ETHAN FROME
By Edith Wharton
Prelude
I Had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens
in such cases, each time it was a different story.
If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the
post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive
up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the
brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was.
It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the
sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in
Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great
height that marked him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by
their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless
powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk
of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he
was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised
to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who
had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and
knew the chronicle of all the families on his line.
"He's looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that's
twenty-four years ago come next February," Harmon threw out between
reminiscent pauses.
The "smash-up" it was-I gathered from the same informant-which,
besides drawing the red gash across Ethan Frome's forehead, had so shortened
and warped his right side that it cost him a visible effort to take the few
steps from his buggy to the post-office window. He used to drive in from his
farm every day at about noon, and as that was my own hour for fetching my mail
I often passed him in the porch or stood beside him while we waited on the
motions of the distributing hand behind the grating. I noticed that, though he
came so punctually, he seldom received anything but a copy of the Bettsbridge
Eagle, which he put without a glance into his sagging pocket. At intervals,
however, the post-master would hand him an envelope addressed to Mrs.
Zenobia-or Mrs. Zeena-Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper
left-hand corner the address of some manufacturer of patent medicine and the
name of his specific. These documents my neighbour would also pocket without a
glance, as if too much used to them to wonder at their number and variety, and
would then turn away with a silent nod to the post-master.
Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his
own grave mien; but his taciturnity was respected and it was only on rare
occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for a word. When
this happened he would listen quietly, his blue eyes on the speaker's face, and
answer in so low a tone that his words never reached me; then he would climb
stiffly into his buggy, gather up the reins in his left hand and drive slowly
away in the direction of his farm.
"It was a pretty bad smash-up?" I questioned Harmon, looking
after Frome's retreating figure, and thinking how gallantly his lean brown
head, with its shock of light hair, must have sat on his strong shoulders
before they were bent out of shape.
"Wust kind," my informant assented. "More'n enough to kill
most men. But the Fromes are tough. Ethan'll likely touch a hundred."
"Good God!" I exclaimed. At the moment Ethan Frome, after
climbing to his seat, had leaned over to assure himself of the security of a
wooden box-also with a druggist's label on it-which he had placed in the back
of the buggy, and I saw his face as it probably looked when he thought himself
alone. "That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell
now!"
Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and pressed
it into the leather pouch of his cheek. "Guess he's been in Starkfield too
many winters. Most of the smart ones get away."
"Why didn't he?"
"Somebody had to stay and care for the folks. There warn't ever
anybody but Ethan. Fust his father-then his mother-then his wife."
"And then the smash-up?"
Harmon chuckled sardonically. "That's so. He had to stay then."
"I see. And since then they've had to care for him?"
Harmon thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek. "Oh, as to
that: I guess it's always Ethan done the caring."
Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach
permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense
that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps. But one phrase stuck in my
memory and served as the nucleus about which I grouped my subsequent
inferences: "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters."
Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what that meant. Yet
I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery, when
communication was easy between the scattered mountain villages, and the bigger
towns in the valleys, such as Bettsbridge and Shadd's Falls, had libraries,
theatres and Y. M. C. A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend
for recreation. But when winter shut down on Starkfield and the village lay
under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see
what life there-or rather its negation-must have been in Ethan Frome's young
manhood.
I had been sent up by my employers on a job connected with the big
power-house at Corbury Junction, and a long-drawn carpenters' strike had so
delayed the work that I found myself anchored at Starkfield-the nearest
habitable spot-for the best part of the winter. I chafed at first, and then,
under the hypnotising effect of routine, gradually began to find a grim
satisfaction in the life. During the early part of my stay I had been struck by
the contrast between the vitality of the climate and the deadness of the community.
Day by day, after the December snows were over, a blazing blue sky poured down
torrents of light and air on the white landscape, which gave them back in an
intenser glitter. One would have supposed that such an atmosphere must quicken
the emotions as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce no change except
that of retarding still more the sluggish pulse of Starkfield. When I had been
there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by
long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their
white tents about the. devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had
charged down to their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged
from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without
quarter. Twenty years earlier the means of resistance must have been far fewer,
and the enemy in command of almost all the lines of access between the
beleaguered villages; and, considering these things, I felt the sinister force
of Harmon's phrase: "Most of the smart ones get away." But if that
were the case, how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the flight
of a man like Ethan Frome?
During my stay at Starkfield I lodged with a middle-aged widow colloquially
known as Mrs. Ned Hale. Mrs. Hale's father had been the village lawyer of the
previous generation, and "lawyer Varnum's house," where my landlady
still lived with her mother, was the most considerable mansion in the village.
It stood at one end of the main street, its classic portico and small-paned
windows looking down a flagged path between Norway spruces to the slim white
steeple of the Congregational church. It was clear that the Varnum fortunes
were at the ebb, but the two women did what they could to preserve a decent dignity;
and Mrs. Hale, in particular, had a certain wan refinement not out of keeping
with her pale old-fashioned house.
In the "best parlour," with its black horse-hair and mahogany
weakly illuminated by a gurgling Carcel lamp, I listened every evening to
another and more delicately shaded version of the Starkfield chronicle. It was
not that Mrs. Ned Hale felt, or affected, any social superiority to the people
about her; it was only that the accident of a finer sensibility and a little
more education had put just enough distance between herself and her neighbours
to enable her to judge them with detachment. She was not unwilling to exercise
this faculty, and I had great hopes of getting from her the missing facts of
Ethan Frome's story, or rather such a key to his character as should
co-ordinate the facts I knew. Her mind was a store-house of innocuous anecdote
and any question about her acquaintances brought forth a volume of detail; but
on the subject of Ethan Frome I found her unexpectedly reticent. There was no
hint of disapproval in her reserve; I merely felt in her an insurmountable
reluctance to speak of him or his affairs, a low "Yes, I knew them both...
it was awful..." seeming to be the utmost concession that her distress
could make to my curiosity.
So marked was the change in her manner, such depths of sad initiation did
it imply, that, with some doubts as to my delicacy, I put the case anew to my
village oracle, Harmon Gow; but got for my pains only an uncomprehending grunt.
"Ruth Varnum was always as nervous as a rat; and, come to think of it,
she was the first one to see 'em after they was picked up. It happened right
below lawyer Varnum's, down at the bend of the Corbury road, just round about
the time that Ruth got engaged to Ned Hale. The young folks was all friends,
and I guess she just can't bear to talk about it. She's had troubles enough of
her own."
All the dwellers in Starkfield, as in more notable communities, had had
troubles enough of their own to make them comparatively indifferent to those of
their neighbours; and though all conceded that Ethan Frome's had been beyond
the common measure, no one gave me an explanation of the look in his face
which, as I persisted in thinking, neither poverty nor physical suffering could
have put there. Nevertheless, I might have contented myself with the story
pieced together from these hints had it not been for the provocation of Mrs.
Hale's silence, and-a little later-for the accident of personal contact with
the man.
On my arrival at Starkfield, Denis Eady, the rich Irish grocer, who was the
proprietor of Starkfield's nearest approach to a livery stable, had entered
into an agreement to send me over daily to Corbury Flats, where I had to pick
up my train for the Junction. But about the middle of the winter Eady's horses
fell ill of a local epidemic. The illness spread to the other Starkfield
stables and for a day or two I was put to it to find a means of transport. Then
Harmon Gow suggested that Ethan Frome's bay was still on his legs and that his
owner might be glad to drive me over.
I stared at the suggestion. "Ethan Frome? But I've never even spoken
to him. Why on earth should he put himself out for me?"
Harmon's answer surprised me still more. "I don't know as he would;
but I know he wouldn't be sorry to earn a dollar."
I had been told that Frome was poor, and that the saw-mill and the arid
acres of his farm yielded scarcely enough to keep his household through the
winter; but I had not supposed him to be in such want as Harmon's words
implied, and I expressed my wonder.
"Well, matters ain't gone any too well with him," Harmon said.
"When a man's been setting round like a hulk for twenty years or more,
seeing things that want doing, it eats inter him, and he loses his grit. That
Frome farm was always 'bout as bare's a milkpan when the cat's been round; and
you know what one of them old water-mills is wuth nowadays. When Ethan could
sweat over 'em both from sunup to dark he kinder choked a living out of 'em;
but his folks ate up most everything, even then, and I don't see how he makes
out now. Fust his father got a kick, out haying, and went soft in the brain,
and gave away money like Bible texts afore he died. Then his mother got queer
and dragged along for years as weak as a baby; and his wife Zeena, she's always
been the greatest hand at doctoring in the county. Sickness and trouble: that's
what Ethan's had his plate full up with, ever since the very first
helping."
The next morning, when I looked out, I saw the hollow-backed bay between
the Varnum spruces, and Ethan Frome, throwing back his worn bearskin, made room
for me in the sleigh at his side. After that, for a week, he drove me over
every morning to Corbury Flats, and on my return in the afternoon met me again
and carried me back through the icy night to Starkfield. The distance each way
was barely three miles, but the old bay's pace was slow, and even with firm
snow under the runners we were nearly an hour on the way. Ethan Frome drove in
silence, the reins loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile,
under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like
the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered,
except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I
ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of
its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the
surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he
lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the
sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight,
tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the
profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.
Only once or twice was the distance between us bridged for a moment; and
the glimpses thus gained confirmed my desire to know more. Once I happened to
speak of an engineering job I had been on the previous year in Florida, and of
the contrast between the winter landscape about us and that in which I had
found myself the year before; and to my surprise Frome said suddenly:
"Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call
up the sight of it in winter. But now it's all snowed under."
He said no more, and I had to guess the rest from the inflection of his
voice and his sharp relapse into silence.
Another day, on getting into my train at the Flats, I missed a volume of
popular science-I think it was on some recent discoveries in bio-chemistry-which
I had carried with me to read on the way. I thought no more about it till I got
into the sleigh again that evening, and saw the book in Frome's hand.
"I found it after you were gone," he said.
I put the volume into my pocket and we dropped back into our usual silence;
but as we began to crawl up the long hill from Corbury Flats to the Starkfield
ridge I became aware in the dusk that he had turned his face to mine.
"There are things in that book that I didn't know the first word
about," he said.
I wondered less at his words than at the queer note of resentment in his
voice. He was evidently surprised and slightly aggrieved at his own ignorance.
"Does that sort of thing interest you?" I asked.
"It used to."
"There are one or two rather new things in the book: there have been
some big strides lately in that particular line of research." I waited a
moment for an answer that did not come; then I said: "If you'd like to
look the book through I'd be glad to leave it with you."
He hesitated, and I had the impression that he felt himself about to yield
to a stealing tide of inertia; then, "Thank you-I'll take it," he
answered shortly.
I hoped that this incident might set up some more direct communication
between us. Frome was so simple and straightforward that I was sure his
curiosity about the book was based on a genuine interest in its subject. Such
tastes and acquirements in a man of his condition made the contrast more
poignant between his outer situation and his inner needs, and I hoped that the chance
of giving expression to the latter might at least unseal his lips. But
something in his past history, or in his present way of living, had apparently
driven him too deeply into himself for any casual impulse to draw him back to
his kind. At our next meeting he made no allusion to the book, and our
intercourse seemed fated to remain as negative and one-sided as if there had
been no break in his reserve.
Frome had been driving me over to the Flats for about a week when one
morning I looked out of my window into a thick snow-fall. The height of the
white waves massed against the garden-fence and along the wall of the church
showed that the storm must have been going on all night, and that the drifts
were likely to be heavy in the open. I thought it probable that my train would
be delayed; but I had to be at the power-house for an hour or two that
afternoon, and I decided, if Frome turned up, to push through to the Flats and
wait there till my train came in. I don't know why I put it in the conditional,
however, for I never doubted that Frome would appear. He was not the kind of
man to be turned from his business by any commotion of the elements; and at the
appointed hour his sleigh glided up through the snow like a stage-apparition
behind thickening veils of gauze.
I was getting to know him too well to express either wonder or gratitude at
his keeping his appointment; but I exclaimed in surprise as I saw him turn his
horse in a direction opposite to that of the Corbury road.
"The railroad's blocked by a freight-train that got stuck in a drift
below the Flats," he explained, as we jogged off into the stinging
whiteness.
"But look here-where are you taking me, then?"
"Straight to the Junction, by the shortest way," he answered,
pointing up School House Hill with his whip.
"To the Junction-in this storm? Why, it's a good ten miles!"
"The bay'll do it if you give him time. You said you had some business
there this afternoon. I'll see you get there."
He said it so quietly that I could only answer: "You're doing me the
biggest kind of a favour."
"That's all right," he rejoined.
Abreast of the schoolhouse the road forked, and we dipped down a lane to
the left, between hemlock boughs bent inward to their trunks by the weight of
the snow. I had often walked that way on Sundays, and knew that the solitary
roof showing through bare branches near the bottom of the hill was that of
Frome's saw-mill. It looked exanimate enough, with its idle wheel looming above
the black stream dashed with yellow-white spume, and its cluster of sheds
sagging under their white load. Frome did not even turn his head as we drove
by, and still in silence we began to mount the next slope. About a mile
farther, on a road I had never travelled, we came to an orchard of starved
apple-trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled
up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the
orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the
fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those
lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier.
"That's my place," said Frome, with a sideway jerk of his lame
elbow; and in the distress and oppression of the scene I did not know what to
answer. The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the house
on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness. The black wraith of a
deciduous creeper flapped from the porch, and the thin wooden walls, under
their worn coat of paint, seemed to shiver in the wind that had risen with the
ceasing of the snow.
"The house was bigger in my father's time: I had to take down the 'L,'
a while back," Frome continued, checking with a twitch of the left rein
the bay's evident intention of turning in through the broken-down gate.
I saw then that the unusually forlorn and stunted look of the house was
partly due to the loss of what is known in New England as the "L":
that long deep-roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main house,
and connecting it, by way of storerooms and tool-house, with the wood-shed and
cow-barn. Whether because of its symbolic sense, the image it presents of a
life linked with the soil, and enclosing in itself the chief sources of warmth
and nourishment, or whether merely because of the consolatory thought that it
enables the dwellers in that harsh climate to get to their morning's work
without facing the weather, it is certain that the "L" rather than
the house itself seems to be the centre, the actual hearth-stone of the New
England farm. Perhaps this connection of ideas, which had often occurred to me
in my rambles about Starkfield, caused me to hear a wistful note in Frome's
words, and to see in the diminished dwelling the image of his own shrunken
body.
"We're kinder side-tracked here now," he added, "but there
was considerable passing before the railroad was carried through to the
Flats." He roused the lagging bay with another twitch; then, as if the
mere sight of the house had let me too deeply into his confidence for any
farther pretence of reserve, he went on slowly: "I've always set down the
worst of mother's trouble to that. When she got the rheumatism so bad she
couldn't move around she used to sit up there and watch the road by the hour;
and one year, when they was six months mending the Bettsbridge pike after the
floods, and Harmon Gow had to bring his stage round this way, she picked up so
that she used to get down to the gate most days to see him. But after the
trains begun running nobody ever come by here to speak of, and mother never
could get it through her head what had happened, and it preyed on her right
along till she died."
As we turned into the Corbury road the snow began to fall again, cutting
off our last glimpse of the house; and Frome's silence fell with it, letting
down between us the old veil of reticence. This time the wind did not cease
with the return of the snow. Instead, it sprang up to a gale which now and
then, from a tattered sky, flung pale sweeps of sunlight over a landscape
chaotically tossed. But the bay was as good as Frome's word, and we pushed on
to the Junction through the wild white scene.
In the afternoon the storm held off, and the clearness in the west seemed
to my inexperienced eye the pledge of a fair evening. I finished my business as
quickly as possible, and we set out for Starkfield with a good chance of
getting there for supper. But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an
earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky
without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and
eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be
the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.
The small ray of Frome's lantern was soon lost in this smothering medium,
in which even his sense of direction, and the bay's homing instinct, finally
ceased to serve us. Two or three times some ghostly landmark sprang up to warn
us that we were astray, and then was sucked back into the mist; and when we
finally regained our road the old horse began to show signs of exhaustion. I
felt myself to blame for having accepted Frome's offer, and after a short
discussion I persuaded him to let me get out of the sleigh and walk along
through the snow at the bay's side. In this way we struggled on for another
mile or two, and at last reached a point where Frome, peering into what seemed
to me formless night, said: "That's my gate down yonder."
The last stretch had been the hardest part of the way. The bitter cold and
the heavy going had nearly knocked the wind out of me, and I could feel the
horse's side ticking like a clock under my hand.
"Look here, Frome," I began, "there's no earthly use in your
going any farther-" but he interrupted me: "Nor you neither. There's
been about enough of this for anybody."
I understood that he was offering me a night's shelter at the farm, and
without answering I turned into the gate at his side, and followed him to the
barn, where I helped him to unharness and bed down the tired horse. When this
was done he unhooked the lantern from the sleigh, stepped out again into the
night, and called to me over his shoulder: "This way."
Far off above us a square of light trembled through the screen of snow.
