windows in Mosley Street, and Dr. Hardie from his in Piccadilly,
had been satisfied that if they ventured forth they might soon need
doctoring themselves—and they both pleaded “medical etiquette” in
excuse for their lukewarmness. They were “physicians, not surgeons.” He
bethought himself of Mr. Huertley, in Oldham Street, but even he had
more than one wounded patient in his surgery, and was loth to encounter
the danger outside. Ben Travis, however, would take no denial. He
waited until sundry gaping wounds were closed, cuts plaistered and
bandaged, a broken limb set, and a bullet extracted, even lending
a hand himself where unskilled help could be available, being less
bemused with liquor than many of his cavalry corps. Then, although
they were almost within a stone’s throw of their destination—as Oldham
Street was not safe for a civilian to cross on foot, with loaded cannon
in such close proximity—Travis mounted the surgeon behind him, the
latter not sorry to have the yeoman’s capacious body in its conspicuous
uniform for a shield, as they dashed across into Back-Piccadilly to
Mabbott’s back door.
As they passed Chadwick’s the younger man cast a sharp glance of
scrutiny at the drawing-room windows, and bowed low in recognition of
the face for which he was looking—the face he had seen so pale and
pitiful, bending over an afflicted father, and so shocked to hear of
even an apprentice wounded in that father’s behalf.
Ben Travis had a big body and a big heart, but he had little knowledge
of the hearts of womankind, or he might have found another solution for
Ellen Chadwick’s fainting fit. He did not know how she had trembled
for another on seeing him dismount at Mr. Huertley’s door, nor how
she had watched, too sick and sad to descend to the dining-room, when
the spoiled dinner was at length set on the table—watched eagerly
and anxiously, her heart’s pulsations counting each second a minute,
as hours elapsed before she saw them mount and away, and noted the
direction they took. And she saw no admiration in the low bow of the
fine soldierly young gentleman—only the polite salutation of a stranger
introduced casually by the untoward events of the day, albeit, having
rendered her father a service, and professed himself the friend of
Jabez, she was bound to recognise him as he passed.
To Jabez himself, lying faint and exhausted with loss of blood, on kind
Mr. Mabbott’s chintz-covered squab-sofa, everything was a haze, and the
people around him little more than voices. He was perfectly conscious
when Mr. Mabbott hastily cut away the sleeve of his jacket, and bound
the wounded arm as tightly as towels could bind. When Mr. Ashton put
his troubled face into the confectioner’s small parlour, Mr. Mabbott
was in the act of reaching from a corner cupboard a small square spirit
decanter, and an engraved wine-glass, in order to administer a dose of
brandy to the young man, then rapidly sinking into unconsciousness.
Under its influence he revived for awhile; but, as the blood gradually
soaked through the towelling, he grew fainter, in spite of brandy,
and by the time Ben Travis (who had surely kept the promise made in
school-boy days) brought Dr. Huertley to his aid he had lapsed into a
stupor from which the manipulations of the surgeon barely aroused him.
“You should have tied a ligature tightly as possible round the arm
above the wound, first thing,” said the surgeon, addressing those
around him—“a bit of tape, a strip of linen, a garter—anything narrow,
to stop the hæmorrhage. Had this been done, there would have been less
effusion of blood, and our patient would not have been so utterly
prostrated.”
“Just so, just so,” assented Mr. Ashton, adding, “but Mr. Mabbott had——”
“Done his best—no doubt,” interrupted the surgeon, “or our young friend
might have bled to death. But the tight, narrow ligature would have
been better; and many a valuable life may have been saved or lost this
day through that bit of knowledge or—the want of it.”
Mr. Ashton’s “Just so, just so; I daresay you are right,” was followed
up by “Shall we be able to remove him to-night, Mr. Huertley? He is
my apprentice, and has been injured whilst bravely protecting your
opposite neighbour, Mr. Chadwick, my brother-in-law. I should like to
get him home, to be under Mrs. Ashton’s care, as well as to relieve Mr.
Mabbott, to whom, I am sure, we all feel greatly indebted.”
“Don’t name it, I beg; at fearful times like this,” said Mr. Mabbott,
with a shudder, “it does not do to think of trouble or of ceremony.
But I do not imagine the doctor would counsel the young man’s removal
to-night, even if the road were clear and safe.”
“Certainly not,” replied Mr. Huertley, as he packed up his lint and
instruments. “And in my opinion, if you remove him to-morrow you must
do it carefully on every account, and will have to smuggle him away in
a hackney-coach, lest he should be pounced upon as a wounded rebel.”
