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Updated: September 14, 2025
"I've got to go home first," he said, and plunged off quickly down the old road, the short-cut to his house. Madelon Hautville, in her red cloak and her great silk hood, stood in the midst of her brothers on the wood-sled, and the oxen drew them ponderously to the ball. The tavern was all alight.
She clutched his arm and shook his great frame to and fro. "Father, promise me you'll go over to New Salem to-night and tell them to set him free and take me instead! Father!" "We'll see about it, Madelon," answered David Hautville. There was a tone in his voice which she had never heard before.
He came in, dragging his old, snow-laden feet, tapping heavily with his stout stick, and settled, cackling, into a chair. "Heard the news?" queried Uncle Luke basset, his eyes, like black sparks, twinkling rapidly at all their faces. Madelon set the cups and saucers on the dresser. "We don't have any time for anybody's business but our own," quoth David Hautville, gruffly.
Forster were talking together like old acquaintances, and the three sat down to dinner together. Mr. Forster was, as he himself often said, a grim old lawyer, without any poetry or romance, but even he could not sit opposite the pale, pure loveliness of Marion Hautville unmoved; there was something about her that reminded one irresistibly of starlight, delicate, graceful, holy veiled loveliness.
Your visitors and friends will not broach such a subject to you, I am sure." "I shall not mention it," she replied; "although Marion will be sure to suspect something wrong." At that moment the last dressing-bell rang. "You will join us in a few minutes," said Lady Carruthers; "never mind your traveling-dress; Miss Hautville and I are quite alone."
Madelon looked at him as if she would penetrate his soul, and he met her eyes fully. "I did not see your brother give you the knife," he replied, with a steady, unflinching look at her; but a long shudder went over him as he spoke. The first deliberate lie of his whole life was Jim Otis telling, for he had seen Richard Hautville give his sister the knife.
"I didn't think of it to-day," Dorothy replied, with forlorn surprise. Madelon went close to the other girl peremptorily, as if she had been her mother, pulled forward two soft curls from under her hood, and arranged them becomingly against the pale cheeks; and Dorothy submitted. Alvin Mead opened the jail door, and his great face took on a forbidding scowl when he saw Madelon Hautville.
Old David Hautville, the father, stood out in front of the hearth by his great bass-viol, leaning fondly over it like a lover over his mistress. David Hautville was a great, spare man a body of muscles and sinews under dry, brown flesh, like an old oak-tree. His long, white mustache curved towards his ears with sharp sweeps, like doves' wings. His thick, white brows met over his keen, black eyes.
No costly finery had Madelon Hautville, but she had done some cunning needle-work on an old black-satin gown of her mother's, and it was fitted as softly over her sweet curves as a leaf over a bud. A long garland of flowers after her own design had she wrought in bright-colored silks around the petticoat, and there were knots of red ribbon to fasten the loopings here and there.
Through the fields north of the Hautville place there was an old foot-path to the former site of an old homestead, long ago burned to the ground and its ashes dissipated on winds long died away. The oldest inhabitants in the village barely remembered the house that used to stand there.
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