When they entered Parson Fair's south yard there was a swift
disappearance of a dark face from a window, and the door was flung
open, and the grimly faithful servant-woman came forth and lifted
Dorothy out of the sleigh, crooning the while in tender and angry
gutturals. Poor Dorothy Fair shook like a white flower in a wind, for
beside the rigor of the cold, which seemed to pierce her very soul,
the chill of fever was still upon her. She chattered helplessly when
she tried to speak, and there were sobs in her throat. The black
woman half carried her into the house, and up-stairs to her own
chamber, where the hearth-fire was blazing bright. She covered her up
warm in bed, with a hot brick at her feet, and dosed her with warm
herb drinks, and coddled her, until, after some piteous weeping, she
fell asleep.
But for Madelon Hautville there was no rest and no sleep. She felt
not the cold, and if she had fever in her veins the fierce disregard
of her straining spirit was beyond it. No knowledge of her body at
all had Madelon Hautville, no knowledge of anything on earth except
her one aim--to save her lover's life. She was nothing but a purpose
concentrated upon one end; there was in her that great impetus of the
human will which is above all the swift forces of the world when once
it is aroused.
She unharnessed the horse quickly from the parson's sleigh, and led
him, restive again at the near prospect of his stall and feed, back
to the tavern stable, paid for him, and struck out on the homeward
road, straight and swift as one of her Indian ancestors. A group of
men in the stable door stood aside with curious alacrity to let her
pass; they stared after her, then at each other.
"I swan!" said one.
"Wouldn't like to be in the way when that gal was headed anywheres,"
said another.
"If that gal belonged to me I'd get her some stronger bits," said the
man who had been cleaning the bay horse when Madelon came for the
white.
"I believe she's lost her mind," said the tavern-keeper. "It's the
last time I'll ever let her have a horse, and I told her so." There
came a blast of northwest wind which buffeted them about their faces
and chests like an icy flail, and they scattered before it, some to
their duties in the stable, some into the warm tavern for a mug of
something hot to do away with the chill. It was too cold a day to
gossip in a doorway. It was not long past noon, but the cold had
seemed to strengthen as the sun rode higher. The wind blew from the
icy northwest more frequently in fiercer gusts. Madelon Hautville
sped along before it, her red cloak flying out like a flag, and took
no thought of it at all. She was, while still in the flesh and upon
the earth, so intensified in spirit that there existed for her
consciousness neither heat nor cold. She reached the old road, the
short-cut, stretched down through the stiff white woods to her own
home; she hastened along it a little way, then she stopped and faced
back and stood irresolute. The icy wind stiffened her face, but she
did not note it. She looked back at the road with its blue
snow-furrows stretching between the desolate woods, at the spires and
roofs of the village beyond. If one followed that road to the village
and took the first one upon the right, and travelled ten miles, one
would come to the town of Kingston.
Madelon began moving along on the road to the village, vaguely at
first, as if half in a dream, then with gathering purpose. Back she
went, in her tracks, straight to the village and the tavern stable,
and asked of Dexter Beers another horse to drive to Kingston. But he
refused her, standing before her, blocking the stable door, looking
aside with a kind of timid doggedness. "Can't let ye have another
horse to-day nohow," said he; "too cold to let 'em out."
"I'll pay you well," said Madelon.
"Pay ain't no object. Can't let none of 'em out but the stage-horses
in no sech weather as this." Still Dexter Beers did not look at
Madelon's stern and angry eyes; he gazed intently at a post in an icy
slant of snow in the yard on the left.
He had the usual masculine dread of an angry woman, and, moreover, he
had a sharp-tongued wife, but he had also the masculine tenacity of a
position. He stared at the post as if his spirit held fast to it, and
braced itself against the torrent of feminine wrath which he
expected; but it did not come. Madelon Hautville set her mouth hard,
wrapped her red cloak around her with a firm gesture, as if she were
a soldier about to start on a long march, and walked out of the yard
and up the road without another word.
"I swan!" said Dexter Beers.
