The Branding Iron Part 18

She stood up. The natural color left her face ghastly with patches of paint and daubs of black. She threw back her head and said, "Prosper!"

just above her breath.

"Go out, Henrietta." This was spoken to the maid in the voice of Jane the virago and Henrietta fled.

At sight of Joan, Prosper had won back instantly his old poise, his old feeling of ascendancy.

"Joan, Joan," he said gently; "was ever anything so strange? Why didn't you let me know? Why didn't you answer my letters? Why didn't you take my money? I have suffered greatly on your account."

Joan laughed. Four years ago she would not have been capable of this laugh, and Prosper started.

"I wrote again and again," he said pa.s.sionately. "Wen Ho told me that you had gone, that he didn't know anything about your plans. I went out to Wyoming, to our house. I scoured the country for you. Did you know that?"

"No," said Joan slowly, "I didn't know that But it makes no difference to me."

They were still standing a few paces apart, too intent upon their inner tumult to heed any outward situation. She lowered her head in that dangerous way of hers, looking up at him from under her brows.

Her color had returned and the make-up had a more natural look.

"Maybe you did write, maybe you did send money, maybe you did come back--I don't care anything for all that." She made a gesture as if to sweep something away. "The day after you left me in that house, Pierre, my husband, came up the trail. He was taking after me. He meant to fetch me home. You told me"--she began to tremble so violently that the jewels on her neck clicked softly--"you told me he was _dead_."

Prosper came closer, she moving back, till, striking the chair, she sat down on it and looked up at him with her changed and embittered eyes.

"Would you have gone back to him, Joan Landis, after he had tied you up and branded your shoulder with his cattlebrand?"

"What has that got to do with it?" she asked, her voice lifting on a wave of anger. "That was between my man and me. That was not for you to judge. He loved me. It was through loving me too much, too ignorantly, that he hurt me so." She choked. "But you--"

"Joan," said Prosper, and he laid his hand on her cold and rigid fingers, "I loved you too."

She was still and stiff. After a long silence she seemed to select one question from a tide of them.

"Why did you leave me?"

"I wrote you a full explanation. The letter came back to me unread."

Again Joan gave the laugh and the gesture of disdain.

"That doesn't matter ... your loving or not loving. You made use of me for your own ends, and when you saw fit, you left me. But that's not my complaint. I don't say I didn't deserve that. I was easy to use.

But it was all based on what wasn't true. I was married, my man was living, and I had dealings with you. That was sin. That was horrible.

That was what my mother did. She was a ----" Joan used the coa.r.s.e and ugly word her father had taught her, and Prosper laid a hand over her mouth.

"Joan! No! Never say it, never think it. You are clean."

Joan twisted herself free, stood up, and walked away. "I am _that_!"

she said grimly; "and it was you that made me. You took lots of trouble to make me see things in a way where nothing a person wants is either right or wrong. You made me thirsty with your talk and your books and your music, and when I was tormented with thirst, you came and offered me a drink of water. That was it. I don't care about your not marrying me. I still don't see that that has much to do with it except, perhaps, that a man would be caring to give any woman he rightly loves whatever help or cherishing or gifts the world has decided to give her. But, you see, Prosper, we didn't start fair. You knew that Pierre was alive."

"But, Joan, you say yourself that marrying--"

She stopped him with so fierce a gesture that he flinched. "Yes.

Pierre did rightly love me. He gave me his best as he knew it. Oh, he was ignorant, a savage, I guess, like I was. But he did rightly love me. He was not trying to break my spirit nor to tame me, nor to amuse himself with me, nor to give me a longing for beauty and easiness and then leave me to fight through my own rough life without any of those things. Did you really think, Prosper Gael, that I would stay in your house and live on your money till you should be caring to come back to me--if ever you would care? Did you honestly think that you would be coming back--as--as my lover? No. Whatever it was that took you away, it was likely to keep you from me for always, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Prosper in a m.u.f.fled voice, "it was likely to. But, Joan, Fate was on your side. Since I have been yours, I haven't belonged to any one but you. You've put your brand on me."

"I don't want to hear about you," Joan broke in. "I am done with you.

