Beaming maternally on Ethan, she bent over to add:
“I on’y just heard from Mr. Hale ’bout
Zeena’s going over to Bettsbridge to see that
new doctor. I’m real sorry she’s feeling
so bad again! I hope he thinks he can do something
for her. I don’t know anybody round here’s
had more sickness than Zeena. I always tell Mr.
Hale I don’t know what she’d ‘a’
done if she hadn’t ‘a’ had you to
look after her; and I used to say the same thing ’bout
your mother. You’ve had an awful mean time,
Ethan Frome.”
She gave him a last nod of sympathy while her son
chirped to the horse; and Ethan, as she drove off,
stood in the middle of the road and stared after the
retreating sleigh.
It was a long time since any one had spoken to him
as kindly as Mrs. Hale. Most people were either
indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think
it natural that a young fellow of his age should have
carried without repining the burden of three crippled
lives. But Mrs. Hale had said, “You’ve
had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome,” and he
felt less alone with his misery. If the Hales
were sorry for him they would surely respond to his
appeal...
He started down the road toward their house, but at
the end of a few yards he pulled up sharply, the blood
in his face. For the first time, in the light
of the words he had just heard, he saw what he was
about to do. He was planning to take advantage
of the Hales’ sympathy to obtain money from
them on false pretences. That was a plain statement
of the cloudy purpose which had driven him in headlong
to Starkfield.
With the sudden perception of the point to which his
madness had carried him, the madness fell and he saw
his life before him as it was. He was a poor
man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion
would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had
had the heart to desert her he could have done so
only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied
him.
He turned and walked slowly back to the farm.
At the kitchen door Daniel Byrne sat in his sleigh
behind a big-boned grey who pawed the snow and swung
his long head restlessly from side to side.
Ethan went into the kitchen and found his wife by
the stove. Her head was wrapped in her shawl,
and she was reading a book called “Kidney Troubles
and Their Cure” on which he had had to pay extra
postage only a few days before.
Zeena did not move or look up when he entered, and
after a moment he asked: “Where’s
Mattie?”
Without lifting her eyes from the page she replied:
“I presume she’s getting down her trunk.”
The blood rushed to his face. “Getting
down her trunk-alone?”
“Jotham Powell’s down in the wood-lot,
and Dan’l Byrne says he darsn’t leave
that horse,” she returned.
Her husband, without stopping to hear the end of the
phrase, had left the kitchen and sprung up the stairs.
The door of Mattie’s room was shut, and he wavered
a moment on the landing. “Matt,” he
said in a low voice; but there was no answer, and
he put his hand on the door-knob.
