The Branding Iron Part 7

"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 b.u.t.terflies 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 canon, 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 pa.s.sionate 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.