Madelon Part 19

Madelon looked at her. "You are a good woman," said she, with fierce scorn. "You are a member of Parson Fair's church, and you keep to the commandments and all the creed. You are a good woman, and you believe in the eternal wrath of G.o.d and the guilt of your own son. You believe in that, in spite of what I tell you. But I tell you again that I, and not your son, am guilty, and I will save him yet!"

Madelon Hautville gathered her red cloak about her, and Mrs. Gordon arose as she would have done when any caller was about to take leave.

It would scarcely have seemed out of keeping with her manner had she politely invited Madelon to call again. However, her quiet voice was somewhat unsteady and hoa.r.s.e when she spoke to Madelon on the threshold of the outer door, although the words were still gently formal. "I am grateful to you for the interest you take in my son,"

she said; "I hope you will not excite yourself so much that you will be ill."

"I will die if that can save him," answered Madelon Hautville, and went down the snowy steps over the terraces.

Elvira Gordon, when she had closed the door, drew the bolt softly.

Truth was, she thought the girl had gone mad through grief and love for her son. Believing, as she did, that the love was all unsought and unreturned, and being also shocked in all her delicate decorum by such unmaidenly violence and self-betrayal, she regarded Madelon with a strange mixture of scorn and sympathy and fear.

Moreover, not one word did she believe of Madelon's a.s.sertion that she herself was guilty. "She is accusing herself to save my son,"

thought Elvira Gordon, and her heart seemed to leap after the girl with half-shamed grat.i.tude, in spite of her astonishment and terror, as she watched her go out of the yard and across the road to Lot Gordon's house. Mrs. Gordon stood at one of the narrow lights beside her front door and watched until Madelon entered the opposite house; then she went hastily through her fine sitting-room to her own bedroom, and there went down on her knees, and all her icy constraint melted into a very pa.s.sion of weeping and prayer. Those placidly folded hands of hers clutched at the poor mother-bosom in the fury of her grief; those placid-lidded eyes welled over with scalding tears; that calmly set mouth was convulsed like a wailing child's, and all the rigorous lines of her whole body were relaxed into overborne curves of agony. "Oh, my son, my son, my son!" lamented Elvira Gordon. "Have mercy, have mercy, O Father in heaven! Let him be proved innocent! Let Lot Gordon live! Oh, my son!"

Elvira Gordon had the stern pride of justice of a Brutus. She would not without proof discover even to the pa.s.sionate pleading of her own heart that she believed her son innocent, but believe it she did.

Every breath she drew was a prayer that Lot Gordon might yet speak and clear Burr. This morning she had some slight hope that that might come to pa.s.s, for the sick man had pa.s.sed a comfortable night except for his old enemy, the cough.

"It's my belief," Margaret Bean had told Elvira, when she had sped across the road in the early morning to inquire, "that it's his old trouble that's going to kill him when he does die instead of anything else."

"Has he spoken yet?" asked Elvira, eagerly.

"No, he ain't; but there's none so still as them that won't speak."

Margaret Bean nodded shrewdly at Elvira. Her voice was weak and hoa.r.s.e as if from a cold or much calling, but there was sharp emphasis in it. She gave a curious impression of spirit subdued and tearfully rasped, like her face, yet never lacking.

"You--think he--could?" whispered Elvira Gordon.

"'Tain't for me to say," replied Margaret Bean. "He lays there--looks most as if he was dead." She wiped her eyes hard, with a handkerchief so stiff that it looked on that cold morning frozen as with old tears. Margaret Bean was famous for her fine starching in the village; it was her chief domestic talent, and she was faithful in its application in all possible directions.

"I wish he would speak if he could," said Mrs. Gordon.

"I do, if it's for the best," returned Margaret Bean. She hesitated; there were red rings around her tearful eyes, like a bird's. "I can't believe your son did it, nohow, Mis' Gordon," said she.

"I hope if my son is innocent he will be proved so," returned Elvira Gordon. She was too proudly just herself not to use the word _if_, and yet she could have slain the other woman for the sly doubt and pity in her tone.

