CHAPTER XXVI.
The Squire.—The Life of a Captive.—A Strange Fatality.—The Associates.
Vice, by the decrees of Providence, seems to have its allotted span. Truly may we say, “The wicked triumph for a season,” and by some strange combination of circumstances, notwithstanding the turbulence, the anxiety, and the danger of Learmont’s early days in the metropolis, matters so arranged themselves, or were arranged for wise purposes by the great Dispenser of all things, that from the day on which Ada made her promise to Jacob Gray, Learmont had prospered in his career of villany. His natural sagacity had told him, that now Jacob Gray was put upon his guard, any further open attempt against his life would be attended with great danger; and might possibly have the effect of driving him to some desperate measure of retaliation and revenge, which might involve both. From a deep and careful review, therefore, of the whole of circumstances by which he was surrounded, the criminal and unscrupulous squire decided upon a safer, although more expensive and protracted course of action, than he had hitherto pursued; that was, to continually tempt Gray by large offers to give up the supposed boy, together with his own confession, and go to some foreign land to spend the earnings of his criminality.
Jacob Gray, with the cunning which formed such an ingredient in his character, favoured this idea on the part of Learmont, by apparently always hesitating upon his offers, while at the same time he had thoroughly and entirely made up his mind not to accept them; feeling, as he did, that his life would not be worth a minute’s purchase after he had declared Ada’s sex, and given her up together with his written confession.
Learmont at the same time was not neglectful of the chance that continually presented itself of discovering Gray’s place of abode, and pouncing upon him some night unawares, and wresting from him both the boy and the confession, at the same time that he glutted his hatred by putting him to death.
Jacob Gray for once in his life had been injudicious when he told Ada that he only waited for a certain amount of gold before he gratified his revenge by declaring who and what she was. He really had decided upon such a course. The taunts and undisguised contempt of Learmont had awakened a revengeful spirit in his breast, while the attempt to murder him in the old house at Lambeth inflamed to perfect fury, and made, as it were, part of his very nature.
Learmont laboured under considerable difficulty in any attempts he might make to trace Jacob Gray to his abode, in consequence of the impossibility of trusting any one to do the office of spy upon him, except the smith or himself. To the smith, Britton, there were many weighty objections now. Intoxication was doing its work, and moreover Gray knew him so well. Learmont therefore felt that henceforward Britton could be no useful agent in any attempt to discover the retreat of Gray.
Then for him, Learmont himself, to dog the footsteps of the cautious villain from his own house, was an undertaking full of difficulty. The very haste with which he would have had to attire himself for the street had its objections; and were Gray to come some day by appointment, and find him ready equipped to follow him, would not his extremely suspicious mind at once conclude the object?
Thus the task of following Jacob Gray became one of no ordinary difficulty, and Learmont wasted many months in trying to dissuade himself from persevering in his present course, and take a large sum at once; expatriating himself immediately afterwards, which, by-the-by, Learmont never for one moment intended to permit him to do, for he would have slaughtered him upon his own marble steps rather than allow him to escape, the moment he could do so with no other danger than that to be encountered from the mere fact of taking a life, in justification of which he would easily have found some plausible excuse, if questioned concerning the act by the laws.
Not a week passed without a visit from Gray, and at each he always carried away as much as he could wring from Learmont’s policy or his fears.
But how truly did poor Ada say that the love of gold was a passion which grew if it was fed. Already had Gray received from Learmont a sum far exceeding that which he had first fixed in his mind as what would content him ere he sought his revenge. Still, however, he lingered, and as each visit to Squire Learmont’s mansion added something to his store, he could not bring his mind to stop in time. Day after day—week after week—month succeeding month—he still hoarded, saying over to himself,—
“Not yet—not yet! I will have more gold ere I have my revenge.”
The smith, too, was to Learmont ever a sight of terror. He still lived at the Chequers, close to Learmont’s mansion; and he, too, paid periodical visits to the proud squire, although his demands were insignificant in comparison with those of Jacob Gray.
While a few guineas sufficed for the coarse vices, the drunkenness, and the debaucheries of the smith, Jacob Gray was not satisfied unless he increased his hidden store by a large sum.
