Dispirited, angry, and his apparel disarranged, Learmont returned to his ball-room. His guests would not, however, be persuaded to remain, and despite all his protestations that the “madman” was properly secured, he could not restore the confidence or hilarity of the company.
Upon one excuse or another, they one and all departed, and not a single dance took place in the elaborately and expensively prepared ball-room of the ambitious and mortified squire.
With a forced civility he saw the last of his numerous guests to his door. The lights were still blazing in his saloons, but there was silence and loneliness in the midst of all his splendour, which now looked such a mockery of gaiety.
He sunk upon a chair, and buried his face in his hands for many minutes in an agony of painful reflection.
Learmont’s first grand fête was over, and a signal failure.
Albert Seyton.—The Lonely Search.—A Suggestion.—An Important Visit.
We will now conduct the reader to one of our dramatis personæ that we have unwillingly been compelled to neglect for some time—we mean the gallant and enthusiastic Albert Seyton. As we have recorded the prostration of spirits which ensued, when he lost all trace again of the unfortunate and persecuted Ada, after so providentially, as it were, encountering her in St. James’s Park, terminated in a long and dangerous illness—an illness which brought him to the brink of the grave; but thanks to the tender nursing of his father, and an excellent constitution, he successfully battled with his sickness and after some months, was able, although but the shadow of his former self, to walk abroad, by the assistance of his father.
His deep dejection concerning Ada, however, still clung to him like a blight, and it became clear to his deeply affected father that he should never again see the bloom of health upon the cheek of his son unless the hiding-place of the deceitful Jacob Gray was once more discovered.
The old house at Lambeth had been soon deserted by Tibbs, the bear-warden. The gloom and solitariness of the situation by no means suited the habits of the roving vagabond, who had been so long without a fixed home of any kind, that now he had become possessed of one, such as it was, he soon hated it, and looked upon it in the light of a prison. All that Jacob Gray had left in the house he sold off and once more the ruined building was tenanted only by the rats and mice who scampered along its deserted rooms and echoing corridors.