CHAPTER IX
DRIED ROSE-LEAVES
The house that Prosper Gael had built for himself and for the woman whom Joan came to think of as the “tall child,” stood in a cañon, a deep, secret fold of the hills, where a cliff stood behind it, and where the pine-needled ground descended before its door, under the far-flung, greenish-brown shade of fir boughs, to the lip of a green lake. Here the highest snow-peak toppled giddily down and reared giddily up from the crystal green to the ether blue, firs massed into the center of the double image. In January, the lake was a glare of snow, in which the big firs stood deep, their branches heavily weighted. Prosper had dug a tunnel from his door through a big drift which touched his eaves. It was curious to see Wen Ho come pattering out of this Northern cave, his yellow, Oriental face and slant eyes peering past the stalactite icicles as though they felt their own incongruity almost with a sort of terror. The interior of the five-room house gave just such an effect of bizarre and extravagant contrast; an effect, too, of luxury, though in truth it was furnished for the most part with stuffs and objects picked up at no very great expense in San Francisco shops. Nevertheless, there was nothing tawdry and, here and there, something really precious. Draperies on the walls, furniture made by Wen Ho and Prosper, lacquered in black and red, brass and copper, bright pewter, gay china, some fur rugs, a gorgeous Oriental lamp, bookcases with volumes of a sober richness, in fact the costliest and most laborious of imports to this wilderness, small-paned, horizontal windows curtained in some heavy green-gold stuff which slipped along the black lacquered pole on rings of jade; all these and a hundred other points of softly brilliant color gave to the living-room a rare and striking look, while the bedrooms were matted, daintily furnished, carefully appointed as for a bride. Much thought and trouble, much detailed labor, had gone to the making of this odd nest in a Wyoming cañon. Whatever one must think of Prosper Gael, it is difficult to shirk heartache on his account. A man of his temperament does not lightly undertake even a companioned isolation in a winter land. To picture what place of torment this well-appointed cabin was to him before he brought to it Joan, as a lonely man brings in a wounded bird to nurse and cherish, stretches the fancy on a rack of varied painfulness.
On that night, snow was pouring itself down the narrow cañon in a crowded whirl of dry, clean flakes. Wen Ho, watchful, for his master was already a day or so beyond the promised date of his return, had started a fire on the hearth and spread a single cover on the table. He had drawn the green-and-gold curtains as though there had been anything but whirling whiteness to look in and stood warming himself with a rubbing of thin, dry hands before the open blaze. The real heat of the house, and it was almost unbearably hot, came from the stoves in kitchen and bedrooms, but this fire gave its quota of warmth and more than its quota of that beauty so necessary to Prosper Gael.
Wen Ho put his head from one side to the other and stopped rubbing his hands. He had heard the packing of snow under webs and runners. After listening a moment, he nodded to himself, like a figure in a pantomime, ran into the kitchen, did something to the stove, then lighted a lantern and pattered out along the tunnel dodging the icicle stalactites. Between the firs he stopped and held his lantern high so that it touched a moving radius of flakes to silver stars. Back of him through the open door streamed the glow of lamp and fire filling the icicles with blood and flushing the walls and the roof of the cave.
Down the cañon Prosper shouted, “Wen Ho! Wen Ho!”
The Chinaman plunged down the trail, packed below the new-fallen snow by frequent passage, and presently met the bent figure of his master pulling and breathing hard. Without speaking, Wen Ho laid hold of the sled rope and together the two men tugged up the last steep bit of the hill.
“Velly heavy load,” said Wen.
Prosper’s eyes, gleaming below the visor of his cap, smiled half-maliciously upon him. “It’s a deer killed out of season,” he said, “and other cattle—no maverick either—fairly marked by its owner. Lend me a hand and we’ll unload.”