“Mercy—mercy—mercy!”
None dared to arouse him, but lifting up their hands in silent terror, they gently closed the door, and crept softly down the staircase, leaving him alone with his dark and awful thoughts.
The sun was lighting up the east, and the dim clouds of night were rapidly changing their inky hue for the glorious tints of day; but there sat Learmont still with his head upon the table, and the glare of the many wax lights he had ordered, strangely mingling with the roseate tints of the coming day.
Oh, what awful images of horror and despair came marching in dismal troops through the brain of the blood-guilty man. Over and over again was the fearful tragedy he had been an actor in, exhibited to his shrinking imagination. Then he fancied himself alone with the mangled body of Jacob Gray. His feet were rooted to the floor of the room, and he thought the body rose, while Gray, with his long, ghastly-looking fingers dabbled in blood, strove to hold his eyes in their sockets—to replace the splintered pieces of his fractured skull, the while he glared at him, Learmont, with such a look of stony horror, that with a shriek the squire awoke, and stood in his chamber a picture of guilty horror, staring with blood-shot eyes at the wax-lights and the morning sunshine with a racking brain and a fevered pulse.
CHAPTER CXIV.
Albert’s Visit to Learmont.—The Squire’s Triumph.
After a time Learmont became more conscious of his situation, and a feeling of exhaustion coming over him in consequence of the fatigue, both of body and mind he had undergone, he partially divested himself of his apparel, and throwing himself upon the luxurious bed which was in the room, he soon dropped into a deep sleep, which was not visited and rendered hideous by any of the frightful images which had before been conjured up by his oppressed brain.
It was some four hours or more before he again awakened, and then he found himself much refreshed both bodily and mentally. He ran over in his mind accurately all the circumstances of his present position, and now that his cooler judgment had sway, and the horror of the recent events he had passed through was beginning to subside, he inclined more and more to his previously expressed opinion, that Jacob Gray had not really written any confession, but had merely pretended to have such a document always at hand, for the purpose of aweing him and saving his, Jacob’s life, from any attempt on the part of either of his great enemies.
Learmont rose and paced his room in deep thought, and then, while he stood as it were upon a mine, which, did he but know it, was ready to explode beneath him, and hurl him to destruction; a feeling of self-satisfaction began to creep over him, and he re-assured himself into a belief that he must have materially bettered his situation by the destruction of Gray.
“It must be so,” he muttered. “There is no confession written, and Gray was not only a heavy expense, but would, no doubt, some day have played some serious trick in payment for the attempts which, to his knowledge, had been made against him. ’Tis well, then, he is dead—exceedingly well, for my worst enemy is gone. Britton will drink himself to death, surely; and as for the pretended papers he has, of such great consequence to me, as he and Gray ever affected they were, I now begin to think that like Jacob Gray’s written confession such a tale is merely invented as a bugbear to my imagination. Yes, I must be now in a better, a far better position, and the day will come, when I shall have no further fear of the stability of my fortunes.”