Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - Madelon

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In a moment Dorothy answered her question negatively herself: "I will
not marry Burr," she said, without raising her head, and yet with
that tone of voice which accompanies a lift of chin and stiffening of
the neck muscles.

Eugene looked at her, and extended his arms as if he would take her
to him again; then drew them back. "I do not know what to counsel
you," he said, slowly. Then his eyes fell before the sudden shame and
distress in Dorothy's.

"You do not know what do counsel me!" she cried. "Then you do
not--care--" Tears rolled over her cheeks, and Eugene gathered her
into his arms again, and laid his cheek against her fair head, and
soothed her as he would have soothed a child. "There, there," he
whispered, "it is not that, it is not that, sweet. I would die for
you, I love you so! It is not that, but you are the promised wife of
another man. How can I turn a thief even for you, Dorothy? How can I
bid you be false, and forswear yourself? There's honor as well as
love, child."

"But love is honor," said Dorothy.

"Not for a man," said Eugene.

Then she clung to him softly and modestly, and sobbed, and he kissed
her hair and whispered in one breath that she was all his own, and in
another that he knew not what to do, and was near distracted between
his love and his sense of honor, until Dorothy said something which
set him pleading for his rival whether he would or no, for the sake
of stern justice.

"I am afraid of him, I am afraid of Burr," Dorothy whispered in his
ear. "How could I have married him, when I was so afraid, even if you
had not come?"

"Afraid?"

"_You--know--what--they said--Burr did!_"

Eugene held her away from him by her slender arms, and looked at her.
"You did not believe that?"

"He would not tell me he was innocent, even when I begged him so."

"You knew he was."

"Why did he not tell me, when I begged him so?" she said, and the
soft unyielding in her tone was absolute.

"Dorothy!"

"I am so afraid--you don't know," she whispered, piteously.

"But--you know Burr was cleared."

"Yes, I know, but even now he will not tell me on the Bible, as I
asked him, that he is innocent."

"Dorothy, he _is_ innocent," Eugene said, with solemn and bitter
emphasis of which she knew not the full meaning.

"Then why does he not swear that he is, to me?" Back went Dorothy
always, in all reasoning, to the starting-point in her own mind.

"I tell you he is, child. It has been proven so."

"Then why--" Dorothy began, but Eugene interrupted her in her circle.
"There is no more cause for you to fear him than me," he said almost
harshly, in his stern resolve to be just. Then Dorothy turned on him
with sudden passion. "I am afraid," she cried out, "I shall always be
afraid; even if he were to swear to me now that he is innocent, I
shall always be afraid, for I coupled him with that awful deed once
in my thoughts, and I cannot separate him from it forever. He will
always hold the knife in his hand; even if it were not for you, I
should be near mad with fear. I bid black Phyllis stay by the door
when he comes."

"Dorothy!"

"Yes, I do. What my mind has once laid hold of, that it will not let
go. I cannot separate him from my old thought of him. I have tried to
be faithful, and true, but even had he sworn to me that he was
innocent, the fear would have remained. Save me from him--oh, Eugene,
save me!"

But Eugene put her quite away from him, and looked at her almost
sternly. His honor held the reins now in good earnest. The suspicion
of Madelon, which he had never owned to himself, became a certainty.
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 passed 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 illustrative 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 assertions
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 gratitude 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 sex
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 furnishings 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 compassion,
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 quantity 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 assent.

"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.

Lot got up, went over to the mantel-shelf, and stood there a minute,
leaning against it, his face hidden. When he looked at Burr again he
was so white that his cousin started. "Are you sick?" he cried, with
harsh concern.

Lot smiled with stiff lips. "Only with the life-sickness that smites
the child when it enters the world, and makes it weep with its first
breath," he answered.

"If you want to say anything to me, Lot, talk like a man, and not a
book," Burr cried out, with another step towards the door; and yet he
spoke kindly enough, for there was something in his cousin's face
which aroused his pity.

"It is not--" began Lot, and stopped, and caught his breath. Burr
watched him half alarmed; he looked in mortal agony. Lot clutched the
carven edge of the mantel-shelf, then loosened his fingers. "If," he
said, brokenly, looking at Burr with the eyes of one who awaits a
mortal blow, "you want--Madelon--it is not--too late. She--I know how
she feels--towards you."

Burr turned white, as he stared at him. "She--she was going to marry
you!" he said with a sneer.

"Do--you know why?"

Burr shook his head, still staring at his cousin.

"It was the price of--your--acquittal."

Burr did not move his eyes from Lot's face. He looked as if he were
reading something there writ in startling characters, against which
his whole soul leaped up in incredulity. "My God, I see!" he groaned
out slowly, at length. And then he said, sharply, "But--you were
going to marry her. Why did you give her up?"

"I loved her," Lot said, simply. His white face worked.

"But now--you--ask me to--"

"I love her!" Lot said again, with a gasp.

Burr strode forward, quite up to his cousin, and grasped his hand
warmly for the first time in his life. "Before the Lord, Lot," he
said, huskily, "'twas you, and not me, she should have fancied in the
first of it."

