He looked at Joan and laughed.
Pierre went white and dumb; the chance shot had inflamed his wound.
He strapped on his snowshoes and bade a grim good-bye to Joan, after
the man had left. "Don't you be wastin' oil while I'm away," he told
her sharply, standing in the doorway, his head level with the steep
wall of snow behind him, and he gave her a threatening look so that
the tenderness in her heart was frozen.
After he had gone, "Pierre, say a real good-bye, say good-bye," she
whispered. Her face cramped and tears came.
She heard his steps lightly crunching across the hard, bright surface
of the snow, they entered into the terrible frozen silence. Then she
turned from the door, dried her eyes with her sleeve like a little
village girl, and ran across the room to a certain shelf. Pierre would
be gone a week. She would not waste oil, but she would read. It was
with the appetite of a starved creature that she fell upon her books.
CHAPTER VI
PIERRE TAKES STEPS TO PRESERVE HIS PROPERTY
A log fell forward and Joan lifted her head. She had not come to an
end of Isabella's tragedy nor of her own memories, but something other
than the falling log had startled her; a light, crunching step upon
the snow.
She looked toward the window. For an instant the room was almost dark
and the white night peered in at her, its gigantic snow-peaks pressing
against the long, horizontal window panes, and in that instant she saw
a face. The fire started up again, the white night dropped away, the
face shone close a moment longer, then it too disappeared. Joan came
to her feet with pounding pulses. It had been Pierre's face, but at
the same time, the face of a stranger. He had come back five days too
soon and something terrible had happened. Surely his chancing to see
her with her book would not make him look like that. Besides, she was
not wasting oil. She had stood up, but at first she was incapable of
moving forward. For the first time in her life she knew the paralysis
of unreasoning fear. Then the door opened and Pierre came in out of
the crystal night.
"What brought you back so soon?" asked Joan.
"Too soon fer you, eh?" He strode over to the hearth where she had
lain, took up the book, struck it with his hand as though it had been
a hated face, and flung it into the fire. "I seen you through the
window," he said. "So you been happy readin' while I been away?"
"I'll get you supper. I'll light the lamp," Joan stammered.
Pierre's face was pale, his black hair lay in wet streaks on his
temples. He must have traveled at furious speed through the bitter
cold to be in such a sweat. There was a mysterious, controlled
disorder in his look and there arose from him the odor of strong
drink. But he was steady and sure in all his movements and his eyes
were deadly cool and reasonable--only it was the reasonableness of
insanity, reasonableness based on the wildest premises of unreason.
"I don't want no supper, nor no light," he said. "Firelight's enough
fer you to read parsons' books by, it's enough fer me to do what I
oughter done long afore to-night."
She stood in the middle of the small, log-walled room, arrested in the
act of lighting a match, and stared at him with troubled eyes. She was
no longer afraid. After all, strange as he looked, more strangely as
he talked, he was her Pierre, her man. The confidence of her heart had
not been seriously shaken by his coldness and his moods during this
winter. There had been times of fierce, possessive tenderness. She was
his own woman, his property; at this low counting did she rate
herself. A sane man does no injury to his own possessions. And Pierre,
of course, was sane. He was tired, angry, he had been drinking--her
ignorance, her inexperience led her to put little emphasis on the
effects of the poison sold at the town saloon. When he was warm and
fed and rested, he would be quite himself again. She went about
preparing a meal in spite of his words.
He did not seem to notice this. He had taken his eyes from her at last
and was busy with the fire. She, too, busy and reassured by the
familiar occupation, ceased to watch him. Her pulses were quiet now.
She was even beginning to be glad of his return. Why had she been so
frightened? Of course, after such a terrible journey alone in the
bitter cold, he would look strange. Her father, when he came back
smelling of liquor, had always been more than usually morose and
unlike his every-day self. He would sit over the stove and tell her
the story of his crime. They were horrible home-comings, horrible
evenings, but the next morning they would seem like dreams. To-morrow
this strangeness of Pierre's would be mistlike and unreal.
"I seen your sin-buster in town," said Pierre. He was squatting on his
heels over the fire which he had built up to a great blaze and glow
and he spoke in a queer sing-song tone through his teeth. "He asked
after you real kind. He wanted to know how you was gettin' on with the
edication he's ben handin' out to you. I tell him that you was right
satisfied with me an' my ways an' hed quit his books. I didn't know as
you was hevin' such a good time durin' my absence."
Joan was cruelly hurt. His words seemed to fall heavily upon her
heart. "I wasn't hevin' a good time. I was missin' you, Pierre," said
she in a low tremolo of grieving music. "Them books, they seemed like
they was all the company I hed."
"You looked like you was missin' me," he sneered. "The sin-buster an'
I had words about you, Joan. Yes'm, he give me quite a line of
preachin' about you, Joan, as how you hed oughter develop yer own life
in yer own way--along the lines laid out by him. I told him as how I
knowed best what was right an' fittin' fer my own wife; as how, with a
mother like your'n you needed watchin' more'n learnin'; as how you
belonged to me an' not to him. An', says he, 'She don't belong to any
man, Pierre Landis,' he said, 'neither to you nor to me. She belongs
to her own self.' 'I'll see that she belongs to me,' I said. 'I'll fix
her so she'll know it an' every other feller will.'"
At that he turned from the fire and straightened to his feet.
Joan moved backward slowly to the door. He had made no threatening
sign or movement, but her fear had come overwhelmingly upon her and
every instinct urged her to flight. But before she touched the handle
of the door, he flung himself with deadly, swift force and silence
across the room and took her in his arms. With all her wonderful young
strength, Joan could not break away from him. He dragged her back to
the hearth, tied her elbows behind her with the scarf from his neck,
that very scarf he had worn when the dawn had shed a wistful beauty
upon him, waiting for her on a morning not so very long ago. Joan went
weak.
"Pierre," she cried pitifully, "what are you a-goin' to do to me?"
He roped her to the heavy post of a set of shelves built against the
wall. Then he stood away, breathing fast.
"Now whose gel are you, Joan Carver?" he asked her.
"You know I'm yours, Pierre," she sobbed. "You got no need to tie me
to make me say that."
"I got to tie you to make you do more'n say it. I got to make sure you
are it. Hell-fire won't take the sureness out of me after this."
She turned her head, all that she could turn.
He was bending over the fire, and when he straightened she saw that he
held something in his hand ... a long bar of metal, white at the
shaped end. At once her memory showed her a broad glow of sunset
falling over Pierre at work. "There'll be stock all over the country
marked with them two bars," he had said. "The Two-Bar Brand, don't you
fergit it!" She was not likely to forget it now.
She shut her eyes. He stepped close to her and jerked her blouse down
from her shoulder. She writhed away from him, silent in her rage and
fear and fighting dumbly. She made no appeal. At that moment her heart
was so full of hatred that it was hardened to pride. He lifted his
brand and set it against the bare flesh of her shoulder.
Then terribly she screamed. Again, when he took the metal away, she
screamed. Afterwards there was a dreadful silence.
Joan had not lost consciousness. Her healthy nerves stanchly received
the anguish and the shock, nor did she make any further outcry. She
pressed her forehead against the sharp edge of the shelf, she drove
her nails into her hands, and at intervals she writhed from head to
foot. Circles of pain spread from the deep burn on her shoulder,
spread and shrank, to spread and shrink again. The bones of her
shoulder and arm ached terribly; fire still seemed to be eating into
her flesh. The air was full of the smell of scorched skin so that she
tasted it herself. And hotter than her hurt her heart burned consuming
its own tenderness and love and trust.
When this pain left her, when she was free of her bonds, no force nor
fear would hold her to Pierre. She would leave him as she had left her
father. She would go away. There was no place for her to go to, but
what did that matter so long as she might escape from this horrible
place and this infernal tormentor? She did not look about to see the
actuality of Pierre's silence. She thought that he had dropped the
brand and was sitting near the table with his face hidden. How long
the stillness of pain and fury and horror lasted there was no one to
reckon. It was most startlingly broken by a voice. "Who screamed for
help?" it said, and at the same instant a draught of icy air smote
Joan. The door had opened with suddenness and violence. With
difficulty she mastered her pain and turned her head.
Pierre had staggered to his feet. Opposite him, framed against the
open door filled with the wan whiteness of the snow, stood a spare,
tall figure. The man wore his fur collar turned up about his chin and
ears, his fur cap pulled down about his brow, a sharp aquiline nose
stood out above frozen mustaches, keen and brilliant eyes searched the
room. He carried his gun across his arm in readiness, and snuffed the
air like a suspicious hound. Then he advanced a step toward Pierre.
"What devil's work have you been at?" said he, his voice cutting the
ear in its sharpness of astonished rage, and his hand slid down along
the handle of his gun.
Pierre, watching him like a lynx, side-stepped, crouched, whipped out
his gun, and fired. At almost the same second the other's gun went
off. Pierre dropped.
This time Joan's nerves gave way and the room, with its smell of
scorched flesh, of powder, and of frost, went out from her horrified
senses. For a moment the stranger's stern face and brilliant eyes made
the approaching center of a great cloud of darkness, then it too went
out.
CHAPTER VII
THE JUDGMENT OF GOD
The man who had entered with such violence upon so violent a scene,
stood waiting till the smoke of Pierre's discharge had cleared away,
then, still holding his gun in readiness, he stepped across the room
and bent over the fallen man.
"I've killed him!" he said, just above his breath, and added
presently, "That was the judgment of God." He looked about, taking in
every detail of the scene, the branding iron that had burnt its mark
deep into the boards where Pierre had thrown it down, the glowing fire
heaped high and blazing dangerously in the small room, the woman bound
and burnt, the white night outside the uncurtained window.
Afterwards he went over to the woman, who drooped in her bonds with
head hanging backward over the wounded shoulder. He untied the silk
scarf and the rope and carried her, still unconscious, into the
bedroom where he laid her on the bed and bathed her face in water.
Joan's crown of hair had fallen about her neck and temples. Her bared
throat and shoulder had the firm smoothness of marble, her lifeless
face, its pure, full lips fallen apart, its long lids closed,
black-fringed and black-browed, owing little of its beauty to color or
expression, was at no loss in this deathlike composure and whiteness.
The man dealt gently with her as though she had been a child. He found
clean rags which he soaked in oil and placed over her burn, then he
drew the coarse clothing about her and resumed his bathing of her
forehead.
She gave a moaning sigh, her face contracted woefully, and she opened
her eyes. The man looked into them as a curious child might look into
an opened door.
"Did you see what happened?" he asked her when she had come fully to
herself.
"Yes," Joan whispered, her lips shaking.
"I've killed the brute."
Her face became a classic mask of tragedy, the drawn brows, horrified
eyes, and widened mouth.
"Pierre? Killed?" Her voice, hardly more than a whisper, filled the
house with its agony.
"Are you sorry?" demanded her rescuer sternly. "Was he in the habit of
tying you up or was this--branding--a special diversion?"
Joan turned her face away, writhed from head to foot, put up her two
hands between him and her agonizing memories.
The man rose and left her, going softly into the next room. There he
stood in a tense attitude of thought, sat down presently with his
long, narrow jaw in his hands and stared fixedly at Pierre. He was
evidently trying to fight down the shock of the spectacle, grimly
telling himself to become used to the fact that here lay the body of a
man that he had killed. In a short time he seemed to be successful,
his face grew calm. He looked away from Pierre and turned his mind to
the woman.
"She can't stay here," he said presently, in the tone of a man who has
fallen into the habit of talking aloud to himself. He looked about in
a hesitant, doubtful fashion. "God!" he said abruptly and snapped his
fingers and thumb. He looked angry. Again he bent over Pierre,
examined him with thoroughness and science, his face becoming more and
more calm. At the end he rose and with an air of authority he went in
again to Joan. She lay with her face turned to the wall.
"It is impossible for you to stay here," said he in a voice of
command. "You are not fit to take care of yourself, and I can't stay
and take care of you. You must come with me. I think you can manage
that. Your husband--if he is your husband--is dead. It may or may not
be a matter for sorrow to you, but I should say that it ought not to
be anything but a merciful release. Women are queer creatures,
though.... However, whether you are in grief or in rejoicing, you
can't stay here. By to-morrow or next day you'll need more nursing
than you do now. I don't want to take you to a neighbor, even if there
was one near enough, but I'll take you with me. Will you get ready
now?"
His sure, even, commanding voice evidently had a hypnotizing effect
upon the dazed girl. Slowly, wincing, she stood up, and with his help
gathered together some of her belongings which he put in the pack he
carried on his shoulders. She wrapped herself in her warmest outdoor
clothing. He then put his hand upon her arm and drew her toward the
door of that outer room. She followed him blindly with no will of her
own, but, as he stopped to strap on his snowshoes, her face lightened
with pain, and she made as if to run to Pierre's body. He stood before
her, "Don't touch him," said he, and, turning himself, he glanced back
at Pierre. In that glance he saw one of the lean, brown hands stir.
His face became suddenly suffused, even his eyes grew shot with blood.
Standing carefully so as to obstruct her view, he caught at the corner
of an elk hide and threw it over Pierre. Then he went to Joan, who
stared at him, white and shaking. He put his arm around her and drew
her out, shutting the door of her home and leaning against it.
"You can't go back," said he gently and reasonably. "The man tried to
kill you. You can't go back. Surely you meant to go away."
"Yes," said Joan, "yes. I did mean to go away. But--but it's Pierre."
He bent and began to strap on her snowshoes. There was a fighting
brilliance in his eyes and a strange look of hurry about him that had
its effect on Joan. "It's Pierre no longer," said he. "What can you do
for him? What can he do for you? Be sensible, child. Come. Don't waste
time. There will be snow to-day."
In fact it was to-day. The moon had set and a gray dawn possessed the
world. It was not nearly so cold and the great range had vanished in a
bank of gray-black clouds moving steadily northward under a damp wind.
Joan looked at this one living creature with wide, fever-brightened
eyes.
"Come," said the man impatiently.
Joan bent her head and followed him across the snow.
CHAPTER VIII
DELIRIUM
It is not the people that have led still and uneventful lives who are
best prepared for emergencies. They are not trained to face crises, to
make prompt and just decisions. Joan had made but two such resolutions
in her life; the first when she had followed Pierre, the second when
she had kept Holliwell's books in defiance of her husband's jealousy.
The leaving her father had been the result of long and painful
thought. Now, in a few hours, events had crashed about her so that her
whole life, outer and inner, had been shattered. Beyond the pain and
fever of her wound there was an utter confusion of her faculties.
Before she fainted she had, indeed, made a distinct resolve to leave
Pierre. It was this purpose, working subconsciously on her will, as
much as the urgent pressure of the stranger, that took her past
Pierre's body out into the dawn and sent her on that rash journey of
hers in the footsteps of an unknown man. This being seemed to her then
hardly human. Mysteriously he had stepped in out of the night,
mysteriously he had condemned Pierre, and in self-defense, for Joan
had seen Pierre draw his gun and fire, he had killed her husband. Now,
just as mysteriously, as inevitably it seemed to her, he took command
of her life. She was a passive, shipwrecked thing--a derelict. She had
little thought and no care for her life.
As the silent day slowly brightened through its glare of clouds, she
plodded on, setting her snowshoes in the tracks her leader made. The
pain in her shoulder steadily increased, more and more absorbed her
consciousness. She saw little but the lean, resolute figure that went
before her, turning back now and then with a look and a smile that
were a compelling mixture of encouragement, pity, and command. She did
not know that they were traveling north and west toward the wildest
and most desolate country, that every time she set down her foot she
set it down farther from humanity. She began soon to be a little
light-headed and thought that she was following Pierre.
At noon they entered the woods, and her guide came beside her and led
her through fallen timber and past pitfalls of soft snow. Suddenly, "I
can't go no more," she sobbed, and stopped, swaying. At that he took
her in his arms and carried her a few hundred feet till they entered a
cabin under the shelter of firs.
"It's the ranger-station," said he; "the ranger told me that I could
make use of it on my way back. We can pass the night here."
Joan knew that he had carried her across a strange room and put her on
a strange bed. He took off her snowshoes, and she lay watching him
light a fire in the cold, clean stove and cook a meal from supplies
left by the owner of the house. She was trying now to remember who he
was, what had happened, and why she was in such misery and pain.
Sometimes she knew that he was her father and that she was at home in
that wretched shack up Lone River, and an ineffable satisfaction would
relax her cramped mind; sometimes, just as clearly, she knew that he
was Pierre who had taken her away to some strange place, and, in this
certainty, she was even more content. But always the horrible flame on
her shoulder burnt her again to the confusion of half-consciousness.
