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Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - Madelon

M >> Mary E. Wilkins Freeman >> Madelon



Madelon

A Novel

By

Mary E. Wilkins

Author of "A Humble Romance"
"Jane Field" etc.

New York
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1896




Love is the crown, and the crucifixion, of life,
and proves thereby its own divinity.




Chapter I


There was a new snow over the village. Indeed, it had ceased to fall
only at sunset, and it was now eight o'clock. It was heaped
apparently with the lightness of foam on the windward sides of the
roads, over the fences and the stone walls, and on the village roofs.
Its weight was evident only on the branches of the evergreen-trees,
which were bent low in their white shagginess, and lost their upward
spring.

There were evergreens--Norway pines, spruces, and hemlocks--bordering
the road along which Burr Gordon was coming. Now and then he jostled
a low-hanging bough and shook off its load of snow upon his
shoulders. Then he walked nearer the middle of the street, tramping
steadily through the new snow. This was an old road, but little used
of late years, and the forest seemed to be moving upon it with the
unnoted swiftness of a procession endless from the beginning of the
world. In places the branches of the opposite pines stretched to each
other like white-draped arms across the road, and slender, snow-laden
saplings stood out in young crowds well in advance of the old trees.
At times the road was no more than a cart-path through the forest;
but it was a short-cut to the Hautville place, and that was why Burr
Gordon went that way.

Everything was very still. The new-fallen snow seemed to muffle
silence itself, and do away with that wide susceptibility to sound
which affects one as forcibly as the crashing of cannon.

There was no whisper of life from the village, which lay a half-mile
back; no roll of wheels, or shout, or peal of bell. Burr Gordon kept
on in utter silence until he came near the Hautville house. Then he
began to hear music: the soaring sweetness of a soprano voice, the
rich undertone of a bass, and the twang of stringed instruments.

When he came close to the house the low structure itself, overlaid
with snow, and with snow clinging to its gray-shingled sides like
shreds of wool, seemed to vibrate and pulse and shake, and wax fairly
sonorous with music, like an organ.

Burr Gordon stood still in the road and listened. The constituents of
the concert resolved themselves to his ear. There was a wonderful
soprano, a tenor, a bass, one sweet boy's voice, a bass-viol, and a
violin. They were practising a fugue. The soprano rang out like the
invitation of an angel,

"Come, my beloved, haste away,
Cut short the hours of thy delay,"

above all the others--even the shrill boy-treble. Then it followed,
with noblest and sweetest order, the bass in--

"Fly like a youthful hart or roe,
Over the hills where the spices grow."

The very breath of the spices of Arabia seemed borne into the young
man's senses by that voice. He saw in vision the blue tops of those
delectable hills where the myrtle and the cassia grew; he felt within
his limbs the ardent impulse of the hart or roe. He stood with his
head bent, listening, until the music ceased; the blue hills sank
suddenly into the land of the past, and all the spice-plants withered
away.

There was but a few minutes' interval; then there was a chorus--

"Strike the Timbrel."

Burr Gordon, listening, heard in that only the great soprano, and it
was to him like the voice of Miriam of old, summoning him to battle
and glory.

But when that music ceased he did not wait any longer nor enter the
house, but stole away silently. This time he travelled the main road,
which intersected the old one at the Hautville house. The village
lights shone before him all the way. He was half-way to the village
when he met his cousin, Lot Gordon. He knew he was coming through the
pale darkness of the night some time before he was actually in sight
by his cough. Lot Gordon had had for years a sharp cough which
afflicted him particularly when he walked abroad in night air. It
carried as far as the yelp of a dog; when Burr first heard it he
stopped short, and looked irresolutely at the thicket beside the
road. He had a half-impulse to slink in there among the snowy bushes
and hide until his cousin passed by. Then he shook his head angrily
and kept on.

However, when the two men drew near each other Burr kept well to his
side of the road and strode on rapidly, hoping his cousin might not
recognize him. But Lot, with a hoarse laugh and another cough,
swerved after him and jostled him roughly.

"Can't cheat me, Burr Gordon," said he.

"I don't want to cheat you," returned Burr, in a surly tone.