Staggering along in Frome's wake I floundered toward it, and in the darkness
almost fell into one of the deep drifts against the front of the house. Frome
scrambled up the slippery steps of the porch, digging a way through the snow
with his heavily booted foot. Then he lifted his lantern, found the latch, and
led the way into the house. I went after him into a low unlit passage, at the
back of which a ladder-like staircase rose into obscurity. On our right a line
of light marked the door of the room which had sent its ray across the night;
and behind the door I heard a woman's voice droning querulously.
Frome stamped on the worn oil-cloth to shake the snow from his boots, and
set down his lantern on a kitchen chair which was the only piece of furniture
in the hall. Then he opened the door.
"Come in," he said; and as he spoke the droning voice grew
still...
It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put
together this vision of his story.
CHAPTER 1.
As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the
projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely muffled
groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a face flushed with
food and dancing. The villagers, being afoot, were the first to climb the slope
to the main street, while the country neighbours packed themselves more slowly
into the sleighs under the shed.
"Ain't you riding, Mattie?" a woman's voice called back from the
throng about the shed, and Ethan's heart gave a jump. From where he stood he
could not see the persons coming out of the hall till they had advanced a few
steps beyond the wooden sides of the storm-door; but through its cracks he
heard a clear voice answer: "Mercy no! Not on such a night."
She was there, then, close to him, only a thin board between. In another
moment she would step forth into the night, and his eyes, accustomed to the
obscurity, would discern her as clearly as though she stood in daylight. A wave
of shyness pulled him back into the dark angle of the wall, and he stood there
in silence instead of making his presence known to her. It had been one of the
wonders of their intercourse that from the first, she, the quicker, finer, more
expressive, instead of crushing him by the contrast, had given him something of
her own ease and freedom; but now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his
student days, when he had tried to "jolly" the Worcester girls at a
picnic.
He hung back, and she came out alone and paused within a few yards of him.
She was almost the last to leave the hall, and she stood looking uncertainly
about her as if wondering why he did not show himself. Then a man's figure
approached, coming so close to her that under their formless wrappings they
seemed merged in one dim outline.
"Gentleman friend gone back on you? Say, Matt, that's tough! No, I
wouldn't be mean enough to tell the other girls. I ain't as low-down as
that." (How Frome hated his cheap banter!) "But look a here, ain't it
lucky I got the old man's cutter down there waiting for us?"
Frome heard the girl's voice, gaily incredulous: "What on earth's your
father's cutter doin' down there?"
"Why, waiting for me to take a ride. I got the roan colt too. I kinder
knew I'd want to take a ride to-night," Eady, in his triumph, tried to put
a sentimental note into his bragging voice.
The girl seemed to waver, and Frome saw her twirl the end of her scarf
irresolutely about her fingers. Not for the world would he have made a sign to
her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture.
"Hold on a minute while I unhitch the colt," Denis called to her,
springing toward the shed.
She stood perfectly still, looking after him, in an attitude of tranquil
expectancy torturing to the hidden watcher. Frome noticed that she no longer
turned her head from side to side, as though peering through the night for
another figure. She let Denis Eady lead out the horse, climb into the cutter
and fling back the bearskin to make room for her at his side; then, with a
swift motion of flight, she turned about and darted up the slope toward the
front of the church.
"Good-bye! Hope you'll have a lovely ride!" she called back to
him over her shoulder.
Denis laughed, and gave the horse a cut that brought him quickly abreast of
her retreating figure.
"Come along! Get in quick! It's as slippery as thunder on this
turn," he cried, leaning over to reach out a hand to her.
She laughed back at him: "Good-night! I'm not getting in."
By this time they had passed beyond Frome's earshot and he could only
follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes as they continued to move
along the crest of the slope above him. He saw Eady, after a moment, jump from
the cutter and go toward the girl with the reins over one arm. The other he
tried to slip through hers; but she eluded him nimbly, and Frome's heart, which
had swung out over a black void, trembled back to safety. A moment later he
heard the jingle of departing sleigh bells and discerned a figure advancing
alone toward the empty expanse of snow before the church.
In the black shade of the Varnum spruces he caught up with her and she
turned with a quick "Oh!"
"Think I'd forgotten you, Matt?" he asked with sheepish glee.
She answered seriously: "I thought maybe you couldn't come back for
me."
"Couldn't? What on earth could stop me?"
"I knew Zeena wasn't feeling any too good to-day."
"Oh, she's in bed long ago." He paused, a question struggling in
him. "Then you meant to walk home all alone?"
"Oh, I ain't afraid!" she laughed.
They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering
about them wide and grey under the stars. He brought his question out.
"If you thought I hadn't come, why didn't you ride back with Denis
Eady?"
"Why, where were you? How did you know? I never saw you!"
Her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw. Ethan
had the sense of having done something arch and ingenious. To prolong the
effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in a growl of rapture:
"Come along."
He slipped an arm through hers, as Eady had done, and fancied it was
faintly pressed against her side. but neither of them moved. It was so dark
under the spruces that he could barely see the shape of her head beside his
shoulder. He longed to stoop his cheek and rub it against her scarf. He would
have liked to stand there with her all night in the blackness. She moved
forward a step or two and then paused again above the dip of the Corbury road.
Its icy slope, scored by innumerable runners, looked like a mirror scratched by
travellers at an inn.
"There was a whole lot of them coasting before the moon set," she
said.
"Would you like to come in and coast with them some night?" he
asked.
"Oh, would you, Ethan? It would be lovely!"
"We'll come to-morrow if there's a moon."
She lingered, pressing closer to his side. "Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum
came just as near running into the big elm at the bottom. We were all sure they
were killed." Her shiver ran down his arm. "Wouldn't it have been too
awful? They're so happy!"
"Oh, Ned ain't much at steering. I guess I can take you down all
right!" he said disdainfully.
He was aware that he was "talking big," like Denis Eady; but his
reaction of joy had unsteadied him, and the inflection with which she had said
of the engaged couple "They're so happy!" made the words sound as if
she had been thinking of herself and him.
"The elm is dangerous, though. It ought to be cut down," she
insisted.
"Would you be afraid of it, with me?"
"I told you I ain't the kind to be afraid" she tossed back,
almost indifferently; and suddenly she began to walk on with a rapid step.
These alterations of mood were the despair and joy of Ethan Frome. The
motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches.
The fact that he had no right to show his feelings, and thus provoke the
expression of hers, made him attach a fantastic importance to every change in
her look and tone. Now he thought she understood him, and feared; now he was
sure she did not, and despaired. To-night the pressure of accumulated
misgivings sent the scale drooping toward despair, and her indifference was the
more chilling after the flush of joy into which she had plunged him by
dismissing Denis Eady. He mounted School House Hill at her side and walked on
in silence till they reached the lane leading to the saw-mill; then the need of
some definite assurance grew too strong for him.
"You'd have found me right off if you hadn't gone back to have that
last reel with Denis," he brought out awkwardly. He could not pronounce
the name without a stiffening of the muscles of his throat.
"Why, Ethan, how could I tell you were there?"
"I suppose what folks say is true," he jerked out at her, instead
of answering.
She stopped short, and he felt, in the darkness, that her face was lifted
quickly to his. "Why, what do folks say?"
"It's natural enough you should be leaving us" he floundered on,
following his thought.
"Is that what they say?" she mocked back at him; then, with a
sudden drop of her sweet treble: "You mean that Zeena-ain't suited with me
any more?" she faltered.
Their arms had slipped apart and they stood motionless, each seeking to
distinguish the other's face.
"I know I ain't anything like as smart as I ought to be," she
went on, while he vainly struggled for expression. "There's lots of things
a hired girl could do that come awkward to me still-and I haven't got much
strength in my arms. But if she'd only tell me I'd try. You know she hardly
ever says anything, and sometimes I can see she ain't suited, and yet I don't
know why." She turned on him with a sudden flash of indignation.
"You'd ought to tell me, Ethan Frome-you'd ought to! Unless you want me to
go too-"
Unless he wanted her to go too! The cry was balm to his raw wound. The iron
heavens seemed to melt and rain down sweetness. Again he struggled for the
all-expressive word, and again, his arm in hers, found only a deep "Come
along."
They walked on in silence through the blackness of the hemlock-shaded lane,
where Ethan's sawmill gloomed through the night, and out again into the
comparative clearness of the fields. On the farther side of the hemlock belt
the open country rolled away before them grey and lonely under the stars.
Sometimes their way led them under the shade of an overhanging bank or through
the thin obscurity of a clump of leafless trees. Here and there a farmhouse
stood far back among the fields, mute and cold as a grave-stone. The night was
so still that they heard the frozen snow crackle under their feet. The crash of
a loaded branch falling far off in the woods reverberated like a musket-shot,
and once a fox barked, and Mattie shrank closer to Ethan, and quickened her
steps.
At length they sighted the group of larches at Ethan's gate, and as they
drew near it the sense that the walk was over brought back his words.
"Then you don't want to leave us, Matt?"
He had to stoop his head to catch her stifled whisper: "Where'd I go,
if I did?"
The answer sent a pang through him but the tone suffused him with joy. He
forgot what else he had meant to say and pressed her against him so closely
that he seemed to feel her warmth in his veins.
"You ain't crying are you, Matt?"
"No, of course I'm not," she quavered.
They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where,
enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles through
the snow. Ethan looked at them curiously. For years that quiet company had
mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom. "We never got
away-how should you?" seemed to be written on every headstone; and
whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a shiver: "I shall
just go on living here till I join them." But now all desire for change
had vanished, and the sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of
continuance and stability.
"I guess we'll never let you go, Matt," he whispered, as though
even the dead, lovers once, must conspire with him to keep her; and brushing by
the graves, he thought: "We'll always go on living here together, and some
day she'll lie there beside me."
He let the vision possess him as they climbed the hill to the house. He was
never so happy with her as when he abandoned himself to these dreams. Half-way
up the slope Mattie stumbled against some unseen obstruction and clutched his
sleeve to steady herself. The wave of warmth that went through him was like the
prolongation of his vision. For the first time he stole his arm about her, and
she did not resist. They walked on as if they were floating on a summer stream.
Zeena always went to bed as soon as she had had her supper, and the
shutterless windows of the house were dark. A dead cucumber-vine dangled from
the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death, and the thought
flashed through Ethan's brain: "If it was there for Zeena-" Then he
had a distinct sight of his wife lying in their bedroom asleep, her mouth
slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed...
They walked around to the back of the house, between the rigid gooseberry
bushes. It was Zeena's habit, when they came back late from the village, to
leave the key of the kitchen door under the mat. Ethan stood before the door,
his head heavy with dreams, his arm still about Mattie. "Matt-" he
began, not knowing what he meant to say.
She slipped out of his hold without speaking, and he stooped down and felt
for the key.
"It's not there!" he said, straightening himself with a start.
They strained their eyes at each other through the icy darkness. Such a
thing had never happened before.
"Maybe she's forgotten it," Mattie said in a tremulous whisper;
but both of them knew that it was not like Zeena to forget.
"It might have fallen off into the snow," Mattie continued, after
a pause during which they had stood intently listening.
"It must have been pushed off, then," he rejoined in the same
tone. Another wild thought tore through him. What if tramps had been there-what
if...
Again he listened, fancying he heard a distant sound in the house; then he
felt in his pocket for a match, and kneeling down, passed its light slowly over
the rough edges of snow about the doorstep.
He was still kneeling when his eyes, on a level with the lower panel of the
door, caught a faint ray beneath it. Who could be stirring in that silent
house? He heard a step on the stairs, and again for an instant the thought of
tramps tore through him. Then the door opened and he saw his wife.
Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular,
one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held
a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her
puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt,
and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face
under its ring of crimping-pins. To Ethan, still in the rosy haze of his hour
with Mattie, the sight came with the intense precision of the last dream before
waking. He felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like.
She drew aside without speaking, and Mattie and Ethan passed into the
kitchen, which had the deadly chill of a vault after the dry cold of the night.
"Guess you forgot about us, Zeena," Ethan joked, stamping the
snow from his boots.
"No. I just felt so mean I couldn't sleep."
Mattie came forward, unwinding her wraps, the colour of the cherry scarf in
her fresh lips and cheeks. "I'm so sorry, Zeena! Isn't there anything I
can do?"
"No; there's nothing." Zeena turned away from her. "You
might 'a' shook off that snow outside," she said to her husband.
She walked out of the kitchen ahead of them and pausing in the hall raised
the lamp at arm's-length, as if to light them up the stairs.
Ethan paused also, affecting to fumble for the peg on which he hung his
coat and cap. The doors of the two bedrooms faced each other across the narrow
upper landing, and to-night it was peculiarly repugnant to him that Mattie
should see him follow Zeena.
"I guess I won't come up yet awhile," he said, turning as if to
go back to the kitchen.
Zeena stopped short and looked at him. "For the land's sake-what you
going to do down here?"
"I've got the mill accounts to go over."
She continued to stare at him, the flame of the unshaded lamp bringing out
with microscopic cruelty the fretful lines of her face.
"At this time o' night? You'll ketch your death. The fire's out long
ago."
Without answering he moved away toward the kitchen. As he did so his glance
crossed Mattie's and he fancied that a fugitive warning gleamed through her
lashes. The next moment they sank to her flushed cheeks and she began to mount
the stairs ahead of Zeena.
"That's so. It is powerful cold down here," Ethan assented; and
with lowered head he went up in his wife's wake, and followed her across the
threshold of their room.
Chapter 2.
There was some hauling to be done at the lower end of the wood-lot, and
Ethan was out early the next day.
The winter morning was as clear as crystal. The sunrise
burned red in a pure sky, the shadows on the rim of the wood-lot were darkly
blue, and beyond the white and scintillating fields patches of far-off forest
hung like smoke.
It was in the early morning stillness, when his muscles were swinging to
their familiar task and his lungs expanding with long draughts of mountain air,
that Ethan did his clearest thinking. He and Zeena had not exchanged a word
after the door of their room had closed on them. She had measured out some
drops from a medicine-bottle on a chair by the bed and, after swallowing them,
and wrapping her head in a piece of yellow flannel, had lain down with her face
turned away. Ethan undressed hurriedly and blew out the light so that he should
not see her when he took his place at her side. As he lay there he could hear
Mattie moving about in her room, and her candle, sending its small ray across
the landing, drew a scarcely perceptible line of light under his door. He kept
his eyes fixed on the light till it vanished. Then the room grew perfectly
black, and not a sound was audible but Zeena's asthmatic breathing. Ethan felt
confusedly that there were many things he ought to think about, but through his
tingling veins and tired brain only one sensation throbbed: the warmth of
Mattie's shoulder against his. Why had he not kissed her when he held her
there? A few hours earlier he would not have asked himself the question. Even a
few minutes earlier, when they had stood alone outside the house, he would not
have dared to think of kissing her. But since he had seen her lips in the
lamplight he felt that they were his.
Now, in the bright morning air, her face was still before him. It was part
of the sun's red and of the pure glitter on the snow. How the girl had changed
since she had come to Starkfield! He remembered what a colourless slip of a
thing she had looked the day he had met her at the station. And all the first
winter, how she had shivered with cold when the northerly gales shook the thin
clapboards and the snow beat like hail against the loose-hung windows!
He had been afraid that she would hate the hard life, the cold and
loneliness; but not a sign of discontent escaped her. Zeena took the view that
Mattie was bound to make the best of Starkfield since she hadn't any other
place to go to; but this did not strike Ethan as conclusive. Zeena, at any
rate, did not apply the principle in her own case.
He felt all the more sorry for the girl because misfortune had, in a sense,
indentured her to them. Mattie Silver was the daughter of a cousin of Zenobia
Frome's, who had inflamed his clan with mingled sentiments of envy and
admiration by descending from the hills to Connecticut, where he had married a
Stamford girl and succeeded to her father's thriving "drug" business.
Unhappily Orin Silver, a man of far-reaching aims, had died too soon to prove
that the end justifies the means. His accounts revealed merely what the means
had been; and these were such that it was fortunate for his wife and daughter
that his books were examined only after his impressive funeral. His wife died
of the disclosure, and Mattie, at twenty, was left alone to make her way on the
fifty dollars obtained from the sale of her piano. For this purpose her
equipment, though varied, was inadequate. She could trim a hat, make molasses
candy, recite "Curfew shall not ring to-night," and play "The
Lost Chord" and a pot-pourri from "Carmen." When she tried to
extend the field of her activities in the direction of stenography and book-keeping
her health broke down, and six months on her feet behind the counter of a
department store did not tend to restore it. Her nearest relations had been
induced to place their savings in her father's hands, and though, after his
death, they ungrudgingly acquitted themselves of the Christian duty of
returning good for evil by giving his daughter all the advice at their
disposal, they could hardly be expected to supplement it by material aid. But
when Zenobia's doctor recommended her looking about for some one to help her
with the house-work the clan instantly saw the chance of exacting a
compensation from Mattie. Zenobia, though doubtful of the girl's efficiency,
was tempted by the freedom to find fault without much risk of losing her; and
so Mattie came to Starkfield.
Zenobia's fault-finding was of the silent kind, but not the less
penetrating for that. During the first months Ethan alternately burned with the
desire to see Mattie defy her and trembled with fear of the result. Then the
situation grew less strained. The pure air, and the long summer hours in the
open, gave back life and elasticity to Mattie, and Zeena, with more leisure to
devote to her complex ailments, grew less watchful of the girl's omissions; so
that Ethan, struggling on under the burden of his barren farm and failing
saw-mill, could at least imagine that peace reigned in his house.
