“And yourself, Miss Ashton?” questioned he.
“Oh, I have a heap of clear-starching to do. My frills and laces are in
a woeful plight. I shall be clap-clap-clap all the afternoon, and this
sultry weather prohibits ironing until there is a cool evening breeze
to fan me through the window. Without it I should be as likely to faint
as Ellen.”
Miss Chadwick made light of her faintness, and objected, if not too
strenuously, to be so disposed of; but Augusta, in her old wilful way,
insisted, and Jabez, with his friend’s letter on his mind, was not
likely to throw opposition in the way. So, notwithstanding his recent
rebuff, he was once more “Miss Ashton’s humble servant to command.”
After an early tea, which was but a fiction to all three, Augusta
was left behind, busy with a box-iron and her lady-like laundry of
lace and muslin in the house-place, whilst Ellen Chadwick and Jabez
went rambling with the winding waters of the translucent Goyt, under
umbrageous trees on pleasant mountain slopes, where foxgloves nodded
and horsetail grasses bent before them, and only an occasional reaper
or gleaner crossed their path.
Had these two been incipient lovers, no more embarrassing silence
could have fallen upon them. If Jabez, her junior by two years, had
had a tussle to keep his love within bounds, there had at least been a
glimmer of hope in the distance, and the struggle was upwards. Ellen
had been trained from her childhood to keep her naturally strong
feelings under control; but there was a war in her breast between
maidenly shame and unsought, hopeless love, and the two hacked at
each other and at her heart in the rayless dark, and the struggle was
downwards.
Here she was, for the first time, alone with the man she loved with all
the strength of a strong heart, with the newly-gained knowledge that
he “would die to save her cousin pain;” and he, conscious of a sacred
and delicate mission, all unaware of her secret love for himself, was
perplexed how best to approach the subject, and take advantage of the
opportunity so afforded him. At length—
“I had a letter from my friend, Captain Travis, to-day,” he began.
With little perceptible emotion, she replied,
“Indeed! I hope he was in good health. You are honoured in your
friendship, sir. Mr. Travis is a noble gentleman, and I esteem him
highly.”
This paved the way for him to expatiate on Ben Travis’s many good
qualities. He told the story of the big, raw-boned youth’s first
patronage of himself, and found an attentive listener as he traced the
growth of their friendship upwards, and related favourable anecdotes
which have no place in this history. But no sooner did he begin to
plead his friend’s cause with all the warmth of young friendship, than
her manner entirely changed. Her colour came and went; she panted as
if for breath, and gasping out, “Oh—h! Mr. Clegg, for mercy’s sake,
don’t—don’t!” was seized with a sudden faintness for the second time
that day.
A lichen-covered old tree-trunk, shattered and uptorn in the late
thunder-storms, was at hand; he seated her upon it, bringing water to
revive her from a runnel near; but any attempt to renew the subject
only seemed to give her exquisite pain, and he desisted on her telling
him, in a suffocating voice,
“Honour forbids that I should listen to Mr. Travis; I—I—love another.”
Something in her tone or manner told him that her love was as hopeless
as his own for Augusta: and nothing could be more respectful and gentle
than his bearing towards her on their homeward way, thus adding fuel to
the fire which consumed her.
The evening shadows were fast closing in when they reached the cottage;
and she, with a simple inclination of the head, left Jabez on the
threshold, and passing through the parlours, carried her overmastering
emotions upwards to her room, to be grappled with in the silence of the
night.
“Wheere’s Miss Ashton?” asked Bess. “Hoo said it wur too hot to bide i’
th’ heawse an’ hoo put her irons deawn, an’ after tittivatin’ hersel’
oop a bit, went eawt a-seekin’ yo’.”
In some surprise, not unmixed with alarm, for the hour was late—as
times and country went—and the harvest brought rough strangers into the
neighbourhood, Jabez set off at full speed down the avenue, and ere he
had reached the first brook, saw her lithe figure advancing buoyantly;
and, if his eyes and the gathering mist did not deceive him, a second
figure parted from her at the gate.
She was the first to speak. “Whichever way did you people ramble off?”
“Oh, down by the Goyt, Taxal way, Miss Ashton,” answered Jabez.
“Ah! and I went up the Buxton Road; we were certain to miss.”
“I thought I saw you part from some one at the gate? Could I be
mistaken?” half-questioned her interlocutor.
