“A woman—Emily—came in here after I had gone to sleep! Don’t you see, or if you can’t see, can’t you feel that I’m on tenterhooks? Will you go on, or must I take you by the shoulders and shake it out of you?”
I told her what there was to tell, in the dark. She stood close up to me. As she said, I could feel she was on tenterhooks. She gripped me with her hands, as if she were unwilling to let there be so much as an inch of space between us, for fear of losing a syllable of what I had to say. As the interest increased her grasp tightened. Yet when I had to stop and tell her that she was pinching me black and blue, she resented my remonstrance as if it had been an unnecessary interruption of my narration. She could not have been more unreasonable had she tried. And to crown it all, so soon as I had finished she professed to doubt me.
“You’re sure you’ve been telling me just exactly what took place. I know your taste for the romantic.”
“I’ve been telling you nothing but the sober facts.”
“Sober, you call them? Staggering facts they seem to me. But why didn’t you ask the creature who she was?”
“Don’t I tell you that I did? And she replied that she was a daughter of the gods, and held life and death in her hand.”
“Is that so? She must have been a oner. Emily, I’ll never forgive you as long as I live for letting me sleep on.”
“Don’t! I wish you wouldn’t pinch. If you’d been in my place, I don’t believe you’d have done anything different—it’s all very well for you to talk. Why didn’t you wake up on your own accord? Anyone else in your place would have done—I should. The truth is, Pollie, you were sleeping like a grampus.”
“Thank you, my pet. I don’t quite know how a grampus sleeps, and I don’t believe you do either; but I’m obliged for the compliment all the same. I suppose it’s meant for a compliment. Of course the thing’s as plain as a pikestaff. Your daughter of the gods sneaked out of one of Bluebeard’s chambers, where, no doubt, she is at this identical moment. Shouldn’t I like to get at her! I will before I’m done. It seems as if she—or somebody—is discontented with the way I’ve behaved since I came into my fortune, though it’s early days to be dissatisfied. And the idea apparently is to get hold of the keys, and then to get rid of me; on the supposition that when I’m once outside I shan’t be able, without the keys, to get in again. But I’m not quite so simple as I look. When she went I expect you fell asleep, though why you didn’t wake me up, and help chivy her downstairs, is more than I can understand. I’d have daughter-of-the-gods her! Then she sneaked back, searched for the keys. Fortunately, the intricacies of a Christian woman’s costume were too many for her. So she jumped to the conclusion that they were concealed in some mysterious hiding-place, quite beyond her finding out, daughter of the gods though she is. She pinned the piece of paper to my bodice, and she locked the door, supposing that we’d the spirits of mice, and that we’d give her what she’s no more right to than the man in the moon, just to unlock it again. But you’re mistaken, you daughter of the gods! Emily, I can’t see your face, and you can’t see mine. If you could you’d see determination written on it, and you’d know she was. I don’t mean to be kept shut up like a rat in a trap, not much, I don’t. Outside there! Are you going to open this door, or am I to open it for you?”
Bang, bang she went with her fists against the panels. The noise she made shook the room.