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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ethan Frome
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Release Date: October, 2003  [Etext #4517]
+Posting Date: February 4, 2010
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ETHAN FROME ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo
+
+
+
+
+
+ETHAN FROME
+
+
+By Edith Wharton
+
+
+
+
+ETHAN FROME
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy
+corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles
+and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was
+so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray
+against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the
+basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across
+the endless undulations.
+
+Young Ethan Frome walked at a quick pace along the deserted street, past
+the bank and Michael Eady's new brick store and Lawyer Varnum's house
+with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite the Varnum gate,
+where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the church reared
+its slim white steeple and narrow peristyle. As the young man walked
+toward it the upper windows drew a black arcade along the side wall of
+the building, but from the lower openings, on the side where the ground
+sloped steeply down to the Corbury road, the light shot its long bars,
+illuminating many fresh furrows in the track leading to the basement
+door, and showing, under an adjoining shed, a line of sleighs with
+heavily blanketed horses.
+
+The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave
+little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was rather of
+a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than
+ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic
+dome overhead. "It's like being in an exhausted receiver," he
+thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a year's course at a
+technological college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with
+a friendly professor of physics; and the images supplied by that
+experience still cropped up, at unexpected moments, through the totally
+different associations of thought in which he had since been living. His
+father's death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature
+end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be
+of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge
+cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.
+
+As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in
+his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by his sharp tramp.
+At the end of the village he paused before the darkened front of the
+church. He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and
+down the street, in which not another figure moved. The pitch of
+the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum's spruces, was the favourite
+coasting-ground of Starkfield, and on clear evenings the church corner
+rang till late with the shouts of the coasters; but to-night not a sled
+darkened the whiteness of the long declivity. The hush of midnight lay
+on the village, and all its waking life was gathered behind the church
+windows, from which strains of dance-music flowed with the broad bands
+of yellow light.
+
+The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope
+toward the basement door. To keep out of range of the revealing rays
+from within he made a circuit through the untrodden snow and gradually
+approached the farther angle of the basement wall. Thence, still hugging
+the shadow, he edged his way cautiously forward to the nearest window,
+holding back his straight spare body and craning his neck till he got a
+glimpse of the room.
+
+Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood, it
+seemed to be seething in a mist of heat. The metal reflectors of the
+gas-jets sent crude waves of light against the whitewashed walls, and
+the iron flanks of the stove at the end of the hall looked as though
+they were heaving with volcanic fires. The floor was thronged with
+girls and young men. Down the side wall facing the window stood a row of
+kitchen chairs from which the older women had just risen. By this time
+the music had stopped, and the musicians--a fiddler, and the young lady
+who played the harmonium on Sundays--were hastily refreshing themselves
+at one corner of the supper-table which aligned its devastated
+pie-dishes and ice-cream saucers on the platform at the end of the hall.
+The guests were preparing to leave, and the tide had already set toward
+the passage where coats and wraps were hung, when a young man with a
+sprightly foot and a shock of black hair shot into the middle of
+the floor and clapped his hands. The signal took instant effect.
+The musicians hurried to their instruments, the dancers--some already
+half-muffled for departure--fell into line down each side of the room,
+the older spectators slipped back to their chairs, and the lively young
+man, after diving about here and there in the throng, drew forth a girl
+who had already wound a cherry-coloured "fascinator" about her head,
+and, leading her up to the end of the floor, whirled her down its length
+to the bounding tune of a Virginia reel.
+
+Frome's heart was beating fast. He had been straining for a glimpse
+of the dark head under the cherry-coloured scarf and it vexed him that
+another eye should have been quicker than his. The leader of the reel,
+who looked as if he had Irish blood in his veins, danced well, and his
+partner caught his fire. As she passed down the line, her light figure
+swinging from hand to hand in circles of increasing swiftness, the scarf
+flew off her head and stood out behind her shoulders, and Frome, at each
+turn, caught sight of her laughing panting lips, the cloud of dark hair
+about her forehead, and the dark eyes which seemed the only fixed points
+in a maze of flying lines.
