Alvin Mead looked at her a second irresolutely. Then he stepped back in the corridor and locked the cell door. “That the gal? Thought ye was the one,” he said, with a half-chuckle, with coarse, sharp eyes upon her face.
“He is going to marry her,” Madelon repeated. She stood stiff and straight like a statue, and waited. Once, when Alvin made an impatient motion as though to open the door, she restrained him with such despairing eagerness that he drew back and looked at her wonderingly, and stood in surly silence awhile longer.
“She's got to come out now,” he said, at last. “I've got other things to tend to. Can't stay here no longer, nohow.” He unlocked the door and threw it open with a jerk. “Time's up!” he shouted, and Dorothy came out directly, almost as if she were running away. Alvin Mead clapped to the door with a great jar and locked it. Madelon, had she tried, could not have got a glimpse of Burr; but she did not try. She sprang at Dorothy Fair, and took her by the shoulders, and looked into her scared face with agonized questioning.
“Did—he confess?” she gasped out. “Did—he tell you, did he—tell you, Dorothy Fair?”
Dorothy shook her head in a mute terror that was almost horror. It seemed as if she would sink to the floor under Madelon's heavy hands. Alvin Mead stood staring at them.
“Didn't he—tell you—I was the one who—stabbed Lot? Didn't he—tell you?”
“She's at it again,” muttered Alvin Mead.
Dorothy shook her head. “He wouldn't speak,” she said, faintly. “He would say nothing about it.”
Madelon fairly shook her. “Couldn't you make him speak?You!”
“I couldn't, I couldn't, Madelon!”
“Did you tell him your heart would break if he didn't—that you couldn't marry him if he didn't?”
“Yes—don't, don't—look at me so, Madelon.”
Alvin Mead stepped forward. “Look at here—you're scarin' of that gal to death,” he interfered. “You'd better take your hands off her.”
Then Madelon turned to him, and grasped at the keys in his hands, as if she would wrest them from him. “Unlock the door and let me in, and let Burr Gordon out!” she demanded, wildly.
The jailer wrested his keys away with a contemptuous jerk, and took the skin from Madelon's hands with them. “You're crazy,” he said.
“I am not crazy! You've got an innocent man locked up in there, and I, who am guilty and tell you so, you will not arrest. It is you who are crazy. Let me in!”
Alvin Mead laid a rough hand on Madelon's shoulder. “Now you look at here, gal,” said he. “I've had about all this darned nonsense I'm a-goin' to stan'. That chap is in jail for murder, an' in jail he's a-goin' to stay till I git orders from somebody besides you to let him out. An' what's more, don't you come here on no sich tom-fool arrant agin. If you do you won't git in. I ain't no objection to gals he was goin' to marry ef he hadn't broke the laws comin' to see him a leetle spell, if they'll go away peaceable when they're bid, but as for havin' sech highstericky work as this, I'll be darned if I will. Now I can't stan' here foolin' no longer; you'd better be gittin' right along home, an' don't you break this other gal's neck with that old stepper you've got out there.”
Madelon Hautville said not another word. She went out of the jail quickly, and she and Dorothy were soon in the sleigh and flying down the road. The old racer was not so old nor so weary that the impetus of the homeward stretch failed to stir him—for a mile or so, at least. After that his pace slackened, and then Madelon turned to the other girl, who looked up at her with a kind of piteous defiance. “What did you say to him?” she demanded.
“I—begged him—if he—did not kill Lot to—say so,” replied Dorothy, faintly; then she shrank and quivered before the other girl, who started wrathfully, half as if she would fling her from the sleigh.
“Ifhe did not kill Lot to say so!” repeated Madelon. “Ifhe did not! You know he did not.”
“He would not tell me so,” said Dorothy, with her stubbornness of meekness, and her blue eyes met Madelon's, although there were tears welling up in them.
“Tell you so!” cried Madelon. “What are you made of, Dorothy Fair?”
“He would not,” repeated Dorothy. “If hewasinnocent, why should he not have told me if he loved me?”
Madelon looked at her. “You don't love him!” she cried out, sharply. “You don't love him, and that's why. You don't love him, Dorothy Fair!”
Dorothy flushed red and drew herself up with gentle stiffness. “You cannot expect me to unveil my heart to you,” said she.
“You have betrayed it,” persisted Madelon. “You don't love him, Dorothy Fair! Shame on you, after all!”
“What right have you to say that?” demanded Dorothy, and this time with some show of anger.
“The right of another woman who does love him, and would save his life,” Madelon answered, fiercely. “The right of a woman who can love more in an hour than such as you in a lifetime!”
“You—don't know—”
“I do know. You don't love him or you would not have distrusted him. You would have made him tell you the truth. You would have flung your arms around him, and you would not have let him go until he told you. Did you do that? Answer me: did you do that?”
A great wave of red crept over Dorothy's face, but she replied, with cold dignity: “I throw my arms around no man unbidden!”
“Unbidden!” repeated Madelon, and scorn seemed to sound in her voice like the lash of a whip. She flung out the reins over the horse's back, and they slipped along swiftly over the icy crust, and not another word did she speak to Dorothy Fair all the way home.
When they entered Parson Fair's south yard there was a swift disappearance of a dark face from a window, and the door was flung open, and the grimly faithful servant-woman came forth and lifted Dorothy out of the sleigh, crooning the while in tender and angry gutturals. Poor Dorothy Fair shook like a white flower in a wind, for beside the rigor of the cold, which seemed to pierce her very soul, the chill of fever was still upon her. She chattered helplessly when she tried to speak, and there were sobs in her throat. The black woman half carried her into the house, and up-stairs to her own chamber, where the hearth-fire was blazing bright. She covered her up warm in bed, with a hot brick at her feet, and dosed her with warm herb drinks, and coddled her, until, after some piteous weeping, she fell asleep.
But for Madelon Hautville there was no rest and no sleep. She felt not the cold, and if she had fever in her veins the fierce disregard of her straining spirit was beyond it. No knowledge of her body at all had Madelon Hautville, no knowledge of anything on earth except her one aim—to save her lover's life. She was nothing but a purpose concentrated upon one end; there was in her that great impetus of the human will which is above all the swift forces of the world when once it is aroused.
She unharnessed the horse quickly from the parson's sleigh, and led him, restive again at the near prospect of his stall and feed, back to the tavern stable, paid for him, and struck out on the homeward road, straight and swift as one of her Indian ancestors. A group of men in the stable door stood aside with curious alacrity to let her pass; they stared after her, then at each other.
“I swan!” said one.
“Wouldn't like to be in the way when that gal was headed anywheres,” said another.
“If that gal belonged to me I'd get her some stronger bits,” said the man who had been cleaning the bay horse when Madelon came for the white.
