The Branding Iron Part 19

"I am not trying to make it hard," she said; "I want you to say what you came to say and go."

"Did _you_ ever love me, Joan?"

He had said it to force a look from her, but it had the effect only of making her more still, if possible.

"I don't know," she said slowly, answering with her old directness. "I thought you needed me. I was alone. I was scared of the emptiness when I went out and looked down the valley. I thought Pierre had gone out of the world and there was no living thing that wanted me. I came back and you met me and you put your arms round me and you said"--she closed her eyes and repeated his speech as though she had just heard it--"'Don't leave me, Joan.'"

Her voice was more than ever before moving and expressive. Prosper felt that half-forgotten thrill. The muscles of his throat contracted.

"Joan, I did want you. I spoke the truth," he pleaded.

She went on with no impatience but very coldly. "You came to tell me your side. Will you tell me, please?"

For the first time she looked into his eyes and he drew in his breath at the misery of hers.

"I built that cabin, Joan," he said, "for another woman."

"Your wife?" asked Joan.

"No."

"For the one I said must have been like a tall child? She wasn't your wife? She was dead?"

Prosper shook his head. "No. Did you think that? She was a woman I loved at that time very dearly and she was already married to another man."

"You built that house for her? I don't understand."

"She had promised to leave her husband and to come away with me. I had everything ready, those rooms, those clothes, those materials, and when I went out to get her, I had a message saying that her courage had failed her, that she wouldn't come."

"She was a better woman than me," said Joan bitterly.

Prosper laughed. "By G.o.d, she was not! She sent me down to h.e.l.l. I couldn't go back to the East again. I had laid very careful and elaborate plans. I was trapped out there in that horrible winter country...."

"It was not horrible," said Joan violently; "it was the most wonderful, beautiful country in all the world." And tears ran suddenly down her face.

But she would not let him come near to comfort her. "Go on," she said presently.

"Before you came, Joan," Prosper went on, "it was horrible. It was like being starved. Every thing in the house reminded me of--her. I had planned it all very carefully and we were to have been--happy. You can fancy what it was to be there alone."

Joan nodded. She _was_ just and she was honestly trying to put herself in his place. "Yes," she said; "if I had gone back and Pierre had been dead, his homestead would have been like that to me."

"It was because I was so miserable that I went out to hunt. I'd scour the country all day and half the night to tire myself out, that I could get some sleep. I was pretty far from home that moonlight night when I heard you scream for help...."

Joan's face grew whiter. "Don't tell about that," she pleaded.

He paused, choosing another opening. "After I had bandaged you and told you that Pierre was dead--and I honestly thought he was--I didn't know what to do with you. You couldn't be left, and there was no neighbor nearer than my own house; besides, I had shot a man, and, perhaps,--I don't know, maybe I was influenced by your beauty, by my own crazy loneliness.... You were very beautiful and very desolate. I was in a fury over the brute's treatment of you...."

"Hus.h.!.+" said Joan; "you are not to talk about Pierre."

Prosper shrugged. "I decided to take you home with me. I wanted you desperately, just, I believe, to take care of, just to be kind to--truly, Joan, I was lonely to the point of madness. Some one to care for, some one to talk to, was absolutely necessary to save my reason. So when I was leading you out, I--I saw Pierre's hand move--"

Joan stood up. After a moment she controlled herself with an effort and sat down again. "Go on. I can stand it," she said.

"And I thought to myself, 'The devil is alive and he deserves to be dead. This woman can never live with him again. G.o.d wouldn't sanction such an act as giving her back to his hands.' And I was half-mad myself, I'd been alone so long ... I stood so you couldn't see him, Joan, and I threw an elk-hide over him and led you out."

"I followed you; I didn't look at Pierre; I left him lying there,"

gasped Joan.

Prosper went on monotonously. "When I came back a week later, I thought he would be dead. It was dusk, the wind was blowing, the snow was driving in a scud. I came down to the cabin and dropped below the drift by that northern window, and, the second I looked in, I dropped out of sight. There was a light and a fire. Your husband was lying before the fire on a cot. There was another man there, your Mr.

Holliwell; they were talking, Holliwell was dressing Pierre's wound. I went away like a ghost, and while I was going back, I thought it all out; and I decided to keep you for myself. I suppose," said Prosper dully, "that that was a horrible sin. I didn't see it that way then.

I'm not sure I see it that way now. Pierre had tied you up and pressed a white-hot iron into your bare shoulder. If you went back to him, if he took you back, how was I to know that he might not repeat his drunken deviltry, or do worse, if anything could be worse! It was the act of a fiend. It put him out of court with me. Whatever I gave you, education and beauty, and ease, must be better and happier for you than life with such a brute as Pierre--"

"Stop!" said Joan between her teeth; "you know nothing of Pierre and me; you only know that one dreadful night. You don't know--the rest."

"I don't want to know the rest," he said sharply; "that is enough to justify my action. I thought so then and I think so now. You won't be able to make me change that opinion."

"I shall not try," said Joan.

He accepted this and went on. "When I found you in your bed waiting for news of Pierre, I thought you the most beautiful, pitiful thing I had ever seen. I loved you then, Joan, then. Tell me, did I ever in those days hurt you or give you a moment's anxiety or fear?"

"No," Joan admitted, "you did not. In those days you were wonderful, kind and patient with me. I thought you were more like G.o.d than a human then."

Prosper laughed with bitterness. "You thought very wrong, but, according to my own lights, I was very careful of you. I meant to give you all I could and I meant to win you with patience and forbearance.

I had respect for you and for your grief and for the horrible thing you had suffered. Joan, by now you know better what the world is. Can you reproach me so very bitterly for our--happiness, even if it was short?"

"You lied to me," said Joan. "It wasn't just. We didn't start even.

And--and you knew what you wanted of me. I never guessed."

"You didn't? You never guessed?"

"No. Sometimes, toward the last, I was afraid. I felt that I ought to go away. That day I ran off--you remember--I was afraid of you. I felt you were bad and that I was bad too. Then it seemed to me that I'd been dreadfully ungrateful and unkind. That was what began to make me give way to my feelings. I was sorrowful because I had hurt you and you so kind! The day I came in with that suit and spoke of--her as a 'tall child' and you cried, why, I felt so sorrowful that I'd made you suffer. I wanted to comfort you, to put my hands on you in comfort, like a mother, I felt. And you went out like you were angry and stayed away all night as though you couldn't bear to be seeing me again in your house that you had built for her. So I wrote you my letter and went away. And then--it was all so awful cold and empty. I didn't know Pierre was out there. I came back...."

They were both silent for a long time and in the silence the idyll was re-lived. Spring came again with its crest of green along the canon and the lake lay like a turquoise drawing the glittering peak down into its heart.

"My book--its success," Prosper began at last, "made me restless.

You'll understand that now that you are an artist yourself. And one day there came a letter from that woman I had loved."

"It was a little square gray envelope," said Joan breathlessly. "I can see it now. You never rightly looked at me again."

"Ah!" said Prosper. He turned and hid his face.

"Tell me the rest," said Joan.

He went on without turning back to her, his head bent. "The woman wrote that her husband was dying, that I must come back to her at once."

The snow tapped and the fire crackled.

"And when you--went back?"

"Her husband did not die," said Prosper blankly; "he is still alive."