It was four o'clock that summer afternoon when the three
women--Margaret Bean, the tavern-keeper's wife, and the storekeeper's
wife--who had followed Dorothy and Eugene into the lane to pry upon
them set forth to communicate by word of mouth the scandalous
proceedings they had witnessed; and long before midnight all the
village knew. The women crept cautiously at a good distance behind
Dorothy and Eugene out of the lane, and watched, with incredulous
eyes turning to each other for confirmation, the pair walk into
Parson Fair's house together. Then they could do no more, since their
ears were not long enough, and each went her way to tell what she had
seen.
All the neighbors knew when Eugene Hautville left Parson Fair's
house that afternoon, but their knowledge stopped there. Nobody
ever discovered just what was said within those four walls when
Dorothy--who, soft plumaged though she was, had flown in the
faces of all her decorous feminine antecedents and her goodly
teaching--confronted her father with her new lover at her side.
It was safe enough to assume, for one who knew her and them well,
that the two men did finally turn and protect her and shelter her
each against himself, and his own despite, as well as one another.
After that Eugene Hautville was seen every Sunday night and twice in
the week going into Parson Fair's house, and the candles burned late
in the north parlor.
The banns were published in a month's time. Some accounted it
unseemly haste, after the other banns which had come to naught, and
some said 'twas better so, and they blamed not Parson Fair for
placing such a flighty and jilting maid safe within the pale of
wedlock--and they guessed he was thankful enough to find a husband
for her, even if 'twas one of the Hautvilles.
However, Eugene was held in somewhat more of esteem than the others,
since he had in his own right a snug little sum in bank which had
come to him from an uncle whose name he bore. When it was known that
Eugene had bought the old Squire Damon place, a goodly house with a
box-bordered front walk, and a pillared front door, and would take
his bride home to it, public favor became quite strong for him. Folk
opined that he would, even if he was a Hautville, make full as good a
husband as Burr, and that Dorothy Fair would have the best of the
bargain all around. While many held Dorothy in slight esteem for her
instability and delicacy, and thought she was no desirable helpmeet
for any man, some were of the opinion that she had shown praiseworthy
judgment and shrewdness in jilting Burr for Eugene.
Dorothy this time made small show of her wedding, and was married in
her father's study with only the necessary witnesses and no guests.
Eugene Hautville had chafed. Dorothy also, with her feminine desire
for all minor details of happiness, was aggrieved that she could
never now appear before the public gaze in all the splendor of her
wedding-gear. But Parson Fair stood firm for once, and would have it
so.
All the watchful neighbors saw was, after nightfall and moonrise,
Parson Fair's door open, and the bride and groom appear for a second
in a golden shaft of light which flashed into gloom at the closing of
the door, and left there two shadows, as if the story of their life
and love had already been told and passed into history. And then the
neighbors saw them move up the road with long vanishing flutters of
the bride's white draperies, and the great black woman, steadying a
basket against her hip, in their wake, following her mistress like a
faithful dog, with perhaps the most unselfish love of all.
The black woman favored Eugene more than she had ever favored Burr,
perhaps because she was a true slave of love, and leaned with the
secret leanings of her mistress's heart against all words of mouth,
obeying her commands with a fuller understanding of them than Dorothy
herself.
When this new lover came a-courting, the African woman had always
greeted him at the door with that wide, sudden smile of hers, at once
simple, like a child's, and wild, like the grin of an animal; and her
voice, in her thick jargon, was nearly as softly rich to him as to
Dorothy. Moreover she kept no longer jealous watch at the door of the
room where the lovers sat, and was fond of treating the young man
with little cakes which she made with honey, whose like was to be
eaten nowhere else in the village.
After Dorothy and Eugene were wedded they faded into comparative
insignificance in the thoughts of the villagers, which were then
centred upon Burr Gordon and Madelon. The curtain went down upon
Eugene and his bride as upon any pair of wedded lovers in his
Shakespeare book.
Burr was in exceedingly ill repute, but he did not himself know it.
Many of his old friends treated him coolly, but he attributed that to
the embarrassed sympathy and constraint which they naturally felt
towards him in his position. He thought they avoided him because they
knew well that he would suspect even friendliness lest it contain a
pity which would hurt his pride; and he thanked them for it. But the
truth was, that outcry of Dorothy's against him on the wedding-night
had lashed up into a hurricane all the suspicions which Lot's avowal
had stilled. They did away easily enough with the force of Lot's
statement, for there are many theories to furnish skin-fits for every
difficulty, if one searches in the infinity of possibilities.
Lot's true reason none fathomed, for it was beyond their
sounding-lines of selfish curiosity; but they found another which
seemed to meet the needs of the case as well.