The red-faced hostler approached with a pail in each hand bound for
the well; he was watering the coach-horses for the next relay.
"What's up?" he inquired, pushing past him.
"I'll be darned if I don't believe that gal of Hautville's has
started to walk to Kingston, 'cause I wouldn't let her have another
horse!"
"Let her go it," droned the red-faced man, with a short chuckle.
"Hope she won't freeze her feet nor nothin'," said Dexter Beers,
uneasily.
"Let her _go_ it!" said the red-faced man, swinging across the yard
with his pails.
Madelon Hautville walked on steadily. She reached the right-hand
turn, and then she was on the direct Kingston road, with a ten-mile
stretch before her. It was past one o'clock, and she could not reach
her journey's end much before dark.
About two miles after the turn of the road the more thickly set
habitations ceased, and there were only isolated farm-houses, with
long, sloping reaches of woods and pasture-lands between. The
pasture-lands were hummocked with ice-coated rocks and hooped with
frozen vines; they seemed to flow down in glittering waves, like
glaciers, over the hill-sides. The woods stood white and petrified,
as woods might have done in a glacial era. There was no sound in them
except now and then the crack of a bough under the weight of ice, and
slow, painful responses, like the twangs of rusty harp-strings, to
the harder gusts of wind. The cold was so intense that the ice did
not melt in the noonday sun, and there were no soft droppings and
gurglings to modify this rigor of white light and sound. Occasionally
a rabbit crossed Madelon's path, silent as a little gray scudding
shadow, and so swiftly that he did not reach one's consciousness
until he was out of sight. There was seldom a winter bird, even, in
sight. The ice on the trees and the pastures had locked and sealed
their larders. Their little beaks could not pierce it for seeds and
grubs, and so they were forced to repair to kitchen doors and
barnyards in quest of stray crumbs from the provender of men and
cattle.
The rabbits, and an ox-team drawing a sled laden with cedar logs,
slipping with shrill, long squeaks over the white road, driven by a
man with a red face in an ambush of frozen beard, were all the living
things she met for the first four miles. The man clambered stiffly
down from his sled just before he met her, and began walking,
stamping, rubbing his ears, and swinging his arms violently the
while. He stared hard at Madelon, and gave a sort of grunt as he
passed. It was an instinctive note of comradeship with another in a
situation hard for their common humanity. The man, toiling painfully
along that hard road, on that bitter day, with hands and feet half
frost-bitten, and face smarting as if with fire, his aching lungs
straining with the icy air, felt that he and the woman struggling
over the same road had common cause for wrath against this stress of
nature, and so made that half-surly, half-sympathetic grunt as he
passed her. But she did not respond. She did not even glance at him
as she went along. Her face glowed all over, red as a rose with the
freezing wind; she wrapped her cloak instinctively tight around her,
and walked a little stiffly, as if her feet might be somewhat numb;
but there was in her fixed dark eyes no recognition of anything but
some end she had in view beyond his ken.
The man stopped and looked seriously after her, and past her down the
road. "Wonder what she's up to!" he muttered. Then he struggled on
after his oxen, who plodded along with goat's-beards of their frozen
breath hanging from their jaws.
Two miles farther on there was a sudden loud blast of a horn, and
following upon it a great jangle of bells and the tramp of hoofs, and
Madelon knew the Ware and Kingston stage was coming. Presently the
top of the coach and the leaders' heads appeared above the rise of
the road, and Madelon stood well aside to meet it, pressing in among
the crackling icy bushes.
There was another blast of the horn, then a wild rush of sure-footed
horses down the hill, and the coach was past, going towards Ware.
Madelon had caught only a glimpse of the frost-white driver on the
box, a man beside him shrugged up miserably in great-coat and
comforter, with back rounded and head bent against the cold, and some
chilled faces in the windows. Some of the passengers had come from
Wolverton, ten miles past Kingston, and one might freeze to death on
a long stage journey a day like that. There was, perhaps, less danger
in a walk, but there was danger in that should the cold increase, and
it did increase hourly. Madelon's feet grew more and more numb. She
stamped them from time to time, but more from instinct than from any
real appreciation of the discomfort they gave her. So wrought up was
she with zeal that it seemed she might have set out to walk through a
fiery furnace as soon as through this frozen waste, and perhaps have
had her flesh consumed to ashes, with her soul still intent upon its
one purpose. All thought of her own self, save as an instrument to
save the life of the man she loved, was gone out of the girl.
