He would have felt tenfold more miserable had he even dreamed that not a dozen yards from his own chamber, which hour after hour he paced in such an angry and discontented mood, his father lay in a dark and dismal cell, a close and unhappy prisoner.
Poor Mr. Ellerton was unhappy indeed, for he felt that he had almost willfully thrown himself into his present situation, by so utterly disregarding the warning he had received. A week had passed since his abduction, and as he sat brooding over his situation, a slight rustling outside his door caused him to look quickly up, with a faint hope at his heart that some friend might be at hand.
His hope was quickly crushed, however, as he caught sight of the ugly face, with its cruel and sinister expression, which peered eagerly at him from between the iron bars of his prison door.
Ugh! what a horrible face it was! with its wolfish grin and snaky red-black eyes. Despite its ugliness it had a familiar look; but where or when he had ever seen it he could not recall to mind.
“Ha! my friend,” said the stranger, in a disagreeable voice, and with intense irony. “You don’t seem to remember me, do you?”
“No, sir, I do not,” was the reply. “And yet there is something about your face that seems familiar.”
“Um!—it’s a pleasant face to you, no doubt,” was the sneering rejoinder.
Mr. Ellerton made no answer. He loathed the very sight of this man, but resolved not to gain his ill-will by making any incautious remark.
The stranger eyed him balefully, while he kept hopping uneasily first upon one foot and then upon the other; at length he said, grimly:
“Um! I presume if you don’t remember me you do Jessie Almyr! Ha! that touches you in a tender spot, doesn’t it?” said the villain, with a horrible grin, as the other started violently, and flushed to his very brows with a deep crimson, at hearing one whom he had tenderly loved and reverenced spoken thus lightly of, and by such a monster, too.