The Branding Iron Part 11

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 canon 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sionate 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 canon 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 G.o.d--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 pa.s.sion 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 canon in untrammeled flight. Prosper was lost in wonder of her, in a pa.s.sionate admiration for his own handiwork. He was making, here in this G.o.d-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 p.r.i.c.k up its ears. Wen Ho had ridden by a secret trail back over the range; he had not pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude, 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 gla.s.s 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.