“Go away, sir, and don’t aggravate me. It would make folk’s hair stand on end to know what I suffer—it would.”
The lady now turned round on the bed with such a bounce that Jacob Gray thought for a moment it must eventually come down on the top of him.
“What shall I do now?” thought Gray; “this is a strange house. They do not seem at all the kind of persons I suspected. How could that dead body have come into the cupboard in the attic? Perhaps they don’t know it’s there at all, and if I should be seen, it will in some way be laid to my charge.”
He now remained for some moments in painful thought. Then he came at length to a conclusion that he must venture down stairs before the lady got up, as his only chance of getting out of the house.
“Only Thomas down stairs,” he repeated to himself, “and a servant girl I presume? I must make the attempt as circumstances direct me—at the back or the front of the house, I may be able to leave it.”
He made now a very slight movement in an endeavour to crawl from under the bed, and make towards the door, but the corpulent virago heard him, and cried,—
“I thought I heard somebody a moving. I shall get up and ring for Deborah. Lor a mighty—I’m all of a tremble.”
“If I let her get up and have assistance here, I am lost,” said Gray.
It took him a moment or two more to screw up his courage, and then he suddenly rose up at the side of the bed, and said,—
“If you stir or speak for the next half hour, I’ll cut your throat from ear to ear.”