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Updated: June 12, 2025
But the practical problem was there and had to be dealt with. "You know I haven't got the money to pay for a girl, Zeena. You'll have to send her back: I can't do it." "The doctor says it'll be my death if I go on slaving the way I've had to. He doesn't understand how I've stood it as long as I have." "Slaving! " He checked himself again, "You sha'n't lift a hand, if he says so.
"Aunt Martha's ain't got a faded leaf on 'em; but they pine away when they ain't cared for," she said reflectively. Then she turned to Jotham and asked: "What time'd you say Dan'l Byrne'd be along?" The hired man threw a hesitating glance at Ethan. "Round about noon," he said. Zeena turned to Mattie.
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. There was a long silence between them; then Mattie said in a low voice: "Don't be too sorry, Ethan." "Oh, God oh, God," he groaned.
"Zeena, I've done all I could for you, and I don't see as it's been any use. I don't blame you, nor I don't blame myself. Maybe both of us will do better separate. I'm going to try my luck West, and you can sell the farm and mill, and keep the money " His pen paused on the word, which brought home to him the relentless conditions of his lot.
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 got about the next day," she went on, "that Zeena Frome had sent Mattie off in a hurry because she had a hired girl coming, and the folks here could never rightly tell what she and Ethan were doing that night coasting, when they'd ought to have been on their way to the Flats to ketch the train... I never knew myself what Zeena thought I don't to this day. Nobody knows Zeena's thoughts.
Now these and all other tokens of her presence had vanished and the room looked as bare and comfortless as when Zeena had shown her into it on the day of her arrival. In the middle of the floor stood her trunk, and on the trunk she sat in her Sunday dress, her back turned to the door and her face in her hands.
"It's not there!" he said, straightening himself with a start. They strained their eyes at each other through the icy darkness. Such a thing had never happened before. "Maybe she's forgotten it," Mattie said in a tremulous whisper; but both of them knew that it was not like Zeena to forget.
She stopped short, and he felt, in the darkness, that her face was lifted quickly to his. "Why, what do folks say?" "It's natural enough you should be leaving us" he floundered on, following his thought. "Is that what they say?" she mocked back at him; then, with a sudden drop of her sweet treble: "You mean that Zeena ain't suited with me any more?" she faltered.
You know how it is yourself: it's not so long ago since you fixed up your own place for Zeena." Ethan left the grays in Hale's stable and went about some other business in the village. As he walked away the builder's last phrase lingered in his ears, and he reflected grimly that his seven years with Zeena seemed to Starkfield "not so long."
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