There was really, even now, no tangible evidence to the contrary; but since
the previous night a vague dread had hung on his sky-line. It was formed of
Zeena's obstinate silence, of Mattie's sudden look of warning, of the memory of
just such fleeting imperceptible signs as those which told him, on certain
stainless mornings, that before night there would be rain.
His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty.
The hauling was not over till mid-day, and as the lumber was to be delivered to
Andrew Hale, the Starkfield builder, it was really easier for Ethan to send
Jotham Powell, the hired man, back to the farm on foot, and drive the load down
to the village himself. He had scrambled up on the logs, and was sitting
astride of them, close over his shaggy grays, when, coming between him and
their streaming necks, he had a vision of the warning look that Mattie had
given him the night before.
"If there's going to be any trouble I want to be there," was his
vague reflection, as he threw to Jotham the unexpected order to unhitch the
team and lead them back to the barn.
It was a slow trudge home through the heavy fields, and when the two men
entered the kitchen Mattie was lifting the coffee from the stove and Zeena was
already at the table. Her husband stopped short at sight of her. Instead of her
usual calico wrapper and knitted shawl she wore her best dress of brown merino,
and above her thin strands of hair, which still preserved the tight undulations
of the crimping-pins, rose a hard perpendicular bonnet, as to which Ethan's
clearest notion was that he had to pay five dollars for it at the Bettsbridge
Emporium. On the floor beside her stood his old valise and a bandbox wrapped in
newspapers.
"Why, where are you going, Zeena?" he exclaimed.
"I've got my shooting pains so bad that I'm going over to Bettsbridge
to spend the night with Aunt Martha Pierce and see that new doctor," she
answered in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she had said she was going into the
store-room to take a look at the preserves, or up to the attic to go over the
blankets.
In spite of her sedentary habits such abrupt decisions were not without
precedent in Zeena's history. Twice or thrice before she had suddenly packed
Ethan's valise and started off to Bettsbridge, or even Springfield, to seek the
advice of some new doctor, and her husband had grown to dread these expeditions
because of their cost. Zeena always came back laden with expensive remedies,
and her last visit to Springfield had been commemorated by her paying twenty
dollars for an electric battery of which she had never been able to learn the
use. But for the moment his sense of relief was so great as to preclude all
other feelings. He had now no doubt that Zeena had spoken the truth in saying,
the night before, that she had sat up because she felt "too mean" to
sleep: her abrupt resolve to seek medical advice showed that, as usual, she was
wholly absorbed in her health.
As if expecting a protest, she continued plaintively; "If you're too
busy with the hauling I presume you can let Jotham Powell drive me over with
the sorrel in time to ketch the train at the Flats."
Her husband hardly heard what she was saying. During the winter months
there was no stage between Starkfield and Bettsbridge, and the trains which
stopped at Corbury Flats were slow and infrequent. A rapid calculation showed
Ethan that Zeena could not be back at the farm before the following evening....
"If I'd supposed you'd 'a' made any objection to Jotham Powell's
driving me over-" she began again, as though his silence had implied
refusal. On the brink of departure she was always seized with a flux of words.
"All I know is," she continued, "I can't go on the way I am much
longer. The pains are clear away down to my ankles now, or I'd 'a' walked in to
Starkfield on my own feet, sooner'n put you out, and asked Michael Eady to let
me ride over on his wagon to the Flats, when he sends to meet the train that
brings his groceries. I'd 'a' had two hours to wait in the station, but I'd
sooner 'a' done it, even with this cold, than to have you say-"
"Of course Jotham'll drive you over," Ethan roused himself to
answer. He became suddenly conscious that he was looking at Mattie while Zeena
talked to him, and with an effort he turned his eyes to his wife. She sat
opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of snow made
her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened the three
parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous lines from her thin
nose to the corners of her mouth. Though she was but seven years her husband's
senior, and he was only twenty-eight, she was already an old woman.
Ethan tried to say something befitting the occasion, but there was only one
thought in his mind: the fact that, for the first time since Mattie had come to
live with them, Zeena was to be away for a night. He wondered if the girl were
thinking of it too....
He knew that Zeena must be wondering why he did not offer to drive her to
the Flats and let Jotham Powell take the lumber to Starkfield, and at first he
could not think of a pretext for not doing so; then he said: "I'd take you
over myself, only I've got to collect the cash for the lumber."
As soon as the words were spoken he regretted them, not only because they
were untrue-there being no prospect of his receiving cash payment from Hale-but
also because he knew from experience the imprudence of letting Zeena think he
was in funds on the eve of one of her therapeutic excursions. At the moment,
however, his one desire was to avoid the long drive with her behind the ancient
sorrel who never went out of a walk.
Zeena made no reply: she did not seem to hear what he had said. She had
already pushed her plate aside, and was measuring out a draught from a large
bottle at her elbow.
"It ain't done me a speck of good, but I guess I might as well use it
up," she remarked; adding, as she pushed the empty bottle toward Mattie:
"If you can get the taste out it'll do for pickles."
Chapter 3.
As soon as his wife had driven off Ethan took his coat and cap from the
peg. Mattie was washing up the dishes, humming one of the dance tunes of the
night before. He said "So long, Matt," and she answered gaily
"So long, Ethan"; and that was all.
It was warm and bright in the kitchen. The sun slanted through the south
window on the girl's moving figure, on the cat dozing in a chair, and on the
geraniums brought in from the door-way, where Ethan had planted them in the summer
to "make a garden" for Mattie. He would have liked to linger on,
watching her tidy up and then settle down to her sewing; but he wanted still
more to get the hauling done and be back at the farm before night.
All the way down to the village he continued to think of his return to
Mattie. The kitchen was a poor place, not "spruce" and shining as his
mother had kept it in his boyhood; but it was surprising what a homelike look
the mere fact of Zeena's absence gave it. And he pictured what it would be like
that evening, when he and Mattie were there after supper. For the first time
they would be alone together indoors, and they would sit there, one on each
side of the stove, like a married couple, he in his stocking feet and smoking
his pipe, she laughing and talking in that funny way she had, which was always
as new to him as if he had never heard her before.
The sweetness of the picture, and the relief of knowing that his fears of
"trouble" with Zeena were unfounded, sent up his spirits with a rush,
and he, who was usually so silent, whistled and sang aloud as he drove through
the snowy fields. There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the
long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and
inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to
the marrow by friendly human intercourse. At Worcester, though he had the name
of keeping to himself and not being much of a hand at a good time, he had
secretly gloried in being clapped on the back and hailed as "Old
Ethe" or "Old Stiff"; and the cessation of such familiarities
had increased the chill of his return to Starkfield.
There the silence had deepened about him year by year. Left alone, after
his father's accident, to carry the burden of farm and mill, he had had no time
for convivial loiterings in the village; and when his mother fell ill the
loneliness of the house grew more oppressive than that of the fields. His
mother had been a talker in her day, but after her "trouble" the
sound of her voice was seldom heard, though she had not lost the power of
speech. Sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when in desperation her son
asked her why she didn't "say something," she would lift a finger and
answer: "Because I'm listening"; and on stormy nights, when the loud
wind was about the house, she would complain, if he spoke to her: "They're
talking so out there that I can't hear you."
It was only when she drew toward her last illness, and his cousin Zenobia
Pierce came over from the next valley to help him nurse her, that human speech
was heard again in the house. After the mortal silence of his long imprisonment
Zeena's volubility was music in his ears. He felt that he might have "gone
like his mother" if the sound of a new voice had not come to steady him.
Zeena seemed to understand his case at a glance. She laughed at him for not
knowing the simplest sick-bed duties and told him to "go right along
out" and leave her to see to things. The mere fact of obeying her orders,
of feeling free to go about his business again and talk with other men,
restored his shaken balance and magnified his sense of what he owed her. Her
efficiency shamed and dazzled him. She seemed to possess by instinct all the
household wisdom that his long apprenticeship had not instilled in him. When
the end came it was she who had to tell him to hitch up and go for the
undertaker, and she thought it "funny" that he had not settled
beforehand who was to have his mother's clothes and the sewing-machine. After
the funeral, when he saw her preparing to go away, he was seized with an
unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm; and before he knew what he
was doing he had asked her to stay there with him. He had often thought since
that it would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of
winter...
When they married it was agreed that, as soon as he could straighten out
the difficulties resulting from Mrs. Frome's long illness, they would sell the
farm and saw-mill and try their luck in a large town. Ethan's love of nature
did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an
engineer, and to live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and
"fellows doing things." A slight engineering job in Florida, put in
his way during his period of study at Worcester, increased his faith in his
ability as well as his eagerness to see the world; and he felt sure that, with
a "smart" wife like Zeena, it would not be long before he had made
himself a place in it.
Zeena's native village was slightly larger and nearer to the railway than
Starkfield, and she had let her husband see from the first that life on an
isolated farm was not what she had expected when she married. But purchasers
were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan learned the impossibility
of transplanting her. She chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not
have lived in a place which looked down on her. Even Bettsbridge or Shadd's
Falls would not have been sufficiently aware of her, and in the greater cities
which attracted Ethan she would have suffered a complete loss of identity. And
within a year of their marriage she developed the "sickliness" which
had since made her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances.
When she came to take care of his mother she had seemed to Ethan like the very
genius of health, but he soon saw that her skill as a nurse had been acquired
by the absorbed observation of her own symptoms.
Then she too fell silent. Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life on
the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes said, it was because Ethan "never
listened." The charge was not wholly unfounded. When she spoke it was only
to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy; and to check
a tendency to impatient retort he had first formed the habit of not answering
her, and finally of thinking of other things while she talked. Of late,
however, since he had reasons for observing her more closely, her silence had
begun to trouble him. He recalled his mother's growing taciturnity, and wondered
if Zeena were also turning "queer." Women did, he knew. Zeena, who
had at her fingers' ends the pathological chart of the whole region, had cited
many cases of the kind while she was nursing his mother; and he himself knew of
certain lonely farm-houses in the neighbourhood where stricken creatures pined,
and of others where sudden tragedy had come of their presence. At times,
looking at Zeena's shut face, he felt the chill of such forebodings. At other
times her silence seemed deliberately assumed to conceal far-reaching
intentions, mysterious conclusions drawn from suspicions and resentments
impossible to guess. That supposition was even more disturbing than the other;
and it was the one which had come to him the night before, when he had seen her
standing in the kitchen door.
Now her departure for Bettsbridge had once more eased his mind, and all his
thoughts were on the prospect of his evening with Mattie. Only one thing
weighed on him, and that was his having told Zeena that he was to receive cash
for the lumber. He foresaw so clearly the consequences of this imprudence that
with considerable reluctance he decided to ask Andrew Hale for a small advance
on his load.
When Ethan drove into Hale's yard the builder was just getting out of his
sleigh.
"Hello, Ethe!" he said. "This comes handy."
Andrew Hale was a ruddy man with a big gray moustache and a stubbly
double-chin unconstrained by a collar; but his scrupulously clean shirt was
always fastened by a small diamond stud. This display of opulence was misleading,
for though he did a fairly good business it was known that his easygoing habits
and the demands of his large family frequently kept him what Starkfield called
"behind." He was an old friend of Ethan's family, and his house one
of the few to which Zeena occasionally went, drawn there by the fact that Mrs.
Hale, in her youth, had done more "doctoring" than any other woman in
Starkfield, and was still a recognised authority on symptoms and treatment.
Hale went up to the grays and patted their sweating flanks.
"Well, sir," he said, "you keep them two as if they was
pets."
Ethan set about unloading the logs and when he had finished his job he
pushed open the glazed door of the shed which the builder used as his office.
Hale sat with his feet up on the stove, his back propped against a battered
desk strewn with papers: the place, like the man, was warm, genial and untidy.
"Sit right down and thaw out," he greeted Ethan.
The latter did not know how to begin, but at length he managed to bring out
his request for an advance of fifty dollars. The blood rushed to his thin skin
under the sting of Hale's astonishment. It was the builder's custom to pay at
the end of three months, and there was no precedent between the two men for a
cash settlement.
Ethan felt that if he had pleaded an urgent need Hale might have made shift
to pay him; but pride, and an instinctive prudence, kept him from resorting to
this argument. After his father's death it had taken time to get his head above
water, and he did not want Andrew Hale, or any one else in Starkfield, to think
he was going under again. Besides, he hated lying; if he wanted the money he
wanted it, and it was nobody's business to ask why. He therefore made his
demand with the awkwardness of a proud man who will not admit to himself that
he is stooping; and he was not much surprised at Hale's refusal.
The builder refused genially, as he did everything else: he treated the
matter as something in the nature of a practical joke, and wanted to know if
Ethan meditated buying a grand piano or adding a "cupolo" to his
house; offering, in the latter case, to give his services free of cost.
Ethan's arts were soon exhausted, and after an embarrassed pause he wished
Hale good day and opened the door of the office. As he passed out the builder
suddenly called after him: "See here-you ain't in a tight place, are
you?"
"Not a bit," Ethan's pride retorted before his reason had time to
intervene.
"Well, that's good! Because I am, a shade. Fact is, I was going to ask
you to give me a little extra time on that payment. Business is pretty slack,
to begin with, and then I'm fixing up a little house for Ned and Ruth when
they're married. I'm glad to do it for 'em, but it costs." His look
appealed to Ethan for sympathy. "The young people like things nice. You
know how it is yourself: it's not so long ago since you fixed up your own place
for Zeena."
Ethan left the grays in Hale's stable and went about some other business in
the village. As he walked away the builder's last phrase lingered in his ears,
and he reflected grimly that his seven years with Zeena seemed to Starkfield
"not so long."
The afternoon was drawing to an end, and here and there a lighted pane
spangled the cold gray dusk and made the snow look whiter. The bitter weather
had driven every one indoors and Ethan had the long rural street to himself.
Suddenly he heard the brisk play of sleigh-bells and a cutter passed him, drawn
by a free-going horse. Ethan recognised Michael Eady's roan colt, and young
Denis Eady, in a handsome new fur cap, leaned forward and waved a greeting.
"Hello, Ethe!" he shouted and spun on.
The cutter was going in the direction of the Frome farm, and Ethan's heart
contracted as he listened to the dwindling bells. What more likely than that
Denis Eady had heard of Zeena's departure for Bettsbridge, and was profiting by
the opportunity to spend an hour with Mattie? Ethan was ashamed of the storm of
jealousy in his breast. It seemed unworthy of the girl that his thoughts of her
should be so violent.
He walked on to the church corner and entered the shade of the Varnum
spruces, where he had stood with her the night before. As he passed into their
gloom he saw an indistinct outline just ahead of him. At his approach it melted
for an instant into two separate shapes and then conjoined again, and he heard
a kiss, and a half-laughing "Oh!" provoked by the discovery of his
presence. Again the outline hastily disunited and the Varnum gate slammed on
one half while the other hurried on ahead of him. Ethan smiled at the discomfiture
he had caused. What did it matter to Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum if they were
caught kissing each other? Everybody in Starkfield knew they were engaged. It
pleased Ethan to have surprised a pair of lovers on the spot where he and
Mattie had stood with such a thirst for each other in their hearts; but he felt
a pang at the thought that these two need not hide their happiness.
He fetched the grays from Hale's stable and started on his long climb back
to the farm. The cold was less sharp than earlier in the day and a thick fleecy
sky threatened snow for the morrow. Here and there a star pricked through,
showing behind it a deep well of blue. In an hour or two the moon would push
over the ridge behind the farm, burn a gold-edged rent in the clouds, and then
be swallowed by them. A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt
the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter
sleep.
Ethan's ears were alert for the jingle of sleigh-bells, but not a sound
broke the silence of the lonely road. As he drew near the farm he saw, through
the thin screen of larches at the gate, a light twinkling in the house above
him. "She's up in her room," he said to himself, "fixing herself
up for supper"; and he remembered Zeena's sarcastic stare when Mattie, on
the evening of her arrival, had come down to supper with smoothed hair and a
ribbon at her neck.
He passed by the graves on the knoll and turned his head to glance at one
of the older headstones, which had interested him deeply as a boy because it
bore his name.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
ETHAN FROME AND ENDURANCE HIS WIFE,
WHO DWELLED TOGETHER IN PEACE
FOR FIFTY YEARS.
He used to think that fifty years sounded like a long time to live
together, but now it seemed to him that they might pass in a flash. Then, with
a sudden dart of irony, he wondered if, when their turn came, the same epitaph
would be written over him and Zeena.
He opened the barn-door and craned his head into the obscurity,
half-fearing to discover Denis Eady's roan colt in the stall beside the sorrel.
But the old horse was there alone, mumbling his crib with toothless jaws, and
Ethan whistled cheerfully while he bedded down the grays and shook an extra
measure of oats into their mangers. His was not a tuneful throat-but harsh melodies
burst from it as he locked the barn and sprang up the hill to the house. He
reached the kitchen-porch and turned the door-handle; but the door did not
yield to his touch.
Startled at finding it locked he rattled the handle violently; then he
reflected that Mattie was alone and that it was natural she should barricade
herself at nightfall. He stood in the darkness expecting to hear her step. It
did not come, and after vainly straining his ears he called out in a voice that
shook with joy: "Hello, Matt!"