"You can't if you do. Set me down anywhere in the woods when there's
a wind, and I'll tell ye what the trees are if it's so dark you can't
see a leaf by the way the boughs blow. The maples strike out stiff
like dead men's arms, and the elms lash like live snakes, and the
pines stir all together like women. I can tell the trees no matter
how dark 'tis by the way they move, and I can tell a Gordon by the
swing of his shoulders, no matter how fast he slinks by on the other
side in the shadow. You don't set much by me, Burr, and I don't set
any too much by you, but we've got to swing our shoulders one way,
whether we will or no, because our father and our grandfather did
before us. Good Lord, aren't men in leading-strings, no matter how
high they kick!"

"I can't stand here in the snow talking," said Burr, and he tried to
push past. But the other man stood before him with another laugh and
cough. "You aren't talking, Burr; I'm the one that's talking, and
I've heard stuff that was worse to listen to. You'd better stand
still."

"I tell you I'm going," said Burr, with a thrust of his elbow in his
cousin's side.

"Well," said Lot, "go if you want to, or go if you don't want to.
That last is what you're doing, Burr Gordon."

"What do mean by that?"

"You're going to see Dorothy Fair when you want to see Madelon
Hautville, because you don't want to do what you want to. Well, go
on. I'm going to see Madelon and hear her sing. I've given up trying
to work against my own motions. It's no use; when you think you've
done it, you haven't. You never can get out of this one gait that you
were born to except in your own looking-glass. Go and court Dorothy
Fair, and in spite of yourself you'll kiss the other girl when you're
kissing her. Well, I sha'n't cheat Madelon Hautville that way."

"You know--she will not--you know Madelon Hautville never--"
stammered Burr Gordon, furiously.

Lot laughed again. "You think she sets so much by you she'll never
kiss me," said he. "Don't be too sure, Burr. Nature's nature, and the
best of us come under it. Madelon Hautville's got her place, like all
the rest. There isn't a rose that's too good to take a bee in. Go do
your own courting, and trust me to do mine. Courting's in our
blood--I sha'n't disgrace the family."

Burr Gordon went past his cousin with a smothered ejaculation. Lot
laughed again, and tramped, coughing, away to the Hautville house.
When he drew near the house the chorus within were still practising
"Strike the Timbrel." When he opened the door and entered there was
no cessation in the music, but suddenly the girl's voice seemed to
gain new impulse and hurl itself in his face like a war-trumpet.

Burr Gordon kept on to Minister Jonathan Fair's great house in the
village, next the tavern. There was a light in the north parlor, and
he knew Dorothy was expecting him. He raised the knocker, and knew
when it fell that a girl's heart within responded to it with a wild
beat.

He waited until there was a heavy shuffle of feet in the hall and the
door opened, and Minister Fair's black servant-woman stood there
flaring a candle before his eyes.

"Who be you?" said she, in her rich drone, which had yet a twang of
hostility in it.

Burr Gordon ignored her question. "Is Miss Dorothy at home?" said he.

"Yes, she's at home, I s'pose," muttered the woman, grudgingly. She
distrusted this young man as a suitor for Dorothy. The girl's mother
had long been dead, and this old dark woman, whose very thoughts
seemed to the village people to move on barbarian pivots of their
own, had a jealous guardianship of her which exceeded that of her
father.

Now she filled up the doorway before Burr Gordon with her majestic,
palpitating bulk, her great black face stiffened back with obstinacy.
It was said that she had been born in Africa, and had been a princess
in her own country; and, indeed, she bore herself like one now, and
held up her orange-turbaned head as if it were crowned, and bore her
candle like a flaming sceptre which brought out strange gleams of
color and metallic lustres from her garments and the rows of beads on
her black neck.

Burr Gordon made an impatient yet deferential motion to enter. "I
would like to see her a few minutes if she is at home," said he.

The woman muttered something which might have been in her native
dialect, the words were so rolled into each other under her thick
tongue. Her small, sharp eyes were fairly malicious upon the young
man's handsome face.

"I don't know what you say," he said, half angrily. "Can't I see
her?"

"She's in the north parlor, I s'pose," muttered the black woman; and
she stood aside and let Burr Gordon pass in, following him with her
hostile eyes as he opened the north-parlor door. Dorothy Fair sat
with her embroidery-work at the mahogany table, whereon a whole
branch of candles burned in silver sticks. She was working a muslin
collar for her own adornment, and she set a fine stitch in a sprig
before she rose up, either to prove her self-command to herself or to
Burr Gordon. She had also held herself quiet during the delay in the
hall.

