above the water, and Jabez knew that Augusta Aspinall was sinking
there before him. A few strokes brought him to the spot; he dived; a
youth was clinging to her shirts, and held her down. One or both must
have drowned. With a blow which went to his heart, he freed her, and,
catching her beneath the armpit, held her well from him as he made for
shore. To the Humane Society’s men he yielded her—so far gone, the men
shook their heads over the lovely woman, as though she were beyond
help. But they bore the dripping lady to the sail-room close at hand,
whilst Jabez, taking the precaution to secure a rope to his waist,
plunged boldly into the midst of the entangled mass in quest of his own.
It was a vain search; he brought one strange child, and then another to
bank, and then a man; but he was again laid hold of when his strength
was exhausted; and only for the precautionary rope, he would have given
to the greedy river the life Simon Clegg had saved from it.
Travis had the good fortune to rescue Mr. Ashton, but he had been some
time in the water, and the old man was far spent; but there was no
trace of Ellen or her boys, even though he dived close by the sunken
flat, and brought up lifeless bodies in their stead.
Jabez and he could only hope some other of the brave men, putting their
own lives in peril, had saved them.
The governor of the gaol had opened his house doors, the recovered dead
were carried into the gaol itself, the sail-maker’s room was crowded,
every tavern near was filled, but no trace was found of Ellen or their
sons, and Jabez was like one distraught.
He was but one agitated atom in that seething, surging, frantic crowd,
where women shrieked for their husbands, parents for their children,
children for their parents; where passing strangers threw themselves
into the water to save life, and lost their own; where ignorance lifted
the hapless by the heels “to pour the water out” and extinguished the
last spark of vitality; and where yelping dogs astray were caught and
slaughtered, that medical skill might transfuse the warm blood of
the lesser animal into the veins of the human, as a last resource to
restore suspended animation. Even gallant old Nelson narrowly escaped
falling a sacrifice to the surgeons.
Jabez entered the room where Augusta Ashton was lying, to all
appearance, dead—ordinary means of resuscitation having failed; and a
surgeon was about so to operate on her from a bleeding spaniel on the
ground. Jabez shrank with a strange loathing; in an instant bared his
arm to the doctor’s lancet; and if he did not give his life to serve
her, as he had once said, he gave his life’s blood to save her; and as
the warm fluid passed from his quick veins to hers, he saw the blue
quivering lids tremble, light pass into the brown eyes, breath part
the blue lips once more; and from the depths of his anguished heart
he thanked God as a faint “Jabez” indicated recognition as well as
returning animation.
He had restored a wife to thankless Aspinall; but who should restore to
him the darling boys who had crept about his knees and round his heart,
and the good wife who had won a place there, in spite of fate, by her
own patient, but intense, love?
The _Emma_ was raised and floated, so little damaged that she was
speedily ready for use, and continued so for many years. In her cabin
were found the remains of Ellen and her sons, where the childish
curiosity of the elder one had doubtless led all three; but they were
raised from the water only to be committed to the earth, and covered up
out of sight and hearing for evermore; and never did Jabez know fully
all she had become to him until he stood with Travis by the side of
an open grave, and heard the clods rattle on the coffin-lid. She was
all as one then to the man who had worshipped her, and the man she had
worshipped; and though the babe she had left behind was nearer to the
one, it would be hard to say to which little Nelly was the dearest in
the aftertime.
Including the bodies found beneath the flat and those laid out in the
gaol and elsewhere for inquest, thirty-three lives were sacrificed on
the altar of the _Emma_; and of these must be reckoned the brave men
who cast their lives away to rescue others.
Among the early saved were the Captain, Miss Grimes, and her sister,
the two latter being hastily conveyed home in a private carriage
(mayhap Mr. Aspinall’s), with coats and cloaks wrapped around their
saturated garments.
Good, kind, genial Mr. Ashton never recovered from the effects of his
long immersion. He was a man far advanced in years, and the shock was
too much for him. He hobbled about the warehouse, snuff-box in hand, a
few months, and then dropped asleep in his easy-chair after a game of
cribbage with Jabez—never to wake again.
