“Guess he didn't change his mind about havin' Mad'lon Hautville 'cause he was so much worse than common,” they said; “guess when the time drawed near he was afraid.” Margaret Bean was, furthermore, on good authority reported to have intimated that never, if Madelon had come to that house while she was in it, would she and her husband have gone to bed without the scissors in the latch of their bedroom door.
Lot Gordon, who had forsworn himself to save Madelon, was now, by his last sacrifice for her, bidding fair to prove what her own assertions had failed to do—her guilt. He crept out secretly into cover of the woods, now and then, on a mild day; he could not deny himself that. But otherwise he stayed close, and coughed hard when there were listening ears, and complained like any old woman of his increasing aches and pains. Still his cunning availed little, although he did not dream of it.
He went not among the gossips himself, and no one as yet had ventured to approach him with the rumor that was fast gaining ground.
No one had ventured to broach the matter to the Hautville men, for obvious reasons. “I wouldn't vally your skin if that fellar overheard what you was sayin' of when he come up the road, Joe Simpson,” one loafer drawled to another, when Eugene left the store that afternoon and had disappeared going the long way home.
“Hush up, will ye!” whispered the other, glancing around pale under his unshaven beard as if he feared Eugene might yet be there. The Hautville men, however, hearing nothing, and saying nothing about the matter to each other, had always, among themselves, a subtle exchange of uneasy thought concerning it. If one sat moodily by and moved out of her way without a word while Madelon prepared a meal, the others knew what it meant. They also knew well the meaning of each other's glances at her, and sudden lowering of brows. Madelon herself did not know. When she had come home that Sunday night, and announced that she was not going to be married at all, she had not understood the sharp questioning, and then the stern quiet that followed upon it. She had told them simply that Lot said that his lungs were gone; that he had ascertained the fact himself through his own knowledge of medicine; that he could only live a wreck of a man, if at all, and, knowing it was so, had made up his mind that he would not marry.
Lot had indeed told her so, and had made her believe it, doing away with much of the force of his giving her up for the sake of his love. It is difficult in any case for one to understand fully the love to which he cannot respond, for involuntarily the heart averts itself from it like an ear or an eye, and misses it like the highest notes of music and colors of the spectrum.
Madelon had stared dumbly at Lot when he told her she was free, and for a moment indeed had struggled with a consciousness which would have stirred her at least into pity and gratitude and remorse, which she had never known, had not Lot recovered himself and spoken again in his old manner. He tapped himself on his hollow chest. “After all,” he said, “'tis best you are not seduced like most of your sex into making the accessories of life supply the lack of the primal needs of it, into taking sugar instead of bread, and weakening your stomach and your understanding. 'Tis best for you and best for me, and best for those that might come after us. Treasure of house and land and fine apparel and furnishings may be a goodly inheritance, but our heirs would thank us more for power to draw the breath of life freely, and you would do better without a gown to your back, or a shoe to your foot, and a mate that was not half a dead man; and I should do better alone in my anteroom of the tomb than with another life to disturb the peace of it, and rouse me to efforts which will send me farther on.”
Madelon had stared at him, not knowing what to say, with compassion, and yet with growing conviction of his selfish ends, which disturbed it.
Lot tapped his chest again. “My lungs are gone,” he said, shortly; “I need no doctor to tell me. I know enough of physics myself to send the whole village stumbling, instead of racing, into their graves, if I choose to use it. My lungs are gone, and you are well quit of me, and I of a foolish undertaking, though of a charming bride. Now, go your way, child, and take up your maiden dreams again, for all me.”
Madelon looked at him proudly, although she was half dazed by what she heard. “I care nothing for all the fine things you have shown me,” said she, “and I have told you truly always that I do not care for you, but I will keep my promise to marry you unless you yourself bid me to break it.”
“I bid you to break it,” said Lot, steadily, and his eyes met hers, and his old mocking smile played over his white face. Then suddenly he bent over with his racking cough, and Madelon made a step towards him, but he motioned her away. “Good-night—child,” he gasped out.
Then Madelon had gone home and told her father and brothers, and thought their strange reception of the news due to anything but the truth. She had told them that she was guilty of wounding Lot Gordon almost to death. That they should now be rendered uneasy by suspicions, when she had given them actual knowledge, was something beyond her imagination. She fancied rather that they considered Lot had treated her badly, or else that she had a longing love for Burr, and, perhaps, had herself broken off her match with his cousin on that account. She strove hard to bear herself in such a manner that they should not think that. She put on as gay a face as she could muster, and even took, beside the dress, a little blue-silk mantle to embroider for Dorothy Fair's wedding outfit, and sang over it as she worked.
Still, in a way, although her pride led her to it, her singing and her gayety were no pretence, for Madelon, through much suffering, had reached that growth in love which enabled her to see over her own self and her own needs. That knife-thrust she had meant for her lover had stilled forever the jealous temper in her own heart, and she fairly dreamed as she embroidered Dorothy's bridal mantle some dreams of happiness that might have been Burr's; so filled was she with purest love for him that his imagination possessed her own.
It was told on good authority in the village that Parson Fair had paid all Burr Gordon's back interest money on his mortgage, and so released him from the danger of foreclosure; and then on equally good authority it was denied. There was much discussion over it, but one day the loafers in the store arrived at the truth. Parson Fair had indeed offered to pay the interest, and Burr had declined. He had also refused to live with his bride in his father-in-law's house, and when Parson Fair had, with his gracefully austere manner, intimated that he should be unwilling to place his daughter in such uncertain shelter, had replied harshly that Dorothy should have a roof over her head of his own providing while he lived; when he was dead it would be time to talk about her father's.
When Burr had gone to Lot Gordon and offered to part with a small wood-lot of his, with a quantity of half-grown wood thereon, at two-thirds of its real value to pay the interest, Margaret Bean had listened at the door, and thus the story.
“It is a sacrifice of a full third of its value, you know well enough,” Burr had said, standing moodily before his cousin. “If I could wait for the growth of the wood, 'twould bring much more, but I'll call it even on the interest I owe you, if you will. This is the last foot of land I own clear.”
For answer Lot had bidden Burr open his desk and bring him a certain paper from a certain corner. Then Margaret Bean had opened the door a crack, and had with her two peering eyes seen Lot Gordon take his pen in hand and write upon the paper, and show it to his cousin Burr.
“Very well,” said Burr, “I will go home and get the deed of the wood-lot,” and motioned towards the door, which drew to in a soft panic as if with the wind.
“Stop,” said Lot; and Margaret Bean paused in her flight, and laid her ear to the door again. “I don't want your woodland,” said Lot. “The interest is paid without it. It is your wedding-gift.”
“Why should you do this? I did not ask you to,” Burr returned, almost defiantly; and Margaret Bean had felt indignant at his unthankfulness.
“You can take from your kinsman what you could not take from Parson Fair,” replied Lot. “I hear you will not go to nest in Parson Fair's snug roof-tree, with your pretty bird, either.”
“I will die before I will take my wife under any roof but my own,” cried Burr, fiercely, “and I want no gifts from you either. I am not turned beggar from any one yet. You shall take the woodland.”
Lot waved his hand as if he swept the woodland, with all its half-grown trees, out of his horizon. “And yet,” he said, “I thought 'twas what you left the other for. I should have said 'twas but your wage that was offered you;” and he smiled at his cousin.