Lot, they said, had bargained with Burr to give up all claim to
Madelon, and he would set him free by confessing an attempt at
suicide. Margaret Bean, it was reported, had seen the letter which
Lot had written to Burr in prison. When Madelon, who, half crazed by
anxiety about her lover, had wrongfully accused herself to save him,
had seen him turn to her rival and scorn her after his release, she
had accepted Lot in a rage of pride and jealousy, as he had planned
for her to do. The breaking off of the marriage betwixt her and Lot
they mostly attributed to the simple cause he had mentioned--his
failing health--though some thought that he had hesitated about
marrying into the Hautville family when it came to it.
Suspicion had been for a time somewhat hushed against Madelon, the
more so that she had been seen, since Dorothy had jilted Burr, to
pass him with scarcely a nod, and was popularly supposed to hold an
Indian grudge against him, and to be still anxious to wed his cousin
Lot.
However, the tide soon turned again. On the Sunday after the banns
between Dorothy and Eugene had been published, Burr had been seen to
walk home openly with Madelon from evening meeting; and it was soon
known that he was courting her regularly.
Then darker whispers were circulated. People said now that they were
accomplices in attempted crime. That black atmosphere of suspicion
and hatred, which gathers nowhere more easily than in a New England
town, was thick around Burr and Madelon. They breathed, though as yet
it was in less degree, the same noxious air as did the persecuted
Quakers and witches of bygone times. The gases which lie at the
bottom of human souls, which gossip and suspicious imaginations
upstir, are deadlier than those at the bottoms of old wells. Still
Madelon and Burr knew nothing of it, nor Burr's mother, nor Lot, nor
any of the Hautville men. The attitude of Madelon's father and
brothers towards herself and Burr had done much to strengthen
suspicion. High voices and strange remarks had been overheard by folk
strolling casually, of a pleasant evening, past the Hautville house.
In truth, at first old David Hautville and all his sons except Eugene
had risen against Burr and Madelon, all their pride in arms that she
should return to this man who had once forsaken her for another. But
later they had yielded, for their pride was undermined by their own
gloomy convictions as to Madelon, which they confided not to one
another. However, the boy Richard still greeted Burr surlily, with a
fierce black flash under frowning brows, and scarcely spoke to
Madelon at all until the day before her marriage. That was set some
two months after Dorothy's.
Burr and Madelon, during the days of their betrothal, were as closely
beset by spies on every hand as a party of Madelon's old kindred
might have been, encamped in a wooded country, where every bush
veiled savage eyes and every tree stood in front of a foeman, but
they did not know it. Folk knew when Mrs. Gordon went to visit her
son's betrothed, though 'twas on a dark evening. They knew what she
wore, and how long she stayed. They knew when Madelon returned her
visit; they knew, to remember, in many cases, more details of their
daily lives than Burr and Madelon themselves.
Madelon had few wedding preparations to make. The wedding-garments
which she had stitched with sorrow for her marriage with Lot would
serve her now. She employed her time in increasing still further the
household stores of linen for her father's and brothers' use, when
she should be gone, and in making a great stock of sweet-sauce,
jelly, and cordials from the fruits and berries of the season.
One afternoon in late summer, when the high blackberries were ripe,
Madelon set forth with a great basket on her arm. A fine cordial,
good for many ills, she knew how to make from the berries, and had
planned to brew a goodly quantity this year. She went down the road a
way, then over some bars, with her hands on the highest and a spring
like a willow branch set free, across a pasture where some red cows
were grazing, then over another set of bars, into a rough and shaggy
land sloping gradually into a hill. Here the high blackberries grew
in great thorny thickets, and Madelon pressed among them warily and
began picking. She had not picked long--indeed the bottom of her
basket was not covered--when she heard a rustle in the bushes behind
her and looked over her shoulder hurriedly, and there was Lot Gordon.
Lot came forward from a cluster of young firs, parting the rank
undergrowth with the careless wonted movement of one who steers his
way among his own household goods. Well used to all the wild disorder
of out-doors was Lot Gordon, and could have picked his way of a dark
night among the stones and bushes and trees of many a pasture and
woodland. Moreover, Lot, uprising from the great nest which he had
hollowed out for himself from a sweet fern growth under the balsam
firs, exhaling their fragrant breath of healing, and coming into
sight, made better show than he had ever done in his own book-walled
study.
Here, where the minds of other men swerved him and incited him not,
where only Nature herself held him in leading-strings with
unsearchable might or was laid bare before his daring eyes and many a
secret discovered, Lot Gordon gained his best grace of home. The
balsam firs framed him with more truth than the door of his own
dwelling. To Madelon, as he came out from them, he looked more a man
than he had ever done; for all unconsciously to her mind of strong
and simple bent, he had seemed at times scarce a man but rather some
strange character from a book, which had gotten life through too
strong imagining.