And then the excitement and agitation consequent on the loss of his
dear Ellen and her romping boys having brought on Mr. Chadwick a fresh
attack of paralysis, which left him still more helpless (though he
survived many years to pet and spoil Ellen’s baby-girl), Mrs. Ashton,
lonely in her large house, proposed that her sister’s family (Jabez
included) should join her in George Street; but when she would have
said “the more the merrier,” the words died on her lips. Who were they
but the survivors of two wrecked households?
After a little hesitation the offer was accepted, and the whole
family gathered in their shorn proportions under one roof. But there
was another proposition from another quarter, to which there was
considerably more demur. Mrs. Hulme, in a warm grey-duffel cloak, for
the preservation of her new mourning, travelled from Whaley-Bridge, to
ask as a favour that baby Nelly should be committed to her care.
“You see, Mrs. Chaddick, th’ poor little babby’ll thrive better yond
than here i’ th’ smooak; an’ aw’d fain do summat for Mester Clegg, he
have done so much fur feyther an——.”
Jabez interrupted her.
“Hush! Mrs. Hulme. I owe life and all that life has given to your
father and yourself. What little I have done in return has been but
dust in the balance. Yet as it is your desire, and I know baby would
be best in your hands, if grandmother will consent to part with her,
Nelly and her nurse shall go back with you for the coming summer
months.”
And so, though parting with Ellen’s baby seemed parting with Ellen over
again, the little blossom went away to other blossoms on the healthy
hill-side.
Tom Hulme was no longer overlooker, but responsible manager at the
Whaley-Bridge Mill, with a good salary; and if Jabez gratefully traced
his fortune back to his cradle, so too did they trace their amended
position to the same source. But Bess more immediately referred to the
benefit Simon Clegg had derived from the Buxton Baths, whither Jabez
had sent him year after year, for the relief of his rheumatism, and
to his care of steadfast little Sim. He had first placed the crippled
lad with a doctor celebrated for his treatment of bodily deformities,
under whom the boy’s bent body had strengthened and straightened
considerably, and then removed him for education to the house of a
married clergyman, where there were no rough boys to torment him. Jabez
knew well what were the amenities of public schools.
CHAPTER THE FORTY-SEVENTH.
THE LAST ACT.
The catastrophe which deprived Laurence Aspinall of a father, and
had almost robbed him of a loving, patient wife, would have steadied
any man less reckless and selfish than he. But that he should rescue
strangers, and Jabez save his wife, and that through transfusion
the blood of Jabez should course through Augusta’s veins, formed a
combination of mischances beyond parallel, and the honey was changed to
gall. Nay, he was graceless enough to exclaim, in the first burst of
his jealous rage, “I would rather she had died outright than have that
fellow triumph in her restoration through his means. D—— him!”
And yet there were times when in his uxorious fondness he wholly
persuaded himself, and half persuaded her, that his very extravagances
arose from excess of love!
His fancied wrongs culminated when first the will of his father, and
after a brief period that of Augusta’s father, were read and proved.
The former set forth that, disgusted with the ungentleman-like excesses
of his son, and convinced that his course of lavish extravagance would
end in penury, he had determined to settle on his son’s wife, Augusta
Aspinall, for her sole use and benefit, the house and premises on
Ardwick Green, with all therein contained, together with a sufficient
sum in the funds to maintain a befitting state; in the event of her
decease, the reversion to pass to any child or children she had or
might hereafter bear to his son Laurence. To him he left the residue
of his means, and the old business in Cannon Street, with a charge to
apply himself to merchandise.
The latter will, though equally stringent, was a much more prolix
affair. After a number of legacies, of which Jabez came in for one,
Mr. Ashton bequeathed to his wife all other properties whatsoever he
died possessed of, together with half his share in the firm of Ashton,
Chadwick, Clegg, and Co.; the other half to his beloved daughter,
limiting the annual sum she was to draw from the firm, and which was in
nowise to pass into the hands of her depraved husband; and Jabez Clegg
and Benjamin Travis were appointed executors for the due performance of
its provisions.
Imagine the excitement and jealous fury of Laurence Aspinall on thus
being set aside even by his own father and superseded by his wife;
and as if that were not sufficient degradation, to have Jabez Clegg,
whose charity-school face yet bore the impress of his foot, set as his
wife’s executor, to dole out what he called a “pittance” where he had
anticipated a fortune!
