Then, "They'll shut me up!" cried Timothy; and there was a ring of mortal terror in his voice.
Barnabas himself would, any day, have preferred to face death to a long imprisonment. He freed himself from Timothy's grasp, and stepped between hunter and hunted.
"I think ye should be 'shamed!" he said. "Ha' ye nought better to do than to hound that poor creature to death or to Bedlam? which, happen, is a deal worse! Let him be; he's past doin' any harm. Any way, ye'll ha' to do wi' me first."
There was a pause; the united strength of all this riff-raff would, probably, have been more than a match for the preacher; but no one quite cared to be the first to make the rush and "do wi' him".
A big coalheaver in the background shouted derisively: "A nice, white-livered set you are! Blessed if the Methody ain't a match for all of you!"
And then, all at once, the group broke up and scuttled away, dividing itself among the labyrinth of squalid streets that sloped down to the river; and tramp, tramp, with heavy, warning steps, in their tightly buttoned swallow-tail coats and white trousers, came a detachment of four City police, who promptly arrested Barnabas for making a disturbance, and Timothy for being drunk, on the king's highway.
"That he's not," remarked the preacher. "He's got too little, not too much, aboard this time."
But he went to the police station without remonstrance, for he didn't mean to lose sight of Timothy.
Certainly Barnabas ought to have had enough of taking uncalled-for responsibilities on his shoulders; but there were some simple lessons which Dame Experience never could teach him, though she tried her hardest, and punished him well for his denseness in learning. He never could turn a deaf ear to a cry for mercy, nor refrain from burning his own fingers in attempts to save other people's from fire. If his doctrines were narrow, his pity was wide. It is a combination of characteristics that gives an infinity of trouble—especially to the owner.
Timothy complicated matters by dropping on the floor of the police station in an exhausted heap; but the officer in charge, having at last arrived at the conclusion that the idiot was ill, not drunk, and that the preacher had protected, not assaulted him, dismissed both with a warning; and Barnabas found himself saddled with this most unprepossessing incubus, whose present helplessness was his only recommendation.