Silence answered; but in a minute or two he caught a sound on the stairs
and saw a line of light about the door-frame, as he had seen it the night
before. So strange was the precision with which the incidents of the previous
evening were repeating themselves that he half expected, when he heard the key
turn, to see his wife before him on the threshold; but the door opened, and
Mattie faced him.
She stood just as Zeena had stood, a lifted lamp in her hand, against the
black background of the kitchen. She held the light at the same level, and it
drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist
no bigger than a child's. Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on
her lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above
the black curve of her brows.
She wore her usual dress of darkish stuff, and there was no bow at her
neck; but through her hair she had run a streak of crimson ribbon. This tribute
to the unusual transformed and glorified her. She seemed to Ethan taller,
fuller, more womanly in shape and motion. She stood aside, smiling silently,
while he entered, and then moved away from him with something soft and flowing
in her gait. She set the lamp on the table, and he saw that it was carefully
laid for supper, with fresh doughnuts, stewed blueberries and his favourite
pickles in a dish of gay red glass. A bright fire glowed in the stove and the
cat lay stretched before it, watching the table with a drowsy eye.
Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well-being. He went out into the
passage to hang up his coat and pull off his wet boots. When he came back
Mattie had set the teapot on the table and the cat was rubbing itself
persuasively against her ankles.
"Why, Puss! I nearly tripped over you," she cried, the laughter
sparkling through her lashes.
Again Ethan felt a sudden twinge of jealousy. Could it be his coming that
gave her such a kindled face?
"Well, Matt, any visitors?" he threw off, stooping down
carelessly to examine the fastening of the stove.
She nodded and laughed "Yes, one," and he felt a blackness
settling on his brows.
"Who was that?" he questioned, raising himself up to slant a
glance at her beneath his scowl.
Her eyes danced with malice. "Why, Jotham Powell. He came in after he
got back, and asked for a drop of coffee before he went down home."
The blackness lifted and light flooded Ethan's brain. "That all? Well,
I hope you made out to let him have it." And after a pause he felt it
right to add: "I suppose he got Zeena over to the Flats all right?"
"Oh, yes; in plenty of time."
The name threw a chill between them, and they stood a moment looking
sideways at each other before Mattie said with a shy laugh. "I guess it's
about time for supper."
They drew their seats up to the table, and the cat, unbidden, jumped
between them into Zeena's empty chair. "Oh, Puss!" said Mattie, and
they laughed again.
Ethan, a moment earlier, had felt himself on the brink of eloquence; but
the mention of Zeena had paralysed him. Mattie seemed to feel the contagion of
his embarrassment, and sat with downcast lids, sipping her tea, while he
feigned an insatiable appetite for dough-nuts and sweet pickles. At last, after
casting about for an effective opening, he took a long gulp of tea, cleared his
throat, and said: "Looks as if there'd be more snow."
She feigned great interest. "Is that so? Do you suppose it'll
interfere with Zeena's getting back?" She flushed red as the question
escaped her, and hastily set down the cup she was lifting.
Ethan reached over for another helping of pickles. "You never can
tell, this time of year, it drifts so bad on the Flats." The name had
benumbed him again, and once more he felt as if Zeena were in the room between
them.
"Oh, Puss, you're too greedy!" Mattie cried.
The cat, unnoticed, had crept up on muffled paws from Zeena's seat to the
table, and was stealthily elongating its body in the direction of the milk-jug,
which stood between Ethan and Mattie. The two leaned forward at the same moment
and their hands met on the handle of the jug. Mattie's hand was underneath, and
Ethan kept his clasped on it a moment longer than was necessary. The cat,
profiting by this unusual demonstration, tried to effect an unnoticed retreat,
and in doing so backed into the pickle-dish, which fell to the floor with a
crash.
Mattie, in an instant, had sprung from her chair and was down on her knees
by the fragments.
"Oh, Ethan, Ethan-it's all to pieces! What will Zeena say?"
But this time his courage was up. "Well, she'll have to say it to the
cat, any way!" he rejoined with a laugh, kneeling down at Mattie's side to
scrape up the swimming pickles.
She lifted stricken eyes to him. "Yes, but, you see, she never meant
it should be used, not even when there was company; and I had to get up on the
step-ladder to reach it down from the top shelf of the china-closet, where she
keeps it with all her best things, and of course she'll want to know why I did
it-"
The case was so serious that it called forth all of Ethan's latent
resolution.
"She needn't know anything about it if you keep quiet. I'll get
another just like it to-morrow. Where did it come from? I'll go to Shadd's
Falls for it if I have to!"
"Oh, you'll never get another even there! It was a wedding
present-don't you remember? It came all the way from Philadelphia, from Zeena's
aunt that married the minister. That's why she wouldn't ever use it. Oh, Ethan,
Ethan, what in the world shall I do?"
She began to cry, and he felt as if every one of her tears were pouring
over him like burning lead. "Don't, Matt, don't-oh, don't!" he
implored her.
She struggled to her feet, and he rose and followed her helplessly while
she spread out the pieces of glass on the kitchen dresser. It seemed to him as
if the shattered fragments of their evening lay there.
"Here, give them to me," he said in a voice of sudden authority.
She drew aside, instinctively obeying his tone. "Oh, Ethan, what are
you going to do?"
Without replying he gathered the pieces of glass into his broad palm and
walked out of the kitchen to the passage. There he lit a candle-end, opened the
china-closet, and, reaching his long arm up to the highest shelf, laid the
pieces together with such accuracy of touch that a close inspection convinced
him of the impossibility of detecting from below that the dish was broken. If
he glued it together the next morning months might elapse before his wife
noticed what had happened, and meanwhile he might after all be able to match
the dish at Shadd's Falls or Bettsbridge. Having satisfied himself that there
was no risk of immediate discovery he went back to the kitchen with a lighter
step, and found Mattie disconsolately removing the last scraps of pickle from
the floor.
"It's all right, Matt. Come back and finish supper," he commanded
her.
Completely reassured, she shone on him through tear-hung lashes, and his
soul swelled with pride as he saw how his tone subdued her. She did not even
ask what he had done. Except when he was steering a big log down the mountain
to his mill he had never known such a thrilling sense of mastery.
Chapter 4.
They finished supper, and while Mattie cleared the table Ethan went to look
at the cows and then took a last turn about the house. The earth lay dark under
a muffled sky and the air was so still that now and then he heard a lump of
snow come thumping down from a tree far off on the edge of the wood-lot.
When he returned to the kitchen Mattie had pushed up his chair to the stove
and seated herself near the lamp with a bit of sewing. The scene was just as he
had dreamed of it that morning. He sat down, drew his pipe from his pocket and
stretched his feet to the glow. His hard day's work in the keen air made him
feel at once lazy and light of mood, and he had a confused sense of being in
another world, where all was warmth and harmony and time could bring no change.
The only drawback to his complete well-being was the fact that he could not see
Mattie from where he sat; but he was too indolent to move and after a moment he
said: "Come over here and sit by the stove."
Zeena's empty rocking-chair stood facing him. Mattie rose obediently, and
seated herself in it. As her young brown head detached itself against the
patch-work cushion that habitually framed his wife's gaunt countenance, Ethan
had a momentary shock. It was almost as if the other face, the face of the
superseded woman, had obliterated that of the intruder. After a moment Mattie
seemed to be affected by the same sense of constraint. She changed her
position, leaning forward to bend her head above her work, so that he saw only
the foreshortened tip of her nose and the streak of red in her hair; then she
slipped to her feet, saying "I can't see to sew," and went back to
her chair by the lamp.
Ethan made a pretext of getting up to replenish the stove, and when he
returned to his seat he pushed it sideways that he might get a view of her
profile and of the lamplight falling on her hands. The cat, who had been a
puzzled observer of these unusual movements, jumped up into Zeena's chair,
rolled itself into a ball, and lay watching them with narrowed eyes.
Deep quiet sank on the room. The clock ticked above the dresser, a piece of
charred wood fell now and then in the stove, and the faint sharp scent of the
geraniums mingled with the odour of Ethan's smoke, which began to throw a blue
haze about the lamp and to hang its greyish cobwebs in the shadowy corners of
the room.
All constraint had vanished between the two, and they began to talk easily
and simply. They spoke of every-day things, of the prospect of snow, of the
next church sociable, of the loves and quarrels of Starkfield. The commonplace
nature of what they said produced in Ethan an illusion of long-established
intimacy which no outburst of emotion could have given, and he set his
imagination adrift on the fiction that they had always spent their evenings
thus and would always go on doing so...
"This is the night we were to have gone coasting. Matt," he said
at length, with the rich sense, as he spoke, that they could go on any other
night they chose, since they had all time before them.
She smiled back at him. "I guess you forgot!"
"No, I didn't forget; but it's as dark as Egypt outdoors. We might go
to-morrow if there's a moon."
She laughed with pleasure, her head tilted back, the lamplight sparkling on
her lips and teeth. "That would be lovely, Ethan!"
He kept his eyes fixed on her, marvelling at the way her face changed with
each turn of their talk, like a wheat-field under a summer breeze. It was
intoxicating to find such magic in his clumsy words, and he longed to try new
ways of using it.
"Would you be scared to go down the Corbury road with me on a night
like this?" he asked.
Her cheeks burned redder. "I ain't any more scared than you are!"
"Well, I'd be scared, then; I wouldn't do it. That's an ugly corner
down by the big elm. If a fellow didn't keep his eyes open he'd go plumb into
it." He luxuriated in the sense of protection and authority which his
words conveyed. To prolong and intensify the feeling he added: "I guess
we're well enough here."
She let her lids sink slowly, in the way he loved. "Yes, we're well
enough here," she sighed.
Her tone was so sweet that he took the pipe from his mouth and drew his
chair up to the table. Leaning forward, he touched the farther end of the strip
of brown stuff that she was hemming. "Say, Matt," he began with a
smile, "what do you think I saw under the Varnum spruces, coming along
home just now? I saw a friend of yours getting kissed."
The words had been on his tongue all the evening, but now that he had
spoken them they struck him as inexpressibly vulgar and out of place.
Mattie blushed to the roots of her hair and pulled her needle rapidly twice
or thrice through her work, insensibly drawing the end of it away from him.
"I suppose it was Ruth and Ned," she said in a low voice, as though
he had suddenly touched on something grave.
Ethan had imagined that his allusion might open the way to the accepted
pleasantries, and these perhaps in turn to a harmless caress, if only a mere
touch on her hand. But now he felt as if her blush had set a flaming guard
about her. He supposed it was his natural awkwardness that made him feel so. He
knew that most young men made nothing at all of giving a pretty girl a kiss,
and he remembered that the night before, when he had put his arm about Mattie,
she had not resisted. But that had been out-of-doors, under the open
irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient
implications of conformity and order, she seemed infinitely farther away from
him and more unapproachable.
To ease his constraint he said: "I suppose they'll be setting a date
before long."
"Yes. I shouldn't wonder if they got married some time along in the
summer." She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It
seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades. A pang shot through
Ethan, and he said, twisting away from her in his chair: "It'll be your
turn next, I wouldn't wonder."
She laughed a little uncertainly. "Why do you keep on saying
that?"
He echoed her laugh. "I guess I do it to get used to the idea."
He drew up to the table again and she sewed on in silence, with dropped
lashes, while he sat in fascinated contemplation of the way in which her hands
went up and down above the strip of stuff, just as he had seen a pair of birds
make short perpendicular flights over a nest they were building. At length,
without turning her head or lifting her lids, she said in a low tone:
"It's not because you think Zeena's got anything against me, is it?"
His former dread started up full-armed at the suggestion. "Why, what
do you mean?" he stammered.
She raised distressed eyes to his, her work dropping on the table between
them. "I don't know. I thought last night she seemed to have."
"I'd like to know what," he growled.
"Nobody can tell with Zeena." It was the first time they had ever
spoken so openly of her attitude toward Mattie, and the repetition of the name
seemed to carry it to the farther corners of the room and send it back to them
in long repercussions of sound. Mattie waited, as if to give the echo time to
drop, and then went on: "She hasn't said anything to you?"
He shook his head. "No, not a word."
She tossed the hair back from her forehead with a laugh. "I guess I'm
just nervous, then. I'm not going to think about it any more."
"Oh, no-don't let's think about it, Matt!"
The sudden heat of his tone made her colour mount again, not with a rush,
but gradually, delicately, like the reflection of a thought stealing slowly
across her heart. She sat silent, her hands clasped on her work, and it seemed to
him that a warm current flowed toward him along the strip of stuff that still
lay unrolled between them. Cautiously he slid his hand palm-downward along the
table till his finger-tips touched the end of the stuff. A faint vibration of
her lashes seemed to show that she was aware of his gesture, and that it had
sent a counter-current back to her; and she let her hands lie motionless on the
other end of the strip.
As they sat thus he heard a sound behind him and turned his head. The cat
had jumped from Zeena's chair to dart at a mouse in the wainscot, and as a
result of the sudden movement the empty chair had set up a spectral rocking.
"She'll be rocking in it herself this time to-morrow," Ethan
thought. "I've been in a dream, and this is the only evening we'll ever
have together." The return to reality was as painful as the return to
consciousness after taking an anaesthetic. His body and brain ached with
indescribable weariness, and he could think of nothing to say or to do that
should arrest the mad flight of the moments.
His alteration of mood seemed to have communicated itself to Mattie. She
looked up at him languidly, as though her lids were weighted with sleep and it
cost her an effort to raise them. Her glance fell on his hand, which now
completely covered the end of her work and grasped it as if it were a part of
herself. He saw a scarcely perceptible tremor cross her face, and without
knowing what he did he stooped his head and kissed the bit of stuff in his
hold. As his lips rested on it he felt it glide slowly from beneath them, and
saw that Mattie had risen and was silently rolling up her work. She fastened it
with a pin, and then, finding her thimble and scissors, put them with the roll
of stuff into the box covered with fancy paper which he had once brought to her
from Bettsbridge.
He stood up also, looking vaguely about the room. The clock above the
dresser struck eleven.
"Is the fire all right?" she asked in a low voice.
He opened the door of the stove and poked aimlessly at the embers. When he raised
himself again he saw that she was dragging toward the stove the old soap-box
lined with carpet in which the cat made its bed. Then she recrossed the floor
and lifted two of the geranium pots in her arms, moving them away from the cold
window. He followed her and brought the other geraniums, the hyacinth bulbs in
a cracked custard bowl and the German ivy trained over an old croquet hoop.
When these nightly duties were performed there was nothing left to do but
to bring in the tin candlestick from the passage, light the candle and blow out
the lamp. Ethan put the candlestick in Mattie's hand and she went out of the
kitchen ahead of him, the light that she carried before her making her dark
hair look like a drift of mist on the moon.
"Good night, Matt," he said as she put her foot on the first step
of the stairs.
She turned and looked at him a moment. "Good night, Ethan," she
answered, and went up.
When the door of her room had closed on her he remembered that he had not
even touched her hand.
Chapter 5.
The next morning at breakfast Jotham Powell was between them, and Ethan
tried to hide his joy under an air of exaggerated indifference, lounging back
in his chair to throw scraps to the cat, growling at the weather, and not so
much as offering to help Mattie when she rose to clear away the dishes.
He did not know why he was so irrationally happy, for nothing was changed
in his life or hers. He had not even touched the tip of her fingers or looked
her full in the eyes. But their evening together had given him a vision of what
life at her side might be, and he was glad now that he had done nothing to
trouble the sweetness of the picture. He had a fancy that she knew what had
restrained him...
There was a last load of lumber to be hauled to the village, and Jotham
Powell-who did not work regularly for Ethan in winter-had "come
round" to help with the job. But a wet snow, melting to sleet, had fallen
in the night and turned the roads to glass. There was more wet in the air and
it seemed likely to both men that the weather would "milden" toward
afternoon and make the going safer. Ethan therefore proposed to his assistant
that they should load the sledge at the wood-lot, as they had done on the
previous morning, and put off the "teaming" to Starkfield till later
in the day. This plan had the advantage of enabling him to send Jotham to the
Flats after dinner to meet Zenobia, while he himself took the lumber down to
the village.
He told Jotham to go out and harness up the greys, and for a moment he and
Mattie had the kitchen to themselves. She had plunged the breakfast dishes into
a tin dish-pan and was bending above it with her slim arms bared to the elbow,
the steam from the hot water beading her forehead and tightening her rough hair
into little brown rings like the tendrils on the traveller's joy.
Ethan stood looking at her, his heart in his throat. He wanted to say:
"We shall never be alone again like this." Instead, he reached down
his tobacco-pouch from a shelf of the dresser, put it into his pocket and said:
"I guess I can make out to be home for dinner."
She answered "All right, Ethan," and he heard her singing over
the dishes as he went.
As soon as the sledge was loaded he meant to send Jotham back to the farm
and hurry on foot into the village to buy the glue for the pickle-dish. With
ordinary luck he should have had time to carry out this plan; but everything
went wrong from the start. On the way over to the wood-lot one of the greys
slipped on a glare of ice and cut his knee; and when they got him up again
Jotham had to go back to the barn for a strip of rag to bind the cut. Then,
when the loading finally began, a sleety rain was coming down once more, and
the tree trunks were so slippery that it took twice as long as usual to lift
them and get them in place on the sledge. It was what Jotham called a sour
morning for work, and the horses, shivering and stamping under their wet
blankets, seemed to like it as little as the men. It was long past the
dinner-hour when the job was done, and Ethan had to give up going to the
village because he wanted to lead the injured horse home and wash the cut
himself.