He wasn't John Carver, he wasn't Pierre. Who, in God's name, was he?
And why was she here alone with him? She could not frame a question;
she had a fear that, if she began to speak, she would scream and rave,
would tell impossible, secret, sacred things. So she held herself to
silence, to a savage watchfulness, to a battle with delirium.
The man brought her a cup of strong coffee and held up her head so
that she could drink it, but it nauseated her and she thrust it weakly
away, asking for cold water. After she had drunk this, her mind
cleared for an instant and she tried to stand up.
"I must go back to Pierre now," she said, looking about with wild but
resolute eyes.
"Lie still," said the stranger gently. "You're not fit to stir. Trust
me. It's all right. You're quite safe. Get rested and well, then you
may go wherever you like. I want only to help you."
The reassuring tone, the promising words coerced her and she dropped
back. Presently, in spite of pain, she slept.
She woke and slept in fever for many hours, vaguely aware, at times,
that she was traveling. She felt the motion of a sled under her and
knew that she was lying on the warm hide of some freshly killed beast
and that a blanket and a canvas covering protected her from a swirl of
snow. Then she thought she heard a voice babbling queerly and saw a
face quite terribly different from other human faces. The covering was
taken from her, snowflakes touched her cheek, a lantern shone in her
eyes, and she was lifted and carried into a warm, pleasant-smelling
place from which were magically and completely banished all sound and
bitterness of storm. She tried to see where she was, but her eyes
looked on incredible colors and confusions, so she shut them and
passively allowed herself to be handled by deft hands. She knew only
that delicious coolness, cleanliness, and softness were given to her
body, that the pain in her shoulder was soothed, that dreamlessly she
slept.
CHAPTER IX
DRIED ROSE-LEAVES
The house that Prosper Gael had built for himself and for the woman
whom Joan came to think of as the "tall child," stood in a canyon, a
deep, secret fold of the hills, where a cliff stood behind it, and
where the pine-needled ground descended before its door, under the
far-flung, greenish-brown shade of fir boughs, to the lip of a green
lake. Here the highest snow-peak toppled giddily down and reared
giddily up from the crystal green to the ether blue, firs massed into
the center of the double image. In January, the lake was a glare of
snow, in which the big firs stood deep, their branches heavily
weighted. Prosper had dug a tunnel from his door through a big drift
which touched his eaves. It was curious to see Wen Ho come pattering
out of this Northern cave, his yellow, Oriental face and slant eyes
peering past the stalactite icicles as though they felt their own
incongruity almost with a sort of terror. The interior of the
five-room house gave just such an effect of bizarre and extravagant
contrast; an effect, too, of luxury, though in truth it was furnished
for the most part with stuffs and objects picked up at no very great
expense in San Francisco shops. Nevertheless, there was nothing tawdry
and, here and there, something really precious. Draperies on the
walls, furniture made by Wen Ho and Prosper, lacquered in black and
red, brass and copper, bright pewter, gay china, some fur rugs, a
gorgeous Oriental lamp, bookcases with volumes of a sober richness, in
fact the costliest and most laborious of imports to this wilderness,
small-paned, horizontal windows curtained in some heavy green-gold
stuff which slipped along the black lacquered pole on rings of jade;
all these and a hundred other points of softly brilliant color gave to
the living-room a rare and striking look, while the bedrooms were
matted, daintily furnished, carefully appointed as for a bride. Much
thought and trouble, much detailed labor, had gone to the making of
this odd nest in a Wyoming canyon. Whatever one must think of Prosper
Gael, it is difficult to shirk heartache on his account. A man of his
temperament does not lightly undertake even a companioned isolation in
a winter land. To picture what place of torment this well-appointed
cabin was to him before he brought to it Joan, as a lonely man brings
in a wounded bird to nurse and cherish, stretches the fancy on a rack
of varied painfulness.
On that night, snow was pouring itself down the narrow canyon in a
crowded whirl of dry, clean flakes. Wen Ho, watchful, for his master
was already a day or so beyond the promised date of his return, had
started a fire on the hearth and spread a single cover on the table.
He had drawn the green-and-gold curtains as though there had been
anything but whirling whiteness to look in and stood warming himself
with a rubbing of thin, dry hands before the open blaze. The real heat
of the house, and it was almost unbearably hot, came from the stoves
in kitchen and bedrooms, but this fire gave its quota of warmth and
more than its quota of that beauty so necessary to Prosper Gael.
Wen Ho put his head from one side to the other and stopped rubbing his
hands. He had heard the packing of snow under webs and runners. After
listening a moment, he nodded to himself, like a figure in a
pantomime, ran into the kitchen, did something to the stove, then
lighted a lantern and pattered out along the tunnel dodging the icicle
stalactites. Between the firs he stopped and held his lantern high so
that it touched a moving radius of flakes to silver stars. Back of him
through the open door streamed the glow of lamp and fire filling the
icicles with blood and flushing the walls and the roof of the cave.
Down the canyon Prosper shouted, "Wen Ho! Wen Ho!"
The Chinaman plunged down the trail, packed below the new-fallen snow
by frequent passage, and presently met the bent figure of his master
pulling and breathing hard. Without speaking, Wen Ho laid hold of the
sled rope and together the two men tugged up the last steep bit of the
hill.
"Velly heavy load," said Wen.
Prosper's eyes, gleaming below the visor of his cap, smiled
half-maliciously upon him. "It's a deer killed out of season," he
said, "and other cattle--no maverick either--fairly marked by its
owner. Lend me a hand and we'll unload."
Wen showed no astonishment. He removed the covering and peeped
slantwise at the strange woman who stared at him unseeingly with
large, bright eyes. She closed them, frowning faintly as though she
protested against the intrusion of a Chinese face into her disturbed
mental world.
The men took her up and carried her into the house, where they dressed
her wound and laid her with all possible gentleness in one of the two
beds of stripped and lacquered pine that stood in the bedroom facing
the lake. Afterwards they moved the other bed and Prosper went in to
his meal.
He was too tired to eat. Soon he pushed his plate away, turned his
chair to face the fire, and, slipping down to the middle of his spine,
stuck out his lean, long legs, locked his hands back of his head, let
his chin fall, and stared into the flames.
Wen Ho removed the dishes, glancing often at his master.
"You velly tired?" he questioned softly.
"It was something of a pull in the storm."
"Velly small deer," babbled the Chinaman, "velly big lady."
Prosper smiled a queer smile that sucked in and down the corners of
his mouth.
"She come after all?" asked Wen Ho.
Prosper's smile disappeared; he opened his eyes and turned a wicked,
gleaming look upon his man. What with the white face and drawn mouth
the look was rather terrible. Wen Ho vanished with an increase of
speed and silence.
Alone, Prosper twisted himself in his chair till his head rested on
his arms. It was no relaxation of weariness or grief, but an attitude
of cramped pain. His face, too, was cramped when, a motionless hour
later, he lifted it again. He got up then, broken with weariness, and
went softly across the matted hall into the room where Joan slept, and
he stood beside her bed.
A glow from the stove, and the light shining through the door, dimly
illumined her. She was sleeping very quietly now; the flush of fever
had left her face and it was clear of pain, quite simple and sad.
Prosper looked at her and looked about the room as though he felt what
he saw to be a dream. He put his hand on one long strand of Joan's
black hair.
"Poor child!" he said. "Good child!" And went out softly, shutting the
door.
In the bedroom where Joan came again to altered consciousness of life,
there stood a blue china jar of potpourri, rose-leaves dried and spiced
till they stored all the richness of a Southern summer. Joan's first
question, strangely enough, was drawn from her by the persistence of
this vague and pungent sweetness.
She was lying quietly with closed eyes, Prosper looking down at her,
his finger on her even pulse, when, without opening her long lids, she
asked, "What smells so good?"
Prosper started, drew away his fingers, then answered, smiling, "It's
a jar of dried rose-leaves. Wait a moment, I'll let you hold it."
He took the jar from the window sill and carried it to her.
She looked at it, took it in her hands, and when he removed the lid,
she stirred the leaves curiously with her long forefinger.
"I never seen roses," she said, and added, "What's basil?"
Prosper was startled. For an instant all his suppositions as to Joan
were disturbed. "Basil? Where did you ever hear of basil?"
"Isabella and Lorenzo," murmured Joan, and her eyes darkened with her
memories.
Prosper found his heart beating faster than usual. "Who are you, you
strange creature? I think it's time you told me your name. Haven't you
any curiosity about me?"
"Yes," said Joan; "I've thought a great deal about you." She wrinkled
her wide brows. "You must have been out after game, though 't was out
of season. And you must have heard me a-cryin' out an' come in. That
was right courageous, stranger. I would surely like you to know why I
come away with you," she went on, wistful and weak, "but I don't know
as how I can make it plain to you." She paused, turning the blue jar
in her hand. "You're very strange to me," she said, "an' yet,
someways, you takin' care of me so well an' so--so awful kind--" her
voice gave forth its tremolo of feeling--"seems like I knowed you
better than any other person in the world."
A flush came into his face.
"I wouldn't like you to be thinkin'--" She stopped, a little
breathless.
He took the jar, sat down on the bed, and laid a hand firmly over both
of hers. "I 'won't be thinking' anything," he said, "only what you
would like me to think. Listen--when a man finds a wounded bird out in
the winter woods, he'll bring it home to care for it. And he 'won't be
thinking' the worse of its helplessness and tameness. Of course I
know--but tell me your name, please!"
"Joan Landis."
At the name, given painfully, Joan drew a weighted breath, another,
then, pushing herself up as though oppressed beyond endurance, she
caught at Prosper's arm, clenched her fingers upon it, and bent her
black head in a terrible paroxysm of grief. It was like a tempest.
Prosper thought of storm-driven, rain-wet trees wild in a wind ... of
music, the prelude to "Fliegende Hollander." Joan's weeping bent and
rocked her. He put his arm about her, tried to soothe her. At her cry
of "Pierre! Pierre!" he whitened, but suddenly she broke from him and
threw herself back amongst the pillows.
"'T was you that killed him," she moaned. "What hev I to do with you?"
It was not the last time that bitter exclamation was to rise between
them; more and more fiercely it came to wring his peace and hers. This
time he bore it with a certain philosophy, calmed her patiently.
"How could I help it, Joan?" he pleaded. "You saw how it was?" As she
grew quieter, he talked. "I heard you scream like a person being
tortured to death--twice--a gruesome enough sound, let me tell you, to
hear in the dead of a white, still night. I didn't altogether want to
break into your house. I've heard some ugly stories about men
venturing to disturb the work of murderers. But, you see, Joan, I've a
fear of myself. I've a cruel brain. I can use it on my own failures.
I've been through some self-punishment--no! of course, you don't
understand all that.... Anyway, I came in, in great fear of my life,
and saw what I saw--a woman tied up and devilishly tortured, a man
gloating over her helplessness. Naturally, before I spoke my mind, as
a man was bound to speak it, under the pain and fury of such a
spectacle, I got ready to defend myself. Your--Pierre"--there was a
biting contempt in his tone--"saw my gesture, whipped out his gun, and
fired. My shot was half a second later than his. I might more readily
have lost my life than taken his. If he had lived, Joan, could you
have forgiven him?"
"No," sobbed Joan; "I think not." She trembled. "He said terrible hard
words to me. He didn't love me like I loved him. He planned to put a
brand on me so's I c'd be his own like as if I was a beast belongin'
to him. Mr. Holliwell said right, I don't belong to no man. I belong
to my own self."
The storm had passed into this troubled after-tossing of thought.
"Can you tell me about it all?" asked Prosper. "Would it help?"
"I couldn't," she moaned; "no, I couldn't. Only--if I hadn't 'a' left
Pierre a-lyin' there alone. A dog that had onct loved him wouldn't 'a'
done that." She sat up again, white and wild. "That's why I must go
back. I must surely go. I must! Oh, I must!"
"Go back thirty miles through wet snow when you can't walk across the
room, Joan?" He smiled pityingly.
Her hands twisting in his, she stared past him, out through the
window, where the still, sunny day shone blue through shadowy pine
branches. Tears rolled down her face.
"Can't you go back?" She turned the desolate, haunted eyes upon him.
"Oh, can't you?--to do some kindness to him? Can you ever stop
a-thinkin' of him lyin' there?"
Prosper's face was hard through its gentleness. "I've seen too many
dead men, less deserving of death. But, hush!--you lie down and go to
sleep. I'll try to manage it. I'll try to get back and show him some
kindness, as you say. There! Will you be a good girl now?"
She fell back and her eyes shone their gratitude upon him. "Oh, you
are good!" she said. "When I'm well--I'll work for you!"
He shook his head, smiled, kissed her hand, and went out.
She was entirely exhausted by her emotion, so that all her memories
fell away from her and left her in a peaceful blankness. She trusted
Prosper's word. With every fiber of her heart she trusted him, as
simply, as singly, as foolishly as a child trusts God.
CHAPTER X
PROSPER COMES TO A DECISION
Perhaps, in spite of his gruesome boast as to dead men, it was as much
to satisfy his own spirit as to comfort Joan's that Prosper actually
did undertake a journey to the cabin that had belonged to Pierre. It
was true that Prosper had never been able to stop thinking, not so
much of the tall, slim youth lying so still across the floor, all his
beauty and strength turned to an ashen slackness, as of a brown hand
that stirred. The motion of those fingers groping for life had
continually disturbed him. The man, to Prosper's mind, was an
insensate brute, deserving of death, even of torment, most deserving
of Joan's desertion, nevertheless, it was not easy to harden his
nerves against the picture of a man left, wounded and helpless, to die
slowly alone. Prosper went back expecting to find a dead man, went
back as a murderer visits the scene of his crime. He dubbed himself
more judge than murderer, but there was a restless misery of the
imagination not to be quieted by names. He went back stealthily at
dusk, choosing a dusk of wind-driven snow so that his tracks vanished
as soon as made. It was very desolate--the blank surface of the world
with its flying scud, the blank yellow-gray sky, the range, all iron
and white, the blue-black scars of leafless trees, the green-black
etchings of firs. The wind cut across like a scythe, sharp, but making
no stir above the drift. It was all dead and dark--an underground
world which, Prosper felt, never could have seen the sun, had no
memory of sun nor moon nor stars. The roof of Pierre's cabin made a
dark ridge above the snow, veiled in cloudy drift. He reached it with
a cold heart and slid down to its window, cautiously bending his face
near to the pane. He expected an interior already dark from the snow
piled round the window, so he cupped his hands about his eyes. At once
he let himself drop out of sight below the sill. There was a living
presence in the house. Prosper had seen a bright fire, the smoke of
which had been hidden by the snow-spray, a cot was drawn up before the
fire, and a big, fair young man in tweeds whose face, rosy, sensitive,
and quiet, was bent over the figure on the cot. A pair of large, white
hands were carefully busy.
Prosper, crouched below the window, considered what he had seen. It
was a week now since he had left Landis for a dying man. This big
fellow in tweeds must have come soon after the shooting. Evidently he
was not caring for a dead man. The black head on the pillow had moved.
Now there came the sound of speech, just a bass murmur. This time the
black head turned itself slightly and Prosper saw Pierre's face. He
had seen it only twice before; once when it had looked up, fierce and
crazed, at his first entrance into the house, once again when it lay
with lifted chin and pale lips on the floor. But even after so scarce
a memory, Prosper was startled by the change. Before, it had been the
face of a man beside himself with drink and the lust of animal power
and cruelty; now it was the wistful face of Pierre, drawn into a
tragic mask like Joan's when she came to herself; a miserably haunted
and harrowed face, hopeless as though it, too, like the outside world,
had lost or had never had a memory of sun. Evidently he submitted to
the dressing of his wound, but with a shamed and pitiful look.
Prosper's whole impression of the man was changed, and with the change
there began something like a struggle. He was afflicted by a crossing
of purposes and a stumbling of intention.
He did not care to risk a second look. He crept away and fled into the
windy dusk. He traveled with the wind like a blown rag, and, stopping
only for a few hours' rest at the ranger station, made the journey
home by morning of the second day. And on the journey he definitely
made up his mind concerning Joan.
Prosper Gael was a man of deliberate, though passionate, imagination.
He did not often act upon impulse, though his actions were often those
attempted only by passion-driven or impulsive folk. Prosper could
never plead thoughtlessness. He justified carefully his every action
to himself. Those were cold, dark hours of deliberation as he let the
wind drive him across the desolate land. When the wind dropped and a
splendid, still dawn swept up into the clean sky, he was at peace with
his own mind and climbed up the mountain trail with a half-smile on
his face.
