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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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57 She shone at him across the table. “Well, sit right down then. You must be starving.” She uncovered the pie and pushed it over to him. So they were to have one more evening together, her happy eyes seemed to say! He helped himself mechanically and began to eat; then disgust took him by the throat and he laid down his fork. Mattie’s tender gaze was on him and she marked the gesture. “Why, Ethan, what’s the matter? Don’t it taste right?” “Yes-it’s first-rate. Only I-” He pushed his plate away, rose from his chair, and walked around the table to her side. She started up with frightened eyes. “Ethan, there’s something wrong! I knew there was!” She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes beat his cheek like netted butterflies. “What is it-what is it?” she stammered; but he had found her lips at last and was drinking unconsciousness of everything but the joy they gave him. She lingered a moment, caught in the same strong current; then she slipped from him and drew back a step or two, pale and troubled. Her look smote him with compunction, and he cried out, as if he saw her drowning in a dream: “You can’t go, Matt! I’ll never let you!” “Go-go?” she stammered. “Must I go?” The words went on sounding between them as though a torch of warning flew from hand to hand through a black landscape. Ethan was overcome with shame at his lack of self-control in flinging the news at her so brutally. His head reeled and he had to support himself against the table. All the while he felt as if he were still kissing her, and yet dying of thirst for her lips. “Ethan, what has happened? Is Zeena mad with me?” Her cry steadied him, though it deepened his wrath and pity. “No, no,” he assured her, “it’s not that. But this new doctor has scared her about herself. You know she believes all they say the first time she sees them. And this one’s told her she won’t get well unless she lays up and don’t do a thing about the housenot for months-” He paused, his eyes wandering from her miserably. She stood silent a moment, drooping before him like a broken branch. She was so small and weaklooking that it wrung his heart; but suddenly she lifted her head and looked straight at him. “And she wants somebody handier in my place? Is that it?” “That’s what she says to-night.” “If she says it to-night she’ll say it to-morrow.” Both bowed to the inexorable truth: they knew that Zeena never changed her mind, and that in her case a resolve once taken was equivalent to an act performed. |
