on the frosty stones in the old Long Millgate Yard and, rolling down
its rugged declivity, was supposed to have injured his spine, and he
had been too delicate ever since to run about freely. To the child,
therefore, whose shoulders seemed unnaturally high, the change from
the stifling court was something too exuberant for expression. To
Simon Clegg, who, in losing his crony Matt, had felt the old haunts
oppressive, the bountiful expanse of nature before him, and the
comfortable fragrant home, were matters of deep thankfulness.
“Moi lad,” said he to Jabez, when the latter was about to depart with
Mr. Ashton, after they were fairly inducted, “ar Bess said thah would
be a Godsend to us, an’ thah has bin. This Paradise o’ posies has o’
grown eawt o’ thy cradle. God bless thee!”
“I think, my dear, the experiment will succeed. There is a matronly
air of respectability about Mrs. Hulme, that will help to uphold
her husband’s position amongst the workpeople, and I can trust his
soldierly discipline for keeping the rebellious in order.”
Thus said Mr. Ashton to his good lady, sitting by the fire-side after
supper, the night of his return home. Then, after a little pondering
and trifling with his snuff-box, he added, as if reflectively—
“It is all very well, my dear, to serve the young man’s friends and
ourselves at the same time, but I should like to do something for Jabez
himself. It is entirely to his clear head and his tact that we owe the
preservation of peace at Whaley-Bridge. I should like to give _him_ a
rise.”
“My dear William, make no more haste than good speed, and never do
things in a hurry,” replied his calm proverbial philosopher. “We must
not excite the envy of his fellow-clerks, or we shall surround him with
enemies from the first. In removing his humble friends you have cleared
one barrier to his advancement.”
Mr. Ashton did not say “Just so!” for a wonder; he turned his gold
box round and round in his fingers, and at length gave utterance to a
thought which took Mrs. Ashton by surprise.
“If we remove all the young man’s old associations, don’t you think we
ought to provide him with new ones?”
“I think, William, we ought to ‘leave well alone;’ smooth paths are
slippery paths. The young man will be out of his time in six months;
you can then advance him if you think proper—in the warehouse—but I do
not feel disposed to open our drawing-room to him if that is what you
are driving at;” and she drew herself up as if her dignity had received
a blow.
“We-ll no—not exactly!” and Mr. Ashton, unable to express what he did
mean exactly, shuffled and fidgeted till he upset his snuff on the
Brussels carpet.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH.
ON THE PORTICO STEPS.
Between that expedition to Whaley-Bridge, with its terminal connubial
conversation, and the breakage of Augusta Ashton’s collar-bone, rather
more than six months intervened—six months during which Mr. Clegg,
as his good master had anticipated, felt the solitary state of his
trim sitting-room somewhat oppressive, the permission to receive
his old friends becoming a nullity on their removal. He occupied a
position midway between parlour and kitchen—above his old associates
of the porringers, the fireside settle, and the sanded stone floor,
and beneath the family seated round the tea-urn, on cushioned chairs
and Brussels carpet. Towards the former he cast few backward looks
of regret—he had put his past behind him—but, oh! who shall tell his
unuttered longings for the “Open Sesame!” to that paradise of which he
had had one rapturous glimpse, and one only—that paradise where his
master’s daughter, so high above him, moved like a seraph, and filled
the air with harmony!
I am afraid that at this time he brooded over his orphanhood, and that
unknown father who had disappeared so mysteriously, and strained his
soaring thoughts in their flight towards possibilities more than was
good for him. He was too much alone for one of his years, and there
were times in those long candle-lit winter evenings, when books and
pencils dropped from his wearied hands, and for lack of a companion he
held dreamy converse with the fire.
Of course his library was restricted, and there were no institutions
in Manchester at that time where young men of his class could meet for
mutual improvement, or that mental polish caused by the attrition of
mind upon mind. Occasionally, at long intervals, and at first to the
utter confusion of James, Captain Travis had inquired for “Mr. Clegg,”
and been shown into the little sitting-room, with a disregard to
“caste” very creditable to both of them; and now and then Mr. Chadwick
and Mr. Ashton would drop in together for half-an-hour’s chat, the
gratitude of the former being deeper than the surface.
But rarely did a feminine face save Cicily’s brighten up his solitude,
and she, devoted to her young mistress, had always something to say
about Augusta, if only what she wore or how she looked, which sent him
off into dreamland immediately.
