Madelon Part 6

"I guess you don't want your beau hung."

"I tell you I killed this man. I am the one to be hung!"

Chapter V

The sheriff turned to David Hautville. "Guess you'd better take your gal home," he said, his red, bristling cheeks broad with laughter.

"Guess she's kind of off her balance, she feels so bad about her beau."

David's black eyes flashed haughtily at Jonas Hapgood, who straightened his face suddenly. He deigned not a word to him, but he turned to his daughter with a stern air. "Whether it is one way, or whether it is the other way," said he, "we go neither by staying here. Come home."

"I won't go!"

David looked sharply at his daughter's face. Jonas Hapgood's doubt was over him too. He wondered, with a great spasm of wrath, if she could be accusing herself to shield this man who had played her false.

He grasped her arm again. "Come," he said, "I'll have no more of this," and Madelon went out with her father. Full of spirit as she was, she had always been strangely docile with him. He had ruled all his children with a firm hand from their youth up, and tuned their wills to suit his ear as he did his viol strings.

"I'll have no foolery," he said to her, gruffly, when they were out on the road. "I'll have no putting yourself in the wrong to save a man that's given you the go-by. If ye be fooling me, ye can stop it now if you're a daughter of mine." He shook his head fiercely at her.

But Madelon answered him with a burst of wrath that equalled his own.

"I stabbed him because I took him for the man who jilted me a-trying to kiss me, with Dorothy Fair's kiss on his lips. _Me!_" she cried; and she raised her hand as if she would have struck again had Burr Gordon and his false lips been there.

Her father looked at her gloomily, then strode on with his eyes on the snowy ground. He was still in doubt. David Hautville had that primitive order of mind which distrusts and holds in contempt that which it cannot clearly comprehend, and he could not comprehend womankind. His sons were to him as words of one syllable in straight lines; his daughter was written in compound and involved sentences, as her mother had been before her. Fond and proud of Madelon as he was, and in spite of his stern anxiety, her word had not the weight with him that one of his son's would have had. It was as if he had visions of endless twistings and complexities which might give it the lie, and rob it, at all events, of its direct force.

Indeed, Madelon strengthened this doubt by crying out pa.s.sionately all at once, as they went on: "Father, you must believe me! I tell you I did it! I--don't let them hang him! Father!" All Madelon's proud fierceness was gone for a moment. She looked up at her father, choking with great sobs.

David smiled down at her convulsed face. "She's nothing but a woman,"

he thought to himself, and he thought also, with a throb of angry relief, that she had not killed Lot Gordon. "Come along home and red up the house, and let's have no more fooling," he said, roughly, and strode on faster and would not say another word, although Madelon besought him hard to a.s.sure her that he believed her, and that Burr should not be hanged, until they reached the Hautville house. Then he turned on her and said, with keen sarcasm that stung more than a whip-lash, "'Tis Parson Fair's daughter and not mine that should come down the road in broad daylight a-bawling for Burr Gordon."

Madelon started back, and her face stiffened and whitened. She shut her mouth hard and followed her father into the house. The great living-room was empty; indeed, not one of the Hautville sons was in the house; even Louis was gone. David took his axe out of the corner and set out for the woods to cut some cedar fire-logs. Madelon put the house in order, setting the kitchen and pantry to rights, going through the icy chambers and making the high feather beds. In her own room she paused long and searched again, holding up her red cloak and her ball dress to the window, where they caught the wintry light, for a stain of blood that might prove her guilt; but she could find none.

Madelon prepared dinner for her father and brothers as usual, and when it was ready to be dished she stood in the doorway, with the north wind buffeting her in the face, and blew the dinner-horn with a blast that could be heard far off in the woods.

Presently her father emerged from under the snowy boughs with his axe over his shoulder, and shortly afterwards Eugene and Abner came, in Indian file, with their guns. Eugene was carrying a fat rabbit by its long ears. Louis and Richard did not come at all. David asked sternly of their brothers where they were, but neither Eugene nor Abner knew.

They had not seen them since David and Madelon left for Lot Gordon's that morning.

Madelon set the food before her father and her brothers, and took her place as usual, and ate as she might have filled a crock with milk or cakes, tasting nothing which she put into her mouth. She did not during the meal say another word concerning the tragedy in which she was living, but there was a strange silent vehemence and fire about her which seemed louder than speech. Now and then her father and her brothers started and stared at her as if she had cried out. Two red spots had come on her brown cheeks; her eyes were glittering with dark light; her lips were a firm red; her fingers stiffened with nervous clutches. She looked as if every muscle in her were strained and rigid for a leap.