“I believe she's lost her mind,” said the tavern-keeper. “It's the last time I'll ever let her have a horse, and I told her so.” There came a blast of northwest wind which buffeted them about their faces and chests like an icy flail, and they scattered before it, some to their duties in the stable, some into the warm tavern for a mug of something hot to do away with the chill. It was too cold a day to gossip in a doorway. It was not long past noon, but the cold had seemed to strengthen as the sun rode higher. The wind blew from the icy northwest more frequently in fiercer gusts. Madelon Hautville sped along before it, her red cloak flying out like a flag, and took no thought of it at all. She was, while still in the flesh and upon the earth, so intensified in spirit that there existed for her consciousness neither heat nor cold. She reached the old road, the short-cut, stretched down through the stiff white woods to her own home; she hastened along it a little way, then she stopped and faced back and stood irresolute. The icy wind stiffened her face, but she did not note it. She looked back at the road with its blue snow-furrows stretching between the desolate woods, at the spires and roofs of the village beyond. If one followed that road to the village and took the first one upon the right, and travelled ten miles, one would come to the town of Kingston.
Madelon began moving along on the road to the village, vaguely at first, as if half in a dream, then with gathering purpose. Back she went, in her tracks, straight to the village and the tavern stable, and asked of Dexter Beers another horse to drive to Kingston. But he refused her, standing before her, blocking the stable door, looking aside with a kind of timid doggedness. “Can't let ye have another horse to-day nohow,” said he; “too cold to let 'em out.”
“I'll pay you well,” said Madelon.
“Pay ain't no object. Can't let none of 'em out but the stage-horses in no sech weather as this.” Still Dexter Beers did not look at Madelon's stern and angry eyes; he gazed intently at a post in an icy slant of snow in the yard on the left.
He had the usual masculine dread of an angry woman, and, moreover, he had a sharp-tongued wife, but he had also the masculine tenacity of a position. He stared at the post as if his spirit held fast to it, and braced itself against the torrent of feminine wrath which he expected; but it did not come. Madelon Hautville set her mouth hard, wrapped her red cloak around her with a firm gesture, as if she were a soldier about to start on a long march, and walked out of the yard and up the road without another word.
“I swan!” said Dexter Beers.
The red-faced hostler approached with a pail in each hand bound for the well; he was watering the coach-horses for the next relay. “What's up?” he inquired, pushing past him.
“I'll be darned if I don't believe that gal of Hautville's has started to walk to Kingston, 'cause I wouldn't let her have another horse!”
“Let her go it,” droned the red-faced man, with a short chuckle.
“Hope she won't freeze her feet nor nothin',” said Dexter Beers, uneasily.
“Let hergoit!” said the red-faced man, swinging across the yard with his pails.
Madelon Hautville walked on steadily. She reached the right-hand turn, and then she was on the direct Kingston road, with a ten-mile stretch before her. It was past one o'clock, and she could not reach her journey's end much before dark.
About two miles after the turn of the road the more thickly set habitations ceased, and there were only isolated farm-houses, with long, sloping reaches of woods and pasture-lands between. The pasture-lands were hummocked with ice-coated rocks and hooped with frozen vines; they seemed to flow down in glittering waves, like glaciers, over the hill-sides. The woods stood white and petrified, as woods might have done in a glacial era. There was no sound in them except now and then the crack of a bough under the weight of ice, and slow, painful responses, like the twangs of rusty harp-strings, to the harder gusts of wind. The cold was so intense that the ice did not melt in the noonday sun, and there were no soft droppings and gurglings to modify this rigor of white light and sound. Occasionally a rabbit crossed Madelon's path, silent as a little gray scudding shadow, and so swiftly that he did not reach one's consciousness until he was out of sight. There was seldom a winter bird, even, in sight. The ice on the trees and the pastures had locked and sealed their larders. Their little beaks could not pierce it for seeds and grubs, and so they were forced to repair to kitchen doors and barnyards in quest of stray crumbs from the provender of men and cattle.
The rabbits, and an ox-team drawing a sled laden with cedar logs, slipping with shrill, long squeaks over the white road, driven by a man with a red face in an ambush of frozen beard, were all the living things she met for the first four miles. The man clambered stiffly down from his sled just before he met her, and began walking, stamping, rubbing his ears, and swinging his arms violently the while. He stared hard at Madelon, and gave a sort of grunt as he passed. It was an instinctive note of comradeship with another in a situation hard for their common humanity. The man, toiling painfully along that hard road, on that bitter day, with hands and feet half frost-bitten, and face smarting as if with fire, his aching lungs straining with the icy air, felt that he and the woman struggling over the same road had common cause for wrath against this stress of nature, and so made that half-surly, half-sympathetic grunt as he passed her. But she did not respond. She did not even glance at him as she went along. Her face glowed all over, red as a rose with the freezing wind; she wrapped her cloak instinctively tight around her, and walked a little stiffly, as if her feet might be somewhat numb; but there was in her fixed dark eyes no recognition of anything but some end she had in view beyond his ken.
The man stopped and looked seriously after her, and past her down the road. “Wonder what she's up to!” he muttered. Then he struggled on after his oxen, who plodded along with goat's-beards of their frozen breath hanging from their jaws.
Two miles farther on there was a sudden loud blast of a horn, and following upon it a great jangle of bells and the tramp of hoofs, and Madelon knew the Ware and Kingston stage was coming. Presently the top of the coach and the leaders' heads appeared above the rise of the road, and Madelon stood well aside to meet it, pressing in among the crackling icy bushes.
There was another blast of the horn, then a wild rush of sure-footed horses down the hill, and the coach was past, going towards Ware. Madelon had caught only a glimpse of the frost-white driver on the box, a man beside him shrugged up miserably in great-coat and comforter, with back rounded and head bent against the cold, and some chilled faces in the windows. Some of the passengers had come from Wolverton, ten miles past Kingston, and one might freeze to death on a long stage journey a day like that. There was, perhaps, less danger in a walk, but there was danger in that should the cold increase, and it did increase hourly. Madelon's feet grew more and more numb. She stamped them from time to time, but more from instinct than from any real appreciation of the discomfort they gave her. So wrought up was she with zeal that it seemed she might have set out to walk through a fiery furnace as soon as through this frozen waste, and perhaps have had her flesh consumed to ashes, with her soul still intent upon its one purpose. All thought of her own self, save as an instrument to save the life of the man she loved, was gone out of the girl. Jealousy was purged out of her; all resentment for faithlessness, all longing for possession were gone. She bore in her heart the greatest love of her life as she sped along down the frozen road to Kingston.
The last two miles of the way poor Madelon struggled hard to cover. She drew short, gasping breaths, as if she were on a high mountain-top. The cold strengthened as the daylight waned. The very air seemed frozen and resolved into a cutting diamond-dust of frost. Suddenly Madelon awoke to the fear that she could not walk much farther. She had eaten nothing since morning; the cold and fatigue were consuming her life as the flame consumes the wick of the lamp when the oil is lacking.
“I must get there!” she said to herself. She stamped her numb feet desperately. She beat herself pitilessly with her stiff hands. She set forth on a run towards Kingston, and quickened her blood a little in that way, although she panted and fairly gasped for breath.
She drew a sigh of relief when she gained the last rise in the road, and the town of Kingston lay before her a mile in the valley. It was growing dark and the village lights were coming out when she had passed the straggling farms and come into the little centre of the town where the stores, the meeting-houses, and the tavern were grouped.
The village main street looked almost deserted. There was only one sleigh in sight, drawn up in front of the store. The horse was well covered with a buffalo-skin and an old bed-quilt in addition, which his master's wife had doubtless provided on account of the terrible cold.