“What do you mean, Lot Gordon?”
Lot looked at him with sharp interest. “Was there another leaf of you to read when I thought I was at the end,” said he, “or were you writ in such plain characters that I put in somewhat of my own imaginings to give substance to them? Are you better, and worse, than I thought you, cousin? Do you love this flower that has her counterpart in all the gardens of the world, that is as sweet and no sweeter, that you can replace when she dies by stooping and picking, better than the one which has thorns enough to kill and sweetness enough to pay for death, and whose bloom you can never match?”
“I don't know what you mean,” Burr said, impatiently and angrily; and Margaret Bean outside the door wagged her head in scornful assent.
“Then you loved Dorothy Fair better than Madelon Hautville, and 'twas not her place and money that turned you her way,” said Lot, as if he were translating; and he kept his keen eyes on the other's face.
Burr's face flashed white. “What right have you to question me like this?” he demanded.
“But you would not take the price, after all,” said Lot, as if he had been answered, instead of questioned. Then he looked up at his cousin with something like kindness in his blue eyes. “It proves the truth of what I've thought before,” he said, “that oftentimes a man has to sting his own honor with his own deeds to know 'tis in him.”
“My honor is my own lookout,” Burr said, harshly.
“And you've looked out for it better than I thought,” Lot returned.
Burr made another motion towards the door. “I can't stand here any longer,” he said. “I'll go for the deed.” Margaret Bean, moving as softly as she could in her starched draperies, fled back to the kitchen.
“Wait a minute,” Lot said.
“Well,” returned Burr, impatiently.
Lot got up, went over to the mantel-shelf, and stood there a minute, leaning against it, his face hidden. When he looked at Burr again he was so white that his cousin started. “Are you sick?” he cried, with harsh concern.
Lot smiled with stiff lips. “Only with the life-sickness that smites the child when it enters the world, and makes it weep with its first breath,” he answered.
“If you want to say anything to me, Lot, talk like a man, and not a book,” Burr cried out, with another step towards the door; and yet he spoke kindly enough, for there was something in his cousin's face which aroused his pity.
“It is not—” began Lot, and stopped, and caught his breath. Burr watched him half alarmed; he looked in mortal agony. Lot clutched the carven edge of the mantel-shelf, then loosened his fingers. “If,” he said, brokenly, looking at Burr with the eyes of one who awaits a mortal blow, “you want—Madelon—it is not—too late. She—I know how she feels—towards you.”
Burr turned white, as he stared at him. “She—she was going to marry you!” he said with a sneer.
“Do—you know why?”
Burr shook his head, still staring at his cousin.
“It was the price of—your—acquittal.”
Burr did not move his eyes from Lot's face. He looked as if he were reading something there writ in startling characters, against which his whole soul leaped up in incredulity. “My God, I see!” he groaned out slowly, at length. And then he said, sharply, “But—you were going to marry her. Why did you give her up?”
“I loved her,” Lot said, simply. His white face worked.
“But now—you—ask me to—”
“I love her!” Lot said again, with a gasp.
Burr strode forward, quite up to his cousin, and grasped his hand warmly for the first time in his life. “Before the Lord, Lot,” he said, huskily, “'twas you, and not me, she should have fancied in the first of it.”
“It is neither you nor me, nor any other man, that she will ever love as he is,” Lot said, shortly, straightening himself, for jealousy stung him hard.
“What do you mean?”
“Woman reverses creation. She is a sublimated particle of a man, and she builds a god from her own superstructure, and clothes him with any image whom she chooses. She chose yours. Live up to her thought of you, if you can.”
Burr dropped his cousin's hand, and surveyed him with that impatient wonder which he always felt when he used his favorite symbolic speech. “There's no question of my living up to the thought of any woman's but my wife's,” he said, bitterly, and turned away.
“There's no knowing to what stature even a Dorothy Fair may raise a man in her mind. You may not be able to grow to that.”
“It is all I shall attempt.”
Then Lot spoke again, in that short-breathed voice of his, straining between the syllables. “Be sure—that you do—what—you will not—regret. Honor is not—always what we—think it.”
“I have my own conception of it at least, and that I live up to. 'Tis high time,” said Burr, with a kind of proud scorn of himself in his voice.
“Madelon Hautville—loves—you.”
“She does not, after all this.”
“She does!”
Burr stood straight and firm before his cousin, like a soldier. “If she does,” said he, “and if she loved me with the love of ten lives instead of one, and I her, as perhaps I do, this last word of mine I will keep!” Then he went out with not another word, and presently returned with the deed of his little wooded property, which, however, his cousin Lot finally persuaded him to keep, as Margaret Bean gathered at the door, whither she had ventured again.
The loafers knew it all by nightfall, the news having been brought to the store by old Luke Basset, who had gotten it from Margaret Bean's husband. In a day or two they knew more from the same source. Lot Gordon had engaged his cousin to improve the Gordon acres which had been lying fallow for the last ten years. He had offered him a good salary. He wanted to carry out some new-fangled schemes which he had got out of books. Burr was going right to work; he had hired a man from New Salem to help him.
People began to think better of Lot Gordon than they had ever done, and they looked at Burr with more respect. Many had considered that Dorothy Fair was not going to “do very well.” “Guess if it wa'n't for her father, and the chance of Lot's dying, she'd have a pretty poor prospect,” they had said. Now they agreed that “Maybe Burr Gordon won't turn out so bad after all. Maybe he'll settle right down and go to work, and pay off his mortgage, when he gets married, and get a good living, even if Lot should hold out some time to come.”
They watched Burr as he swung up the street to Parson Fair's in the spring twilights, with admiration for his stalwart grace, and growing approval for those inner qualities which outward beauty sometimes but poorly indicates. They approved also of the temperate hours which he observed in his courting, for no one within eye-shot, or ear-shot, but knew when Parson Fair's front door closed behind him. Burr, during the last weeks before his marriage, never stayed much later than half-past nine or ten at his sweetheart's house, and, in truth, was not sorely tempted to do so. Mistress Dorothy in those days behaved in a manner which might well have aroused to rebellion a more ardent or a less determinately faithful lover. She had the candles lit early in the beautiful spring twilights, and then she sat and stitched and stitched upon her wedding finery, bending her fair face, half concealed by drooping curls, assiduously over it, having never a hand at liberty for a lover's caress, or an eye for his smiles. Then, too, when Burr took leave, she stood before him with such a strange effect of terror and hauteur that he could do no more than touch her lips as if she had been a timid child, and bid her good-night. Had Burr Gordon, in those days, been less aware of his own unfaithfulness and weariness, and less fiercely resolved not to yield to it, he might well have perceived Dorothy's. As it was he confused her coldness with his own, and attributed it to the change in his own heart, and not to that in hers. And even had he suspected it he would not have made the first motion for freedom, so desperate was his adherence to falsity for the sake of truth.
Burr Gordon had at stake in this last more than any temporal good or ill of love. He had at stake his whole belief in himself, and he was also actuated by another motive which he scarcely admitted in his own thoughts.
Convinced he was that Madelon Hautville, believing as she did that he had forsaken her for honest love of another, would hold him in utter scorn and contempt were she to discover him false to Dorothy as she had been to her; and his very love of her love, strangely enough, kept him true to her rival.