“Oh, Crazy Joe! that was all!” and he took her reply in all sincerity,
not believing Augusta Ashton capable of untruth.
A day or two went by, during which Jabez wrote to tell Ben Travis
he “must arm himself with fortitude”—that “the world was full of
disappointments”—that “Miss Chadwick loved elsewhere”—but there was
“something more for men to do than die of disappointments or blighted
love.”
And yet another day or two, during which Augusta’s moods were as
variable as the gusty shadows of the sycamore, changing from wild
exuberance which rallied Ellen on her depression, and condescended
to play or dance for Sim, to a moping, moody melancholy, enlivened
by frequent showers. She was given to snatch up her hat and “run out
into the garden for a breath of fresh air,” but she generally came in
panting, as if the “run” had been literal; and sometimes she would be
found in the house when supposed out of it, and _vice versa_.
The White Hart had not yet walked away, although Jabez considered it
complete. It waited Mr. Ashton’s coming and his verdict, and stood on
the easel in the dining-room.
The morning post had brought a message to Simon Clegg concerning fruit
and vegetables for the Manchester home, and having sought him in the
kitchen-garden to deliver it, Jabez entered the house at dinner time
by the lower staircase window (frequently used for entrance and exit).
His passage through the best parlour was arrested by voices in the
room beyond, one of which he knew too well. It was that of Laurence
Aspinall. His painting was evidently under free criticism, and had been
for some time. There was some jesting at the sign-painter.
“You see, Miss Ashton, what a few touches can affect!”
The speaker had apparently made free with Clegg’s colours and brushes,
and there was a murmured sound of assent from Miss Ashton.
“Well, Barret, _Nec scire fas est omnia; Ne sutor ultra crepidam_. What
say you?”
“Yes; let the cobbler stick to his last. If this Clegg would be an
artist, let him stick to his brush; if a tradesman, let him stick to
his trade. If a man means to succeed, he must never flirt with either
art or trade. It’s just as bad as wooing two women at once.”
Jabez heard no more. The blow which had been aimed at his
art-pretensions drove him back by the way he came, and he paced the
long terrace parallel with the “Lovers’ Walk” for fully half-an-hour.
When he turned the corner of the cottage, and went in at the front
door, the critics were gone, but Aspinall’s “few touches” remained.
They had indeed given life to the White Hart. Henceforth the “cobbler”
resolved to “stick to his last.”
Ellen Chadwick had been away, with little Sim by the hand, to take some
substantial comforts to Meg’s bedridden mother. She appeared annoyed
when she heard of their masculine visitors from Buxton. Her evident
displeasure set Jabez wondering what Travis meant by “after what has
occurred,” and he wrote that afternoon for enlightenment, sending his
letter as a packet by coach, there being no second post.
It has been said that the cellarage of the cottage was only accessible
by flights of steps in the portion of the weed-grown Lovers’ Walk which
lay at the windowless back of the long low building, where nettles
grew so thick and rank that even the square unused trap over one set
of steps was half hidden by them. The path was rarely used, the farmer
having made a nearer cut from the farmyard to his ancient dwelling.
Tom Hulme was slowly recovering, under the care of a Buxton doctor who
came thrice a week. He could walk about the garden with a stick, but
there was no sending him to the dank cellar for anything. The doctor
had ordered him port wine, and Bess, who kept the key, had asked Mr.
Clegg to fetch a couple of bottles from the cellar.
Tea was over, but he fancied there was sufficient light to guide him
without a lantern. He had got the wine, and was approaching the cellar
door at the foot of the sunken steps when he heard the sound of voices
coming along the walk from the direction of the moor.
Every pulse in his body seemed to grow still as he recognised the tones
of Augusta Ashton and Laurence Aspinall, and heard with deepening
anguish the unmistakable sound of kisses interchanged. They had
apparently paused close to the stair-head for that embrace; and then he
heard—and thanked God that he was there to hear, though that hearing
blighted every hope he had—his rival, with every argument which
passionate love or skilful sophistry could employ, persuade her to
elope with him the following night.