In the dawn, awake on her pillows, Joan was listening for him, and at
the sound of his webs she sat up, pale to her lips. She did not know
what she feared, but she was filled with dread. The restful stupor
that had followed her storm of grief had spent itself and she was
suffering again--waves of longing for Pierre, of hatred for him,
alternately submerged her. All these bleak, gray hours of wind during
which Wen Ho had pattered in and out with meals, with wood for her
stove, with little questions as to her comfort, she had suffered as
people suffer in a dream; a restless misery like the misery of the
pine branches that leaped up and down before her window. The stillness
of the dawn, with its sound of nearing steps, gave her a sickness of
heart and brain, so that when Prosper came softly in at her door she
saw him through a mist. He moved quickly to her side, knelt by her,
took her hands. His touch at all times had a tingling charge of
vitality and will.
"He has been cared for, Joan," said Prosper. "Some friend of his came
and did all that was left to be done."
"Some friend?" In the pale, delicately expanding light Joan's face
gleamed between its black coils of hair with eyes like enchanted
tarns. In fact they had been haunted during his absence by images to
shake her soul. Prosper could see in them reflections of those terrors
that had been tormenting her. His touch pressed reassurance upon her,
his eyes, his voice.
"My poor child! My dear! I'm glad I am back to take care of you! Cry.
Let me comfort you. He has been cared for. He is not lying there
alone. He is dead. Let's forgive him, Joan." He shook her hands a
little, urgently, and a most painful memory of Pierre's beseeching
grasp came upon Joan.
She wrenched away and fell back, quivering, but she did not cry, only
asked in her most moving voice, "Who took care of Pierre--after I went
away and left him dead?"
Prosper got to his feet and stood with his arms folded, looking
wearily down at her. His mouth had fallen into rather cynical lines
and there were puckers at the corners of his eyes. "Oh, a big, fair
young man--a rosy boy-face, serious-looking, blue eyes."
Joan was startled and turned round. "It was Mr. Holliwell," she said,
in a wondering tone. "Did you talk with him? Did you tell him--?"
"No. Hardly." Prosper shook his head. "I found out what he had done
for your Pierre without asking unnecessary questions. I saw him, but
he did not see me."
"He'll be comin' to get me," said Joan. It was an entirely unemotional
statement of certainty.
Prosper pressed his lips into a line and narrowed his eyes upon her.
"Oh, he will?"
"Yes. He'll be takin' after me. He must 'a' ben scairt by somethin'
Pierre said in the town durin' their quarrel an' have come up after
him to look out what Pierre would be doin' to me.... I wisht he'd 'a'
come in time.... What must he be thinkin' of me now, to find Pierre
a-lyin' there dead, an' me gone! He'll be takin' after me to bring me
home."
Prosper would almost have questioned her then, his sharp face was
certainly at that moment the face of an inquisitor, a set of keen and
delicate instruments ready for probing, but so weary and childlike did
she look, so weary and childlike was her speech, that he forbore. What
did it matter, after all, what there was in her past? She had done
what she had done, been what she had been. If the fellow had branded
her for sin, why, she had suffered overmuch. Prosper admitted, that,
unbranded as to skin, he was scarcely fit to put his dirty civilized
soul under her clean and savage foot. Was the big, rosy chap her
lover? She had spoken of a quarrel between him and Pierre? But her
manner of speaking of him was scarcely in keeping with the thought,
rather it was the manner of a child-soul relying on the Shepherd who
would be "takin' after" some small, lost one. Well, he would have to
be a superman to find her here with no trails to follow and no fingers
to point. Pierre by now would have told his story--and Prosper knew
instinctively that he would tell it straight; whatever madness the
young savage might perpetrate under the influence of drink and
jealousy, he would hardly, with that harrowed face, be apt at
fabrications--they would be looking for Joan to come back, to go to
the town, to some neighboring ranch. They would make a search, but
winter would be against them with its teeth bared, a blizzard was on
its way. By the time they found her, thought Prosper,--and he quoted
one of Joan's quaint phrases to himself, smiling with radiance as he
did so,--"she won't be carin' to leave me." In his gay, little,
firelit room, he sat, stretched out, lank and long, in the low, deep,
red-lacquered chair, dozing through the long day, sipping strong
coffee, smoking, reading. He was singularly quiet and content. The
devil of disappointment and of thwarted desire that had wived him in
this carefully appointed hiding-place stood away a little from him and
that wizard imagination of his began to weave. By dusk, he was writing
furiously and there was a glow of rapture on his face.
CHAPTER XI
THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMAN
Joan waited for Holliwell and, waiting, began inevitably to regain her
strength. One evening as Wen Ho was spreading the table, Prosper
looked up from his writing to see a tall, gaunt girl clinging to the
door-jamb. She was dressed in the heavy clothes, which hung loose upon
her long bones, her throat was drawn up to support the sharpened and
hollowed face in which her eyes had grown very large and wistful. Her
hair was braided and wrapped across her brow, her long, strong hands,
smooth and only faintly brown, were thin, too, and curiously
expressive as they clung to the logs. She was a moving figure,
piteous, lovely, rather like some graceful mountain beast, its spirit
half-broken by wounds and imprisonment and human tending, but ready to
leap into a savagery of flight or of attack. They were wild, those
great eyes, as well as wistful. Prosper, looking suddenly up at them,
caught his breath. He put down his book as quietly as though she had
indeed been a wild, easily startled thing, and, suppressing the
impulse to rise, stayed where he was, leaning a trifle forward, his
hands on the arms of his chair.
Joan's eyes wandered curiously about the brilliant room and came to
him at last. Prosper met them, relaxed, and smiled.
"Come in and dine with me, Joan," he said. "Tell me how you like it."
She felt her way weakly to the second large chair and sat down facing
him across the hearth. The Chinaman's shadow, thrown strongly by the
lamp, ran to and fro between and across them. It was a strange scene
truly, and Prosper felt with exhilaration all its strangeness. This was
no Darby and Joan fireside; a wizard with his enchanted leopardess,
rather. He was half-afraid of Joan and of himself.
"It's right beautiful," said Joan, "an' right strange to me. I never
seen anything like it before. That"--her eyes followed Wen Ho's
departure half-fearfully--"that man and all."
Prosper laughed delightedly, stretching up his arms in full enjoyment
of her splendid ignorance. "The Chinaman? Does he look so strange to
you?"
"Is that what he is? I--I didn't know." She smiled rather sadly and
ashamedly. "I'm awful ignorant, Mr. Gael. I just can read an' I've
only read two books." She flushed and her pupils grew large.
Prosper saw that this matter of reading trod closely on her pain.
"Yes, he's a Chinaman from San Francisco. You know where that is."
"Yes, sir. I've heard talk of it--out on the Pacific Coast, a big
city."
"Full of bad yellow men and a few good ones of whom let's hope Wen Ho
is one. And full of bric-a-brac like all these things that surprise
you so. Do you like bright colors, Joan?"
She pondered in the unself-conscious and unhurried fashion of the
West, stroking the yellow, spotted skin that lay over the black arm of
her chair and letting her eyes flit like butterflies in a garden on a
zigzag journey to one after another of the flowers of color in the
room.
"Well, sir," she said, "I c'd take to 'em better if they was more one
at a time. I mean"--she pushed up the braid a little from wrinkling
brows--"jest blue is awful pretty an' jest green. They're sort of
cool, an' yeller, that's sure fine. You'd like to take it in your
hands. Red is most too much like feelin' things. I dunno, it most
hurts an' yet it warms you up, too. If I hed to live here--"
Prosper's eyebrows lifted a trifle.
"I'd--sure clear out the whole of this"--and she swept a ruthless
hand.
Again Prosper made delighted use of that upward stretching of his
arms. He laughed. "And you'd clear me out, too, wouldn't you?--if you
had to live here."
"Oh, no," said Joan. She paused and fastened her enormous, grave look
upon him. "I'd like right soon now to begin to work for you."
Again Prosper laughed. "Why," said he, "you don't know the first thing
about woman's work, Joan. What could you do?"
Joan straightened wrathfully. "I sure do know. Sure I do. I can cook
fine. I can make a room clean. I can launder--"
"Oh, pooh! The Chinaman does all that as well--no, better than you
ever could do it. That's not woman's work."
Joan saw all the business of femininity swept off the earth. Profound
astonishment, incredulity, and alarm possessed her mind and so her
face. Truly, thought Prosper, it was like talking to a grave,
trustful, and most impressionable child, the way she sat there, rather
on the edge of her chair, her hands folded, letting everything he said
disturb and astonish the whole pool of her thought.
"But, Mr. Gael, sweepin', washin', cookin',--ain't all that a woman's
work?"
"Men can do it so much better," said Prosper, blowing forth a cloud of
blue cigarette smoke and brushing it impatiently aside so that he
could smile at her evident offense and perplexity.
"But they don't do it better. They're as messy an' uncomfortable as
they can be when there ain't no woman to look after 'em."
"Not if they get good pay for keeping themselves and other people
tidy. Look at Wen Ho."
"Oh," said Joan, "that ain't properly a man."
Prosper laughed out again. It was good to be able to laugh.
"I've known plenty of real white men who could cook and wash better
than any woman."
"But--but what is a woman's work?"
Prosper remained thoughtful for a while, his head thrown back a
little, looking at her through his eyelashes. In this position he was
extraordinarily striking. His thin, sharp face gained by the slight
foreshortening and his brilliant eyes, keen nose, and high brow did
not quite so completely overbalance the sad and delicate strength of
mouth and chin. In Joan's eyes, used to the obvious, clear beauty of
Pierre, Gael was an ugly fellow, but even she, artistically untrained,
caught at the moment the picturesqueness and grace of him, the
mysterious lines of texture, of race; the bold chiselings of thought
and experience. The colors of the room became him, too, for he was
dark, with curious, catlike, greenish eyes.
"The whole duty of woman, Joan," he said, opening these eyes upon her,
"can be expressed in just one little word--charm."
And again at her look of mystification he laughed aloud.
"There's--there's babies," suggested Joan after a pause during which
she evidently wrestled in vain with the true meaning of his speech.
"Dinner is served," said Prosper, rising quickly, and, getting back of
her, he pushed her chair to the table, hiding in this way a silent
paroxysm of mirth.
At dinner, Prosper, unlike Holliwell, made no attempt to draw Joan
into talk, but sipped his wine and watched her, enjoying her composed
silence and her slow, graceful movements. Afterwards he made a couch
for her on the floor before the fire, two skins and a golden cushion,
a rug of dull blue which he threw over her, hiding the ugly skirt and
boots. He took a violin from the wall and tuned it, Joan watching him
with all her eyes.
"I don't like what you're playin' now," she told him, impersonally and
gently.
"I'm tuning up."
"Well, sir, I'd be gettin' tired of that if I was you."
"I'm almost done," said Prosper humbly.
He stood up near her feet at the corner of the hearth, tucked the
instrument under his chin and played. It was the "Aubade Provencale,"
and he played it creditably, with fair skill and with some of the
wizardry that his nervous vitality gave to everything he did. At the
first note Joan started, her pupils enlarged, she lay still. At the
end he saw that she was quivering and in tears.
He knelt down beside her, drew the hands from her face. "Why, Joan,
what's the matter? Don't you like music?"
Joan drew a shaken breath. "It's as if it shook me in here, something
trembles in my heart," she said. "I never heerd music before, jest
whistlin'." And again she wept.
Prosper stayed there on his knee beside her, his chin in his hand.
What an extraordinary being this was, what a magnificent wilderness.
The thought of exploration, of discovery, of cultivation, filled him
with excitement and delight. Such opportunities are rarely given to a
man. Even that other most beautiful adventure--yes, he could think
this already!--might have been tame beside this one. He looked long at
Joan, long into the fire, and she lay still, with the brooding beauty
of that first-heard melody upon her face.
It was the first music she had ever heard, "except whistlin'," but there
had been a great deal of "whistlin'" about the cabin up Lone River;
whistling of robins in spring--nothing sweeter--the chordlike whistlings
of thrush and vireo after sunset, that bubbling "mar-guer-ite" with
which the blackbirds woo, and the light diminuendo with which the
bluebird caressed the air after an April flight. Perhaps Joan's musical
faculty was less untrained than any other. After all, that "Aubade
Provencale" was just the melodious story of the woods in spring. Every
note linked itself to an emotional, subconscious memory. It filled
Joan's heart with the freshness of childhood and pained her only because
it struck a spear of delight into her pain. She was eighteen, she had
grown like a tree, drinking in sunshine and storm, but rooted to a
solitude where very little else but sense-experience could reach her
mind. She had seen tragedies of animal life, lonely death-struggles,
horrible flights and more horrible captures, she had seen joyous
wooings, love-pinings, partings, and bereavements. She had seen maternal
fickleness and maternal constancy, maternal savagery; the end of mated
bliss and its--renewal. She had seen the relentless catastrophes of
storm. There had been starving winters and renewing springs, sad
beautiful autumns, the riotous waste and wantonness of summer. These had
all been objective experiences, but Joan's untamed and undistracted
heart had taken them in deeply and deeply pondered upon them. There was
no morality in their teachings, unless it was the morality of complete
suspension of any judgment whatsoever, the marvelous literal, "Judge
not." She knew that the sun shone on the evil and on the good, but she
knew also that frost fell upon the good as well as upon the evil nor was
the evil to be readily distinguished. Her father prated of only one
offense, her mother's sin. Joan knew that it was a man's right to kill
his woman for "dealin's with another man." This law was human; it
evidently did not hold good with animals. There was no bitterness,
though some ferocity, in the traffic of their loves.
While she pondered through the first sleepless nights in this strange
shelter of hers, and while the blizzard Prosper had counted on drove
bayoneted battalions of snow across the plains and forced them,
screaming like madmen, along the narrow canyon, Joan came slowly and
fully to a realization of the motive of Pierre's deed. He had been
jealous. He had thought that she was having dealings with another man.
She grew hot and shamed. It was her father's sin, that branding on her
shoulder, or, perhaps, going back farther, her mother's sin. Carver
had warned Pierre--of the hot and smothered heart--to beware of Joan's
"lookin' an' lookin' at another man." Now, in piteous woman fashion,
Joan went over and over her memories of Pierre's love, altering them
to fit her terrible experience. It was a different process from that
simple seeing of pictures in the fire from which she had been startled
by Pierre's return. A man's mind in her situation would have been
intensely occupied with thoughts of the new companion, but Joan,
thorough as a woman always is, had not yet caught up. She was still
held by all the strong mesh of her short married life. She had simply
not got as far as Prosper Gael. She accepted his hospitality vaguely,
himself even more vaguely. When she would be done with her passionate
grief, her laborious going-over of the past, her active and tormenting
anger with the lover whom Prosper had told her was dead, then it would
be time to study this other man. As for her future, she had no plans
at all. Joan's life came to her as it comes to a child, unsullied by
curiosity. At this time Prosper was infinitely the more curious, the
more excited of the two.
CHAPTER XII
A MATTER OF TASTE
"What are you writin' so hard for, Mr. Gael?" Joan voiced the question
wistfully on the height of a long breath. She drew it from a silence
which seemed to her to have filled this strange, gay house for an
eternity. For the first time full awareness of the present cut a rift
in the troubled cloudiness of her introspection. She had been sitting
in her chair, listless and wan, now staring at the flames, now
following Wen Ho's activities with absent eyes. A storm was swirling
outside. Near the window, Prosper, a figure of keen absorption, bent
over his writing-table, his long, fine hand driving the pencil across
sheet after sheet. He looked like a machine, so regular and rapid was
his work. A sudden sense of isolation came upon Joan. What part had
she in the life of this companion, this keeper of her own life? She
felt a great need of drawing nearer to him, of finding the humanity in
him. At first she fought the impulse, reserve, pride, shyness locking
her down, till at last her nerves gave her such torment that her
fingers knitted into each other and on the outbreathing of a desperate
sigh she spoke.
"What are you writin' so hard for, Mr. Gael?"
At once Prosper's hand laid down its pencil and he turned about in his
chair and gave her a gleaming look and smile. Joan was fairly
startled. It was as if she had touched some mysterious spring and
turned on a dazzling, unexpected light. As a matter of fact, Prosper's
heart had leapt at her wistful and beseeching voice.
He had been biding his time. He had absorbed himself in writing,
content to leave in suspense the training of his enchanted leopardess.
