“Then _chorus_ agin!” was shouted out by one of the red-faced men in the window: and forthwith a dozen voices yelled, to a harsh discordant melody, the refrain:—
“There’s him, an’ yo’ an’ me, Roarin’ laddies! We loves a bit o spree, Roarin’ laddies we, Roarin’ laddies Roarin’ laddies!”
The man lounged back again to the house, joining lustily in the chorus as he went: so that only the children and I were in the road when ‘Willie’ came up.
He made for the door of the public-house, but the children intercepted him. Sylvie clung to one arm; while Bruno, on the opposite side, was pushing him with all his strength, with many inarticulate cries of “Gee-up! Gee-back! Woah then!” which he had picked up from the waggoners.
‘Willie’ took not the least notice of them: he was simply conscious that _something_ had checked him: and, for want of any other way of accounting for it, he seemed to regard it as his own act.
“I wunnut coom in,” he said: “not to-day.”
“A mug o’ beer wunnut hurt ’ee!” his friends shouted in chorus. “_Two_ mugs wunnut hurt ’ee! Nor a dozen mugs!”
“What, withouten thy drink, Willie man?” shouted the others. But ‘Willie man’ would have no more discussion, and turned doggedly away, the children keeping one on each side of him, to guard him against any change in his sudden resolution.
For a while he walked on stoutly enough, keeping his hands in his pockets, and softly whistling a tune, in time to his heavy tread: his success, in appearing entirely at his ease, was _almost_ complete; but a careful observer would have noted that he had forgotten the second part of the air, and that, when it broke down, he instantly began it again, being too nervous to think of another, and too restless to endure silence.
It was not the old fear that possessed him now—the old fear, that had been his dreary companion every Saturday night he could remember, as he had reeled along, steadying himself against gates and garden-palings, and when the shrill reproaches of his wife had seemed to his dazed brain only the echo of a yet more piercing voice within, the intolerable wail of a hopeless remorse: it was a wholly new fear that had come to him now: life had taken on itself a new set of colours, and was lighted up with a new and dazzling radiance, and he did not see, as yet, how his home-life, and his wife and child, would fit into the new order of things: the very novelty of it all was, to his simple mind, a perplexity and an overwhelming terror.