As Madelon reached the store a man came out with a molasses-jug in hand and arms clasping parcels, which he began stowing away under the seat of the sleigh. Madelon went up to him. “Can you tell me where Mr. Otis lives?” said she. She could scarcely enunciate. Her very tongue seemed stiff with the cold.
The man turned and stared at her with sharp blue eyes under red brows frost-white between his cap and twice-wound red tippet. “Hey?” he said, in a muffled voice.
“Can you tell me where Mr. Otis lives?”
“Otis?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Which Otis d'ye mean? There's two Otises. D'ye mean Calvin Otis or Jim Otis?”
“He has a son that plays the fiddle,” answered Madelon, faintly.
“Then it's Jim ye mean. He died last year. He had a son Jim that plays the fiddle. Lives down the road on the left-hand side, five houses below the meeting-house. House with three popple-trees in front—sets close to the road.”
Madelon started, but the man's voice arrested her. “You look most froze,” said he. “Hadn't ye better go in there an' warm up?” He pointed towards the store-windows with a rosy glow of light and warmth transfusing their thick layers of frost. “It's pipin' hot in there—warm ye all through in a minute. It's a terrible cold night. Old man in there, lived 'round these parts risin' eighty years, says he never knew sech a night. Better just step in there.”
Madelon shook her head and started on.
“Where did ye come from?” called the man.
“Ware Centre,” Madelon gasped out, as the freezing wind struck her.
“Good Lord! you don't mean to say you've walked risin' ten mile from Ware Centre a day like this!”
Madelon was gone, bending before the wind, without another word.
“Good Lord!” said the man, “a woman walkin' from Ware Centre this weather!” He stood staring after the girls' retreating figure; then he started to unblanket his horse. But he stopped and stared again, and finally went into the store to tell the news.
Madelon kept on as fast as she was able, but she was nearly spent. Her exultation of spirit might indeed survive fleshly exhaustion and perhaps in a measure overcome it, but it could not prevent it altogether. When she reached the fifth house below the white meeting-house, the house set close to the road, with three poplar-trees in front, she had just strength enough to stagger to the door and raise the knocker. Then she leaned against the door-post, and it was only with a fierce effort that she kept her grasp upon her consciousness. She did not seem to feel her body at all.
Presently a bolt was shot and the door pushed open with an effort. It was little used, and there was ice against it. Then a man's face peered out irresolutely into the dusk. A knock upon the front door, upon a night like this, seemed so unlikely that he doubted if he had heard rightly.
“Anybody here?” he said. Then he saw the woman's figure propped stiffly against the door-post. “Who is it?” he asked, in a startled voice. “Is it you, Mrs. Lane?”
Madelon aroused herself. “I want to see Mr. Otis's son a minute if I can,” she said, with a great effort. Then she raised her piteous eyes to the face before her, and realized dimly that it was the face of the young man who had taken her place at the ball, and sent her homeward to work all this misery on that dreadful night.
“I am Mr. Otis's son,” returned the young man, wonderingly. “What”—then he gave a cry—“why, it is you!”
“I want—to—see you—a minute,” said Madelon, and her voice sounded far away in her own ears.
The young man started. “Why, you're half frozen,” he cried out, “and here I am keeping you standing out here! Come in.”
Madelon shrank back. “No,” she faltered, “I—only want to ask—”
But Jim Otis took her by the arm with gentle force, and she was so spent that she could but let him have his way, and lead her into the house and the warm living-room, staggering under his supporting clasp.
“Mother,” called Jim Otis—“mother, come here, quick!” He placed Madelon tenderly on the settle, and his mother came hurriedly out of the pantry.
“What is it?” she asked. “What is the matter, Jim? Who was it knocked? Why, who's that?”
Madelon leaned back helplessly in the corner of the settle, her head hanging half unconsciously. The young man stooped over her and unfastened her cloak and hood. “Come here, quick, mother!” he cried, and his voice was as sweet with pity as a woman's. “This poor girl is half dead with the cold.”
Mrs. Otis, large and fair-faced, with her soft, massive curves swathed in purple thibet, stared for a second in speechless wonder. “Who is it? How did she get here?” she whispered.
“Hush—I don't know. She's from Ware Centre. Her name's Hautville.”
“Seems to me I've heard of her. What has she come here for, Jim?”
“Hush—I don't know. She'll hear you. Go and get something hot for her to drink. I saw her at the ball the other night. Go quick, mother.”
“I'll get her some brandy cordial,” said Mrs. Otis, with sudden alacrity. She needed time always to get her mental bearing thoroughly in any emergency, but action was prompt afterwards. She made a quick motion towards the cupboard, but Madelon aroused herself suddenly. Her senses had lapsed for a few minutes upon coming into the warm room. “Where am I?” she asked, in a bewildered way.
“In our house,” replied Mrs. Otis, promptly. “Jim just brought you in, and it's lucky you come just as you did, for I don't know but you'd froze to death if you'd been out much longer. Now, I'll get you some of my brandy cordial, and that'll warm you right up. Did you come way over from Ware Centre this dreadful night?”
“Yes, ma'am,” replied Madelon, with the dazed look still in her eyes. Mrs. Otis looked back on her way to the cupboard.
“Rode way over from Ware Centre in an open sleigh?” she said.
“No, ma'am; I walked.”
Mrs. Otis stopped and looked at Madelon with a gasp, then at her son. “She's out of her head, I'm afraid,” said she.
“You didn't really walk over from Ware Centre?” questioned Jim.
“Yes, I did,” replied Madelon. She stood up with sudden decision. “I want to see you a minute,” she said to Jim. Then she turned to Mrs. Otis. “I don't need anything to take,” said she. “I was only a little dizzy for a minute when I came into this warm room. I feel better now. I only want to ask your son a question, then I must go home—”
Before Mrs. Otis could speak she asked the question with no preface.
“Didn't you see him give me the knife?” she cried out, with fiercely imploring eyes upon Jim Otis's face.
The young man turned deadly white. He looked at her and did not answer.
“Didn't you?” she repeated.
“What knife?” asked Jim Otis, slowly.
“You know what knife! The knife that my brother handed me when I started home from the ball—the knife that I stabbed Lot Gordon with. Tell me that you saw it, that you saw me take it, here before your mother, and then you must go to New Salem and testify, and set Burr Gordon free! He is in prison for murder, and I am guilty, and they will not believe it. You must tell them, and they will. You saw my brother give me that knife.”
Still Jim Otis, with his white face, stood looking at her, and answered not a word. His mother, continually opening her mouth to speak, then shutting it, looked first at one, then at the other, with round, dilated eyes, turning her head and quivering all over her soft bulk, like some great agitated and softly feathered bird.
“Why don't you speak?” demanded Madelon.
“What is it you want me to say?” said Jim Otis, then, hesitatingly.
“Say? Say that you saw my brother Richard give me the knife that I did the deed with.”
Jim Otis stood silent, with his pale, handsome face bent doggedly towards the floor.
“Say so! You saw it!”
Still Jim Otis did not speak, and Madelon pressed close to him, and thrust her agonized face before his. “Have mercy upon me and speak!” she groaned.