It so happened that the early duties of his executorship called Jabez
once or twice unexpectedly to Fallowfield, and that on each occasion
the master of the mansion was from home.
It might be that the river had washed the roses from Augusta’s cheeks
so effectually that her complexion had never regained its tone; or it
might be that her skin looked white in contrast with the blackness of
her bombazine and crape; certain it was that Jabez was struck with the
pallor of her countenance, and his inquiry, “Are you not well, Mrs.
Aspinall?” was tinctured with alarm.
As a light flush tinged her cheek, then faded away again, and she
received him with a timid indecision very unlike her former girlish
freedom, a sense of her almost supernal loveliness brought something of
the old ache into his heart, and out of respect for himself and her, he
hurried over his business, and having obtained the signatures for which
he came, mounted his gig and drove back to town, haunted by look, and
voice, and manner.
Yet in the integrity of his own heart he had no conception that her
embarrassment was the result of fear—fear of the interpretation her
jealous madman of a husband should put on so unwonted a visit.
He thought he saw a smile of malice in the corners of the mouth of the
bold woman who met him in the hall, and nodded to him so freely as he
passed her on his way out; but no prescient spirit whispered in his
ear that his twenty minutes’ visit on absolute business would furnish
envy and jealousy with a pretext for foul-mouthed slander, for coarse
vituperation, for the use of a whip, and for calumnious accusations
which cut deeper than its lash.
Cicily, who intervened to save her mistress, might have conveyed some
inkling of this to Mrs. Ashton, but Augusta absolutely forbade her
sympathetic servant’s interference.
“You would do no good, Cicily,” she said; “the evil is beyond earthly
remedy; you would only distress my dear mother to no purpose, and she
has suffered too much on my account already. It cannot last for ever!”
On the next occasion Jabez was accompanied by his joint-executor, but
even that fact did not save Augusta from her husband’s wrath, and his
vile aspersions went far to drive out the last lingering sentiment of
affection or regard she had for him. But she clung to her child, and
that bound her to her home and him whom in an evil hour she had chosen;
though tears fell bitterly on Willie’s curly head, when he, like his
father, gave her back blows for kisses. And if at times her conscience
smote her for her haughty repulse of Jabez by the stair-foot window at
Carr Cottage, what wonder? Had not Laurence himself scored his rejected
rival’s name on her heart with his braces and whip-lash?
She shut the obtrusive memory out with a shudder, and, dropping on her
knees, prayed earnestly for strength to bear and to forbear.
Yet much of the cruelty of Laurence at this time arose from another
source than causeless jealousy. He had been living far beyond his
private means, and was greatly involved. He had calculated on laying
his hand on a good round sum, and was disappointed. In order, however,
to raise the needful, he sold his father’s old-established concern
to their head clerk, far below its value. On the Fallowfield estate
his friend Barret held a mortgage; and had it been possible, he would
similarly have disposed of Augusta’s possessions. Here, however, he was
doubly baffled, and he turned on her as the primary cause.
The old law which preserved the woman’s absolute right over properties
legally settled upon herself, by strange anomaly did not secure to her
one guinea of the coin those properties produced.
Well did Jabez watch over Augusta’s interest, but his heart ached
as he saw her sad countenance, and the greedy triumphant eyes of
ever-present Laurence when her dividends were paid in. For, before
his very face, Laurence laid his hand upon the money, to squander
it as he had squandered his own on Sarah Mostyn and other dissolute
companions, leaving his wife without so much as would purchase a
pocket-handkerchief.
Then, lest she should make her wrongs known, he kept her a close
prisoner at Fallowfield, and for all the pleasure she had of her
Ardwick mansion, she might as well have been without it.
No wonder if each fresh act of personal violence snapped some bond
between them, until the only one link to bind her to life and her
husband was her boy Willie; whilst the only human trait of Laurence
was his fondness for his son, whom he was rapidly ruining with false
indulgence, as he himself had been ruined.
It was customary, when the hay-making season came round, for Laurence
to gather such friends as his wife or he retained—the married with
their children—for a frolic in the hay-fields, and the bringing home
the last waggon-load in triumph to crown or inaugurate a feast.
On these occasions he had the grace or the diplomacy to keep Sarah
Mostyn in the background, though she flaunted boldly enough about the
house in the presence of his wife, and her child mingled with the
children.
