The Branding Iron Part 12

Four months later the name of Prosper Gael began to be on every one's lips, and before every one's eyes; the world, his world, began to clamor for him. Even Wen Ho grumbled at this going out on tremendous journeys after the mail for which Prosper grew more and more greedy and impatient. His novel, "The Canon," had been accepted, was enormously advertised, had made an extraordinary success. All this he explained to Joan, who tried to rejoice because she saw that it was exquisite delight to Prosper. He was by way of thinking now that his exile, his Wyoming adventure, was to thank for his success, but when a woman, even such a woman as Joan, begins to feel that she has been a useful emotional experience, there begins pain. For Joan pain began and daily it increased. It was suffering for her to watch Prosper reading his letters, forwarded to him from the Western town where his friends and his secretary believed him to be recovering from some nervous illness; to watch him smoking and thinking of himself, his fame, his talents, his future; to watch him scribbling notes, planning another work, to hear his excited talk, now so impersonal, so unrelated to her; to see how his eagerness over her education slackened, faltered, died; to notice that he no longer watched the changeful humors of her beauty nor cared if she wore bronze or blue or yellow; and worst of all, to find him staring at her sometimes with a worried, impatient look which scuttled out of sight like some ugly, many-legged creature when it met her own eyes--painful, of course, yet such an old story. Joan, who had never heard of such experience, did not foresee the inevitable end, and, in so much, she was spared. The extra pain of forfeiting her dignity and self-respect did not touch her, for she made none of those most pitiful, unavailing efforts to hold him, to cling; did not even pretend indifference. She only drew gradually into herself, shrinking from her pain and from him as the cause of it; she only lost her glow of love-happiness, her face seemed dwindled, seemed to contract, and that secret look of a wild animal returned to her gray eyes. She quietly gave up the old regulations of their life; she did not remind him of the study-hours, the music-hours, the hours of wild outdoor play. She read under the firs, alone; she studied faithfully, alone; she climbed and swam, alone--or with his absent-minded, fitful company; she worked in her garden, alone. At night, when he was asleep, she lay with her hand pressed against her heart, staring at the darkness, listening to the night, waiting. Curiously enough, his inevitable returns of pa.s.sion and interest, the always decreasing flood-mark, each time a line lower, did not deceive her, did not distract her. She never expressed her trouble, even to herself. She did not give it any words.

She took her pain without wincing, without complaint, and when he seemed to need her in any little way, in any big way, she gave because she could not help it, because she had promised him largesse, because it was her nature to give. Besides, although she was instinctively waiting, she did not foresee the end.

It was in late October when, somewhere in the pile of Prosper's mail, there lay a small gray envelope. Joan drew his attention to it, calling it a "queer little letter," and he took it up slowly as though his deft and nervous fingers had gone numb. Before he opened it he looked at Joan and, in one sense, it was the last time he ever did look at her; for at that moment his stark spirit looked straight into hers, acknowledged its guilt, and bade her a mute and remorseful farewell.

He read and Joan watched. His face grew pale and bright as though some electric current had been turned into his veins; his eyes, looking up from the writing, but not returning to her, had the look given by some drug which is meant to stupefy, but which taken in an overdose intoxicates. He turned and made for the door, holding the little gray folded paper in his hand. On the threshold he half-faced her without lifting his eyes.

"I have had extraordinary news, Joan. I shall have to go off alone and think things out. I don't know when I shall get back." He went out and shut the door gently.

Joan stood listening. She heard him go along the pa.s.sage and through the second door. She heard his feet on the mountain trail. Afterwards she went out and stood between the two sentinel firs that had marked the entrance to that snow-tunnel long since disappeared. Now it was a late October day, bright as a bared sword. The flowers of the Indian paint-brush burned like red candle flames everywhere under the firs, the fire-weed blazed, the aspen leaves were laid like little golden tiles against the metallic blue of the sky. The high peak pointed up dizzily and down, down dizzily into the clear emptiness of the lake.

This great peak stood there in the glittering stillness of the day. A grouse boomed, but Joan was not startled by the sudden rush of its wings. She felt the sharp weight of that silent mountain in her heart; she might have been buried under it. So she felt it all day while she worked, a desperate, bright day,--hideous in her memory,--and at night she lay waiting. After hours longer than any other hours, the door of her bedroom opened and an oblong of moonlight, as white as paper, fell across the matted floor. Prosper stepped in noiselessly and walked over to her bed. He stood a moment and she heard him swallow.

"You're awake, Joan?"

Her eyes were staring up at him, but she lay still.

"Listen, Joan." He spoke in short sentences, waiting between each for some comment of hers which did not come. "I shall have to go away to-morrow. I shall have to go away for some time. I don't want you to be unhappy. I want you to stay here for a while if you will, for as long as you want to stay. I am leaving you plenty of money. I will write and explain it all very clearly to you. I know that you will understand. Listen." Here he knelt and took her hands, which he found lying cold and stiff under the cover, pressed against her heart. "I have made you happy here in this little house, haven't I, Joan?"

She would not answer even this except by the merest flicker of her eyelids.