“Jim, what does she mean?” asked his mother, in a frightened whisper. “Is she out of her head?”
“No; hush, mother,” replied Jim. Then he turned to the girl. “No,” he said, with stern, defiant eyes upon her face, “I did not see your brother give you the knife.”
“You did! I know you did!”
“Idid not!”
“You did see him! You were looking at us when I went out!”
“I was tightening a string in the fiddle when you went out,” said Jim Otis.
“You must have seen.”
“I tell you I did not.”
Madelon looked at him as if she would penetrate his soul, and he met her eyes fully.
“I did not see your brother give you the knife,” he replied, with a steady, unflinching look at her; but a long shudder went over him as he spoke. The first deliberate lie of his whole life was Jim Otis telling, for he had seen Richard Hautville give his sister the knife.
Madelon believed his lie at last, and turned away. What with her sore exhaustion of body and this last disappointment her heart almost failed her. She went back to the settle for her cloak and her hood, and tied them on, while the others stood watching her, seemingly in a maze. She made for the door, but Jim Otis stopped her.
“You cannot go back to Ware Centre to-night,” he said.
Madelon looked at him with proud determination, although she could scarce stand. “I must go,” said she, and would have pressed past him, but he took hold of her arm.
“Mother,” he said, “tell her she cannot go. There has been no such night as this for forty years, and it is dark now. To-morrow morning I will carry her home; but to-night, as she is, it is out of the question. Tell her so, mother.”
Mrs. Otis gathered herself together then, and came forward and laid hold of Madelon's arm, and strove to pull her back towards the settle. “Come,” said she, as if Madelon were a child—“come, that's a good girl. You stay with us till morning, and then my son shall hitch up and carry you home. I shouldn't dare to have him go way over to Ware Centre to-night, cold as 'tis. He ain't very tough. You stay here with us to-night, and don't worry anything about it. I don't know what you're talkin' about, an' I guess you don't—you are all wore out, poor child; but I guess there didn't nobody have any knife, and I guess he'll git out of prison pretty soon. You just take off your things, and I'll get some pillows out of the bedroom, and you lay down on the settle by the fire while I get some supper. The kettle's on now. And then I'll heat the warming-pan and get the spare-room bed as warm as toast, and mix you up a tumbler of hot brandy cordial, and then you drink it all down and get right into bed, and I'll tuck you up, and I guess you'll feel better in the morning, and things will look different.”
“Let me go,” Madelon said to Jim Otis.
“She mustn't go, mother,” he said, never looking at Madelon at all, although he still held fast to her straining arm.
“Well,” said Mrs. Otis, “You ain't no daughter of mine, and if you set out to go I suppose I ain't any right to hinder you. But there's one thing maybe you ain't thought of—I can't let my son take you 'way over to Ware Centre a night like this, nohow. He's all I've got now, and I can't have anything happen to him. He can't go with you, and there ain't any stable here, and there ain't a neighbor round here that will hitch up and carry you there to-night, and—I suppose you know, if you've got common-sense, that if you set out to walk there, the way you are, you don't stand much chance of gettin' there alive.”
Madelon stared at her.
“I don't really know myself what you and my son have been talkin' about,” continued Mrs. Otis, “but near's I can make out you think you've done something wrong, and somebody's in prison you want to get out. I suppose you've got sense enough to know that if you freeze to death going home to-night you can't do anything more to get him out. Then there's another thing—it's night. You can't do much to get him out anyway before morning. I don't believe they ever let folks out at night, and my son shall carry you over just as soon as it's fit in the morning, and you'll do just as much good as if you went to-night.”
Still Madelon stood staring at her. Then presently she began unfastening her hood and cloak. “If you can keep me till morning I shall be obliged,” she said, with a kind of stern gratitude.
“Stay just as well as not!” cried Mrs. Otis. “Jim, just take her things and lay 'em in the bedroom. Then you have her set right down close to the hearth, and get all warmed through, while I get supper.”
Handsome young Jim Otis stood by with his brows knit moodily while Madelon Hautville removed her wraps, then took them over his arm, and conducted her to the warm seat in the hearth-corner which his mother designated.
In his heart he judged this girl whom he was defending to be guilty, yet was full of intensest admiration, and was sorely torn between the two and his own remorse over his false witnessing. “If I'm called into court and sworn on the Bible, I won't own up that I saw her take that knife,” he muttered to himself, as he laid the red cloak and hood on the high feather-bed in his mother's room.
This handsome, stalwart young man, who had hitherto been considered full of a gay audacity where womenfolk were concerned, able to make almost any pretty girl flutter at his smile, was strangely abashed before this beautiful Madelon Hautville, stained, in his eyes, with crime. He brought in wood and mended the hearth fire; he moved about doing such household tasks as were allotted to his masculine hands, and scarcely let his eyes rest once upon the girl in the chimney-corner. He dreaded the sight of that beautiful face which gave him such a shock of pity and admiration and horror. Jim Otis's mind could not compass this new revelation of a woman, but he would not betray her even for her own pleading if he went down perjured to his grave. So valiant was he in her defence that he withstood her against her own self.
Madelon's mother had died when she was a little girl. She could not fairly remember that ever in her whole life she had been so tended and petted as she was that night by Jim Otis's mother. Kind indeed her father and her brothers had always been to her. They had watched over her with jealous fondness, and had taken all rougher tasks upon themselves, but the devotion of woman, which extends to all the minor details of life, she had never known.
She had never had a supper-table set out for her own especial pleasure with this and that dish to tempt her appetite, as Mrs. Otis set out hers that night. A dish of a fine and sublimated porridge did Mrs. Otis make for her—a porridge mixed with cream and sprinkled with nutmeg and fat plums. “I thought some hot porridge would do you good,” said Mrs. Otis, when she sat the smoking bowl before Madelon. Then she whispered low, that her son, who was putting another stick on the fire before coming to table, might not hear, “It's the same kind of porridge I had after my son was born—with cream and plums in it. I used to think there never was anything so good.” This porridge might well have possessed a flavor of the sweetest memories of motherhood to the older woman, but to the girl, wild with longing to be gone and carry out her purpose, manna from heaven would not have yielded its full measure of sweetness.
She would scarcely have eaten at all had not Jim Otis's mother remarked, as she watched her reluctant sips of the good porridge, “As I said just now, you ain't any daughter of mine, and I ain't any right to dictate, but if you want to get that man, whoever he is, out of prison, you'll have to eat enough to get some strength to do it.”
Simply placid as Mrs. Otis looked, she had often wisdom enough to gain her ends by means of that shrewd finesse of government which appeals to the reason of others as applied to the furthering of their own desires.
Madelon after that swallowed her porridge almost greedily, and when supper was over went up-stairs to bed, following Mrs. Otis as readily as any meek young daughter of her own might have done. The spirit of resistance was laid for the time in this poor Madelon Hautville, but it had yielded, after all, more to the will of her own reason than to Jim Otis's mother or the weariness of her own flesh.
When Mrs. Otis came down-stairs she was flushed with pleasant motherly victory. “She's drunk all that hot cordial,” she said to her son, “every drop of it, and I've tucked her into bed with the extra comfortables over her, an' she eat quite a good supper, an' I told her to go right to sleep, and I guess she will.”
