The result confirmed his suspicions, for he had not been above two minutes in that doorway, than the shoemaker arrived at the corner at the top of his speed, and peered around it with what he considered amazing cleverness and cunning.
The street was a long one, and he felt not a little surprised at missing Gray in so very sudden a manner.
“Lost him, by ——,” he cried. “He must have gone into some house here—that’s flat. I’ll get a constable to come with me and will call at every one. I’d wager my head he’s the man.”
The amateur officer now darted off at a quick rate to procure a real one, and when he had gone, Jacob Gray emerged from his hiding-place.
He paused a moment in the street, and then with bitter malignity, he muttered,—
“Beware! I am not a man to be tempted too far.”
He then hastily walked in an opposite direction to that taken by the shoemaker, although he had no definite idea of where he was going, or what he meant to do until the morning should afford him a chance of seeing Learmont. As the excitement of the last half-hour began along with its danger to wear off, Jacob Gray felt dreadfully fatigued, notwithstanding he had been much supported by the broken victuals he had received from poor Maud, and he thought of proceeding to the sheds of Covent-garden, and lying down to rest himself till morning’s dawn.
The rotten wooden stalls and sheds of Covent-garden-market, at the period of our tale, were the nightly resort of many who had no other place in which to lay an aching head and wearied body. There, among potato-sacks, baskets, vegetable refuse, and all the mass of filth for which that now handsome market was then so famous, the weary, the destitute, and the heart-sore would find a temporary solace from their cares, in the oblivion of sleep.
But not alone were the humble sheds of the market occupied by the sons and daughters of misfortune and want—a number of the worthless and abandoned characters who nightly prowl about the theatres had no other places of refuge; and many a thief and, in some instances, criminals of a higher grade in the scale of iniquity, were pushed out by the officers from among the market lodgers, when he happened to be particularly wanted; and when a housebreaker, or thief of any description, was compelled by necessity to lodge there, he was tolerably sure to be particularly wanted, because such a step augured a state of his finances which was far from enabling him to fee the officers—a system which although now so very rare, was a hundred years ago flourishing in all its iniquity and glory.
To the sheds, then, of the market, Jacob Gray resolved to go, but by many fortuitous accidents, he was doomed not to get there.