Two days, however, elapsed before Mr. Mabbott’s sofa lost its occupant,
and even then the strong arm of Tom Hulme and the loving care of Bess
were needed to help Jabez, feeble and wan, to the hackney-carriage
brought up to the back door, which bore him slowly away, avoiding the
main streets, until they passed under the arched gateway in Back Mosley
Street whence he had last emerged at a headlong pace to prevent Miss
Augusta getting into danger.
Some remembrance of this flashed through the brain of Jabez as the
coach stopped in the court-yard, and on the house door-steps he beheld
Mrs. Ashton, Augusta, and Ellen Chadwick, all three waiting to receive
him as if he had been a wounded relative returning from far-off
victories to his own hearth. Nay, the very servants hovered in the
back-ground, even cross Kezia pressing to have a first look at him.
Mrs. Ashton herself, with the graceful dignity which sat so well upon
her, went down the steps to lead him up and into the house, and as she
touched his left hand and unwounded arm, she said impressively,
“Jabez Clegg, I understand we owe our brother’s life to your
self-abnegation, if not that of our daughter also. I regret that your
noble intervention should have cost you so dear; but I thank you most
truly, and _shall not forget it_.”
The stately lady’s eyes were humid as she led Jabez into their common
parlour (the room in which Augusta had displayed his specimens of
incipient artistry) and there placed him on the large soft sofa,
already prepared with pillows for his reception. The attention touched
him to the heart; the humble apprentice, feeling himself honoured,
raised the lady’s hand to his lips as gracefully and reverently as ever
did knight of old romance.
And then he would have closed his eyes for very weariness but a little
soft warm hand stole into his feeble one, and thrilling through him, a
faint tinge chased the deathly pallor from his face as Augusta’s voice,
full of commiseration, said apologetically, “I had no idea, Jabez,
that I was sending you into danger when I asked you to look for Uncle
Chadwick; I am so sorry you have been hurt.”
He held the little hand of his master’s daughter for one or two
delicious minutes, while he answered feebly—“Never mind, Miss Ashton; I
was only too glad to be there in time;” and lapsed into so ethereal a
dream as he released it, that the low, broken grateful thanks of Ellen
Chadwick left but the impression on his mind that she was very much in
earnest and had called him _Mr. Clegg_.
Mr. Clegg! When had the College-boy—the Blue-coat apprentice—been
anything but Jabez Clegg? _Mr._ Clegg! It was from such lips social
recognition, and so blent strangely with his dream. Ah! could he
but have known how much of latent tenderness was embodied in those
incoherent expressions of a daughter’s gratitude, or that the speaker
dared not trust her faltering tongue with his Christian name!
Mrs. Ashton called the young ladies away.
“My dears, you had better resume your occupations, and leave Jabez to
repose; it is not well to crowd about an invalid on so sultry a day as
this.”
So Miss Chadwick went, with her tatting-shuttle, back to her seat by
the one window where the friendly shade of the dove-coloured curtains
screened from observation any glances which might chance to stray from
the tatting to the sofa; and Miss Ashton went back to her music-stool,
where the sunbeams, falling through the other window, lit up her lovely
profile, shot a glint of gold through her hair, and showed the dimples
in her white shoulder to the half-shut, dreaming eyes of Jabez, who
listened, entranced, as she practised scales and battle-pieces, waltzes
and quadrilles, totally unconscious that she was feeding a fever in the
soul of the apprentice more to be feared than the stroke of Aspinall’s
sabre, though it had cut into the bone.
Not that she was a simple school-girl, and ignorant of the power of
beauty. She was pretty well as romantic as any girl of that romantic
age who, being fifteen, looked a year older, and learned the art of
fascination from the four-volume novels of the period. Mrs. Ashton
herself subscribed to the fashionable circulating library of the
town, but she was somewhat choice in her reading, and had Miss
Augusta stopped where her mother did she would have done well. But
it so happened that, after feasting on the wholesome peas her mother
provided, she fell with avidity on husks obtained surreptitiously
elsewhere. Kisses from Augusta could always coax coins from papa, and
as a Miss Bohanna kept open a well-known, well-stocked circulating
library in Shudehill, albeit in a cellar, its contiguity to Bradshaw
Street and Mrs. Broadbent’s enabled Miss Ashton (or Cicely for her) to
smuggle in amongst her school-books other fictions, such as Elizabeth
Helme and Anna Maria Roche used to concoct, and Samuel Richardson
provided, to delight our grandmothers with.