Half-absent glimpses of her desolate beauty as she moved about his
winter-bound house, contemplation of her unself-consciousness as she
companioned his meals, the pleasure he felt in her rapt listening to
his music in the still, frost-held evenings by the fire--these he had
made enough. They quieted his restlessness, soothed the ache of his
heart, filled him with a warm and patient desire, different from any
feeling he had yet experienced. He was amused by her lack of interest
in him. He was not accustomed to such through-gazing from beautiful
eyes, such incurious absence of questioning. She evidently accepted him
as a superior being, a Providence; he was not a man at all, not of the
same clay as Pierre and herself. Prosper had waited understandingly
enough for her first move. When the personal question came, it made a
sort of crash in the expectant silence of his heart.
Before answering, except by that smile, he lit himself a cigarette;
then, strolling to the fire, he sat on the rug below her, drawing his
knees up into his hands.
"I'd like to tell you about my writing, Joan. After all, it's the
great interest of my life, and I've been fairly seething with it; only
I didn't want to bother you, worry your poor, distracted head."
"I never thought," said Joan slowly, "I never thought you'd be carin'
to tell me things. I know so awful little."
"It wasn't your modesty, Joan. It was simply because you haven't given
me a thought since I dragged you in here on my sled. I've been
nothing"--under the careless, half-bitter manner, he was weighing his
words and their probable effect--"nothing, for all these weeks, but--a
provider."
"A provider?" Joan groped for the meaning of the word. It came, and
she flushed deeply. "You mean I've just taken things, taken your kind
doin's toward me an' not been givin' you a thought." Her eyes filled
and shone mortification down upon him so that he put his hand quickly
over hers, tightened together on her knee.
"Poor girl! I'm not reproaching you."
"But, Mr. Gael, I wanted to work for you. You wouldn't let me." She
brushed away her tears. "What can I do? Where can I go?"
"You can stay here and make me happy as you have been doing ever since
you came. I was very unhappy before. And you can give me just as much
or as little attention as you please. I don't ask you for a bit more.
Suppose you stop grieving, Joan, and try to be just a little happier
yourself. Take an interest in life. Why, you poor, young, ignorant
child, I could open whole worlds of excitement, pleasure, to you, if
you'd let me. There's more in life than you've dreamed of experiencing.
There's music, for one thing, and there are books and beauty of a
thousand kinds, and big, wonderful thoughts, and there's companionship
and talk. What larks we could have, you and I, if you would care--I
mean, if you would wake up and let me show you how. You do want to
learn a woman's work, don't you, Joan?"
She shook her head slowly, smiling wistfully, the tears gone from her
eyes, which were puzzled, but diverted from pain. "I didn't savvy what
you meant when you talked about what a woman's work rightly was. An'
I'm so awful ignorant, you know so awful much. It scares me, plumb
scares me, to think how much you know, more than Mr. Holliwell! Such
books an' books an' books! An' writin' too. You see I'd be no help nor
company fer you. I'd like to listen to you. I'd listen all day long,
but I'd not be understandin'. No more than I understand about that
there woman's work idea."
He laughed at her, keeping reassuring eyes on hers. "I can explain
anything. I can make you understand anything. I'll grant you, my idea
of a woman's work is difficult for you to get hold of. That's a big
question, after all, one of the biggest. But--just to begin with and
we'll drop it later for easier things--I believe, the world believes,
that a woman ought to be beautiful. You can understand that?"
Joan shook her head. "It's a awful hard sayin', Mr. Gael. It's awful
hard to say you had ought to be somethin' a person can't manage for
themselves. I mean--" poor Joan, the inarticulate, floundered, but he
left her, rather cruelly, to flounder out. "I mean, that's an awful
hard sayin' fer a homely woman, Mr. Gael."
He laughed. "Oh," said he with a gesture, "there is no such thing as a
homely woman. A homely woman simply does not count." He got up, looked
for a book, found it, opened it, and brought it to her. "Look at that
picture, Joan. What do you think of it?"
It was of a woman, a long-drawn, emaciated creature, extraordinarily
artificial in her grace and in the pose and expression of her ugly,
charming form and features. She had been aided by hair-dresser and
costumer and by her own wit, aided into something that made of her an
arresting and compelling picture. "What do you think of her, Joan?"
smiled Prosper Gael.
Joan screwed up her eyes distastefully. "Ain't she queer, Mr. Gael?
Poor thing, she's homely!"
He clapped to the book. "A matter of educated taste," he said. "You
don't know beauty when you see it. If you walked into a drawing-room by
the side of that marvelous being, do you think you'd win a look, my dear
girl? Why, your great brows and your great, wild eyes and your face and
form of an Olympian and your free grace of a forest beast--why, they
wouldn't be noticed. Because, Joan, that queer, poor thing knew woman's
work from A to Z. She's beautiful, Joan, beautiful as God most certainly
never intended her to be. Why, it's a triumph--it's something to blow a
trumpet over. It's art!"
He returned the volume and came back to stand by the mantel,
half-turned from her, looking down into the fire. For the moment, he
had created in himself a reaction against his present extraordinary
experiment, his wilderness adventure. He was keenly conscious of a
desire for civilized woman, for her practiced tongue, her poise, her
matchless companionship....
Joan spoke, "You mean I'm awful homely, Mr. Gael?"
The question set him to laughing outrageously. Joan's pride was stung.
"You've no right to laugh at me," she said. "I'd not be carin' what
you think." And she left him, moving like an angry stag, head high,
light-stepping.
He went back to his work, not at all in regret at her pique and still
amused by the utter femininity of her simple question.
Before dinner he rapped at her door. "Joan, will you do me a favor?"
A pause, then, in her sweet, vibrant voice, she answered, "I'd be
doin' anything fer you, Mr. Gael."
"Then, put on these things for dinner instead of your own clothes,
will you?"
She opened the door and he piled into her arms a mass of shining silk,
on top of it a pair of gorgeous Chinese slippers.
"Do it to please me, even if you think it makes you look queer, will
you, Joan?"
"Of course," she smiled, looking up from the gleaming, sliding stuff
into his face. "I'd like to, anyway. Dressing-up--that's fun."
And she shut the door.
She spread the silk out on the bed and found it a loose robe of dull
blue, embroidered in silver dragons and lined with brilliant rose.
There was a skirt of this same rose-colored stuff. In one weighted
pocket she found a belt of silver coins and a little vest of creamy
lace. There were rose silk stockings stuffed into the shoes. Joan
eagerly arrayed herself. She had trouble with the vest, it was so
filmy, so vaguely made, it seemed to her, and to wear it at all she
had to divest herself altogether of the upper part of her coarse
underwear. Then it seemed to her startlingly inadequate even as an
undergarment. However, the robe did go over it, and she drew that
close and belted it in. It was provided with long sleeves and fell to
her ankles. She thrilled at the delightful clinging softness of silk
stockings and for the first time admired her long, round ankles and
shapely feet. The Chinese slippers amused her, but they too were
beautiful, all embroidered with flowers and dragons.
She felt she must look very queer, indeed, and went to the mirror.
What she saw there surprised her because it was so strange, so
different. Pierre had not dealt in compliments. His woman was his
woman and he loved her body. To praise this body, surrendered in love
to him, would have been impossible to the reverence and reserve of his
passion.
Now, Joan brushed and coiled her hair, arranging it instinctively, but
perhaps a little in imitation of that queer picture that had looked to
her so hideous. Then, starting toward the door at Wen Ho's announcement
of "Dinner, lady," she was quite suddenly overwhelmed by shyness. From
head to foot for the first time in all her life she was acutely
conscious of herself.
CHAPTER XIII
THE TRAINING OF A LEOPARDESS
On that evening Prosper began to talk. The unnatural self-repression
he had practiced gave way before the flood of his sociability. It was
Joan's amazing beauty as she stumbled wretchedly into the circle of
his firelight, her neck drawn up to its full length, her head crowned
high with soft, black masses, her lids dropped under the weight of
shyness, vivid fright in her distended pupils, scarlet in her
cheeks,--Joan's beauty of long, strong lines draped to advantage for
the first time in soft and clinging fabrics,--that touched the spring
of Prosper's delighted egotism. There it was again, the ideal
audience, the necessary atmosphere, the beautiful, gracious,
intelligent listener. He forgot her ignorance, her utter simplicity,
the unplumbed emptiness of her experience, and he spread out his
colorful thoughts before her in colorful words, the mental plumage of
civilized courtship.
After dinner, now sipping from the small coffee cup in his hand, now
setting it down to move excitedly about the room, he talked of his
life, his book, his plans. He told anecdotes, strange adventures; he
drew his own inverted morals; he sketched his fantastic opinions; he
was in truth fascinating, a speaking face, a lithe, brilliant presence,
a voice of edged persuasion. He turned witty phrases. Poor Joan! One
sentence in ten she understood and answered with her slow smile and her
quaint, murmured, "Well!" His eloquence did her at least the service of
making her forget herself. She was rather crestfallen because he had
not complimented her; his veiled look of appreciation, this coming to
of his real self was too subtle a flattery for her perception.
Nevertheless, his talk pleased her. She did not want to disappoint him,
so she drew herself up straight in the big red-lacquered chair, sipped
her coffee, in dainty imitation of him, gave him the full, deep tribute
of her gaze, asked for no explanations and let the astounding
statements he made, the amazing pictures he drew, cut their way
indelibly into her most sensitive and preserving memory.
Afterwards, at night, for the first time she did not weep for Pierre,
the old lost Pierre who had so changed into a torturer, but, wakeful,
her brain on fire, she pondered over and over the things she had just
heard, feeling after their meaning, laying aside for future
enlightenment what was utterly incomprehensible, arguing with herself
as to the truth of half-comprehended speeches--an ignorant child
wrestling with a modern philosophy, tricked out in motley by a ready
wit.
There were more personal memories that gave her a flush of pleasure,
for after midnight, as she was leaving him, he came near to her, took
her hand with a grateful "Joan, you've done so much for me to-night,
you've made me happy," and the request, "You won't put your hair back
to the old way, will you? You will wear pretty things, if I give them
to you, won't you?" in a beseeching spoiled-boy's voice, very amusing
and endearing to her.
He gave her the "pretty things," whole quantities of them, fine linen
to be made up into underwear, soft white and colored silks and
crepes, which Joan, remembering the few lessons in dressmaking she
had had from Maud Upper and with some advice from Prosper, made up not
too awkwardly, accepting the mystery of them as one of Prosper's
magic-makings. And, in the meantime, her education went on. Prosper
read aloud to her, gave her books to read to herself, questioned her,
tutored her, scolded her so fiercely sometimes that Joan would mount
scarlet cheeks and open angry eyes. One day she fairly flung her book
from her and ran out of the room, stamping her feet and shedding
tears. But back she came presently for more, thirsting for knowledge,
eager to meet her trainer on more equal grounds, to be able to answer
him to some purpose, to contradict him, to stagger ever so slightly
the self-assurance of his superiority.
And Prosper enjoyed the training of his captive leopardess, though he
sometimes all but melted over the pathos of her and had much ado to
keep his hands from her unconscious young beauty.
"You're so changed, Joan," he said one day abruptly. "You've grown as
thin as a reed, child; I can see every bone, and your eyes--don't you
ever shut them any more?"
Joan, prone on the skin before the fire, elbows on the fur, hands to
her temples, face bent over a book, looked up impatiently.
"I'd not be talkin' now if I was you, Mr. Gael. You had ought to be
writin' an' I'm readin'. I can't talk an' read; seems when I do a
thing I just hed to _do_ it!"
Prosper laughed and returned chidden to his task, but he couldn't help
watching her, lying there in her blue frock across his floor, like a
tall, thin Magdalene, all her rich hair fallen wildly about her face.
She was such a child, such a child!
CHAPTER XIV
JOAN RUNS AWAY
It was a January night when Joan, her rough head almost in the ashes,
had read "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" by the light of flames. It
was in March, a gray, still afternoon, when, looking through Prosper's
bookcase, she came upon the tale again.
Prosper was outdoors cutting a tunnel, freshly blocked with snow, and
Joan, having finished the "Life of Cellini," a writer she loathed, but
whose gorgeous fabrications her master had forced her to read, now
hurried to the book-shelves in search of something more to her taste.
She had the gay air of a holiday-seeker, returned "Cellini" with a
smart push, and kneeling, ran her finger along the volumes, pausing on
a binding of bright blue-and-gold. It was the color that had pleased
her and the fat, square shape, also the look of fair and well-spaced
type. She took the book and squatted on the rug happy as a child with
a new toy of his own choosing.
And then she opened her volume in its middle and her eye looked upon
familiar lines--
"So the two brothers and their murdered man--" Joan's heart fell like a
leaden weight and the color dropped from her face. In an instant she was
back in Pierre's room and the white night circled her in great silence
and she was going over the story of her love and Pierre's--their love,
their beautiful, grave, simple love that had so filled her life. And now
where was she? In the house of the man who had killed her husband! She
had been waiting for Holliwell, but for a long while now she had
forgotten that. Why was she still here? A strange, guilty terror came
with the question. She looked down at the soft, yellow crepe of the
dress she had just made and she looked at her hands lying white and fine
and useless, and she felt for the high comb Prosper had put into her
hair. Then she stared around the gorgeous little room, snug from the
world, so secret in its winter canyon. She heard Wen Ho's incessant
pattering in the kitchen, the crunch and thud of Prosper's shoveling
outside. It was suddenly a horrible nightmare, or less a nightmare than
a dream, pleasant in the dreaming, but hideous to an awakened mind. She
was awake. Isabella's story had thrown her mind, so abruptly dislocated,
back to a time before the change, back to her old normal condition of a
young wife. That little homestead of Pierre's! Such a hunger opened in
her soul that she bent her head and moaned. She could think of nothing
now but those two familiar, bare, clean rooms--Pierre's gun, Pierre's
rod, her own coat there by the door, the snowshoes. There was no place
in her mind for the later tragedy. She had gone back of it. She would
rather be alone in her own home, desolate though it was, than anywhere
else in all the homeless world.
And what could prevent her from going? She laughed aloud,--a short,
defiant laugh,--rippled to her feet, and, in her room, took off
Prosper's "pretty things" and got into her own old clothes; the coarse
underwear, the heavy stockings and boots, the rough skirt, the man's
shirt. How loosely they all hung! How thin she was! Now into her coat,
her woolen cap down over her ears, her gloves--she was ready, her
heart laboring like an exhausted stag's, her knees trembling, her
wrists mysteriously absent. She went into the hall, found her
snowshoes, bent to tie them on, and, straightening up, met Prosper who
had come in out of the snow.
He was glowing from exercise, but at sight of her and her pale
excitement, the glow left him and his face went bleak and grim. He put
out his hand and caught her by the arm and she backed from him against
the wall--this before either of them spoke.
"Where are you going, Joan?"
"I'm a-goin' home."
He let go of her arm. "You were going like this, without a word to
me?"
"Mr. Gael," she panted, "I had a feelin' like you wouldn't 'a' let me
go."
He turned, threw open the door, and stepped aside. She confronted his
white anger.
"Mr. Gael, I left Pierre dead. I've been a-waitin' for Mr. Holliwell
to come. I'm strong now. I must be a-goin' home." Suddenly, she blazed
out: "You killed my man. What hev I to do with you?"
He bowed. Her breast labored and all the distress of her soul,
troubled by an instinctive, inarticulate consciousness of evil,
wavered in her eyes. Her reason already accused her of ingratitude and
treachery, but every fiber of her had suddenly revolted. She was all
for liberty, she must have it.
He was wise, made no attempt to hold her, let her go; but, as she fled
under the firs, her webs sinking deep into the heavy, uncrusted snow,
he stood and watched her keenly. He had not failed to notice the
trembling of her body, the quick lift and fall of her breast, the
rapid flushing and paling of her face. He let her go.
And Joan ran, drawing recklessly on the depleted store of what had
always been her inexhaustible strength. The snow was deep and soft,
heavy with moisture, the March air was moist, too, not keen with frost,
and the green firs were softly dark against an even, stone-colored sky
of cloud. To Joan's eyes, so long imprisoned, it was all astonishingly
beautiful, clean and grave, part of the old life back to which she was
running. Down the canyon trail she floundered, her short skirt
gathering a weight of snow, her webs lifting a mass of it at every
tugging step. Her speed perforce slackened, but she plodded on, out of
breath and in a sweat. She was surprised at the weakness; put it down
to excitement. "I was afeered he'd make me stay," she said, and, "I've
got to go. I've got to go." This went with her like a beating rhythm.
