"You have a cold, I am afraid," he said, scarcely concealing the sneer in his tone. "And yet you look warm. You must have walked fast, my friend?"
"To overtake me, perhaps! It was good of you," he said in the same tone of secret badinage. "But we are here. What part of the Fields do you want? Whitecross Street?"
"No? Well, there is not much else here," he said; and he shrugged his shoulders, "except the Fields and the burial-ground. Your business does not lie with the latter, I suppose?"
At another time I must have shuddered at the dreary expanse on this uttermost fringe of the town that stretched before us under a waning light; an expanse of waste land broken only by the wall of the burial-ground, or the chimney of a brick-kiln, and bordered, where its limits were visible, by half-built houses, and squatter huts, and vast piles of refuse. Ugly as the prospect was, however, and far from reassuring to the timorous, I asked nothing better than to look at it. and look at it, and continue to look at it. But Mr. Smith, who did not understand this mood, turned with an impatient laugh.
"I suppose that you did not come here to look at that," said he.
Like a fool I jumped at the absurd, the flimsy pretext.
"Yes," I said. "I--I merely came to take the air."
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 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.
"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.