Part 24

Mrs. Ashton would not hear of it. Just then little Sim came back with Joe—his most particular friend, to whom he was chief patron—a drivelling idiot, a man in frame, a child in heart and brain. He was a pitiable object, the scoff of the rabble, but he had sense enough to know his protectors. At the instance of the four-years-old child, he shouldered the box with a vacant chuckle; and Sim, loaded with an oval pasteboard bandbox half as big as himself, waddled after him as fast as his deformity would permit.

Before the travellers could reach the top of the avenue Jabez Clegg was with them, the other trunk upon his shoulder. He had heard at the “White Hart” of their arrival, and had almost sacrificed the dignity of his position in _his_ desire to run.

There were more greetings, accompanied by a cordial shaking of hands; and Bess and Simon looked on with pleasure, not unmixed with pain, that the foundling they had adopted and reared had mounted far above their heads, albeit in rising he had drawn them up too.

He breakfasted not with them in the house-place, but with the new-comers in the parlour; and Bess herself waited upon them, Meg, her little maid, being off in the harvest field gleaning for a bed-ridden mother.

She heard him conversing freely, if deferentially, with the lofty Mrs. Ashton on topics and in a language her provincial tongue could never compass. She saw him turn to answer the arch sallies of Miss Ashton, and the quieter observations of Miss Chadwick, and noted that the dark eyes of the latter kindled when he spoke, and her cheeks had a warmer glow, as if they caught their hue from the flushed face of Jabez.

Breakfast over—little Sim had sat on the door-step to share his with Crazy Joe,—whilst Ellen and Augusta retired to unpack. Mrs. Ashton graciously accepted the escort of Mr. Clegg to the mill, and they trod the avenue and the high-road side by side, discussing business matters, her dignity losing no whit by the companionship. Mrs. Ashton was one of those who can lift up without stooping.

Clouds never lingered on Augusta’s face; she had been transported thither, as she said, “with no more ceremony than a bale of twist,” but she put off her displeasure with her travelling bonnet, and danced into the kitchen airily as a sylph, to help Bess out of the quandary caused by their advent.

“I am afraid our arrival has been very inauspicious,” Augusta said, “but I can assure you I was not consulted, and am not to blame” (she had certainly not been consulted—blame was another matter). “And now what can I do for you, Mrs. Hulme?”

Augusta tucked up the sleeves of her peach-coloured gingham dress, borrowed a linen apron from Bess, who confessed to being “rayther a heavy hond at paste,” and soon the matron was at ease respecting pies, and tarts, and custards. Simon Clegg brought in a dish of trout fresh from the stream; the larder supplied savoury ham and eggs, the garden furnished peas; so Mrs. Ashton was not far wrong.

It was but a spurt on Augusta’s part; her tender impressionable heart had melted at Mrs. Hulme’s first look of dismay, but, the impulse over, there was no more tucking up of sleeves or handling of paste pins. Fortunately for their digestion, Ellen Chadwick had no less skill, since, quiet as she was, she seemed to lack an outlet for superabundant energy, and, obtrusively restless, helped Bess she hardly knew how, or how much.

Augusta wandered about cottage and garden, or sat for hours under the shade of the great sycamore tree, singing low-voiced plaintive ditties; feeling herself the most ill-used and wretched being in existence, separated from her adorable lover; and the more she brooded, the more discontented and melancholy she became. It was all very real and very much to be deplored. No knife cuts so keenly at the heart-strings as the sharp edge of a first love turned in upon itself; and Augusta was as much in love as ever was maiden of seventeen.

Mrs. Ashton went daily to the mill, but a casual remark of Mrs. Hulme’s on “Miss Ashton’s mopin’ an’ malancholy” aroused the attention of the energetic mother, and she did her best to counteract morbid fancies with long sharp walks in the early morning (extending, on one occasion, as far as Shawcross Hall, where she astonished her relatives by an informal visit), and a repetition of the dose in the evening, when Mr. Clegg made one of the party, thus unconsciously adding fuel to the fires which, unknown to her, consumed alike her niece and her warehouseman.

