“Well, you see he was put in the cell, and we promised to wake him in the morning, in answer to which piece of politeness he swore away at us like a house o’ fire.”
“At half-past six, I and another went to get him up, and when we went in, he never said not a word, and I cried out, ‘hilloa.’ Still he never spoke, and I held up his light, and there he was, a standing straight up against the further end of the cell with his eyes half an inch out of his head, and some such a face as that Learmont puts on.”
Ada shuddered and the officer continued.
“When we went up to him, what do you think we found?”
“I cannot tell.”
“He was stone dead and stiffened up against the wall of his cell, and our chaplain said as how he must have seen the devil all of a sudden. But here we are at Sir Francis Hartleton’s.”
Ada cast her eyes up to the house, and a pang shot across her heart as the doubt crossed her mind, that Jacob Gray might by some innate possibility have spoken the truth, when he described Sir Francis as her enemy; but still she hesitated not, but silently commending herself to the care of Heaven, she entered the house along with the officer.
She was left for some time in a handsomely-furnished parlour, for this was the magistrate’s private, not his official residence. Each moment that passed now appeared to Ada an age of suspense and anxiety. She could hear the beating of her own heart in the silence of that room, and, as she sat with her eyes fixed upon the door, she thought that she had scarcely suffered as much anxiety, even when, in the dreary cell with Jacob Gray, a spirit of resistance to him and all his acts, supported her and prevented her mind from sinking beneath the oppressive circumstances which then surrounded her.
Ada’s mind was of that rare and high order which rises superior to circumstances, and the energies of which become more acute and more capable of vigorous action, the more necessity there exists for the use of such qualities.
Now, however, when there was no iniquity to denounce, no wickedness to resist, but when her heart was only oppressed with a faint doubt of whether she was to receive from Sir Francis Hartleton kindness or not, she did feel faint, weak, and sad, and all those trembling sensibilities of her nature she had suppressed from native energy of mind, and pride of innocence, when with Gray, now that she was free from him, arose from the recesses of her pure heart and forced her to feel, that, although a noble-minded heroine when surrounded by great peril, yet in real nature she was but a timid shrinking girl, such as her fragile and beautifully delicate appearance would indicate.