“I am not afraid,” returned Madelon. She gave her skirts a careless flirt and entered the door with the snow still clinging to her.
“If you will wait a moment,” said Mrs. Gordon, “I will get a broom and brush the snow from you before it melts. Then you won't take cold.”
“I don't care to have you, thank you,” said Madelon. Mrs. Gordon said no more, but led the way to the sitting-room. She was a tall, slender woman with the face of a saint, long and pale, and full of gentle melancholy, with large, meek-lidded blue eyes and patiently compressed lips. She had a habit of folding her long hands always before her, whether she walked or sat, and she moved with sinuous wavings of her widow-bombazine.
The room into which she ushered Madelon was accounted the grandest sitting-room in the village. When Burr's father had built his fine new house he had made the furnishings correspond. He had eschewed the spindle-legged tables and fiddle-backed chairs of the former generations, and taken to solid masses of red mahogany, which were impressive to the village folk. The carpet was a tapestry of great crimson roses with the like of which no other floor in town was covered, and, moreover, there was a glossy black stove instead of a hearth fire.
“Please be seated,” said Mrs. Gordon. She indicated the best chair in the room. When her guest had taken it, she sat down herself in the middle of her great haircloth sofa, and folded her long hands in her lap. Mrs. Gordon had the extremest manners of the old New England gentlewoman—so punctiliously polite that they called attention to themselves. She had married late in life, having been previously a preceptress in a young ladies' school. She was still the example of her own precepts—all outward decorum if not inward composure.
Madelon Hautville, opposite her, in her snow-powdered cloak, with her face like a flash of white fire in her snow-powdered silk hood, seemed in comparison a female of another and an older race. She might well, from the look of her, have come a nearer and straighter road from the inmost heart of things, from the unpruned tangle of woods and undammed course of streams, from all primitive and untempered love and passion and religion, than this gentlewoman formed upon the models of creeds and scholars.
Madelon looked at the other woman a second with fierce questioning. Then she sprang up out of the chair where she had been placed, and stood before her on her sofa, and cried out, abruptly, “I have come to tell you about your son. He is not guilty. I, myself, stabbed Lot Gordon!”
“Please be seated,” said Elvira Gordon, and her folded hands in her lap never stirred.
“Seated!” cried Madelon, “seated! How can you be seated, how can you rest a moment—you, his mother? Why do you not set out to New Salem now—now? Why do you not walk there, every step, in the snow? Why do you not crawl there on your hands and knees, if your feet fail you, and plead with him to confess that I speak the truth, and tell them to set him free?”
“I beg of you not to so agitate yourself,” said Elvira Gordon. “You will be ill. Pray be seated.”