So Miss Ashton was quite prepared to be admired and play the heroine
prematurely; but she had been reared in the same house with Jabez,
had been caressed and waited upon by him as a child, and anything so
absurd as her father’s apprentice falling in love with her had never
dawned upon her apprehension. Then not even his wounded arm could make
him handsome enough for a hero, so she plunged through the “Battle of
Prague,” and “Lodoiska,” and glided into the “Copenhagen Waltz,” with
no suspicion of a listener more than ordinary.
Mrs. Ashton, who was back-stitching a shirt-wristband (family linen
was then made at home), imagined that Jabez was dozing, and, unwilling
to disturb him, only spoke when a false note, or a passage out of
time, called for a low-voiced hint to her daughter, or when she found
occasion to make some slight observation to the equally silent Ellen.
Presently the clock in the hall proclaimed “five.” Miss Ashton closed
music-books and piano; Miss Chadwick completed a loop, then put her
tatting away in a small, oblong, red morocco reticule; Mrs. Ashton
laid the wristband in her workbasket, which she put out of sight in a
panelled cupboard within the wall, sheathed the scissors hanging from
her girdle, folded up the leather housewife containing her cut skeins
of thread, &c.; James brought in the tea-board, with its genuine China
tea-service, plates with cake and bread-and-butter, and whilst he went
back to Kezia for the tea-urn, in walked Mr. Ashton, and with him the
Rev. Joshua Brookes.
One might have supposed his first salutation would have been to the
lady of the house. Nothing of the kind! With a passing nod to Mrs.
Ashton, who had extended her hand, he marched straight to the sofa, and
greeted its occupant with—
“Well, young Cheat-the-fishes, so you’ve been in the wars again.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jabez, attempting to rise.
“Lie still, lad! And so you thought a velveteen jacket defensive armour
against sharpened steel?”
“I never thought about it, sir.”
“Ugh! Then I suppose you reckoned a young man’s arm worth less than an
old man’s head! Eh?”
Jabez smiled.
“Certainly, sir.”
“Humph! I thought as much!” Then darting a keen inquisitive glance from
under his shaggy eyebrows at the prostrate young fellow, he added in
his very raspiest tones, “And I daresay you’ve no notion whose sabre
carved the wing of the goose so cleverly?”
What little blood was left in his body seemed to mount to the face
of Jabez, the old scar on his brow—which every year made less
conspicuous—purpled and grew livid. Old Joshua needed no more.
“Ah, I see you do! Well, are you inclined to forgive the fellow this
time?”
All ears were on the alert. Jabez caught the quick turn of his kind
master’s head. He hesitated, paled, and flushed again. Joshua Brookes
waited. There was some indecision in the reply when it did come.
“I am not sure, sir. But he was very drunk. I don’t think he would have
done it if he had been sober.”
“Just so, Jabez—just so!” assented Mr. Ashton with evident satisfaction
and a tap on his snuff-box-lid.
Ben Travis had revealed the name of Mr. Chadwick’s assailant to the
manufacturer, and he to the chaplain.
“Oh! that’s your opinion, is it?” cried the latter, crustily, wheeling
sharply round to disguise a smile.—“Here, madam, let’s have a cup of
sober tea after that!”
“I think, Mr. Brookes,” said Mrs. Ashton, as she seated herself, “with
all due deference to you—I think you ask too much from Jabez. I do not
consider drunkenness any excuse for brutality.”
“No excuse for the brute, madam, certainly; but a reason why a
reasoning man should forgive the brute incapable of reason.”
“Just so, Parson!” chimed in Mr. Ashton laying his Barcelona
handkerchief across his knee.
“I don’t see it, sir,” argued Mrs. Ashton, handing a willow-patterned
cup and saucer, with his tea, to her interlocutor; “a man who is a
brute when intoxicated should keep sober. For my own part, I should
be loth to let the same stick beat me twice. Our apprentice has borne
quite too much from that fellow” (she waxed indignant), “and there is a
limit to forgiveness.”
“Yes, madam,” answered the Parson snappishly, “there _is_ a limit to
forgiveness; but the limit is ‘not seven times, but seventy times
seven!’”
There was no more to be said. The rough chaplain spoke with authority,
and from experience, and Jabez knew it.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND.
MR. CLEGG!
