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!
