Chapter Forty Five.
Captain Murray’s News.
The walk in the cool air beneath the trees seemed to have the opposite effect to that intended, for the boy’s head was burning, and his busy imagination kept on forming pictures of what had passed and was passing then. He saw his mother get out of the carriage at their own door, that weak, sorrow-bent form in black, and enter, the carriage waiting for her return. He followed her up the broad staircase into the half-darkened drawing-room, where Drew was waiting to give her the important message from his father.
“Yes,” thought the boy; “it will be a letter of instructions what he is to do, for they have, I feel certain now, made some plan for his escape. But what?”
Then, with everything in his waking dream, he saw his mother descend and leave the house again, enter the carriage, the steps were rattled up, the door closed, and he followed it in imagination along the crowded streets to the dismal front of Newgate, where, with vivid clearness, he saw her enter the gloomy door and disappear.
“I can’t bear it,” he groaned, as he threw himself on the grass; “I can’t bear it. I feel as if I shall go mad.”
At last the hot, beating sensation in his head grew less painful, for the vivid pictures had ceased to form themselves as he mentally saw his mother enter the prison, and in a dull, heavy, despairing fashion he reclined there, waiting until fully two hours should have passed away before he attempted to return to his mother’s apartment to await her return.
The time went slowly now, and he lay thinking of the meeting that must be taking place, till, feeling that if he lay longer there he should excite attention, he rose and walked slowly on, meaning to go right round the Park, carrying out his original intention of trying to grow calm.