The suspicions of primitive men are of a primitive nature. Those three days in which nothing had been seen or heard of his wife or Forbes had been a long agony to Wilson. And now that the end had come it seemed to him that his basest suspicions were confirmed. To his restricted apprehension there was but one passion in the world that could have sent his wife to this stranger’s side, to guard and save him at her cost. So thinking, it seemed to him that swift justice had been done.
And that he might not forget, nor let his fierce thoughts of her grow more tender, the next day when the train had gone eastward and he was left alone to his desolation he took his brush and laboriously wrote across the end of the high platform, in great letters for all men to see and wonder at, the phrase he thought her fitting epitaph:
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.
And there it still stands, remaining in its stupid, brutal accusation the sole monument on earth of a woman’s ended life.
HARDESTY’S COWARDICE
I
Straight on before them stretched the street, a wide and unobstructed way at first, but narrowing a little farther on, where there were, besides, buildings going up, and great piles of lumber standing far out in the road, and heaps of sand, and mortar-beds. Could he possibly get the horses under control before they reached those cruel lumber piles, where to be thrown meant death or worse? They were running wildly, and it was down hill all the way. She did not believe that human strength could do it, not even Neil’s, and he was as strong as he was tender. She looked down at his hands and noticed how white the knuckles were, and how the veins stood out, and then she bent her head that she might not see those fatal obstructions in their way, and clasped her hands as tightly as her lips. She found herself senselessly repeating, over and over, as if it were a charm, “Broad is the way ... that leadeth to destruction.”
It was a June morning, cool and sweet. If ever, life is dear in June. Her eyes fell on the great bunch of white roses in her lap. He had put them in her hands just as they were starting, and then had bent suddenly and left a quick kiss on the hands. It was only the other day he had told her that he had never, from the very first hour they met, seen her hands without longing to fill them with flowers. Would she be pleased to take notice, now that he possessed the right, he meant to exercise it?
Poor roses! Must they be crushed and mangled, too? She did not like the thought of scarlet stains upon their whiteness, and with some wild thought of saving them—for were they not his roses?—she flung them with a sudden gesture into the street.
“Oh, Christ!” she cried, voicelessly, “spare both of us—or neither!”