“Curse the money!” Burr cried out. “Curse the money and the position and all the damned lot of bubbles that come between a man and what's worth more, and will last!”
“Burr, don't talk so!”
“I can't help it, mother. I mean it. Curse it, I say, and the infernal weakness that makes a man see double on women's faces when there's only one woman in his heart! Mother, why didn't you know about that last, so you could tell me when I was a boy?”
His mother colored a little. “I never taught you to be fickle,” she said, with a kind of shamed bewilderment.
“I never have been fickle. This is something else worse.” Burr looked at his mother again, with the old expression of his when he had come in hurt from play. No matter how long Burr Gordon might live, no matter what brave deeds he might do—and there was brave stuff in him, for he would have gone to the gallows rather than betray Madelon—there would always be in him the appeal of a child to the woman who loved him. “Mother, I don't know how to bear it,” he said.
“You must bear it like a man.”
“It is hard to bear the consequence of unmanly conduct like a man,” said Burr, shortly; then he went out, as if the old comfort from his mother had failed him. As for her, she finished heeling her stocking, and then went out into the kitchen and made a pudding that her son loved for his dinner.
Burr went back up-stairs to his cold chamber, and watched for Madelon to come out of Lot's house. It seemed to him she was there an eternity, but in reality it was only a half-hour.
She had found Lot sitting as usual before the fire with a leather-covered volume on his knees. “I have come,” she said, standing just inside the door; then she started at the look he gave her. There was a significance in it which she could not understand.
He did not say a word for full five minutes while she waited. He did not even ask her to be seated. “Do you know the date?” he asked then, harshly. There was no hint of roses and honey in his speech and manner to offend her like his letter.
“Yes, I do.”
“You know the month is up on Monday?”
“I am not likely to forget.”
“True,” said Lot; “it is the last thing a girl will forget—the day set for her happy marriage.” He laughed.
Madelon's face contracted. She set her mouth harder, and looked straight at Lot. “When you have done laughing,” said she, “will you tell me what you want of me? I have to go home and get dinner.”
Lot still looked at her with his mocking smile. “I wished to inquire if you are ready to become my bride on Monday,” said he.
“Yes, I am ready. Is that all?”
“I wished also to inquire if you have any plans concerning the ceremony which you would like carried out.”
“I have none.”
“Then will it suit you to come here on Monday at two o'clock in the afternoon, since the doctor tells me I shall scarcely be able to go out myself, and be united to me by Parson Fair?”
“I am ready to carry out any plans you may make.”
“Your father and your brothers and my cousin Burr and his mother will, of course, be present at our wedding,” said Lot, with wary eyes upon her face.
Madelon looked at him as proudly as ever. “Very well,” said she. She waited a minute longer; then she laid her hand on the doorlatch.
“Wait a minute!” Lot cried. He looked at her hesitatingly. A flush crept over his white face. “Madelon,” he began; then his cough interrupted him. He tried to force it back with fierce swallowings, but had to yield. He bent over double, and shook with rattling volleys. Madelon waited, her eyes averted, without a sign of pity. The near approach of her wedding-day caused a revolt of her whole maiden soul towards him so intense that it was as a contraction of the muscles. She was utterly hard to his suffering. At last he raised himself, panting, and cast a pale look around at her.
“Well, what do you want?” she said.
He motioned feebly towards is desk on the other side of the room. “Top drawer,” he whispered, hoarsely; “left-hand corner—find—leather case—bring to me.”
Madelon crossed the room to the desk, opened the drawer, found the leather case, and carried it to Lot. “Here,” said she.
“Open it,” Lot whispered.
Madelon pressed the spring in the case, and held it out open towards Lot without a glance at its contents.
“Look,” he said.
Madelon glanced at the little gold watch, curled round with a long gold chain, which the case contained, and continued to hold it out towards Lot. “I've looked,” said she. “Here, take it; I must go home.”
“Oh, Madelon, it's for you.”
“I don't want it.”
“Take it—Madelon, won't you have it? I got it for you.”
“No, I don't want it. Shall I put it back in the drawer?”
“Don't you think it's a pretty watch?”
“Yes. Shall I put it back?”
“You haven't any watch, Madelon.”
“I don't want one.” Madelon closed the case impatiently, and turned away.
“Oh, Madelon, won't you take it?” Lot begged, piteously.
“I told you no—I do not care for it.” Madelon put the case back in the desk drawer. Then she drew her cloak together, and went to the door again.
“Oh,” said Lot Gordon, weakly, in his hoarse voice, “the hardest thing in the whole world for Love to bruise himself against is the tender heart of a woman, when 'tis not inclined his way.”
“Good-bye,” said Madelon, and shut the door behind her fiercely. That last speech of Lot's, which, like many of his speeches, seemed to her no human vernacular, added terror to her aversion of him. “He's more like a book than a man,” she had often thought, and the fancy seized her now that the great leather-bound book upon his knees, and all those leather-bound books against his walls, had somehow possessed him with an uncanny life of their own.
And she may have been in a measure right, for Lot Gordon, during his whole life, had dealt indirectly with human hearts through their translations in his beloved books rather than with the beating hearts of men and women around him. Still, although he spoke like one who learns a language from books instead of the familiar converse of people, and his thoughts clothed themselves in images which those about him disdained and threw off as impeding their hard race of life, poor Lot Gordon's heart beat in time with the hearts of his kind. But that Madelon could not know because hers was so set against it.
She hurried out of the house and the yard, dreading again lest she should encounter Burr. But her haste was of no avail, for he came straight down his opposite terraces, and met her when she reached the road.
She would have pushed past then, but he stood squarely before her. “Madelon, can't I speak with you a minute?” he pleaded. Madelon saw, without seeming to look, that Burr's handsome face was white as death and haggard.
“Are you sick?” she asked, suddenly. “Why do you look so? What is the matter with you?” and she put a half-bitter, half-anxiously compassionate weight upon theyou.
“I believe I am going mad,” Burr groaned, with the quick grasp of a man at the pity of the woman he loves. “Oh, Madelon!” He held out his hands towards her like a child, but she stood back from him, and looked straight at him with sharp questioning in her eyes.
“Do you mean—” she began; then stopped, and questioned him with her eyes again. She was seized with the belief, which filled her at once with agony and an impulse of fierce protection like that of a mother defending her young with her own wounded bosom, that Burr had had a falling out with Dorothy.
“Oh, Madelon!” Burr said again, and then he could say no more for very shame and honor. He had run out, indeed, in a half-frenzy.
“Sheshallnot play you false!” Madelon cried out. “Dorothy Fairshallkeep her word with you.”
Burr looked at her, bewildered.
“Marry her at once,” Madelon cried, with a quick rush of her words—“at once. Do you hear me, Burr Gordon? It's all the way to do with a girl like that. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, I hear you,” Burr said, slowly, as if he were stunned.
“Dorothy Fairshallkeep her promise to you—I will make her. She shall marry you whenever you say. I will go this very day and see her.”