She came to the opening in the firs, the foot of the steep trail, and
out there stretched the valley, blank snow, blank sky, here and there a
wooded ridge, then a range of lower hills, blue, snow-mottled; not a
roof, not a thread of smoke, not a sound.
"I'm awful far away," Joan whispered to herself, and, for the first
time in her life, she doubted her strength. "I don't rightly know
where I am." She looked back. There stood a high, familiar peak, but
so were the outlines of these mountains jumbled and changed that she
could not tell if Prosper's canyon lay north or south of Pierre's
homestead. The former was high up on the foothills, and Pierre's was
well down, above the river. From where she stood, there was no
river-bed in sight. She tried to remember the journey, but nothing
came to her except a confused impression of following, following,
following. Had they gone toward the river first and then turned north
or had they traveled close to the base of the giant range? The
ranger's cabin where they had spent the night, surely that ought to be
visible. If she went farther out, say beyond the wooded spur which
shut the mountain country from her sight, perhaps she would find
it.... She braced her quivering muscles and went on. The end of the
jutting foothills seemed to crawl forward with her. She plunged into
drifts, struggled up; sometimes the snow-plane seemed to stand up like
a wall in front of her, the far hills lolling like a dragon along its
top. She could not keep the breath in her lungs. Often she sank down
and rested; when things grew steady she got up and worked on. Each
time she rested, she crouched longer; each time made slower progress;
and always the goal she had set herself, the end of that jutting hill,
thrust itself out, nosed forward, sliding down to the plain. It began
to darken, but Joan thought that her sight was failing. The enormous
efforts she was making took every atom of her will. At last her
muscles refused obedience, her laboring heart stopped. She stood a
moment, swayed, fell, and this time she made no effort to rise. She
had become a dark spot on the snow, a lifeless part of the loneliness
and silence.
Above her, where the sharp peaks touched the clouds, there came a
widening rift showing a cold, turquoise clarity. The sun was just
setting and, as the cloud-banks lifted, strong shadows, intensely
blue, pointed across the plain of snow. A small, black, energetic
figure came out from among the firs and ran forward where the longest
shadow pointed. It looked absurdly tiny and anxious; futile, in its
pigmy haste, across the exquisite stillness. Joan, lying so still, was
acquiescent; this little striving thing rebelled. It came forward
steadily, following Joan's uneven tracks, stamping them down firmly to
make a solid path, and, as the sun dropped, leaving an immense
gleaming depth of sky, he came down and bent over the black speck that
was Joan....
Prosper took her by the shoulder and turned her over a little in the
snow. Joan opened her eyes and looked at him. It was the dumb look of
a beaten dog.
"Get up, child," he said, "and come home with me."
She struggled to her feet, he helping her; and silently, just as a
savage woman, no matter what her pain, will follow her man, so Joan
followed the track he had made by pressing the snow down triply over
her former steps. "Can you do it?" he asked once, and she nodded. She
was pale, her eyes heavy, but she was glad to be found, glad to be
saved. He saw that, and he saw a dawning confusion in her eyes. At the
end he drew her arm into his, and, when they came into the house, he
knelt and took the snowshoes from her feet, she drooping against the
wall. He put a hand on each of her shoulders and looked reproach.
"You wanted to leave me, Joan? You wanted to leave me, as much as
that?"
She shook her head from side to side, then, drawing away, she stumbled
past him into the room, dropped to the bearskin rug, and held out her
hands to the flames. "It's awful good to be back," she said, and fell
to sobbing. "I didn't think you'd be carin'--I was thinkin' only of
old things. I was homesick--me that has no home."
Her shaken voice was so wonderful a music that he stood listening with
sudden tears in his eyes.
"An' I can't ferget Pierre nor the old life, Mr. Gael, an' when I
think 't was you that killed him, why, it breaks my heart. Oh, I know
you hed to do it. I saw. An' I know I couldn't 'a' stayed with him no
more. What he did, it made me hate him--but you can't be thinkin' how
it was with Pierre an' me before that night. We--we was happy. I ust
to live with my father, Mr. Gael, an' he was an awful man, an' there
was no lovin' between us, but when I first seen Pierre lookin' up at
me, I first knowed what lovin' might be like. I just came away with
him because he asked me. He put his hand on my arm an' said, 'Will you
be comin' home with me, Joan Carver?' That was the way of it.
Somethin' inside of me said, 'Yes,' fer all I was too scairt to do
anything but look at him an' shake my head. An' the next mornin' he
was there with his horses. Oh, Mr. Gael, I can't ferget him, even for
hatin'. That brand on my shoulder, it's all healed, but my heart's so
hurted, it's so hurted. An' when I come to thinkin' of how kind an'
comfortin' you are an' what you've been a-doin' fer me, why, then, at
the same time, I can't help but thinkin' that you killed my Pierre.
You killed him. Fergive me, please; I would love you if I could, but
somethin' makes me shake away from you--because Pierre's dead."
Again she wept, exhausted, broken-hearted weeping it was. And
Prosper's face was drawn by pity of her. That story of her life and
love, it was a sort of saga, something as moving as an old ballad most
beautifully sung. He half-guessed then that she had genius; at least,
he admitted that it was something more than just her beauty and her
sorrow that so greatly stirred him. To speak such sentences in such a
voice--that was a gift. She had no more need of words than had a
symphony. The varied and vibrant cadences of her voice gave every
delicate shading of feeling, of thought. She was utterly expressive.
All night, after he had seen her eat and sent her to her bed, the
phrases of her music kept repeating themselves in his ears. "An' so I
first knowed what lovin' might be like"; and, "I would love you, only
somethin' makes me shake away from you--because Pierre's dead." This
was a Joan he had not yet realized, and he knew that after all his
enchanted leopardess was a woman and that his wooing of her had hardly
yet begun. So did she baffle him by the utter directness of her heart.
There was so little of a barrier against him and yet--there was so
much. For the first time, he doubted his wizardry, and, at that, his
desire for the wild girl's love stood up like a giant and gripped his
soul.
Joan slept deeply without dreams; she had confessed herself. But
Prosper was as restless and troubled as a youth. She had not made her
escape; she had followed him home with humility, with confusion in her
eyes. She had been glad to hold out her hands again to the fire on his
hearth. And yet--he was now her prisoner.
CHAPTER XV
NERVES AND INTUITION
"Mr. Gael," said Joan standing before him at the breakfast-table, "I'm
a-goin' to work."
She was pale, gaunt, and imperturbable. He gave her a quick look, one
that turned to amusement, for Joan was really as appealing to his
humor as a child. She had such immense gravity, such intensity over
her one-syllable statements of fact. She announced this decision and
sat down.
"Woman's work?" he asked her, smiling quizzically.
"No, sir," with her own rare smile; "I ain't rightly fitted for that."
"Certainly not in those clothes," he murmured crossly, for she was
dressed again in her own things.
"I'm a-goin' to do man's work. I'm a-goin' to shovel snow an' help
fetch wood an' kerry in water. You tell your Chinese man, please."
"And you're not going to read or study any more?"
"Yes, sir. I like that. If you still want to teach me, Mr. Gael. But
I'm a-goin'--I'm _going_--to get some action. I'll just die if I
don't. Why, I'm so poor I can't hardly lift a broom. I don't know why
I'm so miserably poor, Mr. Gael."
She twisted her brows anxiously.
"You've had a nervous breakdown."
"A _what?_"
"A nervous breakdown."
He lit his cigarette and watched her in his usual lazy, smoke-veiled
manner, but she might have noticed the shaken fabric of his
self-assurance.
"Say, now," said Joan, "what's that the name for?"
"There's a book about it over there--third volume on the top
shelf--look up your case."
With an air of profound alarm, she went over and took it out.
"There's books about everything, ain't there?--isn't there,--Mr. Gael?
Why, there's books about lovin' an' about sickness an' about cattle
an' what-not, an' about women an' children--" She was shirking the
knowledge of her "case," but at last she pressed her lips together and
opened the book. She fell to reading, growing anxiety possessed her
face, she sat down on the nearest chair, she turned page after page.
Suddenly she gave him a look of anger.
"I ain't none of this, Mr. Gael," she said, smote the page, rose with
dignity, and returned the book.
He laughed so long and heartily that she was at last forced to join
him. "You was--you were--jobbin' me, wasn't you?" she said, sighing
relief. "Did you know what that volume said? It said like this--I'll
read you about it--" She took the volume, found the place and read in a
low tone of horror, he helping her with the hard words: "'One of the
most frequent forms of phobia, common in cases of psychic neurasthenia,
is agrophobia in which patients the moment they come into an open space
are oppressed by an exaggerated feeling of anxiety. They may break into
a profuse perspiration and assert that they feel as if chained to the
ground....' And here, listen to this, 'batophobia, the fear that high
things will fall, atrophobia, fear of thunder and lightning,
pantophobia, the fear of every thing and every one'.... Well, now,
ain't that too awful? An' you mean folks really get that way?"
Their talk was for some time of nervous diseases, Joan's horror
increasing.
"Well, sir," said she, "lead me out an' shoot me if I get anyways like
that! I believe it's caused by all that queer dressin' an' what-not. I
feel like somethin' _real_ to-day in this shirt an' all, an' when I
get through some work I'll feel a whole lot better. Don't you say I'm
one of those nervous breakdowns again, though, will you?" she pleaded.
"No, I won't, Joan. But don't make one of me, will you?"
"How's that?"
"By wearing those clothes all day and half the night. If you expect me
to teach you, you'll have to do something for me, to make up for
running away. You might put on pretty things for dinner, don't you
think? Your nervous system could stand that?"
"My nervous system," drawled Joan, and added startlingly, for she did
not often swear, "God!" It was an oath of scorn, and again Prosper
laughed.
But he heard with a sort of terror the sound of her "man's work" to
which she energetically applied herself. It meant the return of her
strength, of her independence. It meant the shortening of her
captivity. Before long spring would rush up the canyon in a wave of
melting snow, crested with dazzling green, and the valley would lie
open to Joan. She would go unless--had he really failed so utterly to
touch her heart? Was she without passion, this woman with the deep,
savage eyes, the lips, so sensuous and pure, the body so magnificently
made for living? She was not defended by any training, she had no
moral standards, no prejudices, none of the "ideals." She was
completely open to approach, a savage. If he failed, it was a personal
failure. Perhaps he had been too subtle, too restrained. She did not
yet know, perhaps, what he desired of her. But he was afraid of
rousing her hatred, which would be fully as simple and as savage as
her love. That evening, after she had dressed to please him, and sat
in her chair, tired, but with the beautiful, clean look of outdoor
weariness on her face, and tried, battling with drowsiness, to give
her mind to his reading and his talk, he was overmastered by his
longing and came to her and knelt down, drawing down her hands to him,
pressing his forehead on them.
For a moment she was stiff and still, then, "What is it, Mr. Gael?"
she asked in a frightened half-voice.
He felt, through her body, the slight recoil of spirit, and drew away,
and arose to his feet.
"You're angry?"
He laughed.
"Oh, no. I'm not angry; why should I be? I'm a superman. I'm
made--let's say--of alabaster. Women with great eyes and wonderful
voices and the beauty of broad-browed nymphs walking gravely down
under forest arches, such women give me only a great, great longing to
read aloud very slowly and carefully a 'Child's History of the English
Race'!" He took the book, tossed it across the room, then stood,
ashamed and defiant, laughing a little, a boy in disgrace.
Joan looked at him in profound bewilderment and dawning distress.
"Now," she said, "you _are_ angry with me. You always are when you
talk that queer way. Won't you please explain it to me, Mr. Gael?"
"No!" said he sharply. "I won't." And he added after a moment, "You'd
better go to bed. You're sleepy and as stupid as an owl."
"Oh!"
"Yes. And you've destroyed what little superstitious belief I had left
concerning something they tell little ignorant boys about a woman's
intuition. You haven't got a bit. You're stupid and I'm tired of
you--No, Joan, I'm not. Don't mind me. I'm only in fun. Please! Damn!
I've hurt your feelings."
Her lips were quivering, her eyes full. "I try so awful hard," she
said. It was a lovely, broken trail of music.
He bent over her and patted her shoulder. "Dear child! Joan, I won't
be so disagreeable again. Only, don't you ever think of me?"
"Yes, yes; all the while I'm thinking of you. I wisht I could do more
for you. Why do I make you so angry? I know I'm awful--awfully stupid
and ignorant. I--I must drive you most crazy, but truly"--here she
turned quickly in his arm and put her hands about his neck and laid
her cheek against his shoulder--"truly, Mr. Gael, I'm awful fond of
you." Then she drew quickly away, quivered back into the other corner
of her great chair, put her face to her hands. "Only--I can't help
seein'--Pierre."
Just her tone showed him that still and ghastly youth, and again he
saw the brown hand that moved. He had stood between her and that
sight. The man ought to have died. He did not deserve his life nor
this love of hers. Even though he had failed to kill the man, he would
not fail to kill her love for him, sooner or later, thought Prosper.
If only the hateful spring would give him time. He must move her from
her memory. She had put her hands about his neck, she had laid her
head against his shoulder, and, if it had been the action of a child,
then she would not have started from him with that sharp memory of
Pierre.
CHAPTER XVI
THE TALL CHILD
There were times, even now, when Prosper tried to argue himself back
into sardonic self-possession. "Pooh!" said his brain, "you were
beside yourself over a loss and then you were shut in for months of
winter alone with this mountain girl, so naturally you are off your
balance." He would school himself while Joan shoveled outdoors. He
would try to see her with critical, clear eyes when she strode in. But
one look at her and he was bemused again. For now she was at a great
height of beauty, vivid with growing strength and purpose, her lips
calm and scarlet, her eyes bright and hopeful. In fact, Joan had made
her plans. She would wait till spring, partly to get back her full
strength, partly to make further progress in her studies, but mostly
in order not to hurt this hospitable Prosper Gael. The naivete of
her gratitude, of her delicate consideration for his feelings, which
continually triumphed over an instinctive fear, would have filled him
with amusement, perhaps with compunction, had he been capable of
understanding them. She was truly sorry that she had hurt him by
running away. She told herself she would not do that again. In the
spring she would make him a speech of thankfulness and of farewell,
and then she would tramp back to Pierre's homestead and win and hold
Pierre's land. As yet, you see, Prosper entered very little into her
conscious life. Somewhere, far down in her, there was a disturbance, a
growing doubt, a something vague and troubling.... Joan had not learnt
to probe her own heart. A sensation was not, or it was. She was
puzzled by the feeling Prosper was beginning to cause her, a feeling
of miserable complexity; but she was not yet mentally equipped for the
confronting of complexity. It was necessary for an emotion to rush at
Joan and throw down, as it were, her heart before she recognized it;
even then she might not give it a name. She would act, however, and
with violence.
So now she planned and worked and grew beautiful with work and
planning, while Prosper curbed his passion and worked, too, and his
instruments were delicate and deadly and his plans made no account of
hers. Every word he read to her, every note he played for her, had its
calculated effect. He worked on her subconsciousness, undermining her
path, and at nights and in her sleep she grew aware of him.
But even now, in his cool and passionate heart there were moments of
reaction, one at last that came near to wrecking his purpose.
"Your clothes are about done for, Joan," Prosper laughed one morning,
watching her belt in her tattered shirt; "you'll soon look like
Cophetua's beggar maid."
"I'm not quite barefoot yet." She held up a cracked boot.
"Joan--" He hesitated an instant, then got up from his desk, walked to
a window, and looked out at the bright morning. The lake was ruffled
with wind, the firs tossed, there were patches of brown-needled earth
under his window; his eyes were startled by a strip of green where
tiny yellow flowers trod on the very edge of the melting drift. The
window was open to soft, tingling air that smelt of snow and of sun,
of pines, of growing grass, of sap, of little leaf-buds. The birds
were in loud chorus. For several minutes Prosper stared and listened.
"What is it, Mr. Gael?" asked Joan patiently.
He started. "Oh," he said without looking at her again, "I was going
to tell you that there are a skirt and a sort of coat in--in a closet
in the hall. Do you want to use them?"
She went out to look. In five minutes--he had gone back to his work at
the desk--he heard her laugh, and, still laughing, she opened the door
again.
"Oh, Mr. Gael, were you really thinking that I could wear these?
Look."
He turned and looked at her. She had crowded her strong, lithe frame
into a brown tweed suit, a world too narrow for her, and she was
laughing heartily at herself and had come in to show him the misfit.
