“What rules?”
“Why, you must strip and let me examine, for myself and Bill and Bill’s young woman, all your togs, to see whether you haven’t forgot a stray five pound note or so. No offence, my covey; but you know rules is rules all the world over, and fair play is a jewel of very great lustre, my rum ’un.”
CHAPTER LV.
The Escape over the Houses.—Many Perils.—Gray’s Great Sufferings.—The Guide Rope.
Gray was silent for some moments, then, with, a deep groan, he dropped his head upon his hands, and gave himself up to a bitterness of anguish that must have both alarmed and melted any heart but the stubborn one of the man who now had him in his power.
“All I have struggled for,” thought Gray—“all that I have dipped my hands in blood for is about to be wrested from me for the mere doubtful boon of existence.”
At that awful moment of misery he did indeed feel that he had chosen the wrong path in life, and the gaudy flowers which had lured him from the right road of virtue to the intricate one of crime and deep iniquity, were but delusion, and had vanished, now leaving him a wanderer in a region of dissolution and gaunt despair. Oh, what would he have not given in that awful moment, when busy memory conjured up all his crimes before him in frightful array, to have been the veriest beggar that ever crept for alms from door to door, so that he could have said, “I am innocent of great wrong—I have shed no man’s blood!”
It might be that the evident mortal agony of Jacob Gray really had some effect even upon the hardened and obdurate heart of his companion, for it was several minutes before he spoke, and then when he did, his voice was scarcely so harshly tuned as before, and it is probable he meant to offer something very consolatory when he said,—
“Snivelling be bothered, I have cracked never so many cribs, and I never gaved up to the enemy yet. Keep up your heart, old ’un, you’ll light on your feet yet, like a cat as is shied out o’ a attic window.”
Gray only groaned and shook his head.