Chapter 16

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_ Chapter XVI

Madelon, half an hour after Eugene had left, put on her cloak and hood, and went down the road to Lot Gordon's. "I want to see him a minute," she said to Margaret Bean when the woman answered her knock, and went in with no more ado. Her face was white and stern in the shadow of her hood.

Margaret Bean recoiled a little when she looked at her. "He's up," said she, backing before her, half as if she were afraid. "I guess you can walk right in."

Madelon went into the sitting-room, and Lot's face confronted her at once, white and peaked, with hollow blue eyes lit, as of old, with a mocking intelligence of life.

He was sunken amid multifold wrappings in a great chair before the fire, with a great leathern-bound book on his knees. Beside him was a little stand with writing-paper thereon, and sealing-wax and a candle, a quill pen and an inkstand. All the room was lined with books, and was full of the musty smell of them.

Madelon went straight up to Lot and spoke out with no word of greeting. "I have sent your answer," said she. "I will keep my promise, but have you thought well of what you do, Lot Gordon?"

Lot looked up at her and smiled, and the smile gave a curiously gentle look to his face, in spite of the sharp light in his eyes.

"The thought has been my meat and my drink, my medicine and my breath of life," said he.

"If I were a man I would rather--take a snake to my breast than a woman who held me as one--"

"Two parallel lines can sooner meet than a woman know the heart of a man. What do I care so I hold you to mine?"

Madelon stood farther away from him, but her eyes did not fall before his.

"Why did you lie" said she. "You knew I stabbed you, and not yourself. You are a liar, Lot Gordon."

But Lot still smiled as he answered her. "However it may be with other men, no happening has come to me since I set foot upon this earth that I brought not upon myself by my own deeds. The hand that set the knife in my side was my own, and I have not lied."

"You have lied. Tell them the truth."

"I have told the truth that lies at the bottom of the well."

"Call them all in now, and tell them--I--did it, I--"

Lot Gordon raised himself a little, and looked at her with the mocking expression gone suddenly from his face. "What good do you think it would do if I did, Madelon?" he said, with a strange sadness in his voice.

She looked at him.

"I shall not die of the wound. You can't escape me by prison or a disgraceful death, and as for me, do you think it would make any difference to me if all the village pointed at you, Madelon?"

Madelon looked at him as if she were frozen.

"All the way to be set loose from your promise is by your own breaking it," said Lot.

"I will keep my promise," said Madelon, shutting her lips hard upon her words. She turned away.

"Madelon," said Lot.

She went towards the door as if she did not hear.

"Madelon."

She turned her white face slightly towards him and paused.

"Won't you come here to me a moment?"

"I cannot until I am driven to it!" she cried out, passion leaping into her voice like fire. "I cannot go near you, Lot Gordon!"

She opened the door, and then she heard a sob. She hesitated a second, then looked around; and Lot Gordon's thin body was curled about in his chair and quivering with sobs like any child's.

Madelon closed the door, and went back and stood over him. She looked at him with a curious expression of pity struggling with loathing, as she might have looked at some wounded reptile.

"Well, I am here," she said, in a harsh voice.

"All my life my heart has had nothing, and now what it has it has not," moaned Lot, as if it had been to his mother. He looked up at her with his hollow blue eyes swimming in tears. He seemed for a minute like a little ailing boy appealing for sympathy, and the latent motherhood in the girl responded to that.

"You know I cannot help that, Lot," she said. "You know how you forced me into this to save the one I do love."

"Oh, Madelon, can't you love me?"

She shrank away from him and shook her head, but still her dark eyes were soft upon his face.

"Does not love for you count anything? I love you more than he--I do, Madelon."

"It is no use talking, I can never love you, Lot," she said, but gently.

"It ought to count. Love ought to count, dear. It is the best thing in the world we have to give. And I have given it to you; oh, God, how have I given it to you, Madelon!"

"Lot, don't--it's no use."

"Listen--you must listen, dear. You must hear it once. It can't turn you more against me. You don't know how I have loved you--you don't know. Listen. Never a morning have I waked but the knowledge of you came before the consciousness of myself. Never a night I fell asleep but 'twas you, you I lost last, and not myself. When I have been sick the sting of my longing for you has dulled all my pain of body. If I die I see not how that can die with me, for it is of my soul. I see not why I must not bear it forever."

"Lot, I must go!"

"Listen, Madelon; you must listen. When I have taken my solitary walks in the woods and pried into the secrets of the little wild things that live there in order to turn my mind from my own musing, I found always, always, that you were in them--I cannot tell you how, but you were, Madelon. There was a meaning of you in every bird-call and flutter of wings and race of wild four-footed things across the open. Every white alder-bush in the spring raised you up anew before me to madden me with vain longing, and every red sumach in the fall. When I have sat here alone every book I have opened has had in it a meaning of you which the writer knew not of. You are in all my forethoughts and my memories and my imaginations. The future has your face, and the past. My whole world is made up of you and my vain hunger. Oh, love, and not toil, is the curse of man!"

