The moment the words were spoken I trembled at my audacity. But he took it better than I expected, for he merely paused to stare at me, and then chuckled grimly.
"Well," he said, "then, now that you have taken the air let us go back. Have you anything to object to that, Mr. Taylor?"
I could find nothing.
"I will come with you," he continued. "I want to see Ferguson, and we can settle my business there."
But this only presented to me a dreadful vision of Ferguson, released from his bonds, and mad with rage and the desire to avenge himself; and I stopped short.
"I am not going there," I said.
"No? Then where, may I ask, are you going?" he answered, watching me with a placid amusement, which made it as clear as the daylight, that he saw through my evasions. "Where is it my lord's pleasure to go?"
"To Brome's, in Fleet Street," I said hoarsely. And if he had had his back to me at that instant, and I a knife in my hand, I could have run him through! For as I said it, and he with mocking suavity assented, and we stepped out together to return the way we had come through Long Lane--over which the sky hung low in a dull yellow haze, the last of the western light--I had a swift and stinging recollection of the King and my lord, and the letter, and the passage of time; and could have sprung from his side, and poured out curses on him in the impotence of my rage and impatience. For the hour of grace which the King had granted was gone, and a second was passing, and still the letter that should warn the Duke of Berwick lay in my pocket, and I saw no chance of delivering it.
That Smith discerned the chagrin which this enforced companionship caused me--though not the ground of it--was as plain as that the fact gave him pleasure of no common kind. I had no longer such a command of my features that I could trust myself to look at him; but I was conscious, using some other sense, that he frequently looked at me, and always after these inspections, smiled like a man who finds something to his taste. And I hated him.
How long with these feelings I could have borne to go with him, or what I should have done in the last resort had he continued the same tactics, remains unproved; for at the same corner half-way down Long Lane, where I had first espied him, he paused. "I want to go in here," he said coolly. "I need only detain you a moment, Mr. Taylor."