I was standing lost in thought, with my eyes fixed upon the vacant bunk or sleeping-shelf, musing upon the incidents of the past few days, and wondering into what sort of issue my hand was to shape this adventure, when I was startled by an extraordinary cry, scarcely less alarming in its way than the death-scream that had been uttered by Don Christoval. It was such a cry as a wounded savage might deliver. Before I could reach the door of the berth the negro boy rushed in.
"Oh, massa," he panted, "dah lady's looking out."
My impression was that he had been stabbed. "Are you hurt?" I exclaimed, grasping him by the arm.
"No, sah!"
"Who shrieked just now?"
"I did, sah."
I cuffed him over his woolly head to clear him out of my road, and stepped into the cabin. Miss Noble, with the handle of the cabin door in her grasp, stood looking out with an expression upon her face of such utter bewilderment that but for her costume and my knowing she was the sole occupant of her room, I should not have recognized her. A person watching the motions of a gliding apparition, knowing it to be a ghost, beckoning, stalking, compelling, might very well be supposed to stare as that girl did. Her eyes slowly rolled over the interior, as though the organ of vision, stupefied by bewilderment, was scarcely capable of effort. She was deadly pale, yet, spite of the withering influence of her astonishment upon her features, I seemed to find an expression of intelligence in them that most certainly was not to be witnessed before. She breathed swiftly. One side of her hair was now entirely unfastened, and the heavy mass of the dark red tresses lay upon her shoulder and upon her bosom. I instantly looked at her idle hand; it held nothing.
I surveyed her a little, wondering whether she would speak; whether reason had been restored to her; whether there might not happen at any beat of the pulse a sudden horrible transformation in her, a new and blacker exhibition of insanity. Her dark eyes came to mine; there was an expression of terror in them. She pressed her hand to her forehead, and looked down as though she would sharpen her sight by averting it for a moment from the object at which she gazed, then looked at me again, pleadingly, eagerly, and fearfully.
"Do not you know where you are, Miss Noble?" said I, in the most careless, matter-of-fact manner I could put on.
"I am trying to think," she answered.