"It's harder for you than 'tis for him, layin' there," said Margaret Bean, nodding towards the house. There was an odd gratulation of pity in her tone. She rubbed her eyes again.

"We all have our own burdens," replied Elvira, with a dignified motion, as if she straightened herself under hers. "I hope he will be able to speak--soon."

"I hope so, if it's for the best," said Margaret Bean.

Chapter XIII

Elvira Gordon had gone home hoping that Lot might yet speak. She had heard his rattling cough as she picked her way out of the icy yard, and Madelon also heard it when she entered it. She knocked at the side door, and Margaret Bean opened it. She had a gruel cup in her hand.

"I want to see him," said Madelon.

Margaret Bean looked at her. Her starched calico ap.r.o.n flared out widely over her lank knees across the doorway.

"I'm afraid he ain't able to see n.o.body this morning," said she, and the asperity in her tone was less veiled than usual. Her voice was not so hoa.r.s.e. She was mindful of this girl's former conduct at her master's bedside, and herself half believed her mad or guilty. A suspicious imagination had Margaret Bean, and Madelon would have found in her a much readier belief than in others.

"I've got to see him, whether he's able or not," said Madelon.

"The doctor said--"

"I'm going to see him!"

Madelon pushed roughly in past the smooth ap.r.o.n and ran through the entry to Lot's room, with the housekeeper staring after her in a helpless ruffle of indignation.

"She's gone in there," she told her husband, who appeared in the kitchen door, dish-towel in hand. Margaret Bean's husband always washed the dishes and performed all the irresponsible domestic duties of the establishment. He was commonly adjudged not as smart as his wife, and little store was set by his counsels. Indeed, at times the only dignity of his man's estate which seemed left to this obediently pottering old body was the masculine p.r.o.noun which necessarily expressed him still. However, even in that the undisturbed use was not allowed. "Margaret Bean's husband" was usually subst.i.tuted for "He," and nothing left of him but the superior feminine element feebly qualified by masculinity.

Margaret Bean's husband's name was Zenas, but scarcely anybody knew it, and he had almost forgotten it himself through never being addressed by it. Margaret herself spoke of her husband as "Him," but she never called him anything, except sometimes "You." However, he always knew when she meant him, and there was no need of specification.

Now he half thought she was appealing to his masculine authority from her bewildered air. He stiffened his meek old back. "Want me to go in there and order her out?"

"_You!_ Go back in there and finish them dishes."

Margaret Bean's husband went back into the kitchen, and Margaret followed Madelon with a sly, determined air, to Lot's room.

The great square northwest room was warm, but the frost had not yet melted from the window-panes. The room looked full of hard white lines of frost, and starched curtains, and high wainscoting; but the hardest white lines of all were in Lot Gordon's face, sunken sharply in his pillows, showing between the stiff dimity slants of his bed-hangings as in a tent door. He looked already like a dead man, except for his eyes. It seemed as if the life in them could never die when they saw Madelon. She bent over him, darkening the light.

"Speak now!" said she.

Lot Gordon looked up at her.

"I tell you, speak! I will not bear this any longer. I am at the end."

Still Lot Gordon looked up at her silently.

Then Madelon made a quick motion in the folds of her skirt, and there was the long gleam of a hunting-knife above the man in the bed.

Margaret Bean, standing by the door, shrieked faintly, but she did not stir.

"I have tried everything," said Madelon. "This is the last. Speak, or I will make your speaking of no avail. I will strike again, and this time they shall find me beside you and not Burr. My new guilt shall prove my old, and they will hang me and not him. Speak, or, before G.o.d, I will strike!"

Then Lot Gordon spoke. "I love you, Madelon," said he.

"Say what I bid you, Lot Gordon; not that."

"All your bidding is in that."

"Will you?"

"I will clear--Burr."

Madelon slipped her knife away, and stood back. Margaret Bean slunk farther around past the bedpost. Neither of them could see her.