Madelon Part 22

One morning, a month after Burr's release, Margaret Bean came to the Hautville door. She was well wrapped against the cold, her head especially being swathed about with lengths of knitted scarf over her silk hood; there was only a thin sharp gleam of face out of it, like a very lance of intelligence. Margaret held out the stiff white corner of a letter from the folds of her shawl. "He sent it," she said to Madelon, who came to the door.

Madelon opened the letter and read it. "I can't come," she said, shortly. "I'm busy. Tell him he must write what he wants to tell me."

Margaret Bean's eyes were sharp as steel points. She had not known what was in the letter. "Hey?" said she, pretending that she had not heard, in order to make Madelon repeat and perhaps reveal more.

"I can't come," said Madelon. "He can write what he wants to tell me."

Suddenly a great red flush spread over her pale face and her neck.

She lowered her eyes before the other woman as if in utter degradation of shame, and shrank back into the house and closed the door in Margaret Bean's face.

Margaret Bean stood for a moment, a silent, shapeless figure in the cold air. "Pretty actions, I call it," said she then, quite loudly, and went out of the yard with a curious tilting motion on slender ankles, as of a balancing bale of wool.

Madelon slipped her letter into her pocket as she entered the kitchen. Her father and all her brothers were there. It was shortly after breakfast, and they had not yet gone out.

"Who was it at the door?" her father asked. He sat by the fire in his great boots.

"Margaret Bean."

"What did she want?"

"Lot Gordon sent for me to come over there."

"What for?"

"He wanted--to--tell me something."

"You ain't going a step. I can tell ye that."

"I--told her I couldn't go," said Madelon. Her voice was almost breathless, and still that red of shame was over her face. She bent her head and turned her back to them all, and went out of the room.

The male Hautvilles looked at one another. "What's come over the girl now?" said Abner, in his surly ba.s.s growl.

"She's a woman," said his father, and he stamped his booted feet on the floor with a great clamp.

Madelon meantime fled up-stairs to her chamber, with her first love-letter from Lot Gordon in her pocket. Until this the reality of all that had happened had not fully come home to her. Without acknowledging it to herself she had entertained a half-hope that Lot might not have been entirely in earnest--that he might not hold her to her promise. And then there had been the uncertainty as to his recovery. But here was this letter, in which Lot Gordon called her--her, Madelon Hautville--his sweetheart, and begged her to come to him, as he had something of importance to say to her! He used, moreover, terms of endearment which thrilled her with the stinging shame of lashes upon her bare shoulders at the public whipping-post.

She lit the candle on her table, s.n.a.t.c.hed the letter out of her pocket, crumpled it fiercely as if it were some live thing that she would crush the life out of, and then held it to the candle-flame until it burned away, and the last flashes of it scorched her fingers. Then she caught a sight of her own miserable, shamed face in her looking-gla.s.s, and flushed redder and struck herself in her face angrily, and then fell to walking up and down her little room.

Her father and brothers down below heard her, and looked at each other.

"There was that Emmeline Littlefield that went mad, and fell to walking all the time," said Abner.

The others listened to the footsteps overhead with a gloomy a.s.sent of silence.

"They had to keep her in a room with an iron grate on the window,"

said Abner, further, with a pale scowl.

Then David Hautville took down his leather jacket from its peg with a jerk, and thrust his arm into it. "I tell ye, she's a _woman_," he said, in a shout, as if to drown out those hurrying steps; and then he went out of the room and the house, and disappeared with axe on shoulder across the snowy reach of fields; and presently all his sons except Eugene followed him. Eugene remained to keep watch over his sister.

Chapter XV

After his father and brothers were gone, Eugene got Louis's fiddle out of the chimney-cupboard and fell to playing with an imperfect touch, picking out a tune slowly, with halts between the strains, as if he spelled a word with stammering syllables. Eugene's musical expression was in his throat alone; his fingers were almost powerless to bring out the meaning of sweet sounds. A drunken crew on a rolling vessel might have danced to the tune that Eugene Hautville fingered on his brother's fiddle that morning while his sister walked back and forth overhead, running the gantlet, as it were, of an agony which his masculine imagination could not compa.s.s, well tutored as it was by the lessons of his Shakespeare book.

When Margaret Bean came to the door the second time she heard the squeak of the fiddle, and clanged the knocker loud to overcome it.

Madelon and Eugene reached the door at the same time, and Margaret Bean extended another letter. "Here's another," said she, shortly, to Madelon. She tucked the hand which had held the letter under her shawl and hugged herself with a shiver, ostentatiously. "I'm most froze, traipsin' back and forth, I know that much," she muttered.

Eugene stood aside with a flourish and a graceful, beckoning wave of his hand. "Won't you come in and warm yourself?" he said, and he smiled in her face as if she and no other were the love of his heart.

But Margaret Bean had a shrewd understanding which no grace of flattery could dazzle, and felt truly that nowadays her princ.i.p.al claim to masculine admiration lay in her fine starching specialty of housewifery; and of that she gave no show, bundled up against the cold in her shapeless wools. So she put aside the young man's smiling courtesy scornfully, as not belonging to her, and spoke in a voice as sharp as an edge of her own well-stiffened linens. "No, sir," said Margaret Bean; "I've got bread in the oven and I can't stop, and I ain't coming in for two or three minutes and set with my things on, and get all chilled through when I go out. I'll stand here while your sister reads that letter. He said the answer would be just 'yes' or 'no,' and I shouldn't have to wait long. 'She ain't one to teeter long on a decision,' says he; 'she finds her footin' one side or the other.' He talks queer, queerer'n ever sence he was hurt. I pity anybody that gets him."

"Tell him 'yes,'" said Madelon, abruptly; and then she wheeled about and went into the house.

"Well," said Margaret Bean, harshly. The door closed before her; Eugene had forgotten his courtesy, and followed his sister into the house without a good-day to the guest.

Margaret Bean stood for a minute looking at the house, with its yawn of blank windows in her face; then she went out of the yard, bearing her message to Lot Gordon.

Eugene Hautville was startled at the look on Madelon's face when she went into the house. "Madelon, what is it?" he said, softly. But she did not answer him a word; she ran across the room and thrust Lot Gordon's letter into the fire. Eugene followed her and turned her about gently, and looked keenly in her white face.

"What was in that latter?" said he.

Madelon shook her head dumbly.

"Madelon?"

"Wait. You will know soon. I can't tell you," she gasped out then.

"Was it from Lot Gordon?"

She nodded.

"What is he writing to you about? You are my sister, and I have a right to know."

"Wait," she gasped again. "Oh, Eugene, wait. I--can't--"

Suddenly Madelon hung heavy on her brother's arm. "Madelon," he cried out loudly to her, as if she were deaf--"Madelon, don't! You needn't tell me. Madelon!"

Eugene almost lifted his sister into the rocking-chair on the hearth, and hastened to get her a cup of water; but when he returned with it she motioned it away, and was sitting up, stern and straight and white, but quite conscious.

"Hadn't you better drink it, Madelon?" pleaded Eugene.

"No. What do I want it for? I am quite well," said she.

"You almost fainted away."

"I don't want it."

Eugene set the cup on the dresser; then he came back to Madelon, and stood over her, looking at her, his dark face as pitiful as a woman's. "Madelon, why can't you tell me what new thing is making you act like this?" he said. Madelon made an impatient motion and started up, and would have gone out of the room, but Eugene flung an arm around her and held her firmly. "What is it, poor girl?" he whispered in her ear.