The Branding Iron - Page 65/142

All the time very grave and still, she took it off, put it on its box,

and laid it on the mantel. Then she went out of doors.

Prosper hurried to the window and saw her walk out to the garden they

had made and begin her work. He was puzzled by her manner, but

presently shrugged the problem of her mood away and went back to his

mail. That night he finished his novel and got it ready for the

publisher.

Again Wen Ho, calm and uncomplaining, was sent out over the hill, and

again the idyll was renewed, and Joan wore the collar and was almost

as happy as before. Only one night she startled Prosper.

"I asked Pierre," she said slowly, after a silence, in her low-pitched

voice, "when he was taking me away home, I asked, 'Where are you

going?' and he said to me, 'Don't you savvy the answer to that

question, Joan?' And, Prosper, I didn't savvy, so he told me and he

looked at me sort of hard and stern, 'We're a-goin' to be married,

Joan.'"

Prosper and Joan were sitting before the fire, Joan on the bearskin at

his feet, he lounging back, long-legged, smoke-veiled, in one of the

lacquered chairs. She had been fingering her collar and she kept on

fingering it as she spoke and staring straight into the flames, but,

at the last, quoting Pierre's words and tone, her voice and face

quivered and she looked at him with eyes of mysterious pain, in them a

sort of uncomprehended anguish.

"Why was that, Prosper?" she asked; "I mean, why did he say it that

way? And what--what does it stand for, marrying or not--?"

Prosper jerked a little in his chair, then said he blasphemously,

"Marriage is the sin against the Holy Ghost. Don't be the conventional

woman, Joan. Isn't this beautiful, this life of ours?"

"Yes." But her eyes of uncomprehended pain were still upon him. So he

put his hand over them and drew her head against his knee. "Yes, but

that other life was--was--before Pierre changed, it was beautiful--"

"Of course. Love is always beautiful. Not even marriage can always

spoil it, though it very often does. Well, Joan," he went on

flippantly, though the tickle of her lashes against his palm somehow

disturbed his flippancy, "I'll go into the subject with you one of

these days, when the weather isn't so beautiful. It's really a matter

of law, property rights, and so forth; a practice variously conducted

in various lands; it's man's most studied insult to woman; it's

recommended as the lesser of two evils by a man who despised woman as

only an Oriental can despise her, Saint Paul by name; it's a thing

civilized women cry for till they get it and then quite bitterly learn

to understand; it's a horrible invention which needn't touch your

beautiful clean soul, dear. Come out and look at the moon."