“I must needs wait your pleasure in this matter, Master Gray; but you are not serious in refusing to exert your skill in the destruction of the besotted knave, Britton? Ah! Jacob Gray, you stand in your own light most grievously.”
“Do I?” said Gray. “Hem! Squire Learmont, some time since I listened to your proposals for the death of Britton, the savage smith, I agreed with you that his love of drink should be the means used to lure him to destruction. The plan was thus to stultify his judgment and never very active caution by the strong stimulants he so dotes on, till I wound from him the secret of where he kept the papers, you know, and the confession, if indeed he had written one—a fact I always doubted; and then a subtle poison in his cup would remove him for ever. Two things prompted me to the deed, Squire Learmont.”
“What were they?”
“The one was my love of gold. Look ye, sir; had I obtained the papers which prove, as I well know, your illegitimacy, and bar you for ever from possessing the estates of Learmont, be assured I should have kept them.”
“Kept them, Gray?”
“Ay, kept them.”
“But you had—you have—sufficient hold on me already, in the person of that boy.”
“A hold I had, but scarcely sufficient, squire. I am as a careful mariner who in the calmest sea, would like two anchors to hold his bark. The boy is a great thing; a valuable property; but human life is uncertain, and the Squire of Learmont deep and bold.”
“What mean you?”
“I mean, that I have lived upon the rack!“ said Gray, his pale face quivering with emotion. “Was I not by you watched, hunted like a wild beast to my lair? You know I was; and the possession of these papers would have made me sleep more soundly at night, for it would scarcely have been prudent of you to hunt a man who possessed such certain means of disinheriting you, even although you had paved your path to wealth with oceans of blood. I tell you I would possess these papers.”