Sunday was a very chequered day, when he missed his old friends most.
True, he followed the family to church, perhaps carried Augusta’s
prayer-book, exchanged a word of kindly greeting with old Mrs. Clowes,
and Parson Brookes, who was not as hale as he had been; but there was
no old Simon to grip his hand, no Bess to give him a motherly smile,
and unless the weather was fine enough for a ramble in the fields with
Nelson for companion, the rest of the day was very dull indeed.
The fan which broke Augusta’s collar-bone broke down a barrier for
Jabez. No personal sacrifice attended the service he rendered. He
but went and came as an active messenger. But he went and came with
intelligence and promptitude, and exercised for mother and daughter
both the care and forethought of a much older man.
In the father’s absence the father was not missed. What came under Mrs.
Ashton’s own eye Mrs. Ashton could appreciate, and the commendation of
Dr. Hull was not without its weight. He had said,
“Capital fellow to send for a doctor, that messenger of yours, Mrs.
Ashton! A determined, persistent fellow! Would see me, and haul me off
with only half a dinner, though I protested, and he had already got a
surgeon there before me!”
His thought about the sedan chair, which he had accompanied to Mosley
Street to insure care on the part of the chairmen, and had ordered
into the very lobby of the house; the cautious manner in which he had
lifted Augusta thence, and borne her to the ready couch, coupled with
his protection of her daughter in the theatre the night before, weighed
down the scale already trembling in the balance, and Mrs. Ashton’s
“Jabez, I am deeply indebted to you,” was not mere words. He was her
messenger to the Chadwicks, her amanuensis to Mr. Ashton; and when
Ellen and her mother arrived somewhere about tea-time, for the second
time he was invited to join their party; and one, if not two, pair of
cheeks burned as the invitation was given.
Then, the night Mr. Ashton returned home, to find Augusta an invalid,
he was gratified to see Jabez again at the tea-table, and after that
at odd times, until the restraint upon him gradually wore away, and he
would read to Augusta and Ellen, as the latter sat at work, and do his
best to make the time pass pleasantly.
Next Mr. Ashton took it into his head to teach him backgammon and
cribbage, to help to make his own evenings at home more lively.
And Mrs. Chadwick, who for some occult reason had resisted her
husband’s desire to show courtesy to his preserver, could scarcely be
less gracious than her grander sister, who owed him so much less; so
now the green-parlour door in Oldham Street was opened to him, and as
Jabez refreshed his memory with Hogarth’s prints, he felt that he had
made another step up the ladder.
Those were halcyon days; while Augusta, too tall to be robust,
recovered so slowly, and was so much gratified by his attempts to
entertain her. Halcyon days for more than one.
Yet, ere Jabez was out of his apprenticeship, or Augusta had left her
pillowed sofa, a pebble was thrown into the stream which broke the
surface of the tranquil waters, and disturbed them for ever.
Mr. Ashton was one of the original shareholders in the Portico, a
classic stone building erected in 1806 as a library and reading-room,
on the other side of Mosley Street, which, with its pillared _facade_
and flight of steps, like an Ionic temple, looked down on the plain
red-brick front of the Assembly Rooms, though its opposite neighbour
stood quite as high in repute, and was equally exclusive in its
constitution.
Mr. Aspinall, the Cannon Street cotton-merchant (who dined with the
Scramble Club, instituted by business men whose homes were in the
suburbs), was likewise a shareholder in the Portico; and from constant
meeting at the long tables within the book-shelved, galleried walls
of its lofty reading-room, he and Mr. Ashton had a tolerably lengthy
acquaintance, although it had never ripened into intimacy—the men were
so dissimilar.
Charlotte Walmsley was naturally troubled by the result of Madame
Broadbent’s notions of discipline, and not unnaturally (considering the
condition in which Ben Travis had taken him home) blamed her husband
as the primary cause. As naturally he shifted the onus to the shoulders
of Laurence Aspinall, and, taking him to task, plainly told him he
ought to apologise. Laurence snatched at the proposal.
“My dear Jack, nothing would please me better! I’ll make a thousand
apologies, if you’ll only introduce me.”
John Walmsley had had quite enough of introductions; besides, he stood
in some awe of Mrs. Ashton, and did not know how she might take it,
especially as his friend Aspinall had acquired the character of “a wild
spark.” He emphatically declined. But if Laurence Aspinall once set his
mind on a thing he would attain it, if within the range of possibility,
whether by fair means or foul, whatever might be the consequences.
