"I hope I should have stood to my guns," he resumed; "but all the same, if it hadn't been for you, the beast would have got the best of it in the village. Go on eating, man! You ought to eat at the rate you work. I'd offer you beer, only I suppose you won't touch it. I heard you stigmatising it as 'accursed poison' on the Green last week. You're wrong, you know, quite wrong."
Mr. Bagshotte was usually a deliberate and placidly silent man, but grief made him curiously restless and talkative.
Barnabas lifted his eyes from his plate and looked at his host, who had just buried his son.
"If you'd felt that drink devil tearing inside you, you'd not care about playing with him; nor about seeing others do it," he said. "But my preaching isn't to you, nor such as you, sir. I've not felt called to speak to them above me, except once." He stopped rather abruptly, and got up.
"I've done, thank 'ee; an' there's some one coming up the garden. Ay, it's Polly Taylor, an' she looks as if it was pressing."
He walked to the window; and the child, seeing him, poured out an urgent message, interspersed with sobs.
Perhaps nothing could have more strongly set forth the general topsy-turvyness than the fact of the revivalist preacher's receiving a call through the rectory window, with the parson standing by unsurprised.
"Her mother's took bad an' her brother's dead," said Barnabas; "but"—with a moment's hesitation—"will ye no gi'e yourself an hour, sir? I'll manage."
The old parson straightened himself, and took up his hat and stick.
"Not now," he said. "When the bullets have stopped flying, we'll count our dead." So the two went into the village street together.