He thought that by starting out again with the lumber as soon as he had
finished his dinner he might get back to the farm with the glue before Jotham
and the old sorrel had had time to fetch Zenobia from the Flats; but he knew
the chance was a slight one. It turned on the state of the roads and on the
possible lateness of the Bettsbridge train. He remembered afterward, with a
grim flash of self-derision, what importance he had attached to the weighing of
these probabilities...
As soon as dinner was over he set out again for the wood-lot, not daring to
linger till Jotham Powell left. The hired man was still drying his wet feet at
the stove, and Ethan could only give Mattie a quick look as he said beneath his
breath: "I'll be back early."
He fancied that she nodded her comprehension; and with that scant solace he
had to trudge off through the rain.
He had driven his load half-way to the village when Jotham Powell overtook
him, urging the reluctant sorrel toward the Flats. "I'll have to hurry up
to do it," Ethan mused, as the sleigh dropped down ahead of him over the
dip of the school-house hill. He worked like ten at the unloading, and when it
was over hastened on to Michael Eady's for the glue. Eady and his assistant
were both "down street," and young Denis, who seldom deigned to take
their place, was lounging by the stove with a knot of the golden youth of
Starkfield. They hailed Ethan with ironic compliment and offers of
conviviality; but no one knew where to find the glue. Ethan, consumed with the
longing for a last moment alone with Mattie, hung about impatiently while Denis
made an ineffectual search in the obscurer corners of the store.
"Looks as if we were all sold out. But if you'll wait around till the
old man comes along maybe he can put his hand on it."
"I'm obliged to you, but I'll try if I can get it down at Mrs.
Homan's," Ethan answered, burning to be gone.
Denis's commercial instinct compelled him to aver on oath that what Eady's
store could not produce would never be found at the widow Homan's; but Ethan,
heedless of this boast, had already climbed to the sledge and was driving on to
the rival establishment. Here, after considerable search, and sympathetic
questions as to what he wanted it for, and whether ordinary flour paste
wouldn't do as well if she couldn't find it, the widow Homan finally hunted
down her solitary bottle of glue to its hiding-place in a medley of
cough-lozenges and corset-laces.
"I hope Zeena ain't broken anything she sets store by," she
called after him as he turned the greys toward home.
The fitful bursts of sleet had changed into a steady rain and the horses
had heavy work even without a load behind them. Once or twice, hearing
sleigh-bells, Ethan turned his head, fancying that Zeena and Jotham might
overtake him; but the old sorrel was not in sight, and he set his face against
the rain and urged on his ponderous pair.
The barn was empty when the horses turned into it and, after giving them
the most perfunctory ministrations they had ever received from him, he strode
up to the house and pushed open the kitchen door.
Mattie was there alone, as he had pictured her. She was bending over a pan
on the stove; but at the sound of his step she turned with a start and sprang
to him.
"See, here, Matt, I've got some stuff to mend the dish with! Let me
get at it quick," he cried, waving the bottle in one hand while he put her
lightly aside; but she did not seem to hear him.
"Oh, Ethan-Zeena's come," she said in a whisper, clutching his
sleeve.
They stood and stared at each other, pale as culprits.
"But the sorrel's not in the barn!" Ethan stammered.
"Jotham Powell brought some goods over from the Flats for his wife,
and he drove right on home with them," she explained.
He gazed blankly about the kitchen, which looked cold and squalid in the
rainy winter twilight.
"How is she?" he asked, dropping his voice to Mattie's whisper.
She looked away from him uncertainly. "I don't know. She went right up
to her room."
"She didn't say anything?"
"No."
Ethan let out his doubts in a low whistle and thrust the bottle back into
his pocket. "Don't fret; I'll come down and mend it in the night," he
said. He pulled on his wet coat again and went back to the barn to feed the
greys.
While he was there Jotham Powell drove up with the sleigh, and when the
horses had been attended to Ethan said to him: "You might as well come
back up for a bite." He was not sorry to assure himself of Jotham's
neutralising presence at the supper table, for Zeena was always
"nervous" after a journey. But the hired man, though seldom loth to
accept a meal not included in his wages, opened his stiff jaws to answer
slowly: "I'm obliged to you, but I guess I'll go along back."
Ethan looked at him in surprise. "Better come up and dry off. Looks as
if there'd be something hot for supper."
Jotham's facial muscles were unmoved by this appeal and, his vocabulary
being limited, he merely repeated: "I guess I'll go along back."
To Ethan there was something vaguely ominous in this stolid rejection of
free food and warmth, and he wondered what had happened on the drive to nerve
Jotham to such stoicism. Perhaps Zeena had failed to see the new doctor or had
not liked his counsels: Ethan knew that in such cases the first person she met
was likely to be held responsible for her grievance.
When he re-entered the kitchen the lamp lit up the same scene of shining
comfort as on the previous evening. The table had been as carefully laid, a
clear fire glowed in the stove, the cat dozed in its warmth, and Mattie came
forward carrying a plate of doughnuts.
She and Ethan looked at each other in silence; then she said, as she had
said the night before: "I guess it's about time for supper."
Chapter 6.
Ethan went out into the passage to hang up his wet garments. He listened
for Zeena's step and, not hearing it, called her name up the stairs. She did
not answer, and after a moment's hesitation he went up and opened her door. The
room was almost dark, but in the obscurity he saw her sitting by the window,
bolt upright, and knew by the rigidity of the outline projected against the
pane that she had not taken off her travelling dress.
"Well, Zeena," he ventured from the threshold.
She did not move, and he continued: "Supper's about ready. Ain't you
coming?"
She replied: "I don't feel as if I could touch a morsel."
It was the consecrated formula, and he expected it to be followed, as
usual, by her rising and going down to supper. But she remained seated, and he
could think of nothing more felicitous than: "I presume you're tired after
the long ride."
Turning her head at this, she answered solemnly: "I'm a great deal
sicker than you think."
Her words fell on his ear with a strange shock of wonder. He had often
heard her pronounce them before-what if at last they were true?
He advanced a step or two into the dim room. "I hope that's not so,
Zeena," he said.
She continued to gaze at him through the twilight with a mien of wan
authority, as of one consciously singled out for a great fate. "I've got
complications," she said.
Ethan knew the word for one of exceptional import. Almost everybody in the
neighbourhood had "troubles," frankly localized and specified; but
only the chosen had "complications." To have them was in itself a
distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death-warrant. People
struggled on for years with "troubles," but they almost always
succumbed to "complications."
Ethan's heart was jerking to and fro between two extremities of feeling,
but for the moment compassion prevailed. His wife looked so hard and lonely,
sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts.
"Is that what the new doctor told you?" he asked, instinctively
lowering his voice.
"Yes. He says any regular doctor would want me to have an
operation."
Ethan was aware that, in regard to the important question of surgical
intervention, the female opinion of the neighbourhood was divided, some
glorying in the prestige conferred by operations while others shunned them as indelicate.
Ethan, from motives of economy, had always been glad that Zeena was of the
latter faction.
In the agitation caused by the gravity of her announcement he sought a
consolatory short cut. "What do you know about this doctor anyway? Nobody
ever told you that before."
He saw his blunder before she could take it up: she wanted sympathy, not
consolation.
"I didn't need to have anybody tell me I was losing ground every day.
Everybody but you could see it. And everybody in Bettsbridge knows about Dr.
Buck. He has his office in Worcester, and comes over once a fortnight to
Shadd's Falls and Bettsbridge for consultations. Eliza Spears was wasting away
with kidney trouble before she went to him, and now she's up and around, and
singing in the choir."
"Well, I'm glad of that. You must do just what he tells you,"
Ethan answered sympathetically.
She was still looking at him. "I mean to," she said. He was
struck by a new note in her voice. It was neither whining nor reproachful, but
drily resolute.
"What does he want you should do?" he asked, with a mounting
vision of fresh expenses.
"He wants I should have a hired girl. He says I oughtn't to have to do
a single thing around the house."
"A hired girl?" Ethan stood transfixed.
"Yes. And Aunt Martha found me one right off. Everybody said I was
lucky to get a girl to come away out here, and I agreed to give her a dollar
extry to make sure. She'll be over to-morrow afternoon."
Wrath and dismay contended in Ethan. He had foreseen an immediate demand
for money, but not a permanent drain on his scant resources. He no longer
believed what Zeena had told him of the supposed seriousness of her state: he
saw in her expedition to Bettsbridge only a plot hatched between herself and
her Pierce relations to foist on him the cost of a servant; and for the moment
wrath predominated.
"If you meant to engage a girl you ought to have told me before you
started," he said.
"How could I tell you before I started? How did I know what Dr. Buck
would say?"
"Oh, Dr. Buck-" Ethan's incredulity escaped in a short laugh.
"Did Dr. Buck tell you how I was to pay her wages?"
Her voice rose furiously with his. "No, he didn't. For I'd 'a' been
ashamed to tell him that you grudged me the money to get back my health, when I
lost it nursing your own mother!"
"You lost your health nursing mother?"
"Yes; and my folks all told me at the time you couldn't do no less
than marry me after-"
"Zeena!"
Through the obscurity which hid their faces their thoughts seemed to dart
at each other like serpents shooting venom. Ethan was seized with horror of the
scene and shame at his own share in it. It was as senseless and savage as a
physical fight between two enemies in the darkness.
He turned to the shelf above the chimney, groped for matches and lit the
one candle in the room. At first its weak flame made no impression on the
shadows; then Zeena's face stood grimly out against the uncurtained pane, which
had turned from grey to black.
It was the first scene of open anger between the couple in their sad seven
years together, and Ethan felt as if he had lost an irretrievable advantage in
descending to the level of recrimination. But the practical problem was there
and had to be dealt with.
"You know I haven't got the money to pay for a girl, Zeena. You'll
have to send her back: I can't do it."
"The doctor says it'll be my death if I go on slaving the way I've had
to. He doesn't understand how I've stood it as long as I have."
"Slaving!-" He checked himself again, "You sha'n't lift a
hand, if he says so. I'll do everything round the house myself-"
She broke in: "You're neglecting the farm enough already," and
this being true, he found no answer, and left her time to add ironically:
"Better send me over to the almshouse and done with it... I guess there's
been Fromes there afore now."
The taunt burned into him, but he let it pass. "I haven't got the
money. That settles it."
There was a moment's pause in the struggle, as though the combatants were
testing their weapons. Then Zeena said in a level voice: "I thought you
were to get fifty dollars from Andrew Hale for that lumber."
"Andrew Hale never pays under three months." He had hardly spoken
when he remembered the excuse he had made for not accompanying his wife to the
station the day before; and the blood rose to his frowning brows.
"Why, you told me yesterday you'd fixed it up with him to pay cash
down. You said that was why you couldn't drive me over to the Flats."
Ethan had no suppleness in deceiving. He had never before been convicted of
a lie, and all the resources of evasion failed him. "I guess that was a
misunderstanding," he stammered.
"You ain't got the money?"
"No."
"And you ain't going to get it?"
"No."
"Well, I couldn't know that when I engaged the girl, could I?"
"No." He paused to control his voice. "But you know it now.
I'm sorry, but it can't be helped. You're a poor man's wife, Zeena; but I'll do
the best I can for you."
For a while she sat motionless, as if reflecting, her arms stretched along
the arms of her chair, her eyes fixed on vacancy. "Oh, I guess we'll make
out," she said mildly.
The change in her tone reassured him. "Of course we will! There's a
whole lot more I can do for you, and Mattie-"
Zeena, while he spoke, seemed to be following out some elaborate mental
calculation. She emerged from it to say: "There'll be Mattie's board less,
any how-"
Ethan, supposing the discussion to be over, had turned to go down to
supper. He stopped short, not grasping what he heard. "Mattie's board
less-?" he began.
Zeena laughed. It was on odd unfamiliar sound-he did not remember ever
having heard her laugh before. "You didn't suppose I was going to keep two
girls, did you? No wonder you were scared at the expense!"
He still had but a confused sense of what she was saying. From the
beginning of the discussion he had instinctively avoided the mention of
Mattie's name, fearing he hardly knew what: criticism, complaints, or vague
allusions to the imminent probability of her marrying. But the thought of a
definite rupture had never come to him, and even now could not lodge itself in
his mind.
"I don't know what you mean," he said. "Mattie Silver's not
a hired girl. She's your relation."
"She's a pauper that's hung onto us all after her father'd done his
best to ruin us. I've kep' her here a whole year: it's somebody else's turn now."
As the shrill words shot out Ethan heard a tap on the door, which he had
drawn shut when he turned back from the threshold.
"Ethan-Zeena!" Mattie's voice sounded gaily from the landing,
"do you know what time it is? Supper's been ready half an hour."
Inside the room there was a moment's silence; then Zeena called out from
her seat: "I'm not coming down to supper."
"Oh, I'm sorry! Aren't you well? Sha'n't I bring you up a bite of
something?"
Ethan roused himself with an effort and opened the door. "Go along
down, Matt. Zeena's just a little tired. I'm coming."
He heard her "All right!" and her quick step on the stairs; then
he shut the door and turned back into the room. His wife's attitude was
unchanged, her face inexorable, and he was seized with the despairing sense of
his helplessness.
"You ain't going to do it, Zeena?"
"Do what?" she emitted between flattened lips.
"Send Mattie away-like this?"
"I never bargained to take her for life!"
He continued with rising vehemence: "You can't put her out of the
house like a thief-a poor girl without friends or money. She's done her best
for you and she's got no place to go to. You may forget she's your kin but
everybody else'll remember it. If you do a thing like that what do you suppose
folks'll say of you?"
Zeena waited a moment, as if giving him time to feel the full force of the
contrast between his own excitement and her composure. Then she replied in the
same smooth voice: "I know well enough what they say of my having kep' her
here as long as I have."
Ethan's hand dropped from the door-knob, which he had held clenched since
he had drawn the door shut on Mattie. His wife's retort was like a knife-cut
across the sinews and he felt suddenly weak and powerless. He had meant to
humble himself, to argue that Mattie's keep didn't cost much, after all, that
he could make out to buy a stove and fix up a place in the attic for the hired
girl-but Zeena's words revealed the peril of such pleadings.
"You mean to tell her she's got to go-at once?" he faltered out,
in terror of letting his wife complete her sentence.
As if trying to make him see reason she replied impartially: "The girl
will be over from Bettsbridge to-morrow, and I presume she's got to have
somewheres to sleep."
Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature
who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a
mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of
silent brooding. It was the sense of his helplessness that sharpened his antipathy.
There had never been anything in her that one could appeal to; but as long as
he could ignore and command he had remained indifferent. Now she had mastered
him and he abhorred her. Mattie was her relation, not his: there were no means
by which he could compel her to keep the girl under her roof. All the long
misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort,
rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the
woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from
him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others.
For a moment such a flame of hate rose in him that it ran down his arm and
clenched his fist against her. He took a wild step forward and then stopped.
"You're-you're not coming down?" he said in a bewildered voice.
"No. I guess I'll lay down on the bed a little while," she
answered mildly; and he turned and walked out of the room.
In the kitchen Mattie was sitting by the stove, the cat curled up on her
knees. She sprang to her feet as Ethan entered and carried the covered dish of
meat-pie to the table.
"I hope Zeena isn't sick?" she asked.
"No."
She shone at him across the table. "Well, sit right down then. You
must be starving." She uncovered the pie and pushed it over to him. So
they were to have one more evening together, her happy eyes seemed to say!
He helped himself mechanically and began to eat; then disgust took him by
the throat and he laid down his fork.
Mattie's tender gaze was on him and she marked the gesture.
"Why, Ethan, what's the matter? Don't it taste right?"
"Yes-it's first-rate. Only I-" He pushed his plate away, rose
from his chair, and walked around the table to her side. She started up with
frightened eyes.
"Ethan, there's something wrong! I knew there was!"
She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his
arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted
butterflies.
"What is it-what is it?" she stammered; but he had found her lips
at last and was drinking unconsciousness of everything but the joy they gave
him.
She lingered a moment, caught in the same strong current; then she slipped
from him and drew back a step or two, pale and troubled. Her look smote him
with compunction, and he cried out, as if he saw her drowning in a dream:
"You can't go, Matt! I'll never let you!"
"Go-go?" she stammered. "Must I go?"
The words went on sounding between them as though a torch of warning flew
from hand to hand through a black landscape.
Ethan was overcome with shame at his lack of self-control in flinging the
news at her so brutally. His head reeled and he had to support himself against
the table. All the while he felt as if he were still kissing her, and yet dying
of thirst for her lips.
"Ethan, what has happened? Is Zeena mad with me?"
Her cry steadied him, though it deepened his wrath and pity. "No,
no," he assured her, "it's not that. But this new doctor has scared
her about herself. You know she believes all they say the first time she sees them.
And this one's told her she won't get well unless she lays up and don't do a
thing about the house-not for months-"
He paused, his eyes wandering from her miserably. She stood silent a
moment, drooping before him like a broken branch. She was so small and
weak-looking that it wrung his heart; but suddenly she lifted her head and
looked straight at him. "And she wants somebody handier in my place? Is
that it?"