Dorothy Fair came of a gentle and self-controlled race of New England
ministers; but now her young heart carried her away. She stood up;
her embroidery, with her scissors and bodkin, slid to the ground, and
she came forward with her fair curls dropping around a face pink and
smiling openly with love like a child's, and was, seemingly half of
her own accord, in Burr Gordon's arms with her lips meeting his; and
then they sat down side by side on the north-parlor sofa.

Dorothy Fair's face was very sweet to see; her blue eyes and her soft
lips were innocent and fond under her lover's gaze. Her little white
hand clung to his like a baby's. There was a sweet hollow under her
chin, above her fine lace collar. Her soft, fair curls smelt in his
face of roses and lavender. The utter daintiness of this maiden
Dorothy Fair was a separate charm and a fascination full of subtle
and innocent earthiness to the senses of a lover. She appealed to his
selfish delight like a sweet-scented flower, like a pink or a rose.

Lot Gordon had been only half right in his analysis of his cousin's
wooing. When Burr sat with his arm around this maiden's waist, with
his face bent tenderly down towards the soft, pink cheek on his
shoulder, this sweetness near at hand was wellnigh sufficient for
him, and Dorothy's shy murmur of love in his ear overcame largely the
memory of the other's wonderful song. A bee cares only for the honey
and not for the flower, therefore one flower is as dear to him as
another; and so it is with many a lover when he gets fairly to
tasting love. The memory of the rose before fades, even if he never
wore it. Then, too, Burr Gordon had a sense of approbation from his
shrewder self which sustained him. This Dorothy Fair, the minister's
daughter, of gentle New England lineage, the descendant of
college-learned men, and of women who had held themselves with a fine
dignity and mild reserve in the village society, the sole heiress of
what seemed a goodly property to the simple needs of the day,
appealed to his reason as well as his heart. He remained until near
midnight, while the old black woman crouched with the patience of a
watching animal outside the door, and he wooed Dorothy Fair with
ardor and delight, although her softly affectionate kisses were to
Madelon Hautville's as the fall of snow-flakes to drops of warm
honey. And although after he had gone home and fallen asleep his
dreams were mixed, still when he waked with the image of Madelon
between himself and Dorothy, because sleep had set his heart free, it
was still with that sense of approbation.

Madelon Hautville was not considered a fair match for a young man who
had claims to ambition. The Hautville family held a peculiar place in
public estimation. They belonged not to any defined stratum of the
village society, but formed rather a side ledge, a cropping, of quite
another kind, at which people looked askance. One reason undoubtedly
was the mixture of foreign blood which their name denoted. Anything
of alien race was looked upon with a mixture of fear and aversion in
this village of people whose blood had flowed in one course for
generations. The Hautvilles were said to have French and Indian blood
yet, in strong measure, in their veins; it was certain that they had
both, although it was fairly back in history since the first
Hautville, who, report said, was of a noble French family, had
espoused an Iroquois Indian girl. The sturdy males of the family had
handed down the name and the characteristics of the races through
years of intermarriage with the English settlers. All the
Hautvilles--the father, the four sons, and the daughter--were tall
and dark, and straight as arrows, and they all had wondrous grace of
manner, which abashed and half offended, while it charmed, the stiff
village people. Not a young man in the village, no matter how finely
attired in city-made clothing, had the courtly air of these Hautville
sons, in their rude, half-woodland garb; not a girl, not even Dorothy
Fair, could wear a gown of brocade with the grace, inherited from a
far-away French grandmother, with which Madelon Hautville wore indigo
cotton.

Moreover, the whole family was as musical as a band of troubadours,
and while that brought them into constant requisition and gave them
an importance in the town, it yet caused them to be held with a
certain cheapness. Music as an end of existence and means of
livelihood was lightly estimated by the followers of the learned
professions, the wielders of weighty doctrines and drugs, and also by
the tillers of the stern New England soil. The Hautvilles, furnishing
the music in church, and for dances and funerals, were regarded much
in the light of mountebanks, and jugglers with sweet sounds. People
wondered that Lot and Burr Gordon should go to their house so much.
Not a week all winter but Burr had been there once or twice, and Lot
had been there nearly every night when his cousin was not. And he
stayed late also--this night he outstayed Burr at Dorothy Fair's. The
music was kept up until a late hour, for Madelon proposed tune after
tune with nervous ardor when her father and brothers seemed to flag.
Nobody paid much attention to Lot; he was too constant a visitor. He
settled into a favorite chair of his near the fire, and listened with
the firelight playing over his delicate, peaked face. Now and then he
coughed.

