Madelon Part 29

"Madelon," said Lot.

"Well?" Madelon waited, but Lot said not another word. She went on towards the door.

"Madelon," he whispered, and she stopped again; but this time also there was a long silence, which he did not break.

Madelon opened the door, and his piteous cry came for the third time, and she waited on the threshold; but again he said nothing more.

"Good-night," said she, shortly, and was out, and the door shut. Then she heard a cry from him, as if he were dying. "Madelon, Madelon!"

She opened the door with a jerk, and went back. "Lot," said she, sternly, "this is the last time I will come back. Once for all, what is it you want of me?"

Lot looked up at her, his face working. He strove to speak and could not. He strove again, and his voice was weak and gasping as if the breath of life had almost left him. "We--had better not be married--to-morrow," he said, with his piteous eyes upon Madelon's face.

She started, and stared at him as if she feared she did not hear rightly.

"I--have been--thinking it over," Lot went on, panting; "I am not as well--we had better wait--until--May. My cough--the doctor--we will wait--Madelon!" Lot's broken speech ended in a pitiful cry of her name.

"Why do you do this?" she asked, looking at him with her white, stern face, through which an expression of joy, which she tried to keep back, was struggling.

"I am not as well, Madelon," Lot answered, with sudden readiness and sad dignity. "If you do not object to the change of time we had best defer it."

Madelon looked away. "There is no need of any pretence between us,"

she said; "I am sorry you are not as well."

"But not sorry that our wedded bliss must be deferred?"

"No," said she. Then she went away, and that time Lot did not call her back. She heard him coughing hard as she went through the entry.

When she came out of the house into the tumultuous darkness of the spring night, and went down the road with the south wind smiting her with broadsides of soft air, and the living sounds of water ahead and on either hand of her, she was happy--in spite of Burr, in spite of everything--with the happiness of one to whom is granted a respite from death.

Chapter XX

When the mind has been strained up and held to the furthering of some painful end and then suddenly released, it sinks back for a time, alive to nothing but the consciousness of freedom and rest. Even the thought for the future, which is its one weapon against fate, is laid down. Madelon, for a few days after the postponement of her marriage, went about in a kind of negative happiness. There are few who have so much to bear that there is not left to them at least the joy of escape from another trial. Madelon had lost her lover indeed, but she was let loose for a while from a worse trouble than that.

When Madelon entered the house that Sunday night her face was so changed that it held her father's and her brothers' casual glances.

Her cheeks were brilliant with the damp wind, her eyes gleaming, her mouth half smiling as she looked around. For the first time for weeks it seemed to Madelon that she had really come home, and the old familiar place did not look strange to her with the threatening light of her own future over it. She tossed off her hood and her red cloak, and proposed with her old manner that they have some music.

The men looked at her and each other. "She's a woman," old David muttered under his mustache, and got his viol.

Soon the grand chorus began, and Madelon sang and sang, with all her old fervor. The brothers kept glancing at her, half uneasily, but David wooed his viol as if it were his one love in the world, and paid no attention to aught besides.

The concert lasted late that night. It was midnight before they stopped singing and put their stringed instruments away.

Then Madelon turned to them all. "I am not going to be married to-morrow," she said, and her face flushed red. "I had better tell you. I am not going to be married for a month." She strove to control her voice, but in spite of herself it rang exultantly at the last.

Louis and Richard exchanged one look with a sudden turn of white faces. David stared hard and perplexedly at his daughter. "What's that ye say?" he asked, after a second's pause.

"I am not going to be married for another month."

"Why not?"

"Lot isn't as well as he was."

"What's the matter? That cut he got?"

"No, I guess not. I think it's his cough." Madelon paled and shivered, and turned away as she spoke, for the horror of her deed and the forced pity came over her again.

Her father caught her by the arm as she would have gone out of the room.

"Look ye here," he said, "is this the whole truth of it? We've got a right to know. Be ye going to marry him in a month's time?"

Madelon looked at him proudly. "I am going to marry him in a month's time, and I am not afraid to face all the truth in the world. Let me go, father."

When she was gone the father and sons stood staring at one another.

There was on all their faces an under meaning to which not one would give tongue.

Richard jostled Louis's shoulder. "Suppose--" he whispered, looking at him with dismayed and suspicious eyes.

"Hush up!" returned Louis, roughly, and swung across to the shelf for his candle.

"If I thought--" began David, with force; then stopped, shaking his old head. The male Hautvilles went out, one after the other, their candles flaring up in their grimly silent faces. They were capable of concerted action without speech, and had evolved one purpose of going to bed with no more parley about Lot Gordon and Madelon that night.

Brave as these men were, not one of them dared set foot squarely upon the dangerous ground which two of them knew, and three suspected, and look another in the face with the consciousness of his whereabouts in his eyes.

Truly afraid were they all, with that subtle cowardice which lurks sometimes in the bravest souls, of one another's knowledge and suspicions, as they filed up the creaking wooden stairs.

Richard looked at Louis in a terrified sidelong way when they were safe in their room with the door shut. "Hush up!" Louis whispered again, roughly, as if Richard had spoken. The two brothers were not to sleep much that night, each being tormented by anxiety lest Lot Gordon had resolved to stand by their sister no longer, and let disgrace fall upon her head; but neither would speak.

The candles flashed athwart the dark window-s.p.a.ces of the Hautville chambers, and one by one went out. The house was dark and still, with all the sweet voices and stringed instruments at rest. Yet so full of sonorous harmony had it been not long since that one might well fancy that it would still, to an attentive ear, reverberate with sweet sounds in all its hollows, like a sh.e.l.l.

Madelon slept soundly that night, and when she woke on the morning of what was to have been her wedding-day felt as if she had a glimpse of her own self again, after a long dream in which she had been changed and lost. Richard went early to tell the woman who had been engaged to do the housework that she need not come for a month. After breakfast her father and brothers all went away, and she was alone in the house. She went about her work singing for the first time for weeks. She raised her voice high in a gay ditty which was then in vogue, ent.i.tled "The Knight Errant":

"It was Dennis the young and brave Was bound for Palestine; But first he made his orisons Before Saint Mary's shrine.

"'And grant, immortal Queen of Heaven,'

Was still the soldier's prayer, 'That I may prove the bravest knight And love the fairest fair.'"

So sang Madelon, loud and sweet, as she tidied the kitchen. There were four verses, and she was on the last when the door opened stealthily and her granduncle, old Luke Ba.s.set, entered. Her back was towards him, and she did not see or hear him.

He waited, his old face fixed in a sly grin, standing unsteadily on his shaking old legs, and holding to the back of a chair for support, until Madelon sang at the close of the song,

"And honored be the bravest brave, Beloved the fairest fair,"

and stopped. Then he spoke. "'Tain't so, then, I s'pose," said he, and his voice seemed to crack with sly suggestiveness.