"That's what she says to-night."
"If she says it to-night she'll say it to-morrow."
Both bowed to the inexorable truth: they knew that Zeena never changed her
mind, and that in her case a resolve once taken was equivalent to an act
performed.
There was a long silence between them; then Mattie said in a low voice:
"Don't be too sorry, Ethan."
"Oh, God-oh, God," he groaned. The glow of passion he had felt
for her had melted to an aching tenderness. He saw her quick lids beating back
the tears, and longed to take her in his arms and soothe her.
"You're letting your supper get cold," she admonished him with a
pale gleam of gaiety.
"Oh, Matt-Matt-where'll you go to?"
Her lids sank and a tremor crossed her face. He saw that for the first time
the thought of the future came to her distinctly. "I might get something
to do over at Stamford," she faltered, as if knowing that he knew she had
no hope.
He dropped back into his seat and hid his face in his hands. Despair seized
him at the thought of her setting out alone to renew the weary quest for work.
In the only place where she was known she was surrounded by indifference or
animosity; and what chance had she, inexperienced and untrained, among the
million bread-seekers of the cities? There came back to him miserable tales he
had heard at Worcester, and the faces of girls whose lives had begun as
hopefully as Mattie's.... It was not possible to think of such things without a
revolt of his whole being. He sprang up suddenly.
"You can't go, Matt! I won't let you! She's always had her way, but I
mean to have mine now-"
Mattie lifted her hand with a quick gesture, and he heard his wife's step
behind him.
Zeena came into the room with her dragging down-at-the-heel step, and
quietly took her accustomed seat between them.
"I felt a little mite better, and Dr. Buck says I ought to eat all I
can to keep my strength up, even if I ain't got any appetite," she said in
her flat whine, reaching across Mattie for the teapot. Her "good"
dress had been replaced by the black calico and brown knitted shawl which
formed her daily wear, and with them she had put on her usual face and manner.
She poured out her tea, added a great deal of milk to it, helped herself
largely to pie and pickles, and made the familiar gesture of adjusting her
false teeth before she began to eat. The cat rubbed itself ingratiatingly
against her, and she said "Good Pussy," stooped to stroke it and gave
it a scrap of meat from her plate.
Ethan sat speechless, not pretending to eat, but Mattie nibbled valiantly
at her food and asked Zeena one or two questions about her visit to
Bettsbridge. Zeena answered in her every-day tone and, warming to the theme,
regaled them with several vivid descriptions of intestinal disturbances among
her friends and relatives. She looked straight at Mattie as she spoke, a faint
smile deepening the vertical lines between her nose and chin.
When supper was over she rose from her seat and pressed her hand to the
flat surface over the region of her heart. "That pie of yours always sets
a mite heavy, Matt," she said, not ill-naturedly. She seldom abbreviated
the girl's name, and when she did so it was always a sign of affability.
"I've a good mind to go and hunt up those stomach powders I got last
year over in Springfield," she continued. "I ain't tried them for
quite a while, and maybe they'll help the heartburn."
Mattie lifted her eyes. "Can't I get them for you, Zeena?" she
ventured.
"No. They're in a place you don't know about," Zeena answered
darkly, with one of her secret looks.
She went out of the kitchen and Mattie, rising, began to clear the dishes
from the table. As she passed Ethan's chair their eyes met and clung together
desolately. The warm still kitchen looked as peaceful as the night before. The
cat had sprung to Zeena's rocking-chair, and the heat of the fire was beginning
to draw out the faint sharp scent of the geraniums. Ethan dragged himself
wearily to his feet.
"I'll go out and take a look around," he said, going toward the
passage to get his lantern.
As he reached the door he met Zeena coming back into the room, her lips
twitching with anger, a flush of excitement on her sallow face. The shawl had
slipped from her shoulders and was dragging at her down-trodden heels, and in
her hands she carried the fragments of the red glass pickle-dish.
"I'd like to know who done this," she said, looking sternly from
Ethan to Mattie.
There was no answer, and she continued in a trembling voice: "I went
to get those powders I'd put away in father's old spectacle-case, top of the
china-closet, where I keep the things I set store by, so's folks shan't meddle
with them-" Her voice broke, and two small tears hung on her lashless lids
and ran slowly down her cheeks. "It takes the stepladder to get at the top
shelf, and I put Aunt Philura Maple's pickle-dish up there o' purpose when we
was married, and it's never been down since, 'cept for the spring cleaning, and
then I always lifted it with my own hands, so's 't shouldn't get broke."
She laid the fragments reverently on the table. "I want to know who done
this," she quavered.
At the challenge Ethan turned back into the room and faced her. "I can
tell you, then. The cat done it."
"The cat?"
"That's what I said."
She looked at him hard, and then turned her eyes to Mattie, who was
carrying the dish-pan to the table.
"I'd like to know how the cat got into my china-closet"' she
said.
"Chasin' mice, I guess," Ethan rejoined. "There was a mouse
round the kitchen all last evening."
Zeena continued to look from one to the other; then she emitted her small
strange laugh. "I knew the cat was a smart cat," she said in a high
voice, "but I didn't know he was smart enough to pick up the pieces of my
pickle-dish and lay 'em edge to edge on the very shelf he knocked 'em off
of."
Mattie suddenly drew her arms out of the steaming water. "It wasn't
Ethan's fault, Zeena! The cat did break the dish; but I got it down from the
china-closet, and I'm the one to blame for its getting broken."
Zeena stood beside the ruin of her treasure, stiffening into a stony image
of resentment, "You got down my pickle-dish-what for?"
A bright flush flew to Mattie's cheeks. "I wanted to make the
supper-table pretty," she said.
"You wanted to make the supper-table pretty; and you waited till my
back was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I've got,
and wouldn't never use it, not even when the minister come to dinner, or Aunt
Martha Pierce come over from Bettsbridge-" Zeena paused with a gasp, as if
terrified by her own evocation of the sacrilege. "You're a bad girl,
Mattie Silver, and I always known it. It's the way your father begun, and I was
warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you couldn't
get at 'em-and now you've took from me the one I cared for most of all-"
She broke off in a short spasm of sobs that passed and left her more than ever
like a shape of stone.
"If I'd 'a' listened to folks, you'd 'a' gone before now, and this
wouldn't 'a' happened," she said; and gathering up the bits of broken
glass she went out of the room as if she carried a dead body...
Chapter 7.
When Ethan was called back to the farm by his father's illness his mother
gave him, for his own use, a small room behind the untenanted "best
parlour." Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built himself a
box-sofa out of boards and a mattress, laid out his papers on a kitchen-table,
hung on the rough plaster wall an engraving of Abraham Lincoln and a calendar
with "Thoughts from the Poets," and tried, with these meagre
properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a "minister" who
had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at Worcester. He still took
refuge there in summer, but when Mattie came to live at the farm he had to give
her his stove, and consequently the room was uninhabitable for several months
of the year.
To this retreat he descended as soon as the house was quiet, and Zeena's
steady breathing from the bed had assured him that there was to be no sequel to
the scene in the kitchen. After Zeena's departure he and Mattie had stood
speechless, neither seeking to approach the other. Then the girl had returned
to her task of clearing up the kitchen for the night and he had taken his
lantern and gone on his usual round outside the house. The kitchen was empty
when he came back to it; but his tobacco-pouch and pipe had been laid on the
table, and under them was a scrap of paper torn from the back of a seedsman's
catalogue, on which three words were written: "Don't trouble, Ethan."
Going into his cold dark "study" he placed the lantern on the
table and, stooping to its light, read the message again and again. It was the
first time that Mattie had ever written to him, and the possession of the paper
gave him a strange new sense of her nearness; yet it deepened his anguish by
reminding him that henceforth they would have no other way of communicating
with each other. For the life of her smile, the warmth of her voice, only cold
paper and dead words!
Confused motions of rebellion stormed in him. He was too young, too strong,
too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the destruction of his
hopes. Must he wear out all his years at the side of a bitter querulous woman?
Other possibilities had been in him, possibilities sacrificed, one by one, to
Zeena's narrow-mindedness and ignorance. And what good had come of it? She was
a hundred times bitterer and more discontented than when he had married her:
the one pleasure left her was to inflict pain on him. All the healthy instincts
of self-defence rose up in him against such waste...
He bundled himself into his old coon-skin coat and lay down on the box-sofa
to think. Under his cheek he felt a hard object with strange protuberances. It
was a cushion which Zeena had made for him when they were engaged-the only
piece of needlework he had ever seen her do. He flung it across the floor and
propped his head against the wall...
He knew a case of a man over the mountain-a young fellow of about his own
age-who had escaped from just such a life of misery by going West with the girl
he cared for. His wife had divorced him, and he had married the girl and
prospered. Ethan had seen the couple the summer before at Shadd's Falls, where
they had come to visit relatives. They had a little girl with fair curls, who
wore a gold locket and was dressed like a princess. The deserted wife had not
done badly either. Her husband had given her the farm and she had managed to
sell it, and with that and the alimony she had started a lunch-room at
Bettsbridge and bloomed into activity and importance. Ethan was fired by the
thought. Why should he not leave with Mattie the next day, instead of letting
her go alone? He would hide his valise under the seat of the sleigh, and Zeena
would suspect nothing till she went upstairs for her afternoon nap and found a
letter on the bed...
His impulses were still near the surface, and he sprang up, re-lit the
lantern, and sat down at the table. He rummaged in the drawer for a sheet of
paper, found one, and began to write.
"Zeena, I've done all I could for you, and I don't see as it's been
any use. I don't blame you, nor I don't blame myself. Maybe both of us will do
better separate. I'm going to try my luck West, and you can sell the farm and
mill, and keep the money-"
His pen paused on the word, which brought home to him the relentless
conditions of his lot. If he gave the farm and mill to Zeena what would be left
him to start his own life with? Once in the West he was sure of picking up
work-he would not have feared to try his chance alone. But with Mattie
depending on him the case was different. And what of Zeena's fate? Farm and
mill were mortgaged to the limit of their value, and even if she found a
purchaser-in itself an unlikely chance-it was doubtful if she could clear a
thousand dollars on the sale. Meanwhile, how could she keep the farm going? It
was only by incessant labour and personal supervision that Ethan drew a meagre
living from his land, and his wife, even if she were in better health than she
imagined, could never carry such a burden alone.
Well, she could go back to her people, then, and see what they would do for
her. It was the fate she was forcing on Mattie-why not let her try it herself?
By the time she had discovered his whereabouts, and brought suit for divorce,
he would probably-wherever he was-be earning enough to pay her a sufficient
alimony. And the alternative was to let Mattie go forth alone, with far less
hope of ultimate provision...
He had scattered the contents of the table-drawer in his search for a sheet
of paper, and as he took up his pen his eye fell on an old copy of the
Bettsbridge Eagle. The advertising sheet was folded uppermost, and he read the
seductive words: "Trips to the West: Reduced Rates."
He drew the lantern nearer and eagerly scanned the fares; then the paper
fell from his hand and he pushed aside his unfinished letter. A moment ago he
had wondered what he and Mattie were to live on when they reached the West; now
he saw that he had not even the money to take her there. Borrowing was out of
the question: six months before he had given his only security to raise funds
for necessary repairs to the mill, and he knew that without security no one at
Starkfield would lend him ten dollars. The inexorable facts closed in on him
like prison-warders handcuffing a convict. There was no way out-none. He was a
prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.
He crept back heavily to the sofa, stretching himself out with limbs so
leaden that he felt as if they would never move again. Tears rose in his throat
and slowly burned their way to his lids.
As he lay there, the window-pane that faced him, growing gradually lighter,
inlaid upon the darkness a square of moon-suffused sky. A crooked tree-branch
crossed it, a branch of the apple-tree under which, on summer evenings, he had
sometimes found Mattie sitting when he came up from the mill. Slowly the rim of
the rainy vapours caught fire and burnt away, and a pure moon swung into the
blue. Ethan, rising on his elbow, watched the landscape whiten and shape itself
under the sculpture of the moon. This was the night on which he was to have
taken Mattie coasting, and there hung the lamp to light them! He looked out at
the slopes bathed in lustre, the silver-edged darkness of the woods, the
spectral purple of the hills against the sky, and it seemed as though all the
beauty of the night had been poured out to mock his wretchedness...
He fell asleep, and when he woke the chill of the winter dawn was in the
room. He felt cold and stiff and hungry, and ashamed of being hungry. He rubbed
his eyes and went to the window. A red sun stood over the grey rim of the
fields, behind trees that looked black and brittle. He said to himself:
"This is Matt's last day," and tried to think what the place would be
without her.
As he stood there he heard a step behind him and she entered.
"Oh, Ethan-were you here all night?"
She looked so small and pinched, in her poor dress, with the red scarf
wound about her, and the cold light turning her paleness sallow, that Ethan
stood before her without speaking.
"You must be frozen," she went on, fixing lustreless eyes on him.
He drew a step nearer. "How did you know I was here?"
"Because I heard you go down stairs again after I went to bed, and I
listened all night, and you didn't come up."
All his tenderness rushed to his lips. He looked at her and said:
"I'll come right along and make up the kitchen fire."
They went back to the kitchen, and he fetched the coal and kindlings and
cleared out the stove for her, while she brought in the milk and the cold
remains of the meat-pie. When warmth began to radiate from the stove, and the
first ray of sunlight lay on the kitchen floor, Ethan's dark thoughts melted in
the mellower air. The sight of Mattie going about her work as he had seen her
on so many mornings made it seem impossible that she should ever cease to be a
part of the scene. He said to himself that he had doubtless exaggerated the
significance of Zeena's threats, and that she too, with the return of daylight,
would come to a saner mood.
He went up to Mattie as she bent above the stove, and laid his hand on her
arm. "I don't want you should trouble either," he said, looking down
into her eyes with a smile.
She flushed up warmly and whispered back: "No, Ethan, I ain't going to
trouble."
"I guess things'll straighten out," he added.
There was no answer but a quick throb of her lids, and he went on: "She
ain't said anything this morning?"
"No. I haven't seen her yet."
"Don't you take any notice when you do."
With this injunction he left her and went out to the cow-barn. He saw
Jotham Powell walking up the hill through the morning mist, and the familiar sight
added to his growing conviction of security.
As the two men were clearing out the stalls Jotham rested on his pitch-fork
to say: "Dan'l Byrne's goin' over to the Flats to-day noon, an' he c'd
take Mattie's trunk along, and make it easier ridin' when I take her over in
the sleigh."
Ethan looked at him blankly, and he continued: "Mis' Frome said the
new girl'd be at the Flats at five, and I was to take Mattie then, so's 't she
could ketch the six o'clock train for Stamford."
Ethan felt the blood drumming in his temples. He had to wait a moment
before he could find voice to say: "Oh, it ain't so sure about Mattie's
going-"
"That so?" said Jotham indifferently; and they went on with their
work.
When they returned to the kitchen the two women were already at breakfast.
Zeena had an air of unusual alertness and activity. She drank two cups of
coffee and fed the cat with the scraps left in the pie-dish; then she rose from
her seat and, walking over to the window, snipped two or three yellow leaves
from the geraniums. "Aunt Martha's ain't got a faded leaf on 'em; but they
pine away when they ain't cared for," she said reflectively. Then she
turned to Jotham and asked: "What time'd you say Dan'l Byrne'd be
along?"
The hired man threw a hesitating glance at Ethan.
"Round about noon," he said.
Zeena turned to Mattie. "That trunk of yours is too heavy for the
sleigh, and Dan'l Byrne'll be round to take it over to the Flats," she
said.
"I'm much obliged to you, Zeena," said Mattie.
"I'd like to go over things with you first," Zeena continued in
an unperturbed voice. "I know there's a huckabuck towel missing; and I
can't take out what you done with that match-safe 't used to stand behind the
stuffed owl in the parlour."
She went out, followed by Mattie, and when the men were alone Jotham said
to his employer: "I guess I better let Dan'l come round, then."
Ethan finished his usual morning tasks about the house and barn; then he
said to Jotham: "I'm going down to Starkfield. Tell them not to wait
dinner."
The passion of rebellion had broken out in him again. That which had seemed
incredible in the sober light of day had really come to pass, and he was to
assist as a helpless spectator at Mattie's banishment. His manhood was humbled
by the part he was compelled to play and by the thought of what Mattie must
think of him. Confused impulses struggled in him as he strode along to the
village. He had made up his mind to do something, but he did not know what it
would be.
The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under
the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a
pale haze of spring. Every yard of the road was alive with Mattie's presence,
and there was hardly a branch against the sky or a tangle of brambles on the
bank in which some bright shred of memory was not caught. Once, in the
stillness, the call of a bird in a mountain ash was so like her laughter that
his heart tightened and then grew large; and all these things made him see that
something must be done at once.
Suddenly it occurred to him that Andrew Hale, who was a kind-hearted man,
might be induced to reconsider his refusal and advance a small sum on the
lumber if he were told that Zeena's ill-health made it necessary to hire a
servant. Hale, after all, knew enough of Ethan's situation to make it possible
for the latter to renew his appeal without too much loss of pride; and,
moreover, how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?
