The Head of the House of Coombe

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

“I was in time,” he said to himself, feeling somewhat nauseated. “By extraordinary luck, I was in time. In earlier days one would have said something about ‘Provadence’.” And he at once walked back.

CHAPTER XXIII

It was not utterly dark in the room, though Robin, after passing her hands carefully over the walls, had found no electric buttons within reach nor any signs of candles or matches elsewhere. The night sky was clear and brilliant with many stars, and this gave her an unshadowed and lighted space to look at. She went to the window and sat down on the floor, huddled against the wall with her hands clasped round her knees, looking up. She did this in the effort to hold in check a rising tide of frenzy which threatened her. Perhaps, if she could fix her eyes on the vault full of stars, she could keep herself from going out of her mind. Though, perhaps, it would be better if she did go out of her mind, she found herself thinking a few seconds later.

After her first entire acceptance of the hideous thing which had happened to her, she had passed through nerve breaking phases of terror-stricken imaginings. The old story of the drowning man across whose brain rush all the images of life, came back to her. She did not know where or when or how she had ever heard or read of the ghastly incidents which came trooping up to her and staring at her with dead or mad eyes and awful faces. Perhaps they were old nightmares—perhaps a kind of delirium had seized her. She tried to stop their coming by saying over and over again the prayers Dowie had taught her when she was a child. And then she thought, with a sob which choked her, that perhaps they were only prayers for a safe little creature kneeling by a white bed—and did not apply to a girl locked up in a top room, which nobody knew about. Only when she thought of Mademoiselle Vallé and Dowie looking for her—with all London spread out before their helplessness—did she cry. After that, tears seemed impossible. The images trooped by too close to her. The passion hidden within her being—which had broken out when she tore the earth under the shrubbery, and which, with torture staring her in the face, had leaped in the child’s soul and body and made her defy Andrews with shrieks—leaped up within her now. She became a young Fury, to whom a mad fight with monstrous death was nothing. She told herself that she was strong for a girl—that she could tear with her nails, she could clench her teeth in a flesh, she could shriek, she could battle like a young madwoman so that they would be forced to kill her. This was one of the images which rose up before her again and yet again, A hideous—hideous thing, which would not remain away.

She had not had any food since the afternoon cup of tea and she began to feel the need of it. If she became faint—! She lifted her face desperately as she said it, and saw the immense blue darkness, powdered with millions of stars and curving over her—as it curved over the hideous house and all the rest of the world. How high—how immense—how fathomlessly still it was—how it seemed as if there could be nothing else—that nothing else could be real! Her hands were clenched together hard and fiercely, as she scrambled to her knees and uttered a of prayer—not a child’s—rather the cry of a young Fury making a demand.

“Perhaps a girl is Nothing,” she cried, “—a girl locked up in a room! But, perhaps, she is Something—she may be real too! Save me—save me! But if you won’t save me, let me be killed!”

She knelt silent after it for a few minutes and then she sank down and lay on the floor with her face on her arm.

How it was possible that even young and worn-out as she was, such peace as sleep could overcome her at such a time, one cannot say. But in the midst of her torment she was asleep.

But it was not for long. She wakened with a start and sprang to her feet shivering. The carriages were still coming and going with guests for the big house opposite. It could not be late, though she seemed to have been in the place for years—long enough to feel that it was the hideous centre of the whole earth and all sane and honest memories were a dream. She thought she would begin to walk up and down the room.

But a sound she heard at this very instant made her stand stock still. She had known there would be a sound at last—she had waited for it all the time—she had known, of course, that it would come, but she had not even tried to guess whether she would hear it early or late. It would be the sound of the turning of the handle of the locked door. It had come. There it was! The click of the lock first and then the creak of the turned handle!