"These things, Mr. Gael," she said,--"they must have been made for a
tall child."
Prosper had too far tempted his pain, and in her vivid phrase it came
to life before him. She had painted a startling picture and he had
seen that suit, so small and trim, before.
Joan saw his face grow white, his eyes stared through her. He drew a
quick breath and winced away from her, hiding his face in his hands. A
moment later he was weeping convulsively, with violence, his head down
between his hands. Joan started toward him, but he made a wicked and
repellent gesture. She fled into her room and sat, bewildered, on her
bed.
All at once the question came to her: for whom had the delicate
fabrics been bought, for whom had this suit been made? "It was his
wife and she is dead," thought Joan, and very pitifully she took off
the suit, laid it and the other things away, and sitting by her window
rested her chin in her hands and stared out through the blue pines.
Tears ran down her face because she was so sorry for Prosper's pain.
And again, thought Joan, she had caused it, she who owed him
everything. Yes, she was deeply sorry for Prosper, deeply; her whole
heart was stirred. For the first time she had a longing to comfort him
with her hands.
For all that day Prosper fled the house and went across the country,
now fording a flood of melted snow, now floundering through a drift,
now walking on springy sod, unaware of the soft spring, conscious only
of a sort of fire in his breast. He suffered and he resented his
suffering, and he would have killed his heart if, by so doing, he
could have given it peace. And all day he did not once think of Joan,
but only of the "tall child" for whom the gay canyon refuge had been
built, but who had never set her slim foot upon its threshold. Sunset
found him miles away in the foothills of a low, many-folded range
across the plain. He was dog tired, so that for very exhaustion his
brain had stopped its tormenting work. He lit a fire and sat by it,
huddled in his coat, smoking, dozing, not able really to sleep for
cold and hunger. The bright stars, flung all about the sky, mildly
regarded hum. Coyotes mourned their loneliness and hunger near and
far, and once, in the broken woods above him, a mountain lion gave its
blood-curdling scream. Prosper hated the night and its beautiful
desolation, he hated the God that had made this land. He cursed the
dawn when it came delicately, spreading a green arc of radiance across
the east. And then, as he arose stiffly, stamped out his fire, and
started slowly on his way back, he was conscious of a passionate
homesickness, not for the old life he had lost, but for his cabin, his
bright hearth, his shut-in solitude, his Joan. Very dear and real and
human she was, and her laughter had been sweet. He had shocked it to
silence, he had repulsed her comforting hands. She had been so
innocent of any desire to hurt him. He could not imagine her ever
hurting any one, this broad-browed Joan. She was so kind. And now she
must be anxious about him. She would have sat up by the fire all
night.... His eagerness for her slighted comfort gave his lagging
steps a certain vigor, the long walk back seemed very long, indeed.
Noon was hot, but he found water and by sundown he came to the canyon
trail. He wanted Joan as badly now as a hurt child wants its mother.
He came, haggard and breathless, to the door, called "Joan," came into
the warm little room and found it empty. Wen Ho, to be sure, pattered
to meet him.
"Mister Gael been gone a long time, velly long, all night. Wen Ho, he
fix bed, fix breakfast--oh, the lady? She gone out yestiddy, not come
back. She leave a letter for him, there on the table."
Prosper took it, waved Wen Ho out, and, dropping into the big chair,
opened the paper. There was Joan's big handwriting, that he himself
had taught her. Before she could only sign her name.
_Mister Gael, dere frend,_--
You have ben too good to me an it has ben too hard for you to
keep me when you were all the wile amissin her an it hurts me to
think of how it must have ben terrible hard for you all this
winter to see me where you had ben ust to seem her an me wearin
her pretty things all the wile. Now dere frend this must not be
no more. I will not stay to trouble you. You have ben awful
free-hearted. When you come back from your wanderin an tryin to
get over your bein so unhappy you will find your house quiet an
peaceful an you will not be hurt by me no more. I am not able to
say all I am feelin about your goodness an I hev not always ben
as kind to you in my thoughts an axions but that has ben my own
fault not yours. I want you to beleave this, Mister Gael. I am
goin back to Pierre's ranch to work on his land an some day I
will be hopin to see you come ridin in an I will keep on learnin
as well as I can an mebbe you will not be ashamed of me. I feel
awful bad to go but I would feel more bad to stay when it must
hurt you so. Respectably
JOAN
There were blistered spots above that pathetic, mistaken signature.
The poor girl had meant to sign herself "Respectfully," and somehow
that half-broke his heart.
He drank the strong coffee Wen Ho brought for him, two great cups of
it, and he ate a piece of broiled elk meat. Then he went out again and
walked rapidly down the trail. It was not yet dark; the world was in a
soft glow of rose and violet, opalescent lights. The birds were
singing in a hundred chantries. And there, through the firs, a sight
to stop his heart, Joan came walking toward him, graceful, free, a
swinging figure, bareheaded, her rags girded beautifully about her.
And up and up to him she came soundlessly over the pine needles and
through the wet snow-patches, looking at him steadfastly and tenderly,
without a smile. She came and stood before him, still without dropping
her sad, grave look.
"Mr. Gael," she said, "I hev come back. I got out yonder an'"--her
breast heaved and a sort of terror came into her eyes--"an' the world
was awful lonely. There ain't a creature out yonder to care fer me,
fer me to care fer. It seemed like as if it was all dead. I couldn't
abear it."
She put out her hand wistfully asking for pity, but he fell upon his
knees and wrapped his hungry arms about her. "Joan," he sobbed, "Joan!
Don't leave me. Don't--I couldn't bear it!" He looked up at her, his
worn face wet with tears. "Don't leave me, Joan! I want you. Don't you
understand?"
Her deep gray eyes filled slowly with light, she put a hand on either
side of his face and bent her lips to his. "I never thought you'd be
wantin' _me_," she said.
CHAPTER XVII
CONCERNING MARRIAGE
And it was spring-time; these prisoners of frost were beautifully
sensitive. They, too, with the lake and the aspens and the earth, the
seeds and the beasts, had suffered the season of interment. In such
fashion Nature makes possible the fresh undertakings of last summer's
reckless prodigals; she drives them into her mock tomb and freezes
their hearts--it is a little rest of death--so that they wake like
turbulent bacchantes drunk with sleep and with forgetfulness. Love,
spring says, is an eternal fact, welcome its new manifestations.
Remating bluebirds built their nests near Joan's window; they were not
troubled by sad recollections of last year's nests nor the young birds
that flew away. It was another life, a resurrection. If they remembered
at all, they remembered only the impulses of pleasure; they had
somewhere before learned how to love, how to build; the past summers
had given practice to their singing little throats and to their rapid
wings. No ghosts forbade happiness and no God--man-voiced--saying,
because he knew the ugly human aftermaths, hard sayings of "Be ye
perfect."
What counsel was theirs for Joan and what had her human mentor taught
her? He had taught her in one form or another the beauty of passion and
its eternal sinlessness, for that was his sincere belief. By music he
had taught her, by musical speech, by the preaching of heathen sage and
the wit of modern arguers. He had given her all the moral schooling she
had ever had and its golden rule was, "Be ye beautiful and generous."
Joan was both beautiful and made for giving, "free-hearted" as she
might herself have said, Friday's child as the old rhyme has it,--and
to cry out to her with love, saying, "I want you, Joan," was just,
sooner or later, to see her turn and bend her head and hold out her
arms. Prosper had the reward of patience; his wild leopardess was tamed
to his hand and her sweetness made him tender and very merciful.
Their gay, little house stood open all day while they explored the
mountains and plunged into the lake, choosing the hot hour of noon.
Joan made herself mistress of the house and did her woman's work at
last of tidying and beautifying and decking corners with gorgeous
branches of blossoms while Prosper worked at his desk. He was happy;
the reality of Joan's presence had laid his ghost just as the reality
of his had laid hers. His work went on magically and added the glow of
successful creation to the glow of satisfied desire. And his sin of
deceit troubled him very little, for he had worked out that problem
and had decided that Pierre, dead or alive, was unworthy of this mate.
But sometimes in her sleep Joan would start and moan feeling the touch
of the white-hot iron on her shoulder. Her hatred of Pierre's cruelty,
her resolution to be done with him forever, must have vividly renewed
itself in those dreams, for she would cling to Prosper like a
frightened child, and wake, trembling, happy to find herself safe in
his arms.
So they lived their spring. Wen Ho, the silent and inscrutable, went
out of the valley for provisions, and during his absence Joan queened
it in the kitchen. She was learning to laugh, to see the absurd,
delightful twists of daily living, to mock Prosper's oddities as he
mocked hers. She was learning to be a comrade and she was learning
better speech and more exquisite ways. It was inevitable that she
should learn. Prosper, in these days, spent his whole soul upon her,
fed her with music and delight, and he trained her to sing her sagas so
that every day her voice gained in power and flexible sweetness. She
would sing, since he told her to, her voice beating its wings against
the walls of the house or ringing down the canyon in untrammeled
flight. Prosper was lost in wonder of her, in a passionate admiration
for his own handiwork. He was making, here in this God-forsaken
solitude, a thing of marvel; what he was making surely justified the
means. Joan's laughable simplicity and directness were the same; they
were part of her essence; no civilizing could confuse or disturb them;
but she changed, her brain grew, it absorbed material, it attempted
adventures. Nowadays Joan sometimes argued, and this filled Prosper
with delight, so quaint and logical she was and so skillful.
They were reading out under the firs by the green lip of the lake,
when Wen Ho led his pack-horse up the trail. He had been gone a month,
for Prosper had sent him out of the valley to a distant town for his
supplies. He didn't want the little frontier place to prick up its
ears. Wen Ho had ridden by a secret trail back over the range; he had
not passed even the ranger station on his way. He called out, and, in
the midst of a sentence Joan was reading, Prosper started up.
Joan looked at him smiling. "You're as easily turned away from
learning as a boy," she began, and faltered when she saw his face. It
was turned eagerly toward the climbing horses, toward the pack, and it
was sharp and keen with detached interest, an excitement that had
nothing, nothing in the world to do with her.
It was the great bundle of Prosper's mail that first brought home to
Joan the awareness of an outside world. She knew that Prosper was a
traveled and widely experienced man, but she had not fancied him held
to this world by human attachments. Concerning the "tall child" she
had not put a question and she still believed her to have been
Prosper's wife. But when, leaving her place under the tree, she came
into the house and found Prosper feverishly slitting open envelope
after envelope, with a pile of papers and magazines, ankle-high,
beside him on the floor, she stood aghast.
"What a lot of people must have been writing to you, Prosper!"
He did not hear her. He was greedy of eye and fingertips, searching
written sheet after sheet. He was flushed along the cheek-bones and a
little pale about the lips. Joan stood there, her hands hanging, her
head bent, staring up and out at him from under her brows. She looked,
in this attitude, rather dangerous.
Prosper sped through his mail, made an odd gesture of desperation, sat
still a moment staring, his brilliant, green-gray eyes gone dull and
blank, then he gave himself a shuddery shake, pulled a small parcel
from under the papers, and held it out to Joan. He smiled.
"Something for you, leopardess," he said--he had told her his first
impression of her.
She took the box haughtily and walked with it over to her chair. But
he came and kissed her.
"Jealous of my mail? You foolish child. What a girl-thing you are! It
doesn't matter, does it, how we train you or leave you untrained,
you're all alike, you women, under your skins. Open your box and thank
me prettily, and leave matters you don't understand alone. That's the
way to talk, isn't it?"
She flushed and smiled rather doubtfully, but, at sight of his gift,
she forgot everything else for a moment. It was a collar of topaz and
emerald set in heavy silver. She was awe-struck by its beauty, and
went, after he had fastened it for her, to stand a long while before
the glass looking at it. She wore her yellow dress cut into a V at the
neck and the jewels rested beautifully at the base of her long, round
throat, faintly brown like her face up to the brow. The yellow and the
green brought out all the value of her grave, scarlet lips, the soft,
even tints of her skin, the dark lights and shadows of her hair and
eyes.
"It's beautiful," she said. "It's wonderful. I love it."
All the time very grave and still, she took it off, put it on its box,
and laid it on the mantel. Then she went out of doors.
Prosper hurried to the window and saw her walk out to the garden they
had made and begin her work. He was puzzled by her manner, but
presently shrugged the problem of her mood away and went back to his
mail. That night he finished his novel and got it ready for the
publisher.
Again Wen Ho, calm and uncomplaining, was sent out over the hill, and
again the idyll was renewed, and Joan wore the collar and was almost
as happy as before. Only one night she startled Prosper.
"I asked Pierre," she said slowly, after a silence, in her low-pitched
voice, "when he was taking me away home, I asked, 'Where are you
going?' and he said to me, 'Don't you savvy the answer to that
question, Joan?' And, Prosper, I didn't savvy, so he told me and he
looked at me sort of hard and stern, 'We're a-goin' to be married,
Joan.'"
Prosper and Joan were sitting before the fire, Joan on the bearskin at
his feet, he lounging back, long-legged, smoke-veiled, in one of the
lacquered chairs. She had been fingering her collar and she kept on
fingering it as she spoke and staring straight into the flames, but,
at the last, quoting Pierre's words and tone, her voice and face
quivered and she looked at him with eyes of mysterious pain, in them a
sort of uncomprehended anguish.
"Why was that, Prosper?" she asked; "I mean, why did he say it that
way? And what--what does it stand for, marrying or not--?"
Prosper jerked a little in his chair, then said he blasphemously,
"Marriage is the sin against the Holy Ghost. Don't be the conventional
woman, Joan. Isn't this beautiful, this life of ours?"
"Yes." But her eyes of uncomprehended pain were still upon him. So he
put his hand over them and drew her head against his knee. "Yes, but
that other life was--was--before Pierre changed, it was beautiful--"
"Of course. Love is always beautiful. Not even marriage can always
spoil it, though it very often does. Well, Joan," he went on
flippantly, though the tickle of her lashes against his palm somehow
disturbed his flippancy, "I'll go into the subject with you one of
these days, when the weather isn't so beautiful. It's really a matter
of law, property rights, and so forth; a practice variously conducted
in various lands; it's man's most studied insult to woman; it's
recommended as the lesser of two evils by a man who despised woman as
only an Oriental can despise her, Saint Paul by name; it's a thing
civilized women cry for till they get it and then quite bitterly learn
to understand; it's a horrible invention which needn't touch your
beautiful clean soul, dear. Come out and look at the moon."
"Listen!" They stood side by side at the door. "Some silly bird thinks
that is the dawn. Look at me, Joan!"
She lifted obedient eyes.
"There! That's better. Don't get that other look. I can't bear it. I
love you."
A moment later they went out into the sweet, silver silence down to
the silver lake.
* * * * *
Four months later the name of Prosper Gael began to be on every one's
lips, and before every one's eyes; the world, his world, began to
clamor for him. Even Wen Ho grumbled at this going out on tremendous
journeys after the mail for which Prosper grew more and more greedy and
impatient. His novel, "The Canyon," had been accepted, was enormously
advertised, had made an extraordinary success. All this he explained to
Joan, who tried to rejoice because she saw that it was exquisite
delight to Prosper. He was by way of thinking now that his exile, his
Wyoming adventure, was to thank for his success, but when a woman, even
such a woman as Joan, begins to feel that she has been a useful
emotional experience, there begins pain. For Joan pain began and daily
it increased. It was suffering for her to watch Prosper reading his
letters, forwarded to him from the Western town where his friends and
his secretary believed him to be recovering from some nervous illness;
to watch him smoking and thinking of himself, his fame, his talents,
his future; to watch him scribbling notes, planning another work, to
hear his excited talk, now so impersonal, so unrelated to her; to see
how his eagerness over her education slackened, faltered, died; to
notice that he no longer watched the changeful humors of her beauty nor
cared if she wore bronze or blue or yellow; and worst of all, to find
him staring at her sometimes with a worried, impatient look which
scuttled out of sight like some ugly, many-legged creature when it met
her own eyes--painful, of course, yet such an old story. Joan, who had
never heard of such experience, did not foresee the inevitable end,
and, in so much, she was spared. The extra pain of forfeiting her
dignity and self-respect did not touch her, for she made none of those
most pitiful, unavailing efforts to hold him, to cling; did not even
pretend indifference. She only drew gradually into herself, shrinking
from her pain and from him as the cause of it; she only lost her glow
of love-happiness, her face seemed dwindled, seemed to contract, and
that secret look of a wild animal returned to her gray eyes. She
quietly gave up the old regulations of their life; she did not remind
him of the study-hours, the music-hours, the hours of wild outdoor
play. She read under the firs, alone; she studied faithfully, alone;
she climbed and swam, alone--or with his absent-minded, fitful company;
she worked in her garden, alone. At night, when he was asleep, she lay
with her hand pressed against her heart, staring at the darkness,
listening to the night, waiting. Curiously enough, his inevitable
returns of passion and interest, the always decreasing flood-mark, each
time a line lower, did not deceive her, did not distract her. She never
expressed her trouble, even to herself. She did not give it any words.
