Part 20

A small match will kindle a large flame if combustibles be there. Fired by her too apparent satisfaction, and Mrs. Ashton’s presence, his excessive vanity induced him to perform what, with the imperfect skates of the period, was a distinguished feat. He was ordinarily proud of his calligraphy. Now, he wound and twisted, lifted his skates or dashed them down, until he had scored upon the ice an alphabet in bold capitals; but whether he had miscalculated his space, or the strength of the ice—broken into for the use of cattle at the upper end—or the crowd of inquisitive or envious followers had been too great for its resistance as he had made the last curl of the letter Z, the ice gave way, and he was plunged in up to the neck, amid the shrieks of women and the shouts of men. His chin had caught upon the ice with a stunning blow; but it rested there, and, aided by the buoyancy of the water beneath, upheld him until, with returning sense, he struggled to bring his shoulders above the surface, and upheave himself. He trod the water, and it sustained him, but the _ice_ would not. He was forced to content himself with the use of his hands beneath as paddles, to relieve the pressure on his chin, and wait for help, which seemed an eternity in coming.

He had been in the water some time when Jabez and Mr. Ashton appeared on the scene, amongst women shrieking with affright, and men rushing about without presence of mind, or paralysed to powerlessness. Mr. Travis alone seemed to have a thought, and he had sent for ropes and hatchets to cut a way to him through the ice itself. But there was a question, would his strength hold out?

“Will no one save him? Will no one save him?” cried Augusta, piteously.

“Fifty pounds to him who will save my son!” was the cry of the frantic father, who had witnessed the accident from his own carriage window. “A hundred!—two hundred pounds!—five hundred pounds to anyone who will save him!”

“It’s noan a bit o’ use, measter,” said a working man, with a shake of his head. “Men wunna chuck their lives aweay for brass; an’ yon ice is loike a pane o’ glass wi’ a stone through it.”

Unfortunately, impulsive Ben Travis had darted forward to his rescue at the outset, and his ponderous weight had cracked the already broken ice in all directions. He had himself retreated with difficulty; and now no offers of reward would tempt men to put their own lives in peril, though Kit Townley was there, urging others to the attempt, and Bob, the ex-groom, had rushed for ropes they had neither pluck nor skill to use, since a noosed cord, flung like a lasso, would have strangled him.

“Oh! save him; save him, Jabez!” implored Augusta, as he and her father came up.

Jabez looked at her strangely. His head seemed to spin. His face went livid as that on the ice. Had his secret devotion no other end than this? True, she had called him “Jabez,” but so she had called him in his servitude. She had appealed to him as one she trusted in implicitly; but the appeal sounded as made for one she loved, and that was not himself, but he who, as boy and man, had wounded him in soul and body. The very tone of her cry was as a knell to his hopes and himself. It was his foe and his rival who was perishing! Was he called upon to risk his life to warm a serpent to sting him again? The conflict in his breast was sharp and terrible. “If thine enemy hunger, give him food,” seemed to float in his ears.

There was a small gloved hand on his arm, a pale, sweet face looking up into his. The moments were flying fast.

“Oh! Jabez, Jabez, do try!”

“I will,” said he, hoarsely.

Had he not often declared in his secret heart that he would give his life to serve her?—and should he be ungenerous enough to shrink now?

“It is folly to attempt. I forbid it!” exclaimed Mrs. Ashton, laying her hand on his arm. And Ellen Chadwick, pale as Augusta, tried to stop him with—“You must not! you must not! You will perish!”

Even strangers from the crowd warned him back. But he was gone ere Mrs. Chadwick softly recalled her daughter to herself. “Hush! Ellen. This is not seemly. Mr. Clegg will attempt nothing impossible.”

He hurried to the side nearest Laurence; called to him, “Keep up; help is coming!”—asked for ladders; gave a word or two of instruction to Mr. Ashton and Travis; sent Nelson on the ice to try its strength; secured a rope round his own waist; then, lying flat on the cold ice, cautiously felt his way to the farther side of Aspinall, whose eyes were closed, and whose strength was ebbing fast. He hardly heard the words of cheer addressed to him.

