“Eh, see,” cried one, “here’s the parson come among us.”
“He’ll be getting his blue coat with brass buttons out of the pop-shop just now,” cried another; “and he’ll hold his head so high that he won’t look at us wicked sinners.”
A third came up to him with a mock serious air, and eyeing him with his head on one side, said,—
“They call you Thomas, I reckon. Ah, well, now you’re going to be one of Ned’s childer, we must take you to the parson and get him to christen you Jonadab.”
Poor Johnson! he started up, for one moment he meditated a fierce rush at his persecutors, the next, he turned round, darted from the public-house, and hurried away he knew not whither.
And what will he do? Poor man—wretched, degraded drunkard as he had been—he was by natural character a man of remarkable energy and decision; what he had fairly and fully determined upon, his resolution grasped like a vice. Brought up in constant contact with drunkenness from his earliest years, and having imbibed a taste for strong drink from his childhood, that taste had grown with his growth, and he had never cared to summon resolution or seek strength to break through his miserable and debasing habit. Married to a woman who rather rejoiced to see her husband moderately intoxicated, because it made him good-natured, he had found nothing in his home, except its growing misery, to induce him to tread a better path. True, he could not but be aware of the wretchedness which his sin and that of his wife had brought upon him and his; yet, hitherto, he had never seen himself to be the chief cause of all this unhappiness. He blamed his work, he blamed his thirst, he blamed his wife, he blamed his children, he blamed his dreary comfortless home—every one, everything but himself. But now light had begun to dawn upon him, though as yet it had struggled in only through a few chinks. God had made a partial entrance for it through his remorse at the loss of his son; that entrance had been widened by his visit to Ned Brierley, yet he was still in much darkness; his light showed him evil and sin in great mis-shapen terrible masses, but was not so far sufficiently bright to let him see anything in clear sharp outline. A great resolve was growing, but it needed more hammering into form, it wanted more prayer to bring it up to the measure of a Christian duty.
And here we must leave him for the present, and pass to other and very different scenes and characters essential to the development of our story.
Note 1. “Four lane ends,” a place where four roads meet.
Note 2. “Hoggart”, a ghost.