In his heart he judged this girl whom he was defending to be guilty, yet was full of intensest admiration, and was sorely torn between the two and his own remorse over his false witnessing. “If I'm called into court and sworn on the Bible, I won't own up that I saw her take that knife,” he muttered to himself, as he laid the red cloak and hood on the high feather-bed in his mother's room.
This handsome, stalwart young man, who had hitherto been considered full of a gay audacity where womenfolk were concerned, able to make almost any pretty girl flutter at his smile, was strangely abashed before this beautiful Madelon Hautville, stained, in his eyes, with crime. He brought in wood and mended the hearth fire; he moved about doing such household tasks as were allotted to his masculine hands, and scarcely let his eyes rest once upon the girl in the chimney-corner. He dreaded the sight of that beautiful face which gave him such a shock of pity and admiration and horror. Jim Otis's mind could not compass this new revelation of a woman, but he would not betray her even for her own pleading if he went down perjured to his grave. So valiant was he in her defence that he withstood her against her own self.
Madelon's mother had died when she was a little girl. She could not fairly remember that ever in her whole life she had been so tended and petted as she was that night by Jim Otis's mother. Kind indeed her father and her brothers had always been to her. They had watched over her with jealous fondness, and had taken all rougher tasks upon themselves, but the devotion of woman, which extends to all the minor details of life, she had never known.
She had never had a supper-table set out for her own especial pleasure with this and that dish to tempt her appetite, as Mrs. Otis set out hers that night. A dish of a fine and sublimated porridge did Mrs. Otis make for her—a porridge mixed with cream and sprinkled with nutmeg and fat plums. “I thought some hot porridge would do you good,” said Mrs. Otis, when she sat the smoking bowl before Madelon. Then she whispered low, that her son, who was putting another stick on the fire before coming to table, might not hear, “It's the same kind of porridge I had after my son was born—with cream and plums in it. I used to think there never was anything so good.” This porridge might well have possessed a flavor of the sweetest memories of motherhood to the older woman, but to the girl, wild with longing to be gone and carry out her purpose, manna from heaven would not have yielded its full measure of sweetness.
She would scarcely have eaten at all had not Jim Otis's mother remarked, as she watched her reluctant sips of the good porridge, “As I said just now, you ain't any daughter of mine, and I ain't any right to dictate, but if you want to get that man, whoever he is, out of prison, you'll have to eat enough to get some strength to do it.”
Simply placid as Mrs. Otis looked, she had often wisdom enough to gain her ends by means of that shrewd finesse of government which appeals to the reason of others as applied to the furthering of their own desires.
Madelon after that swallowed her porridge almost greedily, and when supper was over went up-stairs to bed, following Mrs. Otis as readily as any meek young daughter of her own might have done. The spirit of resistance was laid for the time in this poor Madelon Hautville, but it had yielded, after all, more to the will of her own reason than to Jim Otis's mother or the weariness of her own flesh.
When Mrs. Otis came down-stairs she was flushed with pleasant motherly victory. “She's drunk all that hot cordial,” she said to her son, “every drop of it, and I've tucked her into bed with the extra comfortables over her, an' she eat quite a good supper, an' I told her to go right to sleep, and I guess she will.”
“If she don't she'll be down sick,” said Jim, sternly. He sat by the fire, tuning his fiddle.
“She can't hear your fiddle so it'll keep her awake, can she?” asked Mrs. Otis, anxiously.