"Then it shall be. You promise that?" he said, kindling with delight.
"Yes, Thrasher, I promise now. Only give me time," and she held out her hand, he kissed it, and went away.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
A DOUBLE GUARD.
It was true the officer had insisted that Katharine should be removed to one of the upper chambers. She was gradually recovering strength, and though he had not the heart to propose her removal to prison, the dangers of escape became more apparent each hour. At last he suggested the only means of safety that presented itself—Katharine must be confined in the upper story, from whence flight would be difficult, unless assistance should come from without, a thing that he considered more than improbable.
Mrs. Allen made no resistance to these arrangements, for well the poor mother knew that all protest would be in vain. In some respects she preferred the change. It would remove Katharine from the sight of her jailor whenever the door of her room was opened; a presence that had become unspeakably oppressive of late. She seemed afraid of understanding what it meant, but every time his face passed by, or his shadow appeared on the wall, a terror came into her eyes, and she would look wistfully out, as you have seen a poor little rabbit peering with his great brown eyes through the trap some cruel boy had baited for him when the snow covered all other food.
Mrs. Allen had seen this with an aching heart. The man who usurped her own high-backed chair, with his feet stretched out stolidly on the hearth, watching the door of her child's room, had become a torment to her, patient and undemonstrative as she was. So the room was prepared, and in gentle silence Katharine took possession of it. She had no courage to question her mother, but shrunk with sensitive pain from the truth, harassed with fears, yet dreading to have them confirmed.
The mother, too, shrunk from the subject, which was forever lying cold at her heart. What good would it do were she to place all the hideous danger before her child? The law would strike hard enough when its time came; she had no heart to help it by a word.
They were very silent together, those two wretched women, for—with the one subject that filled their existence held in abeyance—what could they talk about? But the mother grew so gentle, so exquisitely loving, that some gleams of joy broke through their misery; still, the tenderness of this affection almost broke her child's heart. It was the offshoot of a great sorrow, which had softened the stern character of the mother, and lifted the young girl into sudden womanhood. The hour of maternity, be it in joy or grief, breaks down all the barriers of age, and, as in this case, the extremes of womanhood meet with some degree of equality.
But a painful apprehension was always at Katharine's heart. No one told her the terrible fate of which that man, sitting forever on her mother's hearth, was the harbinger, but the truth pressed vaguely upon her understanding, and her solitude was a perpetual terror. She grew keen in her observation. She searched even the mournful eyes of little Paul and the grieved features of Jube, in her silent quest after the knowledge she had no courage to claim in words.