Madelon Part 16

Still Jim Otis, with his white face, stood looking at her, and answered not a word. His mother, continually opening her mouth to speak, then shutting it, looked first at one, then at the other, with round, dilated eyes, turning her head and quivering all over her soft bulk, like some great agitated and softly feathered bird.

"Why don't you speak?" demanded Madelon.

"What is it you want me to say?" said Jim Otis, then, hesitatingly.

"Say? Say that you saw my brother Richard give me the knife that I did the deed with."

Jim Otis stood silent, with his pale, handsome face bent doggedly towards the floor.

"Say so! You saw it!"

Still Jim Otis did not speak, and Madelon pressed close to him, and thrust her agonized face before his. "Have mercy upon me and speak!"

she groaned.

"Jim, what does she mean?" asked his mother, in a frightened whisper.

"Is she out of her head?"

"No; hush, mother," replied Jim. Then he turned to the girl. "No," he said, with stern, defiant eyes upon her face, "I did not see your brother give you the knife."

"You did! I know you did!"

"I _did not!_"

"You did see him! You were looking at us when I went out!"

"I was tightening a string in the fiddle when you went out," said Jim Otis.

"You must have seen."

"I tell you I did not."

Madelon looked at him as if she would penetrate his soul, and he met her eyes fully.

"I did not see your brother give you the knife," he replied, with a steady, unflinching look at her; but a long shudder went over him as he spoke. The first deliberate lie of his whole life was Jim Otis telling, for he had seen Richard Hautville give his sister the knife.

Madelon believed his lie at last, and turned away. What with her sore exhaustion of body and this last disappointment her heart almost failed her. She went back to the settle for her cloak and her hood, and tied them on, while the others stood watching her, seemingly in a maze. She made for the door, but Jim Otis stopped her.

"You cannot go back to Ware Centre to-night," he said.

Madelon looked at him with proud determination, although she could scarce stand. "I must go," said she, and would have pressed past him, but he took hold of her arm.

"Mother," he said, "tell her she cannot go. There has been no such night as this for forty years, and it is dark now. To-morrow morning I will carry her home; but to-night, as she is, it is out of the question. Tell her so, mother."

Mrs. Otis gathered herself together then, and came forward and laid hold of Madelon's arm, and strove to pull her back towards the settle. "Come," said she, as if Madelon were a child--"come, that's a good girl. You stay with us till morning, and then my son shall hitch up and carry you home. I shouldn't dare to have him go way over to Ware Centre to-night, cold as 'tis. He ain't very tough. You stay here with us to-night, and don't worry anything about it. I don't know what you're talkin' about, an' I guess you don't--you are all wore out, poor child; but I guess there didn't n.o.body have any knife, and I guess he'll git out of prison pretty soon. You just take off your things, and I'll get some pillows out of the bedroom, and you lay down on the settle by the fire while I get some supper. The kettle's on now. And then I'll heat the warming-pan and get the spare-room bed as warm as toast, and mix you up a tumbler of hot brandy cordial, and then you drink it all down and get right into bed, and I'll tuck you up, and I guess you'll feel better in the morning, and things will look different."

"Let me go," Madelon said to Jim Otis.

"She mustn't go, mother," he said, never looking at Madelon at all, although he still held fast to her straining arm.

"Well," said Mrs. Otis, "You ain't no daughter of mine, and if you set out to go I suppose I ain't any right to hinder you. But there's one thing maybe you ain't thought of--I can't let my son take you 'way over to Ware Centre a night like this, nohow. He's all I've got now, and I can't have anything happen to him. He can't go with you, and there ain't any stable here, and there ain't a neighbor round here that will hitch up and carry you there to-night, and--I suppose you know, if you've got common-sense, that if you set out to walk there, the way you are, you don't stand much chance of gettin' there alive."

Madelon stared at her.

"I don't really know myself what you and my son have been talkin'

about," continued Mrs. Otis, "but near's I can make out you think you've done something wrong, and somebody's in prison you want to get out. I suppose you've got sense enough to know that if you freeze to death going home to-night you can't do anything more to get him out.

Then there's another thing--it's night. You can't do much to get him out anyway before morning. I don't believe they ever let folks out at night, and my son shall carry you over just as soon as it's fit in the morning, and you'll do just as much good as if you went to-night."

Still Madelon stood staring at her. Then presently she began unfastening her hood and cloak. "If you can keep me till morning I shall be obliged," she said, with a kind of stern grat.i.tude.

