Madelon Part 26

David Hautville, rearing his great height before the fire, casting a long shadow over the room, stood, holding his unlighted pipe, and staring again at the wedding-silk, until his daughter returned. Then he brought his gaze to bear upon her again.

"I suppose you've thought over what you're going to do, and feel it's for the best," said he, with a kind of stern embarra.s.sment. David Hautville felt no resentment because his daughter had not confided her engagement to him. From his very lack of understanding of the feminine character, and his bewilderment over it, he was disposed to give his daughter a wide lat.i.tude in a matter of this kind. Not comprehending the feminine gait to matrimony, but recognizing its inevitability, he was inclined to stand silently out of the road, unless his prejudices were too violently shocked. He had also a mild respect for, and understanding of, reticence concerning one's own affairs, and was, moreover, furtively satisfied with the match.

"Yes, I have," answered Madelon, calmly.

"How soon were you calculating--" asked her father, pressing the tobacco harder into the pipe-bowl, and casting a meditative eye at the coals.

"He said a month--that was three weeks ago Monday. To-day is Wednesday." Madelon Hautville spoke with her proud chin raised, and her eyes as compelling as a queen's; but in spite of herself there came into her voice the tone of one who counts the days to death.

Her father looked at her sharply. She turned again towards her task at the table. "Well, Lot Gordon can give ye a good home," said he.

"His health ain't very good, that's the most I see about it. But he may last a number of years yet--folks in consumption do sometimes; and I hear he's gettin' over that cut he give himself. I suppose he did that because he thought you wouldn't have him."

Madelon, moving about the table, did not say a word.

"It must have been that," said David Hautville. "I suppose he thought you favored--" he was about to speak Burr's name; then he stopped short. He was usually one to plunge upon dangerous ground, but this time something stopped him--perhaps a look in his daughter's face. He laid his pipe carefully on the mantel-shelf, went over to Madelon, and laid a heavily tender hand on her shoulder.

"D'ye want any money to buy your wedding-fixings with?" he said, in a half-whisper.

"I've got all I want," replied Madelon, wincing as if he had struck her.

"Because I've sold some skins, lately, and wood." David plunged a hand into his pocket, and began to pull out a leather pouch jingling with coins.

"I've got all the money I want, father," said Madelon, catching her breath a little, but keeping her face steady. Could her father have understood, if she had told him, the pretty maiden providence, almost like one of the primal instincts, which had led her to save, year after year, little sums from her small earnings, towards her wedding-outfit? Could he, with his powerful masculine grasp of the large woes of life, have sensed this lesser one, and fairly known the piteous struggle it cost Madelon to spend her poor little wealth, which was to have furnished adornment for her bridal happiness with her lover, for such a purpose as this? Had she turned upon him then and there, and told him that she hated Lot Gordon, and would rather lie down in her grave than be his wife, he might have grasped that indeed, although not in her full sense of it, for the same sense of misery of that kind comes not to a man and a woman; but the other he would have puzzled over and solved it by his one sweeping solution of all feminine problems--by femininity itself.

However, he continued to stand beside his daughter, looking at her across that great gulf of original conceptions of things which love itself can never quite bridge. Tears came into his keen black eyes, and his voice was hoa.r.s.e when he spoke again. "Well, Madelon," said David Hautville, with a firmer laying on of his heavy hand on his daughter's shoulder, "ye've been a good daughter and sister, and we're all of us glad you've got over this last foolishness, and we don't lay it up against ye, and--we'll all miss ye when ye're gone."

Madelon moved quietly away from her father's roughly tender hand. "I thought maybe the Widow Scoville would be willing to come here and live," said she. "She's a good cook and a good housekeeper. I'm going to see her about it."

"Well, we'll see," said David Hautville, huskily--"we'll see." He turned away, and looked irresolutely at the shelf whereon his pipe lay, at the wedding-silk on the chair, at his great boots in the corner at the outer door, then at his ba.s.s-viol leaning in the corner which the dresser formed against the wall, and a light of decision flashed into his eyes.

He drew his old arm-chair nearer the fire, carried the viol over to it, set it between his knees, flung an arm around its neck and began to play. His great chest heaved tenderly over it; its sweetly sonorous voice spoke to his soul. Here was the friend who vexed David Hautville with no problems of character or s.e.x, but filled his simple understanding without appeal. These chords in which the viol spoke were from the foundations of things, like the spring-time and the harvest and the frosts; they abided eternally through all the vain speculations of life, and sounded above the grave. No imagination of a great artist had David Hautville, but his music was to him like his woodcraft. He traced out the chords and the harmonies with the same fervor that he followed the course of a stream or climbed a mountain-path. A great player was he, although the power of creation was not in him, for he fingered his viol with the ardor of a soul set in its favorite way of all others. As David Hautville played his great resonant viol he forgot all about his own perplexity and his daughter's love-troubles; but she, listening as she worked, did not forget.

Madelon, swept around with these sweet waves of sounds, never once had her memory of her own misery submerged. A strange double consciousness she had, as she listened, of her senses and her soul.

All her nerves lapsed involuntarily into delight at the sounds they loved, and all her soul wept above all melodies and harmonies in her ears. The spirit of an artist had Madelon, and could, had she wished, have made the songs she sung; and for that very reason music could never carry her away from her own self.

