“Jacob is in a horrid fright—I’m sure he is,” he muttered; “d—n me, I’ll—I’ll alarm him a bit.”
Britton applied his mouth to the key-hole, and made an unearthly kind of noise, that had Jacob Gray been there, would have gone far towards frightening him into fits. Then he dealt the door a bang with his fists, that made the whole attic shake again.
“He’s half dead, I know he is,” he cried; “upon my word I haven’t had such a pleasant evening for a long time.”
The smith then, after several efforts, for he was not in the steadiest condition, succeeded in unlocking the door. There burnt the light, nearly expiring, and Jacob Gray was gone.
For a moment Britton could scarcely believe his eyes. He then rushed to the open window, and the truth flashed across his mind. After all Jacob Gray had escaped him. A torrent of curses burst from his lips, and he sunk upon a chair quite exhausted by his ungovernable passion.
CHAPTER LXXVIII.
Gray on the House Tops.—Specimens of the Rising Generation.—The Old Attic.
Gray’s situation on the house tops was as far from being safe as it was far from pleasant, for the rapidly advancing daylight, he felt conscious, would very soon make him a prominent object to the whole liberty of Westminster, if he found not some means of descending.
His standing upon the parapets, and in the gutters, along which he crawled, was insecure in the extreme, and his nervousness, from repeated slips which nearly precipitated him into the street, increased each moment, so that he began to feel that, unless he got refuge speedily somewhere, he should meet with a fatal and disastrous accident. His idea was to get in at some attic window, and so make his way into the street through the house; but this, although the only possible means that he could think of, for rescuing him from his very precarious situation, was fraught with dangers and difficulties; for who would allow a man to get in at an attic window, and walk undisturbed through their house into the street?
Jacob Gray, groaned as he thought of this, and wrung his hands in despair. “I cannot fight my way out,” he muttered. “There is but one remote chance for me, and that is to get into some house where there are no men. I may succeed in alarming females, so that they may be glad to let me go in peace, but what a slender hope is that.”