Morton looked fearfully round the vault. He and Gawtrey were alone. His eyes sought the places where the dead had lain—they were removed—no vestige of the deeds, not even a drop of blood.
"Come, take up your cutlass, come!" repeated the voice of the chief, as with his dim lantern—now the sole light of the vault—he stood in the shadow of the doorway.
Morton rose, took up the weapon mechanically, and followed that terrible guide, mute and unconscious, as a Soul follows a Dream through the House of Sleep!
CHAPTER X.
"Sleep no more!"—Macbeth
After winding through gloomy and labyrinthine passages, which conducted to a different range of cellars from those entered by the unfortunate Favart, Gawtrey emerged at the foot of a flight of stairs, which, dark, narrow, and in many places broken, had been probably appropriated to servants of the house in its days of palmier glory. By these steps the pair regained their attic. Gawtrey placed the lantern on the table and seated himself in silence. Morton, who had recovered his self-possession and formed his resolution, gazed on him for some moments, equally taciturn. At length he spoke:
"Gawtrey!"
"I bade you not call me by that name," said the coiner; for we need scarcely say that in his new trade he had assumed a new appellation.
"It is the least guilty one by which I have known you," returned Morton, firmly. "It is for the last time I call you by it! I demanded to see by what means one to whom I had entrusted my fate supported himself. I have seen," continued the young man, still firmly, but with a livid cheek and lip, "and the tie between us is rent for ever. Interrupt me not! it is not for me to blame you. I have eaten of your bread and drunk of your cup. Confiding in you too blindly, and believing that you were at least free from those dark and terrible crimes for which there is no expiation —at least in this life—my conscience seared by distress, my very soul made dormant by despair, I surrendered myself to one leading a career equivocal, suspicious, dishonourable perhaps, but still not, as I believed, of atrocity and bloodshed. I wake at the brink of the abyss— my mother's hand beckons to me from the grave; I think I hear her voice while I address you—I recede while it is yet time—we part, and for ever!"
Gawtrey, whose stormy passion was still deep upon his soul, had listened hitherto in sullen and dogged silence, with a gloomy frown on his knitted brow; he now rose with an oath—