“I am wondering what you are going to do with me,” I ventured.
In all of her quick actions, and in the tones of her voice, there was evident a most unnatural sort of strain. She may well have been excited; that was only to be expected in the circumstances. But the repressed excitement in this woman's manner was not that of a woman who is forcing herself to keep her courage up; not that of a woman who would like to scream; but a steadier nervous energy which seemed to burn in her like a fire, to escape from her finger tips, and almost to crackle in her hair; an intensity that was vibrant. I marveled. Most women would have screamed at the advent of a man in the dead of night; screamed and fainted. Or the ones who would not, and who were armed as she, would ordinarily have been inclined to shoot, and at once; or immediately to have given the alarm. She had done none of these things. She had merely taken me captive. She had set me down in a chair at the center of the room. She had not roused the house. And now she stood looking at me with a trace of abstraction in her manner; looking at me, for the moment, less as if I were a human being than as if I were a factor in some mathematical problem which it was the immediate task of that active, high-keyed brain of hers to solve. And there was a measure of irony in her glance, as if she alone tasted and enjoyed some ulterior jest.
“I am wondering,” I repeated, “what you are going to do with me.”
She sat down at the opposite side of the table before she replied.
“I believe,” she said slowly, “that I have nearly made up my mind what to do with you.”
“Well?” I asked.
But she said nothing, and continued to say nothing. I looked at her and her diamonds—the diamonds I had come after!—and wondered again why she was wearing them; wondered why she had tricked herself out as for some grand entertainment. And as the ignominious result of my night's expedition pressed more sharply against my pride I could have strangled her through sheer disappointment and mortification. The pistol she held was the answer to that impulse. But what was the answer to her hesitancy in alarming the house? Why did she not give me up and be done with me?
At the farther end of the room was a long red curtain, which covered the entrance to a sitting-room or parlor, as I guessed; and by the side of the curtain hung an old-fashioned bell cord, also of red, which I supposed to communicate with the servants' quarters. It were easy enough, now that she had taken the whip hand of me so cleverly, to pull that rope, to set the bell jangling, to rouse the house. Why did she not do so?
Was she a mad woman? There was that in her inexplicable conduct, and in her highly-wrought, yet governed, mood, as she sat in brooding silence across the table from me, to make the theory plausible. Brooding she was, and studying me, I thought; yet watchful, too. For at any least motion of mine her hand tightened slightly upon the pistol. We sat thus while the slow seconds lengthened into intolerable minutes; and I steamed with sweat, and fidgeted. Nor was I set more at my ease by her long searching glances. In fact, my overthrow had been so instant and so complete that my scattered wits had never drawn themselves together again; I continued as one in a haze; as a person half under the power of the hypnotist; as a mouse must feel after the first blow of the cat's paw. And yet one idea began to loom clearly out of that haze and possess me—the idea that she desired the alarm to be given as little as I did myself.
But there was no light in that. It was easy to understand why she did not wish the house aroused while she still believed me to be Charles—whoever Charles might be. But now?—it was too much for me. I could not find a justification in reason for my belief; and yet the conviction grew.