Two long ladders had been lashed side by side to give breadth of surface. These, by the help of cords and Nelson, whose sagacity was akin to reason, he drew across the cracked and gaping ice; and crept slowly from rung to rung, watched from the land breathlessly, until he reached his almost insensible rival. With rapidly benumbing fingers he secured strong ropes beneath each shoulder, sending Nelson back to the bank with the main line, in case his own strength was insufficient to lift the dead weight of Laurence, or that the ice should yield beneath the double weight.

Someone sent a brandy-flask back by the dog.

“Can you swallow?” he asked. There was no answer, but a gurgle.

He moistened the blue lips, while the head bent slightly back, introduced a small quantity of the potent spirit between his set teeth; and, having warmed himself by the same means, essayed to lift the freezing skater, who was almost powerless to aid. But the latter with an extreme effort raised an arm above the ice, and grasped recumbent Jabez. And now Nelson proved his worth. He set his teeth in Aspinall’s high coat-collar, and tugged until their united strength drew him upwards and across the ladder sledge, almost as stiff and helpless as a corpse.

To lessen the weight, Jabez crept from the ladders; they were drawn to the side with their living freight before he himself was out of danger; for the heavy pressure and the swift motion set the ice cracking under him, and with extreme difficulty he dragged himself to the bank to sink down on the hardened snow, overcome by the strain of mind and muscle, whilst the approving crowd set up a shout, and Augusta Ashton thanked him tremulously.

“I’m afraid, Clegg, you’ve spent your strength for a dead man,” said Travis, grasping his hand warmly, “and Aspinall was scarcely worth it, alive or dead.”

But Jabez made no reply. He rose slowly and painfully, shook off the congratulatory crowd of strangers and friends, on the plea of needing to “warm and dry himself,” refused pointblank to accept the grateful hospitality of Mr. Aspinall, and taking the proffered arm of Travis, turned towards the “George and Dragon,” as little like one who had done a noble action as could be imagined.

Mr. Ashton followed, tapping his gold snuff-box in wonder and perplexity. He saw that something was wrong, but knew not that Augusta’s hasty thanks had closed the young man’s heart against all but its own pain.

CHAPTER THE THIRTIETH.

BLIND!

So white, so cold, so still was the rigid figure borne from the pond to Mr. Aspinall’s house, Travis might well count him “a dead man,” as the rumour ran concerning him; and feeble old Kitty set up a lamentation as over the dead.

Mrs. Ashton, who knew that to be a home without a thinking woman at its head, volunteered her services, and entered the house with the bearers, leaving the trembling Augusta with their friends. She gently put the old woman aside, and felt pulse and heart.

“There is life,” said she, “and while there is life there is hope. Keep tears until there is time to shed them; now we must act.” Then turning to the scared and scurrying servants, she gave her orders much as though she had been in her own warehouse, and with a stately authority there was no disputing.

The butler was bidden to “Bring brandy, quick!” The footman was required to “wheel this sofa to the fire, and pile up the coals!” A maid was asked for “hot blankets without delay!” and moaning Kitty was set to work to “help to strip her young master and chafe his limbs.” And so promptly were her clear, cool orders obeyed, that when the doctor arrived in hot haste with Mr. Aspinall, half his work was done. The pulse had quickened and the limbs began to glow, though the eyelids remained closed.

Most grateful then was Mr. Aspinall for the efficient matronly service rendered to his motherless boy by the stately lady, who was drawn nearer to him in his helplessness by her own kindly act than by all the conciliatory visits and peace-offerings with which Laurence had himself sought to propitiate her. And for _once_ Mr. Aspinall accepted a kindness as a favour, not as a tribute to his personal importance, and he placed his carriage at the disposal of Mr. Ashton and herself for their return home, without a sign of his usual self-inflation.

His importance received a considerable shock, however, when he called at the house in Mosley Street the following day to report progress, and relieve himself of his obligation to his son’s preserver by paying over the five hundred pounds he had in his extremity offered as a reward.

