“Look ye here,” he said, “is this the whole truth of it? We've got a right to know. Be ye going to marry him in a month's time?”
Madelon looked at him proudly. “I am going to marry him in a month's time, and I am not afraid to face all the truth in the world. Let me go, father.”
When she was gone the father and sons stood staring at one another. There was on all their faces an under meaning to which not one would give tongue.
Richard jostled Louis's shoulder. “Suppose—” he whispered, looking at him with dismayed and suspicious eyes.
“Hush up!” returned Louis, roughly, and swung across to the shelf for his candle.
“If I thought—” began David, with force; then stopped, shaking his old head. The male Hautvilles went out, one after the other, their candles flaring up in their grimly silent faces. They were capable of concerted action without speech, and had evolved one purpose of going to bed with no more parley about Lot Gordon and Madelon that night. Brave as these men were, not one of them dared set foot squarely upon the dangerous ground which two of them knew, and three suspected, and look another in the face with the consciousness of his whereabouts in his eyes.
Truly afraid were they all, with that subtle cowardice which lurks sometimes in the bravest souls, of one another's knowledge and suspicions, as they filed up the creaking wooden stairs.
Richard looked at Louis in a terrified sidelong way when they were safe in their room with the door shut. “Hush up!” Louis whispered again, roughly, as if Richard had spoken. The two brothers were not to sleep much that night, each being tormented by anxiety lest Lot Gordon had resolved to stand by their sister no longer, and let disgrace fall upon her head; but neither would speak.
The candles flashed athwart the dark window-spaces of the Hautville chambers, and one by one went out. The house was dark and still, with all the sweet voices and stringed instruments at rest. Yet so full of sonorous harmony had it been not long since that one might well fancy that it would still, to an attentive ear, reverberate with sweet sounds in all its hollows, like a shell.
Madelon slept soundly that night, and when she woke on the morning of what was to have been her wedding-day felt as if she had a glimpse of her own self again, after a long dream in which she had been changed and lost. Richard went early to tell the woman who had been engaged to do the housework that she need not come for a month. After breakfast her father and brothers all went away, and she was alone in the house. She went about her work singing for the first time for weeks. She raised her voice high in a gay ditty which was then in vogue, entitled “The Knight Errant”: