Gray’s Visit to Learmont.—The Disappointment.—A Week of Terror.—The
Street Newsvender.
Evening was casting its broad shadows across the Hampstead fields, and
the air was varied with the songs of thousands of birds retiring to
roost, when Jacob Gray with pain and difficulty began his descent from
the tree which had afforded him so hazardous and painful a refuge for
so many hours.
Stiffened and benumbed as he was in every limb, he found it no easy
matter to crawl down from his high perch; and it was only after many
minutes of uneasiness and terror that he at last reached the ground;
then he leaned against the trunk of the tree, and with dizzy eyes and a
bewildered brain looked anxiously around him. A death-like silence
reigned around, broken by nothing but the twittering of the sparrows,
and the occasional chirp of a grasshopper. He put his hand up to his
wounded face, but the blood had ceased to flow, and he only now felt a
heavy, deadening sensation about the region of his wounds. After a time
then, he ventured to leave the tree, and with a slow, uncertain and
tottering step he walked towards the pond.
The direful pangs of hunger, which in his recumbent position in the
tree had not greatly afflicted him, now began to make themselves felt
in earnest, and Jacob Gray groaned in his agony.
“Oh,” he cried, “for a crust—the hardest morsel that ever a dainty
beggar cast from him as unworthy of his wallet—I shall die of hunger
ere I reach Westminster!”
Still he tottered on towards the pond, and when he reached its grassy
brink, he lay down as he had done before, and drank largely at the
clear water.
Then he bathed his face, and washed away partially the stains of blood
that had hardened into coagulated masses upon his cheeks; and he was
again somewhat refreshed, although still terribly faint from want of
sustenance.
To abate, if possible, the aching, racking pains in all his limbs, he
strove to increase his rate of walking, but that expedient, by
increasing the languid circulation of his half-thickened blood, caused
his wounds from the shot to burst out bleeding afresh, and the horrible
faintness that came over him for want of food made him reel along like
a drunken man.
It might have been the lingering effects of the opiate that had been so
freely administered to him, or it might be his huge draughts of water
upon an empty stomach, but, from whatever cause it arose, a deadly
sickness came over him just as he neared some cottages at the base of
the hill, leading to what is now a pretty collection of suburban
cottages, which was then a swampy hollow, with a few miserable huts,
occupied by people who sold bundles of dry sticks for firewood
ostensibly, but who were in reality had characters, not averse to
anything, so that it promised the smallest gain.
Jacob Gray held with a shivering, nervous grasp by one of the palings
which divided the patch of garden ground belonging to one of these
hovels from the waste common, and was dreadfully sick—sick until what
little strength had been left to him was frustrated, and he fell, a
breathing, but scarcely animate mass, by the side of the palings.
His situation was an unfavourable one for attracting the attention of
any person who might be in the hut, for the palings hid him, and he had
not strength, had he the inclination, to cry for help. How long he
remained there he knew not, but it was quite dark, when, the awful
sickness having subsided, he made an effort to rise again. With much
difficulty he gained his feet, and the moment he did, the horrible
feeling of hunger—maddening hunger—came across him with twice its
former intensity of pain.
“I—I can go no further,” he gasped. “I shall die on the road side if I
attempt to reach London from here with—without food, I—I cannot—cannot.”
He staggered along the palings till he came to a wide gate which had no
fastening, and there, with a feeling of desperation, he crawled
through, determined to risk all by craving charity of the cottagers.
As he went on by the inner-side of the wide palings, which he was
obliged to cling to for support, he struck against some projection
which threw him down and very much bruised his knee. As he lay there he
put up his hands, to feel what it was, and by the shape of the
projection, as well as dipping his hand into its contents, he thought
in a moment what it was, and he rose with alacrity to eat greedily from
a pig-trough the loathsome remainder of the last meal that had been
given to the swine.
What will hunger not induce persons to do? Jacob Gray thought he had
never so much enjoyed a meal in his life, and when he had devoured the
remnants of the mash in the trough, he sat down by the palings, and in
about half an hour was sufficiently recovered to make his project of
proceeding to the house of Learmont at Westminster not so wild and
impracticable.
The night was now fairly set in, and there was not much chance of
Gray’s ragged, wounded, and emaciated appearance attracting the notice
of any one along the dimly lighted road from Hampstead to London.
Although his strength was now a little restored, he still felt very ill
at every step of his progress, and his only hope became entirely
founded upon the chance of finding Learmont within, and inducing in him
a belief that his (Gray’s) strange and disordered appearance arose
merely from some accident on his road, and not from any circumstances
which had put it out of his power to be half so noxious and dangerous
as he had been.
“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.”
The man then in a loud nasal voice, commenced his verses.
Jacob Gray only paused to hear the first line, which consisted of an
appeal to young mothers nursing tender babes, and then unable any
longer to remain in the throng, he pushed his way through them like a
madman, and despite the kicks and cuffs he received, succeeded in
passing on and arriving nearly breathless, heated, and alarmed at
Charing-cross.