“Thank you. Thank you.”
Gray left the house, and when he was some paces from the door, he muttered.—
“So, Master Learmont, I have another hold upon your kind generosity. That by some strange chance, which I cannot conjecture, this waterman found out my place of abode, and thus communicated it to you, Squire Learmont. I am convinced. Humph! He has got his wages. I could accuse you of a crime, good, kind, considerate Learmont, that would not in the least compromise my own safety. We shall see—we shall see. I—I must now make my way homewards again. Surely by this time Ada has returned. She must be waiting. Home! Home! And then, to think of another place in which to hide my head from my worst foe, and yet my only source of wealth.”
CHAPTER XXVII.
Ada’s Flight and Despair.—Old Westminster Bridge at Daybreak.—The Smith.—Mad Maud.
When Ada, the beautiful and persecuted child of the dead, passed from the room in the garments befitting her sex, she thought her heart must burst with the suppressed feelings which were conjured up in its inmost recesses. One awful question occurred to her to be traced in letters of liquid fire upon her brain, and that was: “Is it true that Jacob Gray is my father?” His assertion of the fact had come upon her so entirely unawares that, as Gray had himself exultingly supposed, she had not time to think—but the doubt—the merest suspicion that it might true, was madness. Ada did not—she could not, even at the moment that Gray declared himself her father, believe his words; but still the doubt was raised, and although all reason—all probability—all experience gave the lie to the assertion, there was still the awful intrusive thought that it might be so.
Upon the impulse of that small possibility, that in that moment of despair and agony of soul Jacob Gray had spoken truly, Ada acted. She could not run the dreadful risk of sacrificing even a brutal and criminal father, and with a speed that in her state of mind was marvellous, she altered herself, in her girl’s clothing, and, as we have seen, for the time, saved Jacob Gray from death.
As she descended the narrow, dilapidated staircase, she pressed her hands convulsively upon her heart to still its tumultuous beatings. Her position in life appeared to her to be all at once strangely altered. If—and oh! That horrid if,—if conveying as it did a possibility of the fact—if Jacob Gray was really her father!—What was she now to do?—How think of him?—How address him? Could she ever bestow upon him the smallest fraction of that dear love which flows in so easy and natural a current from a child to its parent? Could she call him father?—No, she felt that she could not. She examined her feelings to endeavour to detect some yearnings of natural love and duty—some of that undefined, mysterious instinct she had read of as enabling the parent to single out the child—the child the parent, from the great mass of humanity; but the search—the self-examination was in vain. Jacob Gray was to her but the cruel, vindictive tyrant, rioting in oppression and brutality when un-resisted, and shrinking from her like a beaten hound when she dared to confront him, and question his acts.
“God of Heaven!” she said, when she had reached the street; “there should be some similarity of thought, some community of feeling between a father and his child. Do I and Jacob Gray think alike in anything? Have we one feeling in common?—No,—not one.”
As the probabilities of his not being her father crowded upon her mind, now that the intense excitement of the minute was over, Ada became more happy and composed, and she slackened her pace, seeing that she had already placed a considerable distance between herself and the house which had been to her a prison for so long a period.