Madelon Part 31

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 ap.r.o.n 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.surance 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.

Chapter XXI

The weeks went past, and the Sunday before the day set for her wedding came again. She had seen Lot but three times in the interval.

He had sent for her, and she had gone obediently, and remained a short time, pleading her work as an excuse to return home. Lot had not sought to detain her; he had vexed her with no vain appeals, but treated her with a sort of sad deference which would have perplexed her had she cared enough for him to dwell upon it.

Lot was said to be in no better health. He did not stir abroad on those warm spring days. Once he had put on his great-coat, and was for setting foot on the springing gra.s.s in the sunny yard, but Margaret Bean had remarked to him how she had heard, whilst purchasing a bit of cheese in the store, a man say that he guessed Lot Gordon wasn't much worse, only afraid of a wife that could use a knife. Margaret Bean had shaken in her starched petticoats as she said it, not knowing how the news might affect her master towards the monger of it; but she was disposed to risk a little rather than have a mistress over her.

Lot said nothing in response about the matter, but pulled off his great-coat and sank into his chair with a fit of coughing, and declared he felt not well enough to go out that day.

That last Sunday Madelon went to him without being summoned, in the early evening after supper. On her last visit, the week before, he had asked her, and she had promised to come.

The frogs were calling across the meadows as she went along; there was a young moon s.h.i.+ning with frequent silvery glances through the budding trees, which tossed athwart it like foam, and the mists curled along the horizon distances. Madelon, moving along, was as the ghost of one who had belonged to the spring, as a part of its radiant hope and stir of life and youth in days past, but was now done with it forever. The spring sounds and sights, and all its sweet influence, seemed to tear her heart anew with memories of the visions of fair futures which she had forfeited. The loss of the sweet dreams which the spring awakens in the human heart is not one of the least losses of life. Though the spring be unfulfilled, it sweetens the year.

Just before Madelon reached Lot Gordon's house, she met Burr going to court Dorothy. They were to be married in two weeks more. Madelon and Burr exchanged a murmur of salutations and pa.s.sed each other.

Madelon went directly into Lot's house, to his sitting-room, as she was used to do lately, and found Lot standing in the midst of the room, waiting for her, with a lighted candle in his hand.

"I heard your footstep when you came through that open s.p.a.ce, where the road has a hollow echo," he said; "and I have been waiting for you ever since."

"You could not hear me; it is a half-mile away," said Madelon.

"A half-mile! what's a hundred miles when 'tis the heart that listens, and not the ears? Come; I have something I want to show you."

Lot led the way and Madelon followed out of the room across the front entry, with its spiral of stair mounting its landscape-papered height, and Lot opened the door of the opposite room, the great north parlor. "Wait here a minute," he said to Madelon, and she waited in the entry after he entered until he called her to follow.

Lot had lighted every candle in the great branching candelabra upon the shelf, and the room was full of light. Madelon looked about her, and even her despairing calm was stirred a little. Never had she seen or dreamed of a room like this. She grasped no details; her bewildered eyes saw them all melting into each other, combining newly and vanis.h.i.+ng like kaleidoscopic pictures--folds and gleaming stretches of crimson damask and velvet, the dark polish of precious woods, spots and arabesques of gold and the satin s.h.i.+mmer of wall-paper, lights and shades of steel engravings, and elegant and graceful lady-treasures of gilded books and work-boxes and vases on shelf and tables. There was even a little piano, the only one in the village, with slender, fluted legs, and a mother-of-pearl garland over the key-board.

"I have had this all newly furnished for you. I hope it may please you," said Lot; and he looked at Madelon with hollow, wistful eyes.

That brought her to herself. "It is very pretty," she replied, and turned away.

Lot sighed. "Well, I have something more to show you," said he, and went forlornly before her, stooping weakly and coughing now and then, into the great middle room of the house, which was fitted up with carven oak which Governor Winthrop might have used. Here, too, Lot lighted all the branches of the candelabra on the shelf; and the great buffet directly responded with the dazzling white glitter of silver from the cream-jugs and ewers and spoons thereon.

Then Lot threw open the fine carved doors of the cupboard, and the shelves were covered with precious blue china, brought from over seas, and wine-gla.s.ses like bubbles of crystal, and decanters as graceful as plumes.

"Do you like it, Madelon?" Lot asked; and Madelon replied, as before, that it was pretty.

Lot showed Madelon all the wealth of his house before they returned to the sitting-room. Much had been there from his father's day, but much had been added to please this bride, who looked at it more coldly and with less part in it than she would have looked at the treasures in a merchant's windows. She saw, unmoved by any pride of possession, great canopied bedsteads, and chests of drawers whose carven tops reached the ceiling, and mirrors in gilded frames. She saw marvellous stores of linen damask napery in such delicate and graceful designs, from foreign looms, as she had never dreamed. She saw an India shawl, and lengths of silk and satin and velvet, and turned away from it all to the obstinate contemplation and endurance of her own misery.

At last Lot led the way back to the sitting-room. He set the candle on the shelf, and gave a strange, beseeching glance around the room at his books. It was as if he besought, with the irrationality of grief, those only friends he fairly knew for help and sympathy.

Then he turned to Madelon and laid a hand on each of her shoulders, and looked at her. "No, there is no need now," he said, when she would have shrunk away from him; and something in his voice hushed her, and she stood still.

"Madelon," said Lot Gordon, "tell me true, as before G.o.d. You are a woman, and always, I have heard, a woman takes comfort and pleasure in life with such gear as I have shown you, alone, even if she has little else. Would not all this give you some little happiness, even as my wife, Madelon?"

Madelon looked at Lot and hesitated. She had a feeling that her word of reply would stab him more cruelly than her knife had done.

"Madelon, tell me!"

"Will you have the truth?"

Lot nodded.

"No, Lot."

"Madelon, I can buy you more than all this. Are you sure?"

"Yes."

Lot gave a great sigh. "Dearly bought possessions are worse than poverty, you hold," said he. "Then, Madelon, there is no sweetening in all this for your bondage?"

She shook her head. "I shall do my duty, as I have promised," she said. "All this is useless. Let me go, Lot."

"Madelon!"

She looked up in his face, and a strange awe came over her at the look in it. A more secret lurking-place than any of the little wild things that he loved to discover had the self in Lot Gordon, and Madelon saw it for the first time, and perhaps he, also.

"True love exists not unless it can do away with the desire of possession. I love you, Madelon," said Lot; and then he let go of her shoulders and went over to the mantel-shelf, and leaned against it, with his head bent.

Madelon, all bewildered and trembling, stared at him.

"I--don't think I know what you mean," she gasped out, finally.