"Oh, King was splendid!" he said with a chuckle. "That ended very well. A big navvy chap was coming out of a public-house just as King was passing. He looked round at his friends and called out something to the effect that here was another monkey in petticoats—we wear our cassocks in the streets—and see how he'd do for um! So he gave poor King a clout on the side of the head."
"Oh, I am sorry," Lucy said, looking with interest upon the priest, and realising dimly that to be a clergyman in Hornham apparently ranked as one of the dangerous trades. "What did you do, Mr. King?"
King flushed a little and looked singularly foolish. He was a bashful man with ladies,—they did not come much into his pastoral way.
Lucy thought that the poor fellow had probably run away and wished that she had not asked such an awkward question.
"Oh, he won't tell ye, my dear!" Blantyre said, "but I will. When the gentleman smacked um on the cheek, he turned the other to him and kept's hands behind's back. Then the hero smacked that cheek too. 'Hurroo!' says King, or words to that effect, 'now I've fulfilled me duty to me religion and kept to the words of Scripture. And now, me friend, I'm going to do me duty to me neighbour and thrash ye till ye can't see out of your eyes.' With that he stepped up to um and knocked um down, and when he got up, he knocked um down again!"
Mr. King fidgeted uneasily in his seat. "I thought it was the wisest thing to do," he said, apologetically. "You see, it would stop anything of the sort for the future!"
"And the fun of the whole thing, Miss Blantyre," Stephens broke in, "was that I came along soon after and found the poor wretch senseless—King's got a fist like a hammer. So we got him up and refused to charge him to the policeman who turned up after it was all over, and we brought him here. We sponged him and mended him and fed him, and he turned out no end of a good sort when the drink was out of him. Poor chap gets work when he can, hasn't a friend in the world; hadn't any clothes or possessions but what he stood up in, and was utterly a waster and uncared for. We asked him if he knew what a papist was, and found he hadn't an idea, only he thought that they made love to workingmen's wives when their husbands were at work! He'd been listening to our friend, Mr. Hamlyn, who called a mass-meeting after the police-court proceedings and lectured on the three men of sin at the vicarage!"
A flood of strange and startling ideas poured into the girl's brain. A new side of life, a fourth dimension, was beginning to be revealed to her. She looked wonderingly at the three men in their long cassocks; she felt she was in the presence of power. She had felt that when James Poyntz was talking to her in the train, in the fresh, sunlit morning, which seemed a thing of the remotest past now. Yet this afternoon she felt it more poignantly than before. Things were going on down here, in this odd corner of London, that were startling in their newness.
"And what happened to the poor man?" she said at length.
"Oh," answered the vicar, "very fortunately we are without a man of all work just now, so we took him on. He carried your trunk up-stairs. He's wearing Stephen's trousers, which are much too tight for um! and an old flannel tennis coat of King's—till we can get his new clothes made. He was in rags!"