Ethan Frome
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