So he went to see Dorothy, and found no fault with her coldness. The wedding preparations went on, and at last the day came.
The wedding was to be at eight o'clock in the evening, and nearly all the village was bidden to it—even many of the Unitarian faction who had been Parson Fair's old parishioners. At half-past seven o'clock the street was full of people. The village women rustled through the soft dusk with silken whispers of wide best skirts. Young girls with spring buds in their hair flounced about with white muslins, and fluttering with ribbons, flitted along. The men, holding back firmly their best broadcloth shoulders, marched past in their creaking Sunday shoes. Before eight o'clock the fine old rooms in Parson Fair's house were lined with faces solemnly expectant, as the faces of simple country folk are wont to be before the great rites of love and death.
The women sat with their mitted hands folded on their silken laps, their best brooches pinning decorously their fine-wrought neckerchiefs, their bosoms filled with sober knowledge and patient acquiescence. The young girls sat among them very still, with the stillness of unrest, like birds who alight only to fly, their soft cheeks burning, their necks and arms showing rosy through their laces, their little clasped fingers full of pulses, and their hearts tumultuous and stirred to imagination by the sweet surmise and ignorance of love. They looked seldom at the young men, and the young men at them, as they sat waiting. Still there were some who had learned in city schools the suavities which cover like clothes the primal emotions of life, and they moved about with exchanges of fine courtesies, while the others looked at them wondering.
When the tall clock in the south room struck eight, there was a hush among these few who had learned to flock gracefully, chattering like birds, bearing always the same aspect to one another, without regard to selfish joys or pains. The lawyer's wife, in a grand gown and topknot of feathers, which she was said to have worn to a great party at the governor's house in Boston, composed to majestic approval her handsome florid face, and stood back with a white-gloved hand on an arm of each of her daughters, slender and pretty, and unshrinkingly radiant in the faces of the doctor's college-bred son and his visiting classmate. The doctor's wife, also, who had come of a grand family, and appeared always on festive occasions in some well-preserved splendor of her maiden days, which had been prolonged, drew back, spreading out with both hands a vast expanse of purple velvet skirt. She quite eclipsed as with a murky purple cloud the two meek elderly women and a timid young girl who sat behind her. They immediately peered around her sumptuous folds with anxious eyes lest they might lose sight of the bridal party; but the bridal party did not come.
A passageway was left quite clear to the space between the windows on the west side of the room, where it was whispered the bride and groom were to stand, and the people all pressed back towards the walls; but no one came. A little hum of wondering conversation rose and fell again at fancied stirs of entrance. Folk hushed and nudged each other a dozen times, and craned their necks, and the clock struck the half-hour, and the bridal party had not come.
In a great chair near the clear space between the windows sat the bridegroom's mother, with a large pearl brooch gleaming out of the black satin folds on her bosom. Her face, between long lace lappets, looked as clearly pallid and passively reflective as the pearls. Not a muscle stirred about her calm mouth and the smooth triangle of forehead between her curtain slants of gray hair. If she speculated deeply within herself, and was agitated over the delay, not a restless glance of her steadily mild eyes betrayed it.
People wondered a little that she should not be busied about the bridal preparations, instead of waiting there like any other guest; but it was said that Dorothy had refused absolutely to have any helping hands but those of her old black slave woman about her. It was known, too, that Dorothy had only once taken tea with Burr's mother since the engagement, and everybody speculated as to how they would get on together. Dorothy had, in truth, received the rigorously courteous overtures of her future mother with the polite offishness of a scared but well-trained child, and the proud elder woman had not increased them.
“When she comes here to live I shall do my duty by her, but I shall not force myself upon her,” she told Burr. Burr's mother had not seen any of the dainty bridal gewgaws, but that she kept to herself. People glanced frequently at her with questioning eyes as the time went on; but she sat there with the gleam of her personality as unchanged in her face as the gleam of the pearls on her bosom.
“Catch her looking flustered!” one woman whispered to another. After the clock struck nine a long breath seemed to be drawn simultaneously by the company; it was quite audible. Then came a sharp hissing whisper of wonder and consternation; then a hush, and all faces turned towards the door. Burr Gordon, his face stern and white, stood there looking across at his mother. She rose at once and went to him with a stately glide, and they disappeared amid a distinct buzz of curiosity that could no longer be restrained.
“They've gone into the parson's study,” whispered one to another. Some reported, upon the good authority of a neighbor's imagination, that Parson Fair had “fallen down dead;” some that Dorothy had fainted away; some that the black woman had killed her and her father.
Meanwhile, Burr and his mother went into Parson Fair's study. There stood the minister by his desk, with his proudly gentle brow all furrowed, and his fine, long scholar-fingers clutching nervously at the back of his arm-chair. He cast one glance around as the door opened and shut, then looked away, then commanded himself with an effort, and stepped forward and bowed courteously to the woman in her black satin and pearls. Elvira Gordon looked from one to the other, and the two men followed her glances, and each waited for the other to speak.
“Where is she?” she asked, finally.
“She is up in her chamber,” replied Parson Fair, in a voice more strained with his own anxiety than it had ever been in the pulpit over the sins of his fellow-men. “I know not what to say or do—I never thought that daughter of mine—she will not come—”
Then Elvira Gordon cast a quick, sharp glance at her son, which he met with proud misery and resentment. “It is quite true, mother,” he said. “We have both tried, and she will not come.”
“Perhaps a woman—” said Parson Fair. “I wish her mother were alive,” he added, with a break in his voice.
“I will go and see her if you think it is best,” said Mrs. Gordon. In her heart she rebelled bitterly against seeming to plead with this unwilling bride to come to her son. Had she not felt guilty for her son, with the conviction of his own secret deflection, she would never have mounted the spiral stairs to Dorothy Fair's chamber that night. Parson Fair led the way, and Burr followed. The people stood back with a kind of awed curiosity. Some of the young girls were quite pale, and their eyes were dilated. Folk longed to follow them up-stairs, but they did not dare.
At the door of Dorothy's chamber crouched, like a fierce dog on guard, the great black African woman. When the three drew near she looked up at them with a hostile roll of savage eyes and a glitter of white teeth between thick lips. The parson advanced, and she sprang up and put her broad back against the door and rolled out defiance at him from under her burring tongue.
But he continued to advance with unmoved front, as if she had been the Satanas of his orthodoxy, which, indeed, she did not faintly image. She moved aside with a savage sound in her throat, and he threw the door wide open. There sat Dorothy Fair before them at her dimity dressing-table, with all her slender body huddled forward and resting seemingly upon her two bare white arms, which encompassed her bowed head like sweet rings. Not a glimpse of Dorothy's face could be seen under the wide flow of her fair curls, which parted only a little over the curve of one pink shoulder. Dorothy wore her wedding-gown of embroidered India muslin; but her satin slippers were widely separated upon the floor, as if she had kicked them hither and thither; and on the bed, in a great, careless, fluffy heap, lay her wedding-veil, as if it had been tossed there.
Elvira Gordon, at a signal from Parson Fair, entered the room past the sullen negress, who rolled her eyes and muttered low, and went close to the girl at the dressing-table.
“Dorothy!” said Mrs. Gordon.
Dorothy made no sign that she heard.
“Dorothy, do you know it is an hour after the time set for your wedding?”
Dorothy was so still that instinctively Mrs. Gordon bent close over her and listened; but she heard quite plainly the soft pant of her breath, and knew she had not fainted.
