“I know about it and I’ve told Maud,” the railroad man’s sister said sharply. “We don’t need to talk about it no more.”
Maud Welliver had listened with flushed cheeks to her father’s words, and even as he talked had made up her mind she would see May again and soon. Since coming to Bidwell she had not left the house at night, but now she felt suddenly quite strong and well. When the supper was finished and darkness came on she got up from her chair on the porch and spoke to her aunt, at work inside the house. “I feel better than I have for months, aunty,” she said, “and I’m going for a little walk. You know the doctor said I was to walk all I could and I can’t walk during the day on account of the heat. I’ll just go uptown a little while.”
Maud went cautiously along the sidewalk toward the business section of town and then crossed over and returning on the opposite side, stole along, walking on the grass at the edge of lawns. What an adventure! She felt like one being admitted into some strange world filled with romance. For her May Edgley’s tales had become golden apples of existence, to taste which she would risk anything. “What a person!” she thought as she crept forward in the darkness, lifting and putting down her feet on the grass like a kitten compelled to walk in water. She thought of May Edgley’s adventure in the wood with Jerome Hadley. How stupid her father had been, how stupid everyone in the town of Bidwell! “It must be so with men and women everywhere,” she thought vaguely. “They go on thinking they know what’s happening, and they know nothing.” She thought of May Edgley, small and a woman, alone in the forest with a man—a dark determined man, intent upon murder. The man held in his hand a little package containing a white powder. A few grains of it in a cup of coffee and a human life would go out. A man who walked and talked and went about the streets of Bidwell with other men would become a white lifeless bit of clay. Maud had been at several times in her life close to the door of death. She imagined a scene. There was a rich man’s home with soft carpets, woven of priceless stuffs, brought from the Orient. One walking on the carpets made no sound. The feet sank softly into the velvety stuff and soft-voiced servants moved about. A man entered and sat at breakfast. The movies had not at that time come to Bidwell but Maud had read many popular novels and several times, at Fort Wayne, had been to the theatre.
There was a woman in the rich man’s house—his guilty wife. She was slender and willowy. Ah, there was something serpentine about her. In Maud’s imagination she lay on a silken couch beside the table, at which the man now sat down to eat his breakfast. A wood fire burned in the fireplace. The woman’s hand stole forward and a tiny pinch of the white powder went into the coffee cup; then she raised a white hand and stroked the man’s cheek. She closed her eyes and lay back on the silken couch. The dastardly deed was done and the woman did not care. She was not even curious as to how death would come. She yawned and waited.
The man drank his coffee and arising moved about the room and then a sudden pallor came upon his cheeks. It was quite noticeable as he was a ruddy-cheeked man with soft grey hair—a strong commanding figure of a man, a leader among men. Maud pictured him as the president of a great railroad system. She had never seen a railroad president but her father had often spoken of the president of the Nickle Plate and had described him as a big fine looking fellow.
What a thing is passion, so terrible, so strange. It takes such unimaginable turns. The woman on the silken couch, the willowy serpentine woman, had turned from her husband, from the commander of men, from the strong man, the powerful one who swept all before him, and had given her illicit but powerfully fascinating love to a railroad mail clerk.
Maud had seen Jerome Hadley. When the Wellivers had first come to Bidwell she, with her aunt and father, had been driven about town with a real-estate man and his wife. They were looking for a house in which to live and as they drove about the real-estate man’s wife, who sat on the back seat of a surrey with Maud and her aunt, had pointed to Jerome Hadley, walking past in the street, and had told in a whisper the story of his going into the wood with May Edgley. Maud was half sick on that day and had not listened. The railroad journey from Fort Wayne to Bidwell had given her a headache.
However, she had looked at Jerome. He had sloping shoulders, pale grey eyes and sandy hair, and when he walked he toed out badly and his trousers were baggy. And for that man the woman on the silken couch, the railroad president’s wife, was ready to commit murder. What an unexplainable, what a strange thing is love! The windings and twistings of its pathway through life cannot be followed by the human mind.
The scene being enacted in Maud Welliver’s mind played itself out. The strong man in the richly furnished room put his hand to his throat and staggered. He reeled from side to side and clutched at the backs of chairs. The noiseless servants had all gone out of the room. The woman half arose from the couch as the man fell to the floor and in falling struck his head on the corner of a table so that his blood ran out upon the silken carpets. The woman smiled sardonically. It was terrible. She cared not the least in the world and a slow cruel smile came and remained fixed on her face. Then there was the sound of running feet. The servants were coming, they were running, running desperately. The woman lay back on the couch and yawned again. “I had better scream and then faint,” she thought and she did the two things, did them with the air of a tired actor rehearsing a well known part for a play. It was all for love, for a strange and mysterious thing called passion. She did it for Jerome Hadley’s sake, that she might be free to walk with him the illicit paths of love.