Jacqueline of Golden River | Page 6

now. It was half-past two in the morning, and beginning to grow cold. The thoroughfare was empty. I fled, a tiny thing, between two rows of high, dark houses.
When at last I found my door my hands were trembling so that I could hardly fit the key into the lock.
I wondered now whether it had not been the pattering of my heart that I had heard.
I bounded up the stairs. But on the top story I had to pause to get my breath, and then I dared not enter. I listened outside. There was no sound from within.
The two rooms that I occupied were separated only by a curtain, which fell short a foot from the floor and was slung on a wooden pole, disclosing two feet between the top of it and the ceiling. The rooms were thus actually one, and even that might have been called small, for the bed in the rear room was not a dozen paces from the door.
I listened for the breathing of the sleeping girl. My intelligence cried out upon my folly, telling me that my appearance there would terrify her; and yet that clamorous fear that beat at my heart would not be silenced.
If I could hear her breathe, I thought, I would go quietly away, and find a hotel in which to sleep. I listened minute after minute, but I could not hear a sound.
At last I put my mouth to the keyhole and spoke to her. "Jacqueline," I called. The name sounded as strange and sweet on my own lips as it had sounded on hers when she told it to me. I waited.
There was no answer.
Then a little louder: "Jacqueline!"
And then quite loudly: "Jacqueline!"
I listened, dreading that she would cry out in alarm, but the same dead silence followed.
Then, out of the silence, hammering on my eardrums, burst the loud ticking of the little alarm-clock that I had left on the mantel of the bedroom. I heard that, and it must have been ticking minutes before the sound reached me; perhaps if I waited a little longer I should hear her breathing.
The alarm-clock was one of that kind which, when set to "repeat," utters a peculiar little click every two hundred and eighth stroke owing to a catch in the mechanism. Formerly it had annoyed me inexpressibly, and I would lie awake for hours waiting for that tiny sound. Now I could hear even that, and heard it repeat and repeat itself; but I could not hear Jacqueline breathe.
I took the key of the apartment door from my pocket at last and fitted it noiselessly into the lock. I stood there, trembling and irresolute. I dared not turn the key. The hall door gave immediately upon the rooms without a private passage, and at the moment when I opened the door I should be practically inside my bedroom save for the intervening curtain.
Once more I ventured:
"Jacqueline! Jacqueline!"
There was not the smallest answering stir within. And so, with shaking fingers, I turned the key.
The door creaked open with a noise that must have sounded throughout the empty house. I recollected then that it was impossible to keep it shut without locking it. The landlord had long ago ceased to concern himself with his tumble-down property.
I caught at the door-edge, missed it and, tripping over a rent in the cheap mat that lay against the door inside, stumbled against the table-edge and clung there.
And even after I had caught at it, and stayed my fall, that infernal door went creaking, creaking backward till it brought up against the wall.
The room was completely dark, except for a little patch of light high up on the bedroom wall, which came through the hole the workmen had made when they began demolishing the building. I hesitated a moment; then I drew a match from my pocket and rubbed it softly into a flame against my trouser leg.
I reached up to the gas above the table, turned it on, and lit the incandescent mantle, lowering the light immediately. But even then there was no sound from behind the curtains.
They hung down close together, so that I was able to see only the gas-blackened ceiling above them and, underneath, the lower edge of the bed linen, and the bed-frame at the base, with its enamelled iron feet, The sheets hung straight, as though the bed had not been occupied; but, though there was no sound, I knew Jacqueline was at the back of the curtains.
The oppressive stillness was not that of solitude. She must be awake; she must be listening in terror.
I went toward the curtains, and when I spoke I heard the words come through my lips in a voice that I could not recognize as mine.
"Jacqueline!" I whispered, "it is Paul. Paul, your friend.