Madelon Part 34

Lot got up, went over to the mantel-shelf, and stood there a minute, leaning against it, his face hidden. When he looked at Burr again he was so white that his cousin started. "Are you sick?" he cried, with harsh concern.

Lot smiled with stiff lips. "Only with the life-sickness that smites the child when it enters the world, and makes it weep with its first breath," he answered.

"If you want to say anything to me, Lot, talk like a man, and not a book," Burr cried out, with another step towards the door; and yet he spoke kindly enough, for there was something in his cousin's face which aroused his pity.

"It is not--" began Lot, and stopped, and caught his breath. Burr watched him half alarmed; he looked in mortal agony. Lot clutched the carven edge of the mantel-shelf, then loosened his fingers. "If," he said, brokenly, looking at Burr with the eyes of one who awaits a mortal blow, "you want--Madelon--it is not--too late. She--I know how she feels--towards you."

Burr turned white, as he stared at him. "She--she was going to marry you!" he said with a sneer.

"Do--you know why?"

Burr shook his head, still staring at his cousin.

"It was the price of--your--acquittal."

Burr did not move his eyes from Lot's face. He looked as if he were reading something there writ in startling characters, against which his whole soul leaped up in incredulity. "My G.o.d, I see!" he groaned out slowly, at length. And then he said, sharply, "But--you were going to marry her. Why did you give her up?"

"I loved her," Lot said, simply. His white face worked.

"But now--you--ask me to--"

"I love her!" Lot said again, with a gasp.

Burr strode forward, quite up to his cousin, and grasped his hand warmly for the first time in his life. "Before the Lord, Lot," he said, huskily, "'twas you, and not me, she should have fancied in the first of it."

"It is neither you nor me, nor any other man, that she will ever love as he is," Lot said, shortly, straightening himself, for jealousy stung him hard.

"What do you mean?"

"Woman reverses creation. She is a sublimated particle of a man, and she builds a G.o.d from her own superstructure, and clothes him with any image whom she chooses. She chose yours. Live up to her thought of you, if you can."

Burr dropped his cousin's hand, and surveyed him with that impatient wonder which he always felt when he used his favorite symbolic speech. "There's no question of my living up to the thought of any woman's but my wife's," he said, bitterly, and turned away.

"There's no knowing to what stature even a Dorothy Fair may raise a man in her mind. You may not be able to grow to that."

"It is all I shall attempt."

Then Lot spoke again, in that short-breathed voice of his, straining between the syllables. "Be sure--that you do--what--you will not--regret. Honor is not--always what we--think it."

"I have my own conception of it at least, and that I live up to. 'Tis high time," said Burr, with a kind of proud scorn of himself in his voice.

"Madelon Hautville--loves--you."

"She does not, after all this."

"She does!"

Burr stood straight and firm before his cousin, like a soldier. "If she does," said he, "and if she loved me with the love of ten lives instead of one, and I her, as perhaps I do, this last word of mine I will keep!" Then he went out with not another word, and presently returned with the deed of his little wooded property, which, however, his cousin Lot finally persuaded him to keep, as Margaret Bean gathered at the door, whither she had ventured again.

The loafers knew it all by nightfall, the news having been brought to the store by old Luke Ba.s.set, who had gotten it from Margaret Bean's husband. In a day or two they knew more from the same source. Lot Gordon had engaged his cousin to improve the Gordon acres which had been lying fallow for the last ten years. He had offered him a good salary. He wanted to carry out some new-fangled schemes which he had got out of books. Burr was going right to work; he had hired a man from New Salem to help him.

People began to think better of Lot Gordon than they had ever done, and they looked at Burr with more respect. Many had considered that Dorothy Fair was not going to "do very well." "Guess if it wa'n't for her father, and the chance of Lot's dying, she'd have a pretty poor prospect," they had said. Now they agreed that "Maybe Burr Gordon won't turn out so bad after all. Maybe he'll settle right down and go to work, and pay off his mortgage, when he gets married, and get a good living, even if Lot should hold out some time to come."

They watched Burr as he swung up the street to Parson Fair's in the spring twilights, with admiration for his stalwart grace, and growing approval for those inner qualities which outward beauty sometimes but poorly indicates. They approved also of the temperate hours which he observed in his courting, for no one within eye-shot, or ear-shot, but knew when Parson Fair's front door closed behind him. Burr, during the last weeks before his marriage, never stayed much later than half-past nine or ten at his sweetheart's house, and, in truth, was not sorely tempted to do so. Mistress Dorothy in those days behaved in a manner which might well have aroused to rebellion a more ardent or a less determinately faithful lover. She had the candles lit early in the beautiful spring twilights, and then she sat and st.i.tched and st.i.tched upon her wedding finery, bending her fair face, half concealed by drooping curls, a.s.siduously over it, having never a hand at liberty for a lover's caress, or an eye for his smiles. Then, too, when Burr took leave, she stood before him with such a strange effect of terror and hauteur that he could do no more than touch her lips as if she had been a timid child, and bid her good-night. Had Burr Gordon, in those days, been less aware of his own unfaithfulness and weariness, and less fiercely resolved not to yield to it, he might well have perceived Dorothy's. As it was he confused her coldness with his own, and attributed it to the change in his own heart, and not to that in hers. And even had he suspected it he would not have made the first motion for freedom, so desperate was his adherence to falsity for the sake of truth.

Burr Gordon had at stake in this last more than any temporal good or ill of love. He had at stake his whole belief in himself, and he was also actuated by another motive which he scarcely admitted in his own thoughts.

Convinced he was that Madelon Hautville, believing as she did that he had forsaken her for honest love of another, would hold him in utter scorn and contempt were she to discover him false to Dorothy as she had been to her; and his very love of her love, strangely enough, kept him true to her rival.