"It is neither you nor me, nor any other man, that she will ever love
as he is," Lot said, shortly, straightening himself, for jealousy
stung him hard.

"What do you mean?"

"Woman reverses creation. She is a sublimated particle of a man, and
she builds a god from her own superstructure, and clothes him with
any image whom she chooses. She chose yours. Live up to her thought
of you, if you can."

Burr dropped his cousin's hand, and surveyed him with that impatient
wonder which he always felt when he used his favorite symbolic
speech. "There's no question of my living up to the thought of any
woman's but my wife's," he said, bitterly, and turned away.

"There's no knowing to what stature even a Dorothy Fair may raise a
man in her mind. You may not be able to grow to that."

"It is all I shall attempt."

Then Lot spoke again, in that short-breathed voice of his, straining
between the syllables. "Be sure--that you do--what--you will
not--regret. Honor is not--always what we--think it."

"I have my own conception of it at least, and that I live up to. 'Tis
high time," said Burr, with a kind of proud scorn of himself in his
voice.

"Madelon Hautville--loves--you."

"She does not, after all this."

"She does!"

Burr stood straight and firm before his cousin, like a soldier. "If
she does," said he, "and if she loved me with the love of ten lives
instead of one, and I her, as perhaps I do, this last word of mine I
will keep!" Then he went out with not another word, and presently
returned with the deed of his little wooded property, which, however,
his cousin Lot finally persuaded him to keep, as Margaret Bean
gathered at the door, whither she had ventured again.

The loafers knew it all by nightfall, the news having been brought to
the store by old Luke Basset, who had gotten it from Margaret Bean's
husband. In a day or two they knew more from the same source. Lot
Gordon had engaged his cousin to improve the Gordon acres which had
been lying fallow for the last ten years. He had offered him a good
salary. He wanted to carry out some new-fangled schemes which he had
got out of books. Burr was going right to work; he had hired a man
from New Salem to help him.

People began to think better of Lot Gordon than they had ever done,
and they looked at Burr with more respect. Many had considered that
Dorothy Fair was not going to "do very well." "Guess if it wa'n't
for her father, and the chance of Lot's dying, she'd have a pretty
poor prospect," they had said. Now they agreed that "Maybe Burr
Gordon won't turn out so bad after all. Maybe he'll settle right down
and go to work, and pay off his mortgage, when he gets married, and
get a good living, even if Lot should hold out some time to come."

They watched Burr as he swung up the street to Parson Fair's in the
spring twilights, with admiration for his stalwart grace, and growing
approval for those inner qualities which outward beauty sometimes but
poorly indicates. They approved also of the temperate hours which he
observed in his courting, for no one within eye-shot, or ear-shot,
but knew when Parson Fair's front door closed behind him. Burr,
during the last weeks before his marriage, never stayed much later
than half-past nine or ten at his sweetheart's house, and, in truth,
was not sorely tempted to do so. Mistress Dorothy in those days
behaved in a manner which might well have aroused to rebellion a more
ardent or a less determinately faithful lover. She had the candles
lit early in the beautiful spring twilights, and then she sat and
stitched and stitched upon her wedding finery, bending her fair face,
half concealed by drooping curls, assiduously over it, having never a
hand at liberty for a lover's caress, or an eye for his smiles. Then,
too, when Burr took leave, she stood before him with such a strange
effect of terror and hauteur that he could do no more than touch her
lips as if she had been a timid child, and bid her good-night. Had
Burr Gordon, in those days, been less aware of his own unfaithfulness
and weariness, and less fiercely resolved not to yield to it, he
might well have perceived Dorothy's. As it was he confused her
coldness with his own, and attributed it to the change in his own
heart, and not to that in hers. And even had he suspected it he would
not have made the first motion for freedom, so desperate was his
adherence to falsity for the sake of truth.

Burr Gordon had at stake in this last more than any temporal good or
ill of love. He had at stake his whole belief in himself, and he was
also actuated by another motive which he scarcely admitted in his own
thoughts.

Convinced he was that Madelon Hautville, believing as she did that he
had forsaken her for honest love of another, would hold him in utter
scorn and contempt were she to discover him false to Dorothy as she
had been to her; and his very love of her love, strangely enough,
kept him true to her rival.

So he went to see Dorothy, and found no fault with her coldness. The
wedding preparations went on, and at last the day came.

Chapter XXIV

The wedding was to be at eight o'clock in the evening, and nearly all
the village was bidden to it--even many of the Unitarian faction who
had been Parson Fair's old parishioners. At half-past seven o'clock
the street was full of people. The village women rustled through the
soft dusk with silken whispers of wide best skirts. Young girls with
spring buds in their hair flounced about with white muslins, and
fluttering with ribbons, flitted along. The men, holding back firmly
their best broadcloth shoulders, marched past in their creaking
Sunday shoes. Before eight o'clock the fine old rooms in Parson
Fair's house were lined with faces solemnly expectant, as the faces
of simple country folk are wont to be before the great rites of love
and death.

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