“There is no need for you to do that, Madelon. I will marry her at once, as you advise. I think she will be willing,” Burr said, slowly and coldly. Then he left her without another word, and went up his terraces with his back bent like an old man's. He was holding hard to his heart the surety that Madelon no longer cared for him, for it is scarcely within the imagination of either man or woman that one can love and yet give away. But by the time he entered the house his spirit had awakened within him, and he made a proud resolve that since Madelon so advised and was herself to marry that he would marry Dorothy Fair as soon as she should be willing.
As for Madelon, she went home with her mind diverted from her own unhappiness by Burr's, and, in spite of his assurance, might have gone to visit her righteous anger upon Dorothy had she not heard that very night that Burr and Parson Fair's daughter were to be married in a month's time.
The next day Lot sent again for her, and she obeyed, with her proud sense of duty to her future husband, although every step she took towards him carried her farther away. His conduct began to puzzle her more than ever. Again he sent her to the desk drawer, and this time for a roll of precious rose-colored satin stuff, fit for a queen's gown; but she would have none of that either, although he pleaded with her to take it. When she started to go away he called her back, and called her back, and when she came had nothing to say, until she lost patience and went home.
And the day after that he sent again, and there was a great carved comb for her in the desk drawer, and some rose-colored satin shoes; but she thrust them back indignantly. “Understand once for all, Lot Gordon,” said she, “you I will take, as I would take my death, because I have pledged my word; but your presents I will not take.”
“I have been buying them and treasuring them, against the time you would have them, for years,” pleaded Lot.
“I tell you I will not have them,” said she.
That day, as the day before, he called her back again and again, and looked at her as if he had something on his mind which he would and could not say; and she went home at last resolved not to go again until she was obliged to for the marriage ceremony.
The next day was Sunday, and Madelon went to meeting and sang, as usual. Burr was not there, but pretty Dorothy was, and looked up at Madelon with a kind of wondering alarm when she sang. Madelon had the heart of one who sings her death-song, and there was something of it in her face that morning. Unconsciously people looked past her, when her voice rang out, to see some dead wall of horror at her back to account for the strange tones in it and the look in her face. She had never looked handsomer, however, than she did that day. Her cheeks had the bloom of roses, and her black eyes seemed to give out their own light, like stars.
She held up her head like a queen as she sang, and her wonderful voice sounded through and beyond the viols and violins, and all the other singing voices. The agony within her was great to penetrate the consciousness of others through this fair triumphant mask.
Madelon looked better than her rival that morning. Dorothy sat, as usual, daintily clad in her Sabbath silks and swan's-downs, with a sweet atmosphere as of a flower around her; but her delicate color had faded, and her blue eyes looked as if she had been weeping and had not slept. She never glanced once at Eugene Hautville up in the singing-seats; but sometimes he looked at her, and then her face quivered under his eyes.
That noon Lot Gordon sent again for Madelon, but this time she refused to go. “Tell him I am busy and can't come,” she told Margaret Bean's husband, who had brought the note. The old man went off, muttering over her message to himself lest he forget it. She heard him repeating it in a childish sing-song—“Tell him I'm busy and can't come; tell him I'm busy and can't come”—as he went out of the yard, slanting his old body before the south wind. The wind blew from the south that day in great gusts as warm as summer; the air was full of the sounds of running water, of sweet, interrupted tinkles and sudden gurgles and steady outpourings as from a thousand pitchers. The snow was going fast; here and there were bare patches that showed a green shimmer across the wind. Sometimes spring comes with a rush to New England on the 1st of April.
That afternoon Madelon went to meeting and sang again, and when she got home Margaret Bean was waiting for her, sitting, a motionless, swaddled figure, beside a window. The Hautvilles never locked their doors while away from home, and she had walked in and waited at her ease until Madelon should return.
Madelon came in alone; her father, Abner, and Eugene had stopped in the barn to look after the roan, who had gone somewhat lame in one foot, and Louis and Richard had lagged. Margaret Bean stood up when Madelon entered.
“You'd better come over,” said she.
“Didn't I tell your husband I couldn't?” returned Madelon, harshly.
“You'd better, I guess.”
“I've got my father's and brothers' supper to get, and other things to see to. Tell him he must leave me in peace to-day, or I'll never come.” Madelon's voice rose high and strident. She unfastened her cloak as if it choked her. Margaret looked at her, her small black eyes peering out wrathfully from her swathing woollens. She was as much wrapped up on this mild day as she had been when the cold was intense. A certain dogged attitude towards the weather Margaret Bean always took. On Thanksgiving Day she donned her winter garments; on May Day she exchanged them for her summer ones, regardless of the temperature. She never made any compromises or concessions. She sweltered in her full regalia of wools on mild spring days; she weathered the early November blasts in her straw bonnet and silk shawl, without an extra kerchief around her stiff old neck. To-day she would not loosen her wraps as she sat waiting for Madelon in the warm room, but remained all securely pinned and tied as when she entered.
However, her discomfort, although she would not yield to it, aroused her temper. “You'd better come,” said she, “or you'll be sorry.”
Madelon made no reply.
“He's sick,” said Margaret Bean; “he's took considerable worse.” She nodded her head angrily at Madelon.
“Is his cough worse?”
“He can scarcely sit up,” said Margaret Bean, with severe emphasis. She rose up stiffly, as if she had but one joint, so girt about was she. “If a woman's going to marry a man, I calculate it's her place to go to him when he's sick and wants her,” she added.
“Is his cough worse?”
“Ain't his cough bad all the time? Well, I'm going. If folks 'ain't got any feelings, they 'ain't. I've got to make some porridge for him.”
Madelon opened the door for her. “I'll come over after supper,” said she; “you can tell him so.”
After supper Madelon went over to Lot's in the early twilight. The tinkles and gurgles and plashes of water came mysteriously from all sides through the dusk. The hill-sides were flowing with shallow cascades, and the woods were threaded with brooks. The wind blew strongly as ever from the south; it had lost the warmth of the sun, but was still soft. The earth was full of a strange commotion and stir—of disorder changing into order, as if creation had come again. It might have been the very birthnight of the spring. Madelon, as she hurried along, felt that memory of old, joyous anticipation which enhances melancholy when the chance of realization is over. The spring might come, radiant as ever, with its fulfilment of love for flowers and birds and all living things, but the spring would never come in its full meaning, with its old prophecies, for her again.
Just before she reached Lot's home, Burr passed her swiftly with a muttered “good-evening.” He was on his way to Dorothy Fair's.
“Good-evening,” Madelon returned, quite clearly.
She found Lot sitting up, but she could see that he looked worse than usual. He was paler, and there was an odd, nervous contraction about his whole face, as if a frown of anxiety and perplexity had extended.
He held out his hand, but she took no notice of it.
“I have come,” said she; “what is it?”
“Won't you shake hands, Madelon?”
Madelon held out her hand, with her face averted, but Lot did not take it, after all.
“My hand is too cold,” he muttered; “never mind—” He continued to look at her, and the anxious lines on his face deepened.
“Are you feeling worse than usual?” Madelon asked; and a little kindness came into her voice, for Lot Gordon looked again like a sick child who had lost his way in the world.