Mrs. Gordon straightened herself and looked at her. It was strange how that delicate, girlish form under the soft flow of fair locks and muslin draperies should express, in all its half-suggested curves, such utter obstinacy that it might have been the passive unresponsiveness of marble. Even that soft tumult of agitated breath could not alter that impression. When Mrs. Gordon spoke again her words seemed to echo back in her own ears, as if she had spoken in an empty room.
“Dorothy Fair,” said she, with a kind of solemn authority, “neither I nor any other human being can look into your heart and see why you do this; and you owe it to my son, who has your solemn promise, and to your father, whose only child you are, to speak. If you are sick, say so; if at the last minute you have a doubt as to your affection for Burr, say so. My son will keep his promise to you with his life, but he will not force himself upon you against your wishes. You need fear nothing; but you must either speak and give us your reason for this, or get up and put on your wedding-veil and your shoes, and come down, where they have been waiting over an hour. You cannot put such a slight upon my son, or your father, or all these people, any longer. You do not think what you are doing, Dorothy.”
Mrs. Gordon's even, weighty voice softened to motherly appeal in the closing words. Dorothy remained quite silent and motionless. Then Burr gave a great sigh of impatient misery, and strode across to Dorothy, and bent low over her, touching her curls with his lips, and whispered. She did not stir. “Won't you, Dorothy?” he said, gently, then quite aloud; and then again, “Have you forgotten what you promised me, Dorothy?” and still again, “Are you sick? Have I offended you in any way? Can't you tell me, Dorothy?”
At length, when Dorothy persisted in her silence, he stood back from her and spoke with his head proudly raised. “I will say no more,” he said; “I have come here to keep my solemn promise, and be married to you, and here I will remain until you or your father bid me go, with something more than silence. That may be enough for my pride, but 'tis not enough for my honor. I will go back to your father's study, Dorothy, and wait there until you speak and tell me what you wish.”
Burr turned to go, but Parson Fair thrust out his arm before him to stop him, and himself came forward and grasped Dorothy, with hardly a gentle hand, by a slender arm. “Daughter,” said Parson Fair in a voice which Dorothy had never heard from his lips except when he addressed wayward sinners from the pulpit, “I command you to stop this folly; stand up and finish dressing yourself, and go down-stairs and fulfil your promise to this man whom you have chosen.” The black woman pressed forward, then stood back at a glance from her master's blue eyes.
Dorothy did not stir; then her father spoke again, and his nervous hand tightened on her arm. “Dorothy,” said he, “I command you to rise”—and there was a great authority of fatherhood and priesthood in his voice, and even Dorothy was moved before it to respond, though not to yielding.
Suddenly she jerked her arm away from her father's grasp, and stood up, with a convulsive flutter of her white plumage like a bird. She flung back her curls and disclosed her beautiful pale face, all strained to terrified resolve, and her dilated blue eyes “I will not!” she cried out, addressing her father alone, “I will not, father. I have made up my mind that I will not.”
Then, as Parson Fair said not a word, only looked at her with stern questioning, she went on, shrill and fast, “I will not; no, I will not! Nobody can make me! I thought I would, I thought I must, until this last. Now when it comes to this, I can do no more. I will not, father.”
“Why?” said Parson Fair.
“I would have kept my promise, father. I would have kept it, no matter if—I would have been faithful to him if he—” Suddenly Dorothy turned on Burr with a gasp of terror and defiance. “I would never have done this, you know,” she cried; “it would never have come to this, if you had spoken and told me you were innocent.”
“What do you mean, child?” said Parson Fair, sternly.
“He would not tell me that he did not stab his cousin Lot,” replied Dorothy, setting her sweet mouth doggedly. Her blue eyes met her father's with shrinking and yet steadfast defiance.
“Dorothy,” said he, “do you not know that he is innocent by his cousin's own confession?”
“Why, then, does he not say so?” finished Dorothy. “How do I know who did it? Madelon Hautville said she was guilty, then Lot Gordon; and Burr would not deny his guilt when I asked him. How do I know which? Madelon Hautville was trying to shield him; I am not blind. Then Lot liked her. How do I know which?” Suddenly she cried out to Burr so loud that the people in the entry below heard her, “Tell me now that you are innocent, and either your cousin Lot or Madelon Hautville guilty,” she demanded. “Tell me!”
Burr, white and rigid, looked at her, and made no reply. “Tell me,” she cried, in her sweet, shrill voice, “tell me now that you did not stab your cousin Lot, and Madelon Hautville spoke the truth, and I will keep my promise to you, even if my heart is not yours.”
Parson Fair grasped his daughter's arm again. “No man whom you have promised to wed should reply to such distrust as this,” he said. “Dorothy, I command you to go down-stairs and be married to this man.”
Then Dorothy broke away from him with a wild shriek. “No, I will not marry this man with his cousin's blood on his soul! I will not, father; you shall not make me! I will not! Night and day I shall see that knife in his hand. I will not marry him, because he tried to kill his cousin Lot. I will not, I will not!” The black woman pushed between them with a savage murmur of love and wrath, and caught her mistress in her arms, and crooned over her, like a wild thing over her young.
“There is no use in prolonging this, sir,” Burr said to Parson Fair.
The elder man looked at him with a strange mixture of helpless dignity and sympathy and wrath. “You know that I have no share in this,” he said, and he glanced almost piteously from Burr to his mother. “I could never have believed that my daughter—”
“We will say no more about it, sir,” responded Burr. “I hold neither you nor your daughter in any blame.” Then he offered his arm to his mother, and the three went out and down-stairs, and the black woman clapped to the chamber door with a great jar upon her mistress, whose calm of obstinacy had broken into wailing hysterics which betokened no less stanchness. Parson Fair, Burr Gordon, and his mother, at the foot of the stairs among the curious wedding-guests, looked for a second at one another.
The parson's fine state seemed to have deserted him. There were red spots on his pale cheeks. His long hands twitched nervously. “I will—inform them,” he said, huskily, at length, but Burr moved before him. “No, sir; I will do it,” he said.
Then he strode into the great north parlor, where the more important guests were assembled, and where he and Dorothy were to have been married. He stood alone in the clear space between the windows, and knew, as the eyes of the people met his, that they had heard Dorothy's last wild cry, and knew why she would not marry him. He stood for a second facing them all before he spoke, and in spite of the shame of rejection which he felt heaped upon him by them all, and a subtler shame arising from his own heart, in spite of the fact that he could not offer any defense, or do aught but bend his back to the full weight of his humiliation, he had a certain majesty of demeanor. Revolt at humiliation alone precipitates the full measure of it, and the strength which survives defeat, even of one's own convictions, is of a good quality. Silence under wrongful accusation gives the bearing of a hero.
There was a hush over the assembly so complete that it seemed as if the very personalities of the listeners were drawn back from self-consciousness to give free scope for sound. When Burr spoke, everybody heard.
“The marriage between Dorothy Fair and myself is broken off,” was all he said. Then he went out of the room as proudly as if his bride had been by his side, through the entry to the study. Parson Fair and his mother were there. “They know it,” he announced, quite calmly; then he took his fine wedding-hat from the table.
“Where are you going?” his mother demanded, quickly.
