CHAPTER LXVI.
Gray’s Visit to Learmont.—The Disappointment.—A Week of Terror.—The Street Newsvender.
Evening was casting its broad shadows across the Hampstead fields, and the air was varied with the songs of thousands of birds retiring to roost, when Jacob Gray with pain and difficulty began his descent from the tree which had afforded him so hazardous and painful a refuge for so many hours.
Stiffened and benumbed as he was in every limb, he found it no easy matter to crawl down from his high perch; and it was only after many minutes of uneasiness and terror that he at last reached the ground; then he leaned against the trunk of the tree, and with dizzy eyes and a bewildered brain looked anxiously around him. A death-like silence reigned around, broken by nothing but the twittering of the sparrows, and the occasional chirp of a grasshopper. He put his hand up to his wounded face, but the blood had ceased to flow, and he only now felt a heavy, deadening sensation about the region of his wounds. After a time then, he ventured to leave the tree, and with a slow, uncertain and tottering step he walked towards the pond.
The direful pangs of hunger, which in his recumbent position in the tree had not greatly afflicted him, now began to make themselves felt in earnest, and Jacob Gray groaned in his agony.
“Oh,” he cried, “for a crust—the hardest morsel that ever a dainty beggar cast from him as unworthy of his wallet—I shall die of hunger ere I reach Westminster!”
Still he tottered on towards the pond, and when he reached its grassy brink, he lay down as he had done before, and drank largely at the clear water.
Then he bathed his face, and washed away partially the stains of blood that had hardened into coagulated masses upon his cheeks; and he was again somewhat refreshed, although still terribly faint from want of sustenance.
To abate, if possible, the aching, racking pains in all his limbs, he strove to increase his rate of walking, but that expedient, by increasing the languid circulation of his half-thickened blood, caused his wounds from the shot to burst out bleeding afresh, and the horrible faintness that came over him for want of food made him reel along like a drunken man.
It might have been the lingering effects of the opiate that had been so freely administered to him, or it might be his huge draughts of water upon an empty stomach, but, from whatever cause it arose, a deadly sickness came over him just as he neared some cottages at the base of the hill, leading to what is now a pretty collection of suburban cottages, which was then a swampy hollow, with a few miserable huts, occupied by people who sold bundles of dry sticks for firewood ostensibly, but who were in reality had characters, not averse to anything, so that it promised the smallest gain.
Jacob Gray held with a shivering, nervous grasp by one of the palings which divided the patch of garden ground belonging to one of these hovels from the waste common, and was dreadfully sick—sick until what little strength had been left to him was frustrated, and he fell, a breathing, but scarcely animate mass, by the side of the palings.
His situation was an unfavourable one for attracting the attention of any person who might be in the hut, for the palings hid him, and he had not strength, had he the inclination, to cry for help. How long he remained there he knew not, but it was quite dark, when, the awful sickness having subsided, he made an effort to rise again. With much difficulty he gained his feet, and the moment he did, the horrible feeling of hunger—maddening hunger—came across him with twice its former intensity of pain.
“I—I can go no further,” he gasped. “I shall die on the road side if I attempt to reach London from here with—without food, I—I cannot—cannot.”
He staggered along the palings till he came to a wide gate which had no fastening, and there, with a feeling of desperation, he crawled through, determined to risk all by craving charity of the cottagers.
As he went on by the inner-side of the wide palings, which he was obliged to cling to for support, he struck against some projection which threw him down and very much bruised his knee. As he lay there he put up his hands, to feel what it was, and by the shape of the projection, as well as dipping his hand into its contents, he thought in a moment what it was, and he rose with alacrity to eat greedily from a pig-trough the loathsome remainder of the last meal that had been given to the swine.
What will hunger not induce persons to do? Jacob Gray thought he had never so much enjoyed a meal in his life, and when he had devoured the remnants of the mash in the trough, he sat down by the palings, and in about half an hour was sufficiently recovered to make his project of proceeding to the house of Learmont at Westminster not so wild and impracticable.
The night was now fairly set in, and there was not much chance of Gray’s ragged, wounded, and emaciated appearance attracting the notice of any one along the dimly lighted road from Hampstead to London.
