Learmont fixed his eye upon the mocking countenance of Gray, with such an expression of deadly hatred that even he quailed under it.
“Jacob Gray,” said the squire, hoarsely—“there is in me, when I am stirred by taunts, something dangerous, that even the fear of the revelations, that such as you are may leave behind you, cannot conquer. Beware, I say—beware.”
Gray trembled before his master’s spirit, and in silence took up the purse that Learmont threw him, and quitted the house.
When he gained the street, he shook his clenched hand, menacingly at the house, muttering between his clenched teeth,—
“Beware yourself, Squire Learmont; Jacob Gray will yet bring you to a gallows!”
CHAPTER LXXXVIII.
Mad Maud and the Magistrate.—The Scraps of Gray’s Confession.
“Man proposes, but God disposes” is a saying which Sir Francis Hartleton was doomed to feel the truth of, as regarded his projected excursion to the Old Smithy, at Learmont, for firmly as he had fixed in his own mind to go, a circumstance occurred, which induced him, at all events, to put off his journey for some short time.
That circumstance was the discovery, by the officers he had commissioned to search for her, of poor Maud, apparently in the last stage of misery and sadness—she had met with some injury from a runaway horse, and it was in one of the most miserable of the many miserable courts about Drury-lane, that the poor creature was discovered almost starved, for those around her could scarcely find the roughest means of satisfying their own wants, and the hunger of their squalid children.
The fact was immediately communicated to Sir Francis Hartleton, and he, as soon as he could get time from his public attendance at his office, went himself to visit her and take measures for her comfort.