“I do not think Mr. Clegg will accept a reward,” said Mr. and Mrs. Ashton in a breath.

“Not accept it!” and the portly figure seemed to swell; “five hundred pounds is a large sum for a young man in his position; only a fool or a madman would refuse it.”

“Just so, just so,” replied Mr. Ashton, offering his open snuff-box to his visitor, whilst Mrs. Ashton stirred the fire as a sort of dubious disclaimer; “but I think, for all that, you will find we are right; Mr. Clegg is not a common man, and is not actuated by common motives.—My dear?” He nodded, and Mrs. Ashton pulled the bell-rope.

Mulberry-suited James answered on the instant.

“Mr. Clegg is wanted.”

Mr. Clegg, labouring under the disadvantage of a cold caught the previous afternoon, to which any huskiness of voice might be attributed, obeyed the summons. He was presented duly to Mr. Aspinall, and much to that gentleman’s surprise, was invited to take a seat.

“Absolutely invited to take a seat!” as he afterwards recounted in indignation to a friend; “these Whigs have no respect for a gentleman’s feelings.”

Nor had Jabez. He was pale enough when he entered, but his face flushed, his lips compressed, and the scar on his brow showed vividly, as Mr. Aspinall drew forth a roll of crisp bank-notes from his pocket-book, and loftily offered to him the reward he had “earned by his bravery.”

He flushed, put back the notes with a movement of his hand, and said, coldly: “You owe me nothing, sir. The meanest creature on God’s earth should have freely such service as I rendered to your son. I cannot set a price on life.”

“But I offered the reward, and the fact is, I must discharge the debt. Reconsider, young man, it is a large sum: many a man starts the world with less.”

“A large sum to pay for your son’s life, or for mine, sir?” interrogated Jabez, drawing himself up stiffly; adding, without waiting for reply, “I do not sell such service, sir. You owe me nothing. Let your son thank Miss Ashton for his life; he is her debtor, not mine.”

The words seemed to rasp over a nutmeg-grater, they came so hoarsely, as did his request for leave to withdraw; and he closed the door on the five hundred pounds, and on the smiles of husband and wife, before the rebuffed cotton merchant could master his indignation to reply.

The notes in his palm were light enough, but lying there they represented liberality contemned; a debt unpaid; an undischarged obligation to an inferior; and not thrice their value in gold could have pressed so heavily on Mr. Aspinall as that last consideration. The frigid manner of Jabez he construed into Radical impudence; he resented the salesman’s repudiation of reward as a personal affront, and did not scruple to express his views openly, then and there, winding up with a question which startled his interlocutors.

“What did the singular young man mean by his reference to Miss Ashton?”

Had they followed the “singular young man” across the hall to the sanctuary of his own sitting-room, seen him dash himself down into a chair, and bury his head in his hands on the table with unutterable anguish on his face, and heard burst from his lips—more as a groan than embodied thought—“Oh, Augusta, adored Augusta, what a presumptuous madman I have been!”—they would but have had half the answer. But had they mounted the polished oaken stairs to the dainty chamber where Augusta Ashton lay in bed with a “cruel headache,” brought on by the fright, and eyes red with weeping at the catastrophe which had befallen her adorable admirer, the gallant lieutenant, and heard her half-audible lamentations, the answer might have been complete.

Mrs. Ashton had heard Augusta’s frantic appeal to Jabez at at the pond, had seen him stagger and turn livid as if shot, noted the inward struggle ere he said, “I will;” but she had ascribed it to old and unforgiven injuries, and thinking it hard that he should be called upon to hazard his life for his known enemy with chances so heavy against him, had herself forbidden the attempt. This was all the solution she had to offer Mr. Aspinall. In the excitement of the accident and the rescue, she had overlooked Augusta’s excessive emotion, but now her mother’s heart took alarm. Could it be that the younger eyes of Jabez had seen a preference for the handsome scapegrace which she had not?