“If she don't she'll be down sick,” said Jim, sternly. He sat by the fire, tuning his fiddle.
“She can't hear your fiddle so it'll keep her awake, can she?” asked Mrs. Otis, anxiously.
“Of course she can't, up in the front chamber, with all the doors shut. Wouldn't have touched it if she could.”
“Well, I don't s'pose she can. Jim—”
Jim twanged a string. “What is it, mother?”
“I don't want to have you think I'm interferin', Jim. I know you're grown-up now, and I know there's things a young man might not want to tell his mother till he gets ready, but I do kind of want to know one thing, Jim.”
Jim tightened the G string. He bent his face low over his violin. “I don't know as I've ever kept much back from you, mother,” he said, soberly.
“No, I know you ain't, Jim; you've always told more to your mother than most boys. But I didn't just know but this might be something you hadn't got ready to speak about.”
“What is it you want to know, mother?”
“Jim, is that yourgirl?”
Jim laughed a little, although his eyes were grave; he raise the fiddle to his shoulder. “Lord, no, mother. I wouldn't get a girl without asking you.”
“I didn't know but you might have seen her over to Ware when you've been there to parties, and not said anything.”
“I never saw her but that once, mother.” Jim struck up “Kinloch of Kinloch,” but he played softly, lest by any chance Madelon, aloft in her chamber, might hear.
“She's handsome as a picture,” said his mother. “Who is it that's in prison, Jim?”
“A young man by the name of Gordon.”
“What for?”
“They think he stabbed his cousin.”
“My sakes! Do you s'pose he did, Jim?”
“I don't know, mother. I wasn't there.”
“I s'pose the young man that did it is this girl's beau, and that's why she's so crazy to get him out.”
Jim played the merry measure softly, and made no reply.
His mother stood before him quivering with curiosity, which she restrained lest it defeat its own ends. She had learned early that too impetuous feminine questioning is apt to strike a dead-wall in the masculine mind.
“I didn't quite understand what she meant about a knife,” she ventured, with an eager glance at her son. He played a little louder, as if he did not hear.
“I s'pose she come here, walked all that way from Ware Centre, this dreadful night, 'cause she thought you could help to get her young man out of prison.”
Jim nodded as he fiddled.
“But I can't see how your seein' her brother give her a knife could do any good. Of course that sweet, pretty girl didn't do it herself. But you didn't see her brother give her the knife, Jim?”
“Didn't you hear me say I didn't?” replied Jim, with sudden force. “Don't let's talk any more about it, mother. It's a dreadful piece of work, anyway. I don't half know what it means myself. That poor girl is 'most crazy because that fellow is in prison. That's why she came on this wild-goose chase after me. You can't tell anything by what she says.”
“Wasn't he a nice kind of a fellow before this happened, Jim?”
“No, he was a scamp,” said Jim Otis, angrily. He struck into the “Fisher's Hornpipe” with fury, regardless of the girl up-stairs.
“Land sakes, Jim, don't fiddle quite so loud as that—I'm dreadful afraid she'll hear,” said his mother. “I shouldn't thought a girl that looks as sweet as she does would ever have taken up with a scamp.”
“The sweetest girls are the worst fools,” answered Jim, bitterly, but he obeyed his mother and played less loudly. The shadows of the winter night might have footed it to the soft measures of the hornpipe which Jim Otis played on his fiddle. His mother could scarcely hear it in the pantry when she went in there to set away the supper dishes. She shut the door every time, lest her son should feel the icy air from the fireless closet. She had always a belief that Jim was delicate, and took a certain pride in it, although she could not have told why.
Everything that was in the least likely to freeze to its injury had to be removed from the cold pantry and set on the hearth that bitter night. It was quite a while before her soft, heavy pattering, which jarred the house when she stepped on certain parts of the floor, ceased, and she took her knitting-work and sat down in her rocking-chair opposite her son.
Jim continued to fiddle, touching the strings as if his fingers were muffled with down. The wind whistled more loudly than his fiddle; it had increased, and the cold with it. Some of Mrs. Otis's crocks froze on the hearth that night. No such cold had been known in Vermont for years. The frost on the window-panes thickened—the light of the full moon could not penetrate them; all over the house were heard sounds like those on a straining ship at sea. The old timbers cracked now and then with a report like a pistol. “It's a dreadful night,” said Mrs. Otis, and as she spoke the returning wind struck the house, and she gasped as if it had in truth taken her breath away.
A few minutes before nine o'clock Mrs. Otis put away her knitting-work and got the great Bible off the desk. “Stop fiddling now, Jim,” she said, solemnly. Mrs. Otis spoke with more direct authority in religious matters than in others. She felt herself well backed by the spiritual law. Jim finished the tune he was playing and lowered his fiddle from his shoulder. His mother found the place in the Bible, and the holy words were on her tongue when there was a sharp clash of sleigh-bells close under the window.
“Somebody's drove into the yard!” cried Mrs. Otis. “Who do you s'pose 'tis this time of night?”
“Hullo!” shouted a man's voice, hoarsely, and Jim shouted “Hullo!” in response, and started towards the door.
“Ask who's there before you open the door,” said the mother, anxiously. She stood listening a moment after Jim had gone; then she caught her shawl from a peg, put it over her head, and followed him—she was so afraid some harm would come to her son.
The outer door was open, and before it was drawn up a sleigh and a great, high-shouldered, snorting and pawing horse. In the sleigh was a man muffled in furs like an Eskimo, leaning out and questioning Jim.
“When did she come?” asked the man.
“About five o'clock,” answered Jim.
Then Mrs. Otis understood that they were talking about the girl in her spare-chamber, and she interposed, standing in the doorway. “She was just about tuckered out, what with the cold and that awful tramp,” said she. “She most ought to have rode over.” Mrs. Otis's voice was soft and conciliatory.
“We didn't know she was coming,” replied the man in the sleigh, courteously, “or we should not have let her walk so far on such a day.”
“Be you her brother?” questioned Mrs. Otis.
“Yes. I'm her brother Eugene.”
“And you drove over to see where she was?”
“Yes; we've been very anxious.”
“Well, you can be easy about her for to-night,” said Mrs. Otis. “She's tucked up nice and warm in my spare-chamber bed, and I give her a tumbler of my brandy cordial, and I guess she's sound asleep.”
“He wants to take her home to-night, mother,” said Jim, and there was a curious appeal in his tone.
Mrs. Otis, standing there on the door-step in the freezing moonlight, turned quickly upon the man in the sleigh, and all the soft conciliation was gone from her voice. “You ain't plannin' to take that girl way home to Ware Centre to-night?” said she.
“Father sent me for her,” replied Eugene Hautville.
“Well, she ain't goin' a step!”
“Her father will expect me to bring her,” said Eugene, with his unfailing courtesy. “He has been very anxious. I had hard work to find where she was. My father won't be satisfied if I come home without her.”
“That girl ain't going out of this house to-night!”
“I've got a bearskin here to wrap her up in. She is used to being out in all weathers,” persisted Eugene, gently.
