But Sophy was not to be persuaded. She went manfully out to the gate, and shut it in the face of the disguised men, who came swaggering up towards it.
“What’s your business here?” she demanded, in her young, clear voice.
“Come, young woman,” said a man in a false nose and a green smock-frock, but whose voice had a town sound in it, and whose legs and feet were those of no rustic, “clear out of the way, or it will be the worse for you!”
“What have you to do here on my brother’s ground?” again asked Sophy, standing there in her straw bonnet and pink cotton frock.
“We don’t want to do nothing, miss,”—and that voice she knew for Dan Hewlett’s—“but to have down that new-fangled machine as takes away the work from the poor.”
“What work of yours did it ever take away, Dan Hewlett?” said she. “Look here! it makes bread cheaper—”
She had thought before of the chain of arguments, but they would not come in the face of the emergency; and besides, she felt that her voice would not carry her words beyond the three or four men who were close to the gate. She might as well have spoken to the raging sea when, as the gate was shaken, she went on with a fresh start, “I call it most cowardly and ungrateful—”
At that moment she was seized from behind by two great brawny arms, and borne backward, struggling helplessly like a lamb in a bear’s embrace. She saw that, not only was the gate burst in, but that the throng were pressing in from the garden side, and she was not released until she was set down in Mrs Pucklechurch’s kitchen, and a gruff voice said, rather as if to a little child, “Bide where you be, and no one will go for to hurt you.”
It was a huge figure, with a woman’s bonnet stuck upright over his chalked face, and a red cloak covering his smock-frock, and he was gone the next moment, while Mrs Pucklechurch, screaming and sobbing, clutched at Sophy, and held her tight, with, “Now, don’t, Miss Sophy, don’t ye! Bide still, I say!”
“But, Edmund’s machine! His things and all!” gasped Sophy, still struggling.