Then as he raised himself, gripped by a sickening coldness in his breast, he remembered Ellen Jorth's face as she had gazed dreamily down off the Rim--so soft, so different, with tremulous lips, sad, musing, with far-seeing stare of dark eyes, peering into the unknown, the instinct of life still unlived. With confused vision and nameless pain Jean thought of her.
"Dad, it's hard on--the--the young folks," he said, bitterly. "The sins of the father, you know. An' the other side. How about Jorth?
Has he any children?"
What a curious gleam of surprise and conjecture Jean encountered in his father's gaze!
"He has a daughter. Ellen Jorth. Named after her mother. The first time I saw Ellen Jorth I thought she was a ghost of the girl I had loved an' lost. Sight of her was like a blade in my side. But the looks of her an' what she is--they don't gibe. Old as I am, my heart--Bah! Ellen Jorth is a damned hussy!"
Jean Isbel went off alone into the cedars. Surrender and resignation to his father's creed should have ended his perplexity and worry.
His instant and burning resolve to be as his father had represented him should have opened his mind to slow cunning, to the craft of the Indian, to the development of hate. But there seemed to be an obstacle.
A cloud in the way of vision. A face limned on his memory.
Those damning words of his father's had been a shock--how little or great he could not tell. Was it only a day since he had met Ellen Jorth? What had made all the difference? Suddenly like a breath the fragrance of her hair came back to him. Then the sweet coolness of her lips! Jean trembled. He looked around him as if he were pursued or surrounded by eyes, by instincts, by fears, by incomprehensible things.
"Ahuh! That must be what ails me," he muttered. "The look of her--an' that kiss--they've gone hard me. I should never have stopped to talk.
An' I'm to kill her father an' leave her to God knows what."
Something was wrong somewhere. Jean absolutely forgot that within the hour he had pledged his manhood, his life to a feud which could be blotted out only in blood. If he had understood himself he would have realized that the pledge was no more thrilling and unintelligible in its possibilities than this instinct which drew him irresistibly.
"Ellen Jorth! So--my dad calls her a damned hussy! So--that explains the--the way she acted--why she never hit me when I kissed her. An' her words, so easy an' cool-like. Hussy? That means she's bad--bad!
Scornful of me--maybe disappointed because my kiss was innocent!
It was, I swear. An' all she said: 'Oh, I've been kissed before.'"
Jean grew furious with himself for the spreading of a new sensation in his breast that seemed now to ache. Had he become infatuated, all in a day, with this Ellen Jorth? Was he jealous of the men who had the privilege of her kisses? No! But his reply was hot with shame, with uncertainty. The thing that seemed wrong was outside of himself.
A blunder was no crime. To be attracted by a pretty girl in the woods --to yield to an impulse was no disgrace, nor wrong. He had been foolish over a girl before, though not to such a rash extent. Ellen Jorth had stuck in his consciousness, and with her a sense of regret.
Then swiftly rang his father's bitter words, the revealing: "But the looks of her an' what she is--they don't gibe!" In the import of these words hid the meaning of the wrong that troubled him.
Broodingly he pondered over them.