AFTER dinner they went back to the drawing-room together. Nettie
brought in coffee. She looked at Pamela curiously--with no very good
feeling. Her sharp, impudent eyes dropped to the left hand, where
Edred’s meaningless ring still gleamed. The look was not lost on
Pamela. Directly the maid had left the room she slipped the ring off
and put it in her purse. Jethro watched her, keen pity and indignation
in his light eyes.
“If ever he comes here,” he said grimly, and with the eager instinct of
a sportsman, “you must let me settle with him.”
“He will never come,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “He took all
he wanted from Folly Corner.”
“Yes; I shall never see my two hundred pounds again,” the other
returned ruefully, and a disagreeable silence fell over the room, the
fire standing red on those two painfully tense faces.
Soon after coffee Jethro grew sleepy. He dozed spasmodically,
shaking himself up at intervals, with apologetic murmurs. Pamela
sat silent, her unringed hands on her lap, her eyes sadly on the
coals. She resented the lack of drama in what she regarded as her
home-coming. The long, varying walk had been so pregnant with
possibilities. She had imagined, dreaded, dared to hope--so much. This
was the end--Jethro, inert with food, sleeping like a tired dog in the
armchair. Everything was settled. They had talked themselves out
already. She was to stay; she was to be Cousin Pamela again. Whether
they were really cousins or not they did not know--they had agreed not
to trouble--it mattered not. She was back at Folly Corner. To-morrow
she would pick up her dropped reins. She would go to Turle, to the
Warren, to all the roomy, warm old houses; she would kiss again the
placid, clumsy-souled woman. No one was to know the truth. Everything
would be just as it had been before--except that there would be no
question of love between her and Jethro. He tacitly insinuated that,
and she as delicately agreed. It had all been conveyed by a look.
When the clock struck ten, he shook himself up for the last time,
stumbled to his feet, yawned openly, and said that it was late. Was she
quite ready for bed? They went round the house together, winding the
thirty-hour clock in the kitchen, which Gainah, strangely enough, had
forgotten, trying bolts and locks, turning out lights. They went up the
oak steps. At the door of the guest-room he kissed her calmly above the
eyes.
When she was half undressed she discovered that the bed had not been
made. The blankets and quilt were there, but there were no sheets, no
slips on the pillows. She was half amused and half angry, divining at
once what had happened. Gainah with a last kick of authority had bidden
the maids prepare the inferior room which had been hers in former days.
She went softly along the corridor and into that room. The bed was
made. She did not intend to sleep there: Gainah must be grasped with a
firm hand from the very start. She set her candle down, peeled off the
sheets, piled them with the pillows in her arms, and turned to go back
to the guest-room. When she opened the door, a puff of wind--the
draughty old house was full of strange gusts--blew out her candle.
Before the candle blew out she noticed that the key was gone from the
door.
It was a wild autumn night, the wind rising and calling warningly down
the chimney. The room was dark, the curtains closely drawn. One gleam
of light, narrow and pointed, pierced through the uncurtained window in
the corridor and fell on the tumbled bed. She had dragged the sheets up
roughly; the blankets were in billows under the cotton quilt, the
bolster, in a case of some coarse, dark stuff, was half doubled and
partly buried beneath the humped-up coverings. As she gave the last
look back before shutting the door she was struck by the oddity of that
untidy bed. Quite unwittingly, in her hurried gathering of linen, she
had achieved the similitude of a human form. The appearance was
sufficiently startling. It was one of those queer, accidental effects
which sometimes occur. The tumbled blankets, under the white quilt
which she had hastily smoothed, the doubled, coarsely-covered bolster,
half hidden, were like the curled-up body and round head of some
sleeper.
She went softly along the passage, down the steps, round the angles, in
the dark, knowing every turn of the way. When she reached the
guest-room she locked the door, lighted the candle, and made the bed.
Directly she was in the shadow of the dim old hangings she fell asleep.
When the house was quiet and dark Gainah crept out of her room and
slipped, in her flat cloth shoes, down the stairs. She had not
undressed, had not even taken the band of dusty velvet from the top of
her head. She crept down to the lower rooms, where the fires were still
burning steadily, and where every article of furniture, new or old,
took fantastic shape. She went about lingeringly from one room to the
other, moving about slowly and stiffly in the dim circle of light which
came from the candle in her quivering hand.
