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 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...
