CHAPTER XVI
THE TALL CHILD
There were times, even now, when Prosper tried to argue himself back into sardonic self-possession. “Pooh!” said his brain, “you were beside yourself over a loss and then you were shut in for months of winter alone with this mountain girl, so naturally you are off your balance.” He would school himself while Joan shoveled outdoors. He would try to see her with critical, clear eyes when she strode in. But one look at her and he was bemused again. For now she was at a great height of beauty, vivid with growing strength and purpose, her lips calm and scarlet, her eyes bright and hopeful. In fact, Joan had made her plans. She would wait till spring, partly to get back her full strength, partly to make further progress in her studies, but mostly in order not to hurt this hospitable Prosper Gael. The naïveté of her gratitude, of her delicate consideration for his feelings, which continually triumphed over an instinctive fear, would have filled him with amusement, perhaps with compunction, had he been capable of understanding them. She was truly sorry that she had hurt him by running away. She told herself she would not do that again. In the spring she would make him a speech of thankfulness and of farewell, and then she would tramp back to Pierre’s homestead and win and hold Pierre’s land. As yet, you see, Prosper entered very little into her conscious life. Somewhere, far down in her, there was a disturbance, a growing doubt, a something vague and troubling.... Joan had not learnt to probe her own heart. A sensation was not, or it was. She was puzzled by the feeling Prosper was beginning to cause her, a feeling of miserable complexity; but she was not yet mentally equipped for the confronting of complexity. It was necessary for an emotion to rush at Joan and throw down, as it were, her heart before she recognized it; even then she might not give it a name. She would act, however, and with violence.
So now she planned and worked and grew beautiful with work and planning, while Prosper curbed his passion and worked, too, and his instruments were delicate and deadly and his plans made no account of hers. Every word he read to her, every note he played for her, had its calculated effect. He worked on her subconsciousness, undermining her path, and at nights and in her sleep she grew aware of him.
But even now, in his cool and passionate heart there were moments of reaction, one at last that came near to wrecking his purpose.
“Your clothes are about done for, Joan,” Prosper laughed one morning, watching her belt in her tattered shirt; “you’ll soon look like Cophetua’s beggar maid.”
“I’m not quite barefoot yet.” She held up a cracked boot.
“Joan—” He hesitated an instant, then got up from his desk, walked to a window, and looked out at the bright morning. The lake was ruffled with wind, the firs tossed, there were patches of brown-needled earth under his window; his eyes were startled by a strip of green where tiny yellow flowers trod on the very edge of the melting drift. The window was open to soft, tingling air that smelt of snow and of sun, of pines, of growing grass, of sap, of little leaf-buds. The birds were in loud chorus. For several minutes Prosper stared and listened.
“What is it, Mr. Gael?” asked Joan patiently.
He started. “Oh,” he said without looking at her again, “I was going to tell you that there are a skirt and a sort of coat in—in a closet in the hall. Do you want to use them?”