+
+The dancers were going faster and faster, and the musicians, to keep
+up with them, belaboured their instruments like jockeys lashing their
+mounts on the home-stretch; yet it seemed to the young man at the window
+that the reel would never end. Now and then he turned his eyes from the
+girl's face to that of her partner, which, in the exhilaration of the
+dance, had taken on a look of almost impudent ownership. Denis Eady was
+the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness
+and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of "smart" business
+methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the
+attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile
+applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood.
+Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but
+now he positively invited a horse-whipping. It was strange that the
+girl did not seem aware of it: that she could lift her rapt face to her
+dancer's, and drop her hands into his, without appearing to feel the
+offence of his look and touch.
+
+Frome was in the habit of walking into Starkfield to fetch home his
+wife's cousin, Mattie Silver, on the rare evenings when some chance of
+amusement drew her to the village. It was his wife who had suggested,
+when the girl came to live with them, that such opportunities should be
+put in her way. Mattie Silver came from Stamford, and when she entered
+the Fromes' household to act as her cousin Zeena's aid it was thought
+best, as she came without pay, not to let her feel too sharp a contrast
+between the life she had left and the isolation of a Starkfield farm.
+But for this--as Frome sardonically reflected--it would hardly have
+occurred to Zeena to take any thought for the girl's amusement.
+
+When his wife first proposed that they should give Mattie an occasional
+evening out he had inwardly demurred at having to do the extra two miles
+to the village and back after his hard day on the farm; but not long
+afterward he had reached the point of wishing that Starkfield might give
+all its nights to revelry.
+
+Mattie Silver had lived under his roof for a year, and from early
+morning till they met at supper he had frequent chances of seeing her;
+but no moments in her company were comparable to those when, her arm in
+his, and her light step flying to keep time with his long stride, they
+walked back through the night to the farm. He had taken to the girl from
+the first day, when he had driven over to the Flats to meet her, and
+she had smiled and waved to him from the train, crying out, "You must be
+Ethan!" as she jumped down with her bundles, while he reflected, looking
+over her slight person: "She don't look much on housework, but she ain't
+a fretter, anyhow." But it was not only that the coming to his house of
+a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold
+hearth. The girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had
+thought her. She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her
+things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he
+imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.
+
+It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most
+intensely the sweetness of this communion. He had always been more
+sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His
+unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his
+unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful
+persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent
+ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even
+know whether any one else in the world felt as he did, or whether he
+was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then he learned that
+one other spirit had trembled with the same touch of wonder: that at his
+side, living under his roof and eating his bread, was a creature to whom
+he could say: "That's Orion down yonder; the big fellow to the right is
+Aldebaran, and the bunch of little ones--like bees swarming--they're the
+Pleiades..." or whom he could hold entranced before a ledge of granite
+thrusting up through the fern while he unrolled the huge panorama of the
+ice age, and the long dim stretches of succeeding time. The fact that
+admiration for his learning mingled with Mattie's wonder at what he
+taught was not the least part of his pleasure. And there were other
+sensations, less definable but more exquisite, which drew them together
+with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter
+hills, the flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the
+intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow. When she said to him
+once: "It looks just as if it was painted!" it seemed to Ethan that the
+art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been
+found to utter his secret soul....
+
+As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back
+with the poignancy of vanished things. Watching Mattie whirl down the
+floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have thought
+that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her
+presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she
+lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always
+looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or
+three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him:
+a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her
+laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when
+anything charmed or moved her.
+
+The sight made him unhappy, and his unhappiness roused his latent fears.