Lot shook his head, with his wistful eyes still upon her face. A little light-stand, with his medicines and a candle, stood on his left. Presently he reached out and took a little box from off it, and extended it to Madelon. She shrank back.
“Take it, Madelon.”
“No, I don't want it.”
“Oh, Madelon, take it and open it at least, and let me see you.”
Madelon took the box, with an impatient gesture, and opened it, and a ring set with a great pearl gleamed on its red velvet cushion. She closed the box and held it out towards Lot. “I want no presents, Lot,” she said, but almost gently.
“Oh, Madelon, keep it!”
She reached across him, and laid the little box back on the table.
“There's another ring I've got for you you'll have to wear, Madelon.”
“I will wear what I must, for the sake of my promise, when the time comes, but that is all I will do,” returned Madelon; and she seemed to feel, as she spoke, the wedding-ring close around her finger like a snake.
“Can nothing I can give you please you, Madelon?”
“No, Lot,” she said, but not ungently. She began to move away.
“Madelon,” said Lot.
“Well?” Madelon waited, but Lot said not another word. She went on towards the door.
“Madelon,” he whispered, and she stopped again; but this time also there was a long silence, which he did not break.
Madelon opened the door, and his piteous cry came for the third time, and she waited on the threshold; but again he said nothing more.
“Good-night,” said she, shortly, and was out, and the door shut. Then she heard a cry from him, as if he were dying. “Madelon, Madelon!”
She opened the door with a jerk, and went back. “Lot,” said she, sternly, “this is the last time I will come back. Once for all, what is it you want of me?”
Lot looked up at her, his face working. He strove to speak and could not. He strove again, and his voice was weak and gasping as if the breath of life had almost left him. “We—had better not be married—to-morrow,” he said, with his piteous eyes upon Madelon's face.
She started, and stared at him as if she feared she did not hear rightly.
“I—have been—thinking it over,” Lot went on, panting; “I am not as well—we had better wait—until—May. My cough—the doctor—we will wait—Madelon!” Lot's broken speech ended in a pitiful cry of her name.
“Why do you do this?” she asked, looking at him with her white, stern face, through which an expression of joy, which she tried to keep back, was struggling.
“I am not as well, Madelon,” Lot answered, with sudden readiness and sad dignity. “If you do not object to the change of time we had best defer it.”
Madelon looked away. “There is no need of any pretence between us,” she said; “I am sorry you are not as well.”
“But not sorry that our wedded bliss must be deferred?”
“No,” said she. Then she went away, and that time Lot did not call her back. She heard him coughing hard as she went through the entry.
When she came out of the house into the tumultuous darkness of the spring night, and went down the road with the south wind smiting her with broadsides of soft air, and the living sounds of water ahead and on either hand of her, she was happy—in spite of Burr, in spite of everything—with the happiness of one to whom is granted a respite from death.
When the mind has been strained up and held to the furthering of some painful end and then suddenly released, it sinks back for a time, alive to nothing but the consciousness of freedom and rest. Even the thought for the future, which is its one weapon against fate, is laid down. Madelon, for a few days after the postponement of her marriage, went about in a kind of negative happiness. There are few who have so much to bear that there is not left to them at least the joy of escape from another trial. Madelon had lost her lover indeed, but she was let loose for a while from a worse trouble than that.
When Madelon entered the house that Sunday night her face was so changed that it held her father's and her brothers' casual glances. Her cheeks were brilliant with the damp wind, her eyes gleaming, her mouth half smiling as she looked around. For the first time for weeks it seemed to Madelon that she had really come home, and the old familiar place did not look strange to her with the threatening light of her own future over it. She tossed off her hood and her red cloak, and proposed with her old manner that they have some music.
The men looked at her and each other. “She's a woman,” old David muttered under his mustache, and got his viol.
Soon the grand chorus began, and Madelon sang and sang, with all her old fervor. The brothers kept glancing at her, half uneasily, but David wooed his viol as if it were his one love in the world, and paid no attention to aught besides.
The concert lasted late that night. It was midnight before they stopped singing and put their stringed instruments away.
Then Madelon turned to them all. “I am not going to be married to-morrow,” she said, and her face flushed red. “I had better tell you. I am not going to be married for a month.” She strove to control her voice, but in spite of herself it rang exultantly at the last.
Louis and Richard exchanged one look with a sudden turn of white faces. David stared hard and perplexedly at his daughter. “What's that ye say?” he asked, after a second's pause.
“I am not going to be married for another month.”
“Why not?”
“Lot isn't as well as he was.”
“What's the matter? That cut he got?”
“No, I guess not. I think it's his cough.” Madelon paled and shivered, and turned away as she spoke, for the horror of her deed and the forced pity came over her again.
Her father caught her by the arm as she would have gone out of the room.
“Look ye here,” he said, “is this the whole truth of it? We've got a right to know. Be ye going to marry him in a month's time?”
Madelon looked at him proudly. “I am going to marry him in a month's time, and I am not afraid to face all the truth in the world. Let me go, father.”
When she was gone the father and sons stood staring at one another. There was on all their faces an under meaning to which not one would give tongue.
Richard jostled Louis's shoulder. “Suppose—” he whispered, looking at him with dismayed and suspicious eyes.
“Hush up!” returned Louis, roughly, and swung across to the shelf for his candle.
“If I thought—” began David, with force; then stopped, shaking his old head. The male Hautvilles went out, one after the other, their candles flaring up in their grimly silent faces. They were capable of concerted action without speech, and had evolved one purpose of going to bed with no more parley about Lot Gordon and Madelon that night. Brave as these men were, not one of them dared set foot squarely upon the dangerous ground which two of them knew, and three suspected, and look another in the face with the consciousness of his whereabouts in his eyes.
Truly afraid were they all, with that subtle cowardice which lurks sometimes in the bravest souls, of one another's knowledge and suspicions, as they filed up the creaking wooden stairs.
Richard looked at Louis in a terrified sidelong way when they were safe in their room with the door shut. “Hush up!” Louis whispered again, roughly, as if Richard had spoken. The two brothers were not to sleep much that night, each being tormented by anxiety lest Lot Gordon had resolved to stand by their sister no longer, and let disgrace fall upon her head; but neither would speak.
The candles flashed athwart the dark window-spaces of the Hautville chambers, and one by one went out. The house was dark and still, with all the sweet voices and stringed instruments at rest. Yet so full of sonorous harmony had it been not long since that one might well fancy that it would still, to an attentive ear, reverberate with sweet sounds in all its hollows, like a shell.
Madelon slept soundly that night, and when she woke on the morning of what was to have been her wedding-day felt as if she had a glimpse of her own self again, after a long dream in which she had been changed and lost. Richard went early to tell the woman who had been engaged to do the housework that she need not come for a month. After breakfast her father and brothers all went away, and she was alone in the house. She went about her work singing for the first time for weeks. She raised her voice high in a gay ditty which was then in vogue, entitled “The Knight Errant”:
“It was Dennis the young and braveWas bound for Palestine;But first he made his orisonsBefore Saint Mary's shrine.