Old David Hautville, the father, stood out in front of the hearth by
his great bass-viol, leaning fondly over it like a lover over his
mistress. David Hautville was a great, spare man--a body of muscles
and sinews under dry, brown flesh, like an old oak-tree. His long,
white mustache curved towards his ears with sharp sweeps, like doves'
wings. His thick, white brows met over his keen, black eyes. He kept
time with his head, jerking it impatiently now and then, when some
one lagged or sped ahead in the musical race.

Three of the Hautville sons were men grown. One, Louis, laid his
dark, smooth cheek caressingly against the violin which he played.
Eugene sang the sonorous tenor, and Abner the bass, like an organ.
The youngest son, Richard, small and slender as a girl, so like
Madelon that he might have been taken for her had he been dressed in
feminine gear, lifted his eager face at her side and raised his
piercing, sweet treble, which seemed to pass beyond hearing into
fancy. Madelon, her brown throat swelling above her lace tucker, like
a bird's, stood in the midst of the men, and sang and sang, and her
wonderful soprano flowed through the harmony like a river of honey;
and yet now and then it came with a sudden fierce impetus, as if she
would force some enemy to bay with music. Madelon was slender, but
full of curves which were like the soft breast of a bird before an
enemy. Sometimes as she sang she flung out her slender hands with a
nervous gesture which had hostility in it. Truth was that she hated
Lot Gordon both on his own account and because he came instead of his
cousin Burr. She had expected Burr that night; she had taken his
cousin's hand on the doorlatch for his. He had not been to see her
for three weeks, and her heart was breaking as she sang. Any face
which had appeared to her instead of his in the doorway that night
would have been to her as the face of a bitter enemy or a black
providence, but Lot Gordon was in himself hateful to her. She knew,
too, by a curious revulsion of all her senses from unwelcome desire,
that he loved her, and the love of any man except Burr Gordon was to
her like a serpent.

She would not look at him, but somehow she knew that his eyes were
upon her, and that they were full of love and malice, and she knew
not which she dreaded more. She resolved that he should not have a
word with her that night if she could help it, and so she urged on
her father and her brothers with new tunes until they would have no
more, and went off to bed--all except the boy Richard. She whispered
in his ear, and he stayed behind with her while she mixed some bread
and set it for rising on the hearth.

Lot Gordon sat watching her. There was a hungry look in his hollow
blue eyes. Now and then he coughed painfully, and clapped his hand to
his chest with an impatient movement.

"Well, whether I ever get to heaven or not, I've heard music," he
said, when she passed him with the bread-bowl on her hip and her soft
arm curved around it. He reached out his slender hand and caught hold
of her dress-skirt; she jerked away with a haughty motion, and set
the bowl on the hearth. "You'd better rake down the fire now,
Richard," said she.

The boy jostled Lot roughly as he passed around him to get the
fire-shovel. Lot looked at the clock, and the hand was near twelve.
He arose slowly.

"I met Burr on his way down to Parson Fair's," he said.

Madelon covered up the bread closely with a linen towel. There was a
surging in her ears, as if misery itself had a veritable sound, and
her face was as white as the ashes on the hearth, but she kept it
turned away from Lot.

"Well," said he, in his husky drawl, "a rose isn't a rose to a bee,
she's only a honey-pot; and she's only one out of a shelfful to him;
she can't complain, it's what she was born to. If she finds any fault
it's got to be with creation, and what's one rose to face creation?
There's nothing to do but to make the best of it. Good-night,
Madelon."

"Good-night," said Madelon. The color had come back to her cheeks,
and she looked back at him proudly, standing beside her bread-bowl on
the hearth.

Lot passed out, turning his delicate face over his shoulder with a
subtle smile as he went. Richard clapped the door to after him with a
jar that shook the house, and shot the bolt viciously. "I'll get my
gun and follow him if you say so, and then I'll find Burr Gordon," he
said, turning a furious face to his sister.

"Would you make me a laughing-stock to the whole town?" said she.
"Rake down the fire; it's time to go to bed."

She looked as proudly at her brother as she had done at Lot. The
resemblance between the two faces faded a little as they confronted
each other. A virile quality in the boy's anger made the difference
of sex more apparent. He looked at her, holding his wrath, as it
were, like a two-edged sword which must smite some one. "If I thought
you cared about that man that has jilted you--and I've heard the talk
about it," said he, "I'd feel like shooting _you_."

"You needn't shoot," returned Madelon.