However grateful Mrs. Ashton might be she never lost sight of her
personal dignity, and had no idea of admitting Jabez on terms of
equality after that first reception.
In his helpless condition he required attention, which she could not
condescend to render personally; yet she was as little inclined to
delegate the duty to Kezia, who was never over well-disposed towards
him, and who might have resented the call to “wait on a ’prentice
lad,” or to Cicily, who was too young to have the run of a young man’s
chamber. It was like herself to hit on the happy mean, and invite Bess
Hulme at once to satisfy her own longings, and meet the requirements of
the case, by waiting on her foster-child in his helplessness, bringing
with her her own boy, now two years old, to be committed to willing
Cicily’s care when the mother was herself engaged.
Yet the apprentice never again sank into the old ruts. His bed in the
attic was turned over to his successor. From that parlour where he had
lain and listened to Augusta’s music, and Parson Brookes’s dictum;
where Mrs. Ashton had placed his pillows, and Ellen Chadwick had
supplied his wants with such intuitive perception at tea-time; from
that room he went to a chamber on an upper floor, furnished neatly but
plainly, with due regard to comfort.
There was a mahogany camp-bedstead, draped with chintz of most
extraordinary device. The bed was of feathers—not flock. An oak chest
of drawers, which did duty for a dressing-table, stood by the window,
which itself overlooked the yard, and on the top stood a small oval
swing looking-glass. There were small strips of carpet along the two
sides of the bed, which did not touch the wall; an almost triangular
washstand in one corner, and near the middle of the room a rush-bottom
chair and a tripod table. There was also a cushioned easy-chair, which
had a suggestiveness of being there for that special occasion only;
and Jabez, who, on his first glance around began to speculate whether
the whole would not vanish with his convalescence, was reassured when
he saw that his wooden box had been brought from the attic and stood
against the wall.
The six-foot, bronzed, bearded man of forty remains a child to the
mother who bore him, or the woman who nursed him. And as she had laid
him in his cradle when a baby, Bess helped Jabez to his new bed, fed
him with the beef-tea which Kezia had prepared (for a wonder, without
a grumble), gave him the cooling draught Mr. Huertley had sent in,
smoothed his pillows for repose, and kissed his brow, with a “God bless
thee!” much as she had done when he was an ailing child, but with all
the access of motherliness her own maternity had given.
Nevertheless he did not sleep readily. Neither Bessy’s soothing hand
nor the soft bed superinduced slumber. He was modest, and “Mr. Clegg”
haunted him. He could not see the connection between his impulsive
rush forward to check the yoeman’s plunging steed, and his employer’s
recognition of the service rendered.
“I only did my duty,” he debated with himself, as he lay there, with
a mere streak of light from the glimmering rush-light showing between
the closely drawn-curtains—“I only did my duty. Anyone else would have
done the same in my place. If I had once thought of consequences and
grasped the reins deliberately, there would have been some bravery in
_that_. But I never thought of the sword, not I. I only thought of poor
old Mr. Chadwick and Molly; and I’m sure Mr. Mabbott’s ready hand did
as good service as mine. Only I happened to get hurt. Yes, that’s it!
And they are sorry for me. I wonder if that ruffianly fellow did know
whom he was striking at? I hardly think he did, he was so very tipsy.
If I fancied he did, I—but he could not. He was just blind drunk.
What a pity, for such a handsome fellow, not older than I am, and a
gentleman’s son too! Forgive him! I don’t think I’ve much to forgive.
I’d bear the pain twice over for all the kind things that have been
said and done since! Tea in the parlour with Parson Brookes and all!
And this handsome bed-room [handsome only in untutored eyes]. And all
the thanks I have had for so little. And, oh! the bliss of holding
Augusta’s delicate hand in mine, and hearing the music those white
fingers made. It’s worth the pain three times over. And Mr. Clegg too!
_Mr._ Clegg! How like a gentleman it does sound! Will anybody call me
Mr. Clegg besides Miss Chadwick? How fond she must be of her father,
from the way she thanked me!”
(Ah Jabez! what oculist can cure blindness such as thine?)
If less consecutive, still in some such current ran the young man’s
thoughts, until chaos came, and his closed eyes saw innumerable _Mr._
Cleggs written on walls, and floor, and curtains, and a delicious
symphony seemed to chorus the words, and “lap him in Elysium.”
After that, once each day, Mrs. Ashton paid him a brief visit of
inspection and inquiry, generally timed so as to meet the surgeon. Mr.
