Citizens were left to wonder how their town, lying usually so sleepily still, like a farmyard on a summer Sunday afternoon, could ever transform itself after this fashion. Men unknown and never before seen seemed suddenly to spring out of the earth, and as suddenly to disappear. Who were they? Respectable Cowfold, which thought it knew everybody in the place, could not tell. There was no sign of their existence on the next day. People gathered together and looked at the mischief wrought the night before, and talked everlastingly about it; but the doers of it vanished, rapt away apparently into an invisible world. On Sunday next, at one o’clock, Cowfold Square, save for a few windows not yet mended, looked just as it always looked; that is to say, not a soul was visible in it, and the pump was, as usual, chained.
The band of rescuers had passed George as he stood in the garden, and when they had gone he knocked at the door. It was a long time before anybody came, but at last it was partly opened, just as far as the chain would permit, and the Reverend John Broad, looking very white and with a candle in his hand appeared.
“It is I, George, Mr. Broad. Please tell me how Priscilla is, and—how you all are after your fright. I will not come in if you are all well.”
“No, Mr. George, you will not come in. I little thought that a member of Tanner’s Lane Church, and my daughter’s husband, would associate himself with such disgraceful proceedings as those we have witnessed this evening.”
“But, Mr. Broad, you are quite mistaken. I was not with the mob. I came here as soon as I could to protect you.”
Mr. Broad, terrified and wrathful, had, however, disappeared, and George heard the bolts drawn. He was beside himself with passion, and knocked again and again, but there was no answer. He was inclined to try and break open the door at first, or seek an entrance through a window, but he thought of Priscilla, and desisted.
He was turning homewards, when he reflected that it would be useless to attempt to go to sleep, and he wandered out into the country towards Piddingfold, pondering over many things. The reaction of that night had been too severe. His ardour was again almost entirely quenched when he saw the men for whom he had worked, and who professed themselves his supporters, filthily drunk. A noble sentence, however, from The Idler came into his mind—his mother had a copy of The Idler in her bedroom, and read and reread it, and oftentimes quoted it to her husband and her son—“He that has improved the virtue or advanced the happiness of one fellow-creature … may be contented with his own performance; and, with respect to mortals like himself, may demand, like Augustus, to be dismissed at his departure with applause.” He reflected that he, an ironmonger’s son, was not born to save the world, and if the great Dr. Johnson could say what he did, with how little ought not a humble Cowfold tradesman to be satisfied! We all of us have too vast a conception of the duty which Providence has imposed upon us; and one great service which modern geology and astronomy have rendered is the abatement of the fever by which earnest people are so often consumed. But George’s meditations all through that night were in the main about his wife, and as soon as he reached his shop in the morning, the first thing he did was to write a note to her telling her to come home. This she did, although her mother and father objected, and George found her there at dinnertime. She looked pale and careworn, but this, of course, was set down to fright. She was unusually quiet, and George forbore to say anything about her father’s behaviour. He dreaded rather to open the subject; he could not tell to what it might lead. Priscilla knew all about George’s repulse from her father’s door, and George could tell she knew it.
His father and he