"Stay just as well as not!" cried Mrs. Otis. "Jim, just take her things and lay 'em in the bedroom. Then you have her set right down close to the hearth, and get all warmed through, while I get supper."

Handsome young Jim Otis stood by with his brows knit moodily while Madelon Hautville removed her wraps, then took them over his arm, and conducted her to the warm seat in the hearth-corner which his mother designated.

In his heart he judged this girl whom he was defending to be guilty, yet was full of intensest admiration, and was sorely torn between the two and his own remorse over his false witnessing. "If I'm called into court and sworn on the Bible, I won't own up that I saw her take that knife," he muttered to himself, as he laid the red cloak and hood on the high feather-bed in his mother's room.

This handsome, stalwart young man, who had hitherto been considered full of a gay audacity where womenfolk were concerned, able to make almost any pretty girl flutter at his smile, was strangely abashed before this beautiful Madelon Hautville, stained, in his eyes, with crime. He brought in wood and mended the hearth fire; he moved about doing such household tasks as were allotted to his masculine hands, and scarcely let his eyes rest once upon the girl in the chimney-corner. He dreaded the sight of that beautiful face which gave him such a shock of pity and admiration and horror. Jim Otis's mind could not compa.s.s this new revelation of a woman, but he would not betray her even for her own pleading if he went down perjured to his grave. So valiant was he in her defence that he withstood her against her own self.

Madelon's mother had died when she was a little girl. She could not fairly remember that ever in her whole life she had been so tended and petted as she was that night by Jim Otis's mother. Kind indeed her father and her brothers had always been to her. They had watched over her with jealous fondness, and had taken all rougher tasks upon themselves, but the devotion of woman, which extends to all the minor details of life, she had never known.

She had never had a supper-table set out for her own especial pleasure with this and that dish to tempt her appet.i.te, as Mrs. Otis set out hers that night. A dish of a fine and sublimated porridge did Mrs. Otis make for her--a porridge mixed with cream and sprinkled with nutmeg and fat plums. "I thought some hot porridge would do you good," said Mrs. Otis, when she sat the smoking bowl before Madelon.

Then she whispered low, that her son, who was putting another stick on the fire before coming to table, might not hear, "It's the same kind of porridge I had after my son was born--with cream and plums in it. I used to think there never was anything so good." This porridge might well have possessed a flavor of the sweetest memories of motherhood to the older woman, but to the girl, wild with longing to be gone and carry out her purpose, manna from heaven would not have yielded its full measure of sweetness.

She would scarcely have eaten at all had not Jim Otis's mother remarked, as she watched her reluctant sips of the good porridge, "As I said just now, you ain't any daughter of mine, and I ain't any right to dictate, but if you want to get that man, whoever he is, out of prison, you'll have to eat enough to get some strength to do it."

Simply placid as Mrs. Otis looked, she had often wisdom enough to gain her ends by means of that shrewd finesse of government which appeals to the reason of others as applied to the furthering of their own desires.

Madelon after that swallowed her porridge almost greedily, and when supper was over went up-stairs to bed, following Mrs. Otis as readily as any meek young daughter of her own might have done. The spirit of resistance was laid for the time in this poor Madelon Hautville, but it had yielded, after all, more to the will of her own reason than to Jim Otis's mother or the weariness of her own flesh.

When Mrs. Otis came down-stairs she was flushed with pleasant motherly victory. "She's drunk all that hot cordial," she said to her son, "every drop of it, and I've tucked her into bed with the extra comfortables over her, an' she eat quite a good supper, an' I told her to go right to sleep, and I guess she will."

"If she don't she'll be down sick," said Jim, sternly. He sat by the fire, tuning his fiddle.

"She can't hear your fiddle so it'll keep her awake, can she?" asked Mrs. Otis, anxiously.

"Of course she can't, up in the front chamber, with all the doors shut. Wouldn't have touched it if she could."

"Well, I don't s'pose she can. Jim--"

Jim tw.a.n.ged a string. "What is it, mother?"

"I don't want to have you think I'm interferin', Jim. I know you're grown-up now, and I know there's things a young man might not want to tell his mother till he gets ready, but I do kind of want to know one thing, Jim."

Jim tightened the G string. He bent his face low over his violin. "I don't know as I've ever kept much back from you, mother," he said, soberly.

"No, I know you ain't, Jim; you've always told more to your mother than most boys. But I didn't just know but this might be something you hadn't got ready to speak about."

"What is it you want to know, mother?"

"Jim, is that your _girl?_"