Jacqueline of Golden River | Page 6

dog's feet, pacing mine.
I was rounding the corner of Tenth Street now, and again the folly of
my behaviour struck home to me. I stopped and tried to think. Was it
some instinct that was taking me back, or was it the remembrance of
Jacqueline's beauty? Was it not the desire to see her, to ask her about
the ring?
Surely my fears were but an overwrought imagination and the
strangeness of the situation, acting upon a mind eagerly grasping out
after adventure, being set free from the oppression of those dreadful
years of bondage!
I had actually swung around when I heard the ghostly patter of the feet
again close at my side. I made my decision in that instant, and hurried
swiftly on my course back toward the apartment house.
I was in Tenth Street 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