“She can't go. Pull her out of a warm bed such a night as this! If you try to take that poor child out to-night I'll stand in my spare-chamber door, and you'll have to walk over me to do it—and my son won't see his mother hurt, I guess!”
Jim Otis stepped closer to the sleigh and spoke to Eugene Hautville in a low voice.
“Well,” said Eugene, slowly, “maybe you're right, Otis. I don't know what father will say, but if she was as used up as you tell for, I don't know as 'tis safe. It is an awful night.”
“I guess it ain't safe, and she ain't going,” maintained Mrs. Otis from the door-step.
Then Eugene Hautville bent well out of his sleigh and asked a question in the other man's ear.
“Yes, she did,” replied Jim Otis.
“The poor girl is crazy over it,” said Eugene. He and Jim talked for a few moments, but Mrs. Otis, straining her ears on the door-step, could not hear.
Suddenly Jim said, quite distinctly, “She wanted to know if I saw him give her the knife.”
There was a pause; then Eugene Hautville asked, in a voice with which he might have addressed a judge of his life and death, “Did you?”
“No,” said Jim Otis.
The next morning there took place in a few hours a great change in the temperature. It moderated rapidly. The frost on the windows and the ice-ridges in the roads did not soften yet, since the sun was overcast by heavy clouds, but the terrible rigor and tension of the cold was relaxed, and men could breathe without constraint. At eight o'clock, when Jim Otis and Madelon started for Ware Centre, there was a white film of fallen snow over the distant hills and scattering flakes drove in advance of the storm.
A mile out of Kingston it snowed hard. “Hadn't you better have that extra shawl mother put in over your shoulders?” Jim Otis suggested.
But Madelon shook her head. “The snow won't hurt me,” she said. She sat up straight in the sleigh, and there was a look in her eyes, fixed ahead on the white drive of the storm, as if her spirit were out-speeding her body. She had her strength again that morning. She had slept and eaten. She had submitted to the exigencies of life that she might gain power to resist them again.
Jim Otis drove a stout little mare with a good wind for speed, but she had not the stride of David Hautville's great roan. Moreover, after the first stretch, she slacked on the hills and fell into walks in the lonely reaches, almost as if she had learned it in a lesson. Many a pretty girl, flushing sweetly under Jim Otis's gay smile, and perhaps under his caressing arm, had ridden behind that little canny mare, who learned well the meaning of the careless rein along the woodland roads.
However, to-day there was no careless rein. At the first slack Madelon herself had reached the whip and touched the gently ambling neck. “She has more speed in her than this,” said she, shortly.
“She hasn't been driven for two days, either,” asserted Jim Otis. “Wake up, Molly!” He took the whip himself and flourished it with a quick little snap over her back. In truth, Jim Otis was as anxious to be at this journey's end as Madelon, for he feared every minute lest she should ask him again if he had seen her take the knife, and that he would again have to oppose falsehood to her frantic pleading. But Madelon had believed him. She did not beg him again for his evidence. She sat still at his side with a strained look in her black eyes, and they rode in silence, with the storm heaping its white flakes on their shoulders, until they reached Ware Centre.
Then Madelon turned quickly to Jim Otis. “Don't drive to my home,” said she; “I would rather not go home yet. Drive to Burr Gordon's house, please. I want to see his mother. Don't turn—keep straight on.”
“Yes, I know where he lives,” said Jim, soberly. He drove very slowly. They were drawing near the turn in the road. “See here,” he said, suddenly, “don't you think you'd better go home now?” He spoke with nothing of the half-gay, half-caressing authority with which he was wont to turn a pretty girl to his mind, but timidly rather, and kept his eyes fixed on the mare's nodding head, hooded with snow.
“No, I must see Burr's mother,” replied Madelon.
“But your folks will be expecting you, won't they?” persisted Jim Otis. He felt that he had a duty of loyalty towards this desperate girl's father and brothers as well as to herself. He had promised Eugene Hautville to bring her home this morning, and who could tell where she might wander and when she might return if he left her now?
He still did not look at Madelon as he spoke, but he felt her turn and fasten her eyes upon his face, and somehow they compelled his. He raised them and saw her beautiful face full of a scorn of passion which he might die and never know in himself.
“What do you think that is to me,” said she, “when I've got to save his life? If you do not wish to carry me farther, go back. I will walk.”
“I will take you wherever you wish,” returned Jim Otis, and touched up the mare, and neither spoke again until they reached Burr Gordon's house, high on its three terraces, with Lot Gordon's opposite. Then Jim halted his mare in the road before it, and would have alighted to assist Madelon, but she sprang out before him. “I am much obliged to you and your mother for what you have done for me,” said she, and turned with a swing of her red cloak, and was skimming up the terraces like a red-winged bird.
As for Jim Otis, he slewed his sleigh about recklessly, and shook the whip over the little mare, and drove up the road. When he reached the turn which he knew led to the Hautville house he drew rein, and sat pondering in his sleigh for a few minutes. He was in doubt whether he should inform Eugene Hautville of his sister's whereabouts or not. Finally he spoke to the mare, and continued on his way to Kingston.
The terraces which Madelon mounted were all covered with the gathering snow. When she reached the last the door was opened, and Burr Gordon's mother, Elvira, stood there. “I am sorry there's so much snow for you to wade through,” said she, in a sweet, quiet voice.
“I don't mind it, thank you,” replied Madelon, harshly. She felt incensed with this mother of Burr's, who came to the door and greeted her as if she were an ordinary caller, and her son were not in prison.
“You had better shake it off your skirts or you'll take cold,” said Mrs. Gordon.
“I am not afraid,” returned Madelon. She gave her skirts a careless flirt and entered the door with the snow still clinging to her.
“If you will wait a moment,” said Mrs. Gordon, “I will get a broom and brush the snow from you before it melts. Then you won't take cold.”
“I don't care to have you, thank you,” said Madelon. Mrs. Gordon said no more, but led the way to the sitting-room. She was a tall, slender woman with the face of a saint, long and pale, and full of gentle melancholy, with large, meek-lidded blue eyes and patiently compressed lips. She had a habit of folding her long hands always before her, whether she walked or sat, and she moved with sinuous wavings of her widow-bombazine.
The room into which she ushered Madelon was accounted the grandest sitting-room in the village. When Burr's father had built his fine new house he had made the furnishings correspond. He had eschewed the spindle-legged tables and fiddle-backed chairs of the former generations, and taken to solid masses of red mahogany, which were impressive to the village folk. The carpet was a tapestry of great crimson roses with the like of which no other floor in town was covered, and, moreover, there was a glossy black stove instead of a hearth fire.
“Please be seated,” said Mrs. Gordon. She indicated the best chair in the room. When her guest had taken it, she sat down herself in the middle of her great haircloth sofa, and folded her long hands in her lap. Mrs. Gordon had the extremest manners of the old New England gentlewoman—so punctiliously polite that they called attention to themselves. She had married late in life, having been previously a preceptress in a young ladies' school. She was still the example of her own precepts—all outward decorum if not inward composure.
Madelon Hautville, opposite her, in her snow-powdered cloak, with her face like a flash of white fire in her snow-powdered silk hood, seemed in comparison a female of another and an older race. She might well, from the look of her, have come a nearer and straighter road from the inmost heart of things, from the unpruned tangle of woods and undammed course of streams, from all primitive and untempered love and passion and religion, than this gentlewoman formed upon the models of creeds and scholars.