“To walk a little way.” Burr turned to Parson Fair. “I beg you not to feel that you must deal severely with your daughter for this,” he said, “for she does not deserve it. She was justified in asking what she did, and in feeling distrust that I did not answer.”
“If a wife's faith cannot survive her husband's silence, then is she no true spouse, and 'twas the part of a man not to answer,” said this Parson Fair, who had all his life followed in most roads the lead of his womankind, and not known it, so much state had he been allowed in his captivity.
“She was justified,” said Burr, “and I beg you, sir, not to visit any displeasure upon her. I have not at any time been worthy of her, although God knows had she not cast me off, and did not this last, with what I remember now of her manner for the last few weeks, make me sure that her heart is no longer mine, I would have lived my life for her, as best I could; and will now, should she say the word.”
With that, Burr Gordon thrust on his wedding-hat, and was out of the study and out of the south door of the house.
In the yard was drawn up in state, behind the five white horses, the grand old Gordon coach, which had not been used before since the death of Lot's father. Lot had insisted upon furnishing the coach and the horses for his cousin's wedding. The man who stood by the horses' heads looked up at Burr in a dazed way when he came out of the house and spoke to him.
“When my mother is ready you can take her home, Silas,” said Burr. “Then drive over to my cousin's, and put up the coach and the horses.”
The man gasped and looked at him. “Do you hear what I say?” said Burr, shortly.
The man gave an affirmative grunt, and strove to speak, but Burr cut him short. “Look out for that bad place in the road, before you get to the bridge,” he said, and went on out of the yard. The road was suddenly full of departing wedding-guests, fluttering along with shrill clatter of persistently individual notes, like a flock of birds.
Burr, out of the yard, passed along through their midst with a hasty yet dignified pace. He said to himself that he would not seem to be running away. He looked neither to the right nor left, except to avoid collisions with silken and muslin petticoats, yet he was conscious of the hush of voices as he passed, and knew that they all recognized him in the broad moonlight.
When he reached the lane which led across-lots to the old place, he plunged into it by a sudden impulse. He went half-way down its leafy tunnel; then he stopped and sat down on a great stone which had fallen off the bordering wall.
Great spiritual as well as great physical catastrophes stun for a while, and there is after both a coming to one's self and an examining one's faculties, as well as one's bones, to see if they be still in working order. Burr Gordon, sitting there on his stone of meditation, in the moonlit dapple of the lane, came slowly to a full realization of himself in his change of state, and strove to make sure what power of action he had left under these new conditions.
His first thought was a cowardly one—that he would sell out, or rather give up his estate to his cousin, take his mother, and turn his back upon the village altogether. He knew what he had to expect. He tasted well in advance the miserable and half ludicrous shame of a man who has been openly jilted by a woman. He tasted, too, the covertly whispered suspicion which had perhaps never quite departed, and which now was surely raised to new life by Dorothy's loud cries of accusation. He knew that he was utterly defenceless under both shame and suspicion, being fettered fast by his own tardy but stern sense of duty and loyalty. It seemed to him at first that he would be crippled beyond cure in his whole life if he should stay where he was; and then he felt the spring of the fighting instinct within him, and said proudly to himself that he would turn his back upon nothing. He would brave it all.
There was a light wind, and now and then the young trees in the lane were driven into a soft tumult of whispering leaves. Burr did not notice when into this voice of the wind and this noise as of a crowd of softly scurrying ghosts there came a crisp rustle of muslin and a quick footstep up the lane. He only looked up when Madelon Hautville stopped before him and looked at him with incredulous alarm, as if she could not believe the evidence of her own eyes.
Dressed like a bride herself was Madelon Hautville, in a sheer white gown, which she had fashioned for herself out of an old crape shawl which had belonged to her mother, and cunningly wrought with great garlands of red flowers. She was going to Burr Gordon's wedding, not knowing the lateness of the hour; for her brother Richard had played a trick upon her, and set back the clock two hours, when to his great wrath she would not stay at home. The others were half in favor of her going, thinking that it showed her pride; but Richard was sorely set against it, and watched his chance, and slipped back the hands of the clock that she should be too late to see the wedding of the man who had forsaken her.
Madelon looked at Burr, and he at her, and neither spoke. Then, when she saw surely who it was, she cried out half in wonder and half chidingly, as if she had been his mother reproaching him for his tardiness: “What are you doing here, Burr Gordon? Do you know 'tis nearly eight o'clock, and time for your wedding?”
“'Tis nearly ten,” said Burr, “and there is no wedding.”
“Nearly ten?”
“Yes.”
“But 'twas not eight by our clock.”
Burr took out the great gold timepiece which had belonged to his father, and held it towards her, and she saw the face plainly in the moonlight.
“What does this mean?” she said; and then she cried, half shrinking away from him, “Are you married then? Where is she?”
“Dorothy Fair is at home in her chamber, and I am not married, and never shall be.”
“Why—what does this mean, Burr Gordon?”
“She will not have me, and—no blame to her.”
“Will not have you, and the people there, and the hour set! Will not have you? Burr, she shall have you! I promise you she shall. I will go talk to her. She is a child, and she does not know—I can make her listen. She shall have you, Burr. I will go this minute, and talk to her, and do you come after me.”
Madelon gave a forward bound, like a deer, but Burr sprang up and caught her by the arm. “Why do you stop me, Burr Gordon?” she cried, trying to wrest her arm away.
“Do you think I have no manhood left, Madelon Hautville, that I will let you,youbeg a woman who does not love me to marry me?”
“She does love you, she shall love you!”
“I tell you she does not!” Burr spoke with a bitterness which might well have come from slighted love, and, indeed, so complex and contradictory are the workings of the mind of a man, and so strong is the bent when once set in one direction, that not loving Dorothy Fair, and loving this other woman with his whole heart, he yet felt for the moment that he would rather his marriage had taken place and he were not free. His freedom, which he knew was a shame to welcome, galled him for the time worse than a chain, and he felt more injured than if he had loved this girl who had jilted him; for something which was more precious to him than love had been slighted and made for naught.
“She does—you are mad, Burr Gordon! She was all ready to marry you. She came to me to help on her wedding-clothes. She was all smiling and pleased. How could she be pleased over her wedding-clothes if she did not love you? She does, Burr! She is a child—I can talk to her. I will make her. Let me go, Burr! You wait here, and not fret. Oh, how pale you look! I tell you, you shall have her, Burr!”
“I tell you, Madelon, she does not love me, and I will not have you go.”
Madelon stood looking at him, her face all at once changing curiously as if from some revelation from within. She remembered suddenly that old scene with Eugene, and a suspicion seized her. “There's somebody else!” she cried out, fiercely. “There's no truth in her. If she thinks—she shall not—nor he—I will not have it so!”
“For God's sake, Madelon, don't!” said Burr, not fairly comprehending what she said. He sat down again upon the stone, and leaned his head upon his hands. In truth he felt dazed and helpless, as if he had reached suddenly the mouth of many roads and knew not which to take. The intricacy of the situation was fairly paralyzing to an order of mind like his, which was wont to grasp, though shrewdly enough, only the straight course of cause and effect. He revolved dizzily in his mind the fact that he could not tell Madelon the reason which Dorothy had given for her rejection of him, and the conviction was fast gaining upon him that it was not the true and only reason. He held fiercely to his loyalty to Madelon, and his shammed loyalty to Dorothy, and his slipping clutch of loyalty to himself, and knew not what to say nor what course to take.
