It is no affair of mine to repeat the chimney-corner story. It suffices to say that I and Luke and a dozen willing fellows worked our hardest until dark, visiting every farmstead and every hovel which remained standing on the lower levels.
A score cottages right on the bank of the river, occupied by labourers and marshmen and their families, had been swept clean away, with what destruction of life could not then be known. The farmers' losses were terribly heavy. The havoc done among horses and cattle was considerable, and hundreds of swine and thousands of sheep had been drowned. Stacks were overthrown and spoiled, and the standing crops were ruined.
How the men cursed the Dutch! Their threats of vengeance made me wish that Mistress Goel and her father were safely out of Crowle. For our Islonians are not fellows who ease their minds with a curse, and then think no more of it, but of that slow, stubborn kind, which smoulders first and does not flame until the end. I assured them that their "Solicitor" would demand compensation for their losses. I argued that this disaster might have so much good in it as to justify my father's resistance to the Vermuijden scheme, and oblige the King and his advisers to hear reason. But I met with bitter and scornful laughter for the most part.
One man said, "'Taint no sort of use to talk so, Mester Frank. Your father is a real gentleman, but he's no match for the Dutch devils. We didn't ought to ha' listened to his peaceable kind of discoursing. Squire Portington's is the way to deal with robbers and murderers like Vermuijden and his gang."
Pretty nearly all were of the same mind, and I returned to the vicarage dispirited and apprehensive, and so weary and spent and heavy with sleep, that I crept off and tumbled into bed, too tired even to talk with Mistress Goel.
Most unexpectedly, the vicar requested me to remain a few days at his house. Hitherto, we had had little to say to each other; he never had much to say to any one. I had disliked him from my early childhood, when I got the impression that he was bound in parchment like one of his folios, and that the back of his head had been chopped off. His days were passed among those folios, and Mr. Butharwick spoke with respect of his learning, but what good came of it I never knew. He preached sermons of an inordinate length, and totally incomprehensible to me, and, as I judged, to his parishioners generally, who composed themselves for slumber when they heard the text. My aunt attended to all the affairs of the parish, and always inspected the parson before he left the house, to see that he was decently clad, and had his handkerchief in his pocket.