“I feel that I, at least, deserve to be,” he said.
CHAPTER IV
FLIGHT
There was a girl named Joan who followed Pierre Landis because he laid his hand upon her wrist, and there was another Joan who fled up the mountain-side at sight of him, as though the fire that had once touched her shoulder had burnt its way into her heart. Then there was a third Joan, a Joan astray. It was this Joan that had come to Lazy-Y Ranch and had cooked for and bullied “the outfit”—a Joan of set face and bitter tongue, whose two years’ lonely battle with life had twisted her youth out of its first comely straightness. In Joan’s brief code of moral law there was one sin—the dealings of a married woman with another man. When Pierre’s living and seeking face looked up toward her where she stood on the mountain-side above Prosper’s cabin, she felt for the first time that she had sinned, and so, for the first time, she was a sinner, and the inevitable agony of soul began.
She fled and hid till dark, then prowled about till she knew that Wen Ho was alone in the house. She came like a spirit from hell and questioned him.
“What did the men ask? What did you tell them?”
The men had asked for a lady. He had told them, as Prosper had once instructed him, that no lady was living there, that the man had just gone. They had been satisfied and had left. But Joan was still in terror. Pierre must never find her now. She had accepted the lie of a stranger, had left her husband for dead, had made no effort to ascertain the truth, and had “dealings with another man.” Joan sat in judgment and condemned herself to loneliness. She turned herself out from all her old life as though she had been Cain, and, following Wen Ho’s trail over the mountains, had gone into strange lands to work for her bread. She called herself “Jane” and her ferocity was the armor for her beauty. Always she worked in fear of Pierre’s arrival, and, as soon as she had saved money enough for further traveling, she moved on. She worked by preference on lonely ranches as cook or harvester, and it was after two years of such life that she had drifted into Yarnall’s kitchen. She was then greatly changed, as a woman who works to the full stretch of her strength, who suffers privation and hardship, who gives no thought to her own youth and beauty, and who, moreover, suffers under a scourge of self-scorn and fear, is bound to change. Of all the people that had seen her after months of such living, Jasper Morena was the only one to find her beautiful. But with his sensitive observation he had seen through the shell to the sweetness underneath; for surely Joan was sweet, a Friday’s child. It was good that Jasper had torn the skin from her wound, good that he had broken up the hardness of her heart. She left him and Yarnall that afternoon and went away to her cabin in the trees and lay face down on the bare boards of the floor and was young again. Waves of longing for love and beauty and adventure flooded her. For a while she had been very beautiful and had been very passionately loved; for a while she had been surrounded by beauty and taught its meanings. She had fled from it all. She hated it, yes, but she longed for it with every fiber of her being. The last two years were scalded away. She was Joan, who had loved Pierre; Joan, whom Prosper Gael had loved.
Toward morning, dawn feeling with white fingers through the pine boughs into her uncurtained window, Joan stopped her weeping and stood up. She was very tired and felt as though all the hardness and strength had been beaten from her heart. She opened her door and looked at pale stars and a still, slowly brightening world. In a hollow below the pines a stream ran and poured its hoarse, hurrying voice into the silence. Joan bent under the branches, undressed and bathed. The icy water shocked life back into her spirit. She began to tingle and to glow. In spite of herself she felt happier. She had been stony for so long, neither sorrowful nor glad; now, after the night of sharp pain, she was aware of the gladness of morning. She came up from her plunge, glowing and beautiful, with loose, wet hair.