Madelon | Page 6

dreamed that Lot Gordon had been watching them,
standing in a snow-drift under the south window, his eyes peering over
the sill, his forehead wet with a snow-wreath, stifling back his cough.
When at last the candlelight went out in the great kitchen he crept
stiffly and wearily through the snow.
Chapter II
Lot Gordon lived about half a mile away in the old Gordon homestead
alone, except for an old servant-woman and her husband, who managed
his house for him and took care of the farm. Lot himself did not work
in the common acceptance of the term. His father had left him quite a
property, and he did not need to toil for his bread. People called him
lazy. He owned nearly as many books as the parson and the lawyer. He
often read all night it was said, and he roamed the woods in all seasons.
Under low-hanging winter boughs and summer arches did Lot Gordon
pry and slink and lie in wait, his fine, sharp face peering through snowy
tunnels or white spring thickets like a white fox, hungrily intent upon
the secrets of nature.

There was a deep mystery in this to the village people. They could not
fathom the reason for a man's haunting wild places like a wild animal
unless he hunted and trapped like the Hautville sons. They were
suspicious of dark motives, upon which they exercised their
imaginations.
Lot Gordon's talk, moreover, was an enigma to them. He was no
favorite, and only his goodly property tempered his ill repute. People
could not help identifying him, in a measure, with his noble old house,
with the stately pillared portico, with his silver-plate and damask and
mahogany, which his great-grandfather had brought from the old
country, with his fine fields and his money in the bank. He held,
moreover, a large mortgage on the house opposite, where Burr Gordon
lived with his mother. Burr's father and Lot's, although sons of one
shrewd father, had been of very different financial abilities. Lot's father
kept his property intact, never wasting, but adding from others' waste.
Burr's plunged into speculation, built a new house, for which he could
not pay, married a wife who was not thrifty, and when his father died
had anticipated the larger portion of his birthright. So Lot's father
succeeded to nearly all the family estates, and in time absorbed the rest.
Lot, at his father's death, had inherited the mortgage upon the estate of
Burr and his mother. Burr's father had died some time before. Lot was
rumored to be harder, in the matter of exacting heavy interest, than his
father had been. It was said that Burr was far behind in his payments,
and that Lot would foreclose. Burr had a better head than his father's,
but he had terrible odds against him. There was only one chance for his
release from difficulty, people thought. All the property, by a provision
in the grandfather's will, was to fall to him if Lot died unmarried. Lot
was twenty years older than Burr, and he coughed.
"Burr Gordon ain't makin' out much now," people said; "the paint's all
off his house and his land's run down, but there's dead men's shoes with
gold buckles in the path ahead of him."
Burr thought of it sometimes, although he turned his face from the
thought, and Lot considered it when he took the mortgage note out of
his desk and scored another installment of unpaid interest on it. "If a

man's only his own debtor he won't be very hard on himself," he said
aloud, and laughed. Old Margaret Bean, his housekeeper, looked at him
over her spectacles, but she did not know what he meant. She prepared
many a valuable remedy for his cough from herbs and roots, but Lot
would never taste them, and she made her old husband swallow them
all as preventatives of colds, that they should not be wasted. Lot was
coughing harder lately. To-night, after he returned from the Hautvilles',
he had one paroxysm after another. He did not go to bed, but huddled
over the fire wrapped in a shawl, with a leather-bound book on his
knees, all night, holding to his chest when he coughed, then turning to
his book again.
When daylight was fully in the room he blew out the candle, and went
over to the window and looked out across the road at the house
opposite, which had always been called the "new house" to distinguish
it from the old Gordon homestead. It was not so solid and noble as the
other, but it had sundry little touches of later times, which his father
had always characterized as wasteful follies. For one thing, it was
elevated ostentatiously far above the road-level upon terraces
surmounted