He knelt down beside her, drew the hands from her face. "Why, Joan,

what's the matter? Don't you like music?"

Joan drew a shaken breath. "It's as if it shook me in here, something

trembles in my heart," she said. "I never heerd music before, jest

whistlin'." And again she wept.

Prosper stayed there on his knee beside her, his chin in his hand.

What an extraordinary being this was, what a magnificent wilderness.

The thought of exploration, of discovery, of cultivation, filled him

with excitement and delight. Such opportunities are rarely given to a

man. Even that other most beautiful adventure--yes, he could think

this already!--might have been tame beside this one. He looked long at

Joan, long into the fire, and she lay still, with the brooding beauty

of that first-heard melody upon her face.

It was the first music she had ever heard, "except whistlin'," but there

had been a great deal of "whistlin'" about the cabin up Lone River;

whistling of robins in spring--nothing sweeter--the chordlike whistlings

of thrush and vireo after sunset, that bubbling "mar-guer-ite" with

which the blackbirds woo, and the light diminuendo with which the

bluebird caressed the air after an April flight. Perhaps Joan's musical

faculty was less untrained than any other. After all, that "Aubade

Provençale" was just the melodious story of the woods in spring. Every

note linked itself to an emotional, subconscious memory. It filled

Joan's heart with the freshness of childhood and pained her only because

it struck a spear of delight into her pain. She was eighteen, she had

grown like a tree, drinking in sunshine and storm, but rooted to a

solitude where very little else but sense-experience could reach her

mind. She had seen tragedies of animal life, lonely death-struggles,

horrible flights and more horrible captures, she had seen joyous

wooings, love-pinings, partings, and bereavements. She had seen maternal

fickleness and maternal constancy, maternal savagery; the end of mated

bliss and its--renewal. She had seen the relentless catastrophes of

storm. There had been starving winters and renewing springs, sad

beautiful autumns, the riotous waste and wantonness of summer. These had

all been objective experiences, but Joan's untamed and undistracted

heart had taken them in deeply and deeply pondered upon them. There was

no morality in their teachings, unless it was the morality of complete

suspension of any judgment whatsoever, the marvelous literal, "Judge

not." She knew that the sun shone on the evil and on the good, but she

knew also that frost fell upon the good as well as upon the evil nor was

the evil to be readily distinguished. Her father prated of only one

offense, her mother's sin. Joan knew that it was a man's right to kill

his woman for "dealin's with another man." This law was human; it

evidently did not hold good with animals. There was no bitterness,

though some ferocity, in the traffic of their loves.




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