The matter was talked over by husband and wife long after Mr. Aspinall had left; and the anxious mother questioned the maiden in the privacy of her own room, to come thence with the sad conviction that Augusta had prematurely been led captive by a handsome face and a dashing air, irrespective of worth or worthlessness. Yet she consoled herself and Mr. Ashton with the reflection. “It is, after all, only a girlish fancy, and will die out.”

“Just so, and as the young rake is laid by the leg for one while, there is all the more chance,” assented Mr. Ashton.

“If his immersion does not convert him into a hero,” added the matron, with a clearer knowledge of her daughter. Yet neither asked themselves how the intuitive perception of Jabez came to be more acute than their own, nor what power impelled him to risk his life for an enemy at the mere bidding of Augusta. Indeed, they set the hazardous exploit down to the score of magnanimity and bravery only.

Equally unobservant were they of Ellen Chadwick’s remonstrance, or her feverish watch of every perilous turn Jabez and Nelson had taken on the ice, or of the caresses she lavished on the dog when all was over. Only Mrs. Chadwick had seen that, as she had seen fainter signs years before; but she held her peace, and, having a leaven of her sister’s pride, “hoped she was mistaken.”

There were three young hearts consumed by the same passion—that which lies at the root of the happiness or misery of the world,—one nursing the romance, two fighting against its hopelessness in silence and concealment; but “the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.”

Jabez Clegg could not tell when he had not loved Augusta Ashton, from the time when she was young enough to play about the ware-rooms, or to be lifted across the muddy roadways in his strong apprentice arms, when it was his pleasant duty to protect her to and from school. But he could trace back the time when Hogarth’s prints gave to that love a definite shape, and he began to look upon his master’s daughter as a prize to be attained. All things had tended to confirm his belief in its possibility, and love and ambition had gone hand in hand, and fed each other. The child had come to him for companionship and entertainment, the girl under his protection had confided to him her school-day troubles, and come to him for help in difficulties, with lessons on slate or book. She had looked up to him, trusted him, clung to him; and though she was as a star in his firmament, he had had a sort of vague impression that the star which shone upon him from afar would draw nearer, and, as he rose to it, come down to meet him.

His first sharp awakening was her reminder that the pair of intoxicated officers who had insulted her in the theatre were “gentlemen,” and so not to be chastised by _him_. His second—and then jealousy added a sting—was meeting Aspinall face to face in the hall, when the latter smilingly bowed himself out on his first visit. And now he brooded in despair over the final dissipation of his dream beneath the icicle-hung boughs on Ardwick Green; for the first time conscious that she belonged to another sphere.

Never by look or word had he done himself, or her, or her parents, the dishonour of giving expression to his ambitious love; and now another had looked on his divinity, and won her for himself. It came upon him like a flash when that white-faced agony, that piteous cry, called him to imperil his own life—worthless in the scale against another, and _that_ other. It came upon him with a flash that scathed like lightning. He had forgiven the boy Aspinall long ago; and the man—well, Augusta’s happiness demanded the sacrifice, and he had made it. Out of his very love for Augusta he had saved the rival’s life she had prayed for. And he had been offered _money_ for the act which wrecked his own life. Thank God he had rejected it with scorn!

A kind hand laid on his shoulder interrupted a reverie which had induced torpor.

“Mr. Clegg, you are ill—your cold requires attention. You had better seek repose: you are quite feverish.”

Repose! The man’s soul was on fire, as well as his body. Yet from his chamber a fortnight later emerged a grave business man, without an apparent thought beyond the warehouse.

And what of Laurence Aspinall, whom we left with closed eyes, wrapped in blankets, on a sofa? He had hung suspended in the water for an hour by the clock in the tower of St. Thomas’ ivy-clad church; and notwithstanding he had kept his limbs and the water in motion so long as he had power, the chill had extended upwards, and though life had been called back, sight and reason were in abeyance.

Shorn of his rich curls, for weeks he raved and struggled in the grasp of brain fever; and old Kitty, forgetting everything but her promise to his dead mother, watched and tended him night and day, albeit nurses from the Fever-Ward relieved each other in their well-paid care of him.

