Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [129]
Clitheridge obeyed gladly, his face flooding with relief at some definite task he could turn himself to. He grasped Dalgetty, who rather awkwardly leaned against him.
“What happened?” Clitheridge made one more effort to understand, because it was his spiritual duty. “Has there been an accident?”
Lally had reached them now and her mind seized the situation immediately.
“Oh, how stupid,” she said in exasperation. “I never thought you’d be so very childish—and now you’ve really hurt each other. And does that prove which of you is right? It only proves you are both extremely stubborn. Which all Highgate knew anyway.” She swung around to Shaw, her face very slightly flushed. “What can I do to be of assistance, Doctor?” By that time Josiah Hatch had also reached them, but she disregarded him. “Do you need linen?” She peered in his bag, then at the extent of the bloodstains, which were increasing with every minute. “How about water? Brandy?”
“Nobody’s going to pass out,” he said sharply, glaring at Dalgetty. “For heaven’s sake put him down!” he ordered Clitheridge, who was bearing most of Dalgetty’s weight now. “Yes, please, Lally—get some more linen. I’d better tie some of this up before we move them. I’ve got enough alcohol to disinfect.”
Prudence Hatch arrived breathlessly, gasping as she came to a halt. “This is awful! What on earth possessed you?” she demanded. “As if we haven’t enough grief.”
“A man who believes in his principles is sometimes obliged to fight in order to preserve them,” Josiah said grimly. “The price of virtue is eternal vigilance.”
“That is freedom,” his wife corrected him.
“What?” he demanded, his brows drawing down sharply.
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” she replied. “You said virtue.” Without being told she was taking a piece of clean cloth out of Shaw’s bag, unfolding it and soaking it in clean spirit from one of his bottles. “Sit down!” she commanded Pascoe smartly, and as soon as he did, she began to clean away the torn outer clothing and then the blood till she could see the ragged tear in the flesh. Then she held the pad of cloth to it and pushed firmly.
He winced and let out a squeak as the spirit hit the open wound, but no one took any notice of him.
“Freedom and virtue are not the same thing at all,” Hatch argued with profound feeling, his face intent, his eyes alight. To him the issue obviously far outweighed the ephemeral abrasions of the encounter. “That is precisely what Mr. Pascoe risked his life to defend!”
“Balderdash!” Shaw snapped. “Virtue isn’t in any danger—and prancing about on the heath with swords certainly isn’t going to defend anything at all.”
“There is no legal way to prevent the pernicious views and the dangerous and degrading ideas he propagates,” Pascoe shouted across Prudence’s instructions, his lips white with pain.
Lally was already setting off again towards the road on her errand. Her upright figure, shoulders back, was well on its way.
“There should be.” Hatch shook his head. “It is part of our modern sickness that we admire everything new, regardless of its merit.” His voice rose a little and he chopped his hands in the air. “We get hold of any new thought, rush to print any idea that overturns and makes mock of the past, the values that have served our forefathers and upon which we have built our nation and carried the faith of Christ to other lands and peoples.” His shoulders were hunched with the intensity of his emotion. “Mr. Pascoe is one of the few men in our time who has the courage and the vision to fight, however futilely, against the tide of man’s own intellectual arrogance, his indiscriminate greed for everything new without thought as to its value, or the result of our espousing it.”
“This is not the place for a sermon, Josiah.” Shaw was busy working on Dalgetty’s cheek and did not even look up at him. Murdo was assisting him with considerable competence. “Especially the arrant rubbish you’re talking,” he went on. “Half these old ideas you’re rehearsing are