At the end of ten days, Mrs. Ashton returned to Manchester, leaving the girls behind. She had extorted a promise from Augusta that she would not write to Mr. Laurence Aspinall, and relied on that promise being faithfully kept. Moreover, after some debate with herself, as they walked from the mill together on the last afternoon of her stay, she committed her daughter and niece to Jabez Clegg’s care.

“You are a very young man for so important a charge,” she said, “but you are steady as old Time, and of your integrity and fidelity we have had many proofs. Miss Ashton’s health demands a prolonged stay on this breezy hill-side, but I fear she feels it dull after Manchester. If you will endeavour to amuse her when you see her drooping, I shall consider myself your debtor, sir; and should anything _unusual_ attract your notice, I depend on your calling our attention to it.”

“I feel honoured by the trust you repose in me, madam,” replied he, a grave consciousness of his own danger stirring at his heart; “you may depend on my watchfulness over Miss Ashton and her cousin.”

But of any danger to Miss Ashton beyond that arising from a sensitively delicate frame, which might need the sudden summons of Dr. Hull to allay the fears of parents anxious for their only child, he had no suspicion or perception. He had no more clue to Mrs. Ashton’s hidden meaning than she to his secret emotions. It had been wiser to have been more explicit. Without that charge he might have made it a point of honour, if not of duty, to hold aloof from the young ladies lest he should be obtrusive: as it was, the more he pondered, the more he became satisfied that it was only a delicate way of giving sanction to a companionship he might otherwise have regarded as presumptuous.

Accordingly, he constituted himself their cavalier after business hours, fulfilling to the letter his instructions to endeavour to amuse Augusta whenever he found her drooping, well rewarded if he could win back a smile or a peal of the rippling laughter he had heard so oft in her school-girl days. His attentions to Miss Chadwick were tinctured with the profoundest respect, but there was no effort to entertain or be agreeable; on the contrary, it was Miss Chadwick who kept the light shafts of her cousin’s wit within bounds when they were likely to wound—as they did sometimes.

The White Hart, to Sim’s disquiet, would have suffered long from dearth of herbage, had not thunderous clouds emptied their reservoirs amongst the hills, until brooks became rivers, and roads almost impassable. Then Jabez resumed his brush, Sim clapped his thin little hands with delight, whilst the sedate young lady of twenty-four, and the bewitching damsel of sweet seventeen, varied the monotony of piano, book, or embroidery-frame, with an occasional criticism of his work.

It was a time fraught with intoxicating delight, but of terrible temptation to Jabez. The frequent fits of langour which bowed Augusta down like a drooping lily, made her only more dangerously dear to him, and it needed all his strength to remember that she was his master’s daughter, and confided to his care. If he now thought of Laurence Aspinall and his fascination, it was only as a butterfly beau, for whom no sensible maiden could entertain a permanent liking. Not even when, turning back one forenoon for something in the closet which he had forgotten, he found her in tears on the low ledge of the open window at the foot of the staircase.

“Good heaven, Miss Ashton, what is the matter? Are you ill? Is anything troubling you?”

“Nothing,” sobbed she, the clear drops falling faster.

“Nothing! oh, Miss Ashton, this cannot be for nothing,” and he sat down on the window-ledge beside her, not daring so much as to touch her hand, his own were in such a quiver.

“Miss Ashton—Augusta—you told me your troubles when you were a school-girl, am I less worthy your confidence now? Can I do anything to serve you? I would lay my life down to save you from pain;” and the earnest tenderness of his voice spoke volumes.

She had subdued her emotion. Gathering herself up with a reflex of her mother’s stateliness, she said haughtily, “It is nothing, sir, I am better,” and swept past him up the staircase, leaving him to set his teeth and turn away with clenched hands, alike exasperated at his own loss of self-command and grieved for her grief.

On the narrow landing which ran parallel with the staircase like a balcony, Augusta found her cousin Ellen, with one hand on her side, leaning against the chamber door-post, as if for support, with closed eyes and pale lips. She had been “overcome by the heat”—so she said.

CHAPTER THE THIRTY-SIXTH.

THE LOVERs’ WALK.