The frost was gone; vegetation, bound so long, had leapt upwards from its chains. Lilacs and May-buds greeted him with perfume through the open windows, and even the daffodil and narcissus sent up their incense from the brim of the garden-pond when he began to show signs of amendment.

“Better,” “Much better,” were the answers to inquirers (among whom may be cited Kit Townley, and Bob, their sometime groom); but the lilac and the hawthorn ripened and faded, and the daffodils gave place to the wallflower and carnation, and the rosebuds opened their ripe lips to June, yet the rich cotton merchant’s son saw nothing of the glow.

Over the blue eyes of Laurence the lids were closed, and not an oculist in the town had skill to open them. Dr. Hull, the consulting physician of the Eye Institution, and his surgical colleagues, Messrs. Wilson and Travers, had laid their heads together over a case peculiar in all its bearings, but the lids remained obstinately shut.

At length, when Hope had folded her drooping wings in despair, and Mr. Aspinall was borne down with grief for his sightless son, someone suggested that, as water had done the mischief, water in action might cure it.

“Can he swim?” asked rough Dr. Hull curtly of Kitty.

“Swim? ay, he can do owt he shouldna do,” replied the old woman, having no faith in the value of her charge’s peculiar accomplishments.

“Is he a good swimmer?”

“Aw reckon so! He usent to swim fur wagers i’ Ardy (Ardwick) Green Pond when he wur quoite a little chap.”

“That will do.”

Mr. Aspinall was conferred with, and the next day’s mail coach took the blind patient, his father, Kitty, and one of the surgeons to Liverpool. After a night’s rest at the York Hotel, they were driven down to St. George’s Pier, a very humble presentment of what it is in this our day. Like Manchester, Liverpool has vastly swelled in size and importance within the last fifty years, and her docks have grown with the shipping needing shelter. The Mersey was not the crowded highway it is now—there were fewer ships and _no_ steamers to cross each other’s track, and set the waters in commotion, defying wind and tide.

Mr. Aspinall had engaged a boat to be in readiness. The sightless athlete was rowed a short distance from curious spectators on the pier, and then, his face being turned towards Birkenhead, he plunged into the swelling river, which he breasted like a Triton, so welcome and native seemed the element to him. And as the salt wave buoyed him up, or dashed over his cropped head, he appeared to gain fresh strength with every stroke.

Anxiously his three attendants followed in his wake, lest cramp should seize him, or his impaired strength give out before the river—there rather more than a mile in breadth—could be crossed. Yet not a yard of the distance bated he.

By instruction he had bent his course slightly down stream, so as to meet the opposing tide, then rolling in with a freshet. He struck out boldly, the very dash of the salt waves invigorating him as they broke over his bare poll, or laved his naked limbs. Still well in advance of the boat, he seemed at last to cross the current as a conqueror. He touched the shore at Rockferry, and—miracle of miracles!—his eyes were opened. Laurence Aspinall, who for weeks had cursed his darkened existence, could once more see!

CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIRST.[21]

CORONATION-DAY.

Misfortune binds closer than prosperity. The calamity which tied Laurence Aspinall down in a strait-waistcoat to a bed of fever, with shaven head and sightless eyes, touched the Ashtons in a tender point. Themselves the parents of an only child, the very crown and glory of their lives, their sympathies went forth to Mr. Aspinall, in spite of his haughty assumption. Indeed, distress brought him down to the common level of humanity; and having neither sister, aunt, nor cousin to undertake the care of his sick son for love, and not for fee, he learned the comparative powerlessness of wealth, and hailed with all the gratitude in his nature the occasional visits of Mrs. Ashton, in whose stately bearing, no doubt, he recognised a sort of kinship.

It was, however, not Mrs. Ashton the business woman, not Mrs. Ashton the lofty lady, but Mrs. Ashton the mother who laid her cool hand on the young man’s fevered forehead, questioned the nurses, made suggestions for the benefit of the invalid, and by means of a “Ladies’ Free Registry” in Chapel Walk, found a staid woman of experience to act as housekeeper, and bring the disorganised household into order without treading on the toes of attached but incapable Kitty.