It was told on good authority in the village that Parson Fair had
paid all Burr Gordon's back interest money on his mortgage, and so
released him from the danger of foreclosure; and then on equally good
authority it was denied. There was much discussion over it, but one
day the loafers in the store arrived at the truth. Parson Fair had
indeed offered to pay the interest, and Burr had declined. He had
also refused to live with his bride in his father-in-law's house, and
when Parson Fair had, with his gracefully austere manner, intimated
that he should be unwilling to place his daughter in such uncertain
shelter, had replied harshly that Dorothy should have a roof over her
head of his own providing while he lived; when he was dead it would
be time to talk about her father's.
When Burr had gone to Lot Gordon and offered to part with a small
wood-lot of his, with a quantity of half-grown wood thereon, at
two-thirds of its real value to pay the interest, Margaret Bean had
listened at the door, and thus the story.
"It is a sacrifice of a full third of its value, you know well
enough," Burr had said, standing moodily before his cousin. "If I
could wait for the growth of the wood, 'twould bring much more, but
I'll call it even on the interest I owe you, if you will. This is the
last foot of land I own clear."
For answer Lot had bidden Burr open his desk and bring him a certain
paper from a certain corner. Then Margaret Bean had opened the door a
crack, and had with her two peering eyes seen Lot Gordon take his pen
in hand and write upon the paper, and show it to his cousin Burr.
"Very well," said Burr, "I will go home and get the deed of the
wood-lot," and motioned towards the door, which drew to in a soft
panic as if with the wind.
"Stop," said Lot; and Margaret Bean paused in her flight, and laid
her ear to the door again. "I don't want your woodland," said Lot.
"The interest is paid without it. It is your wedding-gift."
"Why should you do this? I did not ask you to," Burr returned, almost
defiantly; and Margaret Bean had felt indignant at his unthankfulness.
"You can take from your kinsman what you could not take from Parson
Fair," replied Lot. "I hear you will not go to nest in Parson Fair's
snug roof-tree, with your pretty bird, either."
"I will die before I will take my wife under any roof but my own,"
cried Burr, fiercely, "and I want no gifts from you either. I am not
turned beggar from any one yet. You shall take the woodland."
Lot waved his hand as if he swept the woodland, with all its
half-grown trees, out of his horizon. "And yet," he said, "I thought
'twas what you left the other for. I should have said 'twas but your
wage that was offered you;" and he smiled at his cousin.
"What do you mean, Lot Gordon?"
Lot looked at him with sharp interest. "Was there another leaf of you
to read when I thought I was at the end," said he, "or were you writ
in such plain characters that I put in somewhat of my own imaginings
to give substance to them? Are you better, and worse, than I thought
you, cousin? Do you love this flower that has her counterpart in all
the gardens of the world, that is as sweet and no sweeter, that you
can replace when she dies by stooping and picking, better than the
one which has thorns enough to kill and sweetness enough to pay for
death, and whose bloom you can never match?"
"I don't know what you mean," Burr said, impatiently and angrily; and
Margaret Bean outside the door wagged her head in scornful assent.
"Then you loved Dorothy Fair better than Madelon Hautville, and 'twas
not her place and money that turned you her way," said Lot, as if he
were translating; and he kept his keen eyes on the other's face.
Burr's face flashed white. "What right have you to question me like
this?" he demanded.
"But you would not take the price, after all," said Lot, as if he had
been answered, instead of questioned. Then he looked up at his cousin
with something like kindness in his blue eyes. "It proves the truth
of what I've thought before," he said, "that oftentimes a man has to
sting his own honor with his own deeds to know 'tis in him."
"My honor is my own lookout," Burr said, harshly.
"And you've looked out for it better than I thought," Lot returned.
Burr made another motion towards the door. "I can't stand here any
longer," he said. "I'll go for the deed." Margaret Bean, moving as
softly as she could in her starched draperies, fled back to the
kitchen.
"Wait a minute," Lot said.
"Well," returned Burr, impatiently.
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 God, 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 god 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 Basset, 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
stitched and stitched upon her wedding finery, bending her fair face,
half concealed by drooping curls, assiduously 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.