"You knew about Burr," Madelon said, in a quiet, agitated voice. "Why--did you?"

Lot gave a sharp cry, as if he had been wounded anew. "Oh," he cried, "you are blind, blind, blind--a woman is born blind to love! If I had had the face and the body of him it would have been me you would have turned to, Madelon. Don't you know? can't you see? He has been false to you, he cares no more for you. But if he had? In the end it is love and love alone that sweetens life, and what could his love be to mine?"

Madelon turned away again. "I can't stand here any longer, Lot," she said, and moved towards the door.

But Lot called her piteously: "Madelon, come back! If you have any mercy, come back!"

She stood irresolute, frowning; then she went back. "What is it?" she asked, impatiently.

"Madelon, kiss me once."

"I can't--I can't! Don't ask that of me, Lot."

"Madelon, once!"

Madelon bent over him, keeping her body stiffly aloof, and kissed him on his hollow forehead. Lot closed his eyes and smiled like a contented child; then suddenly he opened them upon Madelon, and the look in them was not a child's. She shrank away with a strong shudder, flushing with anger and shame, and made resolutely for the door again. She looked back and spoke out sharply to him, with her hand on the latch: "Mind you do not say one word about--what I said I'd do, until the last." Then she went out, flinging to the door quickly lest she hear Lot's voice again.

When she got home there was no one there. Eugene had not returned. She went about preparing dinner as usual; it was on the table when the men, all except Eugene, came home, and none of them dreamed she had left the house. They inquired where Eugene was, and she replied that she did not know. They did not suspect that she had taken advantage of this lack of guardianship, and yet there was something unwonted in her manner which led them to look at each other furtively when they first noticed it. The perfect poise of decision at which she had arrived affected their minds in some subtle fashion. Eugene, when he returned late in the afternoon, noticed the change in her, in spite of his own perturbation. He looked hard at her staid face, fixed into a sort of unquestioning and dignified acquiescence with misery, but he said nothing. Madelon, in this state, was not to be questioned even by her father. He simply muttered to himself, as he strode out of the room, that she was a woman.

Madelon's manner was the same as the days went on. There ceased to be any question as to her sanity among her father and brothers. She no longer paced overhead like a wild thing. She no longer made fierce outbreaks of despairing appeal. They no longer kept watch over her lest she commit some folly, and became easier in their minds about her.

They made no objections when, three weeks later, she asked for the sleigh and the roan to go to New Salem and make some purchases for herself. She went early in the afternoon, and returned in good season with her parcels. They did not dream that she had been in a strange spirit of bitterness and shameful misery and feminine pride to purchase her wedding-gown for her marriage with Lot Gordon.

Her frantic and unreasoning impulse of concealment was still strong. It was almost as if the whole horror of it were not so plainly thrust upon her if none but she knew it; then there was the agony of shame which made her fain to turn her back and deafen her ears to her own self, let alone all these others.

They rather wondered, the next morning, when they saw Madelon seated at work upon some shining lengths of silk, at the magnificence of her purchase in New Salem; but they knew that she had a little private fund of her own, which they had never questioned her right to spend.

"Guess she's been saving her egg-and-butter money," Abner said, when she went out for something.

His father nodded. "Glad she's got a new gown. Guess she'll show folks she ain't quite done for on account of that fellow," he said.

When Madelon was seated at her work again, and he passed her to leave the room, he laid a heavy, caressing hand on her black head. "Glad ye've got ye a handsome gown," said he. "It's money well spent."

That day there was a great snow-storm--the last of the season. There had been many such that winter. Snow fell upon snow, and the bare ground was never seen. This time the storm lasted two days. On the morning of the third the sun came out and the wind blew. There was a northern gale all day. The new snow arose like a white spirit from its downfall, and was again all abroad in the air. It moved across the fields in great diamond-glittering shafts; it crested itself over the brows of hills in flashing waves; it lengthened its sharp slants of white light from hour to hour against the windward sides of the fences and houses.

On the morning of the next day everything was still. The snow lay transfixed in blue whirlpools around the trees; the fields were full of frozen eddies, and the hill-tops curled with white wave-crests which never broke. There was a dead calm, and the mercury was fourteen degrees below zero. Everything seemed in the white region of death after the delirium of storm. That morning Madelon Hautville, after her household tasks were done, sat down again to sew her wedding-dress. The silk was of changeable tints, and flashed in patches of green and gold as it lay over her knee and swept around her to the floor.

