Thus was the doddering old fool who had given his youth to Sunday schools when Sunday schools were not patronised by princes, archbishops, and lord mayors, when Sunday schools were the scorn of the intelligent, and had sometimes to be held in public-houses for lack of better accommodation,—thus was he taken off for a show and a museum curiosity by indulgent and shallow Samaritans who had not even the wit to guess that he had sown what they were reaping. And Darius Clayhanger stood oblivious at a high window of the sacred Bank. And Edwin, who, all unconscious, owed the very fact of his existence to the doting imbecile, regarded him chiefly as a figure in a tableau, as the chance instrument of a woman’s beautiful revelation. Mr Shushions’s sole crime against society was that he had forgotten to die.
Four.
Hilda Lessways would not return to the barrels. She was taciturn, and the only remark which she made bore upon the advisability of discovering Janet and Mr Orgreave. They threaded themselves out of the moving crowd and away from the hokey-pokey stall and the barrels into the tranquillity of the market-place, where the shadow of the gold angel at the top of the Town Hall spire was a mere squat shapeless stain on the irregular paving-stones. The sound of the Festival came diminished from the Square.
“You’re very fond of poetry, aren’t you?” Edwin asked her, thinking, among many other things, of her observation upon the verse of Isaac Watts.
“Of course,” she replied disagreeably. “I can’t imagine anybody wanting to read anything else.” She seemed to be ashamed of her kindness to Mr Shushions, and to wish to efface any impression of amiability that she might have made on Edwin. But she could not have done so.
“Well,” he said to himself, “there’s no getting over it. You’re the biggest caution I’ve ever come across!” His condition was one of various agitation.
Then, just as they were passing the upper end of the Cock Yard, which was an archway, Mr Orgreave and Janet appeared in the archway.
“We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“And so have we.”