“Yes,” he said, “fortune has favoured me with the best chance yet of discovering the hiding place of Jacob Gray. This youth must be unknown to him, and surely will succeed in dogging him to his haunt. That once discovered, and an hour shall not elapse without witnessing his dissolution, I can set this young man too upon Britton. The grand difficulty in circumventing these fellows has always consisted in the want of unsuspected persons to mingle with them. This youngster looks bold and capable; he will surely be successful in taking him, and, should his curiosity grow clamorous, he is easily disposed of. What matters it to me a few more lives!—I am already steeped in gore—steeped—steeped; but then I have my reward—wealth—honours—and—and enjoyment, of course. Ha! What noise was that?”
Some slight creaking of an article of furniture sent the blood with a frightful rush to his heart, and he remained for several moments trembling excessively, and clutching the edge of the oaken table for support. Then, with a deep sigh, he again spoke,—
“’Twas nothing—nothing. I have grown strangely nervous of late. I was not wont to be so tremblingly alive to every slight alarm. Is it age creeping upon me, or the shadow of some impending evil upon my heart? Learmont—Learmont, be thyself. Shake off these vapours of the brain. I—I have been ten times worse since I saw that face upon my door step. God of heaven! How like it was to one who sleeps the sleep of death. I—I cannot stay here. This room seems peopled with shapes. Hence—hence—I am going—I am going—going.”
He slowly crept to the door, and kept softly muttering unintelligible words with his cold, livid lips, till he had passed out, and closed the door after him.
Laughter at this moment reached his ears from the servants’ hall, and he smote his forehead with his clenched hand, as he exclaimed,—
“Why can I not laugh? Why has no smile ever lighted my face for years? Am I a thing accursed? Others have spilt blood as well as I, and they have not been thus haunted. I will go out. There seems in the house to be ever close to me some hideous, unfashioned form, whose hot breath comes on my cheek, and whose perpetual presence is a hell. Yes—I—I will go out—out!”
CHAPTER LXII.
Jacob Grey in the Hampstead Fields.—The Placard.—The Reward.
The birds were singing merrily, and skimming over Jacob Gary’s head long before he awoke from the effects of the drugged wine that had been administered to him by the considerate friends he had met with. The morning sun was shining upon his pale, haggard face, lighting even it up with some appearance of less ghastliness, and yet there he lay motionless, as if dead. It is a favourite theory of dreams with some philosophers, that such visions of the fancy never occur but at the moment or two before awakening, or at the moment of losing consciousness by going to sleep, or in other words that we dream only when not fully slumbering.
It would appear that this was the case with Jacob Gray; for, as the birds sung above him, and the sun gleamed upon him, while a crow would occasionally flap his face as it flew over him, his perception appeared half to return, and his face became bedewed with a heavy perspiration, as some fearful images of his past life came across his mental vision.