“Oh,” he thought, “if when I see Learmont he did not know how harmless to him I am without Ada—without a written scrap to leave behind me, to point the finger of suspicion against him—how his fingers would close upon my throat and what music to his ears would be my death rattle. But I must deceive him—I must beard him still—still defy—still taunt him.”
It was some hours before Jacob Gray, travelling at the unsteady pace he did, contrived to reach the first houses in London; and when he did so, what would he had not given for but one of the pieces of bright gold he had been so long hoarding, and of which he had been robbed so speedily, in order that he might, ere he adventured to see Learmont, take some means of improving his appearance, and nourishing his wearied frame, in order that a suspicion might not arise in the breast of the crafty squire that all was not as usual with him.
Then there was another view of his condition, that when it occurred to his mind, brought a tumult of distracting thoughts into the brain of Jacob Gray; and that view was based upon the uncertainty that beset him with regard to Ada’s actions since denouncing him at Whitehall. Had she gone to Sir Francis Hartleton’s, and so far added to his suspicions of Learmont, as to have induced some step against the squire; or, had she made her name and story so public that the whole of Westminster had rung with it, coupled with the fact, that it was he, Jacob Gray, who had been hunted up the Strand; and that Learmont, residing as he did, within almost a stone’s throw of the whole occurrence, heard sufficient to let him know how innoxious Jacob Gray now probably was in his death, and how impolitic it had now become to let him live again to surround himself with those precautions which had been so suddenly and so strangely torn from him in the course of a few short hours.
Whenever all this occurred to Jacob Gray, his steps faltered, and the perspiration of mortal fear broke out upon his brow, for he knew not but that he was hurrying to his destruction, and making powerful efforts to be earlier at the place in which he was to be sacrificed.
Still, what other hope had that miserable guilty man. Learmont alone had the power to aid him, Learmont alone held him in dread, and might still fancy he could even in death leave a sting behind him which might topple him from his haughty height of power, and dissipate to the winds of Heaven all his dreams of wild ambition.
“Yes, yes,” he muttered, “I must run this awful risk—I must go to Learmont and procure enough gold for my present necessaries, and then concoct some scheme for the dark future.”
With a face as pale as monumental marble, save where a few livid marks and streaks of blood showed where he had been wounded, Jacob Gray now turned into the dense mass of houses about St. Giles’s, for the purpose of wending his way as quietly and as far from the public thoroughfares as possible towards Charing-cross.
Skulking along by dark places, and shunning anywhere that presented a light aspect, he pursued his route towards the upper end of St. Martin’s lane. A crowd was there collected sufficiently dense to stop his progress, and he dare not, like a man of clear conscience and open heart, push his way through the motley assemblage. In vain he tried to get up one of the side streets which would not take him far out of his way. He had no recourse but to go back some hundred yards or more, or endeavour to get through the mass of persons, the cause of whose assembling he knew not nor cared, so that they would let him pass unobstructed and unquestioned.
As he neared, in his efforts to pass, the centre of the throng of persons, he found that they were collected around a man who was, in the loud conventional voice of street singers and proclaimers of news, attracting his auditors by some narrative of deep interest, apparently. In another moment, Gray nearly lost all power of motion as he heard these words:—
“Here, my masters, you have a full account with all the particulars of the most horrid murder in the Strand of Mr. Vaughan, together with a copy of verses made on the occasion, and addressed to all young persons, warning them against dice, cards, drink, and Sabbath breaking.”