Mr. Rutland was at the Workhouse Infirmary when the news reached him. The doctor was there too, and the two gentlemen drove off at once to the scene of the disaster, where stood Annie Chapman with a white drawn face, her baby in her arms and three other little ones clinging to her skirts as usual. Martin's girl stood by her. The children were out of school, and they too were there, a hundred or more of them with wide eyes and horror-struck faces. What was not there was any sensible, capable man to take command and keep the crowd back; for it was not yet the dinner-hour, and the labourers were still in the fields, and Martin, on the principle that what is important had better be done by yourself, had rushed off, after sending a boy to fetch Mr. Rutland, to telegraph to Ipswich for scientific help from the firm who had supplied Hayes, and who had given advice as to the mode of proceeding at the outset. Martin returned scarcely a minute later than Mr. Rutland and the doctor, and hurriedly informed them of his action in the matter.
Having made a clear space of some thirty feet or so round the spot where the unfortunate men were perhaps even now lying with the life crushed out of them, the doctor threw himself on the ground and listened anxiously for some sound of life. If they lived, the men would, of course, shout loudly and untiringly for assistance; and then—as it was was just possible that, even if they could not make themselves heard, some sound might reach them—Mr. Rutland leaned over the chasm and shouted words of encouragement and cheer. But he might have shouted to the empty air, for never a sound reached them.
When one o'clock struck from the church tower the vicar sent the children to their homes, and with kindly firmness insisted on Annie Chapman's going back too and getting some refreshment. The children's needs was a good excuse.
"I would not keep you away if you wish to come back," he said. "No one has, alas, a greater right to be here than you. Come when the children are gone into school again. I will have the tarpaulin shelter that was taken down on account of the rain put up again, and you can rest there."
Annie thanked him with a look; she was beyond speaking, and seemed dazed. "Martin's gal" went home with her, helped her with the children's dinner, and came back to watch with her all that long, weary afternoon.
It was two hours before the Ipswich man arrived in a carriage drawn by a strong, fast horse, white with foam, and reeking with the heat of his rapid run. An assistant quickly unpacked the apparatus for lowering the men who had volunteered for the dangerous task of removing the fallen bricks. The accident, the man said, was due to the violence of the rain, which had percolated through the earth so quickly that it had loosened the soil all round the well to a depth of some twenty or thirty feet, and caused the brickwork to bulge inwards and fall. How far down the mischief extended, of course, he was as unable to determine as any one else; but one thing was sufficiently obvious—that time was everything. Another downfall would be almost certain destruction, and the unfortunate men, he said, had two dangers, not one, to contend with. At any moment the springs might begin to work, and they might have escaped death from the fall of the well only to be drowned by the rising water. It was a truly awful predicament, and as it always happens when a real calamity overtakes any of their mates, those who had most reviled them for refusing to strike now came forward with offers of help, and even forbore to make unpleasant remarks of any sort.
Corkam, who was, of course, soon on the scene, actually held his tongue too until the work of rescue was fairly set in hand, and each man had been told off to his hours of duty, when he entertained a favoured group with various supercilious remarks, and an assurance that these things were much better done in 'Meriky. No one, however, paid much attention to him. They naturally could think of nothing but the horror and the magnitude of the present catastrophe. Things that had or had not happened years ago in a foreign country mattered very little to any one now in the face of this horrible reality; and Martin told him so pretty plainly, and not a little roughly, with the desirable result that he went off to the bridge to give his friend Farley the latest details. And nobody missed him particularly!
CHAPTER XV.
FRIENDS IN NEED.
Next morning Milly Greenacre was making bread in her little kitchen at the back of the parlour, when an unaccustomed step sounded on the gravel-path. It was a shy, hesitating sort of step, and yet it was unmistakably a man's. Milly looked through the door, and saw Geo Lummis bending his head to enter the porch. She rubbed some of the flour off her arms and bade him enter.