At home, in Chicopee, she used always to go through with a form of
prayer, but she could not do that now for the something which rose up
between her and Heaven, smothering the words upon her lips, and so in
this dreadful condition she lived on day after day, growing more, and
more desolately and lonely, and wondering sadly if life would always be
as dreary and aimless as it was now. And while she pondered thus, Andy
prayed on and practiced his lessons in good manners, provoking the mirth
of the whole family by his ludicrous attempts to be polite, and feeling
sometimes tempted to give the matter up. Andy was everything to Ethelyn,
and once when her conscience was smiting her more than usual with regard
to the blanks, she said to him abruptly: "if you had made a wicked vow,
which would you do--keep it or break it, and so tell a falsehood?"
Andy was not much of a lawyer, he said, but "he thought he knew some
scripter right to the pint," and taking his well-worn Bible he found and
read the parable of the two sons commanded to work in their
father's vineyard.
"If the Saviour commended the one who said he wouldn't and then went and
did it, I think there can be no harm in your breaking a wicked vow:
leastways I should do it."
This was Andy's advice, and that night, long after the family were in
bed, a light was shining in Ethelyn's chamber, where she sat writing to
her husband, and as if Andy's spirit were pervading hers, she softened,
as she wrote and asked forgiveness for all the past which she had made
so wretched. She was going to do better, she said, and when her husband
came home she would try to make him happy.
"But, oh, Richard," she wrote, "please take me away from here to Camden,
or Olney, or anywhere--so I can begin anew to be the wife I ought to be.
I was never worthy of you, Richard. I deceived you from the first, and
if I could summon the courage I would tell you about it."
This letter which would have done so much good, was never finished, for
when the morning came there were troubled faces at the prairie
farmhouse--Mrs. Markham looking very anxious and Eunice very scared,
James going for the doctor and Andy for Mrs. Jones, while up in Ethie's
room, where the curtains were drawn so closely before the windows, life
and death were struggling for the mastery, and each in a measure coming
off triumphant.