After dinner Eugene and Abner went out again with their guns, and David smoked his old pipe by the fire, while Madelon put away the dishes and swept the floor. When her work was finished the pipe was smoked out, and David rose up slowly, clapped his fur cap over his white head, and took up his axe.

"Mind ye say what ye said this morning to n.o.body else," he said, as he went out the door.

"I'll say it with my dying breath," returned Madelon, and she caught her breath, as if it were indeed her last, as she spoke.

"Accuse yourself of murder, would ye, and be hung, and leave your own kith and kin with n.o.body to keep house for them, for the sake of a man that's left ye for another girl!"

"Father, I tell you that _I_ did it!"

But David clapped to the door on her speech, and the awful truth of it seemed to smite her in her own face.

Madelon went up-stairs, and brushed and braided her black hair before her gla.s.s; but the face therein did not look like her own to her, and she felt all the time as if she were braiding and wreathing the hair around another's head. One of those deeds had she committed which lead a man to see suddenly the stranger that abides always in his flesh and in his own soul, and makes him realize that of all the millions of earth there is not one that he knows not better than his own self, nor whose face can look so strange to him in the light of his own actions.

Madelon put her red cloak over her shoulders as she might have put it on a lay-figure, and tied on her hood. Then she went down-stairs, out of the house to the barn, and put the side-saddle on the roan mare.

Not another woman in the village, and scarcely a man except the Hautville sons, would have dared to ride this roan, with the backward roll of her vicious eyes and her wicked, flat-laid ears; but Madelon Hautville could not be thrown.

The mare, when she was saddled, danced an iron-bound dance in the barn bay, but Madelon bade her stand still, and she obeyed, her nostrils quivering, the breath coming from them in a snort of smoke, and every muscle under her roan hide vibrating.

Then Madelon placed her foot in the stirrup, and was in the saddle, pulling the bit hard against the jaw, and the mare shot out of the barn with a fierce lash-out of her heels and an upheaval of her gaunt roan flanks that threatened to dash the girl's head against the lintel of the door.

But Madelon knew with what she had to do, and she bent low in the saddle and pa.s.sed out in safety. Then she spared not the mare for nigh three miles on the New Salem road. It was ten miles to New Salem, and it did not take long to reach it, riding a horse who went at times as if all the fiends were in chase, and often sprang out like a bow into the wayside bushes, and was off with a new spurt of vicious terror. It was still far from sundown when Madelon Hautville tied the roan outside the jail where Burr Gordon lay.

Burr was sitting in his cell, which was nothing but a rough chamber with whitewashed walls and a grated window. It was furnished with a bed, a table, and a chair. He had an inkstand and a great sheet of paper on the table, and he was writing a letter when the bolt shot and the jailer entered with Madelon Hautville.

Burr looked at her with a white, incredulous face. Then he started up and came forward, but Madelon did not look at him. She turned to the jailer, Alvin Mead. "I want to see him alone," said she, imperatively.

"It's again my orders," said the jailer. He was a great man, with an arm like a crow-bar. He was reputed to have used it as one many a time at a house-raising.

"I've got to see him alone!"

"He's in here on a charge of murder, and it's again my orders,"

repeated Alvin Mead, like a parrot.

"I've got to see him alone!"

Alvin Mead looked at her irresolutely with his stupid light eyes; then all his great system of bone and muscle seemed to back out of the room before her. He shut the door after him, and they heard the bolt slide.

Madelon turned to Burr. "Tell them," she gasped out--"tell them it was--I!"

Burr did not speak for a minute; he stood looking at her. "Perhaps I am not any too much of a man," he said, slowly, at length, "but you ask me to be a good deal less of a man than I am."

Madelon did not seem to hear him. "I have told them I did it! I have told them all," said she, "but they won't believe me--they won't believe me! _You_ must tell them."

"I will die before I will tell them," said Burr Gordon.

Madelon looked at his white face, which was set against hers like a rock; then she gave a great cry and fell down on her knees before him. "Tell them," she moaned, "or they will hang you--they will hang you, Burr!"

"Let them hang me, then!"

"Tell them; they won't believe me!"

Burr caught hold of her two arms and raised her to her feet. "See here, Madelon," said he, "don't you know--"

She looked at him dumbly.