I remained in Pesth over a month, exciting an increasing attention and being unable to account for a further delay, as I was doing nothing, not even sketching, which, in the vicinity of a fortress, would have been the surest way of inviting arrest. I profited by the acquaintance of Dr. Orzovensky's family to pass the time agreeably, and, finally, being unable to extort by post further instructions from Kossuth, or explanations in reply to two urgent letters describing the position I was in, and being unable to give any reason for a longer stay, or to find the people I was sent to, I determined to go back to London and start again with fuller oral instructions and a better understanding of the difficulties. I went to Orzovensky and frankly told him my errand, and asked him if I might leave the dispatches in some place known to him, so that he could indicate to some other person, should my mission be taken up by another, where they were to be found. He burst out on me with violence, accusing me of endangering his family as well as himself, and assuring me that if the slightest suspicion of my mission should transpire they would all be thrown into prison, and he be ruined, refusing to have anything to do or say about the dispatches, and breaking off all communications with me on the spot.
I had not, up to that moment, felt any _real_ fright, though, when I stood under the scrutiny of the officer on the dike, I must confess I felt extremely nervous; but Orzovensky's violence, and his own panic at the thought of having harbored treason so long, making me fear that his anxiety to escape all suspicion might compel him to denounce me, gave me a _mauvais quart d'heure_. I was instantaneously in an awful funk, and I had a practical demonstration of the "_vox haesit in faucibus_," for I was unable to reply to the good doctor in anything but the faintest whisper, and my tongue clattered in my mouth, as dry as a stick, in an instant. I threw the dispatches in the sink and took the next train for Vienna, undisturbed by the train running off the track in the night, in the greater anxiety of my position, and, after making at the station of Vienna only a hasty lunch on a boiled sausage and a roll, continued my journey by express until I was out of the Austrian dominions, and stopped to sleep at Frankfort. My panic was as unreasonable as my security had been, for there was no reason to believe that Dr. Orzovensky would warn the authorities, or that I could not have carried the dispatches back to Kossuth in safety. My habitual courage was not the courage of one who realizes his danger and faces it coolly, but that of constitutional inability to realize what the danger is, however clearly it may be shown to him. As a habit the realization of my danger only came to me when the danger itself had gone by, and then I was frightened.