Abduction -- Fiction; Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Love stories
Then she came to the paragraph which urged the utmost punishment
that law could inflict upon the desperadoes. The outraged populace
could be appeased with nothing save death in its most ignominious,
inglorious form. The trials would be short, the punishment swift and
sure. The people demanded the lives of the villains.
For a long time she sat with expressionless eyes, staring at the
wall opposite, thinking of the five persons who kept her a prisoner,
thinking of the lives the people longed to take, thinking of death.
Death to pretty Lady Jane, to Lady Saxondale, to Lord Bob, to Dickey
Savage--the hunted--and to Philip Quentin, the arch conspirator! To
kill them, to butcher them, to tear them to pieces--that was what it
meant, if they were taken before the maddened people. When Baker
brought in the tea, Dorothy was shivering as one with a chill, and
there was a new terror in her soul. What if they were taken? Could
she endure the thought that death was sure to come to them, or to
two of 'them, at least? Two of the men? Two Americans?
During the next three days she refused to leave her room, coldly
declining the cordial invitations to make one of a very merry house
party, as Lady Jane called it. Her meals were sent to her room, and
Baker was her constant attendant. Into her cheek came the dull white
of loneliness and despair, into her eye the fever of unrest. The
visits met with disdain, and gradually they became less frequent. On
the third day of this self-inflicted separation she sat alone from
early morn until dusk without the first sign of a visit from either
Lady Saxondale or Lady Jane.
All day long she had been expecting them, and now she was beginning
to hunger for them. A ridiculous, inconsistent irritation had been
building itself in her heart since midday, and at dusk it reached
its limit in unmistakable rage. That they might be willing to ignore
her entirely had not entered her mind before. Her heart was very
bitter toward the disagreeable creatures who left her alone all day
in a stuffy room, and in a most horrid temper to boot.
From below, at different times during the afternoon, came the happy
laughter of men and women, rollicking songs, the banging of a piano
in tantalizing “rag-time” by strong New York fingers, the soft boom
of a Chinese dinner gong and--oh! it was maddening to sit away up
there and picture the heartless joy that reigned below. When Baker
left the room, Dorothy, like a guilty child, sneaked--actually
sneaked--to the hall door, opened it softly, and listened with
wrathful longing to the signs of life and good cheer that came to
her ears. Desolate, dispirited, hungry for the companionship of even
thieves and robbers, she dragged herself to the broad window and
looked darkly down upon the green and gray world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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