He shook his head, smiled, kissed her hand, and went out.
She was entirely exhausted by her emotion, so that all her memories fell away from her and left her in a peaceful blankness. She trusted Prosper’s word. With every fiber of her heart she trusted him, as simply, as singly, as foolishly as a child trusts God.
CHAPTER X
PROSPER COMES TO A DECISION
Perhaps, in spite of his gruesome boast as to dead men, it was as much to satisfy his own spirit as to comfort Joan’s that Prosper actually did undertake a journey to the cabin that had belonged to Pierre. It was true that Prosper had never been able to stop thinking, not so much of the tall, slim youth lying so still across the floor, all his beauty and strength turned to an ashen slackness, as of a brown hand that stirred. The motion of those fingers groping for life had continually disturbed him. The man, to Prosper’s mind, was an insensate brute, deserving of death, even of torment, most deserving of Joan’s desertion, nevertheless, it was not easy to harden his nerves against the picture of a man left, wounded and helpless, to die slowly alone. Prosper went back expecting to find a dead man, went back as a murderer visits the scene of his crime. He dubbed himself more judge than murderer, but there was a restless misery of the imagination not to be quieted by names. He went back stealthily at dusk, choosing a dusk of wind-driven snow so that his tracks vanished as soon as made. It was very desolate—the blank surface of the world with its flying scud, the blank yellow-gray sky, the range, all iron and white, the blue-black scars of leafless trees, the green-black etchings of firs. The wind cut across like a scythe, sharp, but making no stir above the drift. It was all dead and dark—an underground world which, Prosper felt, never could have seen the sun, had no memory of sun nor moon nor stars. The roof of Pierre’s cabin made a dark ridge above the snow, veiled in cloudy drift. He reached it with a cold heart and slid down to its window, cautiously bending his face near to the pane. He expected an interior already dark from the snow piled round the window, so he cupped his hands about his eyes. At once he let himself drop out of sight below the sill. There was a living presence in the house. Prosper had seen a bright fire, the smoke of which had been hidden by the snow-spray, a cot was drawn up before the fire, and a big, fair young man in tweeds whose face, rosy, sensitive, and quiet, was bent over the figure on the cot. A pair of large, white hands were carefully busy.
Prosper, crouched below the window, considered what he had seen. It was a week now since he had left Landis for a dying man. This big fellow in tweeds must have come soon after the shooting. Evidently he was not caring for a dead man. The black head on the pillow had moved. Now there came the sound of speech, just a bass murmur. This time the black head turned itself slightly and Prosper saw Pierre’s face. He had seen it only twice before; once when it had looked up, fierce and crazed, at his first entrance into the house, once again when it lay with lifted chin and pale lips on the floor. But even after so scarce a memory, Prosper was startled by the change. Before, it had been the face of a man beside himself with drink and the lust of animal power and cruelty; now it was the wistful face of Pierre, drawn into a tragic mask like Joan’s when she came to herself; a miserably haunted and harrowed face, hopeless as though it, too, like the outside world, had lost or had never had a memory of sun. Evidently he submitted to the dressing of his wound, but with a shamed and pitiful look. Prosper’s whole impression of the man was changed, and with the change there began something like a struggle. He was afflicted by a crossing of purposes and a stumbling of intention.
He did not care to risk a second look. He crept away and fled into the windy dusk. He traveled with the wind like a blown rag, and, stopping only for a few hours’ rest at the ranger station, made the journey home by morning of the second day. And on the journey he definitely made up his mind concerning Joan.
Prosper Gael was a man of deliberate, though passionate, imagination. He did not often act upon impulse, though his actions were often those attempted only by passion-driven or impulsive folk. Prosper could never plead thoughtlessness. He justified carefully his every action to himself. Those were cold, dark hours of deliberation as he let the wind drive him across the desolate land. When the wind dropped and a splendid, still dawn swept up into the clean sky, he was at peace with his own mind and climbed up the mountain trail with a half-smile on his face.