"You have trusted me; now, trust me a little longer. My life is very complicated. This beautiful year with you, the year you have given to me, is just a temporary respite from--from all sorts of things. I've taught you a great deal, Joan. I've healed the wound that brute made on your shoulder and in your heart. I've taught you to be beautiful.

I've filled your mind with beauty. You are a wonderful woman. You'll live to be grateful to me. Some day you'll tell me so."

Her quiet, curved lips moved. "Are you tellin' me good-bye, Prosper?"

It was impossible to lie to her. He bent his head.

"Yes, Joan."

"Then tell it quick and go out and leave me here to-night."

It was impossible to touch her. She might have been wrapped in white fire. He found that though she had not stirred a finger, his hand had shrunk away from hers. He got to his feet, all the cleverness which all day long he had been weaving like a silk net to catch, to bewilder, to draw away her brain from the anguish of full comprehension, was shriveled. He stood and stared helplessly at her, dumb as a youth. And, obedient, he went out and shut the door, taking the white patch of moonlight with him.

So Joan, having waited, behind an obstinately locked door, for his departure, came out at noon and found herself in the small, gay house alone.

She sat in one of the lacquered chairs and saw after a long while that the Chinaman was looking at her.

Wen Ho, it seemed, had been given instructions. He was to stay and take care of the house and the lady for as long as she wanted it, or him. Afterwards he was to lock up the house and go. He handed her a large and bulky envelope which Joan took and let lie in her lap.

"You can go to-morrow, Wen Ho," she said.

"You no wait for Mr. Gael come back? He say he come back."

"No. I'm not going to wait. I guess"--here Joan twisted her mouth into a smile--"I'm not one of the waiting kind. I'm a-going back to my own ranch now. It won't seem so awful lonesome, perhaps, as I was thinking last spring that it would."

She touched the envelope without looking at it.

"Is this money, Wen Ho?"

"I tink so, lady."

She held it, unopened, out to him.

"I will give it to you, then. I have no need of it."

She stood up.

"I am going out now to climb up this mountain back of the house so's I can see just where I am. I'll come down to-night for dinner and to-morrow after breakfast I'll be going away. You understand?"

"Lady, you mean give me all this money?" babbled the Chinaman.

"Yes," said Joan gravely; "I have no need of it."

She went past him with her swinging step.

She was coming down the mountain-side that evening, very tired, but with the curious, peaceful stillness of heart that comes with an entire acceptance of fate, when she heard the sound of horses' hoofs in the hollow of the canon. Her heart began to beat to suffocation.

She ran to where, standing near a big fir tree, she could look straight down on the trail leading up to Prosper's cabin. Presently the hors.e.m.e.n came in sight--the one that rode first was tall and broad and fair, she could see under his hat-brim his straight nose and firmly modeled chin.

"The sin-buster!" said Joan; then, looking at the other, who rode behind him, she caught at the tree with crooked hands and began to sink slowly to her knees. He was tall and slight, he rode with inimitable grace. As she stared, he took off his sombrero, rested his hand on the saddle-horn, and looked haggardly, eagerly, up the trail toward the house. His face was whiter, thinner, worn by protracted mental pain, but it was the beautiful, living face of Pierre.

Joan shrank back into the shadows of the pines, crouched for a few minutes like a mortally wounded beast, then ran up the mountain-side as though the fire that had once touched her shoulder had eaten its way at last into her heart.

Book Two THE ESTRAY

BOOK TWO: The Estray

CHAPTER I

A WILD CAT

The Lazy-Y ranch-house, a one-storied building of logs, was built about three sides of a paved court. In the middle of this court stood a well with a high rustic top, and about this well on a certain brilliant July night, a tall man was strolling with his hands behind his back. It was a night of full moon, sailing high, which poured whiteness into the court, making its cobbles embedded in the earth look like milky bubbles and drawing clear-cut shadows of the well-top and the gables and chimneys of the house. The man slowly circled the court beginning close to the walls and narrowing till he made a loop about the well, and then, reversing, worked in widening orbits as far as the walls again. His wife, looking out at him through one of the windows, thought that, in the moonlight, followed by his own squat, active shadow, he looked like a huge spider weaving a web. This effect was heightened by the fact that he never looked up. He was deep in some plan to which it was impossible for her not to believe that the curious pattern of his walk bore some relation.

From the northern wing of the ranch-house, strongly lighted, came a tumult of sound; music, thumping feet, a man's voice chanting couplets:

"Oh, you walk right through and you turn around and swing the girl that finds you, And you come right back by the same old track and turn the girl behind you."

Some one was directing a quadrille in native fas.h.i.+on. There was much laughter, confusion, and applause. None of this noise disturbed the man. He did not look at the lighted windows. He might really have been a gigantic insect entirely unrelated to the human creatures so noisily near at hand.

A man came round the corner of the house, crossed the square, and, lurching a little, made for the door of the lighted wing. Shortly after his entrance the sound of music and dancing abruptly stopped.

This stillness gave the spider pause, but he was about to renew his weaving, when, in the silence, a woman spoke.