Backwards and forwards they walked in the gathering dusk, but never
beyond the length of the premises; and now and then they stopped, and
drove him mad with their caresses. The place was so retired and lonely,
precaution was neglected; and Jabez, chained to the spot as it were,
gathered that proposals for her hand, made by Laurence himself, had
been peremptorily rejected by Mr. Ashton, who was set down as a despot
and a tyrant for refusing to surrender a silly girl of seventeen to a
rake of two-and-twenty. He heard her tell that Jabez Clegg had found
her sobbing at the separation, even whilst her darling’s letter was
at the gates. And he heard it said that the elder Aspinall not only
countenanced this secret courtship, but had furnished funds for the
proposed elopement. This generosity was set against the cruelty of her
own parents; her affection, her pride, the romance in her nature were
appealed to, but still Augusta’s better angel held her safe, until,
coward that he was, Laurence terrified her with a threat to “blow his
brains out” if she refused him.
She wept her assent upon his breast, and then Jabez, already
half-stunned, heard the details of evidently previously concocted
arrangements for their elopement and marriage at Gretna Green,
professedly with his father’s sanction.
CHAPTER THE THIRTY-SEVENTH.
A RIDE ON A RAINY NIGHT.
Jabez, bottles in hand, his mind a chaos, had walked in at the
wash-kitchen door precisely as Augusta, stealthily creeping
through a gap in the privet-hedge, made her way to the convenient
staircase-window, shivering more from fright than from the chill
drizzling rain which had begun to fall. Putting her head in at the
parlour-door where Ellen was sewing, with a brief “I’m off to bed,”
she hurried upstairs in the dusk to lave her flushed face, smooth
her disordered hair, crush it under a night-cap, and place her head
on a pillow, to still her heart’s flutterings under the screening
counterpane, and hide her emotions from her cousin under the semblance
of sleep, though sleep was an absolute impossibility.
In 1821 the village of Gretna Green, on the Scottish border, was the
general resort of runaway lovers, who, being in their minority, could
not be married legally in England without parental consent, whereas in
Caledonia a mere promise to marry made in the presence of witnesses was
held binding. At Gretna a man not in holy orders, but metaphorically
called “the blacksmith,” because he riveted the chains of matrimony,
lived in the first house beyond the bridge which spanned the river
Sark, and, with a ceremonial as unseemly as it was brief, married
all comers, often with pursuers at his very doors; and the marriages
so contracted were not to be set aside. For more than half a century
Gretna Green weddings had figured largely in the literature of the
stage and of the circulating library; and there is no doubt that the
halo of romance thrown around an elopement to Gretna blinded to the
impropriety of the prenuptial flight many a foolish or headstrong girl
whom the actual ceremony shocked and startled.
Augusta Ashton, with all her sentimental romance, all her petulant
wilfulness, all her resentment at being exiled from home and her
Adonis, yet loved her parents well, although her reverence and filial
obedience had been gradually undermined by the plausible sophistry and
impassioned eloquence of her ardent lover. But if she loved them much,
she, unfortunately, loved Laurence more. He was, to do him justice,
terribly in earnest; and in the inexperience of her seventeen years she
could not be expected to sift and analyse that passionate earnestness
for its many components. With her _all_ was _love_, and _love_ was
_all_.
His proposition had, nevertheless, come upon her with a shock. She
was not prepared to ignore the prudent teaching of her mother, or to
brave the indignation of her indulgent father, or to forfeit her own
self-respect, and nothing could have moved her to consent but that
appalling threat of suicide, and he knew her tender heart well when he
made it.
But neither that threat nor her promise could reconcile her to the rash
step, and she lay in bed shuddering with her own fears, and strangely
enough her first thought was—“What would Jabez say if he knew it?” Not
her father, not her mother, but the Jabez whom she had rebuffed only a
week before, yet of whose opinion she somehow stood more in awe than of
all else besides.
What did Jabez think, seeing that he did know? Think? He scarcely could
think. Feeling seemed to overpower thought, reason, perception. When
after a stagnant time he emerged from the stair-head, it was more as
a culprit than Jabez Clegg. He put down the bottles and escaped again
into the open air, cowed alike by the knowledge which had overpowered
him, and by a sense of dishonour at having played the unworthy part
of a listener, albeit the listening had been involuntary, seeing
that the shock of his discovery had stunned him like a blow from a
sledge-hammer, crushing his own long-cherished hopes to death. His next
thought was of intense thankfulness that by any means the schemes of
Aspinall had been bared to him, and in time to attempt the rescue of
his idolised Augusta from the clutches of a villain.
