The Branding Iron Part 15

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 pa.s.sion 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 does come near to beating her--and he gets her broken so that she lies at his feet and eats out of his hand. All this, you understand, while he's an exile from his own world. Then, in the second act,--that is the second part of the play,--he takes his tamed lioness back to civilization. They go to London and there the woman does his training infinite credit. She is extraordinarily beautiful; she is civilized, successful, courted. Her eccentricities only add to her charm. So it goes on very prettily for a while. Then he makes a mistake. He blunders very badly. He gives his lioness cause for jealousy and--to come to the point--she flies at his throat. You see, he hadn't really tamed her. She was under the skin, a lioness, a beast, at heart."

Jasper had been absorbed in the plot and had not noticed Jane, but Yarnall for several minutes had been leaning forward, his hands tightened on the arms of his chair. The instant Jasper stopped he held up his hand.

"Quiet, Jane," he said softly as a man might speak to a plunging horse. "Steady!"

Jane got to her feet. She was very white. She put up her hand and pressed the back of it against her forehead and from under this hand she looked at the two men with eyes of such astonished pain and beauty as they could never forget.

"Yes," she said presently; "that's something I _could_ do."

At once Jasper hastened to retrieve his error. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I've been horribly clumsy. Do forgive me. Do let me explain. I didn't mean that you were a wild--"

She let the hand fall and held it up to stop his speech. "I'm not taking offense, Mr. Morena," she said. "You say you arrange plays and that you have been seeking for some one to play that girl, that lioness-girl who wasn't rightly tamed, though the man had done his worst to break her?"

Jasper nodded with a puzzled, anxious air. For all his skill and subtlety, he could not interpret her tone.

"And you think I'm beautiful?"

"My dear child, I know you are," said he. "You try to disguise it. And I know that in many other ways you disguise yourself. I think you make a great mistake. Your work is hard and rough--"

She smiled. "I'm not complaining of my work," she said. "It's rough and so am I. Oh, yes, I'm real, true rough. I was born to roughness and raised to it. I'm not anything I don't seem, Mr. Morena. I've had rough travel all my days, only--only--" She sat down again, twisting her hands painfully in her ap.r.o.n and bending her face down from the sight of the two men. The line of her long, bent neck was a beautiful thing to see. She spoke low and rapidly, holding down her emotion, though she could not control all the exquisite modulations of her voice. "There's only one part of my travel that I want to forget and that's the one smooth bit. And it's hateful to me and you've been reminding me of it. I must tell you now that I'd rather be burnt by a white-hot iron"--here she gave him a wide and horrified look like a child who speaks of some dreadful remembered punishment--"than do that thing you've asked of me. I hate everything you've been telling me about. I don't want to be beautiful. I don't want any one to be telling me such things. I don't want to be any different from what I am now. This is my real self. It is. I hate beauty. I hate it. I'm not good enough to love it. Beauty and learning and--and music--"

Her head had been bending lower and lower, her voice rocking under its weight of restrained anguish. On the word "music" she dropped her head to her knees and was silent.

"I can't talk no more," she said, after a moment, and she stood up and ran out of the room.

"I'll be d----d!" swore Yarnall.

But Jasper stood, his face pale, smiting one hand into the other.

"I feel that I, at least, deserve to be," he said.

CHAPTER IV

FLIGHT

There was a girl named Joan who followed Pierre Landis because he laid his hand upon her wrist, and there was another Joan who fled up the mountain-side at sight of him, as though the fire that had once touched her shoulder had burnt its way into her heart. Then there was a third Joan, a Joan astray. It was this Joan that had come to Lazy-Y Ranch and had cooked for and bullied "the outfit"--a Joan of set face and bitter tongue, whose two years' lonely battle with life had twisted her youth out of its first comely straightness. In Joan's brief code of moral law there was one sin--the dealings of a married woman with another man. When Pierre's living and seeking face looked up toward her where she stood on the mountain-side above Prosper's cabin, she felt for the first time that she had sinned, and so, for the first time, she was a sinner, and the inevitable agony of soul began.

She fled and hid till dark, then prowled about till she knew that Wen Ho was alone in the house. She came like a spirit from h.e.l.l and questioned him.

"What did the men ask? What did you tell them?"

