Mr. Bagshotte was usually a deliberate and placidly silent man, but grief made him curiously restless and talkative.
Barnabas lifted his eyes from his plate and looked at his host, who had just buried his son.
"If you'd felt that drink devil tearing inside you, you'd not care about playing with him; nor about seeing others do it," he said. "But my preaching isn't to you, nor such as you, sir. I've not felt called to speak to them above me, except once." He stopped rather abruptly, and got up.
"I've done, thank 'ee; an' there's some one coming up the garden. Ay, it's Polly Taylor, an' she looks as if it was pressing."
He walked to the window; and the child, seeing him, poured out an urgent message, interspersed with sobs.
Perhaps nothing could have more strongly set forth the general topsy-turvyness than the fact of the revivalist preacher's receiving a call through the rectory window, with the parson standing by unsurprised.
"Her mother's took bad an' her brother's dead," said Barnabas; "but"--with a moment's hesitation--"will ye no gi'e yourself an hour, sir? I'll manage."
The old parson straightened himself, and took up his hat and stick.
"Not now," he said. "When the bullets have stopped flying, we'll count our dead." So the two went into the village street together.
Barnabas Thorpe, with his weather-beaten face and long swinging stride; Mr. Bagshotte, trotting along by his side in clerical hat and gaitered legs--these two were the most familiar of sights now; brave men both, who, whatever their differences, would never duck their heads under fire, whether visible or invisible.
A starved dog, whose owner lay in the churchyard, crept after them whining, and thrust his nose under the preacher's hand. Dogs always followed Barnabas, who, from his childhood, had been bound by a specially strong tie to the brute creation. Already he had been adopted as master by four cats and two mongrel dogs, as he remembered with rather rueful amusement.
"Go home!--I've no room for ye," he said; but, on the dog's explaining that he had no home, that nobody had any room for him, and that he was sick of being stoned, his legs having got so shaky that he hadn't energy to get out of the way, Barnabas relented and picked him up. It was absolutely impossible to the man to pass on on the other side in any case, whether advisable or not, as his fellow-worker remarked. Mr. Bagshotte's liking for Barnabas was, sometimes, touched by something that would have been pity if the preacher had not been too strong a man to feel sorry for.