The harvest-home of 1831 was attended with the customary festivities,
Willie, a rough playmate, was half smothering Nelly Clegg in the hay,
or chasing the Walmsleys amongst the haycocks, until the last load was
ready, and then the boy insisted that he and his companions should be
mounted atop. Shouts and cheers announced their coming to the party in
the drawing-room; they came crowding to the windows, and the glass-door
being open, one or two sauntered out on to the flagged walk. Merrily
they came along the gravelled drive, under the hot sun, dreaming of
no danger, Willie clapping his hands and calling, “Look at us, papa,”
when, right in front of the drawing-room window, the pin which held the
body of the cart down, by some means became displaced, the cart tilted
up, and hay and children were sent flying.
Beyond a few bruises, none of the children were injured but one; they
had fallen amongst hay, or on the spongy lawn; but Willie, the one
jewel in the Aspinall casket pitched with his head on the flagged
pavement, and was killed on the spot.
Draw we the curtain over consternation and bereavement, and pass on to
results. If a change came over Laurence, it was not for the better. He
drank incessantly, became alternately moody and defiant, and added a
coping-stone to his offences by placing Sarah Mostyn at his table by
the side of his wife, and boldly avowing that her child was his child
also.
Then all the woman rose within Augusta, so long cowed and dispirited.
She left the table, and, the insult being repeated, again retired in
indignation.
Of the servants none had pitied her so much as Cicily, but for whom
communication with her friends had been cut off. Often had the former
waxed savage over indignities she could neither check nor prevent; but
in many little ways the faithful domestic was enabled to ameliorate the
condition of her mistress. Now that Mrs. Aspinall—more lovely in her
sad womanhood than in her brilliant girlhood—was virtually supplanted,
a prisoner under torture in her husband’s house, with no tie of
motherhood to bind her there, her old nurse, as the mouthpiece of Mrs.
Ashton and her aunt Chadwick, urged upon her once more the necessity
for legal separation, and she no longer turned a deaf ear.
When Jabez came to hand over the next quarter’s dividends Travis
accompanied him, and then Augusta, in the presence of both her
executors, demanded and claimed her right to a legal separation from
her husband.
Laurence taken by surprise, started to his feet, then, resuming his
seat, said, with a scowl and a contemptuous sneer—
“You had better obtain a divorce, madam, whilst you are about it. Mr.
Clegg will not object to the cost, if you can only be made Mrs. Clegg
by Act of Parliament.”
It was a cruel and uncalled-for sneer, and Travis, firing up, resented
it for his friend, who appeared dumbfounded by the suggestion.
“If she _had_ been Mrs. Clegg, sir, instead of Mrs. Aspinall, there
would have been no necessity now for the interference of friends for
her protection!”
“Of course not,” sneered Aspinall. “Mr. Clegg is the white hen that
never lays away; and now, having favoured you with one of Mrs. Ashton’s
pithy proverbs, perhaps, gentlemen, you will favour me by taking your
departure; this house and this lady are alike my property.”
The value he set upon the latter article of property was testified by
an immediate application of a horse-whip, so savagely applied that
even Bob, and Luke the gardener, drawn thither by Augusta’s screams,
wrenched the whip from him, and covered her escape, the latter
declaring he would “no longer stay an’ witness sich wark.”
To this man, who was also gatekeeper, Cicily crept at nightfall, and
offered him a goodly sum down, out of her own savings, promising a much
larger one from Mrs. Aspinall, with the offer of a new situation at
Ardwick, if he would only suffer her ill-used mistress to “get clear o’
that brute’s violence.”
The man, to his credit be it told, refused the money, but opened the
gate; and, when Laurence wakened from his sodden sleep at noon the next
day, wife, cook, and gardener were missing.
They three had walked to Ardwick, and once there, though Augusta
found sad havoc had been made in the place, all was her own, carriage
included, and the domestics in charge welcomed her with gladness.
Without waiting for even the show of a breakfast, Augusta hurried like
a frightened bird to her mother’s nest in George Street, where alone
she felt secure.
Jabez and Travis were summoned, and when Aspinall, recovering from his
stupor, sought his human property at Ardwick, he found the trustee
under his father’s will—a Mr. Lillie—holding the place for Augusta in
right of his trust. And in George Street he was refused admission, Mrs.
