The floor was of earth merely, and the walls seemed to be composed of the same material, mingled with stones and broken bricks, to give them some degree of solidity and strength. The place altogether appeared to be of considerable extent, and, by the various refuse matter that lay about, it would seem to have been a cellar for strong vegetables, wood, &c. during the winter season. A quantity of rough sacks and baskets lay in different corners mouldy and moist, with the accumulated damp of many years, and the air, too, was loaded with unwholesome moisture, and pernicious exhalations.
With a slow and cautious step Ada traversed the whole of this gloomy place, and what surprised her much was that she could see no means of ingress or egress from it.
“How have I been placed here?” she asked herself. “There is no food. Good Heaven! Am I doomed to starve in this wretched place? Alas! Is this the awful mode which the fears of Jacob Gray have suggested to him as the easiest and safest of compassing my death?”
So terrible did the dread of death in that damp, gloomy dungeon become to the imagination of Ada that she could scarcely hold the light for trembling, and she placed it on one of the mouldy baskets, while with clasped hands, and upon her knees, she breathed a prayer to Heaven for protection and safety in her extreme peril.
How calming and sweet is the soothing influence of prayer! As the trembling words, wrung from the pure heart of the gentle and beautiful Ada in her deep anguish, ascended to that Heaven which never permits the wicked to prosper, but always interposes to protect the innocent and virtuous, a holy balm seemed to fall upon her blighted spirit, and the benign influence of some air from the regions of eternal bliss seemed to fill the gloomy dungeon with a brightness and a beauty that deprived it of its horrors.
For many minutes now Ada remained silent, and her fancy strayed to the last kind words of Albert Seyton. Then she pictured him and his father seeking her in the house at Lambeth. In her mind’s eye she saw his despair when he found her not, and she thought then that her heart must break to think that she should never see him more.
“Albert—Albert!” she cried.—“Oh save me—save—seek for me! Oh, could your eyes but cast themselves upon this gloomy abode and know that I was here, how happy might I be—far happier than before, for now I feel convinced this dreadful man Gray is not my father. No—no, he could not thus before Heaven have betrayed his child! Albert—Albert!”
She dropped her head upon her breast, and again the tears blinded those beautiful eyes, and rolled gently down her cheeks, thence falling upon a neck of snowy whiteness, and losing their gem-like lustre in the meshes of her raven hair. Suddenly she ceased to weep. She ceased to call on Albert, and a chill came over her heart, as she heard Gray’s voice, cry,—
“Ada—Ada!”
She looked up, and from a square opening in the wall far above her reach, she saw a streaming light enter the dungeon.