The Morning.—The Body of the Murdered Man.—The Old Inn.—Jacob’s Reflections.
When Learmont and the smith had left the house, and Jacob Gray felt that his great and inevitable danger was over, he sunk into a chair, and a fit of trembling came over him that he was many minutes in recovering from.
“They are foiled this once,” he muttered; “but they may not be again—’twas a rare chance, a most rare chance, I—I must leave her now. I am hunted—hunted like a wild animal, from den to den. Oh! How they would have rejoiced in my destruction. This is a sad life to lead—and—and if, before they came, I had taken her life, I should even now be lying a stiffened corpse on these boards—yet, what can I do? She is my torment; she will be my destruction!”
He then rose, and paced the room for some time with hasty and unequal steps. Suddenly pausing, he trembled again with the same awful intensity that he had done before, and in a hoarse, husky whisper, said,—
“What if she come not back? She suspects me. It is time she were here again. Oh! If she should seek protection elsewhere! More danger!—More danger!—Into what a tangled web of horrors am I placed! Can I fly? What money have I? A large sum, but yet not enough. Oh! If Learmont would give me at once a sum of money which would suffice me in a foreign land, and trust my word to go, and if I could trust him to let me live to go. Ah! There it is!—There it is! We cannot trust each other—not for a moment—no, not for a moment.”
Jacob Gray muttered these gloomy meditations in a low, anxious tone, and almost at every word he paused to endeavour to detect some token of the return of Ada. None, however, met his ears, and, after two hours of mental agony of mind had thus passed over the head of Jacob Gray, he crept down the staircase, and stood at the door looking anxiously about him by the dim morning light that was beginning, with its cold grey tints, to struggle through the darkness of the sky.
“She does not come,” he muttered—“she does not come. What shall I do—whither seek her? Yet—I—I must endeavour to find her.”
He now turned his attention to the broken lock of the door, and after some time, succeeded in closing it after him tolerably securely, then searching in the road till he found a piece of chalk, he wrote on the door,—
“Wait—J.G.”
“Should she return during my absence,” he thought, “she will recognise my writing and initials to wait my return. She is most probably near at hand, waiting for me to search for her.”