“‘And grant, immortal Queen of Heaven,’Was still the soldier's prayer,‘That I may prove the bravest knightAnd love the fairest fair.’”
So sang Madelon, loud and sweet, as she tidied the kitchen. There were four verses, and she was on the last when the door opened stealthily and her granduncle, old Luke Basset, entered. Her back was towards him, and she did not see or hear him.
He waited, his old face fixed in a sly grin, standing unsteadily on his shaking old legs, and holding to the back of a chair for support, until Madelon sang at the close of the song,
“And honored be the bravest brave,Beloved the fairest fair,”
and stopped. Then he spoke. “'Tain't so, then, I s'pose,” said he, and his voice seemed to crack with sly suggestiveness.
Madelon faced around on him. “What isn't so?” she asked, coldly. “I didn't hear you come in.”
Old Luke Basset shuffled stiffly to the hearth and settled into David's chair. “Well,” said he, “I heerd in the store just now that your weddin' was put off, but I s'pose it ain't so, 'cause you seem to be in sech good sperits. A gal wouldn't be singin' if her weddin' was put off.”
“Look here, Uncle Luke,” said Madelon.
“Well?”
“My wedding is put off for a month; now that settles it. I don't want to say another word about it.” Madelon went into the pantry.
Luke sent his old voice, shrill and penetrating as a baby's, after her. “They say 'tain't luck to have a weddin' put off. 'Ain't ye afeard he'll give ye the slip?”
Madelon made no reply. There was a rattle of dishes in the pantry.
Old Luke waited a moment; then raised his shrill, infantile voice again. “If this feller gives ye the slip, ye can jest hang up yer fiddle; ye won't git t'other one back. Parson Fair's gal's got 'nough fine feathers comin' from Boston to fit out the Queen of England, they say.”
Madelon said nothing.
“D'ye hear?” called old Luke; but he got no reply. “Dexter Beers says a hull passel of stuff come up from Boston on the stage yesterday. Saturday,” persisted old Luke, “Mis' Beers she see an eend of blue satin a-stickin' out of one of the bundles.”
Old Luke waited again, with sharp eyes on the pantry. He could see therein a fold of Madelon's indigo-blue petticoat, and could hear the click of a spoon against a dish; that was all.
Old Luke tried his last prod of aggravation. “Folks air sayin' down to the store that mebbe there was some truth, arter all, in what you said 'bout the stabbin', an' mebbe that's the reason Lot is a puttin' off the weddin',” piped old Luke. He chuckled slyly to himself, but sobered suddenly, and cowered in his chair before Madelon.
She came out of the pantry with a rush, and stood before him, her eyes blazing. “Therewastruth in what I said, after all!” she cried. “The truth's the truth, whether there's folks to believe it or not, and I spoke it, and you can tell them so at the store.”
Old Luke shrank before her. His old body seemed to cease to shape his clothes. He looked up at her with scared eyes.
“And the reason I have told for the wedding being postponed is the truth, too,” continued Madelon. “I did stab Lot Gordon, and he knows I did, though he won't own it, and he's bound to stab me back my whole life. And we shall be married in a month fast enough—you needn't worry, Uncle Luke Basset.”
Madelon stood over the old man a minute, quivering with impatience and utterly reckless anger and scorn, and he shrank before her with scared eyes, and yet a lurking of his malicious grin about his mouth. Then she made a contemptuous gesture, as if she would brush him out of her consciousness altogether, and went away out of the room without another word, and left him alone.
He turned his head slowly and looked cautiously around after the door was closed. He heard Madelon's quick tread up the stairs. “Gorry!” muttered old Luke under his breath, and scowled reflectively over his foxy eyes. Quite convinced in his own mind was old Luke Basset that his grandniece had spoken the truth, and had wounded Lot Gordon almost to death, and quite resolute was he also that he would, since she was his own kin, contend against the carping tongues of the village gossips with all the cunning in him.
Old Luke waited for some time. Then he got up stiffly and shuffled out on his tottering legs, scraping his feet for purchase on the floor, like some old claw-footed animal.
Out in the entry he paused a moment, with his head cocked shrewdly and warily towards the stairs. “Hey!” he called, but got no response. He opened the outer door, and, all ready to be gone should his niece appear, he called shrilly up the stairs, “Hey, Mad'lon—forgot to tell ye. Mis' Beers she said she see a bandbox 'mongst them things that come for the parson's gal; said 'twas most big 'nough to hold the bride, and she guessed 'twas the weddin'-bunnit.”
Not a sound from above heard old Luke, and presently he gave it up and went out and down the road to the village, with occasional glances of a crafty old eye over his shoulder at Madelon's chamber window. Madelon had heard every word. She was folding up her own wedding-silk and putting it away in the cedar chest until she should want it. She put away her wedding-bonnet also, with its cream-colored plumes and its linings and strings of yellow satin, in the bandbox.
She set her mouth hard, and coupled bitterly her own poor wedding-finery with Dorothy Fair's grand outfit; and yet not for the reason that her Uncle Luke had striven to give her, for she would have held an old ragged blanket of one of her Indian grandmothers like the bridal gown of a queen had Burr been her bridegroom.
Madelon heard the door shut, and knew her tormentor was gone; and after her fine attire was packed away she went down-stairs and about her tasks again. But she sang no more. The certainty of the future overcame her like the present, and her short-lived joy or respite was all gone. When her father and brothers came home at noon they found the old stern quiet in her face, and their suspicions that there had been a rupture with Lot ceased. They were relieved, but the boy Richard eyed her with furtive pity. That night he lingered behind the others when they dispersed for the night, and went up to Madelon and threw an arm around her, and laid his cheek against hers. “Oh, Madelon, I wish—” he began, and then he caught his breath, and his cheek against hers was wet, and Madelon turned and comforted him, as a woman will turn and comfort a man for even his pity for her sorrow.
“There is no need for you to fret,” she said, with a sort of gentle authority, as if she had been his mother. “I've got my life to live, and I've got strength enough to live it. I shall do well enough.”
Then she put him away from her softly, and went about setting bread to rise. But he followed beseechingly at her heels, with a little parcel which he had been hiding in a corner of the dresser. “I bought these for you, with some of my trap money, for a little present,” the boy whispered, piteously; and Madelon smiled at him and took the parcel and opened it, and found therein a pair of fine red-satin shoes. Then he brightened at the delight which she showed, and went up-stairs to bed, feeling that after all it would be no such hard task for his sister to marry Lot Gordon, and cover her fault of mad temper and her disgrace. “He likes her so much he will treat her kindly, and she will have a fine house, and plenty of silk gowns, and feathers in her bonnets,” reflected Richard, comfortably, with no more consciousness of his sister's outlook upon life than if his eyes were turned towards a scene in another world. Still he loved his sister with all his heart, although he never in his life had seen anything just as she saw it. He did not dream that Madelon's calm broke before his red-satin shoes, and that she was sitting alone before the kitchen fire with them in her lap, weeping bitterly. She was made of stern stuff to endure the worst of things; but, after all, the pitiful little accessories of grief and death are harder to bear without weakening, because all one's powers of defence are not enlisted against them. They are sometimes the scouts that kill.