For a few days he was on his best behaviour at home; and having won
his father over by expressions of deep contrition, and promises of
reformation, and the assurance that he would never again do anything
“unbecoming a gentleman,” he prevailed on him to introduce him to Mr.
Ashton, with a view to making his own apologies in person.
“Well, Laurence, you can go with me to the Portico tomorrow morning,
and if Mr. Ashton is there we will see what can be done;” the tone in
which this was said clearly implying, “If _we_ seek an introduction to
the Ashton’s for the purpose of making the _amende honorable_ as befits
gentlemen, there can be no doubt of its acceptance.”
But when they met Mr. Ashton on the steps of the Portico the following
morning, the self-complacence of the lofty gentleman received a slight
but uncontemplated check. Mr. Ashton nodded to Mr. Aspinall with a
beaming face, and would have passed his acquaintance with a mere “Good
morning,” but the other stopped, and after shaking hands, and remarking
that trade was slack, presented, with due formality, the handsome,
elegant six feet of dandyism who bore him company.
“Mr. Ashton, let me make you acquainted with my son, sir—Mr. Ashton, my
son Laurence; Laurence, Mr. Ashton.”
The young gentleman raised his stylish beaver from his rich coppery
curls, and bowed with courtly grace in acknowledgment of Mr. Ashton’s
formal bow, whilst his father continued, almost in the tone of one who
confers an honour—
“The fact is, my son, sir, desires an opportunity of expressing to Miss
Ashton his deep regret for the indiscretion of which he was guilty in
the lobby of the Theatre Royal, some ten days back.”
The smile faded from the face of Mr. Ashton, who, with a reserve
very foreign to him, put his hand into his pocket for his snuff-box
instead of extending it to the young man, and, tapping it with a little
impatience, caught at his words.
“Indiscretion, sir? What you are pleased to call ‘indiscretion’ has
placed my daughter in the doctors’ hands with a broken collar-bone.”
Before Mr. Aspinall could reply, Laurence, better skilled to temporise,
interposed.
“So, to my infinite regret, my friend Mr. Walmsley has already informed
me, sir. And I assure you I take shame to myself that any word or
action of mine should have led to consequences so lamentable. No one,
sir, can deplore the injury Miss Ashton has sustained, more than
myself—the unhappy cause. It is this, Mr. Ashton, which impels me to
seek an opportunity to express the sensibility of my grave offence, and
my extreme regret, to Mrs. Ashton and Miss Ashton in person. I cannot
rest until I have implored their pardon!”
The tones in which this apologetic speech was delivered were at once
so suave, remorseful, and sympathetic that Mr. Ashton, whose sternness
was seldom of long duration, was considerably mollified. He looked at
the handsome, dashing blade before him, whose blue eyes seemed full of
gentleness and pity, and felt as though the boy he had seen torturing
old Brookes, and the yeomanry officer who had slashed at Mr. Chadwick
and Jabez Clegg, could never be one and the same. He reverted to the
latter circumstance—
“I think, young sir, you owe an apology to someone else under my
roof—the young man who received the sabre-cut you designed for my
brother-in-law, Mr. Chadwick.”
Aspinall’s handsome face flushed. His father’s quick reply gave him
time to think.
“You surely, Mr. Ashton, would not expect _my_ son to apologise to an
apprentice-lad, a mere College-boy.”
“Just so! I would expect him to apologise to _anyone_ he had injured,
were it a beggar!”
Here the son interposed: “My good sir, do not remind me of the horrors
of that dreadful day! I shudder when I recall it. We acted under
orders, and I swear I was utterly unconscious and irresponsible for my
actions throughout the whole affray.”
And Laurence seemed desirous to wash his hands of the responsibility.
“The fact is,” said Mr. Aspinall, coming to his son’s rescue, “Laurence
had taken more wine than his young head would stand on both occasions.
It takes years to season a cask, you know, Mr. Ashton, and we must not
be too hard on young fellows, if they slip sometimes. We have all had
some wild oats to sow.”
This was a platitude of the period, but Mr. Ashton’s “Just so!” was not
a cordial assent; and Laurence, fearing the conversation was taking
an unfortunate turn, led it back to its original request. But Mr.
Ashton tapped his box, and, offering it to his interlocutors, took a
pinch himself, and then a second, before he came to a decision. It was
evidently a debatable question.