Madelon, as he settled back upon the stone and bowed his head, made towards him one of those motions which the body has kept intact from the primitive order of things, when it was free to obey Love; then she stood back and looked at him a moment, while indignation and that compassion which is the very holiness of love swelled high within her. Then suddenly she leaned forward against him in her white robes, with the soft impetus of a white flowering tree driven by the wind, and put her arms around him, and drew his unhappy head against her bosom, and stroked his hair, and poured out in broken words her wrath against Dorothy Fair, and her pity for him. And all this she did in utter self-despite and forgetfulness, not caring if he should discover how great her love for him still was, believing fully that his whole heart had belonged to the other girl, and was breaking for her, and arguing thence no good for herself.
“She shall never marry him, that I swear to you, Burr,” she cried, passionately, “and in time she may turn to you again; there is no faith in her.”
Burr listened a while bewildered, not fully knowing nor asking what she meant, letting his head rest against her bosom, as if he were a child whom she comforted.
“Burr, you shall have her, you shall have her yet!” she said, over and over, as if Dorothy were a sweetmeat for which he longed, until at last a great shame and resolution seemed to go over him like a wave, and he put her away and rose up.
“Madelon,” he said, “you don't know. Listen. You will scorn me after this—you will never look at me again, but listen: Dorothy must never know, for all the slight of this last must come from her and not from me, since she is a woman and I a man; but you shall know the whole truth. I never loved Dorothy Fair, Madelon, not as I love you, as God is my witness. She was pretty to look at, and I liked—but you cannot understand the weakness of a man that makes him ashamed of himself. I left you, and—I went—courting her because she was Parson Fair's only daughter, and I was poor, and that was not all the reason. I liked her pretty face and her pretty ways well enough, but all the time it was you and you alone in my heart; and, knowing that, I left you, though I was a man. I turned Judas to my own self, and denied and would have sold the best that was in me. Now you know the truth, Madelon Hautville.”
Madelon looked at him. Her lips parted, as if her breath came hard.
Burr made as if to pass on without another word, but she held out her hand to stop him, though she did not touch him.
“Stop, Burr,” she said, with a strange, almost oratorical manner, that he had never seen in her before. It was almost as if she mounted before his eyes a platform of her own love and higher purposes. “Listen to me,” she said. “That night when I was in such terrible anger with you that for a second I would have killed you, I put it out of your power forever to do anything that could turn me against you again. I broke my own spirit that night, Burr. The wrong I would have done you outweighs all you ever have done or ever can do me. There is no wrong in this world that you can do me, if I will not take it so; and as for the wrong you may have done yourself—that only makes me more faithful to you, Burr.”
Burr stood looking at her, speechless. It was to him as if he saw the true inner self of the girl, which he had dimly known by half-revealings but had never truly seen before. For a minute it was not Madelon Hautville in flesh and blood who stood before him, but the ghost of her, made evident by her love for him; and his very heart seemed to melt within him with shame and wonder and worship. “Oh, Madelon!” he gasped out, at length.
But Madelon turned away then. “You must go home now,” said she, “and I must. Good-night, Burr.”
“Good-night,” said Burr, as if he repeated it at her bidding.
Then they passed without touching each other. Madelon went home down the lane, across the fields, and Burr went out in the silent street, whence all the wedding-guests had departed, and homeward also.
In this little Vermont village, lying among peacefully sloping hills, away from boisterous river-courses, there was small chance of those physical convulsions which sometimes disturb the quiet of generations. The roar of a spring freshet never smote the ears of the dwellers therein, and the winters passed with no danger of avalanches. From its sheltered situation destructive storms seldom launched themselves upon it; the oldest inhabitant could remember little injury from lightning or hail or wind.
However, there is no village in this world so sheltered in situation that it is not exposed to the full brunt of the great forces of human passion, when they lash themselves at times into the fury of storm. It was here in this little village of Ware Centre, which could never know flood or volcanic fire, as if a sort of spiritual whirlpool had appeared suddenly in its midst. The thoughts of all the people, lying down upon their pillows, or rising for their daily tasks, centred upon it, and it was as if the minds of all were prone upon the edge of it, gazing curiously into the vortex.
The Sunday after Burr Gordon's disastrous wedding-day the faces of all the people on their way to meeting wore the same expression, in different degrees of intensity. One emotion of strained curiosity and wonder made one family of the whole village. The people thought and spoke of only one subject; they asked each other one question—“Will any of them be at meeting?” The Unitarian church was nearly deserted that Sunday, for Parson Fair's former parishioners returned to their old gathering place, under stronger pressure, for the time, than religious tenets.
It was a burning day for May—as hot as midsummer. The flowers were blossoming visibly under the eyes of the people, but they did not notice. They flocked into the meeting-house and looked about them, all with the same expression in their eyes.
When Burr Gordon and his mother entered, a thrill seemed to pass through the whole congregation. Nobody had thought they would come. Mrs. Gordon, gliding with even pace, softly murmurous in her Sunday silk, followed her son, who walked with brave front, although he was undeniably pale, up the aisle to their pew. He stood about to let his mother enter, meeting the eyes of the people as he did so; then sat down himself, and a long glance and a long nudge of shoulders passed over the meeting-house. Burr and his mother both knew it, but she sat in undisturbed serenity of pallor, and he stirred not a muscle, though a red spot blazed out on each cheek.
Madelon Hautville sat in the singing seats, but he never looked at her nor she at him. There were curious eyes upon her also, for people wondered if Burr would turn to her now Dorothy Fair had jilted him; but she did not know it. She heeded nobody but Burr, though she did not look at him, and when she stood up in the midst of her brothers and sang, she sang neither to the Lord nor to the people, but to this one weak and humiliated man whom she loved. The people thought that she had never sung so before, recognizing, though ignorantly, that she struck that great chord of the heart whose capability of sound was in them also. For the time she stood before and led all the actors in that small drama of human life which was on the village stage, and in which she took involuntary part; and the audience saw and heard nobody but her.
Burr, stiff as a soldier, at the end of his pew, felt his heart leap to hope and resolve through the sound of this woman's voice in the old orthodox hymns, and laid hold unknowingly, by means of it, of the love and force which are at the roots of things for the strengthening of the world. With weak and false starts and tardy retrogrades he had woven around his feet a labyrinth of crossing paths of life, but now, of a sudden, he saw clearly his way out. He trampled down the scruples which hampered and blinded him like thorns and had their roots in a false pride of honor, and recognized that divine call of love to worship which simplifies all perplexities. He would take that girl singing yonder for is wife, if she were indeed so generous-minded after all, not now, but later, when there could be no possibility of slight to Dorothy Fair. His honest work in the world he would do, were it in the ploughshares or the wayside ditches, with no striving for aggrandizement through untoward ways, and so would he humbly attain the full dignity of his being.
When Madelon Hautville stopped singing not one in the meeting-house had seen Burr Gordon stir, but the soul in him had surely turned and faced about with a great rending as of swathing wills that bound it.
Parson Fair preached that morning. Great had been the speculation as to whether he would or not. When he stood up in his pulpit and faced the crowded pews and the steely glances of curious eyes through the shifting flutter of fans, he was as austerely composed as ever; but a buzzing whisper went through the audience like a veritable bee of gossip. “He looks dreadful,” they hissed in each other's ears, with nudges and nods.