Have you seen this play?"

"Yes." He found that in telling her so he could not meet her eyes.

"Well, the man who wrote that knew what you are, and, if he didn't, every one that has seen me act in it, knows what you are." She paused, breathing fast and trembling. "Good-bye," she said.

He went vaguely toward the door, then threw up his head defiantly.

"No," he said, "it's not going to be good-bye. I've found you. You must let me tell you the truth about myself. Come, Joan, you're as just as Heaven. You never read my explanations. You've never heard my side of it. You'll let me come to see you and you'll hear me out.

Don't do me an injustice. I'll leave the whole thing in your hands after that. But you must give me that one chance."

"Chance?" repeated Joan. "Chance for what?"

"Oh,"--Prosper flung up his lithe, long hands--"oh, for nothing but a cleansing in your sight. I want what forgiveness I can wring from you.

I want what understanding I can force from you. That's all."

She thought, standing there, still and tall, her arms hanging, her eyes wide and secret, as he had remembered them in her thin, changed, so much more expressive face.

"Very well," she said, "you may come. I'll hear you out." She gave him the address and named an afternoon hour. "Good-night."

It was a graceful and dignified dismissal. Prosper bit his lip, bowed and left her.

As the door closed upon her, he knew that it had closed upon the only real and vivid presence in his life. War had burnt away his glittering, clever frivolity. Betty was the adventure, Betty was the tinsel; Joan was the grave, predestined woman of his man. For the first time in his life he found himself face to face with the cleanness of despair.

CHAPTER VII

AFTERMATH

Joan waited for Prosper on the appointed afternoon. There was a fire on her hearth and a March snow-squall tapped against the window panes.

The crackle of the logs inside and that eerie, light sound outside were so a.s.sociated with Prosper that, even before he came, Joan, sitting on one side of the hearth, closed her eyes and felt that he must be opposite to her in his red-lacquered chair, his long legs stuck out in front, his amused and greedy eyes veiled by a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Since she had seen him at the theater, she had been suffering from sleeplessness. At night she would go over and over the details of their intercourse, seeing them, feeling them, living them in the light of later knowledge, till the torment was hardly to be borne. Three days and nights of this inner activity had brought back that sharp line between her brows and the bitter tightening of her lips.

This afternoon she was white with suspense. Her dread of the impending interview was like a physical illness. She sat in a high-backed chair, hands along the arms, head resting back, eyes half-closed, in that perfect stillness of which the animal and the savage are alone entirely capable. There were many gifts that Joan had brought from the seventeen years on Lone River. This grave immobility was one. She was very carefully dressed in a gown that accentuated her height and dignity. And she wore a few jewels. She wanted, pitifully enough, to mark every difference between this Joan and the Joan whom Prosper had drawn on his sled up the canon trail. If he expected to force her back into the position of enchanted leopardess, to see her "lie at his feet and eat out of his hand," as Morena had once described the plight of Zona, he would see at a glance that she was no longer so easily mastered. In fact, sitting there, she looked as proud and perilous as a young Medea, black-haired with long throat and cold, malevolent lips. It was only in the eyes--those gray, unhappy, haunted eyes--that Joan gave away her eternal simplicity of heart. They were unalterably tender and lonely and hurt. It was the look in them that had prompted Shorty's description, "She's plumb movin' to me--looks about halfway between 'You go to h.e.l.l' and 'You take me in your arms to rest.'"

Prosper was announced, and Joan, keeping her stillness, merely turned her head toward him as he came into the room.

She saw his rapid observation of the room, of her, even before she noticed the very apparent change in him. For he, too, was haggard and utterly serious as she did not remember him. He stood before her fire and asked her jerkily if she would let him smoke. She said "Yes," and those were the only words spoken for five unbearable minutes the seconds of which her heart beat out like a shaky hammer in some worn machine.

Prosper smoked and stood there looking, now at her, now at the fire.

At last, with difficulty, he smiled. "You are not going to make it easy for me, are you, Joan?"

For her part she was not looking at him. She kept her eyes on the fire and this averted look distressed and irritated his nerves.