Part 35 (1/2)

”Queer old stick!” Albert murmured. ”No doing anything with him. He's quarrelled with everybody at Turnhill. That's why he wanted to come to us. And of course we weren't going to refuse the oldest Sunday school teacher in th' Five Towns. He's a catch... Come along, old gentleman!”

Mr Shus.h.i.+ons did not stir.

”Now, Mr Shus.h.i.+ons,” Hilda persuaded him in a voice exquisitely mild, and with a lovely gesture she bent over him. ”Let these gentlemen take you up to the platform. That's what you've come for, you know.”

The transformation in her amazed Edwin, who could see the tears in her eyes. The tableau of the little, silly old man looking up, and Hilda looking down at him, with her lips parted in a heavenly invitation, and one gloved hand caressing his greenish-black shoulder and the other mechanically holding the parasol aloft,--this tableau was imprinted for ever on Edwin's mind. It was a vision blended in an instant and in an instant dissolved, but for Edwin it remained one of the epochal things of his experience.

Hilda gave Edwin her parasol and quickly fastened Mr Shus.h.i.+ons's collar, and the old man consented to be led off between the two rosettes. The bands were playing the Austrian hymn.

”Like to come up with your young lady friend?” Albert whispered to Edwin importantly as he went.

”Oh no, thanks.” Edwin hurriedly smiled.

”Now, old gentleman,” he could hear Albert adjuring Mr Shus.h.i.+ons, and he could see him broadly winking to the other rosettes and embracing the yielding crowd in his wink.

Thus was the doddering old fool who had given his youth to Sunday schools when Sunday schools were not patronised by princes, archbishops, and lord mayors, when Sunday schools were the scorn of the intelligent, and had sometimes to be held in public-houses for lack of better accommodation,--thus was he taken off for a show and a museum curiosity by indulgent and shallow Samaritans who had not even the wit to guess that he had sown what they were reaping. And Darius Clayhanger stood oblivious at a high window of the sacred Bank. And Edwin, who, all unconscious, owed the very fact of his existence to the doting imbecile, regarded him chiefly as a figure in a tableau, as the chance instrument of a woman's beautiful revelation. Mr Shus.h.i.+ons's sole crime against society was that he had forgotten to die.

FOUR.

Hilda Lessways would not return to the barrels. She was taciturn, and the only remark which she made bore upon the advisability of discovering Janet and Mr Orgreave. They threaded themselves out of the moving crowd and away from the hokey-pokey stall and the barrels into the tranquillity of the market-place, where the shadow of the gold angel at the top of the Town Hall spire was a mere squat shapeless stain on the irregular paving-stones. The sound of the Festival came diminished from the Square.

”You're very fond of poetry, aren't you?” Edwin asked her, thinking, among many other things, of her observation upon the verse of Isaac Watts.

”Of course,” she replied disagreeably. ”I can't imagine anybody wanting to read anything else.” She seemed to be ashamed of her kindness to Mr Shus.h.i.+ons, and to wish to efface any impression of amiability that she might have made on Edwin. But she could not have done so.

”Well,” he said to himself, ”there's no getting over it. You're the biggest caution I've ever come across!” His condition was one of various agitation.

Then, just as they were pa.s.sing the upper end of the c.o.c.k Yard, which was an archway, Mr Orgreave and Janet appeared in the archway.

”We've been looking for you everywhere.”

”And so have we.”

”What have you been doing?”

”What have you been doing?”

Father and daughter were gay. They had not seen much, but they were gay. Hilda Lessways and Edwin were not gay, and Hilda would characteristically make no effort to seem that which she was not.

Edwin, therefore, was driven by his own diffidence into a nervous light loquacity. He began the tale of Mr Shus.h.i.+ons, and Hilda punctuated it with stabs of phrases.

Mr Orgreave laughed. Janet listened with eager sympathy.

”Poor old thing! What a shame!” said Janet.

But to Edwin, with the vision of Hilda's mercifulness in his mind, even the sympathy of Janet for Mr Shus.h.i.+ons had a quality of uncomprehending, facile condescension which slightly jarred on him.

The steam-car loitered into view, discharged two pa.s.sengers, and began to manoeuvre for the return journey.

”Oh! Do let's go home by car, father!” cried Janet. ”It's too hot for anything!”