Poor Madelon looked at her brother's wedding-gift, the little red-satin shoes, in which she could never walk or dance with a merry heart, and her courage almost failed her. But it was only for a little while. She rose up and finished setting the bread to rise, and then she went to her chamber and packed away the shoes with the other things in the cedar chest.
Through the days that came now Madelon toiled as she had never toiled before, although she had always been an industrious girl. She had her own linen-chest, which she would take with her when she married, and now she bestirred herself to replenish the stores of the house she would leave, for the comfort of her father and brothers. Long before dawn the gentle hum of her spinning-wheel began, although the days were lengthening, and many a time she sat plying it on her solitary hearth until after midnight. She spent days at the great loom in the north chamber, marching back and forth before it, a straight, resolute figure of industry filling human needs, although with sweat of the brow and heart's blood. No happier was she for her hard toil, but it kept at least the spirit of fierce endurance alive within her, for no one succumbs entirely to misery with unfolded hands. Then, too, she was upheld somewhat by her pride in right-doing and providing for the interests of her family. Enough of the New England conscience she had to give her a certain comfort in holding herself to duty, like a knife to a grindstone.
The third week of April had begun when one morning Dorothy Fair came to the door. Madelon was out in the field beside the house, laying some lengths of cloth on the green sunny levels to whiten. The grass had turned quite green in places, and the sun was hot as midsummer. The buds on the trees opened before one's eyes, as if unfolded by warm fingers. People walked languidly, for the humid heat served to force nothing to life in them but dreams; but the birds lived on their wings and called out of all the distances.
Madelon, standing up from spreading her linen, caught sight of the swing of a blue petticoat, like the swing of a blue flower, beside the house door, and went towards it directly.
But when she reached the house the blue-clad visitor had disappeared within. Madelon entered and found Dorothy Fair in the north parlor. Eugene had been sitting in there with his Shakespeare book, and he had opened the door, bowing and wishing her good-day, with his courtly grace of manner, although his handsome face was pale.
Dorothy was pale, also, under her blue-ribboned bonnet. She courtesied on trembling knees, and spoke like a scared child, in spite of her training and genteel deportment. “Can I see your sister?” she said, in a half-whisper, and she did not raise her blue eyes to Eugene's face.
Eugene looked past her. “I see her coming now across the field,” he said; “she has seen you and will be here presently.”
Then he bade her enter, and made way for her, like a courtier for a princess, and seated her in the north parlor in the best rocking-chair, as if it were a throne. Then he sat down opposite her, with his Shakespeare book still on his knees. That morning he had been poring over “Romeo and Juliet.” His imagination was afire with the sweet ardor of that other lover, and he would gladly have identified Dorothy, as she sat there, with Juliet; and so he adored her doubly.
Yet he saw only the tip of her little shoe below the blue hem of her gown, and dared not fairly glance at her face, although he bore himself with such calm ease that none could have suspected.
“It is a beautiful day,” said Eugene.
“Yes,” whispered Dorothy. Somehow for the moment Eugene forgot Dorothy's marriage, and Burr and his bitter jealousy, for suddenly a strange and unwarrantable sense of possession came over him. He looked fully at Dorothy, and scanned her drooping face, and smiled, and then Madelon came in.
Dorothy arose at once and greeted her with more of her usual manner. Then she fumbled uneasily with a little parcel she held, and glanced at Eugene, and then at Madelon. “I had an errand—” began Dorothy and stopped, and then Eugene said softly, still smiling, “I see you have some weighty matter to discuss,” and bowed himself out with his Shakespeare book.
Then Dorothy, all trembling, and before he was fairly out of hearing across the entry in the other room, announced her errand. She had come to beg Madelon, whose rare skill in embroidering her own floral designs was celebrated in the village, to work for her the front breadth of one of her silken gowns with a garland of red roses. “I can work only from patterns which are marked out,” said Dorothy; and then she held up a shining length of green silk upon which the garland already bloomed in her pretty feminine fancy. “I will pay you whatever you ask,” said Dorothy, further. Then she started and shrank, for Madelon looked at her with such wrath and pride in her black eyes that she was frightened.
“What—have—I—done?” she faltered, piteously. And it was quite true that she did not know what she had done, for she reasoned always like a child, with premises of acts only and not of motives. She considered simply that Madelon had urged her to be true to Burr, and was herself to marry another man, and therefore could not be jealous, and that she wanted her gown embroidered.
Dorothy was not happy, and a nervous terror was always upon her which had caused her blue eyes to look out wistfully from delicate hollows and faded the soft pink on her cheeks; still she kept involuntarily to her feminine ways, and wanted her gowns embroidered.
“I want no pay!” Madelon cried, hoarsely.
“I meant no harm,” Dorothy faltered, again. She remembered that Madelon Hautville had on divers occasions, for prospective brides, turned her marvellous skill in embroidery to financial profit, but she dared not say so for an excuse. “I could not do it myself,” Dorothy said, further, trembling in every limb, “and—I thought maybe—you—”
Suddenly Madelon extended her hand. “Give me this silk,” she said; “I will work the flowers on it for you, but never dare to speak to me of pay, Dorothy Fair.”
Dorothy looked at her, made a motion as to give her the silk, then drew it back again.
“Give me the silk,” said Madelon. Dorothy yielded up the silk hesitatingly, with a scared and apologetic murmur. Then she screamed faintly, for Eugene Hautville strode back into the room with a look on his face which she had never seen before. He snatched the silk out of Madelon's hand and thrust it roughly into Dorothy's.
“Take it home,” he said. “My sister does no work on your wedding-clothes!”
Dorothy gasped and looked at him with wild terror in her blue eyes, and then he caught her in his arms, pressed her yellow head against his breast, and stroked it softly. “Don't be afraid,” he said—and his voice had its wonderful gentle charm again. “Don't be afraid, dear child! I could not harm you if I tried—not a hard word shall be said to you, sweet!”
“Eugene!” cried Madelon, and her voice seemed to carry wrath like a trumpet. She laid hold of his shoulders, and forced him back, and Dorothy slipped out of his arms and stood aside, trembling and weeping, with a little worked apron which she wore thrown over her face. “Let me be!” Eugene cried, angrily, and would have gone to Dorothy again to comfort her, but Madelon in her wrath was as strong as he, and she thrust herself between them.
“You are no brother of mine, Eugene Hautville,” she said, her face all white and fierce with anger. “You dare to touch her again, and you will find out that I can fight to keep her from you as well as Burr could if he were here. Youdareto touch her again!” Then she turned to Dorothy. “Give me the silk,” she said, in a hard voice. In her heart she blamed her more than her brother, although unnecessarily.
Dorothy shrank back. “No,” she said, feebly, “I had better not.”
“Give me the silk!”