Although his strength was now a little restored, he still felt very ill at every step of his progress, and his only hope became entirely founded upon the chance of finding Learmont within, and inducing in him a belief that his (Gray’s) strange and disordered appearance arose merely from some accident on his road, and not from any circumstances which had put it out of his power to be half so noxious and dangerous as he had been.
“Oh,” he thought, “if when I see Learmont he did not know how harmless to him I am without Ada—without a written scrap to leave behind me, to point the finger of suspicion against him—how his fingers would close upon my throat and what music to his ears would be my death rattle. But I must deceive him—I must beard him still—still defy—still taunt him.”
It was some hours before Jacob Gray, travelling at the unsteady pace he did, contrived to reach the first houses in London; and when he did so, what would he had not given for but one of the pieces of bright gold he had been so long hoarding, and of which he had been robbed so speedily, in order that he might, ere he adventured to see Learmont, take some means of improving his appearance, and nourishing his wearied frame, in order that a suspicion might not arise in the breast of the crafty squire that all was not as usual with him.
Then there was another view of his condition, that when it occurred to his mind, brought a tumult of distracting thoughts into the brain of Jacob Gray; and that view was based upon the uncertainty that beset him with regard to Ada’s actions since denouncing him at Whitehall. Had she gone to Sir Francis Hartleton’s, and so far added to his suspicions of Learmont, as to have induced some step against the squire; or, had she made her name and story so public that the whole of Westminster had rung with it, coupled with the fact, that it was he, Jacob Gray, who had been hunted up the Strand; and that Learmont, residing as he did, within almost a stone’s throw of the whole occurrence, heard sufficient to let him know how innoxious Jacob Gray now probably was in his death, and how impolitic it had now become to let him live again to surround himself with those precautions which had been so suddenly and so strangely torn from him in the course of a few short hours.
Whenever all this occurred to Jacob Gray, his steps faltered, and the perspiration of mortal fear broke out upon his brow, for he knew not but that he was hurrying to his destruction, and making powerful efforts to be earlier at the place in which he was to be sacrificed.
Still, what other hope had that miserable guilty man. Learmont alone had the power to aid him, Learmont alone held him in dread, and might still fancy he could even in death leave a sting behind him which might topple him from his haughty height of power, and dissipate to the winds of Heaven all his dreams of wild ambition.
“Yes, yes,” he muttered, “I must run this awful risk—I must go to Learmont and procure enough gold for my present necessaries, and then concoct some scheme for the dark future.”
With a face as pale as monumental marble, save where a few livid marks and streaks of blood showed where he had been wounded, Jacob Gray now turned into the dense mass of houses about St. Giles’s, for the purpose of wending his way as quietly and as far from the public thoroughfares as possible towards Charing-cross.
Skulking along by dark places, and shunning anywhere that presented a light aspect, he pursued his route towards the upper end of St. Martin’s lane. A crowd was there collected sufficiently dense to stop his progress, and he dare not, like a man of clear conscience and open heart, push his way through the motley assemblage. In vain he tried to get up one of the side streets which would not take him far out of his way. He had no recourse but to go back some hundred yards or more, or endeavour to get through the mass of persons, the cause of whose assembling he knew not nor cared, so that they would let him pass unobstructed and unquestioned.
As he neared, in his efforts to pass, the centre of the throng of persons, he found that they were collected around a man who was, in the loud conventional voice of street singers and proclaimers of news, attracting his auditors by some narrative of deep interest, apparently. In another moment, Gray nearly lost all power of motion as he heard these words:—
“Here, my masters, you have a full account with all the particulars of the most horrid murder in the Strand of Mr. Vaughan, together with a copy of verses made on the occasion, and addressed to all young persons, warning them against dice, cards, drink, and Sabbath breaking.”
The man then in a loud nasal voice, commenced his verses.
Jacob Gray only paused to hear the first line, which consisted of an appeal to young mothers nursing tender babes, and then unable any longer to remain in the throng, he pushed his way through them like a madman, and despite the kicks and cuffs he received, succeeded in passing on and arriving nearly breathless, heated, and alarmed at Charing-cross.