All the principal participants in the village commotion were there except Lot Gordon and Dorothy Fair. Dorothy had not come, in spite of her father's stern commands, and sterner they had been than any commands of his to his beloved child before. Dorothy had cowered before her father, in utter misery and trepidation, after the company had left that wedding-night, but yielded she had not—only fallen ill again of that light fever which so easily beset her under stress of mind.
That Sunday morning, striving to rise and go to meeting as her father said, and being in truth willing enough, since she had a terrified longing to see Eugene Hautville in the choir and ascertain if he were angry or glad, she fell back weak and dizzy on her pillows, and the doctor was called. Dorothy's fever ran lightly, as all ailments of hers, whether mental or physical, were wont to do; and yet she had a delicacy of organization which caused her to be shaken sorely by slight causes. A butterfly may not have the capacity for despair, but the touch of a finger can crush it; and had it more capacity, there would be no butterflies.
It was a full month before Dorothy was able to go out of doors, and all that time the gossips were cheated out of the sight of her, and her father was constrained to treat her with a sort of conscience-stricken tenderness, in spite of her grave fault. Her mother had never risen from a fever which seemed akin to this; and Dorothy, in spite of his stern Puritan creed, was yet dearer to him than that abstraction of her which he deemed her soul.
Looking at the girl, flushed softly with fever, her blue eyes shining like jewels, as she lay in her white nest, he knew that he loved her life more fiercely than he judged her sins. He would turn his back upon her and go out of her chamber, his black height bowed like a penitent, and down to his study, and wrestle there upon his knees for hours with that earthly and natural love which he accounted as of the Tempter, yet might after all have been an angel, and of the Lord. And when Dorothy came weakly down-stairs at last, with the great black woman guarding her steps as if she were a baby, he found not in himself the power of stern counsel and reproof which he had decided upon when she should have left her chamber.
All the neighbors knew when Dorothy Fair first stepped her foot out of doors, and told one another suspiciously that she did not look very sick, and that they guessed she might have come out sooner, and gone to meeting, had she been so minded.
And in truth the girl, beyond slight deflections in the curves of her soft cheeks, and a wistful enlarging and brightening of her blue eyes, as in thoughtful shadows, was not much changed. The first Sunday when she appeared in the meeting-house she wore, to the delight and scandal of the women, one of the new gowns and hats of her bridal outfit. Dorothy Fair, in a great plumed hat of peach-blow silk, in a pearly silk gown and pink-silk mitts, in a white-muslin pelerine all wrought with cunning needlework, sat in the parson's pew, and uplifted her lovely face towards her father in the pulpit, and nobody knew how her whole mind and fancy were set, not upon the sermon, but upon Eugene Hautville in the singing-seats behind her. And nobody dreamed how, as she sat there, she held before her face, as it were, a sort of mental hand-mirror, in which she could see her head of fair curls, her peach-blow hat, and her slender white-muslin shoulders reflected from Eugene's dark eyes. The fall of every curl had she studied well that morning, and the folds of the muslin pelerine over her shoulders. And when the congregation arose for the hymns and faced about towards the singers, then did Dorothy let her blue eyes seek, with an innocent unconsciousness, as of blue flowers, which would have deceived the very elect, Eugene's face.
But his black eyes met hers with no more fiery glances. Eugene never even looked at her, but sang, with stern averted face, which was paler and thinner than Dorothy's, though he had had no illness save of the spirit. In vain Dorothy sought his eyes, with her blue appealing ones, during every hymn; in vain once or twice during the sermon she even cast a glance around her shoulder with a slight fling of her curls aside, and a little shiver, as if she felt a draught. Eugene never looked her way that she could see.
When the long service was over, Dorothy, with sly, watchful eyes, quickened her pace, and strove so to manage that she and Eugene should emerge from the meeting-house side by side. But he was striding far ahead, with never a backward glance, when she came out, lifting daintily her pearly skirts. Burr was near her, but him she never thought of, even to avoid, and his mother's stately aside movement was not even seen by her. She courtesied prettily to those who met her face to face, from force of habit, and went on thinking of no one but Eugene.
Again, in the afternoon, Dorothy went to meeting, though her pulses began to beat, with a slight return of the fever, and again she strove with her cunning maiden wiles to attract this obdurate Eugene, and again in vain. That night Dorothy lay and wept awhile before she fell asleep, and dreamed that she and Eugene were a-walking in the lane and that he kissed her. And when she awoke, blushing in the darkness, she resolved that she would go a-walking in the lane on every pleasant day, in the hope that the dream might come true.
And Mistress Dorothy Fair, with many eyes in the neighbors' windows watching, went pacing slowly, for her delicate limbs as yet did not bear her strongly, day after day down the road and into the lane, and, with frequent rests upon wayside stones, to the farther end of it. And yet she did not meet Eugene therein, and her dream did not come true.
But it happened at last, about the middle of the month of June, when the great red and white roses in the dooryards were in such full bloom that in another day they would be past it and fall, that Dorothy and Eugene met in the lane; for there is room enough in time for most dreams to come true, and for the others there is eternity.
That afternoon Dorothy had gone forth as usual, but she said to herself that he would not come; and half-way down the lane she ceased peering into the green distances for him, and sat herself down on a stone, and leaned back against the trunk of a young maple, and shut her eyes wearily, and told herself in a sort of sad penitence that she would look no more for him, for he would not come.
The grass in the lane was grown long now, with a pink mist over the top of it; the trees at the sides leaned together heavy with foliage, and the bordering walls were all hidden under bushes and vines. Everywhere on bush and vine were spikes and corymbs of lusty blossoms. Birds were calling to their mates and their young; the locusts were shrilling out of depths of sunlight. Dorothy, in the midst of this uncontrolled passion of summer, was herself in utter tune and harmony with it. She was just as sweet and gracefully courtesying among her sisters as any flower among the host of the field; and she had silently and inconsequently, like the flower, her own little lust of life and bloom which none could overcome, and against which she could know no religion. This Dorothy, meekly leaning her slender shoulders against the maple-tree, with her blue eyes closed, and her little hands folded in her lap, could no more develop into aught towards which she herself inclined not than a daisy plant out in the field could grow a clover blossom. Moreover her heart, which had after all enough of the sweetness of love in it, opened or shut like the cup of a sensitive plant, with seemingly no volition of hers; therefore was she in a manner innocently helpless and docile before her own emotions and her own destiny.
She sat still a few minutes and kept her eyes closed. Then she thought she heard a stir down the lane, but she would not open her eyes to look, so sadly and impatiently sure was she that he would not come. Even when she knew there was a footstep drawing near she would not look. She kept her eyes closed, and made as if she were asleep; and some one passed her, and she would not look, so sure was she that it was not Eugene.
But that afternoon Eugene Hautville, who had gone all this time the long way to the village, felt his own instincts, or the natural towardness of his heart, too strong for him. Often, watching from a distance across the fields, he had seen a pale flutter of skirts in the lane, and knew well enough that Dorothy was there, and had turned back; but this time he walked on. When he came to Dorothy he cast one glance at her, then set his face sternly and kept on, with his heart pulling him back at every step. Dorothy did not open her eyes until he had fairly passed her, and then she looked and saw him going away from her without a word. Then she gave a little cry that no one could have interpreted with any written language. She called not Eugene by his name; she said no word; but her heart gave that ancient cry for its lover which was before all speech; and that human love-call drowned out suddenly all the others.