“I will mention your request to Mrs. Ashton, young gentleman, and if
I find her agreeable to receive you, I can take you across with me
to-morrow morning, provided you meet me here. Good day.”
Mr. Aspinall’s “Good day” was somewhat stiff. He had held his head very
high all his life, metaphorically as well as physically, and was not
disposed to be snubbed by one whose status he considered scarcely on a
par with his own. He was disposed to look on his son’s peccadilloes as
some of those “wild oats” which young gentlemen of spirit were expected
to sow, and considered his fine figure and beautiful features, his
education, accomplishments, and prospects, passports to any society;
and that Mr. Ashton should for one moment hesitate to open his heart
and his doors to _his_ son, was an indignity not to be borne.
“The fact is, Laurence, that, if you make an apology to those people
after this, you have less spirit than I take you to have!” was his
conclusion.
“Never you mind, father, I know what I’m about. I want to get my foot
in there,” answered subtle Laurence. And he managed it.
Mr. Ashton went home to dinner full of his conversation on the Portico
steps, and set his romantic daughter’s heart in a flutter by mooting
the point at issue in her presence.
“Oh, papa! do bring him; I want to see him again, he is so handsome!”
“‘Handsome is that handsome does,’ Augusta,” was Mrs. Ashton’s
commentary on that young lady’s impulsive exclamation.
“Charlotte says he is very wild,” remarked Ellen, “and I feel as if I
should shudder at the sight of him, after his conduct at Peterloo.”
“You don’t shudder when Captain Travis calls, and you don’t shut the
door in John Walmsley’s face, and they may have done things just as
bad, if you did but know it, Ellen,” retorted Augusta, standing on the
defensive for the absent “Adonis.”
“Just so, my dear, so they might,” admitted Mr. Ashton, whilst Ellen
held her peace, silenced by something in her cousin’s retort.
“Yes, William, but look on the poor bandaged neck and shoulders of our
child, and think of that ruffian’s cruelty to Jabez and others when a
schoolboy. I don’t think either John Walmsley or Mr. Travis could have
done anything so bad.”
“Well, but, mamma,” argued spoiled Augusta, “Jabez forgave him; and
I think Madame Broadbent is more to blame than Mr. Aspinall—he only
offered to bring me home.”
Mrs. Ashton shook her head as she rose from table.
“Besides, mamma, he says he only wants to apologise, and you know you
need not invite him again unless you like. It would be so rude to
refuse.”
“Just so, just so,” assented Mr. Ashton, willing to humour his pet in
her invalid state, “and perhaps it might do the young fellow good to
see the consequences of his folly.”
As usual, where Augusta enlisted her father on her side, Mrs. Ashton’s
dissent grew feebler.
The next day Mr. Ashton made at least _one_ false step in his life, and
brought over his own threshold a blight.
Faultless were the curves of the stylish hat, faultless the fit of
pantaloons, and coat, and Hessian boots, and York-tan gloves; graceful
the figure they adorned; graceful the apology tendered so adroitly—more
to the mother than to the daughter—but if ever a graceless
good-for-nothing cast a shadow on a good man’s hearth, it was the wolf
in sheep’s clothing whose hungry jaws were watering for the pet lamb of
the fold, and who made so courtly an exit full in the sight of Jabez,
as he crossed the end of the hall to his solitary dinner in his own
room.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SEVENTH.
MANHOOD.
Young as he was, Laurence Aspinall was wont to say he “wouldn’t give
a fig for any man who could not be anything in any society; and the
Laurence Aspinall of the cock-pit, the ring, and the bar-parlour, was
a very different being from the Laurence Aspinall of the Assembly or
drawing-room. He could be a blackguard amongst blackguards, a gentleman
amongst ladies.”
Nature had done much for him, art had done more. Nature had given
him at twenty-one a symmetrical figure, and art an easy carriage.
Nature had given him the clear pink-and-white complexion which so
often accompanies ruddy hair, and art had trained his early growth of
whisker to counteract effeminacy of skin. Nature had given him a lofty
forehead, art had clustered his bronze curls so as to hide how much
that brow receded. Nature had given an aquiline nose, eyes of purest
azure, flexile lips with curves like Cupid’s bow; and art had taught
that eyes set so close, whose hue was so apt to change as temper swayed
him, and lips so cruelly thin, might be tutored to obey volition, and
contradict themselves, if so their owner willed. To crown all, nature
had gifted him with a flexible voice, and art had set it to music.