Moreover to-day his likeness to Burr came out strongly. Madelon saw
the cant of his head and swing of his shoulders, with a half sense of
shame that he was not Burr, and yet with a sudden understanding of
him that she had never felt before. She had not seen him since her
betrothal to Burr. She thought to herself that he was thinner, and
that the red flush on his cheeks was the flush of fever and not of
the summer sun.
"How do you do, Lot?" she said. Madelon's cheeks were a splendid red;
her green sunbonnet hung by its strings low on her neck, and her
head, with black hair clinging to her temples in moist rings, was
thrust out from the green tangle of vines like a flower. When Lot did
not answer at once, but stood pale and trembling, as if an icy wind
had struck him, before her, she pulled the pricking vines loose from
her dress, and came out. "How do you do, Lot?" she said, again. Still
Lot did not answer, and after a minute she turned with impatient
dignity as if to enter her fastness again; but then Lot spoke.
"Like mankind," he said, "'tis not well, and it tends to death, but
we were born with a lash at our backs to do it."
Madelon knit her brows impatiently, for this was his old talk, that
savored to her of ink and parchment and thoughts laid up in studied
guise, like mummies. Then she noted his poor face, and again the look
like Burr, which caused her heart to melt with the fancy of her love
in like case, and she said, with that gracious kindness which became
her well, that it was a pleasant day, and the smell of the balsam fir
was good for him.
But Lot looked at her with his great eyes set in hungry hollows, and
answered her in that stilted speech which she liked not, trying to
smile his old mocking smile with his poor lips, which only trembled
like a child's when tears are coming. "There are rivers of honey and
gardens of spices, and branches dropping balm," said Lot, "where a
man can walk but his soul cannot follow him. His soul waits outside
and strives to taste the sweet when he swallows it, and smell the
balm and the spices when he breathes them in, but cannot; and that is
only good for a man which is good for his soul."
"I don't know what you mean," said Madelon, shortly.
"I mean that I am outside all the good of this world, since the one
good which I crave and cannot have is the gate to all the rest," said
Lot. Then suddenly he cried out passionately, lifting up his face to
the sky, "O God, why need it be so? Why need a man be a bond-slave to
one hunger? Why need this one woman be the angel with the flaming
sword before all the little pleasures I used to taste and love? Why
need she come between me and the breath of the woods, and the incense
of the fields, and their secrets which were to me before my own, so I
can take no more delight in them?"
Madelon looked at him half in pity, half in proud resentment. "If it
is so," she said, "it was not of my own accord I came; you know that,
Lot Gordon. I meant no harm to you, and the harm that I did you
brought upon yourself. I would not have come here to-day if I had
known you were here and that it would disturb you."
"You could not have helped coming," said Lot. "I have been here since
morning, and you have been here all the while."
"Why do you talk so, Lot Gordon?" cried Madelon, angrily, for Lot's
covert meanings fretted her straightforwardness beyond endurance.
"You know that I have just come here!"
"You came here when I did," said Lot, "when the fields were dewy. You
held up your skirts and stepped daintily. I went ahead and you
followed, high-kilted, pointing your steps among the wet grasses like
a dove. Had I looked over my shoulder I could have seen you, but I
looked not lest the power of flight might be in you like the dove."
"I shall go away if you talk like this. I will not stay here and
listen to it; you know I was not here," said Madelon, and she paled a
little, for she almost thought, used to his fanciful talk though she
were, that Lot had gone mad.
"We walked towards the sun," persisted Lot, "but you were in my
shadow and needed not to cast down your eyes. I saw some red flowers,
but I did not pick them for you, and I heard you stop and break the
stems as you came after. When we reached the shade of the firs there
I sat down, but I left the space there, where the needles are
smoothest and thickest, for you, and there you sat too, all day."
"Lot Gordon!"
"You need not mind, Madelon, for all day I looked not over my
shoulder once. I saw not your face, nor touched your lips, nor your
hand, nor even the fold of your dress. I harmed you not, even in my
dreams, dear."
Madelon, standing quite free of the clinging blackberry vines, held
up her dark head like an empress, and looked at him. In truth she
felt little pity for Lot Gordon then, for she liked not being made to
follow other than Burr even in a man's dreams. Still, when she spoke
it was not unkindly, for in spite of this jealousy of herself for
Burr, and in spite of her inability to understand such worship of
herself, when she was spent in worship of another, she remembered how
she had nearly taken the life of this man, and how he had striven to
shield her, though against her will, and on hard and selfish
conditions, and how he had at last sacrificed himself to set her
free.
