Samuel Povey involuntarily lifted one leg in his nervous tension.
And now the hope that Dick would arrive became a fear, as his pace grew still more rapid.
Everybody lifted one leg, and gaped.
And the intrepid child surged on, and, finally victorious, crashed into the pavement in front of Samuel at the rate of quite six miles an hour.
Samuel picked him up, unscathed.
And somehow this picking up of Dick invested Samuel with importance, gave him a share in the glory of the feat itself.
Daniel Povey same running and joyous.
"Not so bad for a start, eh?" exclaimed the great Daniel.
Though by no means a simple man, his pride in his offspring sometimes made him a little naive.
Father and son explained the machine to Samuel, Dick incessantly repeating the exceedingly strange truth that if you felt you were falling to your right you must turn to your right and vice versa.
Samuel found himself suddenly admitted, as it were, to the inner fellowship of the boneshaker, exalted above the rest of the Square.
In another adventure more thrilling events occurred.
The fair-haired Dick was one of those dangerous, frenzied madcaps who are born without fear.
The secret of the machine had been revealed to him in his recent transit, and he was silently determining to surpass himself.
Precariously balanced, he descended the Square again, frowning hard, his teeth set, and actually managed to swerve into King Street.
Constance, in the parlour, saw an incomprehensible winged thing fly past the window.
The cousins Povey sounded an alarm and protest and ran in pursuit; for the gradient of King Street is, in the strict sense, steep.
Half-way down King Street Dick was travelling at twenty miles an hour, and heading straight for the church, as though he meant to disestablish it and perish.
The main gate of the churchyard was open, and that affrighting child, with a lunatic's luck, whizzed safely through the portals into God's acre.
The cousins Povey discovered him lying on a green grave, clothed in pride.
His first words were:
"Dad, did you pick my cap up?"
The symbolism of the amazing ride did not escape the Square; indeed, it was much discussed.
This incident led to a friendship between the cousins.
They formed a habit of meeting in the Square for a chat.
The meetings were the subject of comment, for Samuel's relations with the greater Daniel had always been of the most distant.
It was understood that Samuel disapproved of Mrs. Daniel Povey even, more than the majority of people disapproved of her.
Mrs. Daniel Povey, however, was away from home; probably, had she not been, Samuel would not even have gone to the length of joining Daniel on the neutral ground of the open Square.
But having once broken the ice, Samuel was glad to be on terms of growing intimacy with his cousin.
The friendship flattered him, for Daniel, despite his wife, was a figure in a world larger than Samuel's; moreover, it consecrated his position as the equal of no matter what tradesman (apprentice though he had been), and also he genuinely liked and admired Daniel, rather to his own astonishment.
Every one liked Daniel Povey; he was a favourite among all ranks.
The leading confectioner, a member of the Local Board, and a sidesman at St. Luke's, he was, and had been for twenty-five years, very prominent in the town.
He was a tall, handsome man, with a trimmed, greying beard, a jolly smile, and a flashing, dark eye.
His good humour seemed to be permanent.
He had dignity without the slightest stiffness; he was welcomed by his equals and frankly adored by his inferiors.
He ought to have been Chief Bailiff, for he was rich enough; but there intervened a mysterious obstacle between Daniel Povey and the supreme honour, a scarcely tangible impediment which could not be definitely stated.
He was capable, honest, industrious, successful, and an excellent speaker; and if he did not belong to the austerer section of society, if, for example, he thought nothing of dropping into the Tiger for a glass of beer, or of using an oath occasionally, or of telling a facetious story--well, in a busy, broad-minded town of thirty thousand inhabitants, such proclivities are no bar whatever to perfect esteem.
But--how is one to phrase it without wronging Daniel Povey?
He was entirely moral; his views were unexceptionable.
The truth is that, for the ruling classes of Bursley, Daniel Povey was just a little too fanatical a worshipper of the god Pan.
He was one of the remnant who had kept alive the great Pan tradition from the days of the Regency through the vast, arid Victorian expanse of years.
The flighty character of his wife was regarded by many as a judgment upon him for the robust Rabelaisianism of his more private conversation, for his frank interest in, his eternal preoccupation with, aspects of life and human activity which, though essential to the divine purpose, are not openly recognized as such--even by Daniel Poveys.
It was not a question of his conduct; it was a question of the cast of his mind.
If it did not explain his friendship with the rector of St. Luke's, it explained his departure from the Primitive Methodist connexion, to which the Poveys as a family had belonged since Primitive Methodism was created in Turnhill in 1807.
Daniel Povey had a way of assuming that every male was boiling over with interest in the sacred cult of Pan.
The assumption, though sometimes causing inconvenience at first, usually conquered by virtue of its inherent truthfulness.
Thus it fell out with Samuel.
Samuel had not suspected that Pan had silken cords to draw him.
He had always averted his eyes from the god--that is to say, within reason.
Yet now Daniel, on perhaps a couple of fine mornings a week, in full Square, with Fan sitting behind on the cold stones, and Mr. Critchlow ironic at his door in a long white apron, would entertain Samuel Povey for half an hour with Pan's most intimate lore, and Samuel Povey would not blench.