Ashton, with less of ceremony, dropped in occasionally, to bring him a
newspaper, book, or pamphlet to beguile the hours, and was not above
loitering for a pleasant chat on matters indoors and out, the state
of political feeling, and of business, in a manner so friendly Jabez
was at a loss to account for it. Once or twice Augusta tapped at the
door, to ask if Jabez was better, and to “hope he would soon be well,”
and the simple words ran through his brain with a thousand chimerical
meanings.
Joshua Brookes paid him a couple of visits, brought him papers of
sweetmeats and messages from Mrs. Clowes, and a Latin Testament and
a worn Æneid from his own stores, as a little light reading. Mrs.
Chadwick, too, made her appearance at his bedside, with kindly and
grateful words from her husband; and amongst them he was in a fair way
of becoming elevated into a hero to his own hurt.
Simon Clegg (who pulled off his thick Sunday shoes in the kitchen, and
went up-stairs in his stocking feet, lest he should make a clatter, and
spoil the carpets) counteracted the mischief, and somewhat clipped the
pinions of soaring imagination.
Jabez, his arm bandaged and sustained by a sling, lay with his head
against the straight, high back of his padded chair, between the window
and the fireplace, which glowed, not with live coals, but a beau-pot of
sunflowers and hollyhocks from Simon’s garden. At his feet lay little
Sam, fast asleep, with his fat arms round the neck of Nelson, the
black retriever, which had somehow contrived to sneak past Kezia with
his tail between his legs, and to follow Bess up-stairs, where he had
established himself in perfect content.
Simon greeted his foster-son with bated breath, awed no doubt by the
lamp-bearing statues in hall and staircase, and hardly raised his
voice above a whisper while he stayed. He had much to tell which the
reader already knows, but he took his leave with quite a long oration,
impressed no doubt by the comfort in that chamber, as well as by the
grandeur in rooms of which he had caught a glimpse through open doors.
Jabez himself, being still feeble, had spoken but little.
“Moi lad,” said he, “this is a grand place, but dunnot yo’ let it mak’
yo’ preawd; an’ aw hope as yo’re thankful yo’ han fallen among sich
koind folk.”
“Indeed I am.”
“Yo’ did nowt but whatn wur yo’r duty, moi lad, as aw trust thah
allays wilt; and thah’s gotten a mester and missis i’ ten theawsand,
to mak’ so mich on a cut in a ’prentice’s arm—ay, tho it _wur_ got i’
savin’ one o’ theer own kin! Luk yo’, Jabez: o’ th’ mesters aw ever
saw afore thowt as ’prentices, body an’ soul, wur theer own; an’ yo’ve
lit on yo’r feet, aw con tell yo’. an’ yo’ conno’ do too mich for sich
folk. Aw see they’re makkin’ a man on yo’, an’ dunnot yo’ spoil o’ by
thinkin’ yo’ han earnt it, an’ han a reet to it. We’re unprofitable
sarvants, th’ best on us, an’ dunnot yo’ harbour anny malice agen th’
chap as chopped at yo’. Them Yowmanry Calvary wur as drunk as fiddlers,
an’ as blind as bats. Thah tuk thi chance wi’ the ruck, an’ came off
better than some folk. So thenk God it’s no waur, an’ bear no malice;
an’ thenk God as sent yo’ theer i’ the nick o’ time.”
In little more than a fortnight Jabez was downstairs again, although
his arm, not being thoroughly healed, yet needed support, and he was
not hurried into the warehouse. Neither was he again invited to join
the family, Mrs. Ashton having objected to Mr. Ashton’s proposition.
“It would lift the young man out of his sphere, William, and do him
more harm than good. Only very strong heads can stand sudden elevation;
and it is well to make no more haste than good speed.”
But Mr. Ashton’s “Just so” was less definite than ordinary, and he took
a second pinch of snuff unawares, with a prolonged emphasis, which
supplied the place of words. To the observant, Mr. Ashton’s snuff-box
contained as much eloquence as did Lord Burleigh’s celebrated wig.
He had taken a liking to the lad from the first, paid very little
deference to Mrs. Grundy, and gave Jabez credit for a stronger head
than did his more cautious and philosophic lady.
Yet Jabez, to his surprise, found that his little room down stairs had
undergone a transformation. It was no longer a bare office, fitted only
with a desk and stool. Desk and stool were there still, but a carpet,
hanging shelves, a few useful books, and other furniture had been
introduced, the result being a compact parlour. Mrs. Ashton had her own
way of showing goodwill.