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Her memories of her old home had died away, and she was back in Sapps Court again, sympathizing with Dolly over an accident to Shockheaded Peter, the articulation of whose knee-joint had given way, causing his leg to come off promptly, from lack of integuments and tendons.
The little animal looked up at her, pathetically, through his tumbled curls a soft silky mass, which had earned for him his name of Shockheaded Peter. His eyes, red-rimmed from the cold wind, had that unseeing look, often noticeable in a very old dog. Yet there was in them, and in the whole pose of his tiny body, an anguish of anxiety, which could not have escaped a genuine dog-lover.
The paired-off cave-dwellers merely scowled on us as we scrouged past them to a vacant bench in a far corner. The waiter, though, bowed before us a shockheaded personage in the ruins of a dress suit at the same time saying words which I took to be complimentary until one of my friends explained that he had called us something that might be freely translated as a certain kind of female lobster.
'Has he come to spy out the land? the Rector thought to himself, and could not help a momentary tremor at the idea of preaching before so formidable an auditor. Then he pulled himself together by a great effort, and fixing his eyes on a shockheaded urchin half way down the church, read the service to him.
"This is the gentleman you wish to see," he said, and stepped to one of the windows; it overlooked the terraces where he had said good-by to Betty scarcely a week before. The two men had paused by the door. They now advanced. One was gaunt and haggard, his face disfigured by a great red scar, the other was a shockheaded individual who moved with a shambling gait.
And Ambrose Campany, a cheery-faced, middle-aged man, with booklover and antiquary written all over him, shockheaded, blue-spectacled, was there now, talking to an old man whom Bryce knew as a neighbour of his in Friary Lane one Simpson Barker, a quiet, meditative old fellow, believed to be a retired tradesman who spent his time in gentle pottering about the city.
Peter moved to the edge of the chair; sat very upright, and looked eagerly across to where the doctor was sitting. Then he wagged his tail, tapping the chair with quick, anxious, little taps. "The first wag I have seen in twenty-four hours," remarked Lady Ingleby; but neither Deryck Brand nor Shockheaded Peter heeded the remark.
And my grandmother had tales o' auld Ettericks who rade wi' Douglas and the Bruce and the ancient Kings o' Scots; and she used to tell o' others in her mother's time, terrible shockheaded men hunting the deer and rinnin' on the high moors, and bidin' in the broken stane biggings on the hill-taps." The shepherd stared, and he, too, saw the picture.
John Flint knew inoffensive, timid Michael; he knew his broad-bosomed, patient, cowlike wife, and he liked the brood of shockheaded youngsters who plodded along patient in old clothes, bare-footed, and with scanty enough food. He had made a corn-cob doll for the littlest girl and a cigar-box wagon with spool wheels for the littlest boy.
An hour had passed, when another Englishman was standing by the wailing girl, and round him a dozen shockheaded kernes, skene on thigh and javelin in hand, were tossing about their tawny rags, and adding their lamentations to those of the lonely watcher. The Englishman was Eustace Leigh; a layman still, but still at his old work.
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