The trembling prisoner burrowed the deeper in the straw.
Now it would have been a perfect piece of comedy, had not that poor lad been breathing so hard and quick behind me. His life was suspended on a hair, and this he knew, and I knew also. Otherwise I should have enjoyed the acting of this play in a fashion that my jaded appetite seldom enjoys anything. Therefore I continued to regard the Captain with a gravely whimsical look; but if he twitched an eyelid, altered the position of a finger, or shifted the altitude an inch at which the lantern hung, I began to speculate upon the fact, and wrote it in my heart. We played a game of cat and mouse, and for once the Captain was the cat. Conceive me the grey and frightened little mouse, trying to dodge the deathly paw that any instant might descend and mutilate it.
“Captain,” says I, “are you also interested deeply in the study of astronomy?”
“Astronomy!” cries he, “why astronomy?”
He was a wonderfully clever cat, but trembling little mousie had got him, by her cunning ways, a trifle off his guard you see.
“Why, my dearest man,” says I, putting a world of surprise into my tone lest the moonlight should not properly reflect the amount that was inserted in my face, “do you suppose for an instant now that a woman wholly in possession of her wits would quit a warm bed at three o’clock of a winter’s night to gaze at a full moon from a hay loft if a question of the heavenly bodies had not summoned her. Do you think for a moment, sir, that I am here without a reason? Or rank somnambulism you may consider it?”
You would have laughed at the amount of indignant heat, as though I were hurt most tenderly, that I contrived to instil into my accents.
“Oh dear no, dear Lady Barbara!” says the horrid creature as silkily as possible; “that you are here without a reason I do not for a moment think. You misjudge me there, dear lady.”
Captain Grantley was become the devil! I fairly raked his smiling face with the fierceness of my eyes, but when they were driven from it by the simplicity of his look, it was smiling still, yet inscrutable as the night in which we stood. His language was so ordered that it might mean everything; on the contrary it might mean nothing. This was the distracting part. The man spoke in such an honest, unpremeditated fashion that who should suspect that he knew anything at all? But why was he here? And why could at least two interpretations be put upon every word he uttered? These the ruminations of a guilty mind!
Hereabouts an idea regaled me. If I could but coax the Captain up into the loft, it would leave the ladder free. The prisoner then might make a dash for liberty, and if he had an athlete’s body and sound wind and limbs to serve him in his flight, all was not yet lost, and he had still a chance of life.