“He!” the other man seemed to answer; “could I mistake him, think you? If a crowd of devils were to put themselves into his exact shape, and he stood amongst them, there is something that would tell me how to point him out. If you buried him fifty feet deep, and took me across his grave, I should know, if there wasn’t a mark above it, that he lay buried there. Wither his flesh, I should!”
The man seemed to say this with such dreadful hatred that Oliver awoke with the fear, and started up.
Good God! what was that which sent the blood tingling to his heart, and deprived him of voice, or power to move! There—there—at the window—close before him—so close, that he could have almost touched him before he started back—with his eyes peering into the room, and meeting his—there stood the Jew! and beside him, white with rage, or fear, or both, were the scowling features of the very man who had accosted him at the inn-yard.
It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his eyes, and they were gone. But they had recognised him, and he them; and their look was as firmly impressed upon his memory as if it had been deeply carved in stone, and set before him from his birth. He stood transfixed for a moment, and then, leaping from the window into the garden, called loudly for help.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CONTAINING THE UNSATISFACTORY RESULT OF OLIVER’S ADVENTURE, AND A CONVERSATION OF SOME IMPORTANCE BETWEEN HARRY MAYLIE AND ROSE.
When the inmates of the house, attracted by Oliver’s cries, hurried to the spot from which they proceeded, they found him, pale and agitated, pointing in the direction of the meadows behind the house, and scarcely able to articulate the words, “The Jew! the Jew!”
Mr. Giles was at a loss to comprehend what this outcry meant; but Harry Maylie, whose perceptions were something quicker, and who had heard Oliver’s history from his mother, understood it at once.
“What direction did he take?” he asked, catching up a heavy stick which was standing in a corner.