She finished her household tasks and sat down again to sew upon her wedding-gown. After a while her father ceased playing, and leaned his viol tenderly back in its corner, pulled on his great boots, put on his leather jacket and his fur cap, lighted his pipe, shouldered his gun, and set out with his eyes full of the abstraction of one who follows alone a different path.

Chapter XVIII

Then Madelon sat alone, sewing, setting nice st.i.tches in her green-and-gold silk. Like other women, heretofore when she had sewn a new gown she had builded for herself air-castles of innocent vanity and love when she should be dressed in it. Now she builded no more, but sat and sewed among the ruins of all her happy maiden fancies.

She had given herself no care concerning any other arrangements for her wedding than this gown--she felt even no curiosity concerning it.

She left all that to Lot, as a victim leaves the details of his death to the executioner. She supposed he would send for her and tell her before long. When she heard a sc.r.a.ping step at the door she knew instinctively that the message had come.

Margaret Bean's husband's simple old face confronted her when she opened the door. The weather was moderating fast that morning. The sun had the warmth of spring, and the old man stood in a shower of rainbow drops from the melting icicles on the eaves. He handed her a letter, backed clumsily and apologetically from under the drops, then retreated carefully down the slippery path, his clumsy old joints jolting.

Madelon, back in the kitchen, stood for a second looking at the letter. Then she opened it, and read the message written in Lot Gordon's strange poetic style:

"Madelon,--The rose waits in the garden for her lover, because he has wings and she has none. But had the rose wings and her lover none, then would she leave her garden and fly to him with her honey in her heart, for love must be found.

"Lot Gordon."

Enough strength of New England blood Madelon had to feel towards Lot a new impulse of scorn that he should write her thus, instead of bidding her come, simply, like a man, displaying his power over her that they both knew.

Small store of honey did she bear in her heart when she set out to obey Lot's call. She hurried along, indeed, with her cloak flying out at either side, like red wings in the south wind, but not from eagerness to see her lover. She was in constant dread lest she meet Burr on the road; but she gained Lot's house without seeing him or knowing that his miserable, jealous eyes watched her from an opposite window.

Burr was up in his chamber when Madelon went into his cousin's house.

Presently he went down-stairs, where his mother was, with a face so full of the helpless appeal of agony that she looked at him as she used to do when he came in hurt from play.

"What is the matter, Burr, are you sick?" she said, in her quiet voice. She was sitting in a rocking-chair in the sun with her knitting-work. She swayed on gently as she spoke, and her long, delicate fingers still slipped the yarn over the needle.

"Yes, I am sick, mother; I am sick to death," Burr groaned out. Then he went down on the floor at his mother's feet, and hid his face in her lap, as he had used to do when he was a child in trouble. Mrs.

Gordon's stern repose of manner had never seemed to repel any demonstration of her son's. Now she continued to knit above his head, but he apparently felt no lack of sympathy in her.

She asked no more questions, but waited for him to speak. "She's just gone in there," he half sobbed out, presently. "Oh, mother, what shall I do--what shall I do?"

"You'll have to get used to it," said his mother. "You'll have to make up your mind to it, Burr."

"Mother, I can't! Oh, G.o.d, I can't see her every day there with him.

Mother, we've got to sell out and move away. You'll be willing to, won't you? Won't you, mother?"

"You forget Dorothy. She can't leave the town where her father is."

"I wish I could forget Dorothy in honor!" Burr cried out.

"You can't," said his mother, "and there's an end of it."

"I know it," said Burr. He got up and stood looking moodily out of the window.

"You know," said his mother, still knitting, "how I have felt from the very first about Madelon Hautville. I never approved of her for a wife for you; I approve of her still less now, after her violent conduct and her consent to marry Lot, whom she cannot care for.

Still, since you feel as you do about it, I should be glad to have you marry her, if such a thing could be done with any show of honor; but it cannot. You know that as well as I. You must marry Dorothy Fair, and Madelon is going to marry Lot. Leaving everything else out of the question, it is out of your power to say anything on account of the money which you will lose by her marriage with him. You know what she might think."

"Curse the money!" Burr cried out. "Curse the money and the position and all the d.a.m.ned lot of bubbles that come between a man and what's worth more, and will last!"

"Burr, don't talk so!"

"I can't help it, mother. I mean it. Curse it, I say, and the infernal weakness that makes a man see double on women's faces when there's only one woman in his heart! Mother, why didn't you know about that last, so you could tell me when I was a boy?"

His mother colored a little. "I never taught you to be fickle," she said, with a kind of shamed bewilderment.

"I never have been fickle. This is something else worse." Burr looked at his mother again, with the old expression of his when he had come in hurt from play. No matter how long Burr Gordon might live, no matter what brave deeds he might do--and there was brave stuff in him, for he would have gone to the gallows rather than betray Madelon--there would always be in him the appeal of a child to the woman who loved him. "Mother, I don't know how to bear it," he said.

"You must bear it like a man."

"It is hard to bear the consequence of unmanly conduct like a man,"

said Burr, shortly; then he went out, as if the old comfort from his mother had failed him. As for her, she finished heeling her stocking, and then went out into the kitchen and made a pudding that her son loved for his dinner.