Chapter 6

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.