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.