Chapter 20

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_ Chapter XX

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 brave
Was bound for Palestine;
But first he made his orisons
Before Saint Mary's shrine.

"'And grant, immortal Queen of Heaven,'
Was still the soldier's prayer,
'That I may prove the bravest knight
And 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. "There _was_ truth 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. You _dare_ to 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. _

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