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 God 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....”