Ashton justifying her daughter’s flight with “self-preservation is the
first law of nature. A good Jack makes a good Jill. It is the last
straw breaks the camel’s back. If you sow the wind, you must reap the
whirlwind. He who beats his friend makes an enemy.”
He threatened, and she answered—
“Threatened folk live long. You had best, Mr. Aspinall, keep your
breath to cool your porridge. Augusta’s friends will defend her from
her only enemy. Pending separation _you_ see her no more.”
He never saw her more. The deed of separation was _sealed_ but never
signed.
With Augusta, all good angels seemed to have flown from Fallowfield.
In his demoniac passion, he strove to blacken her character, to find
himself met with laughter—his own life had been so chaste! Whilst, as
if to refute him, when she took refuge with her mother, Jabez deemed
it a point of honour to retreat. Accordingly he took up his temporary
abode with Travis, in delicacy towards her, and as a check upon
himself. No act, or thought, or word of his must give an evil tongue a
chance to foul that spotless woman with its slime.
In the midst of all this, Aspinall’s embarrassments increased.
Creditors pressed; writs showered in upon him; Barret foreclosed, and
men were put in possession of the Grange. He flew to his old remedy,
and it drove him mad. Lancaster Gaol for debtors loomed upon him.
From his chamber window he beheld a sheriff’s officer approach with
a warrant. His cavalry-pistols were in his dressing-room. A sharp
report rang through the house. Laurence Aspinall, in the prime of life,
delirious with drink, driven to desperation by his own profligate
excess, set a blood-red seal on the deed of separation.
* * * * *
Ten years had passed from the partnership of Ashton, Chadwick, and
Clegg—years in which money well employed had multiplied itself.
Jabez was a rich man—a man of influence in the town; no longer the
amateur artist, but the patron of art, as well Henry Liverseege and
others could have told. As he had been one of the first promoters
and directors of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution, so was he
now the supporter of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of
Art; and seeing farther than Mr. Ashton, who, as a member of the New
Quay Navigation Company, had opposed the Act for a railway between
Manchester and Liverpool, he threw his energy into the project, and
helped to carry it out, his cousin Travis working with him.
His widowerhood had cast a gloom over him for a time, but he left
himself small leisure for morbid reflection, and that was cheered by
the prattle of his little Nelly. Then came the crash at Fallowfield,
and when darkness set upon Aspinall and his deeds, light broke upon
the path of Jabez Clegg—at first a mere ray, but he worked the more
cheerfully in its light. It was not _hope_ for himself; it was merely a
joyful consciousness that there was hope and calm in the sky over the
head of their fluttering and wounded dove, and that Augusta could now
rest in peace with her mother in the house at Ardwick, with no dread of
a brutal husband bursting on them unawares.
He came and went as friend and executor, but it was long before it
flashed across his comprehension that the fearful ordeal through which
Augusta had passed but brought his old master’s daughter closer to him;
or that the prayer old Simon had taught was being answered to the full.
That which was “above rubies” had blessed his life and kept his human
heart warm whilst his “coast had enlarged;” he had been kept from the
evil of a wilful and capricious wife; and at last when he had resigned
all prospect of setting the purified pearl as a star on his own breast,
it dropped into his hand, unsought, unsolicited.
He had schooled his heart we know. He had married from a sense of duty
and grateful compassion. He was a faithful husband to a true wife, and
when he lost her he mourned her as a valued friend. But though all the
early love of his being had been kept alive and in a ferment by the
sufferings of Augusta, as an honourable man he suffered no word or look
to betray more than a friend’s sympathy. And still he kept as strong a
guard over himself, though the tragic end of Laurence had set her free
once more.
That last fatal act struck a sensitive chord in Augusta’s nature.
There was no exultation at release. For a time she lost sight of his
profligacy and cruelty, and accused herself of having hastened the
catastrophe by leaving him to his own unbridled will and the temptress
by his side. She wept for the handsome lover who had captivated her
young fancy; she mourned for the besotted soul gone to its account with
all its imperfections rampant.
“Let her alone,” said Mrs. Ashton to her sister; “the sharpest shower
wears itself out soonest; she will come to her senses long before her
crape is worn out.”