The more he considered his plan the more hopeful it seemed. If he could get
Mrs. Hale's ear he felt certain of success, and with fifty dollars in his
pocket nothing could keep him from Mattie...
His first object was to reach Starkfield before Hale had started for his
work; he knew the carpenter had a job down the Corbury road and was likely to
leave his house early. Ethan's long strides grew more rapid with the
accelerated beat of his thoughts, and as he reached the foot of School House
Hill he caught sight of Hale's sleigh in the distance. He hurried forward to
meet it, but as it drew nearer he saw that it was driven by the carpenter's
youngest boy and that the figure at his side, looking like a large upright
cocoon in spectacles, was that of Mrs. Hale. Ethan signed to them to stop, and
Mrs. Hale leaned forward, her pink wrinkles twinkling with benevolence.
"Mr. Hale? Why, yes, you'll find him down home now. He ain't going to
his work this forenoon. He woke up with a touch o' lumbago, and I just made him
put on one of old Dr. Kidder's plasters and set right up into the fire."
Beaming maternally on Ethan, she bent over to add: "I on'y just heard
from Mr. Hale 'bout Zeena's going over to Bettsbridge to see that new doctor.
I'm real sorry she's feeling so bad again! I hope he thinks he can do something
for her. I don't know anybody round here's had more sickness than Zeena. I
always tell Mr. Hale I don't know what she'd 'a' done if she hadn't 'a' had you
to look after her; and I used to say the same thing 'bout your mother. You've
had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome."
She gave him a last nod of sympathy while her son chirped to the horse; and
Ethan, as she drove off, stood in the middle of the road and stared after the
retreating sleigh.
It was a long time since any one had spoken to him as kindly as Mrs. Hale.
Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it
natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried without repining the
burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs. Hale had said, "You've had an
awful mean time, Ethan Frome," and he felt less alone with his misery. If
the Hales were sorry for him they would surely respond to his appeal...
He started down the road toward their house, but at the end of a few yards
he pulled up sharply, the blood in his face. For the first time, in the light of
the words he had just heard, he saw what he was about to do. He was planning to
take advantage of the Hales' sympathy to obtain money from them on false
pretences. That was a plain statement of the cloudy purpose which had driven
him in headlong to Starkfield.
With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness had carried
him, the madness fell and he saw his life before him as it was. He was a poor
man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and
destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so
only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.
He turned and walked slowly back to the farm.
Chapter 8.
At the kitchen door Daniel Byrne sat in his sleigh behind a big-boned grey
who pawed the snow and swung his long head restlessly from side to side.
Ethan went into the kitchen and found his wife by the stove. Her head was
wrapped in her shawl, and she was reading a book called "Kidney Troubles
and Their Cure" on which he had had to pay extra postage only a few days
before.
Zeena did not move or look up when he entered, and after a moment he asked:
"Where's Mattie?"
Without lifting her eyes from the page she replied: "I presume she's
getting down her trunk."
The blood rushed to his face. "Getting down her trunk-alone?"
"Jotham Powell's down in the wood-lot, and Dan'l Byrne says he darsn't
leave that horse," she returned.
Her husband, without stopping to hear the end of the phrase, had left the
kitchen and sprung up the stairs. The door of Mattie's room was shut, and he
wavered a moment on the landing. "Matt," he said in a low voice; but
there was no answer, and he put his hand on the door-knob.
He had never been in her room except once, in the early summer, when he had
gone there to plaster up a leak in the eaves, but he remembered exactly how
everything had looked: the red-and-white quilt on her narrow bed, the pretty
pin-cushion on the chest of drawers, and over it the enlarged photograph of her
mother, in an oxydized frame, with a bunch of dyed grasses at the back. Now
these and all other tokens of her presence had vanished and the room looked as
bare and comfortless as when Zeena had shown her into it on the day of her
arrival. In the middle of the floor stood her trunk, and on the trunk she sat
in her Sunday dress, her back turned to the door and her face in her hands. She
had not heard Ethan's call because she was sobbing and she did not hear his
step till he stood close behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders.
"Matt-oh, don't-oh, Matt!"
She started up, lifting her wet face to his. "Ethan-I thought I wasn't
ever going to see you again!"
He took her in his arms, pressing her close, and with a trembling hand
smoothed away the hair from her forehead.
"Not see me again? What do you mean?"
She sobbed out: "Jotham said you told him we wasn't to wait dinner for
you, and I thought-"
"You thought I meant to cut it?" he finished for her grimly.
She clung to him without answering, and he laid his lips on her hair, which
was soft yet springy, like certain mosses on warm slopes, and had the faint
woody fragrance of fresh sawdust in the sun.
Through the door they heard Zeena's voice calling out from below:
"Dan'l Byrne says you better hurry up if you want him to take that trunk."
They drew apart with stricken faces. Words of resistance rushed to Ethan's
lips and died there. Mattie found her handkerchief and dried her eyes;
then,-bending down, she took hold of a handle of the trunk.
Ethan put her aside. "You let go, Matt," he ordered her.
She answered: "It takes two to coax it round the corner"; and
submitting to this argument he grasped the other handle, and together they
manoeuvred the heavy trunk out to the landing.
"Now let go," he repeated; then he shouldered the trunk and
carried it down the stairs and across the passage to the kitchen. Zeena, who
had gone back to her seat by the stove, did not lift her head from her book as
he passed. Mattie followed him out of the door and helped him to lift the trunk
into the back of the sleigh. When it was in place they stood side by side on
the door-step, watching Daniel Byrne plunge off behind his fidgety horse.
It seemed to Ethan that his heart was bound with cords which an unseen hand
was tightening with every tick of the clock. Twice he opened his lips to speak
to Mattie and found no breath. At length, as she turned to re-enter the house,
he laid a detaining hand on her.
"I'm going to drive you over, Matt," he whispered.
She murmured back: "I think Zeena wants I should go with Jotham."
"I'm going to drive you over," he repeated; and she went into the
kitchen without answering.
At dinner Ethan could not eat. If he lifted his eyes they rested on Zeena's
pinched face, and the corners of her straight lips seemed to quiver away into a
smile. She ate well, declaring that the mild weather made her feel better, and
pressed a second helping of beans on Jotham Powell, whose wants she generally
ignored.
Mattie, when the meal was over, went about her usual task of clearing the
table and washing up the dishes. Zeena, after feeding the cat, had returned to
her rocking-chair by the stove, and Jotham Powell, who always lingered last,
reluctantly pushed back his chair and moved toward the door.
On the threshold he turned back to say to Ethan: "What time'll I come
round for Mattie?"
Ethan was standing near the window, mechanically filling his pipe while he
watched Mattie move to and fro. He answered: "You needn't come round; I'm
going to drive her over myself."
He saw the rise of the colour in Mattie's averted cheek, and the quick
lifting of Zeena's head.
"I want you should stay here this afternoon, Ethan," his wife
said. "Jotham can drive Mattie over."
Mattie flung an imploring glance at him, but he repeated curtly: "I'm
going to drive her over myself."
Zeena continued in the same even tone: "I wanted you should stay and
fix up that stove in Mattie's room afore the girl gets here. It ain't been
drawing right for nigh on a month now."
Ethan's voice rose indignantly. "If it was good enough for Mattie I
guess it's good enough for a hired girl."
"That girl that's coming told me she was used to a house where they
had a furnace," Zeena persisted with the same monotonous mildness.
"She'd better ha' stayed there then," he flung back at her; and
turning to Mattie he added in a hard voice: "You be ready by three, Matt;
I've got business at Corbury."
Jotham Powell had started for the barn, and Ethan strode down after him
aflame with anger. The pulses in his temples throbbed and a fog was in his
eyes. He went about his task without knowing what force directed him, or whose
hands and feet were fulfilling its orders. It was not till he led out the
sorrel and backed him between the shafts of the sleigh that he once more became
conscious of what he was doing. As he passed the bridle over the horse's head,
and wound the traces around the shafts, he remembered the day when he had made
the same preparations in order to drive over and meet his wife's cousin at the
Flats. It was little more than a year ago, on just such a soft afternoon, with
a "feel" of spring in the air. The sorrel, turning the same big
ringed eye on him, nuzzled the palm of his hand in the same way; and one by one
all the days between rose up and stood before him...
He flung the bearskin into the sleigh, climbed to the seat, and drove up to
the house. When he entered the kitchen it was empty, but Mattie's bag and shawl
lay ready by the door. He went to the foot of the stairs and listened. No sound
reached him from above, but presently he thought he heard some one moving about
in his deserted study, and pushing open the door he saw Mattie, in her hat and
jacket, standing with her back to him near the table.
She started at his approach and turning quickly, said: "Is it
time?"
"What are you doing here, Matt?" he asked her.
She looked at him timidly. "I was just taking a look round-that's
all," she answered, with a wavering smile.
They went back into the kitchen without speaking, and Ethan picked up her
bag and shawl.
"Where's Zeena?" he asked.
"She went upstairs right after dinner. She said she had those shooting
pains again, and didn't want to be disturbed."
"Didn't she say good-bye to you?"
"No. That was all she said."
Ethan, looking slowly about the kitchen, said to himself with a shudder
that in a few hours he would be returning to it alone. Then the sense of
unreality overcame him once more, and he could not bring himself to believe
that Mattie stood there for the last time before him.
"Come on," he said almost gaily, opening the door and putting her
bag into the sleigh. He sprang to his seat and bent over to tuck the rug about
her as she slipped into the place at his side. "Now then, go 'long,"
he said, with a shake of the reins that sent the sorrel placidly jogging down
the hill.
"We got lots of time for a good ride, Matt!" he cried, seeking
her hand beneath the fur and pressing it in his. His face tingled and he felt
dizzy, as if he had stopped in at the Starkfield saloon on a zero day for a
drink.
At the gate, instead of making for Starkfield, he turned the sorrel to the
right, up the Bettsbridge road. Mattie sat silent, giving no sign of surprise;
but after a moment she said: "Are you going round by Shadow Pond?"
He laughed and answered: "I knew you'd know!"
She drew closer under the bearskin, so that, looking sideways around his
coat-sleeve, he could just catch the tip of her nose and a blown brown wave of
hair. They drove slowly up the road between fields glistening under the pale
sun, and then bent to the right down a lane edged with spruce and larch. Ahead
of them, a long way off, a range of hills stained by mottlings of black forest
flowed away in round white curves against the sky. The lane passed into a
pine-wood with boles reddening in the afternoon sun and delicate blue shadows
on the snow. As they entered it the breeze fell and a warm stillness seemed to
drop from the branches with the dropping needles. Here the snow was so pure
that the tiny tracks of wood-animals had left on it intricate lace-like
patterns, and the bluish cones caught in its surface stood out like ornaments
of bronze.
Ethan drove on in silence till they reached a part of the wood where the
pines were more widely spaced, then he drew up and helped Mattie to get out of
the sleigh. They passed between the aromatic trunks, the snow breaking crisply
under their feet, till they came to a small sheet of water with steep wooded
sides. Across its frozen surface, from the farther bank, a single hill rising
against the western sun threw the long conical shadow which gave the lake its
name. It was a shy secret spot, full of the same dumb melancholy that Ethan
felt in his heart.
He looked up and down the little pebbly beach till his eye lit on a fallen
tree-trunk half submerged in snow.
"There's where we sat at the picnic," he reminded her.
The entertainment of which he spoke was one of the few that they had taken
part in together: a "church picnic" which, on a long afternoon of the
preceding summer, had filled the retired place with merry-making. Mattie had
begged him to go with her but he had refused. Then, toward sunset, coming down
from the mountain where he had been felling timber, he had been caught by some
strayed revellers and drawn into the group by the lake, where Mattie, encircled
by facetious youths, and bright as a blackberry under her spreading hat, was
brewing coffee over a gipsy fire. He remembered the shyness he had felt at
approaching her in his uncouth clothes, and then the lighting up of her face,
and the way she had broken through the group to come to him with a cup in her
hand. They had sat for a few minutes on the fallen log by the pond, and she had
missed her gold locket, and set the young men searching for it; and it was
Ethan who had spied it in the moss.... That was all; but all their intercourse
had been made up of just such inarticulate flashes, when they seemed to come
suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter
woods...
"It was right there I found your locket," he said, pushing his
foot into a dense tuft of blueberry bushes.
"I never saw anybody with such sharp eyes!" she answered.
She sat down on the tree-trunk in the sun and he sat down beside her.
"You were as pretty as a picture in that pink hat," he said.
She laughed with pleasure. "Oh, I guess it was the hat!" she
rejoined.
They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a
moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to
marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that
it smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.
Suddenly she rose to her feet and said: "We mustn't stay here any
longer."
He continued to gaze at her vaguely, only half-roused from his dream.
"There's plenty of time," he answered.
They stood looking at each other as if the eyes of each were straining to
absorb and hold fast the other's image. There were things he had to say to her
before they parted, but he could not say them in that place of summer memories,
and he turned and followed her in silence to the sleigh. As they drove away the
sun sank behind the hill and the pine-boles turned from red to grey.
By a devious track between the fields they wound back to the Starkfield
road. Under the open sky the light was still clear, with a reflection of cold
red on the eastern hills. The clumps of trees in the snow seemed to draw
together in ruffled lumps, like birds with their heads under their wings; and
the sky, as it paled, rose higher, leaving the earth more alone.
As they turned into the Starkfield road Ethan said: "Matt, what do you
mean to do?"
She did not answer at once, but at length she said: "I'll try to get a
place in a store."
"You know you can't do it. The bad air and the standing all day nearly
killed you before."
"I'm a lot stronger than I was before I came to Starkfield."
"And now you're going to throw away all the good it's done you!"
There seemed to be no answer to this, and again they drove on for a while
without speaking. With every yard of the way some spot where they had stood,
and laughed together or been silent, clutched at Ethan and dragged him back.
"Isn't there any of your father's folks could help you?"
"There isn't any of 'em I'd ask."
He lowered his voice to say: "You know there's nothing I wouldn't do
for you if I could."
"I know there isn't."
"But I can't-"
She was silent, but he felt a slight tremor in the shoulder against his.
"Oh, Matt," he broke out, "if I could ha' gone with you now
I'd ha' done it-"
She turned to him, pulling a scrap of paper from her breast. "Ethan-I
found this," she stammered. Even in the failing light he saw it was the
letter to his wife that he had begun the night before and forgotten to destroy.
Through his astonishment there ran a fierce thrill of joy. "Matt-" he
cried; "if I could ha' done it, would you?"
"Oh, Ethan, Ethan-what's the use?" With a sudden movement she
tore the letter in shreds and sent them fluttering off into the snow.
"Tell me, Matt! Tell me!" he adjured her.
She was silent for a moment; then she said, in such a low tone that he had
to stoop his head to hear her: "I used to think of it sometimes, summer
nights, when the moon was so bright I couldn't sleep."
His heart reeled with the sweetness of it. "As long ago as that?"
She answered, as if the date had long been fixed for her: "The first
time was at Shadow Pond."
"Was that why you gave me my coffee before the others?"
"I don't know. Did I? I was dreadfully put out when you wouldn't go to
the picnic with me; and then, when I saw you coming down the road, I thought
maybe you'd gone home that way o' purpose; and that made me glad."
They were silent again. They had reached the point where the road dipped to
the hollow by Ethan's mill and as they descended the darkness descended with
them, dropping down like a black veil from the heavy hemlock boughs.
"I'm tied hand and foot, Matt. There isn't a thing I can do," he
began again.
"You must write to me sometimes, Ethan."
"Oh, what good'll writing do? I want to put my hand out and touch you.
I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and
when you're lonesome."
"You mustn't think but what I'll do all right."
"You won't need me, you mean? I suppose you'll marry!"
"Oh, Ethan!" she cried.
"I don't know how it is you make me feel, Matt. I'd a'most rather have
you dead than that!"
"Oh, I wish I was, I wish I was!" she sobbed.
The sound of her weeping shook him out of his dark anger, and he felt
ashamed.
"Don't let's talk that way," he whispered.
"Why shouldn't we, when it's true? I've been wishing it every minute
of the day."
"Matt! You be quiet! Don't you say it."
"There's never anybody been good to me but you."
"Don't say that either, when I can't lift a hand for you!"
"Yes; but it's true just the same."
They had reached the top of School House Hill and Starkfield lay below them
in the twilight. A cutter, mounting the road from the village, passed them by
in a joyous flutter of bells, and they straightened themselves and looked ahead
with rigid faces. Along the main street lights had begun to shine from the
house-fronts and stray figures were turning in here and there at the gates.
Ethan, with a touch of his whip, roused the sorrel to a languid trot.
As they drew near the end of the village the cries of children reached
them, and they saw a knot of boys, with sleds behind them, scattering across the
open space before the church.
"I guess this'll be their last coast for a day or two," Ethan
said, looking up at the mild sky.
Mattie was silent, and he added: "We were to have gone down last
night."
Still she did not speak and, prompted by an obscure desire to help himself
and her through their miserable last hour, he went on discursively: "Ain't
it funny we haven't been down together but just that once last winter?"
She answered: "It wasn't often I got down to the village."
"That's so," he said.
They had reached the crest of the Corbury road, and between the indistinct
white glimmer of the church and the black curtain of the Varnum spruces the
slope stretched away below them without a sled on its length. Some erratic
impulse prompted Ethan to say: "How'd you like me to take you down
now?"