The boy looked at her as angrily as if she were Burr Gordon. Suddenly
her mouth quivered a little and her eyes fell. The boy flung both his
arms around her. "I don't care," he said, brokenly, in his sweet
treble--"I don't care, you're the handsomest girl in the town, and
the best and the smartest, and not one can sing like you, and I'll
kill any man that treats you ill--I will, I will!" He was sobbing on
his sister's shoulder; she stood still, looking over his dark head at
the snow-hung window and the night outside. Her lips and eyes were
quite steady now; she had recovered self-control when her brother's
failed him, as if by some curious mental seesaw.

"No man can treat me ill unless I take it ill," said she, "and that
I'll do for no man. There's no killing to be done, and if there were
I'd do it myself and ask nobody. Come, Richard, let me go; I'm going
to bed." She gave the boy's head a firm pat. "There's a turnover in
the pantry, under a bowl on the lowermost shelf," said she; and she
laughed in his passionate, flushed face when he raised it.

"I don't care, I will!" he cried.

"Go and get your turnover; I saved it for you," said she, with a
push.

Neither of them dreamed that Lot Gordon had been watching them,
standing in a snow-drift under the south window, his eyes peering
over the sill, his forehead wet with a snow-wreath, stifling back his
cough. When at last the candlelight went out in the great kitchen he
crept stiffly and wearily through the snow.




Chapter II


Lot Gordon lived about half a mile away in the old Gordon homestead
alone, except for an old servant-woman and her husband, who managed
his house for him and took care of the farm. Lot himself did not work
in the common acceptance of the term. His father had left him quite a
property, and he did not need to toil for his bread. People called
him lazy. He owned nearly as many books as the parson and the lawyer.
He often read all night it was said, and he roamed the woods in all
seasons. Under low-hanging winter boughs and summer arches did Lot
Gordon pry and slink and lie in wait, his fine, sharp face peering
through snowy tunnels or white spring thickets like a white fox,
hungrily intent upon the secrets of nature.

There was a deep mystery in this to the village people. They could
not fathom the reason for a man's haunting wild places like a wild
animal unless he hunted and trapped like the Hautville sons. They
were suspicious of dark motives, upon which they exercised their
imaginations.

Lot Gordon's talk, moreover, was an enigma to them. He was no
favorite, and only his goodly property tempered his ill repute.
People could not help identifying him, in a measure, with his noble
old house, with the stately pillared portico, with his silver-plate
and damask and mahogany, which his great-grandfather had brought from
the old country, with his fine fields and his money in the bank. He
held, moreover, a large mortgage on the house opposite, where Burr
Gordon lived with his mother. Burr's father and Lot's, although sons
of one shrewd father, had been of very different financial abilities.
Lot's father kept his property intact, never wasting, but adding from
others' waste. Burr's plunged into speculation, built a new house,
for which he could not pay, married a wife who was not thrifty, and
when his father died had anticipated the larger portion of his
birthright. So Lot's father succeeded to nearly all the family
estates, and in time absorbed the rest. Lot, at his father's death,
had inherited the mortgage upon the estate of Burr and his mother.
Burr's father had died some time before. Lot was rumored to be
harder, in the matter of exacting heavy interest, than his father had
been. It was said that Burr was far behind in his payments, and that
Lot would foreclose. Burr had a better head than his father's, but he
had terrible odds against him. There was only one chance for his
release from difficulty, people thought. All the property, by a
provision in the grandfather's will, was to fall to him if Lot died
unmarried. Lot was twenty years older than Burr, and he coughed.

"Burr Gordon ain't makin' out much now," people said; "the paint's
all off his house and his land's run down, but there's dead men's
shoes with gold buckles in the path ahead of him."

Burr thought of it sometimes, although he turned his face from the
thought, and Lot considered it when he took the mortgage note out of
his desk and scored another installment of unpaid interest on it. "If
a man's only his own debtor he won't be very hard on himself," he
said aloud, and laughed. Old Margaret Bean, his housekeeper, looked
at him over her spectacles, but she did not know what he meant. She
prepared many a valuable remedy for his cough from herbs and roots,
but Lot would never taste them, and she made her old husband swallow
them all as preventatives of colds, that they should not be wasted.
Lot was coughing harder lately. To-night, after he returned from the
Hautvilles', he had one paroxysm after another. He did not go to bed,
but huddled over the fire wrapped in a shawl, with a leather-bound
book on his knees, all night, holding to his chest when he coughed,
then turning to his book again.

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