All the others had gone, but presently, as she sewed, Richard came in with some parcels. He had been on an errand to the store. He tossed the packages on the dresser, then he went and stood directly in front of his sister, looking at her.

"I want to know if it's true," said he.

Then Madelon knew that he had heard. "Yes," said she.

"And that is--" Richard pointed at the silk.

"Yes."

Richard continued to look at his sister and the gorgeous silk. There was consternation in his look, and withal a certain relief. Boy as he was, he reasoned it out astutely. If Madelon married Lot Gordon the merest shadow of suspicion that her confession had been true would not cling to her, and Richard hated Burr, and was fiercely triumphant that he should not think his sister dying for love of him; and then Burr would lose the Gordon money.

All at once Madelon rose up, let her silk breadths slip rustling to the floor, and took Richard by the shoulder. "Richard," she said, "why could you not have told the truth about the knife, and not forced me to this? Why could you not?"

The boy looked aside from her doggedly. "I don't know what you mean about a knife," said he, but his voice shook.

"Yes, you do know, Richard! It is all over now. I must marry Lot. I have promised. I shall not try to escape it--I shall not try again to make people believe it was I. If you were to tell the truth now it would do no good. But you must tell me this, Richard. How came Burr Gordon's knife there instead of yours?"

The boy hesitated.

"Richard, you know you can trust me."

"Well," said Richard, slowly, in a low voice, "I came right up behind Burr before you were hardly out of sight. I'd got uneasy about your going home alone, and I'd thought I'd follow you unbeknown to you, and turn 'round and go back when you were safe in sight of home. Burr pulled my knife out of the wound quick and wiped it on the snow. 'Take it quick,' says he, and I knew what he meant, and put it in my pocket, and slid out of sight in the bushes; and then he whipped out his knife and laid it in the pool of blood, and the others came up, and 'twas all done in a second. That's how."

"He did it to save me," said Madelon, and her voice was fuller of exultant sweetness than it had ever been in a song.

"He's a rascal, that's what he is!" said Richard. "If he hadn't treated you so, it wouldn't ever have happened."

"He did it to save me," said Madelon, as if to herself; "it's worth all I'm going to do to save him." She sat down again, and took up her wedding-dress, and resumed sewing. Richard stood looking at her a minute; then he got his gun off the hooks where he kept it, put on his fur cap, and went out.

Madelon sat and sewed, in a broad slant of wintry sunshine, for an hour longer. Then a shadow passed suddenly athwart the floor, the door opened, and Burr Gordon was in the room. He came straight across to her, but she sat still and drew her needle through her wedding-silk.

"Madelon!" he cried out, "is this true that I have just heard? Madelon!"--Burr Gordon's handsome face was white as death, and he breathed hard, as if he had been running--"Madelon! tell me, for God's sake, is it--true?"

"Yes," said Madelon. She took another stitch. The self-restraint of her New England mother was upon her then. Burr Gordon, betrothed to Dorothy Fair, loving her not, yet still noble enough and kind enough to have perilled his life to save hers, should know nothing of the greater sacrifice she was making for him.

"You are going to marry--Lot?"

"Yes."

"Oh, my God!"

Burr Gordon stood a moment looking at the girl sewing the breadths of shining silk. Then he went over to the settle and sat down there and bent over, leaning his head on his hands. He knew no more at that moment of Madelon's mind than an utter stranger.

It well might be, he thought, that she no longer cared for him. It was not long since she had seemed to, but women, he had always heard, were fickle, and he had so treated her that it might have turned any woman's heart cold. And his cousin Lot had the family wealth, and if she married him she would inherit it, and not he. What could he say to her, sewing so calmly upon her wedding-dress, seemingly in utter acquiescence and content with her fate? Could he take another step without going deeper into the slough of shame and distress where it seemed to him he already stood? And there was Dorothy.

Madelon never glanced at him as she sewed. Presently he arose and went over to her again. "Madelon," he said, hesitatingly, coloring red, "tell me you do not have any hard feelings towards me? I know I deserve it."

"You deserve nothing; it is I," she said, in a low voice.

"_You!_"

"I know what you did to save my life," she said. Her voice gave out a rich thrill, like a musical tone, as she spoke. She bent lower over her work.

"That was nothing. Madelon"--he paused a moment; she was silent--"Madelon, tell me. Are you--are you satisfied--with this step you are going to take?"

"Yes."

"There is nothing I can do? You know I would do--anything to-- You know if you wished--I would do whatever you said."

"You will marry Dorothy Fair," Madelon said, in such a tone of calm assertion that he quailed before it.

"Then you--are satisfied to--marry Lot-- It is your wish?"

"Yes."

"Oh, my God!" said Burr, and went out, while Madelon took another stitch in her wedding-gown. _

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