Here, however, I took sudden fright. My mind, which as I walked had been busy with the girl and the steps I should take to find her--if indeed I wished to find her, about which I was puzzled, the surrounding circumstances being so different--was invaded by the notion that I had been long on the road. To this was added next moment the reflection that messengers sent to arrest the Duke could by taking a coach forestall me. The thought threw me into a hot fit, which increased on me when I considered that I did not know the remainder of the road, and might waste much time in tracing it. Naturally my first impulse in this strait was to seek a guide; but Long Lane by Smithfield is only one degree better than Whetstone Park, and I shrank from applying to the sots and drabs who stood at the doors and corners, or lounged out of the patched windows, and, lazily or rudely, watched me go by.
In this difficulty, and growing the more diffident and alarmed the more slowly I walked, I looked about eagerly for some person, of passable aspect, of whom I could enquire. I saw none, and my uncertain glances and loitering steps were beginning to draw on me advances and an attention that were anything but welcome, when, reaching a corner where an alley, now removed--I think it was then called Dog Alley--runs out of Long Lane, I saw a man, decently habited, come out of a house a little way down the alley. He closed the door sharply behind him, and, as I looked, went off in the opposite direction.
Here was my opportunity. Without losing a moment I ran after him, and he, hearing my steps, turned; and we came face to face. Then, when it was too late to retreat, I saw with unutterable dismay that the man I had stopped was no stranger, but the person who had dressed me up the night before and taken me to the mysterious house in the suburbs; the man called Smith whom I had first seen under the Piazza in Covent Garden, and again in Ferguson's room.
To come face to face with anyone of the gang with the knowledge that I had but now left the palace after informing against them was of itself enough to make my knees tremble under me. But of this man, though his civil treatment had been in pleasant contrast to Ferguson's brutality, I had conceived an instinctive dread, based as much on his silence and reserve and a sort of strict power with which I credited him, as on his contemptuous treatment of my tyrant. In a word, had I come on Ferguson himself I could scarcely have been more overcome.
On hearing my footsteps he had turned on me very sharply, with the air of a man who had no mind to be followed, and no taste for followers. But on seeing who it was his face grew light and he whistled his surprise. "I was on my way to you," he said, "and here you are. That is good luck. I suppose Ferguson sent you?"
"No," I stammered, avoiding his eyes, and wondering, with inward quakings, what was going to happen to me. "I--I lost my road."
"Oh!" said he, and looked keenly at me. "Lost your road, did you? Well, it was very much to the purpose, as it happened. May I ask where you were going?"
I shifted my feet uneasily. "To Bunhill Fields," I said, naming the first place of which I could think.
"Ah!" he answered, with apparent carelessness, and though it seemed scarcely possible he should fail to observe the heat and disorder into which his presence had thrown me, he made no sign. "Well, you are not far out," he continued, "and I will come with you. When you have done your errand we will talk over my business. This way. I know this end of the town well. And so it was not Ferguson," he added with a sharp look at me, "who sent you after me?"
"No," I said.