Learmont’s Adventure.—A Discovery.—The Haunted House.—Exultation, and a Resolution.
In the wild excitement of his passions, Learmont had walked onwards, heedless of whither he was going, and now that he had in some measure found the relief he sought for in fatigue, he glared anxiously round to find if possible what part of the town he had strayed to in his deep abstraction.
The night was very dark, not a star peeped forth from heaven to light with its small twinkling lustre the massive black arch of the firmament. No moon shed its silvery radiance on the gigantic city;—a darkness, so intense that sky, houses, trees,—all seemed merged into one chaotic mass.
“Where should I be?” muttered Learmont; “I must have walked far, for I am weary. Ha! Is that the hour?”
The clock of St. Paul’s struck three as he spoke, and from the direction of the sound, Learmont guessed that he was somewhere southward of that edifice.
“Some chance passenger,” he muttered, “will direct me to Westminster; yet I hear no footfall in these silent streets. How still and solemn now is the great city; one might imagine it a vast cemetery, in which the dead alone dwelt.”
He paced slowly down a long straggling street, and his own footsteps were the only sounds that disturbed the solemn stillness that reigned around.
Learmont walked on slowly, for he knew not but he might be in some dangerous quarter of the city, and his suspicions that the locality in which he was did not possess any great claims to fashion or respectability were much increased by a door suddenly opening in a house some dozen yards in advance of him, and a man being flung from it with considerable force into the centre of the street, while a loud voice, exclaimed:—
“Go to the devil, an’ you will. Are we to sit up all night to attend to one sot? No, that will never suit the Old Mitre, an’ there were a round dozen of you, we might think of it.”
“It’s d—damned ill-usage,” remonstrated the man who had been turned out so unceremoniously from what appeared to Learmont a little tavern, and the door of which was immediately flung close, and barred from within.
“That’s the—the way of the world,” remarked the drunken man, as he slowly gathered himself up on his feet, and shook his head with tipsy gravity. “There’s no such thing as a consideration in the world, and the street even is turning round—and round in a most ex—ex—extra—ordinary manner. That’s how I never can get home prop—properly. The streets keep a-moving in that ex—ex—extraordinary manner;—that end comes round to this end—and that’s how I’m led astray. It’s too bad—it is indeed; it’s enough to—to make one weep, it is. But no matter ex—ex—a double extraordinary man, and a greatly injured character.”