The Liverpool schoolmaster had obeyed Mr. Aspinall’s instructions to
the letter; all that education and accomplishments could do to polish
and refine the physical man into the gentleman, as the word was then
understood, had been done for him; but under the stucco was the rough
brickwork Bob the groom had heaped together, and which no trained or
loving hand had removed.
Be sure Laurence Aspinall did not carry this analysis into society,
written on his forehead. Instead, he had cultivated the art of
fascination; and in the brief space occupied by this apologetic
introductory visit in Mosley Street he not only contrived to dazzle
the romance-beclouded eyes of Augusta, but, what was almost as much
to his purpose, to win over Mr. Ashton, and to weaken the prejudice
of Miss Augusta’s less pliant mamma. Ellen Chadwick was the only one
on whom he made no impression, the only one who retained a previous
opinion—confirmed. Possibly, as Charlotte Walmsley’s sister she
knew something of his life below the surface, and had imbibed that
sister’s notion that he “led John Walmsley away.” Possibly, too, as
Charles Chadwick’s daughter, she contrasted the silken speech of the
drawing-room dandy with the hectoring, sword-in-hand, yeomanry cavalry
lieutenant who, in striking at her father, had wounded Jabez his
deliverer instead.
At all events, she met the enthusiastic admiration of Augusta after his
departure, the gratified encomiums of her uncle, and the more subdued
approbation of her aunt, with the unvarying expression, “He would have
murdered my dear father but for Jabez Clegg, and Mr. Clegg is worth a
hundred of him.”
Mr. Laurence knew better than to presume on that introduction all at
once. From their gardens and greenhouses at Ardwick and Fallowfield,
he sent small baskets of early flowers and fruit to Mrs. Ashton, for
her daughter, with courteous inquiries; but he allowed several days to
elapse before he presented himself in person, and then his call was of
the briefest.
He knew he had prejudice to overcome, and worked his way gradually.
Meanwhile Augusta progressed favourably; and if Aspinall grew in favour
with the family, so did Jabez.
May, sweet-scented month of promise, brought to Jabez Clegg in 1820
his natural and legal heritage—manhood and manhood’s freedom. He was
no longer an apprentice bound to a master by the will of others. He
had a right to think and act for himself, subject only to the laws of
God and of the realm. True, that free agency brought with it a train
of responsibilities, but the new _man_ was not the one to overlook or
ignore the fact. He had thought long and keenly of the coming change,
and all it might involve, months before it came.
His fixed wages as an indoor apprentice, according to indenture, were
no great matter; but, supplemented by coin he extracted from his
paint-box after business hours, he had found a margin for saving,
besides contributing to the humble wants of his early fosterers. The
latter duty he had never neglected, but Simon was as sternly just as
the lad had been gratefully generous, and, even when poverty bit the
hardest, would never accept the whole of his earnings.
“Si thi, Jabez, if thah dunnot keep summat fur thisel’ to put by
fur a nest-egg, thah’ll ne’er see the good o’ thi own earnin’s, an’
thah’ll lose heart in toime,” the old tanner had been wont to say, when
sturdily limiting the extent to which his foster-son should open his
small purse.
So Jabez, leading a steady, industrious life, spending little on
personal gratification, save what he invested in books, had quite a
little store laid by—the result of very small savings—against the
time when he might have to shift for himself. Two things had troubled
him—the possibility of having to find a situation elsewhere, Mr. Ashton
having said no word of retaining him, though, on the contrary, he had
said nothing of his removal; and the necessity for quitting the house
which had been to him a home so long that even the grumbling cook and
the affectionate dog had welded themselves into his daily life, how
much more the kind master and mistress, and that beatific vision, their
beautiful, bewitching daughter, who had held him in vassalage from
the very day of his apprenticeship, and tyrannised over him as only a
wayward, spoiled beauty—child or woman—could.
The bright morning of the fifth of May set this at rest. He was
called into the inner counting-house, and passed the high stools of
inquisitive-eyed, quill-driving clerks with a palpitating heart,
conscious how much depended on the issue of that interview.
As he opened the curtained glass door, to his surprise he found himself
confronted by not only Mr. Ashton, but Mr. Chadwick, and Simon Clegg,
who had been brought from Whaley-Bridge for the occasion.
Business men, as a rule, are not demonstrative over business, and after
the first salutations and surprised greetings, the congratulations of
the day were soon said, and the stereotyped “And now to business” put
sentiment to flight. And yet not entirely so, as will be seen.