Chapter XV
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.”
“Tell him ‘yes,’” said Madelon, abruptly; and then she wheeled about and went into the house.
“Well,” said Margaret Bean, harshly. The door closed before her; Eugene had forgotten his courtesy, and followed his sister into the house without a good-day to the guest.
Margaret Bean stood for a minute looking at the house, with its yawn of blank windows in her face; then she went out of the yard, bearing her message to Lot Gordon.
Eugene Hautville was startled at the look on Madelon's face when she went into the house. “Madelon, what is it?” he said, softly. But she did not answer him a word; she ran across the room and thrust Lot Gordon's letter into the fire. Eugene followed her and turned her about gently, and looked keenly in her white face.
“What was in that latter?” said he.