So he went to see Dorothy, and found no fault with her coldness. The wedding preparations went on, and at last the day came.

Chapter XXIV

The wedding was to be at eight o'clock in the evening, and nearly all the village was bidden to it--even many of the Unitarian faction who had been Parson Fair's old paris.h.i.+oners. At half-past seven o'clock the street was full of people. The village women rustled through the soft dusk with silken whispers of wide best skirts. Young girls with spring buds in their hair flounced about with white muslins, and fluttering with ribbons, flitted along. The men, holding back firmly their best broadcloth shoulders, marched past in their creaking Sunday shoes. Before eight o'clock the fine old rooms in Parson Fair's house were lined with faces solemnly expectant, as the faces of simple country folk are wont to be before the great rites of love and death.

The women sat with their mitted hands folded on their silken laps, their best brooches pinning decorously their fine-wrought neckerchiefs, their bosoms filled with sober knowledge and patient acquiescence. The young girls sat among them very still, with the stillness of unrest, like birds who alight only to fly, their soft cheeks burning, their necks and arms showing rosy through their laces, their little clasped fingers full of pulses, and their hearts tumultuous and stirred to imagination by the sweet surmise and ignorance of love. They looked seldom at the young men, and the young men at them, as they sat waiting. Still there were some who had learned in city schools the suavities which cover like clothes the primal emotions of life, and they moved about with exchanges of fine courtesies, while the others looked at them wondering.

When the tall clock in the south room struck eight, there was a hush among these few who had learned to flock gracefully, chattering like birds, bearing always the same aspect to one another, without regard to selfish joys or pains. The lawyer's wife, in a grand gown and topknot of feathers, which she was said to have worn to a great party at the governor's house in Boston, composed to majestic approval her handsome florid face, and stood back with a white-gloved hand on an arm of each of her daughters, slender and pretty, and unshrinkingly radiant in the faces of the doctor's college-bred son and his visiting cla.s.smate. The doctor's wife, also, who had come of a grand family, and appeared always on festive occasions in some well-preserved splendor of her maiden days, which had been prolonged, drew back, spreading out with both hands a vast expanse of purple velvet skirt. She quite eclipsed as with a murky purple cloud the two meek elderly women and a timid young girl who sat behind her. They immediately peered around her sumptuous folds with anxious eyes lest they might lose sight of the bridal party; but the bridal party did not come.

A pa.s.sageway was left quite clear to the s.p.a.ce between the windows on the west side of the room, where it was whispered the bride and groom were to stand, and the people all pressed back towards the walls; but no one came. A little hum of wondering conversation rose and fell again at fancied stirs of entrance. Folk hushed and nudged each other a dozen times, and craned their necks, and the clock struck the half-hour, and the bridal party had not come.

In a great chair near the clear s.p.a.ce between the windows sat the bridegroom's mother, with a large pearl brooch gleaming out of the black satin folds on her bosom. Her face, between long lace lappets, looked as clearly pallid and pa.s.sively reflective as the pearls. Not a muscle stirred about her calm mouth and the smooth triangle of forehead between her curtain slants of gray hair. If she speculated deeply within herself, and was agitated over the delay, not a restless glance of her steadily mild eyes betrayed it.

People wondered a little that she should not be busied about the bridal preparations, instead of waiting there like any other guest; but it was said that Dorothy had refused absolutely to have any helping hands but those of her old black slave woman about her. It was known, too, that Dorothy had only once taken tea with Burr's mother since the engagement, and everybody speculated as to how they would get on together. Dorothy had, in truth, received the rigorously courteous overtures of her future mother with the polite offishness of a scared but well-trained child, and the proud elder woman had not increased them.

"When she comes here to live I shall do my duty by her, but I shall not force myself upon her," she told Burr. Burr's mother had not seen any of the dainty bridal gewgaws, but that she kept to herself.

People glanced frequently at her with questioning eyes as the time went on; but she sat there with the gleam of her personality as unchanged in her face as the gleam of the pearls on her bosom.

"Catch her looking fl.u.s.tered!" one woman whispered to another. After the clock struck nine a long breath seemed to be drawn simultaneously by the company; it was quite audible. Then came a sharp hissing whisper of wonder and consternation; then a hush, and all faces turned towards the door. Burr Gordon, his face stern and white, stood there looking across at his mother. She rose at once and went to him with a stately glide, and they disappeared amid a distinct buzz of curiosity that could no longer be restrained.

"They've gone into the parson's study," whispered one to another.

Some reported, upon the good authority of a neighbor's imagination, that Parson Fair had "fallen down dead;" some that Dorothy had fainted away; some that the black woman had killed her and her father.

Meanwhile, Burr and his mother went into Parson Fair's study. There stood the minister by his desk, with his proudly gentle brow all furrowed, and his fine, long scholar-fingers clutching nervously at the back of his arm-chair. He cast one glance around as the door opened and shut, then looked away, then commanded himself with an effort, and stepped forward and bowed courteously to the woman in her black satin and pearls. Elvira Gordon looked from one to the other, and the two men followed her glances, and each waited for the other to speak.

"Where is she?" she asked, finally.

"She is up in her chamber," replied Parson Fair, in a voice more strained with his own anxiety than it had ever been in the pulpit over the sins of his fellow-men. "I know not what to say or do--I never thought that daughter of mine--she will not come--"

Then Elvira Gordon cast a quick, sharp glance at her son, which he met with proud misery and resentment. "It is quite true, mother," he said. "We have both tried, and she will not come."

"Perhaps a woman--" said Parson Fair. "I wish her mother were alive,"

he added, with a break in his voice.