Dorothy gave her the silk. Eugene stood apart. He possessed his fine pride and graceful self-poise again, and though his blood boiled he would not, being a man, wrestle with his sister for another man's bride.
Dorothy moved towards the door, her fair curls drooping over her agitated face. Eugene made a motion in her direction, and when Madelon would have thrust him back again, he only said, with a half-smile, “I would crave the lady's pardon; you would not prevent that.” And then he bowed low before Dorothy Fair, and besought her to pardon, if she could, his unseemly conduct, and believe that it had for motive only the highest respect and esteem for her.
And Dorothy swept her curls farther over her face, and could not make the dignified response of offended maidenhood that she should, but courtesied tremblingly and fairly fled out of the house.
Eugene, with his Shakespeare book under his arm, went also out of the house and over across the field, to a piney wood he loved, where all the trees, even in this warm flush of spring, whispered eternally of winter and the north, and there he stretched himself out beneath a tree, as melancholy as Jacques in the forest of Arden. Now that he had got the better of his impulse of mad passion and jealousy, he was ashamed, and stayed late in the wood, for he did not like to meet his sister's rightly scornful face.
When he went at last late for his supper, Madelon, as he expected, noticed him only by an angry flash of her black eyes, under drooping lids. She said not one word to him, and as the days went on treated him coldly; and yet she did not give to the matter its full seriousness of meaning.
Madelon, well acquainted with Eugene's caressing manner, thought simply that, seeing poor Dorothy's alarm, he had striven to soothe her with endearments and assurance that he would not hurt her, as he would have done with a child. As for Dorothy, Madelon credited her with the soft spirit which she knew she possessed. She scorned them both, and felt as jealous for Burr's sake as he himself could have done, that other hands than his had touched his bride's; and yet she did not dream of the full significance of it all.
She wrought a marvellous garland of red roses on Dorothy Fair's green silk, and scarcely left herself time to sleep that she might complete that and her stint of household linen. She had nothing to add to her own wedding-garments.
The weeks went past, and the Sunday before the day set for her wedding came again. She had seen Lot but three times in the interval. He had sent for her, and she had gone obediently, and remained a short time, pleading her work as an excuse to return home. Lot had not sought to detain her; he had vexed her with no vain appeals, but treated her with a sort of sad deference which would have perplexed her had she cared enough for him to dwell upon it.
Lot was said to be in no better health. He did not stir abroad on those warm spring days. Once he had put on his great-coat, and was for setting foot on the springing grass in the sunny yard, but Margaret Bean had remarked to him how she had heard, whilst purchasing a bit of cheese in the store, a man say that he guessed Lot Gordon wasn't much worse, only afraid of a wife that could use a knife. Margaret Bean had shaken in her starched petticoats as she said it, not knowing how the news might affect her master towards the monger of it; but she was disposed to risk a little rather than have a mistress over her.
Lot said nothing in response about the matter, but pulled off his great-coat and sank into his chair with a fit of coughing, and declared he felt not well enough to go out that day.
That last Sunday Madelon went to him without being summoned, in the early evening after supper. On her last visit, the week before, he had asked her, and she had promised to come.
The frogs were calling across the meadows as she went along; there was a young moon shining with frequent silvery glances through the budding trees, which tossed athwart it like foam, and the mists curled along the horizon distances. Madelon, moving along, was as the ghost of one who had belonged to the spring, as a part of its radiant hope and stir of life and youth in days past, but was now done with it forever. The spring sounds and sights, and all its sweet influence, seemed to tear her heart anew with memories of the visions of fair futures which she had forfeited. The loss of the sweet dreams which the spring awakens in the human heart is not one of the least losses of life. Though the spring be unfulfilled, it sweetens the year.
Just before Madelon reached Lot Gordon's house, she met Burr going to court Dorothy. They were to be married in two weeks more. Madelon and Burr exchanged a murmur of salutations and passed each other.
Madelon went directly into Lot's house, to his sitting-room, as she was used to do lately, and found Lot standing in the midst of the room, waiting for her, with a lighted candle in his hand.
“I heard your footstep when you came through that open space, where the road has a hollow echo,” he said; “and I have been waiting for you ever since.”
“You could not hear me; it is a half-mile away,” said Madelon.
“A half-mile! what's a hundred miles when 'tis the heart that listens, and not the ears? Come; I have something I want to show you.”
Lot led the way and Madelon followed out of the room across the front entry, with its spiral of stair mounting its landscape-papered height, and Lot opened the door of the opposite room, the great north parlor. “Wait here a minute,” he said to Madelon, and she waited in the entry after he entered until he called her to follow.
Lot had lighted every candle in the great branching candelabra upon the shelf, and the room was full of light. Madelon looked about her, and even her despairing calm was stirred a little. Never had she seen or dreamed of a room like this. She grasped no details; her bewildered eyes saw them all melting into each other, combining newly and vanishing like kaleidoscopic pictures—folds and gleaming stretches of crimson damask and velvet, the dark polish of precious woods, spots and arabesques of gold and the satin shimmer of wall-paper, lights and shades of steel engravings, and elegant and graceful lady-treasures of gilded books and work-boxes and vases on shelf and tables. There was even a little piano, the only one in the village, with slender, fluted legs, and a mother-of-pearl garland over the key-board.
“I have had this all newly furnished for you. I hope it may please you,” said Lot; and he looked at Madelon with hollow, wistful eyes.
That brought her to herself. “It is very pretty,” she replied, and turned away.
Lot sighed. “Well, I have something more to show you,” said he, and went forlornly before her, stooping weakly and coughing now and then, into the great middle room of the house, which was fitted up with carven oak which Governor Winthrop might have used. Here, too, Lot lighted all the branches of the candelabra on the shelf; and the great buffet directly responded with the dazzling white glitter of silver from the cream-jugs and ewers and spoons thereon.
Then Lot threw open the fine carved doors of the cupboard, and the shelves were covered with precious blue china, brought from over seas, and wine-glasses like bubbles of crystal, and decanters as graceful as plumes.
“Do you like it, Madelon?” Lot asked; and Madelon replied, as before, that it was pretty.
Lot showed Madelon all the wealth of his house before they returned to the sitting-room. Much had been there from his father's day, but much had been added to please this bride, who looked at it more coldly and with less part in it than she would have looked at the treasures in a merchant's windows. She saw, unmoved by any pride of possession, great canopied bedsteads, and chests of drawers whose carven tops reached the ceiling, and mirrors in gilded frames. She saw marvellous stores of linen damask napery in such delicate and graceful designs, from foreign looms, as she had never dreamed. She saw an India shawl, and lengths of silk and satin and velvet, and turned away from it all to the obstinate contemplation and endurance of her own misery.
At last Lot led the way back to the sitting-room. He set the candle on the shelf, and gave a strange, beseeching glance around the room at his books. It was as if he besought, with the irrationality of grief, those only friends he fairly knew for help and sympathy.
Then he turned to Madelon and laid a hand on each of her shoulders, and looked at her. “No, there is no need now,” he said, when she would have shrunk away from him; and something in his voice hushed her, and she stood still.