Thus, although the smith’s eternal “message from the Old Smithy“ grated upon his very soul, Learmont did not feel that intensity of hatred to Britton that he did to Jacob Gray.
Nevertheless he made frequent offers to Britton to quit the country, and give up to him certain papers which, on the night of the murder at the Old Smithy, had been by Britton taken from the corpse of him who met his death within that ill-named pile.
These papers were of as much importance to Learmont as any could well be; for if they did not prove his illegitimacy, they raised the point so strongly that had he stood alone as the last and only heir to the vast estates of Learmont, he could scarcely have established his claim.
Of this he was assured by Gray, who would himself have gloried in the possession of such a document, but he dared not take them from the body; hence they fell, knowingly by him, into the hands of Britton.
It was likewise constantly urged by Britton that he, too, had a confession written, and in pursuance of his word, had rolled it round the knife of Jacob Gray, which the latter had left behind him at the smithy in the body of his victim.
For a long time it had become an object with Learmont to discover from Britton where he kept such important documents, determining, should he find out, to make some desperate effort by fraud or violence to possess himself of them; but the smith constantly and pertinaciously eluded the most artful inquiries, and Learmont could obtain no clue to where they were concealed, although by Britton’s manner he felt satisfied they were not at the Chequers. Still he feared to do violence to Britton, lest he might have adopted some means of bringing them to light after his decease.
Never probably were three persons placed by a curious train of circumstances in such strange relation to each other.
Learmont hating the two accomplices of his guilt, and not deterred by the slightest compunctions of conscience from taking their lives if he dared, yet placed in so singular a position with regard to them, that he trembled at the idea of any accident or sudden illness depriving either of them of existence, as such an event might bring to light the documents by which they held themselves safe from assassination at his hands.
Jacob Gray received large sums of money which he dare not use, and trembled with apprehensions from day to day lest his miserable retreat in the marshes of Battersea should be discovered, yet with a species of insanity lingered on with an unquenchable thirst of adding to his store of gold before he began the enjoyment of a single guinea of it.
Britton, the reckless savage smith, was the only one of these three men who in his own brutal manner enjoyed the fruits of his crimes. He feasted, drank, and led a life of awful and reckless debauchery from day to day—defying the future and drowning the present in a sea of intoxication.
And now let us speak of Ada—the young, the beautiful, the persecuted Ada—who now for many weary months had endured the solitary and miserable life of a captive in the little house at Battersea.
From time to time Jacob Gray had enforced a renewal of the girl’s promise not to escape from her state of bondage; and who, under similar circumstances, would have refused the pledge when death was the only alternative? Life to all is dear and precious—it is the one possession to which mankind fondly clings under all privations—all sufferings. Rob life of all its joys—clothe it in misery—attack the frame in which lingers by disease and unceasing pain; still, while the brain retains its healthy action, there will be a clinging to life—to mere vitality, which is in human nature a feeling altogether independent of all that makes up the pains or joys of existence. But if life is thus clung to with a desperate reluctance to quit it by the aged, the diseased, and the hopeless, how much greater must be its charms to the young, healthful, ardent, and enthusiastic spirit that in its young existence seems almost immortal!
Ada was unhappy—miserable, but she had not yet done with hope; she could not say, take my life, Jacob Gray, for I will promise no more; that would have been a species of moral suicide from which she shrank aghast; and feeling, from Gray’s manner, a firm conviction that he did speak the truth when he declared that her death or life were alike indifferent to him, except so far as the former placed him in a less dangerous position, and the latter would eventually gratify some wild feelings of revenge against some one, she did go on from month to month promising that she would make no effort to escape, and still hoping that a day of deliverance was near, till the hue of health began to fade upon her cheeks, and she felt that dreadful sinking of the heart which ever waits on hope deferred.
We have now another person in our dramatis personæ to speak of, and that is the gallant, young, and enthusiastic Albert Seyton.
The sudden and mysterious disappearance of Ada had struck deeply upon his heart, and after about a fortnight’s hopeless search through London, during which he endured immense fatigue, and scarcely took any nourishment to sustain his exhausted frame, he was seized with an illness which brought him to the point of death, and from which he recovered but very slowly, although a good constitution and the affectionate solicitude of his father at length triumphed over the disease.