"Lot," said she, "there must be no more of this. I am almost your
cousin's wife. You have no right." And then she repeated it
passionately. "I say you have no right to love me like this, if I do
not love you, Lot Gordon. I will have no other man but Burr think me
at his heels. I will follow him till the day of my death, but no
other. I would only have married you to save his life--you know that.
You know I never loved you. You have no right."
"The right of love is every man's who sets not himself before it,"
returned Lot, with sad dignity. "I will not yield that even for love
of you, Madelon; but myself shall be pushed yet farther out of sight,
I promise you, and you shall be pestered no more, child. Go on with
your berry-picking."
A great mound of rock uplifted itself like the swelling crouch of
some fossil animal among the sweet ferns and the wild scramble of
vines. Lot sank down upon it panting for breath. He leaned his head
wearily forward between his hands, his elbows resting on his knees.
Madelon looked at him hesitatingly; she opened her mouth as if to
speak, then was silent. She looked at the high vines, black with
fruit, then at the field beyond, as if half minded to go away and
leave them.
Finally she fell to picking again without a word. Lot coughed once,
but he did not speak. Madelon kept glancing at him as she picked.
Compunction and pity softened more and more her fiery heart, the more
so since she felt the guilt of happiness in the face of the woe of
another upon her. Finally she said, with that fond reversion to the
little homely truths and waysides of life with which the feminine
mind strives often to comfort, that she would put up for him a jug of
her blackberry cordial, and furthermore that she hoped his cough was
better. She said it with half-constrained kindness, not looking up
from her berry-picking; but Lot lifted his head and thanked her and
said the cough was nearly cured, with eagerness to respond to grace,
like a child who has been chidden.
Then he watched her with bright eyes as she picked, his breath coming
hard and quick. "Madelon!" he said, and stopped.
"What, Lot?"
"You remember--the gewgaws which I--showed you, Madelon--the feathers
and ribbons and satins, and the other things? You cared not for them
then. Will you have them now, for your wedding-gift?"
"No, Lot," said Madelon, quickly. "I thank you, but I cannot take
them; I have enough."
"Why not?"
"I have enough."
"There is no need for you to tell me why," said Lot. "A woman like
you would almost veil herself from her own eyes for the sake of a
lover, so great is her jealousy. The thoughts and the dreams with
which I bought the gewgaws profane them in your eyes while I am
alive."
"I do not need them, and I cannot take them, Lot," said Madelon,
steadily.
Lot said no more. He leaned his head upon his hands again. Madelon
could hear his panting breath. She resolved that she would go away
across the fields, down the road a piece, to another berry patch that
she knew of. Still she did not go. One of those impulses which seem
to come from authority outside one's self, or else from some hidden
springs of motion which we know not of, had seized her. She looked at
Lot and moved softly away a few steps, holding her skirts clear of
the vines. Then she paused and looked again, and was away again. Her
face was resolute and wary, as if she saw something which she feared
and loathed, and yet would brave. Then she went close to Lot, and
stood still over him a minute.
"Lot," she said.
He looked up at her, wonderingly. "Are you sick, Madelon?" he cried,
and would have risen, but she motioned him back and spoke, turning
her face away the while.
"Once I asked Burr to give me the kiss that I would have killed him
for," said she, in a voice so sharpened by her stress of spirit that
it might have come out of the flames of martyrdom. "Now I ask you to
give me the kiss that I almost took your life for."
"Madelon!"
"It is all I can do to make amends," said she. Then she looked full
at him, and did not shrink when she met his eyes, though her face
grew white before the mad longing in them.
Lot stood up and leaned towards her, and she stood waiting. Then he
threw out his hands, as if he would push her back, and turned away.
"You owe me no amends," he said, hoarsely. "The wound that you gave
me was my just desert for striving to take what you were not willing
to give."
"Your life is your life," said she, steadily, "and I almost took it
away from you. I would do this in token of repentance for that and
whatever other harm I have done you unwittingly."
"You owe me no amends, and I will take none," said Lot, again.
Then he faced about towards her, and she started and looked at him,
wondering and half in awe, for suddenly the love in the heart of the
man showed itself in his face like a light, and it was almost as if
she saw, unbelieving and denying, her own transfigured image in his
eyes.
"Good-bye, Madelon," said Lot.
"Good-bye," she returned, faintly, and looked at him for the first
time in all her life without the thought of Burr between them.
But that Lot did not know, and stood a moment gazing at her as a man
gazes at one beloved under the shadow of long parting, striving to
gain possession of somewhat to hold and cherish aside from the
conditions of the flesh. Then he said good-bye again, and went away,
with that soft winding glide of his through the underbrush which he
might have learned from the wild dwellers in the woods, and was out
of sight through the violet glooms of the firs.