Ada was unhappy—miserable, but she had not yet done with hope; she could not say, take my life, Jacob Gray, for I will promise no more; that would have been a species of moral suicide from which she shrank aghast; and feeling, from Gray’s manner, a firm conviction that he did speak the truth when he declared that her death or life were alike indifferent to him, except so far as the former placed him in a less dangerous position, and the latter would eventually gratify some wild feelings of revenge against some one, she did go on from month to month promising that she would make no effort to escape, and still hoping that a day of deliverance was near, till the hue of health began to fade upon her cheeks, and she felt that dreadful sinking of the heart which ever waits on hope deferred.
We have now another person in our dramatis personæ to speak of, and that is the gallant, young, and enthusiastic Albert Seyton.
The sudden and mysterious disappearance of Ada had struck deeply upon his heart, and after about a fortnight’s hopeless search through London, during which he endured immense fatigue, and scarcely took any nourishment to sustain his exhausted frame, he was seized with an illness which brought him to the point of death, and from which he recovered but very slowly, although a good constitution and the affectionate solicitude of his father at length triumphed over the disease.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Learmont at Home.—The Baronetcy.—A Visitor.—The Rejected Offer.
A rich, glowing summer’s sun was shining through the stained glass in a large window of one of the principal rooms in the mansion of Learmont. The very air seemed filled with glorious tints, rivalling in hues of gorgeous beauty the brightest refulgence of the rainbow. The songs of birds from the gardens came sweetly to the ear: a dreamy stillness, such as is often to be observed towards the close of some delicious summer day, seemed to pervade all things. He, however, who sat in that richly-decked apartment, had no ear for the melodies of nature; for him the glorious sunlight had no romantic charms. His brow was knit with anxious care—deep furrows were on his cheeks, and a nervous irritation of manner betrayed the heart ill at ease.
It was Squire Learmont himself who thus sat at the close of that summer’s day, and the change in his appearance since we last presented him to the reader was so great that it might have been supposed many years had passed over his head instead of the comparatively short time that had actually elapsed. His lank black hair was thickly mingled with grey tints, and the sallow of his complexion had changed more and more to a sickly awful white, such as might be supposed to sit upon the countenance of one risen from the grave.
He sat for a long time silent, although his lips moved as if he were muttering to himself something that formed the principal subject of his meditation.
“Well,” he suddenly said, half aloud, “if I have made so great an inroad in my accumulated wealth as to reduce it by one-fourth of its whole amount, I have achieved something—ay, a great deal, for I have made the first step up the ladder of nobility. This baronetcy that is promised me is what I suggested to myself long since. Yes, that is the commencement of power, the limit of which who shall define—then a marriage—one of those marriages of convenience on one side and ambition on the other. My wealth will make me a most acceptable suitor to some branch of a noble family, whose peerage will look all the better for a new coat of gilding. Humph, what says the minister?”
He took from the table before him a note which lay open, and read it slowly and distinctly. It ran thus;—