She took her pain without wincing, without complaint, and when he
seemed to need her in any little way, in any big way, she gave because
she could not help it, because she had promised him largesse, because
it was her nature to give. Besides, although she was instinctively
waiting, she did not foresee the end.
It was in late October when, somewhere in the pile of Prosper's mail,
there lay a small gray envelope. Joan drew his attention to it,
calling it a "queer little letter," and he took it up slowly as though
his deft and nervous fingers had gone numb. Before he opened it he
looked at Joan and, in one sense, it was the last time he ever did
look at her; for at that moment his stark spirit looked straight into
hers, acknowledged its guilt, and bade her a mute and remorseful
farewell.
He read and Joan watched. His face grew pale and bright as though some
electric current had been turned into his veins; his eyes, looking up
from the writing, but not returning to her, had the look given by some
drug which is meant to stupefy, but which taken in an overdose
intoxicates. He turned and made for the door, holding the little gray
folded paper in his hand. On the threshold he half-faced her without
lifting his eyes.
"I have had extraordinary news, Joan. I shall have to go off alone and
think things out. I don't know when I shall get back." He went out and
shut the door gently.
Joan stood listening. She heard him go along the passage and through
the second door. She heard his feet on the mountain trail. Afterwards
she went out and stood between the two sentinel firs that had marked
the entrance to that snow-tunnel long since disappeared. Now it was a
late October day, bright as a bared sword. The flowers of the Indian
paint-brush burned like red candle flames everywhere under the firs,
the fire-weed blazed, the aspen leaves were laid like little golden
tiles against the metallic blue of the sky. The high peak pointed up
dizzily and down, down dizzily into the clear emptiness of the lake.
This great peak stood there in the glittering stillness of the day. A
grouse boomed, but Joan was not startled by the sudden rush of its
wings. She felt the sharp weight of that silent mountain in her heart;
she might have been buried under it. So she felt it all day while she
worked, a desperate, bright day,--hideous in her memory,--and at night
she lay waiting. After hours longer than any other hours, the door of
her bedroom opened and an oblong of moonlight, as white as paper, fell
across the matted floor. Prosper stepped in noiselessly and walked
over to her bed. He stood a moment and she heard him swallow.
"You're awake, Joan?"
Her eyes were staring up at him, but she lay still.
"Listen, Joan." He spoke in short sentences, waiting between each for
some comment of hers which did not come. "I shall have to go away
to-morrow. I shall have to go away for some time. I don't want you to
be unhappy. I want you to stay here for a while if you will, for as
long as you want to stay. I am leaving you plenty of money. I will
write and explain it all very clearly to you. I know that you will
understand. Listen." Here he knelt and took her hands, which he found
lying cold and stiff under the cover, pressed against her heart. "I
have made you happy here in this little house, haven't I, Joan?"
She would not answer even this except by the merest flicker of her
eyelids.
"You have trusted me; now, trust me a little longer. My life is very
complicated. This beautiful year with you, the year you have given to
me, is just a temporary respite from--from all sorts of things. I've
taught you a great deal, Joan. I've healed the wound that brute made
on your shoulder and in your heart. I've taught you to be beautiful.
I've filled your mind with beauty. You are a wonderful woman. You'll
live to be grateful to me. Some day you'll tell me so."
Her quiet, curved lips moved. "Are you tellin' me good-bye, Prosper?"
It was impossible to lie to her. He bent his head.
"Yes, Joan."
"Then tell it quick and go out and leave me here to-night."
It was impossible to touch her. She might have been wrapped in white
fire. He found that though she had not stirred a finger, his hand had
shrunk away from hers. He got to his feet, all the cleverness which all
day long he had been weaving like a silk net to catch, to bewilder, to
draw away her brain from the anguish of full comprehension, was
shriveled. He stood and stared helplessly at her, dumb as a youth. And,
obedient, he went out and shut the door, taking the white patch of
moonlight with him.
So Joan, having waited, behind an obstinately locked door, for his
departure, came out at noon and found herself in the small, gay house
alone.
She sat in one of the lacquered chairs and saw after a long while that
the Chinaman was looking at her.
Wen Ho, it seemed, had been given instructions. He was to stay and
take care of the house and the lady for as long as she wanted it, or
him. Afterwards he was to lock up the house and go. He handed her a
large and bulky envelope which Joan took and let lie in her lap.
"You can go to-morrow, Wen Ho," she said.
"You no wait for Mr. Gael come back? He say he come back."
"No. I'm not going to wait. I guess"--here Joan twisted her mouth into
a smile--"I'm not one of the waiting kind. I'm a-going back to my own
ranch now. It won't seem so awful lonesome, perhaps, as I was thinking
last spring that it would."
She touched the envelope without looking at it.
"Is this money, Wen Ho?"
"I tink so, lady."
She held it, unopened, out to him.
"I will give it to you, then. I have no need of it."
She stood up.
"I am going out now to climb up this mountain back of the house so's I
can see just where I am. I'll come down to-night for dinner and
to-morrow after breakfast I'll be going away. You understand?"
"Lady, you mean give me all this money?" babbled the Chinaman.
"Yes," said Joan gravely; "I have no need of it."
She went past him with her swinging step.
She was coming down the mountain-side that evening, very tired, but
with the curious, peaceful stillness of heart that comes with an
entire acceptance of fate, when she heard the sound of horses' hoofs
in the hollow of the canyon. Her heart began to beat to suffocation.
She ran to where, standing near a big fir tree, she could look
straight down on the trail leading up to Prosper's cabin. Presently
the horsemen came in sight--the one that rode first was tall and broad
and fair, she could see under his hat-brim his straight nose and
firmly modeled chin.
"The sin-buster!" said Joan; then, looking at the other, who rode
behind him, she caught at the tree with crooked hands and began to
sink slowly to her knees. He was tall and slight, he rode with
inimitable grace. As she stared, he took off his sombrero, rested his
hand on the saddle-horn, and looked haggardly, eagerly, up the trail
toward the house. His face was whiter, thinner, worn by protracted
mental pain, but it was the beautiful, living face of Pierre.
Joan shrank back into the shadows of the pines, crouched for a few
minutes like a mortally wounded beast, then ran up the mountain-side
as though the fire that had once touched her shoulder had eaten its
way at last into her heart.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Book Two
THE ESTRAY
----------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOK TWO: The Estray
CHAPTER I
A WILD CAT
The Lazy-Y ranch-house, a one-storied building of logs, was built
about three sides of a paved court. In the middle of this court stood
a well with a high rustic top, and about this well on a certain
brilliant July night, a tall man was strolling with his hands behind
his back. It was a night of full moon, sailing high, which poured
whiteness into the court, making its cobbles embedded in the earth
look like milky bubbles and drawing clear-cut shadows of the well-top
and the gables and chimneys of the house. The man slowly circled the
court beginning close to the walls and narrowing till he made a loop
about the well, and then, reversing, worked in widening orbits as far
as the walls again. His wife, looking out at him through one of the
windows, thought that, in the moonlight, followed by his own squat,
active shadow, he looked like a huge spider weaving a web. This effect
was heightened by the fact that he never looked up. He was deep in
some plan to which it was impossible for her not to believe that the
curious pattern of his walk bore some relation.
From the northern wing of the ranch-house, strongly lighted, came a
tumult of sound; music, thumping feet, a man's voice chanting
couplets:
"Oh, you walk right through and you turn around
and swing the girl that finds you,
And you come right back by the same old track
and turn the girl behind you."
Some one was directing a quadrille in native fashion. There was much
laughter, confusion, and applause. None of this noise disturbed the
man. He did not look at the lighted windows. He might really have been
a gigantic insect entirely unrelated to the human creatures so noisily
near at hand.
A man came round the corner of the house, crossed the square, and,
lurching a little, made for the door of the lighted wing. Shortly
after his entrance the sound of music and dancing abruptly stopped.
This stillness gave the spider pause, but he was about to renew his
weaving, when, in the silence, a woman spoke.
"You, Mabel, don't you go home," she said.
She had not spoken loudly, but her voice beat against the walls of the
court as though it could have filled the whole moonlight night with
dangerous beauty. The listener outside lifted his head with a low,
startled exclamation. Suddenly the world was alive with adventure and
alarm.
"Mind your own business, you wild cat," answered a man's raucous
voice. "She's my wife, which is somethin' that your sort knows nothin'
about. Come on, you Mabel. You think that outlaw can keep me from
takin' home my wife, you're betting wrong."
Another silence; then the voice again, a little louder, as though the
speaker had stepped out into the center of the room.
"Mabel is not a-goin' home with you," it said; and the listener
outside threw back his head with the gesture of a man sensitive to
music who listens to some ecstatic melody. "She happens to be stoppin'
here with us to-night. You say that she's your wife, but that don't
mean that she belongs to you, body and soul, Bill Greer--not to you,
who don't possess your own body, or soul. Why, you can't keep your
feet steady, you can't pull your hand away from mine. You can't hold
your tipsy eyes on mine. Do you call that ownin' your own body? And as
fer your soul, it's a hell of rage and dirty feelin's that I'd hate to
burn my eyes by lookin' closely at."
A deep, short, alarming chorus of laughter interrupted the speech. The
speaker evidently had her audience.
"So you don't own anything to-night," went on the extraordinary,
deliberate voice; "surely you don't own Mabel. You can't get a claim
on her, not thataway. She's her own. She belongs to her own self. When
you're fit to take her, why, then come and tell us about it, and if we
judge you're a-tellin' us the truth, mebbe we'll let her go. Till
then--" a pause which was filled with a rapid shuffling of feet. The
door flew open and in its lighted oblong the observer saw a huddled
figure behind which rose a woman's black and shapely head. "Till
then," repeated the deep-toned, ringing voice, "_get out_!" And the
huddled man came on a staggering run which ended in a backward fall on
the cobbles of the court.
The man who watched trod lightly past him and came to the open door.
Inside, firelight beat on the golden log walls and salmon-colored
timber ceiling; a lamp hanging from a beam threw down a strong,
conflicting arc of white light. A dozen brown-faced, booted young men
stood about, three musicians were ready to take up their interrupted
music, the little fat man who had called out the figures of the
quadrille, stood on a barrel, his arms folded across his paunch. A
fair-haired girl, her face marred by recent tears, drooped near him.
Two of the young men were murmuring reassurances to her; others
surrounded a stout, red-faced girl who was laughing and talking
loudly. The Jew's eyes wandered till they came to the fireplace. There
another woman leaned against the wall.
The music struck up, the dancing began again, the two other girls,
quickly provided with partners, began to waltz, the superfluous men
stood up together and went at it with gravity and grace. No one asked
this woman, who stood at ease, watching the dancers, her hands resting
on her hips, her head tilted back against the logs. As he looked at
her, the intruder had a queer little thrill of fright. He remembered
something he had once seen--a tame panther which was to be used in
some moving-picture play. Its confident owner had led it in on a chain
and held it negligently in a corner of the room, waiting for his cue.
The panther had stood there drowsily, its eyes shifting a little,
then, watching people, its inky head had begun to move from side to
side. He remembered the way the loose chain jerked. The animal's eyes
half-closed, it lowered its head, its upper lip began to draw away
from its teeth. All at once it had dropped on its belly. Some one
cried out, "Hold your beast!"
This young woman by the fireplace had just that panther-air of
perilous quietness. She was very haggard, very thin; she wore her
massive, black hair drawn away hideously from brow and temple, and out
of this lean, unshaded face a pair of deep eyes looked drowsily,
dangerously. Her mouth was straightened into an expression of proud
bitterness, her round chin thrust forward; there was a deep, scowling
line that rose from the bridge of her straight, short nose almost to
the roots of her hair. It cut across a splendidly modeled brow. She
was very graceful, if such a bundle of bones might be said to have any
grace. Her pose was arresting. There was a tragic force and attraction
about her.
The man by the door appraised her carefully between his narrowed lids.
He kept in mind the remembered melody of her voice, and, after a few
moments, he strolled across the floor and came up to her.
"Will you dance?" he said.
He had a very charming and subtle smile, a very charming and
sympathetic look. The woman was startled, color rose into her face.
She stared at him.
"I'm not dancing, Mr. Morena," she answered.
"You know my name," smiled Morena; "and I don't know yours. I've been
on Mr. Yarnall's ranch for a month. Why haven't I seen you?"
"Fer not lookin', I suppose." She had given him that one startled
glance, and now she had turned her eyes back to the dancers and wore a
grim, contemptuous air. Her speeches, though they were cut into short,
crisp words, were full of music of a sharp, metallic quality different
from the tone of her other speech, but quite as beautifully expressive.
"May I smoke?" asked Morena. He was still smiling his charming smile
and watching her out of the corners of his eyes.
"I'm not hinderin' you any," said she.
Morena smiled deeper. He took some time making and lighting his
cigarette.
"You don't smoke, yourself?" he asked.
"No."
"Nor dance?"
"No."
"Nor behave prettily to polite young men?"
Again the woman looked at him. "You ain't so awful young, are you?"
He laughed aloud.
"I amuse you, don't I? Well, I'm not always so all-fired funny,"
drawled the creature, lowering her head a little.
"No. I've heard that you're not. You rather run things here, I gather;
got the boys 'plumb-scared'?"
"Did Mr. Yarnall tell you that?"
"Yes. I've just in the last few minutes remembered who you are. You're
Jane. You cook for the 'outfit,' and Yarnall was telling us the other
night how he sent one of the boys out for a cook, the last one, a man,
having been beaten up, and how the boy had brought you back behind him
on his saddle. He said you'd kept order for him ever since, were
better than a foreman. Who was the man you threw out to-night?"
"Perhaps," drawled Jane, "he was just a feller who asked too many
questions?"
Again Morena's smile deepened into his cheeks. He gave way, in the
Jewish fashion so deceptively suggestive of meekness and timidity,
when it is, at its worst, merely pliable insolence, at its best,
pliable determination. "You must pardon me, Miss Jane," he said in his
murmuring, cultivated voice. "You see I've had a great misfortune.
I've never been in your West. I've lived in New York where good
manners haven't time or space to flourish. I hadn't the least
intention of being impertinent. Do you want me to go?"
He moved as if to leave her, and she did not lift a finger to detain
him.
"I'm not carin'. Do as you please," she said with entire indifference.
"Oh," said Morena, looking back at her, "I don't stay where people are
'not carin'.'"
She gave him an extraordinarily intelligent look. "I should say that's
the only place you'd be wantin' to stay in at all--where you're not
exactly urged to come," she said.
Morena flushed and his lids flickered. He was for an instant absurdly
inclined to anger and made two or three steps away. But he came back.
He bowed and spoke as he would have spoken to a great lady, suavely,
deferentially.
"Good-night. I wish I could think that you have enjoyed our talk as
greatly as I have, Miss Jane. I should very much like to be allowed to
repeat it. May I be stupidly personal and tell you that you are very
beautiful?" He bowed, gave her an upward look and went out, finding
his way cleverly among the dancers.
Outside, in the moonlit court, he stood, threw back his head and
laughed, not loudly but consumedly. He was remembering her white face
of mute astonishment. She looked almost as if his compliment had given
her sharp pain.
Morena went laughing to his room in the opposite wing. He wanted to
describe the interview to his wife.
CHAPTER II
MORENA'S WIFE
Betty Morena was sitting in a rustic chair before an open fire, smoking
a cigarette. She was a short woman, so slenderly, even narrowly built,
as to appear overgrown, and she was a mature woman so immaturely shaped
and featured as to appear hardly more than a child. Her curly, russet
hair was parted at the side, her wide, long-lashed eyes were set far
apart, her nose was really a finely modeled snub,--more, a boy's nose
even to a light sprinkling of freckles,--and her mouth was provokingly
the soft, red mouth of a sorrowful child. She lounged far down in her
chair, her slight legs, clad in riding-breeches of perfect cut,
stretched out straight, her limber arms along the arms of the chair,
her chin sunk on her flat chest, and her big, clear eyes staring into
the fire. It was an odd figure of a wife for Jasper Morena, a Jew of
thirty-eight, producer and manager of plays.