“Madelon,” said Lot Gordon, “tell me true, as before God. You are a woman, and always, I have heard, a woman takes comfort and pleasure in life with such gear as I have shown you, alone, even if she has little else. Would not all this give you some little happiness, even as my wife, Madelon?”
Madelon looked at Lot and hesitated. She had a feeling that her word of reply would stab him more cruelly than her knife had done.
“Madelon, tell me!”
“Will you have the truth?”
Lot nodded.
“No, Lot.”
“Madelon, I can buy you more than all this. Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Lot gave a great sigh. “Dearly bought possessions are worse than poverty, you hold,” said he. “Then, Madelon, there is no sweetening in all this for your bondage?”
She shook her head. “I shall do my duty, as I have promised,” she said. “All this is useless. Let me go, Lot.”
“Madelon!”
She looked up in his face, and a strange awe came over her at the look in it. A more secret lurking-place than any of the little wild things that he loved to discover had the self in Lot Gordon, and Madelon saw it for the first time, and perhaps he, also.
“True love exists not unless it can do away with the desire of possession. I love you, Madelon,” said Lot; and then he let go of her shoulders and went over to the mantel-shelf, and leaned against it, with his head bent.
Madelon, all bewildered and trembling, stared at him.
“I—don't think I know what you mean,” she gasped out, finally.
“You are—free,” said Lot.
That year, spring seemed to break over the village in a day, like a green flood. All at once people's thoughts were interrupted, and their eyes turned from selfish joys or pains by the emerald flash of fields and hill-sides in the morning sun, and the white flutter of flowering boughs past their windows like the festal garments of unexpected guests.
The first week in May, the cherry-trees were in blossom, and the alders and shad bushes were white in the borders of the woods against the filmy green of the birches. The young women got out their summer muslins, and trimmed their bonnets anew; their faces, all unknown to themselves, took on a new meaning of the spring, like new flowers, and the young men looked after them as they passed as if they were strangers in the village.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, in the first week of May, Eugene Hautville strolled across-lots over to the village. Through the fields north of the Hautville place there was an old foot-path to the former site of an old homestead, long ago burned to the ground and its ashes dissipated on winds long died away. The oldest inhabitants in the village barely remembered the house that used to stand there. The slant of its roof crossed their minds dimly when they spoke of it: they could not agree as to whether it had faced north or south. It might have seemed almost fabulous, had it not been for the thicket of old lilacs purpling with bloom every spring, which had first grown before its windows, and the perennial houseleek which had clustered round the door.
Then, too, east of where the house had stood there was an old apple orchard, the trees thereof bent to the ground like distorted old men, and, when spring came, bearing scarcely one bough of pink bloom, among others shaggy with gray moss like the beard of age.
Then, also, the lane still remained which had stretched, in days gone by, from the northward of the old house to the highway. The lane had divided the fields of the old landowners, and had been the thoroughfare for the dwellers in the house when they went to meeting and to mill.
The Hautvilles often used it in the summer-time for a short-cut to the village. Eugene went along this foot-path, which was in its way a little humble track of history of simple village life, passed the site of the house, and then struck into the lane. It stretched before him like a shaft of green light. The afternoon sun shone through young willow-leaves, transparent like green glass. Low overhead hung rosy tassels from out-reaching boughs of maples. Between the trees, the flowering alders seemed gleaming out of sight before him like the white skirts of maidens. Here and there the ground was blue with violets. Eugene picked some half mechanically, as he went along, and made a little nosegay, with some sprigs of alder. He was half through the lane, and had just emerged from a clump of alders, when he saw Dorothy Fair coming. She gave a start when she saw him appear with a great jostling of white branches, and made as if she would have fled; then she held up her head with gentle dignity and advanced, lifting her lady-skirts with dainty fingers on either side. Mistress Dorothy, being weary of fine needle-work upon her bridal linen, had come out a little way to take the air, and naturally enough had chosen for her walk this sweet lane, which opened upon the highway a stone's-throw below her house.
If Eugene Hautville, at sight of her, felt a quaking of his spirit, and would also fain have fled, he made no sign, but walked on proudly like a prince, with a bold yet graceful swing of his stalwart shoulders. And when he and Dorothy met, he bowed low before her, and she courtesied and he bade her good-day quite clearly, and she murmured a response with pretty, prim lips; and they would have passed on had not both, as if constrained by hands of force upon their necks, raised their faces and looked of a sudden into each other eyes with that same old look which they had exchanged in the meeting-house long ago.
Dorothy Fair wore on that day a thin wool gown of a mottled blue color like a dapple of spring violets. It was laid across her bosom in smooth plaits, and showed at the throat her finely wrought lace kerchief. The sun was so warm that she had put on her white straw hat with blue ribbons, and her soft curls flowed from under it to her blue belt ribbon. She wore, too, her little black-silk apron, cunningly worked in the corners with flowers in colored silks. Dorothy looked up in Eugene Hautville's face, and he looked down at her, for a force against which they had come into the world unarmed constrained them. Then she bent her head before him until he could see nothing but the white slant of her hat, and caught at her silk apron as if she would hide her face with that also.
Eugene stood still looking at her, his face radiant and glowing red. “Dorothy!” he stammered, and then Dorothy straightened herself suddenly, though she kept her face averted, flung up her head, caught up her blue skirts again, and made as if she would pass on without another word. Eugene, with his face all at once white, and his head proudly raise, stood aside to let her pass. “'Tis a warm day for the season,” he said, with his old graceful courtesy. But Dorothy looked up at him again as she neared him in passing, and her sweet mouth was quivering like a frightened baby's, and the tears were in her blue eyes, and no man who loved her could have let her go by; and certainly not this fiery young Eugene. Suddenly, and with seemingly no more involvement of wills or ethics than the alders in their blossoming, the two were in each other's arms, and their lips were meeting in kisses.
This fair and demure daughter of Puritans might well, as she stood there in her lover's embrace, being already, as she was, the betrothed bride of another, have been accounted fickle and false, but perhaps in a sense she was not. Never had she forgot or been untrue to her first love-dreams, which Eugene had caused, but had held to them with that mild negative obstinacy of her nature which she could not herself overcome. Now it was to her as if she were reconciled to her true lover, and was faithful instead of false; and less false she surely was to her own self.
Right contentedly had she loved for a time Burr's love for her and his tenderness, and had been stirred thereby to passion, but now she loved this other man for something better than her own sweet image in his eyes.
Never a word she said, but her hat slipped down on her shoulders, hanging by its blue strings, and she let her head lie on Eugene's shoulder, with a strange sense of wontedness and of remembering something which had never been.
And, also, all Eugene's fond words in her ear seemed to her like the strains of old songs which were past her memory. Burr's, although she had listened happily, had never seemed to her like that.
They stood together so for a few minutes, while the alder-flowers shook out sweetness, as from perfumed garments, at their side, and a bee who had left his hive and winter honey, and made that day another surprise of spring, hummed from one white raceme to another and then was away, disappearing in the blue air with a last gleam of filmy wing as behind a sapphire wall.
