Her father and brothers down below heard her, and
looked at each other.
“There was that Emmeline Littlefield that went
mad, and fell to walking all the time,” said
Abner.
The others listened to the footsteps overhead with
a gloomy assent of silence.
“They had to keep her in a room with an iron
grate on the window,” said Abner, further, with
a pale scowl.
Then David Hautville took down his leather jacket
from its peg with a jerk, and thrust his arm into
it. “I tell ye, she’s a woman,”
he said, in a shout, as if to drown out those hurrying
steps; and then he went out of the room and the house,
and disappeared with axe on shoulder across the snowy
reach of fields; and presently all his sons except
Eugene followed him. Eugene remained to keep watch
over his sister.
After his father and brothers were gone, Eugene got
Louis’s fiddle out of the chimney-cupboard and
fell to playing with an imperfect touch, picking out
a tune slowly, with halts between the strains, as
if he spelled a word with stammering syllables.
Eugene’s musical expression was in his throat
alone; his fingers were almost powerless to bring
out the meaning of sweet sounds. A drunken crew
on a rolling vessel might have danced to the tune
that Eugene Hautville fingered on his brother’s
fiddle that morning while his sister walked back and
forth overhead, running the gantlet, as it were, of
an agony which his masculine imagination could not
compass, well tutored as it was by the lessons of
his Shakespeare book.
When Margaret Bean came to the door the second time
she heard the squeak of the fiddle, and clanged the
knocker loud to overcome it. Madelon and Eugene
reached the door at the same time, and Margaret Bean
extended another letter. “Here’s another,”
said she, shortly, to Madelon. She tucked the
hand which had held the letter under her shawl and
hugged herself with a shiver, ostentatiously.
“I’m most froze, traipsin’ back
and forth, I know that much,” she muttered.
Eugene stood aside with a flourish and a graceful,
beckoning wave of his hand. “Won’t
you come in and warm yourself?” he said, and
he smiled in her face as if she and no other were
the love of his heart.
But Margaret Bean had a shrewd understanding which
no grace of flattery could dazzle, and felt truly
that nowadays her principal claim to masculine admiration
lay in her fine starching specialty of housewifery;
and of that she gave no show, bundled up against the
cold in her shapeless wools. So she put aside
the young man’s smiling courtesy scornfully,
as not belonging to her, and spoke in a voice as sharp
as an edge of her own well-stiffened linens. “No,
sir,” said Margaret Bean; “I’ve
got bread in the oven and I can’t stop, and I
ain’t coming in for two or three minutes and
set with my things on, and get all chilled through
when I go out. I’ll stand here while your
sister reads that letter. He said the answer would
be just ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and
I shouldn’t have to wait long. ’She
ain’t one to teeter long on a decision,’
says he; ‘she finds her footin’ one side
or the other.’ He talks queer, queerer’n
ever sence he was hurt. I pity anybody that gets
him.”
