"You are going to her, then?" asked Richard de Ashby.
"Yes, yes," said the old woman, impatiently; "I am going to carry her news, from the good father, of all that happens at the Castle to-night. But go along, now--go along! I am afraid of his coming back and finding you here: then he might think something, you know. At the north gate in the grey of the morning."
"I will not fail," replied Richard de Ashby, and turning away, he slowly descended the stairs.
The old woman paused not to look after him, but closed the door, muttering and talking to herself.
The life of Richard de Ashby had arrived at one of those moments so fearful, so terrible, in the career of wickedness, when one offence following another has accumulated scheme upon scheme, each implying new crimes, and new dangers, and each, though intended to guard the other, offering, like the weakened frontier of an over extended empire, but new points of peril, but fresh necessity of defence.
"'Tis unfortunate," he thought, as he turned from the door--"'tis unfortunate that I have not found her; but she is absent from the city, and that is one point gained."
The moment, however, that his mind had thus cast off the thought of Kate Greenly, and the secret she possessed, it turned with maddening rapidity to all the other points of his situation.
"What shall I do with the body?" he asked himself. "I cannot let it lie and rot there.--I wonder how fares my cousin Alured? He has surely drank the wine. Oh, yes; I know him, he has drank it, and more too.--If that man Ellerby were not hovering round about, all might be secure still."
The word still showed better than any other the state of his mind, though he hid it from himself. He knew, in short, that he was anything but secure. Over his head hung the awful cloud of coming detection and punishment. He saw it with his eyes, he felt it in his heart, that the tempest was about to descend; and, as those who, in a thunderstorm, gallop away from the flashing lightning, are said to draw it more surely on their own heads, so his desperate efforts to save himself, only called down more surely the approaching retribution.
The next minute his mind reverted to the corpse again. "This carrion of Dighton," he thought; "it were well, perhaps, to dare the thing openly--to give him a simple but a public funeral--to call the priests to aid, and pay them well. With them, one is always sure to get a good word for one's money.--'Tis but to say he was brought to my house in my absence, and died there while I was away. What have I to do with his death? 'Tis no affair of mine.--I will hie up to the castle, and spy what is going on. Oh, that I could prove that Alured has drank wine or broken bread in the room of Hugh de Monthermer!--That were a stroke indeed! But, at all events, he has been with him. Who can tell how a man may be poisoned? 'Tis at all events suspicious, that he should be with him just before his death.--I will not go into the court; I will just look through the gates, and speak with the warder for a moment or two. The gates are not closed till nine." And thus saying, he retrod his steps to the castle gate.