CHAPTER XPROSPER 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-drivensnow 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 sincehe 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 traveledwith 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 Hohad 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.” Heshook 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 trailsto 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 XITHE 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 impulseto 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 onlyread 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-à-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 Provençale,” 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 Provençale” 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 andmore 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 bayonetedbattalions of snow across the plains and forced them, screaming like madmen, along the narrow cañon, 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 wasdead, 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 XIIA 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 otherand 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 aman 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 yourkind 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, toflounder 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 knewwoman’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, sheanswered, “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 andbelted 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 XIIITHE 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, hisbook, 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 theirmeaning, 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 crêpes, 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 sofiercely 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 todoit!”
Prosper laughed and returned chidden to his task, but he couldn’t help watching her, lyingthere 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 XIVJOAN 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 crêpe 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 cañon. 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 hungeropened 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 shebacked 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 quicklift 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 cañon 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 doubtedher 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 cañon 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, shecrouched 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 camedown 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 beback,” 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, butmy 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 Joanhe 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.