Ethan Frome. Edith Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ his wife’s drawl came from behind him.

      “Oh, she’d never leave us as long as you needed her,” he returned, scraping hard at his chin.

      “I wouldn’t ever have it said that I stood in the way of a poor girl like Mattie marrying a smart fellow like Denis Eady,” Zeena answered in a tone of plaintive self-effacement.

      Ethan, glaring at his face in the glass, threw his head back to draw the razor from ear to chin. His hand was steady, but the attitude was an excuse for not making an immediate reply.

      “And the doctor don’t want I should be left without anybody,” Zeena continued. “He wanted I should speak to you about a girl he’s heard about, that might come—”

      Ethan laid down the razor and straightened himself with a laugh.

      “Denis Eady! If that’s all, I guess there’s no such hurry to look round for a girl.”

      “Well, I’d like to talk to you about it,” said Zeena obstinately.

      He was getting into his clothes in fumbling haste. “All right. But I haven’t got the time now; I’m late as it is,” he returned, holding his old silver turnip-watch to the candle.

      Zeena, apparently accepting this as final, lay watching him in silence while he pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and jerked his arms into his coat; but as he went toward the door she said, suddenly and incisively: “I guess you’re always late, now you shave every morning.”

      That thrust had frightened him more than any vague insinuations about Denis Eady. It was a fact that since Mattie Silver’s coming he had taken to shaving every day; but his wife always seemed to be asleep when he left her side in the winter darkness, and he had stupidly assumed that she would not notice any change in his appearance. Once or twice in the past he had been faintly disquieted by Zenobia’s way of letting things happen without seeming to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in a casual phrase, revealing that she had all along taken her notes and drawn her inferences. Of late, however, there had been no room in his thoughts for such vague apprehensions. Zeena herself, from an oppressive reality, had faded into an insubstantial shade. All his life was lived in the sight and sound of Mattie Silver, and he could no longer conceive of its being otherwise. But now, as he stood outside the church, and saw Mattie spinning down the floor with Denis Eady, a throng of disregarded hints and menaces wove their cloud about his brain …

       CHAPTER 2

      As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a face flushed with food and dancing. The villagers, being afoot, were the first to climb the slope to the main street, while the country neighbours packed themselves more slowly into the sleighs under the shed.

      “Ain’t you riding, Mattie?” a woman’s voice called back from the throng about the shed, and Ethan’s heart gave a jump. From where he stood he could not see the persons coming out of the hall till they had advanced a few steps beyond the wooden sides of the storm-door; but through its cracks he heard a clear voice answer: “Mercy no! Not on such a night.”

      She was there, then, close to him, only a thin board between. In another moment she would step forth into the night, and his eyes, accustomed to the obscurity, would discern her as clearly as though she stood in daylight. A wave of shyness pulled him back into the dark angle of the wall, and he stood there in silence instead of making his presence known to her. It had been one of the wonders of their intercourse that from the first, she, the quicker, finer, more expressive, instead of crushing him by the contrast, had given him something of her own ease and freedom; but now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his student days, when he had tried to “jolly” the Worcester girls at a picnic.

      He hung back, and she came out alone and paused within a few yards of him. She was almost the last to leave the hall, and she stood looking uncertainly about her as if wondering why he did not show himself. Then a man’s figure approached, coming so close to her that under their formless wrappings they seemed merged in one dim outline.

      “Gentleman friend gone back on you? Say, Matt, that’s tough! No, I wouldn’t be mean enough to tell the other girls. I ain’t as low-down as that.” (How Frome hated his cheap banter!) “But look a here, ain’t it lucky I got the old man’s cutter down there waiting for us?”

      Frome heard the girl’s voice, gaily incredulous: “What on earth’s your father’s cutter doin’ down there?”

      “Why, waiting for me to take a ride. I got the roan colt too. I kinder knew I’d want to take a ride to-night,” Eady, in his triumph, tried to put a sentimental note into his bragging voice.

      The girl seemed to waver, and Frome saw her twirl the end of her scarf irresolutely about her fingers. Not for the world would he have made a sign to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture.

      “Hold on a minute while I unhitch the colt,” Denis called to her, springing toward the shed.

      She stood perfectly still, looking after him, in an attitude of tranquil expectancy torturing to the hidden watcher. Frome noticed that she no longer turned her head from side to side, as though peering through the night for another figure. She let Denis Eady lead out the horse, climb into the cutter and fling back the bearskin to make room for her at his side; then, with a swift motion of flight, she turned about and darted up the slope toward the front of the church.

      “Good-bye! Hope you’ll have a lovely ride!” she called back to him over her shoulder.

      Denis laughed, and gave the horse a cut that brought him quickly abreast of her retreating figure.

      “Come along! Get in quick! It’s as slippery as thunder on this turn,” he cried, leaning over to reach out a hand to her.

      She laughed back at him: “Good-night! I’m not getting in.”

      By this time they had passed beyond Frome’s earshot and he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes as they continued to move along the crest of the slope above him. He saw Eady, after a moment, jump from the cutter and go toward the girl with the reins over one arm. The other he tried to slip through hers; but she eluded him nimbly, and Frome’s heart, which had swung out over a black void, trembled back to safety. A moment later he heard the jingle of departing sleigh bells and discerned a figure advancing alone toward the empty expanse of snow before the church.

      In the black shade of the Varnum spruces he caught up with her and she turned with a quick “Oh!”

      “Think I’d forgotten you, Matt?” he asked with sheepish glee.

      She answered seriously: “I thought maybe you couldn’t come back for me.”

      “Couldn’t? What on earth could stop me?”

      “I knew Zeena wasn’t feeling any too good to-day.”

      “Oh, she’s in bed long ago.” He paused, a question struggling in him. “Then you meant to walk home all alone?”

      “Oh, I ain’t afraid!” she laughed.

      They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about СКАЧАТЬ