When Betty Kane had run away with him, there had been lamentation and
rage in the houses of Kane and of Morena. To the pride of an old
Hebrew family, the marriage even of this wandering son with a Gentile
was fully as degrading as to the pride of the old Tory family was the
marriage with a Jew. Her perverse Gaelic blood on fire with the
insults heaped upon her lover, Betty, seventeen years old, romantic,
clever, would have walked over flint to give her hand to him. That was
ten years ago. Now, when Jasper came into her room, she drew her quick
brows together, puffed at her cigarette, and blinked as though she was
looking at something distasteful and at the same time rather alarming.
"Have they stopped dancing, Jasper?" she asked in a voice that was at
once brusque and soft.
Jasper rubbed his hands delightedly. He was still merry, and came to
stand near the fire, looking down at her with eyes entirely kind and
admiring.
"Have you ever noticed Jane, who cooks for the outfit, Betty?"
"Yes. She's horrible."
"She's extraordinary, and I mean to get hold of her for Luck's play.
Did you read it?"
"Yes."
"The play is absolutely dependent on the leading part and I have found
it simply impossible to fill. Now, here's a woman of extraordinary
grace and beauty--"
Betty lifted skeptical eyebrows, twisted her limber mouth, but forbore
to contradict.
"And with a magical voice--a woman who not only looks the part, but is
it. You remember Luck's heroine?"
Betty flicked off the ash of her cigarette and looked away. "A savage,
isn't she? The man has her tamed, takes her back to London, and there
gives her cause for jealousy and she springs on him--yes, I remember.
This woman, Jane, is absolutely without education and hasn't a notion
of acting, I suppose."
Jasper rubbed his hands with increased delight. "Not a notion and she
murders the King's English. But she is Luck's savage and--in spite of
your eyebrows, Betty--she is beautiful. I can school her. It will take
money, no end of patience, but I can do it. It's one of the things I
can do. But, of course, there's the initial difficulty of persuading
her to try it."
"That oughtn't to be any difficulty at all. Of course she'll jump at
the chance."
"I'm not so sure. She was ready to throw me out of the kitchen
to-night. She is really a virago. Do you know what one of the men said
about her?" Jasper laughed and imitated the gentle Western drawl.
"Jane's plumb movin' to me. She's about halfway between 'You go to
hell' and 'You take me in your arms to rest.'"
Betty smiled. Her smile was vastly more mature than her appearance. It
was clever and cynical and cold. The Oriental, looking down at her,
lost his merriment.
"Do you feel better, dear?" he asked timidly. "Do you think you will
be able to go back next week?"
She stood up as he came nearer and walked over to the little table
that played the part of dressing-table under a wavy mirror. "Oh, yes.
I am quite well. I don't think the doctors have much sense. I'm sure I
hadn't anything like a nervous breakdown. I was just tired out."
Jasper drew back the hand whose touch she had eluded, and nervously,
his long supple fingers a little unsteady, lighted a cigarette. At
that moment he did not look like a spider, but like a lover who has
been hurt. Betty could see in the mirror a distorted image of his
dejected gracefulness, but, entirely unmoved, she put up her thin,
brown hands and began to take the pins out of her hair.
"I like your Jane experiment," she said. "Let me know how you get on
with it and whether I can help. I shall have to turn in now. I'm dead
beat. Yarnall took me halfway up the mountain and back. Good-night."
Jasper looked at her, then pressed his lips into a straight line and
went to the door which led from her bedroom to his. He said "Good-night"
in a low tone, glanced at her over his shoulder, and went out.
Betty waited an instant, then slowly unlaced her heavy, knee-high
boots, took them off, and began to walk to and fro on stocking feet,
hands clasped behind her back. With her curly hair all about her face
and shoulders, she looked like a wild, extravagantly naughty
school-girl, a girl in a wicked temper, a rebel against authority. In
fact, she was rejoicing that this horrible enforced visit to the West
was all but over. One week more! She was almost at an end of her
endurance. How she hated the beautiful white night outside, those
mountain peaks, the sound of that rapid river, the stillness of
sagebrush, the voice of the big pines! And she hated the log room, its
simplicity now all littered with incongruous luxuries; ivory toilet
articles on the board table; lacy, beribboned underwear thrown over the
rustic chair; silver-framed photographs; an exquisite, gold-mounted
crystal vase full of wild flowers on the pine shelf; satin bedroom
slippers on the clay hearth; a gorgeous, fur-trimmed dressing-gown over
the foot of her narrow, iron cot; all the ridiculous necessities that
Betty's maid had put into her trunk. Yes, Betty hated it all because it
was what she had always thirsted for. What a malevolent trick of fate
that Jasper should have brought her to Wyoming, that the doctor had
insisted upon at least a month of just this life. "Take her West," he
had said, and Betty, lying limp and white in her bed, her small head
sunk into the pillow, had jerked from head to foot. "Take her West. I
know a ranch in Wyoming--Yarnall's. She'll get outdoor exercise, tonic
air, sound sleep, release from all these pestiferous details, like a
cloud of flies, that sting women's nerves to death. Don't pay any
attention to whether she likes it or not. Let her behave like a naughty
child, let her kick and scream and cry. Pick her up, Morena, and carry
her off. Do you hear? Don't let her make you change your plans." The
doctor had seen his patient's convulsive jerk. "Pack her up. Make your
reservations and go straight to 'Buck' Yarnall's ranch, Lazy-Y,--that's
his brand, I believe,--Middle Fork, Wyoming. I'll send him a wire. He
knows me. She needs all outdoors to run about in. She needs joggin'
around all day through the sagebrush on a cow-pony in that sun; she
needs the smell of a camp-fire--Gad! wish I could get back to it
myself."
Betty, having heard this out, began to laugh. She laughed till they
gave her something to keep her quiet. But, except for that laughter,
she had made no protest whatever; she did not "kick and scream and
cry." In fact, though she looked like a child, she was not at all
inclined to such exhibitions. This doctor had not seen her through her
recent ordeal. Two years before her breakdown, Jasper had been
terribly hurt in an automobile accident, and Betty had come to him at
the hospital, had waited, as white as a snow-image, for the result of
the examination. They had told her emphatically that there was no
hope. Jasper Morena could not live for more than a few days. She must
not allow herself to hope. He might or might not regain consciousness.
If he did, it would be for a few minutes before the end. Betty had
listened with her white, rigid, child face, had thanked them, had gone
home. There in her exquisite, little sitting room above Central Park,
she had sat at her desk and written a few lines on square, gray note
paper.
"Jasper is dying," she had written. "By the time you get this, he
will be dead. If you can forgive me for having failed in courage
last year, come back. What I have been to you before I will be
again, only, this time we can love openly. Come back."
Then she had dropped her head on the desk and cried. Afterwards she
had addressed her letter to a certain Prosper Gael. The letter went to
Wyoming. When it reached its destination, it was taken over a
mountain-range by a patient Chinaman.
Three days later Jasper regained consciousness and began slowly to
return to health. He had the tenacious vitality of his race, and, in
his own spirit, an iron will to live. He kept Betty beside his bed for
hours, and held her cold hand in his long, sensitive one, and he
stared at her under his lashes till she thought she must go mad. But
she did not. She nursed him through an interminable convalescence. She
received Prosper, very early in this convalescence, by her husband's
bed, and Jasper had murmured gratitude for the emotion that threatened
to overwhelm his friend. It was not till some time--an extraordinarily
long time--after Morena's complete recovery that she had snapped like
a broken icicle. And then, forsooth, they had sent her to Wyoming to
get back her health!
Having paced away some of her restlessness, Betty stopped by the cabin
window and pushed aside one of the short, calico curtains. She looked
out on the court. A tall woman had just pulled up a bucket of water
from the well and had emptied it into a pitcher. She finished, let the
bucket drop with a whirr and a clash, and raised her head. For a
second she and Jasper Morena's wife looked at each other. Betty
nodded, smiled, and drew the curtain close.
CHAPTER III
JANE
After that night, there began a sort of persecution, skillfully
conducted by Jasper and Betty, against the ferocity of Jane. It was a
persecution impossible to imagine in any other setting, even the social
simplicity of Lazy-Y found itself a trifle amused. For Jasper, the
stately Jewish figure, would carry pails of water for Jane from the
well to the kitchen, would help her in the vegetable garden, and to
straighten out her recalcitrant stove-pipe; Betty would put on an apron
a mile too large, to wash dishes and shell peas. She would sit on the
kitchen table swinging her long, childlike legs and chatter amiably.
Jasper talked, too, to the virago, talked delightfully, about horses
and dogs,--he had a charming gift of humorous observation,--talked
about hunting and big-game shooting, about trapping, about travel, and,
at last, about plays. Undoubtedly Jane listened. Sometimes she laughed.
Once in a while she ejaculated, musically, "Well!" Occasionally she
swore.
One afternoon he met her riding home from an errand to a neighboring
ranch, and, turning his horse, rode with her. In worn corduroy skirt,
flannel shirt, and gray sombrero, she looked like a handsome, haggard
boy, and, that afternoon, there was a certain unusual wistfulness in
her eyes, and her mouth had relaxed a little from its bitterness.
Perhaps it was the beauty of a clear, keen summer day; without doubt,
also, she was touched by the courteous pleasure of his greeting and by
his giving up his ride in order to accompany her. She even unbent from
her silence and, for the first time, really talked to him. And she
spoke, too, in a new manner, using her beautiful voice with beautiful
carefulness. It was like a master-musician who, after a long illness,
takes up his beloved instrument and tentatively tests his shaken
powers. Jasper had much ado to keep his surprise to himself, for the
rough ranch girl could speak pure enough English if she would.
"You and your wife are leaving soon?" she asked him, and, when he
nodded, she gave a sigh. "I'll be missing you," she said, throwing
away her _brusquerie_ like a rag with which she was done. "You've been
company for me. You've made use of lots of patience and courage, but I
have really liked it. I've not got the ways of being sociable and I
don't know that I want ever to get them. I am not seeking for friends.
There isn't another person on the ranch that would dare talk to me as
you and Mrs. Morena have talked. They don't know anything about me
here and I don't mean that they should know." She paused, then gave
way to an impulse of confidence. "One of the boys asked me to marry
him. He came and shouted it through the window and I caught him with a
pan of water." She sighed. "I don't know rightly if he meant it for a
joke or not, but the laugh wasn't on me."
Jasper controlled his laughter, then saw the dry humor of her eyes and
lips and let out his mirth.
"Why, sir," said Jane, "you'd be surprised at the foolishness of men.
Sometimes it seems that, just for pure contrariness, they want to
marry her that least wants them about. The day I came tramping into
this valley, I stopped for food at the ranch of an old bachelor down
yonder at the ford. And he invited me to be his wife while I was
drinking a glass of water from his well. He told me how much money he
had and said he'd start my stove for me winter mornings. There's a
good husband! And he was sure kind to me even when I told him 'no.' 'T
was that same evening that the boy from Lazy-Y rode in and claimed me
for a cook. Mr. Yarnall is a trusting man. He took me and didn't ask
any questions. I told him I was 'Jane' and that I wasn't planning to
let him know more. He hasn't asked me another question since. He's a
gentleman, I figure it, and he's kind of quiet himself about what he
was before he came to this country. He's a man of fifty and he has
lots back of him only he's taken a fresh start." She sighed, "Folks
like you and Betty seem awfully open-hearted. It's living in cities, I
suppose, where every one knows every one else so well."
This astonishing picture of the candid simplicity of New York's social
life absorbed Jasper's attention for some time.
"Wouldn't you like to live in a city, Jane?"
She laughed her short, boyish "Hoo!" "It isn't what I would like, Mr.
Morena," she said. "Why, I'd like to see the world. I would like to be
that fellow who was condemned to wander all over the earth and never
to die. He was a Jew, too, wasn't he?"
Jasper flushed. People were not in the habit of making direct
reference to his nationality, and, being an Israelite who had early
cut himself off with dislike from his own people and cultivated the
society of Gentiles, "a man without a country," he was acutely
sensitive.
"The Wandering Jew? Yes. Where did you ever hear of him?"
"I read his story," she answered absently; "an awful long one, but
interesting, about lots of people, by Eugene Sue."
Jasper's lips fell apart and he stared. She had spoken unwittingly and
he could see that she was not thinking of him, that she was far away,
staring beyond her horse's head into the broad, sunset-brightened
west.
"Where were you schooled?" he asked her.
He had brought her back and her face stiffened. She gave him a
startled, almost angry look, dug her heels into her horse and broke
into a gallop; nor could he win from her another word.
A few days before he left, he took Yarnall into his confidence. At
first the rancher would do nothing but laugh. "Jane on the boards!
That's a notion!" followed by explosion after explosion of mirth. The
Jew waited, patient, pliant, smiling, and then enumerated his reasons.
He talked to Yarnall for an hour, at the end of which time, Yarnall,
his eyes still twinkling, sent for Jane.
The two men sat in a log-walled room, known as the office. Yarnall's
big desk crowded a stove. There was no other furniture except shelves
and a box seat beneath a window. Jasper sat on the end of the desk,
swinging his slim, well-booted leg; Yarnall, stocky, gray, shabby,
weather-beaten, leaned back in his wicker chair. The door which Jasper
faced was directly behind Yarnall. When Jane opened it, he turned.
The girl looked grim and a little pale. She was evidently frightened.
This summons from Yarnall suggested dismissal or reproof. She came
around to face him and stood there, looking fierce and graceful, her
head lowered, staring gloomily at him from under her brows. To Jasper
she gave not so much as a glance.
"Well, Jane, I fancy I shall have to let you go," said Yarnall. He was
not above tormenting the wild-cat. Female ferocity always excites the
teasing boy in a man. "You're getting too ambitious for us. You see,
once these rich New Yorkers take you up, you're no more use to a plain
ranchman like me."
"What are you drivin' at?" asked Jane.
"Do let me explain it to her, Yarnall!" Jasper snapped his elastic
fingers, color had risen to his face, and he looked annoyed. "Miss
Jane, won't you sit down?"
Jane turned her deep, indignant eyes upon him. "Are you and your wife
the rich New Yorkers he says are takin' me up?"
"No, no. He's joking. This is a serious business. It's of vital
importance to me and it ought to be of vital importance to you. Please
do sit down!"
Jane took a long step back and sat down on the settle under the long,
horizontal window. She folded her hands on her knee and looked up at
Morena. She had transferred her attention completely to him. Yarnall
watched them. He was an Englishman of much experience and this picture
of the skillful, cultivated, handsome Jew angling deftly for the
gaunt, young savage diverted him hugely. He screwed up his eyes to get
a picture of it.
"I am a producer and manager of plays," said Jasper, "which means that
I take a play written by a more gifted man and arrange it for the
stage. Have you ever seen a play?"
"No, sir."
"But you have some idea what they are?"
"Yes. I have read them. Shakespeare wrote quite a lot of that kind of
talking pieces, didn't he?"
Jasper was less surprised than Yarnall. "At present I have a play on
my hands which is a very brilliant and promising piece of work, but
which I have been unable to produce for lack of a heroine. There isn't
an actress on my list that can take the part and do it justice. Now,
Miss Jane, I believe that with some training you could take it to
perfection. My wife and I would like to take you to New York, paying
all your expenses, of course, and put you into training at once. It
would take a year's hard work to get you fitted for the part. Then
next fall we could bring out the play and I think I can promise you
success and fame and wealth in no small measure. I don't know you very
well; I don't know whether or not you are ambitious; but I do know
that every woman must love beauty and ease and knowledge and
experience. For what else," he smiled, "did Eve eat the apple? All
these you can have if you will let us take you East. Of course, if I
find you cannot take this part, I will hold myself accountable for
you. I will not let you be a loser in any way by the experiment. With
your beauty"--Yarnall fell back in his chair and gaped from the
excited speaker to the silent listener--"and your extraordinary voice,
and your magnetism, you must be especially fitted for a career of some
kind. I promise to find you your career."
Every drop of blood had fallen from Jane's face and the rough hands on
her knee were locked together.
"What part," she asked in a quick, low voice, "is this that you think
I could learn to do?"
Jasper changed his position. He came nearer and spoke more rapidly.
"It is the story of a girl, a savage girl, whom a man takes up and
trains. He trains her as a professional might train a lioness. It is a
passion with him to break spirits and shape them to his will. He
trains her with coaxing and lashing--not actual lashing, though I
believe in one place he do
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