Mr. Pennycomequick saw before him the shelter-hut of the locksman on the embankment, a shelter-hut that had been erected as a protection against rain and wind and frost. It was of brick, and the only chance of escape that offered lay in a scramble to the roof.
How mysterious is it with our wishes and our prayers! We labour for many a year with taut nerve, and ambition keenly, unswervingly set on some object. We hope for it, we entreat for it, and it is as though the heavens were brass, and our prayers could not pierce them, or as if it were indifferent to our desires; it is as though a perverse fate smote all our efforts with paralysis, and took pleasure in thwarting every wish, and frustrating every attempt to obtain what we long for. At another time, hardly knowing what we say, not calculating how what we ask may be accomplished, not lifting a little finger to advance its fulfilment, we form a wish, vague and inarticulate, and instantly, completely, in the way least expected, and with a fulness hardly desired, the prayer is answered, the wish is accomplished.
'Would to Heaven,' Jeremiah Pennycomequick had said twice that night on the towpath, hardly meaning what he said, saying it because he was in perplexity, not because he desired extraneous help out of it; 'Would to Heaven,' he had said, 'that my course were determined for me!' and at once, that same night, within an hour, Heaven had responded to the call.
CHAPTER V.
RIPE AND DROPPED.
Mrs. Sidebottom slept soundly, only troubled by the mistake about the tablecloth. The captain slept soundly, troubled by nothing at all. The scream of steam-whistle, the bray of buzzer and bawl of syren, the jangle of alarm bells, and the hum of voices outside their windows, did not rouse them. They had become accustomed to these discordant noises which startled the ears every morning early, to rouse the mill-hands and call them from their beds. Moreover, the whistles and buzzers and syrens were not in the town, but were below in the valley, at some distance, and distance modified some of the dissonance.
It is true that Mrs. Sidebottom dreamed, and to dream is not to enjoy perfect rest. She dreamt that her brother Jeremiah was examining the tablecloth, and that she was dribbling water over the sheet out of a marrow-spoon, in patterns, to give it an appearance of being figured with acorns and oak-leaves. And she found in her dreams that Jeremiah was hard to persuade that what he had before him was a figured damask tablecloth and not a sheet. And she thought how she assured her brother on her word that what he saw was a watered table-cover, and mightily pleased she was with herself at her ingenuity in equivocation.
But towards morning the house was roused by violent ringing at the front-door bell, and by calls under the windows, and gravel thrown at the panes. The watchman had come, at Salome's desire, to inquire if by chance Mr. Pennycomequick was there. He had gone out, after his return home, and had not returned or been seen. Fears were entertained that he might have been swept away in the flood.
'Flood! what flood?' asked Mrs. Sidebottom.
'The valley is full of water. Holroyd reservoir be busted.'