Neither of the lovers had knowingly heard the bee's hum, but when it ceased the silence seemed to make an accusing sense audible to them. They let each other go and stood apart guiltily, as if some one had entered the lane and was spying upon them.
Dorothy spoke first, without raising her pale little face, all drooped round with her curls. “What shall I do?” she said, like a child. She was trembling, and could scarcely control her tongue.
Eugene made no reply. He stood looking moodily at the ground, where his nosegay of violets and alders was all scattered and trampled.
Suddenly he had the feeling as of a thief in another man's garden, and a shame before Dorothy herself came over him. Eugene Hautville's principles of honor, in spite of his fiery nature, read like a primer, with no subtleties of evasion therein. Here was another man's betrothed, and he had wooed her away! He had kissed her lips, which were vowed to another. He had wronged her and Burr Gordon also. Strangely enough, Dorothy's own responsibility never occurred to him at all; he never dreamed of blaming her for falsity either to himself or Burr. That little fair trembling creature, clad like a violet in her mottled blue, seemed to him at once above and below all questions of personal agency. She bloomed like a flower in her garden, infinitely finer than those who wrangled around her and strove to gather her, and yet in a measure helpless before them.
In a moment Dorothy answered her question negatively herself: “I will not marry Burr,” she said, without raising her head, and yet with that tone of voice which accompanies a lift of chin and stiffening of the neck muscles.
Eugene looked at her, and extended his arms as if he would take her to him again; then drew them back. “I do not know what to counsel you,” he said, slowly. Then his eyes fell before the sudden shame and distress in Dorothy's.
“You do not know what do counsel me!” she cried. “Then you do not—care—” Tears rolled over her cheeks, and Eugene gathered her into his arms again, and laid his cheek against her fair head, and soothed her as he would have soothed a child. “There, there,” he whispered, “it is not that, it is not that, sweet. I would die for you, I love you so! It is not that, but you are the promised wife of another man. How can I turn a thief even for you, Dorothy? How can I bid you be false, and forswear yourself? There's honor as well as love, child.”
“But love is honor,” said Dorothy.
“Not for a man,” said Eugene.
Then she clung to him softly and modestly, and sobbed, and he kissed her hair and whispered in one breath that she was all his own, and in another that he knew not what to do, and was near distracted between his love and his sense of honor, until Dorothy said something which set him pleading for his rival whether he would or no, for the sake of stern justice.
“I am afraid of him, I am afraid of Burr,” Dorothy whispered in his ear. “How could I have married him, when I was so afraid, even if you had not come?”
“Afraid?”
“You—know—what—they said—Burr did!”
Eugene held her away from him by her slender arms, and looked at her. “You did not believe that?”
“He would not tell me he was innocent, even when I begged him so.”
“You knew he was.”
“Why did he not tell me, when I begged him so?” she said, and the soft unyielding in her tone was absolute.
“Dorothy!”
“I am so afraid—you don't know,” she whispered, piteously.
“But—you know Burr was cleared.”
“Yes, I know, but even now he will not tell me on the Bible, as I asked him, that he is innocent.”
“Dorothy, heisinnocent,” Eugene said, with solemn and bitter emphasis of which she knew not the full meaning.
“Then why does he not swear that he is, to me?” Back went Dorothy always, in all reasoning, to the starting-point in her own mind.
“I tell you he is, child. It has been proven so.”
“Then why—” Dorothy began, but Eugene interrupted her in her circle. “There is no more cause for you to fear him than me,” he said almost harshly, in his stern resolve to be just. Then Dorothy turned on him with sudden passion. “I am afraid,” she cried out, “I shall always be afraid; even if he were to swear to me now that he is innocent, I shall always be afraid, for I coupled him with that awful deed once in my thoughts, and I cannot separate him from it forever. He will always hold the knife in his hand; even if it were not for you, I should be near mad with fear. I bid black Phyllis stay by the door when he comes.”
“Dorothy!”
“Yes, I do. What my mind has once laid hold of, that it will not let go. I cannot separate him from my old thought of him. I have tried to be faithful, and true, but even had he sworn to me that he was innocent, the fear would have remained. Save me from him—oh, Eugene, save me!”
But Eugene put her quite away from him, and looked at her almost sternly. His honor held the reins now in good earnest. The suspicion of Madelon, which he had never owned to himself, became a certainty. He defended his rival as strenuously as he would have defended himself, since it involved truth to himself. “I swear to you, Dorothy Fair,” he said, “that Burr Gordon is innocent, and that your fear of him is groundless.”
Dorothy looked at him with dilated eyes. She said not a word, but her mind travelled its circle again.
“It is so,” said Eugene; “I know it.”
Still Dorothy looked at him.
“All my heart is yours,” Eugene went on, “but I would rather it broke, and yours too, before I counselled you to be false to a man for a reason like that.”
A flush came over Dorothy's face. She pulled her straw hat from her shoulders to her head, and tied the blue strings under her chin. She gathered up daintily a fold of her blue mottled skirt on either side. “Then I will marry Burr this day week,” she said. “I will endeavor to be a good and true wife to him, and I pray you to forget if you can what has passed between us to-day.”
She said this as calmly and authoritatively as her father could have said it in the pulpit, and courtesied slightly, then went on down the lane and out into the open beyond, with a soft tilt of her blue skirts and as gently proud a carriage as when she walked into the meeting-house of a Sabbath.
Eugene said not a word to stop her, but stood staring after her. All his study of his Shakespeare helped him not to an understanding of this one girl, whom he saw with love-dimmed eyes. This sudden abetting on her part of his resolve gave him a sense of earthquake and revolution, yet he did not call her back or follow her.
He proceeded through the lane to the highway, then a few yards farther to the store, to get his Boston weekly paper. The mail had come in. On this warm spring day the loafers on the boxes and barrels within the store had crawled out to the bench on the piazza and sat there in a row. All mental states have their illustrative lives of body. This shabby row leaned and lopped and settled upon themselves, into all the lines and curves and downward slants of laziness, and with rank tobacco-smoke curling about them, like the very languid breath of it. However, when Eugene Hautville drew near, there was a slight shuffling stir; a drawling hum of conversation ceased, and when he entered the store their eyes followed him, bright with furtive attention. The mill of gossip had ground slowly in this heavy spring atmosphere, but it had ground steadily. They had been discussing Madelon Hautville and the breaking off of her marriage with Lot Gordon. It was village property by this time, and all tongues were exercised over it.
“Why ain't Lot Gordon goin' to marry her?” they asked each other, and exchanged answering looks of dark suspicion. The reason for not marrying which Lot used every means in his power to promulgate—his fast-failing health—gained little credence. The story came directly from the doctor's wife that Lot Gordon was no worse than he had been for the last ten years, and was likely to live ten years to come. Margaret Bean was said to have told a neighboring woman, who told another, who in her turn told another, and so started an endless chain of good authority, that Lot Gordon had never coughed so little as he did this spring, and “ate like a pig.” He was, it is true, never seen on the highway, but there were those who said he was abroad again in his old woodland haunts.