Jealousy was purged out of her; all resentment for faithlessness, all
longing for possession were gone. She bore in her heart the greatest
love of her life as she sped along down the frozen road to Kingston.
The last two miles of the way poor Madelon struggled hard to cover.
She drew short, gasping breaths, as if she were on a high
mountain-top. The cold strengthened as the daylight waned. The very
air seemed frozen and resolved into a cutting diamond-dust of frost.
Suddenly Madelon awoke to the fear that she could not walk much
farther. She had eaten nothing since morning; the cold and fatigue
were consuming her life as the flame consumes the wick of the lamp
when the oil is lacking.
"I must get there!" she said to herself. She stamped her numb feet
desperately. She beat herself pitilessly with her stiff hands. She
set forth on a run towards Kingston, and quickened her blood a little
in that way, although she panted and fairly gasped for breath.
She drew a sigh of relief when she gained the last rise in the road,
and the town of Kingston lay before her a mile in the valley. It was
growing dark and the village lights were coming out when she had
passed the straggling farms and come into the little centre of the
town where the stores, the meeting-houses, and the tavern were
grouped.
The village main street looked almost deserted. There was only one
sleigh in sight, drawn up in front of the store. The horse was well
covered with a buffalo-skin and an old bed-quilt in addition, which
his master's wife had doubtless provided on account of the terrible
cold.
As Madelon reached the store a man came out with a molasses-jug in
hand and arms clasping parcels, which he began stowing away under the
seat of the sleigh. Madelon went up to him. "Can you tell me where
Mr. Otis lives?" said she. She could scarcely enunciate. Her very
tongue seemed stiff with the cold.
The man turned and stared at her with sharp blue eyes under red brows
frost-white between his cap and twice-wound red tippet. "Hey?" he
said, in a muffled voice.
"Can you tell me where Mr. Otis lives?"
"Otis?"
"Yes, sir."
"Which Otis d'ye mean? There's two Otises. D'ye mean Calvin Otis or
Jim Otis?"
"He has a son that plays the fiddle," answered Madelon, faintly.
"Then it's Jim ye mean. He died last year. He had a son Jim that
plays the fiddle. Lives down the road on the left-hand side, five
houses below the meeting-house. House with three popple-trees in
front--sets close to the road."
Madelon started, but the man's voice arrested her. "You look most
froze," said he. "Hadn't ye better go in there an' warm up?" He
pointed towards the store-windows with a rosy glow of light and
warmth transfusing their thick layers of frost. "It's pipin' hot in
there--warm ye all through in a minute. It's a terrible cold night.
Old man in there, lived 'round these parts risin' eighty years, says
he never knew sech a night. Better just step in there."
Madelon shook her head and started on.
"Where did ye come from?" called the man.
"Ware Centre," Madelon gasped out, as the freezing wind struck her.
"Good Lord! you don't mean to say you've walked risin' ten mile from
Ware Centre a day like this!"
Madelon was gone, bending before the wind, without another word.
"Good Lord!" said the man, "a woman walkin' from Ware Centre this
weather!" He stood staring after the girls' retreating figure; then
he started to unblanket his horse. But he stopped and stared again,
and finally went into the store to tell the news.
Madelon kept on as fast as she was able, but she was nearly spent.
Her exultation of spirit might indeed survive fleshly exhaustion and
perhaps in a measure overcome it, but it could not prevent it
altogether. When she reached the fifth house below the white
meeting-house, the house set close to the road, with three
poplar-trees in front, she had just strength enough to stagger to the
door and raise the knocker. Then she leaned against the door-post,
and it was only with a fierce effort that she kept her grasp upon her
consciousness. She did not seem to feel her body at all.