Ethan Frome Page #8

Ethan Frome is a 1911 book by American author Edith Wharton. It is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. The novel was adapted into a film, Ethan Frome, in 1993.

• Fantasy
• Horror
• Novel

								


“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?”
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