She walked about through one room into another, along the corridor and
back again. Sometimes she sat down for a moment: sometimes she just
stealthily opened a door and peered in. The two clocks, the eight-day
in the dining-room and the thirty-hour in the kitchen, had clanging
tongues of brass. They were the only sounds in the sleeping house. The
hours struck. She did not seem to notice. A threatening change had come
over her. She was full of fever and tremor. Her cold eyes burned with
the fire of amethysts. Her ever-increasing restlessness would not let
her stay in one room long. She went about wearily, stiffly, driven by
some malignant whip. She went into the drawing-room and screwed herself
awkwardly at one end of the cozy corner. She started up almost
immediately. To her hardihood there was a feeling of oppressive luxury
and enervation about that soft, gayly-tricked room. She was such a
persistent worker that her back felt strange against stuffing; she was
more at ease with the broad bars of a rush-seated chair cutting from
shoulder to shoulder.
She went out in the kitchen and moved about uneasily, peering, by long
habit, into drawers, and sniffing, like an eager old dog, for fire.
There was a fatty frying-pan on the top of the kitchen range--that
new-fangled range that Pamela had made Jethro buy. A victorious gleam
hardened her glittering eyes: the maids had been cutting rashers for
their supper. Her rule was bread, cheese, and water or cider. This was
a battle to be fought out in the morning. The jades! And not wit enough
to scour the pan!
The knife-box stood on the dresser. Gainah bent over it, from habit
again. Everything definite that she did that night was done quite
mechanically and from unquenchable habit. It was her habit to peer for
dirty knives sneaked in among the clean: that was a cardinal offense.
The box was made of mahogany. There was a brass handle; it gleamed in
the light of her candle. The knives had heavy buck-horn handles. Old
Jethro had been proud of them, his son took to them as a matter of
course, but Pamela had sneered and said they were barbarous.
There were two sets--a dozen to each set. One was of lighter make
than the other; their handles were straight and tipped with steel. The
heavier set had stouter handles, which bulged out in knots at the ends.
Gainah picked out the two carving-knives and scrutinized the blades.
There was a weary, speculative look on her wasted, corpse-white face,
in which the brilliant eyes stood out so unnaturally. The frying-pan
was at her feet, but at the touch of the keen knives she absolutely
whirled away from trivial offenses--she was swept by one superb,
dangerous emotion.
She looked round the polished, scoured kitchen, as if asking those dumb
gleaming metal things on walls and shelves to help her--to suggest.
Then she moved toward the scullery and quietly drew the long bolts of
the door. She went across the yard, skirting the generous pile of
farm-buildings. They had been overhauled with the rest of the place.
The brick walls had been pointed; she could see every even, white line
of mortar. The roofs of thick thatch had been covered with sheets of
corrugated iron, which were hard and gray in the dim night. She went to
the tool-shed. That, by some oversight or by intention, had been left
untouched. It stood apart--the walls red patched with green, the roof
of rough tiles covered with a luxurious growth of lichens and
stonecrop.
She pushed back the door and went in. There were tools and labor
implements of many sorts in the house: all the deadly array of weapons
permitted to the peaceful agriculturist. Every one was familiar, to
her; she had known them all from her very birth--pronged fork, long
scythe, solid spade, rakes with long pointed teeth.
She sat down on a heap of sacks and rubbish by the wall. Her oddly
bright eyes roved feverishly over the collection; some on the earthen
floor, some sentinel-like against the wall, some slipped up in the
rafters, lying stealthily in wait.
After a little she got up stiffly, the rheumatism gripping her cold
limbs, and touched these things one by one lingeringly. She ran her
fingers along edges, pressed them against teeth: the speculative,
questioning look crossed her face again. Yes. She must do it. That was
necessary for the peaceful carrying on of the farm life. She had never
scrupled to destroy anything that came in the way of the farm. It must
be done. But how?
She took the hedgebill down. It had a long rounded handle of wood; its
iron head was reared, as if to strike; there was the malignity of a
cobra in the curve.
There was the scythe with which through so many early summers she had
seen them cut down the young grass; the sickle, the almost circular
faghook, the solid billhook of shining steel with which the men chopped
thick sticks that were bound in the very hearts of the fagots.
There was an old tragic tale bound round the sickle. Years ago
Chalcraft had made a clean cut with it through his child’s leg--a
three-year-old asleep in the quivering oats. They said that Chalcraft,
when the child died, tried to hang himself in the granary; but it was
before she came to Folly Corner.
There were the shears--long-handled shears, short-handled. She stood
thoughtfully moving the handles. What sharp wide jaws! One could almost
catch a head, a human head, in them, and clip it off as easily as one
would the head of a dandelion.
