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.