Madelon Part 33

He defended his rival as strenuously as he would have defended himself, since it involved truth to himself. "I swear to you, Dorothy Fair," he said, "that Burr Gordon is innocent, and that your fear of him is groundless."

Dorothy looked at him with dilated eyes. She said not a word, but her mind travelled its circle again.

"It is so," said Eugene; "I know it."

Still Dorothy looked at him.

"All my heart is yours," Eugene went on, "but I would rather it broke, and yours too, before I counselled you to be false to a man for a reason like that."

A flush came over Dorothy's face. She pulled her straw hat from her shoulders to her head, and tied the blue strings under her chin. She gathered up daintily a fold of her blue mottled skirt on either side.

"Then I will marry Burr this day week," she said. "I will endeavor to be a good and true wife to him, and I pray you to forget if you can what has pa.s.sed between us to-day."

She said this as calmly and authoritatively as her father could have said it in the pulpit, and courtesied slightly, then went on down the lane and out into the open beyond, with a soft tilt of her blue skirts and as gently proud a carriage as when she walked into the meeting-house of a Sabbath.

Eugene said not a word to stop her, but stood staring after her. All his study of his Shakespeare helped him not to an understanding of this one girl, whom he saw with love-dimmed eyes. This sudden abetting on her part of his resolve gave him a sense of earthquake and revolution, yet he did not call her back or follow her.

He proceeded through the lane to the highway, then a few yards farther to the store, to get his Boston weekly paper. The mail had come in. On this warm spring day the loafers on the boxes and barrels within the store had crawled out to the bench on the piazza and sat there in a row. All mental states have their ill.u.s.trative lives of body. This shabby row leaned and lopped and settled upon themselves, into all the lines and curves and downward slants of laziness, and with rank tobacco-smoke curling about them, like the very languid breath of it. However, when Eugene Hautville drew near, there was a slight shuffling stir; a drawling hum of conversation ceased, and when he entered the store their eyes followed him, bright with furtive attention. The mill of gossip had ground slowly in this heavy spring atmosphere, but it had ground steadily. They had been discussing Madelon Hautville and the breaking off of her marriage with Lot Gordon. It was village property by this time, and all tongues were exercised over it.

"Why ain't Lot Gordon goin' to marry her?" they asked each other, and exchanged answering looks of dark suspicion. The reason for not marrying which Lot used every means in his power to promulgate--his fast-failing health--gained little credence. The story came directly from the doctor's wife that Lot Gordon was no worse than he had been for the last ten years, and was likely to live ten years to come.

Margaret Bean was said to have told a neighboring woman, who told another, who in her turn told another, and so started an endless chain of good authority, that Lot Gordon had never coughed so little as he did this spring, and "ate like a pig." He was, it is true, never seen on the highway, but there were those who said he was abroad again in his old woodland haunts.

"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 a.s.sertions 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 grat.i.tude 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 s.e.x 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 furnis.h.i.+ngs 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 compa.s.sion, 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.

Chapter XXIII

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 quant.i.ty 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 a.s.sent.

"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.