Unacquainted with the events which had preceded Augusta’s removal to
Carr—unaware that the Mosley Street doors had been closed against
Laurence, or that a formal proposal for the young lady’s hand had been
made by the elder Aspinall on behalf of his son, and peremptorily
declined by the Ashtons; ignorant that imperious Mr. Aspinall, in his
gouty wrath, had sworn “upon his honour” that his son _should_ “marry
the girl in spite of the paltry beggar’s-inkle-weaver,” and having no
faith in the man himself, Jabez regarded the use of the father’s name
only as a proof of his greater perfidy, and gave him no credit even for
an honourable intention or an honest emotion. The time was past for
Clegg to find excuses for the wrong-doing of his adversary.
Now, with every nerve unstrung, he was required to act, and that
promptly. To-morrow would be too late. What if he should take Miss
Chadwick into his confidence? But no, he could not lower Augusta in
the eyes even of her own cousin and neither she nor anyone there had
authority to detain Miss Ashton against her will even if her foot
were on the step of the post-chaise. It was imperative that he should
reach Manchester immediately, yet how to do so without exciting alarm
perplexed him. There was a horse in the stable at the mill, but as he
had a bed in Simon’s room, and could neither leave it nor return to it
in the night without passing through the Hulmes’ sleeping apartment,
there was a difficulty in quitting the house unknown.
“I must be at the mill before daybreak to-morrow having something
of importance to attend to, so I will sleep on the squab in the
house-place, Mrs. Hulme, and if I am not in for breakfast, do not
wait for me,” said he; and no one questioned him, although Mrs. Hulme
and her husband were of joint opinion that “Jabez looked terribly put
eawt,” and wondered what business he could have on hand of so much
consequence.
No one thought of locking country cottage doors. By nine o’clock all
the inmates were in bed and asleep. Before ten Jabez, sad at heart,
had quietly left the cottage for the mill, had saddled Peveril, and,
though no great horseman, was speeding past the “White Hart” along the
highway to Manchester, fast as the steady-going roadster would travel.
The wind had risen, and the rain came down persistently; but heedless
of discomfort or danger, with the one thought paramount in his mind—the
preservation of his master’s daughter—he set his teeth and rode on with
a feverish impatience, which at length communicated itself to Peveril,
and quickened the beat of the sensible animal’s hoof; impatience which
would have sent him flying over the toll-gates, had either he or his
steed been equal to the exploit, and which could barely brook the delay
of drowsy toll-keepers.
Nevertheless as he turned from Piccadilly into Mosley Street, the
muffled-up old watchman, catching the echoes of the Infirmary clock,
bawled out, to mark his own vigilance, “Just one o’clock, an’ a dark
rainy neet!” and the Ashton household had closed its eyelids, and its
account with the day, at least a couple of hours.
It is never pleasant to be the bearer of ill-tidings, so no wonder
Jabez hesitated with the lion-headed knocker in his hand ere he sent
its reverberations growling through the silent house. His hesitation
must have influenced the knocker, for the lion had to roar again, and
louder, before he heard the window above unclose, and saw Mr. Ashton’s
night-capped head thrust out, to ask, in alarm, “Who’s there? What’s
the matter?”
Jabez stepped back to the kerbstone to let the dull rays of an oil lamp
fall upon his face.
“It is I, Jabez Clegg, sir; I have a matter of importance to
communicate.”
“Good heavens, Clegg, you! Surely the mill’s not been burned down?”
“No, sir, all’s right at the factory. There’s no harm done anywhere at
_present_. If you will please to come down, I hope there may be time to
prevent that which is threatened.”
“Just so, I’ll be down directly.”
There were no lucifer-matches with which to procure instantaneous
light, but during this brief colloquy, Mrs. Ashton had been groping on
the tall chimney-piece for their precursors the Prometheans, and having
found them, by dipping a small chemically prepared match into a tiny
bottle of fluid, she obtained a light as soon as the window was closed
and the draught shut out.
Too uneasy to waste much time in dressing, before many minutes had
flown, Mr. and Mrs. Ashton, whose fears had equally pointed to their
daughter—the one in a roquelaire, and the other in her warehouse
overall—were both listening with agitated and anxious faces to Mr.
Clegg’s communication, made with a discomposure great as their own.
“Elope!” both parents exclaimed, simultaneously.
“Elope!” reiterated the mother! “our daughter consent to elope, and
with a reprobate like him? It is not possible!”