Madelon looked at the other woman a second with fierce questioning. Then she sprang up out of the chair where she had been placed, and stood before her on her sofa, and cried out, abruptly, “I have come to tell you about your son. He is not guilty. I, myself, stabbed Lot Gordon!”
“Please be seated,” said Elvira Gordon, and her folded hands in her lap never stirred.
“Seated!” cried Madelon, “seated! How canyoube seated, how can you rest a moment—you, his mother? Why do you not set out to New Salem now—now? Why do you not walk there, every step, in the snow? Why do you not crawl there on your hands and knees, if your feet fail you, and plead with him to confess that I speak the truth, and tell them to set him free?”
“I beg of you not to so agitate yourself,” said Elvira Gordon. “You will be ill. Pray be seated.”
Madelon bent towards her with a sudden motion, as if she would seize her by the shoulders.
“Are you his mother,” she cried—“his mother—and sit here, like this, and speak like this? Why do you not move? Why do you not start this instant for New Salem—this instant?”
“I beg you to calm yourself,” replied Elvira Gordon. “I have been to New Salem to visit my son. I have prayed with him in his prison.”
“Prayed with him! Don't you know that he is innocent, and in prison for murder—your own son? You stop to pray with him; why don't you act to save him?”
“You will make yourself ill, my dear.”
“Don't you believe that your son is innocent?” demanded Madelon. “Don't you believe it?”
Her eyes blazed; she clinched her hands. She felt as if she could spring at this other woman with her gentle murmurings and soft foldings, and shake her into her own meaning of life. If her impulse had had the power of deed, Elvira Gordon's little cap of fine needle-work would have been a fiercely crumpled rag upon her decorous head, her sober bands of gray hair would have streamed like the locks of a fury, the quiet clasp of her long fingers would have been stirred with some response of indignant defence if nothing else. Madelon, with her, realized that worst balk in the world—the balk of a passive nature in the path of an active one—and all her fiery zeal seemed to flow back into herself and fairly madden her.
“I hope,” said Elvira Gordon, “that my son will be proved innocent and set free.”
“Provedinnocent! Don't you know your own son is innocent?”
“I pray without ceasing that he may be acquitted of the crime for which he is imprisoned,” replied Elvira Gordon, over her folded hands.
Madelon looked at her. “You are a good woman,” said she, with fierce scorn. “You are a member of Parson Fair's church, and you keep to the commandments and all the creed. You are a good woman, and you believe in the eternal wrath of God and the guilt of your own son. You believe in that, in spite of what I tell you. But I tell you again that I, and not your son, am guilty, and I will save him yet!”
Madelon Hautville gathered her red cloak about her, and Mrs. Gordon arose as she would have done when any caller was about to take leave. It would scarcely have seemed out of keeping with her manner had she politely invited Madelon to call again. However, her quiet voice was somewhat unsteady and hoarse when she spoke to Madelon on the threshold of the outer door, although the words were still gently formal. “I am grateful to you for the interest you take in my son,” she said; “I hope you will not excite yourself so much that you will be ill.”
“I will die if that can save him,” answered Madelon Hautville, and went down the snowy steps over the terraces.
Elvira Gordon, when she had closed the door, drew the bolt softly. Truth was, she thought the girl had gone mad through grief and love for her son. Believing, as she did, that the love was all unsought and unreturned, and being also shocked in all her delicate decorum by such unmaidenly violence and self-betrayal, she regarded Madelon with a strange mixture of scorn and sympathy and fear.
Moreover, not one word did she believe of Madelon's assertion that she herself was guilty. “She is accusing herself to save my son,” thought Elvira Gordon, and her heart seemed to leap after the girl with half-shamed gratitude, in spite of her astonishment and terror, as she watched her go out of the yard and across the road to Lot Gordon's house. Mrs. Gordon stood at one of the narrow lights beside her front door and watched until Madelon entered the opposite house; then she went hastily through her fine sitting-room to her own bedroom, and there went down on her knees, and all her icy constraint melted into a very passion of weeping and prayer. Those placidly folded hands of hers clutched at the poor mother-bosom in the fury of her grief; those placid-lidded eyes welled over with scalding tears; that calmly set mouth was convulsed like a wailing child's, and all the rigorous lines of her whole body were relaxed into overborne curves of agony. “Oh, my son, my son, my son!” lamented Elvira Gordon. “Have mercy, have mercy, O Father in heaven! Let him be proved innocent! Let Lot Gordon live! Oh, my son!”
Elvira Gordon had the stern pride of justice of a Brutus. She would not without proof discover even to the passionate pleading of her own heart that she believed her son innocent, but believe it she did. Every breath she drew was a prayer that Lot Gordon might yet speak and clear Burr. This morning she had some slight hope that that might come to pass, for the sick man had passed a comfortable night except for his old enemy, the cough.
“It's my belief,” Margaret Bean had told Elvira, when she had sped across the road in the early morning to inquire, “that it's his old trouble that's going to kill him when he does die instead of anything else.”
“Has he spoken yet?” asked Elvira, eagerly.
“No, he ain't; but there's none so still as them that won't speak.” Margaret Bean nodded shrewdly at Elvira. Her voice was weak and hoarse as if from a cold or much calling, but there was sharp emphasis in it. She gave a curious impression of spirit subdued and tearfully rasped, like her face, yet never lacking.
“You—think he—could?” whispered Elvira Gordon.
“'Tain't for me to say,” replied Margaret Bean. “He lays there—looks most as if he was dead.” She wiped her eyes hard, with a handkerchief so stiff that it looked on that cold morning frozen as with old tears. Margaret Bean was famous for her fine starching in the village; it was her chief domestic talent, and she was faithful in its application in all possible directions.
“I wish he would speak if he could,” said Mrs. Gordon.
“I do, if it's for the best,” returned Margaret Bean. She hesitated; there were red rings around her tearful eyes, like a bird's. “I can't believe your son did it, nohow, Mis' Gordon,” said she.
“I hope if my son is innocent he will be proved so,” returned Elvira Gordon. She was too proudly just herself not to use the wordif, and yet she could have slain the other woman for the sly doubt and pity in her tone.
“It's harder for you than 'tis for him, layin' there,” said Margaret Bean, nodding towards the house. There was an odd gratulation of pity in her tone. She rubbed her eyes again.
“We all have our own burdens,” replied Elvira, with a dignified motion, as if she straightened herself under hers. “I hope he will be able to speak—soon.”
“I hope so, if it's for the best,” said Margaret Bean.
Elvira Gordon had gone home hoping that Lot might yet speak. She had heard his rattling cough as she picked her way out of the icy yard, and Madelon also heard it when she entered it. She knocked at the side door, and Margaret Bean opened it. She had a gruel cup in her hand.
“I want to see him,” said Madelon.
Margaret Bean looked at her. Her starched calico apron flared out widely over her lank knees across the doorway.
