She started, and stared at him as if she feared she
did not hear rightly.
“I—have been—thinking
it over,” Lot went on, panting; “I am not
as well—we had better wait—until—May.
My cough—the doctor—we will
wait—Madelon!” Lot’s broken
speech ended in a pitiful cry of her name.
“Why do you do this?” she asked, looking
at him with her white, stern face, through which an
expression of joy, which she tried to keep back, was
struggling.
“I am not as well, Madelon,” Lot answered,
with sudden readiness and sad dignity. “If
you do not object to the change of time we had best
defer it.”
Madelon looked away. “There is no need
of any pretence between us,” she said; “I
am sorry you are not as well.”
“But not sorry that our wedded bliss must be
deferred?”
“No,” said she. Then she went away,
and that time Lot did not call her back. She
heard him coughing hard as she went through the entry.
When she came out of the house into the tumultuous
darkness of the spring night, and went down the road
with the south wind smiting her with broadsides of
soft air, and the living sounds of water ahead and
on either hand of her, she was happy—in
spite of Burr, in spite of everything—with
the happiness of one to whom is granted a respite
from death.
When the mind has been strained up and held to the
furthering of some painful end and then suddenly released,
it sinks back for a time, alive to nothing but the
consciousness of freedom and rest. Even the thought
for the future, which is its one weapon against fate,
is laid down. Madelon, for a few days after the
postponement of her marriage, went about in a kind
of negative happiness. There are few who have
so much to bear that there is not left to them at
least the joy of escape from another trial. Madelon
had lost her lover indeed, but she was let loose for
a while from a worse trouble than that.
When Madelon entered the house that Sunday night her
face was so changed that it held her father’s
and her brothers’ casual glances. Her cheeks
were brilliant with the damp wind, her eyes gleaming,
her mouth half smiling as she looked around.
For the first time for weeks it seemed to Madelon
that she had really come home, and the old familiar
place did not look strange to her with the threatening
light of her own future over it. She tossed off
her hood and her red cloak, and proposed with her
old manner that they have some music.
The men looked at her and each other. “She’s
a woman,” old David muttered under his mustache,
and got his viol.
Soon the grand chorus began, and Madelon sang and
sang, with all her old fervor. The brothers kept
glancing at her, half uneasily, but David wooed his
viol as if it were his one love in the world, and
paid no attention to aught besides.
The concert lasted late that night. It was midnight
before they stopped singing and put their stringed
instruments away.