She forced a laugh. "Why, there isn't time!"
"There's all the time we want. Come along!" His one desire now
was to postpone the moment of turning the sorrel toward the Flats.
"But the girl," she faltered. "The girl'll be waiting at the
station."
"Well, let her wait. You'd have to if she didn't. Come!"
The note of authority in his voice seemed to subdue her, and when he had
jumped from the sleigh she let him help her out, saying only, with a vague
feint of reluctance: "But there isn't a sled round anywheres."
"Yes, there is! Right over there under the spruces." He threw the
bearskin over the sorrel, who stood passively by the roadside, hanging a
meditative head. Then he caught Mattie's hand and drew her after him toward the
sled.
She seated herself obediently and he took his place behind her, so close
that her hair brushed his face. "All right, Matt?" he called out, as
if the width of the road had been between them.
She turned her head to say: "It's dreadfully dark. Are you sure you
can see?"
He laughed contemptuously: "I could go down this coast with my eyes
tied!" and she laughed with him, as if she liked his audacity.
Nevertheless he sat still a moment, straining his eyes down the long hill, for
it was the most confusing hour of the evening, the hour when the last clearness
from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in a blur that disguises
landmarks and falsifies distances.
"Now!" he cried.
The sled started with a bound, and they flew on through the dusk, gathering
smoothness and speed as they went, with the hollow night opening out below them
and the air singing by like an organ. Mattie sat perfectly still, but as they
reached the bend at the foot of the hill, where the big elm thrust out a deadly
elbow, he fancied that she shrank a little closer.
"Don't be scared, Matt!" he cried exultantly, as they spun safely
past it and flew down the second slope; and when they reached the level ground
beyond, and the speed of the sled began to slacken, he heard her give a little
laugh of glee.
They sprang off and started to walk back up the hill. Ethan dragged the
sled with one hand and passed the other through Mattie's arm.
"Were you scared I'd run you into the elm?" he asked with a
boyish laugh.
"I told you I was never scared with you," she answered.
The strange exaltation of his mood had brought on one of his rare fits of
boastfulness. "It is a tricky place, though. The least swerve, and we'd
never ha' come up again. But I can measure distances to a hair's-breadth-always
could."
She murmured: "I always say you've got the surest eye..."
Deep silence had fallen with the starless dusk, and they leaned on each
other without speaking; but at every step of their climb Ethan said to himself:
"It's the last time we'll ever walk together."
They mounted slowly to the top of the hill. When they were abreast of the
church he stooped his head to her to ask: "Are you tired?" and she
answered, breathing quickly: "It was splendid!"
With a pressure of his arm he guided her toward the Norway spruces. "I
guess this sled must be Ned Hale's. Anyhow I'll leave it where I found
it." He drew the sled up to the Varnum gate and rested it against the
fence. As he raised himself he suddenly felt Mattie close to him among the
shadows.
"Is this where Ned and Ruth kissed each other?" she whispered
breathlessly, and flung her arms about him. Her lips, groping for his, swept
over his face, and he held her fast in a rapture of surprise.
"Good-bye-good-bye," she stammered, and kissed him again.
"Oh, Matt, I can't let you go!" broke from him in the same old
cry.
She freed herself from his hold and he heard her sobbing. "Oh, I can't
go either!" she wailed.
"Matt! What'll we do? What'll we do?"
They clung to each other's hands like children, and her body shook with
desperate sobs.
Through the stillness they heard the church clock striking five.
"Oh, Ethan, it's time!" she cried.
He drew her back to him. "Time for what? You don't suppose I'm going
to leave you now?"
"If I missed my train where'd I go?"
"Where are you going if you catch it?"
She stood silent, her hands lying cold and relaxed in his.
"What's the good of either of us going anywheres without the other one
now?" he said.
She remained motionless, as if she had not heard him. Then she snatched her
hands from his, threw her arms about his neck, and pressed a sudden drenched
cheek against his face. "Ethan! Ethan! I want you to take me down
again!"
"Down where?"
"The coast. Right off," she panted. "So 't we'll never come
up any more."
"Matt! What on earth do you mean?"
She put her lips close against his ear to say: "Right into the big
elm. You said you could. So 't we'd never have to leave each other any
more."
"Why, what are you talking of? You're crazy!"
"I'm not crazy; but I will be if I leave you."
"Oh, Matt, Matt-" he groaned.
She tightened her fierce hold about his neck. Her face lay close to his
face.
"Ethan, where'll I go if I leave you? I don't know how to get along
alone. You said so yourself just now. Nobody but you was ever good to me. And
there'll be that strange girl in the house... and she'll sleep in my bed, where
I used to lay nights and listen to hear you come up the stairs..."
The words were like fragments torn from his heart. With them came the hated
vision of the house he was going back to-of the stairs he would have to go up
every night, of the woman who would wait for him there. And the sweetness of
Mattie's avowal, the wild wonder of knowing at last that all that had happened
to him had happened to her too, made the other vision more abhorrent, the other
life more intolerable to return to...
Her pleadings still came to him between short sobs, but he no longer heard
what she was saying. Her hat had slipped back and he was stroking her hair. He
wanted to get the feeling of it into his hand, so that it would sleep there
like a seed in winter. Once he found her mouth again, and they seemed to be by
the pond together in the burning August sun. But his cheek touched hers, and it
was cold and full of weeping, and he saw the road to the Flats under the night
and heard the whistle of the train up the line.
The spruces swathed them in blackness and silence. They might have been in
their coffins underground. He said to himself: "Perhaps it'll feel like
this..." and then again: "After this I sha'n't feel anything..."
Suddenly he heard the old sorrel whinny across the road, and thought:
"He's wondering why he doesn't get his supper..."
"Come!" Mattie whispered, tugging at his hand.
Her sombre violence constrained him: she seemed the embodied instrument of
fate. He pulled the sled out, blinking like a night-bird as he passed from the
shade of the spruces into the transparent dusk of the open. The slope below
them was deserted. All Starkfield was at supper, and not a figure crossed the
open space before the church. The sky, swollen with the clouds that announce a
thaw, hung as low as before a summer storm. He strained his eyes through the
dimness, and they seemed less keen, less capable than usual.
He took his seat on the sled and Mattie instantly placed herself in front
of him. Her hat had fallen into the snow and his lips were in her hair. He
stretched out his legs, drove his heels into the road to keep the sled from
slipping forward, and bent her head back between his hands. Then suddenly he
sprang up again.
"Get up," he ordered her.
It was the tone she always heeded, but she cowered down in her seat,
repeating vehemently: "No, no, no!"
"Get up!"
"Why?"
"I want to sit in front."
"No, no! How can you steer in front?"
"I don't have to. We'll follow the track."
They spoke in smothered whispers, as though the night were listening.
"Get up! Get up!" he urged her; but she kept on repeating:
"Why do you want to sit in front?"
"Because I-because I want to feel you holding me," he stammered,
and dragged her to her feet.
The answer seemed to satisfy her, or else she yielded to the power of his
voice. He bent down, feeling in the obscurity for the glassy slide worn by
preceding coasters, and placed the runners carefully between its edges. She
waited while he seated himself with crossed legs in the front of the sled; then
she crouched quickly down at his back and clasped her arms about him. Her
breath in his neck set him shuddering again, and he almost sprang from his
seat. But in a flash he remembered the alternative. She was right: this was
better than parting. He leaned back and drew her mouth to his...
Just as they started he heard the sorrel's whinny again, and the familiar
wistful call, and all the confused images it brought with it, went with him
down the first reach of the road. Half-way down there was a sudden drop, then a
rise, and after that another long delirious descent. As they took wing for this
it seemed to him that they were flying indeed, flying far up into the cloudy
night, with Starkfield immeasurably below them, falling away like a speck in
space... Then the big elm shot up ahead, lying in wait for them at the bend of
the road, and he said between his teeth: "We can fetch it; I know we can
fetch it-"
As they flew toward the tree Mattie pressed her arms tighter, and her blood
seemed to be in his veins. Once or twice the sled swerved a little under them.
He slanted his body to keep it headed for the elm, repeating to himself again
and again: "I know we can fetch it"; and little phrases she had
spoken ran through his head and danced before him on the air. The big tree
loomed bigger and closer, and as they bore down on it he thought: "It's
waiting for us: it seems to know." But suddenly his wife's face, with
twisted monstrous lineaments, thrust itself between him and his goal, and he
made an instinctive movement to brush it aside. The sled swerved in response,
but he righted it again, kept it straight, and drove down on the black
projecting mass. There was a last instant when the air shot past him like
millions of fiery wires; and then the elm...
The sky was still thick, but looking straight up he saw a single star, and
tried vaguely to reckon whether it were Sirius, or-or-The effort tired him too
much, and he closed his heavy lids and thought that he would sleep... The stillness
was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by
under the snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he
wondered languidly if it were hurt. Then he understood that it must be in pain:
pain so excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through
his own body. He tried in vain to roll over in the direction of the sound, and
stretched his left arm out across the snow. And now it was as though he felt
rather than heard the twittering; it seemed to be under his palm, which rested
on something soft and springy. The thought of the animal's suffering was
intolerable to him and he struggled to raise himself, and could not because a
rock, or some huge mass, seemed to be lying on him. But he continued to finger
about cautiously with his left hand, thinking he might get hold of the little
creature and help it; and all at once he knew that the soft thing he had
touched was Mattie's hair and that his hand was on her face.
He dragged himself to his knees, the monstrous load on him moving with him
as he moved, and his hand went over and over her face, and he felt that the
twittering came from her lips...
He got his face down close to hers, with his ear to her mouth, and in the
darkness he saw her eyes open and heard her say his name.
"Oh, Matt, I thought we'd fetched it," he moaned; and far off, up
the hill, he heard the sorrel whinny, and thought: "I ought to be getting
him his feed..."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE QUERULOUS DRONE ceased as I entered Frome's kitchen, and of the two
women sitting there I could not tell which had been the speaker.
One of them, on my appearing, raised her tall bony figure from her seat,
not as if to welcome me-for she threw me no more than a brief glance of
surprise-but simply to set about preparing the meal which Frome's absence had
delayed. A slatternly calico wrapper hung from her shoulders and the wisps of
her thin grey hair were drawn away from a high forehead and fastened at the
back by a broken comb. She had pale opaque eyes which revealed nothing and
reflected nothing, and her narrow lips were of the same sallow colour as her
face.
The other woman was much smaller and slighter. She sat huddled in an
arm-chair near the stove, and when I came in she turned her head quickly toward
me, without the least corresponding movement of her body. Her hair was as grey
as her companion's, her face as bloodless and shrivelled, but amber-tinted,
with swarthy shadows sharpening the nose and hollowing the temples. Under her
shapeless dress her body kept its limp immobility, and her dark eyes had the
bright witch-like stare that disease of the spine sometimes gives.
Even for that part of the country the kitchen was a poor-looking place.
With the exception of the dark-eyed woman's chair, which looked like a soiled
relic of luxury bought at a country auction, the furniture was of the roughest
kind. Three coarse china plates and a broken-nosed milk-jug had been set on a
greasy table scored with knife-cuts, and a couple of straw-bottomed chairs and
a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood meagrely against the plaster walls.
"My, it's cold here! The fire must be 'most out," Frome said,
glancing about him apologetically as he followed me in.
The tall woman, who had moved away from us toward the dresser, took no
notice; but the other, from her cushioned niche, answered complainingly, in a
high thin voice. "It's on'y just been made up this very minute. Zeena fell
asleep and slep' ever so long, and I thought I'd be frozen stiff before I could
wake her up and get her to 'tend to it."
I knew then that it was she who had been speaking when we entered.
Her companion, who was just coming back to the table with the remains of a
cold mince-pie in a battered pie-dish, set down her unappetising burden without
appearing to hear the accusation brought against her.
Frome stood hesitatingly before her as she advanced; then he looked at me
and said: "This is my wife, Mis' Frome." After another interval he
added, turning toward the figure in the arm-chair: "And this is Miss
Mattie Silver..."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mrs. Hale, tender soul, had pictured me as lost in the Flats and buried
under a snow-drift; and so lively was her satisfaction on seeing me safely
restored to her the next morning that I felt my peril had caused me to advance
several degrees in her favour.
Great was her amazement, and that of old Mrs. Varnum, on learning that
Ethan Frome's old horse had carried me to and from Corbury Junction through the
worst blizzard of the winter; greater still their surprise when they heard that
his master had taken me in for the night.
Beneath their wondering exclamations I felt a secret curiosity to know what
impressions I had received from my night in the Frome household, and divined
that the best way of breaking down their reserve was to let them try to
penetrate mine. I therefore confined myself to saying, in a matter-of-fact
tone, that I had been received with great kindness, and that Frome had made a
bed for me in a room on the ground-floor which seemed in happier days to have
been fitted up as a kind of writing-room or study.
"Well," Mrs. Hale mused, "in such a storm I suppose he felt
he couldn't do less than take you in-but I guess it went hard with Ethan. I
don't believe but what you're the only stranger has set foot in that house for
over twenty years. He's that proud he don't even like his oldest friends to go
there; and I don't know as any do, any more, except myself and the
doctor..."
"You still go there, Mrs. Hale?" I ventured.
"I used to go a good deal after the accident, when I was first
married; but after awhile I got to think it made 'em feel worse to see us. And
then one thing and another came, and my own troubles... But I generally make
out to drive over there round about New Year's, and once in the summer. Only I
always try to pick a day when Ethan's off somewheres. It's bad enough to see
the two women sitting there-but his face, when he looks round that bare place,
just kills me... You see, I can look back and call it up in his mother's day,
before their troubles."
Old Mrs. Varnum, by this time, had gone up to bed, and her daughter and I
were sitting alone, after supper, in the austere seclusion of the horse-hair
parlour. Mrs. Hale glanced at me tentatively, as though trying to see how much
footing my conjectures gave her; and I guessed that if she had kept silence
till now it was because she had been waiting, through all the years, for some
one who should see what she alone had seen.
I waited to let her trust in me gather strength before I said: "Yes,
it's pretty bad, seeing all three of them there together."
She drew her mild brows into a frown of pain. "It was just awful from
the beginning. I was here in the house when they were carried up-they laid
Mattie Silver in the room you're in. She and I were great friends, and she was
to have been my bridesmaid in the spring... When she came to I went up to her
and stayed all night. They gave her things to quiet her, and she didn't know
much till to'rd morning, and then all of a sudden she woke up just like
herself, and looked straight at me out of her big eyes, and said... Oh, I don't
know why I'm telling you all this," Mrs. Hale broke off, crying.
She took off her spectacles, wiped the moisture from them, and put them on
again with an unsteady hand. "It got about the next day," she went
on, "that Zeena Frome had sent Mattie off in a hurry because she had a
hired girl coming, and the folks here could never rightly tell what she and
Ethan were doing that night coasting, when they'd ought to have been on their
way to the Flats to ketch the train... I never knew myself what Zeena thought-I
don't to this day. Nobody knows Zeena's thoughts. Anyhow, when she heard o' the
accident she came right in and stayed with Ethan over to the minister's, where
they'd carried him. And as soon as the doctors said that Mattie could be moved,
Zeena sent for her and took her back to the farm."
"And there she's been ever since?"
Mrs. Hale answered simply: "There was nowhere else for her to
go;" and my heart tightened at the thought of the hard compulsions of the
poor.
"Yes, there she's been," Mrs. Hale continued, "and Zeena's
done for her, and done for Ethan, as good as she could. It was a miracle,
considering how sick she was-but she seemed to be raised right up just when the
call came to her. Not as she's ever given up doctoring, and she's had sick
spells right along; but she's had the strength given her to care for those two
for over twenty years, and before the accident came she thought she couldn't
even care for herself."
Mrs. Hale paused a moment, and I remained silent, plunged in the vision of
what her words evoked. "It's horrible for them all," I murmured.
"Yes: it's pretty bad. And they ain't any of 'em easy people either.
Mattie was, before the accident; I never knew a sweeter nature. But she's
suffered too much-that's what I always say when folks tell me how she's soured.
And Zeena, she was always cranky. Not but what she bears with Mattie
wonderful-I've seen that myself. But sometimes the two of them get going at
each other, and then Ethan's face'd break your heart... When I see that, I
think it's him that suffers most... anyhow it ain't Zeena, because she ain't
got the time... It's a pity, though," Mrs. Hale ended, sighing, "that
they're all shut up there'n that one kitchen. In the summertime, on pleasant
days, they move Mattie into the parlour, or out in the door-yard, and that
makes it easier... but winters there's the fires to be thought of; and there
ain't a dime to spare up at the Fromes.'"
Mrs. Hale drew a deep breath, as though her memory were eased of its long
burden, and she had no more to say; but suddenly an impulse of complete avowal
seized her.
She took off her spectacles again, leaned toward me across the bead-work
table-cover, and went on with lowered voice: "There was one day, about a
week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn't live. Well, I
say it's a pity she did. I said it right out to our minister once, and he was
shocked at me. Only he wasn't with me that morning when she first came to...
And I say, if she'd ha' died, Ethan might ha' lived; and the way they are now,
I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the
Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the
women have got to hold their tongues."
.