He took the gibe and scowled at me--he spoke always like a Sawney, and could never pass for English; but in his pleasure at the discovery he had made he let the word pass. "See, man!" he said, "there are fine times coming! It is like Monmouth's day over again. I'll warrant Hunt's, down in the Marshes, is like a penny ferry with their coming over. The fat is fairly in the fire now, and if we do not singe little Hooknose's wig for him, I'll hang for it! He is a better man than his father, is Jamie; ay, the very same figure of a man that his cold-blooded, grease-your-boots, and sell-you-for-a-groat uncle, John Churchill, was at his age! So Jamie is over! Well, well: and if we knew precisely where he was and where he lies nights--there are two ways about it! Ye-es! Ye-es!" And the old rogue, falling first into a drawl and then into silence, looked at me slyly, and, unless I was mistaken, began to ruminate on a new treason; rubbing now one calf and now the other, and now dressing his ragged wig with his fingers, as he continued to smile at his wicked thoughts; so that, as he sat there, one leg over the other knee, he was the veriest baldheaded Judas to be conceived. In the meantime I watched him and hated him, and, I thought, read him.
Whatever the scheme in his mind, however, and whether he was, as I expected, as ready to sell the Duke of Berwick as to plot with him, he said no more to me on the subject; but presently went to his own room. Thus left, I thought it high time to consider where I stood, being all of a tremble and twitter with what I had heard and seen; and I tossed through the night, fearfully sounding the depths in which I found myself, and striving to gain strength to battle with the stream that day by day was forcing me farther and farther from the land. I was no boy or fool, unaware of the danger of being mixed up with great men and great names; rather the ten years during which I had followed public affairs had presented me with only too many examples of the iron pot and clay pitcher. When, therefore, I slept at last, late in the evening, it was to dream of the sledge and Tyburn road and the Ordinary--who bore in my dream a marvellous likeness to Mr. Brome--and a wall of faces that lined the way and never ceased from St. Giles's Pound to the Edgeware Road.
Such a dream, taken with my night's thoughts, left me eager to put in execution a plan I had more than once considered; which was to give up all, to fly from London, and hiding myself in some quiet place under another name, to live as I best might until Ferguson's capture, or a change in the state of affairs freed me from danger. At a distance from him I might even gain courage to inform against him; but this I left for future decision, the main thing now being to pack my clothes, secure about me the money I had saved, which amounted to thirty guineas, and escape from the town on foot or in a stage-wagon without any of his myrmidons being the wiser.
To adopt this course was to lose Mr. Brome's friendship and the livelihood which his employment provided; but such was the fear I had conceived of Ferguson's schemes and the perils they involved that I scarcely hesitated. Before noon, an hour which I thought least open to suspicion, I had engaged a porter and bidden him wait below, had made all my other arrangements, and in five minutes I should have been safe in the streets with my face set towards Kensington--when, at the last moment, there came a tap at my door and a voice asked if I was in.
It was not an hour at which Ferguson had ever troubled me, and trusting to this I had not been careful to hide the signs of removal which my room presented. For a moment I hung over my trunk, panic-stricken; then the door opened, and admitted the girl who had intervened once before--I mean at the door of the Secretary's office--and whom I had since noticed, but not often, going in at the opposite rooms.
She curtseyed demurely, standing in the doorway, and said that Mr. Smith--which was one of the names by which Ferguson went--had sent her to me with a message.
"Yes," I said, forcing myself to speak.
"Would you please to wait on him this evening at eight," she answered. "He wishes to speak with you."
"Yes," I said again, helplessly assenting; and there was an end of my fine evasion. I took it for a warning, and my clothes from my mail; and going down paid the porter a groat, and received in return a dozen porter's oaths. And so dismissed him and my plan together.