Page:California Digital Library (IA pamelaorvirtuere00richiala).pdf/166
Alarm on missing Pamela.
I must leave off for the present. For, oh! my strength and my will are at this time very far unequal to one another. But yet I will add, that though I should have praised God for my deliverance, had I been freed from my wicked keepers, and my designing master, yet I have more abundant reason to praise him, that I have been delivered from a worse enemy, myself.
I will conclude my sad relation.
It seems Mrs. Jewkes awaked not till day-break; and not finding me in bed, she called me; and, no answer being returned, she relates, that she got out of bed, ran to my closet; and, missing me, searched under the bed, and in another closet, finding the chamber-door, as she had left it, quite fast, and the key, as usual, about her wrist. For if I could have got out of the chamber-door, there were two or three passages and doors to them all, double locked and barred, to go through into the great garden: so that, to escape, there was no way but out of the window I had passed, because the other windows are a great way from the ground.
Mrs. Jewkes was excessively frightened; she instantly raised the Swiss, and the two maids, who lay not far off; and finding every door fast, she said, "I must be carried away, as Peter was out of prison, by some angel." Its a wonder she had no worse thought.
She says, she wept and wrung her hands and took on sadly, running about like a mad woman, little thinking I could have got out of the closet window, between the iron bars; and indeed I don't know whether I could do so again. But at last finding that casement open, they concluded it must be so; and ran out into the garden, and found my footsteps in the mould of the bed which I dropt down upon from the leads: immediately Mrs. Jewkes, Colbrand, aud Nan, went towards the back-door, to see if that was fast; while the cook was sent to the out-offices, to raise the men, and make them get horses ready, to take each a different way to pursue me.
Finding that door double locked, and padlocked, the heel of my shoe, and the broken bricks, they concluded I was got away by some means over the wall; and then, they say, Mrs. Jewkes seemed like a distracted woman: till at last Nan had the thought to go towards the pond; and there seeing my coat, cap, and handkerchief, in the water, cast almost to the banks by the agitation of the waves, she thought it was me; and, screaming out, ran to Mrs. Jewkes, and said, "O Madam! here's a piteous thing!—Mrs. Pamela lies drowned in the pond."—Thither they all ran; and finding my clothes, doubted not I was at the bottom: they all, Swiss among the rest, beat their breasts, and made the most dismal lamentations. Mrs. Jewkes sent Nan to the men, to bid them get the drag-net ready, and leave the horses, and come to try to find the poor innocent! as she, it seems, then called me, beating her breast, and lamenting my hard fate,