The next morning there took place in a few hours a great change in
the temperature. It moderated rapidly. The frost on the windows and
the ice-ridges in the roads did not soften yet, since the sun was
overcast by heavy clouds, but the terrible rigor and tension of the
cold was relaxed, and men could breathe without constraint. At eight
o'clock, when Jim Otis and Madelon started for Ware Centre, there was
a white film of fallen snow over the distant hills and scattering
flakes drove in advance of the storm.
A mile out of Kingston it snowed hard. "Hadn't you better have that
extra shawl mother put in over your shoulders?" Jim Otis suggested.
But Madelon shook her head. "The snow won't hurt me," she said. She
sat up straight in the sleigh, and there was a look in her eyes,
fixed ahead on the white drive of the storm, as if her spirit were
out-speeding her body. She had her strength again that morning. She
had slept and eaten. She had submitted to the exigencies of life that
she might gain power to resist them again.
Jim Otis drove a stout little mare with a good wind for speed, but
she had not the stride of David Hautville's great roan. Moreover,
after the first stretch, she slacked on the hills and fell into walks
in the lonely reaches, almost as if she had learned it in a lesson.
Many a pretty girl, flushing sweetly under Jim Otis's gay smile, and
perhaps under his caressing arm, had ridden behind that little canny
mare, who learned well the meaning of the careless rein along the
woodland roads.
However, to-day there was no careless rein. At the first slack
Madelon herself had reached the whip and touched the gently ambling
neck. "She has more speed in her than this," said she, shortly.
"She hasn't been driven for two days, either," asserted Jim Otis.
"Wake up, Molly!" He took the whip himself and flourished it with a
quick little snap over her back. In truth, Jim Otis was as anxious to
be at this journey's end as Madelon, for he feared every minute lest
she should ask him again if he had seen her take the knife, and that
he would again have to oppose falsehood to her frantic pleading. But
Madelon had believed him. She did not beg him again for his evidence.
She sat still at his side with a strained look in her black eyes, and
they rode in silence, with the storm heaping its white flakes on
their shoulders, until they reached Ware Centre.
Then Madelon turned quickly to Jim Otis. "Don't drive to my home,"
said she; "I would rather not go home yet. Drive to Burr Gordon's
house, please. I want to see his mother. Don't turn--keep straight
on."
"Yes, I know where he lives," said Jim, soberly. He drove very
slowly. They were drawing near the turn in the road. "See here," he
said, suddenly, "don't you think you'd better go home now?" He spoke
with nothing of the half-gay, half-caressing authority with which he
was wont to turn a pretty girl to his mind, but timidly rather, and
kept his eyes fixed on the mare's nodding head, hooded with snow.
"No, I must see Burr's mother," replied Madelon.
"But your folks will be expecting you, won't they?" persisted Jim
Otis. He felt that he had a duty of loyalty towards this desperate
girl's father and brothers as well as to herself. He had promised
Eugene Hautville to bring her home this morning, and who could tell
where she might wander and when she might return if he left her now?
He still did not look at Madelon as he spoke, but he felt her turn
and fasten her eyes upon his face, and somehow they compelled his. He
raised them and saw her beautiful face full of a scorn of passion
which he might die and never know in himself.
"What do you think that is to me," said she, "when I've got to save
his life? If you do not wish to carry me farther, go back. I will
walk."
"I will take you wherever you wish," returned Jim Otis, and touched
up the mare, and neither spoke again until they reached Burr Gordon's
house, high on its three terraces, with Lot Gordon's opposite. Then
Jim halted his mare in the road before it, and would have alighted to
assist Madelon, but she sprang out before him. "I am much obliged to
you and your mother for what you have done for me," said she, and
turned with a swing of her red cloak, and was skimming up the
terraces like a red-winged bird.
As for Jim Otis, he slewed his sleigh about recklessly, and shook the
whip over the little mare, and drove up the road. When he reached the
turn which he knew led to the Hautville house he drew rein, and sat
pondering in his sleigh for a few minutes. He was in doubt whether he
should inform Eugene Hautville of his sister's whereabouts or not.
Finally he spoke to the mare, and continued on his way to Kingston.
The terraces which Madelon mounted were all covered with the
gathering snow. When she reached the last the door was opened, and
Burr Gordon's mother, Elvira, stood there. "I am sorry there's so
much snow for you to wade through," said she, in a sweet, quiet
voice.
"I don't mind it, thank you," replied Madelon, harshly. She felt
incensed with this mother of Burr's, who came to the door and greeted
her as if she were an ordinary caller, and her son were not in
prison.