The men had asked for a lady. He had told them, as Prosper had once instructed him, that no lady was living there, that the man had just gone. They had been satisfied and had left. But Joan was still in terror. Pierre must never find her now. She had accepted the lie of a stranger, had left her husband for dead, had made no effort to ascertain the truth, and had "dealings with another man." Joan sat in judgment and condemned herself to loneliness. She turned herself out from all her old life as though she had been Cain, and, following Wen Ho's trail over the mountains, had gone into strange lands to work for her bread. She called herself "Jane" and her ferocity was the armor for her beauty. Always she worked in fear of Pierre's arrival, and, as soon as she had saved money enough for further traveling, she moved on. She worked by preference on lonely ranches as cook or harvester, and it was after two years of such life that she had drifted into Yarnall's kitchen. She was then greatly changed, as a woman who works to the full stretch of her strength, who suffers privation and hardship, who gives no thought to her own youth and beauty, and who, moreover, suffers under a scourge of self-scorn and fear, is bound to change. Of all the people that had seen her after months of such living, Jasper Morena was the only one to find her beautiful. But with his sensitive observation he had seen through the sh.e.l.l to the sweetness underneath; for surely Joan was sweet, a Friday's child. It was good that Jasper had torn the skin from her wound, good that he had broken up the hardness of her heart. She left him and Yarnall that afternoon and went away to her cabin in the trees and lay face down on the bare boards of the floor and was young again. Waves of longing for love and beauty and adventure flooded her. For a while she had been very beautiful and had been very pa.s.sionately loved; for a while she had been surrounded by beauty and taught its meanings. She had fled from it all. She hated it, yes, but she longed for it with every fiber of her being. The last two years were scalded away. She was Joan, who had loved Pierre; Joan, whom Prosper Gael had loved.

Toward morning, dawn feeling with white fingers through the pine boughs into her uncurtained window, Joan stopped her weeping and stood up. She was very tired and felt as though all the hardness and strength had been beaten from her heart. She opened her door and looked at pale stars and a still, slowly brightening world. In a hollow below the pines a stream ran and poured its hoa.r.s.e, hurrying voice into the silence. Joan bent under the branches, undressed and bathed. The icy water shocked life back into her spirit. She began to tingle and to glow. In spite of herself she felt happier. She had been stony for so long, neither sorrowful nor glad; now, after the night of sharp pain, she was aware of the gladness of morning. She came up from her plunge, glowing and beautiful, with loose, wet hair.

In the corral the men were watering their teams; above them on the edge of a mesa, against the rosy sky, the other ponies, out all night on the range, were trooping, driven by a cowboy who darted here and there on his nimble pony, giving shrill cries. In the clear air every syllable was sharp to the ear, every tint and line sharp to the eye.

It was beautiful, very beautiful, and it was near and dear to her, native to her--this loveliness of quick action, of inarticulate calling to dumb beasts, of work, of simple, often repeated beginnings.

She was glad that she was working with her hands. She twisted up her hair and went over to the ranch-house where she began soberly and thankfully to light her kitchen fire.

It was after breakfast, two or three mornings later, when a stranger on a chestnut pony rode into Yarnall's ranch, tied his pony to a tree, and, striding across the cobbled square, came to knock at the office door. At the moment, Yarnall, on the other side of the house, was saying farewell to his guests, and helping the men pile the baggage into the two-seated wagon, so this other visitor, getting no answer to his knock, turned and looked about the court. He did not, it was evident, mind waiting. It was to be surmised from the look of him that he was used to it; patient and not to be discouraged by delay. He was a very brown young man of quite astounding beauty and his face had been schooled to keenness and restraint. He was well-dressed, very clean, an outdoor man, a rider, but a man who had, in some sense, arrived. He had the inimitable stamp of achievement. He had been hard driven--the look of that, too, was there; he had been driven to more than ordinary effort. One of the men, seeing him, walked over and spoke respectfully.

"You want to see Mr. Yarnall?"

"Yes, sir." The man's eyes were searching the ranch-house wistfully again. "I would like to see him if I can. I have some questions to ask him."

"He's round the house, gettin' rid of a bunch of dudes. Some job. Both hands tied up. Will you go round or wait?"