“I'm afraid he ain't able to see nobody this morning,” said she, and the asperity in her tone was less veiled than usual. Her voice was not so hoarse. She was mindful of this girl's former conduct at her master's bedside, and herself half believed her mad or guilty. A suspicious imagination had Margaret Bean, and Madelon would have found in her a much readier belief than in others.
“I've got to see him, whether he's able or not,” said Madelon.
“The doctor said—”
“I'm going to see him!”
Madelon pushed roughly in past the smooth apron and ran through the entry to Lot's room, with the housekeeper staring after her in a helpless ruffle of indignation.
“She's gone in there,” she told her husband, who appeared in the kitchen door, dish-towel in hand. Margaret Bean's husband always washed the dishes and performed all the irresponsible domestic duties of the establishment. He was commonly adjudged not as smart as his wife, and little store was set by his counsels. Indeed, at times the only dignity of his man's estate which seemed left to this obediently pottering old body was the masculine pronoun which necessarily expressed him still. However, even in that the undisturbed use was not allowed. “Margaret Bean's husband” was usually substituted for “He,” and nothing left of him but the superior feminine element feebly qualified by masculinity.
Margaret Bean's husband's name was Zenas, but scarcely anybody knew it, and he had almost forgotten it himself through never being addressed by it. Margaret herself spoke of her husband as “Him,” but she never called him anything, except sometimes “You.” However, he always knew when she meant him, and there was no need of specification.
Now he half thought she was appealing to his masculine authority from her bewildered air. He stiffened his meek old back. “Want me to go in there and order her out?”
“You!Go back in there and finish them dishes.”
Margaret Bean's husband went back into the kitchen, and Margaret followed Madelon with a sly, determined air, to Lot's room.
The great square northwest room was warm, but the frost had not yet melted from the window-panes. The room looked full of hard white lines of frost, and starched curtains, and high wainscoting; but the hardest white lines of all were in Lot Gordon's face, sunken sharply in his pillows, showing between the stiff dimity slants of his bed-hangings as in a tent door. He looked already like a dead man, except for his eyes. It seemed as if the life in them could never die when they saw Madelon. She bent over him, darkening the light.
“Speak now!” said she.
Lot Gordon looked up at her.
“I tell you, speak! I will not bear this any longer. I am at the end.”
Still Lot Gordon looked up at her silently.
Then Madelon made a quick motion in the folds of her skirt, and there was the long gleam of a hunting-knife above the man in the bed. Margaret Bean, standing by the door, shrieked faintly, but she did not stir.
“I have tried everything,” said Madelon. “This is the last. Speak, or I will make your speaking of no avail. I will strike again, and this time they shall find me beside you and not Burr. My new guilt shall prove my old, and they will hang me and not him. Speak, or, before God, I will strike!”
Then Lot Gordon spoke. “I love you, Madelon,” said he.
“Say what I bid you, Lot Gordon; not that.”
“All your bidding is in that.”
“Will you?”
“I will clear—Burr.”
Madelon slipped her knife away, and stood back. Margaret Bean slunk farther around past the bedpost. Neither of them could see her.
“On one condition,” said Lot Gordon.
“What?”
“That you marry me.”
Madelon gasped. “You?”
Lot laughed faintly, stretching his ghastly mouth. “You think it is an offer of wedlock from a churchyard knight,” he said.
“What are you talking about, Lot Gordon?”
“Marry me!”
“Marry you? I am going to prison to-day for stabbing you. If you die, I die for your murder. Marriage between us? You are mad, Lot Gordon.”
Lot Gordon opened his mouth to speak, but he coughed instead. He half raised himself feebly, and his cough shook the bed. Madelon waited until he lay back, gasping.
“You are mad to talk so,” she said again, but her voice was softer.
“No madder—than—my ancestors made me,” Lot stammered, feebly. Great drops of sweat stood on his forehead.
Madelon stood looking at him. He lay still, breathing hard, for a little; then he spoke again. “Say you will marry me, and I will clear him,” he said, “or else—strike as you will. But all will believe that Burr struck the first blow and you the second for love of him, and though he be not hung, the mark of the noose will be round his neck in folks' fancies so long as he draws the breath of life.”
“I will marry you,” said Madelon.
“Don't cheat yourself,” Lot went on, in his disjointed sentences, broken with the rise of the cough in his throat. “This wound may not be—mortal—after all, and a man lives—long, sometimes, when he's sore put to it for breath. The spark of life dies hard, and you may fan it into a blaze again. All the doctor's nostrums may not stir my poor dying flesh—but give the spirit—what it craves—and 'tis sometimes—strong enough—to gallop the flesh where it will. Lord, I've seen a tree blossom in the fall, when 'twas warm enough. It may be a long life we'll—live together, Madelon. Don't—cheat—yourself into—thinking you'll be my widow, instead of—my wife. My wife you may be, and—the mother of my children.”
Madelon moved towards him with a curious, pushing motion, as if she thrust out of her way her own will. She bent over him her white face, holding her body aloof. “I will marry you, come what will. Now, set him free.”
Great tears stood in Lot's eyes. “Oh,” he whispered, “you think only of him. I love you better than he does, Madelon.”
“Set him free,” said she, in a hard voice.
Lot heaved a great sigh, and rolled his eyes feebly about towards the door.
“Find—Margaret Bean,” he began; and with that Margaret Bean, who had kept the door ajar, slid out softly, “and tell her—to send her husband to—Parson Fair, and—Jonas Hapgood, and she—must go the other way for—the doctor. Tell them to come at once.”
With that Lot fell to coughing again, but Madelon went out quickly, and found Margaret Bean in the kitchen mixing gruel.
“Mr. Gordon wishes your husband to go at once for Parson Fair and Jonas Hapgood, and you for the doctor,” said she.
“Is he took worse?” asked Margaret Bean, innocently, with a quick sniff of apprehension.
“No, he is no worse, but he wishes to see them. He said to go at once.”
Margaret Bean cast an injured eye at the window, all blurred with the clinging shreds of the storm. “I don't see how I can get out in this awful storm nohow,” she said. “I've got rheumatism now. Why can'thego to see 'em all, I'd like to know?”
“The doctor lives a quarter of a mile the other way. It will save time.”
Margaret Bean looked at the gruel. “I've got to make this gruel for him.”
“I will make it. Get your shawl, quick.”
“It ain't b'iled.”
“I tell you I will make it.”
“Why can'thego to both places?”
“I will go myself!” Madelon cried, suddenly. She had been bewildered, or that would have occurred to her before. She had never been one to send where she could go, but for the time Lot Gordon's will had overcome hers. “Tell your husband to go to the parson's and the sheriff's, quick, and I will go for the doctor,” said she, and was flashing out of the yard in her red cloak before Margaret Bean had time to turn herself about from the prospect of her own going. Then she ordered her husband imperiously into his boots and great-coat and tippet, and sent him forth.
She finished the gruel, and took it in to the sick man, and fed him with hard thrusts of the spoon. Lot looked about feebly for Madelon, and Margaret Bean replied to the look, in her husky voice, “She's gone, instead of me. I've got rheumatism too bad to venture out in such a storm and get my petticoats bedraggled.” She spoke with a little whine of defiant crying, but Lot took no notice. He was exhausted. After he had eaten the gruel, he pointed to the chimney-cupboard.