Madelon: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“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.”