VI
Something, one tense and feverish midnight, when he lay in his bed snarling and brooding and chuckling—a kind of snapping sense in some remote interior chamber of his brain, followed by a nervous shock that made him sit upright—warned him that the time for action was at hand. What is it that makes sinners, at provincial revival meetings, suddenly aware that the hours of dalliance are past and the great instant that shall send them to “the mourners' bench” is at hand? Somehow, they seem to know! And, somehow, Clarke felt an occult touch and knew that his time for action had arrived.
He did not care what came afterwards. Any jury in the world, so he told himself, ought to acquit him of his deed, when they once knew his story; when they once looked at the damning evidence of her guilt which she had hidden away for so long in the brass-bound box. But if they did not acquit him, that was all right, too. His work in the world would have been done; he would have punished a guilty woman. He would have shown that all men are not fools.
But he did not spend a great deal of thought on how other people would regard what he was about to do. As he crept down the hall with the knife in his hand, his chief sensation was a premonitory itch, a salty tang of pleasure in the doing of the deed itself. When hatred comes in where love has gone out, there may be a kind of voluptuary delight in the act of murder.
Very carefully he opened the door of her room. And then he smiled to himself, and entered noisily; for what was the need of being careful about waking up a woman who was already dead? He did not care whether he killed her in her sleep or not;—indeed, if she wakened and begged for her life, he thought it might add a certain zest to the business. He should enjoy hearing her plead. He would not mind prolonging things.
But things were not prolonged. His hand and the muscles of his forearm had tensed so often with the thought, with the idea, that the first blow went home. She never waked.