“So I should have said, madam, yesterday,” rejoined Jabez, sadly, as he
sank on a chair, overpowered more by the strain on his feelings than by
the fatigue of his long, wet, midnight ride; “and I would have given
the _world_ to have been able to doubt the evidence of my own ears.”
Mrs. Ashton, with clasped hands up, sat opposite to Jabez; Mr. Ashton,
lacking the consolation and inspiration of his snuff-box, walked
about the room with one hand to his head in a state of distressing
perturbation. He stopped in his walk to ask, “What’s to be done?” as
Jabez made this declaration, unconscious of its force.
The light of the chamber candle fell upon the haggard face and drenched
garments of the young man. The elder one looked full at him, paused,
then drawing near and laying his right hand heavily on the other’s wet
shoulder, asked in a troubled voice, with an inquisitorial but not
unkind manner—
“My lad, did no other motive than duty to your employers bring you
eighteen miles through the rain this dark night to save Miss Ashton
from an imprudent marriage?”
Jabez had not stopped to analyse his own motives. Thus questioned, it
was not without embarrassment that he answered, “Mrs. Ashton desired
me, sir, to watch over Miss Ashton, and acquaint you with any matter
affecting her welfare. But apart from that, sir, I could not see Miss
Ashton in the toils of a libertine without an attempt to rescue her. I
should have been a dastard to sit passive; and even now I feel we are
losing time.”
“Just so, just so,” assented Mr. Ashton. “That reminds me, Peveril is
in the street, and you are soaked to the skin. My dear”—turning to his
wife—“will you arouse the servants, and see that neither horse nor
rider suffers in our service more than we can help.”
Having thus got rid of his wife, of whom he stood somewhat in awe, he
resumed his searching catechism of Jabez.
“And so, Clegg, you have no motive beyond a chivalrous desire to save
your master’s daughter, no _interest_ to serve beyond your duty to us?”
The ordeal was terrible. Jabez rose, his features working convulsively.
“Mr. Ashton, you are torturing me. Humble as I am, I love Miss Ashton
with my whole life and soul. But knowing the distance between us, I
have striven to keep the secret in my own breast. And I protest I had
no double motive in my journey hither.”
The genial small-ware manufacturer, to whom that night had brought
two revelations, looked Jabez steadfastly in the face as he made his
avowal; then, taking him kindly by the hand, said—his eyes swimming—
“Just so, just so, my lad! I believe you. And, Jabez Clegg, let me tell
you that I would rather give my daughter to an upright, persevering
man like you, without a penny, than to a spendthrift like Laurence
Aspinall, though he rolled in riches. But it’s no use saying that
_now_.”
Indeed there was no use, and time was flying. A glance of grateful
attachment, and a mute pressure of his liberal master’s hand, were the
sole acknowledgment of Jabez. But a new bond was established between
the twain.
Mrs. Ashton had come back to discuss with her husband and Jabez the
best mode of procedure. She was not less shrewd than her lord, and had
not failed to perceive that the young man’s heart was in the service he
now rendered them. The blow dealt by Augusta to her pride dashed down
the impalpable barrier between them, and she took counsel with him as a
tried and true friend.
Mr. Clegg pointed out the necessity for his return to the mill before
it should open, and he be missed; and taking a proffered glass of
brandy and water to avert cold, he hurried, whilst hot coffee was
preparing, to change his soaked garments preparatory to the ride
back; his elders also taking the opportunity to dress and prepare for
departure with the morning coach.
Not a moment was wasted, but though Peveril had been well groomed
and fed, he was not so fresh to the road as he had been; still the
journey was homeward, the rain had abated; day began to dawn as he left
Stockport behind, and without much use of the whip, Jabez had his horse
back in the stable before the factory bell began to ring. And then
the _beast_ was allowed to rest. The jaded _man_ had to rouse himself
to another day’s work, another day’s trial and excitement, without a
moment for repose.
To everybody’s astonishment, Mr. and Mrs. Ashton stepped out of the
“Lord Nelson” coach that morning at the bottom of the avenue, with a
carpet-bag for luggage. The difference of their reception by daughter
and niece was palpable, and they could not fail to observe how much the
former was disconcerted by their arrival.
“Oh, aunt and uncle, this is a pleasant surprise!” exclaimed Ellen,
running down the avenue to meet them.