"You had better shake it off your skirts or you'll take cold," said
Mrs. Gordon.
"I am not afraid," returned Madelon. She gave her skirts a careless
flirt and entered the door with the snow still clinging to her.
"If you will wait a moment," said Mrs. Gordon, "I will get a broom
and brush the snow from you before it melts. Then you won't take
cold."
"I don't care to have you, thank you," said Madelon. Mrs. Gordon said
no more, but led the way to the sitting-room. She was a tall, slender
woman with the face of a saint, long and pale, and full of gentle
melancholy, with large, meek-lidded blue eyes and patiently
compressed lips. She had a habit of folding her long hands always
before her, whether she walked or sat, and she moved with sinuous
wavings of her widow-bombazine.
The room into which she ushered Madelon was accounted the grandest
sitting-room in the village. When Burr's father had built his fine
new house he had made the furnishings correspond. He had eschewed the
spindle-legged tables and fiddle-backed chairs of the former
generations, and taken to solid masses of red mahogany, which were
impressive to the village folk. The carpet was a tapestry of great
crimson roses with the like of which no other floor in town was
covered, and, moreover, there was a glossy black stove instead of a
hearth fire.
"Please be seated," said Mrs. Gordon. She indicated the best chair in
the room. When her guest had taken it, she sat down herself in the
middle of her great haircloth sofa, and folded her long hands in her
lap. Mrs. Gordon had the extremest manners of the old New England
gentlewoman--so punctiliously polite that they called attention to
themselves. She had married late in life, having been previously a
preceptress in a young ladies' school. She was still the example of
her own precepts--all outward decorum if not inward composure.
Madelon Hautville, opposite her, in her snow-powdered cloak, with her
face like a flash of white fire in her snow-powdered silk hood,
seemed in comparison a female of another and an older race. She might
well, from the look of her, have come a nearer and straighter road
from the inmost heart of things, from the unpruned tangle of woods
and undammed course of streams, from all primitive and untempered
love and passion and religion, than this gentlewoman formed upon the
models of creeds and scholars.
Madelon looked at the other woman a second with fierce questioning.
Then she sprang up out of the chair where she had been placed, and
stood before her on her sofa, and cried out, abruptly, "I have come
to tell you about your son. He is not guilty. I, myself, stabbed Lot
Gordon!"
"Please be seated," said Elvira Gordon, and her folded hands in her
lap never stirred.
"Seated!" cried Madelon, "seated! How can _you_ be seated, how can
you rest a moment--you, his mother? Why do you not set out to New
Salem now--now? Why do you not walk there, every step, in the snow?
Why do you not crawl there on your hands and knees, if your feet fail
you, and plead with him to confess that I speak the truth, and tell
them to set him free?"
"I beg of you not to so agitate yourself," said Elvira Gordon. "You
will be ill. Pray be seated."
Madelon bent towards her with a sudden motion, as if she would seize
her by the shoulders.
"Are you his mother," she cried--"his mother--and sit here, like
this, and speak like this? Why do you not move? Why do you not start
this instant for New Salem--this instant?"
"I beg you to calm yourself," replied Elvira Gordon. "I have been to
New Salem to visit my son. I have prayed with him in his prison."
"Prayed with him! Don't you know that he is innocent, and in prison
for murder--your own son? You stop to pray with him; why don't you
act to save him?"
"You will make yourself ill, my dear."
"Don't you believe that your son is innocent?" demanded Madelon.
"Don't you believe it?"
Her eyes blazed; she clinched her hands. She felt as if she could
spring at this other woman with her gentle murmurings and soft
foldings, and shake her into her own meaning of life. If her impulse
had had the power of deed, Elvira Gordon's little cap of fine
needle-work would have been a fiercely crumpled rag upon her decorous
head, her sober bands of gray hair would have streamed like the locks
of a fury, the quiet clasp of her long fingers would have been
stirred with some response of indignant defence if nothing else.
Madelon, with her, realized that worst balk in the world--the balk of
a passive nature in the path of an active one--and all her fiery zeal
seemed to flow back into herself and fairly madden her.
"I hope," said Elvira Gordon, "that my son will be proved innocent
and set free."
"_Proved_ innocent! Don't you know your own son is innocent?"
"I pray without ceasing that he may be acquitted of the crime for
which he is imprisoned," replied Elvira Gordon, over her folded
hands.
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 God 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 hoarse 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 assertion 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 gratitude, 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 passion 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 passionate 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 pass, for the sick man had passed 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
hoarse 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.