+His wife had never shown any jealousy of Mattie, but of late she had
+grumbled increasingly over the house-work and found oblique ways of
+attracting attention to the girl's inefficiency. Zeena had always been
+what Starkfield called "sickly," and Frome had to admit that, if she
+were as ailing as she believed, she needed the help of a stronger arm
+than the one which lay so lightly in his during the night walks to the
+farm. Mattie had no natural turn for housekeeping, and her training had
+done nothing to remedy the defect. She was quick to learn, but forgetful
+and dreamy, and not disposed to take the matter seriously. Ethan had
+an idea that if she were to marry a man she was fond of the dormant
+instinct would wake, and her pies and biscuits become the pride of the
+county; but domesticity in the abstract did not interest her. At first
+she was so awkward that he could not help laughing at her; but she
+laughed with him and that made them better friends. He did his best to
+supplement her unskilled efforts, getting up earlier than usual to light
+the kitchen fire, carrying in the wood overnight, and neglecting the
+mill for the farm that he might help her about the house during the day.
+He even crept down on Saturday nights to scrub the kitchen floor after
+the women had gone to bed; and Zeena, one day, had surprised him at the
+churn and had turned away silently, with one of her queer looks.
+
+Of late there had been other signs of her disfavour, as intangible but
+more disquieting. One cold winter morning, as he dressed in the dark,
+his candle flickering in the draught of the ill-fitting window, he had
+heard her speak from the bed behind him.
+
+"The doctor don't want I should be left without anybody to do for me,"
+she said in her flat whine.
+
+He had supposed her to be asleep, and the sound of her voice had
+startled him, though she was given to abrupt explosions of speech after
+long intervals of secretive silence.
+
+He turned and looked at her where she lay indistinctly outlined under
+the dark calico quilt, her high-boned face taking a grayish tinge from
+the whiteness of the pillow.
+
+"Nobody to do for you?" he repeated.
+
+"If you say you can't afford a hired girl when Mattie goes."
+
+Frome turned away again, and taking up his razor stooped to catch the
+reflection of his stretched cheek in the blotched looking-glass above
+the wash-stand.
+
+"Why on earth should Mattie go?"
+
+"Well, when she gets married, I mean," his wife's drawl came from behind
+him.
+
+"Oh, she'd never leave us as long as you needed her," he returned,
+scraping hard at his chin.
+
+"I wouldn't ever have it said that I stood in the way of a poor girl
+like Mattie marrying a smart fellow like Denis Eady," Zeena answered in
+a tone of plaintive self-effacement.
+
+Ethan, glaring at his face in the glass, threw his head back to draw
+the razor from ear to chin. His hand was steady, but the attitude was an
+excuse for not making an immediate reply.
+
+"And the doctor don't want I should be left without anybody," Zeena
+continued. "He wanted I should speak to you about a girl he's heard
+about, that might come--"
+
+Ethan laid down the razor and straightened himself with a laugh.
+
+"Denis Eady! If that's all, I guess there's no such hurry to look round
+for a girl."
+
+"Well, I'd like to talk to you about it," said Zeena obstinately.
+
+He was getting into his clothes in fumbling haste. "All right. But I
+haven't got the time now; I'm late as it is," he returned, holding his
+old silver turnip-watch to the candle.
+
+Zeena, apparently accepting this as final, lay watching him in silence
+while he pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and jerked his arms
+into his coat; but as he went toward the door she said, suddenly and
+incisively: "I guess you're always late, now you shave every morning."
+
+That thrust had frightened him more than any vague insinuations about
+Denis Eady. It was a fact that since Mattie Silver's coming he had taken
+to shaving every day; but his wife always seemed to be asleep when he
+left her side in the winter darkness, and he had stupidly assumed that
+she would not notice any change in his appearance. Once or twice in the
+past he had been faintly disquieted by Zenobia's way of letting things
+happen without seeming to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in
+a casual phrase, revealing that she had all along taken her notes and
+drawn her inferences. Of late, however, there had been no room in his
+thoughts for such vague apprehensions. Zeena herself, from an oppressive
+reality, had faded into an insubstantial shade. All his life was lived
+in the sight and sound of Mattie Silver, and he could no longer conceive
+of its being otherwise. But now, as he stood outside the church, and saw
+Mattie spinning down the floor with Denis Eady, a throng of disregarded
+hints and menaces wove their cloud about his brain....
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+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 at 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.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+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."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+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 dough-nuts,
+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.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+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 dough-nuts.
+
+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."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+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 it 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...
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+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 make 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.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+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."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
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