I failed to find it, and tried again; then peering down called Jennie by name. She did not answer. A second time I called, and felt about with my foot; still without success. Then as it dawned upon me at last that the ladder was really gone, and I a prisoner, I thought of prudence no longer, but I called frantically, at first in a whisper, and then as loudly as I dared; called and called again, "Jennie! Jennie!" And yet again, "Jennie!"
Still no answer came; but listening intently, in one of the intervals of silence, I caught the even beat of hoofs, receding along the road, and growing each moment less marked. They held me; scarcely breathing, I listened to them, until they died away in the distance of the summer night, and only the sharp insistent chirp of the cricket, singing in the garden below, came to my ears.
[CHAPTER VII]
How long I hung at the window, at one time stunned and stricken down by the catastrophe that had befallen me, and at another feeling frantically for the ladder which I had over and over again made sure was not there, I know no more than another; but only that after a time, first suspicion and then rage darted lightning-like through the stupor that clouded my mind, and I awoke to all the tortures that love outraged by treachery can feel; with such pangs and terrors added as only a faithful beast, bound and doomed and writhing under the knife of its master, may be supposed to endure.
For a while, it is true, imagining that Jennie, terrified by someone's approach, had lowered the ladder and withdrawn herself, and so would presently return to free me, I hoped against hope. But as minutes passed, and yet more minutes, laden only with the cricket's even chirp, and the creepy rustling of the wind in the poplars, and still failed to bring her, the sound of retreating hoofs which I had heard recurred to my mind, with dreadful significance, and on the top of it a hundred suspicious circumstances; among which, as her sudden passion when I had taken fright at the foot of the ladder, was not the least, so her avoidance of me during the last few days and her frequent absences from the house, spoken to by Mrs. Harris, had their weight. In fine, by the light of her desertion after receiving the plunder, and while I sought the candlesticks--which I had now convinced myself were not there--many things obscure before, or to which I had wilfully shut my eyes--as her callousness, her greed, her recklessness--stood out plainly; while these again, being coolly considered, reflected so seriously on her, as to give her sudden departure the worst possible appearance, even in a lover's eyes. The days had been when I would not have believed such a thing of her at the mouth of an angel from Heaven. But much had happened since, to which my passion had blinded me, temporarily only; so that it needed but a flash of searing light to make all clear, and convince me that she had not only left me, but left me trapped--I who had given up all and risked all for her!
In the first agony of pain and rage wrought by a conviction so horrible, I could think only of her treachery and my loss; and head to knees on the bare floor of the room, I wept as if my heart would break, or choked with the sobs that seemed to rend my breast. And little wonder, seeing that I had given her a boy's first devotion, and that of all sins ingratitude has the sharpest tooth! But to this paroxysm, when I had nearly exhausted myself, came an end and an antidote in the shape of urgent fear; which suddenly flooding my soul, roused me from my apathy of grief, and set me to pacing the room in a dreadful panic, trying now the door and now the window. But on both my attacks were in vain, the former being locked and resisting the chisel, while the latter hung thirty feet above the paved yard.
Thus caught and snared, as neatly as any bird in a springe, I had no resource but in my wits; and for a time, as I had nothing of which I could form a rope, I busied myself with the expedient of throwing out the featherbed and leaping upon it. But when I had dragged it to the window, and came to measure the depth, I recoiled, as the most desperate might, from the leap; and softly returning the bed to its place, I fell to biting my nails, or fitfully roamed from place to place, according as despair or some new hope possessed me.
In one or other of these moods the dawn found me; and then in a surprisingly short time I heard the dreaded sounds of life awaken round me, and creeping to the window I closed it, and crouched down on the floor. Presently Mrs. Harris began to stir, and a boy walked whistling shrilly across the adjacent yard; and then--strangest of all things, and not to be invented--in the crisis of my fate, with the feet of those who must detect me almost on the stairs, I fell asleep; and awoke only when a key grated in the lock of the room, and I started up to find Mr. D---- in the doorway staring at me, and behind him a crowd of piled-up faces.
"Why, Price?" he cried, with a look of stupefaction, as he came slowly into the room, "what is the meaning of this?"
Then I suppose my shame and guilty silence told him, for with a sudden scowl and an oath he strode to the bureau and dragged out the drawer. A glance showed him that the money was gone, and shouting frantically to those at the door to keep it--to keep it, though they were half-a-dozen to one!--he clutched me by the breast of my coat, and shook me until my teeth chattered.