But when Eugene stopped and turned, Dorothy blushed so before his eyes that her very neck and arms glowed pink through her lace tucker and sleeves. She shrank away, twisting herself and hiding her face, so that he could see naught of her but the flow of her muslin skirts and her curling fair locks.
Eugene stood a minute looking at her. His dark face was as red as Dorothy's. He made a motion towards her, then drew back and held up his head resolutely.
“It is a pleasant day,” he said, as if they were exchanging the everyday courtesies of life; and then when she made no reply, he added that he hoped she was quite recovered from her sickness.
And then he was pressing on again, white in the face now and wrestling fiercely with himself that he might, as it were, pass his own heart which stood in the way; but Dorothy rose up, with a sob, and pressed before him, touching his arm with her slender one in her lace sleeve, and shaking out like any flower the rose and lavender scent in her garments.
“I want to speak to you,” she said, and strove in vain to command her voice.
Eugene bowed and tried to smile, and waited, and looked above her head, through the tree branches into the field.
“I want to know if—you are angry with me because—I would not—marry Burr,” said Dorothy, catching her breath between her words.
“I told you that you had no reason—that he was not guilty,” Eugene said, with a kind of stern doggedness; and still he did not look at her.
“I could not marry—him,” Dorothy panted, softly.
“I told you you had no reason,” Eugene said again, as if he were saying a lesson that he had taught himself.
“Are you angry—with me because I could not marry him?” Dorothy asked, with her soft persistency in her own line of thought, and not his.
Then Eugene in desperation looked down at her, and saw her face worn into sweet wistfulness by her illness, her dilated eyes and lips parted and quivering into sobs, like a baby's.
“I am not angry, but I encourage no woman to be false to her betrothal vows,” he said, and strove to make his voice hard; but Dorothy bent her head, and the sobs came, and he took her in his arms.
“Are you angry with me?” Dorothy sobbed, piteously, against his breast.
“No, not with you, but myself,” said Eugene. “It is all with myself. I will take the blame of it all, sweet,” and he smoothed her hair and kissed her and held her close and tried to comfort her; and it seemed to him that he could indeed take all the blame of her inconstancy and distrust, and could even bear his self-reproach for her sake, so much he loved her.
“I would not have married Burr—even if—he had told me—he was innocent,” Dorothy said, after a while. She was hushing her sobs, and her very soul was smiling within her for joy as Eugene's fond whispers reached her ears.
“Why?” said Eugene.
“Because—you came first—when you looked at me in the meeting-house,” Dorothy whispered back. Then she suddenly lifted her face a little, and looked up at him, with one soft flushed cheek crushed against his breast, and Eugene bent his face down to hers. They stood so, and for a minute had, indeed, the whole world to their two selves, for love as well as death has the power of annihilation; and then there was a stir in the lane, a crisp rustle of petticoats and a hiss of whispering voices; and they started and fell apart. There in the lane before them, their eyes as keen as foxes, with the scent of curiosity and gossip, their cheeks red with the shame of it, and their lips forming into apologetic and terrified smiles, stood Margaret Bean and two others—the tavern-keeper's wife and the wife of the man who kept the village store.
For a second the three women fairly cowered beneath Eugene Hautville's eyes, and Margaret Bean began to stammer as if her old tongue were palsied. Then Eugene collected himself, made them one of his courtly bows, turned to Dorothy with another, offered her his arm, and walked away with her out of the lane, before the eyes of the prying gossips.
It was four o'clock that summer afternoon when the three women—Margaret Bean, the tavern-keeper's wife, and the storekeeper's wife—who had followed Dorothy and Eugene into the lane to pry upon them set forth to communicate by word of mouth the scandalous proceedings they had witnessed; and long before midnight all the village knew. The women crept cautiously at a good distance behind Dorothy and Eugene out of the lane, and watched, with incredulous eyes turning to each other for confirmation, the pair walk into Parson Fair's house together. Then they could do no more, since their ears were not long enough, and each went her way to tell what she had seen.
All the neighbors knew when Eugene Hautville left Parson Fair's house that afternoon, but their knowledge stopped there. Nobody ever discovered just what was said within those four walls when Dorothy—who, soft plumaged though she was, had flown in the faces of all her decorous feminine antecedents and her goodly teaching—confronted her father with her new lover at her side.
It was safe enough to assume, for one who knew her and them well, that the two men did finally turn and protect her and shelter her each against himself, and his own despite, as well as one another. After that Eugene Hautville was seen every Sunday night and twice in the week going into Parson Fair's house, and the candles burned late in the north parlor.
The banns were published in a month's time. Some accounted it unseemly haste, after the other banns which had come to naught, and some said 'twas better so, and they blamed not Parson Fair for placing such a flighty and jilting maid safe within the pale of wedlock—and they guessed he was thankful enough to find a husband for her, even if 'twas one of the Hautvilles.
However, Eugene was held in somewhat more of esteem than the others, since he had in his own right a snug little sum in bank which had come to him from an uncle whose name he bore. When it was known that Eugene had bought the old Squire Damon place, a goodly house with a box-bordered front walk, and a pillared front door, and would take his bride home to it, public favor became quite strong for him. Folk opined that he would, even if he was a Hautville, make full as good a husband as Burr, and that Dorothy Fair would have the best of the bargain all around. While many held Dorothy in slight esteem for her instability and delicacy, and thought she was no desirable helpmeet for any man, some were of the opinion that she had shown praiseworthy judgment and shrewdness in jilting Burr for Eugene.
Dorothy this time made small show of her wedding, and was married in her father's study with only the necessary witnesses and no guests. Eugene Hautville had chafed. Dorothy also, with her feminine desire for all minor details of happiness, was aggrieved that she could never now appear before the public gaze in all the splendor of her wedding-gear. But Parson Fair stood firm for once, and would have it so.
All the watchful neighbors saw was, after nightfall and moonrise, Parson Fair's door open, and the bride and groom appear for a second in a golden shaft of light which flashed into gloom at the closing of the door, and left there two shadows, as if the story of their life and love had already been told and passed into history. And then the neighbors saw them move up the road with long vanishing flutters of the bride's white draperies, and the great black woman, steadying a basket against her hip, in their wake, following her mistress like a faithful dog, with perhaps the most unselfish love of all.
The black woman favored Eugene more than she had ever favored Burr, perhaps because she was a true slave of love, and leaned with the secret leanings of her mistress's heart against all words of mouth, obeying her commands with a fuller understanding of them than Dorothy herself.
When this new lover came a-courting, the African woman had always greeted him at the door with that wide, sudden smile of hers, at once simple, like a child's, and wild, like the grin of an animal; and her voice, in her thick jargon, was nearly as softly rich to him as to Dorothy. Moreover she kept no longer jealous watch at the door of the room where the lovers sat, and was fond of treating the young man with little cakes which she made with honey, whose like was to be eaten nowhere else in the village.
After Dorothy and Eugene were wedded they faded into comparative insignificance in the thoughts of the villagers, which were then centred upon Burr Gordon and Madelon. The curtain went down upon Eugene and his bride as upon any pair of wedded lovers in his Shakespeare book.