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.
The next morning at breakfast Jotham Powell was between
them, and Ethan tried to hide his joy under an air
of exaggerated indifference, lounging back in his
chair to throw scraps to the cat, growling at the
weather, and not so much as offering to help Mattie
when she rose to clear away the dishes.
He did not know why he was so irrationally happy,
for nothing was changed in his life or hers.
He had not even touched the tip of her fingers or
looked her full in the eyes. But their evening
together had given him a vision of what life at her
side might be, and he was glad now that he had done
nothing to trouble the sweetness of the picture.
He had a fancy that she knew what had restrained him...
There was a last load of lumber to be hauled to the
village, and Jotham Powell-who did not work regularly
for Ethan in winter-had “come round” to
help with the job. But a wet snow, melting to
sleet, had fallen in the night and turned the roads
to glass. There was more wet in the air and it
seemed likely to both men that the weather would “milden”
toward afternoon and make the going safer. Ethan
therefore proposed to his assistant that they should
load the sledge at the wood-lot, as they had done
on the previous morning, and put off the “teaming”
to Starkfield till later in the day. This plan
had the advantage of enabling him to send Jotham to
the Flats after dinner to meet Zenobia, while he himself
took the lumber down to the village.
He told Jotham to go out and harness up the greys,
and for a moment he and Mattie had the kitchen to
themselves. She had plunged the breakfast dishes
into a tin dish-pan and was bending above it with
her slim arms bared to the elbow, the steam from the
hot water beading her forehead and tightening her
rough hair into little brown rings like the tendrils
on the traveller’s joy.
Ethan stood looking at her, his heart in his throat.
He wanted to say: “We shall never be alone
again like this.” Instead, he reached down
his tobacco-pouch from a shelf of the dresser, put
it into his pocket and said: “I guess I
can make out to be home for dinner.”
She answered “All right, Ethan,” and he
heard her singing over the dishes as he went.