She dropped the tools as wearily as she had dropped the knives, with as
great an air of bewilderment. She went back to the house, in at the
open door. She stood for a moment looking out, seeing faintly some of
the changes that had taken place and imagining the rest. Nothing was
the same. The old prosperous, easy, untidy time had gone forever. The
Jaynes were trying to be gentry. She felt convinced that there was ruin
involved in the effort--ruin to the place, ruin to the family. She
loved the place: the hard iron roofs, the white-seamed bricks affronted
her. It wasn’t the Folly Corner she loved, outside nor in. She loved
the family; loved Jethro: hadn’t she almost married his father and been
a Jayne herself? And he! He was going to marry the girl who had lightly
altered everything. He was going to marry her--the girl who had come
back with the easy, insolent air of a devil that night when the shadows
were falling. It must not be. She must save the farm, save the family.
Yes. That was certain, that was settled. She had always made up her
mind that, if Pamela ever dared return, then Pamela must be done away
with. One had to get rid of certain nuisances, certain unprofitable
things about a farm. It was settled. But how?
She went back to the mahogany box, bent over it, brooded. She took out
the carver again, the poultry carver with the long slender blade and
the sharply pointed tip. She rubbed it stealthily along the stone
coping of the sink, then she carried it back to the kitchen and slowly
swished it backward and forward along the steel, doing everything as
silently as possible. By and by she drew the edge of the blade along
her finger. It was so keen that a thin red line of blood ran up.
She went upstairs. In one hand she carried the flat, winking
candlestick of brass, in the other the knife. Her fingers gripped the
smooth golden-brown handle convulsively. The wicked point she held
outward, her eyes fixed on it with much satisfaction. It was the best
thing after all. The tool-house, with its rude weapons of earth, had
not helped her. The knife-box had.
She was at the door of the room where she believed Pamela was sleeping.
Leaving the light outside, she turned the handle with a sure grasp. She
knew that the door could not be locked; the key was weighting her long
pocket. She had remembered to take away the key.
The room was dark. She went like a slow, certain arrow to the bed. All
her movements were slow, sure, horribly deliberate. She was used to
killing things. She knew that the great secret of success was to keep
cool. It didn’t seem to her any worse to kill a woman, when the woman
was a distinct obstruction and hindrance, than it was to kill a bird.
The knife was in her hand. She gripped the handle fiercely; the shining
red bone of her wrist stood out. She shut her eyes; it was a habit of
hers to shut her eyes at the very moment of killing--her ineradicable,
nervous, womanly habit.
She darted the point of the blade down, jabbing it furiously through
the heaped-up bedclothes. Then, her eyes hardly open, her hand out to
feel the way, she crept away, softly shutting the door behind her.
The hard lines of her worn face had relaxed, the feverish shine of her
eyes had given place to a calm light. The strained, hunted, uncertain
expression had gone forever. The rebellion and misery, the desperate
catechising of herself, were all ended. The question which, a year ago,
had rung and rung in her head so persistently, which had rung again so
noisily to-night when she heard that Pamela had come back, was
answered. That question, that weary, bitter question which had chimed
above her brow and made it ache so dully, would chime no more. There
was silence, a strange feeling of ease and lightness above her eyes,
where that maddening noise had been.
Her smoldering hatred of Pamela had taken tangible form. She wasn’t
clever; she knew not the meaning of finesse nor the nature of
conspiracy. It had never occurred to her that she might get rid of
Pamela by skillful appeal to Jethro’s dearest emotions. That was not
her way. Her way was more rough and ready, more grewsomely certain than
that. Pamela must be got rid of in the usual manner. There were plenty
of precedents on the farm. A knife was the only solution--knife, or a
trap, or a quick twist of the neck. But you could not twist a woman’s
neck; neither could you pin her in a gin. A knife--that was the only
way. She condemned Pamela in exactly the same spirit that she would
have condemned an unprofitable animal. She arrived at the decision with
stolidity. Her nerve had shaken a little at the actual act--that was
all: it needed a man to do the killing properly--it wasn’t woman’s
work on the farm.
Pests must be exterminated; that was the simplest rule of domestic
economy.
As she went along the narrow, silent passage and up the stairs to her
own room everything was strangely threatening. The candle was burning
short and leaping desperately in the stick. All the familiar things,
things of common life, reassuring things by day, were weird now with
night and sleep.
She was afraid. She didn’t know why: she fought the feeling. She had
earned the right to repose.
She shut her bedroom door, shooting the bolt convulsively. It was the
first time in her life that she had locked herself in at night. She
undressed quickly, the candle shooting up spasmodically before it died.
She laid her clothes, precisely folded, on the particular chair. She
took the velvet band from her head, parted her poor wisps of hair into
even strands, and twisted each strand into a wisp of rag.
She peeled herself of the various flannel wrappings which increasing
rheumatism demanded. Then she took off her stockings and slipped on her
coarse nightgown and got into bed, drawing the belated last leg in with
a frightened jerk.