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_ 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was almost as if the other face, the face of the superseded woman,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. _
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