Jabez held a responsible post, and had no more leisure than other business men for emotional indulgence. He hurried out of the cottage, and down the avenue, shutting up his bitter feelings within the doors of his heart as he went. But the process closed his eyes and ears to external sounds, and the old postman, with his long tin horn, which had been echoing through the straggling village a full quarter of an hour, passed him in the avenue and said, “Good-day,” without so much as arresting his attention.

At the mill he found letters waiting—one, which had been post-paid as a double letter, conspicuous amongst the wafered business communications, not only because of its thick, gilt-edged paper, and crimson disk of crested wax, but from its curious folding, as if to baffle prying eyes.

It was signed “Ben Travis,” and was so long, it went into a pantaloon pocket, to be read when his multifarious duties allowed him more leisure.

When the hands were dismissed at noon, and the one clerk had left the counting-house, he took out the voluminous epistle, which was dated September 10th, and certainly found therein matter of interest. Amongst a few preliminary items of news, he learned that the excesses of the Coronation night had created so much disgust in the minds of thinking men that many of those who had denounced Henry Hunt’s advocacy of abstinence, and at the public expense had formerly disseminated printed laudations of good brown ale, the “old English beverage,” as “a cheering and strengthening drink,” no longer branded the water-drinkers as “enemies to the corporeal constitution of Englishmen,” but had given their countenance to social gatherings whence intoxicating liquors were excluded. Travis himself was doing what he could to promote these temperate meetings, and looked for the earnest co-operation of Mr. Clegg on his return to Manchester. (And he did not look in vain; though neither of the young social reformers saw in advance how universal would become the temperance movement of which this was the unpretending precursor).

The letter went on to say—

“Miss Chadwick and her fair cousin were spirited away mysteriously. At first I blamed myself as the unhappy cause. I have since discovered my mistake, through a quarrel between Mr. Walmsley and Mr. Laurence Aspinall, when both were slaves to Bacchus—_In vino veritas!_ I suppose you know that Mr. Aspinall the elder is a martyr to the gout, and has been driven by his enemy to the Buxton baths. The cause, I have heard, was a gentlemanly debauch in a fit of passion or wounded pride. His son joins him to-day. I scarcely think he will call on your young ladies after what has occurred.”

“What has occurred?” repeated Jabez, “what can he mean by that? I wish correspondents would be more explicit!”

He pondered over this sentence, but could make nothing of it, and after reading a little way, came to the real object of the letter, prefaced as it was with much circumlocution.

“It may seem strange that a great, big, burly fellow like myself should be such a booby as to seek the intervention of a third person in an affair of the heart. Yet, if I have any insight into your nature, I think I may confide in you, and depend on your good offices. After so many months’ dangling and craven hesitation, I summoned up courage to make my pretensions known to Miss Chadwick. I know I did it clumsily and ungracefully; the very strength of my passion fettered my tongue. I shall never forget the pitiful look of the sweet girl as she burst into tears, assured me of her esteem, but declined my suit. Her tears unnerved me, and I had not power to plead my own cause. Do not despise me, Clegg; neither Samson nor Hercules was any stronger. I cannot resign myself to that verdict. I would throw myself again at Ellen’s feet, and beseech her pity, but that I dread its repetition. Can I count on your good offices to move her in my behalf? I know the value Miss Chadwick sets on your opinion, and how highly she esteems you, or I should not think of asking this. The trust I repose in you is the best proof I can give of friendship. Do not hesitate to tell me the worst. I trust I am brave enough to bear my fate—when I know it. Mrs. Chadwick does not believe her daughter’s decision final.”

This was a disquieting letter. Mr. Travis had been his firm, true friend, in spite of difference in position and fortune. He had overlooked that difference from the first, but would Miss Chadwick, his employer’s niece, overlook it, if he stepped beyond privileged bounds? From the depths of his own conscious heart he felt for his friend, but how to approach so delicate a subject to serve him was perplexing. He never thought of shirking the trust.

It was late when he got home to dinner. Ellen and Bess were both on the look-out for him. He quickened his pace, fearing some evil to his beloved Augusta, whom he had last seen in tears.

“What an anomaly is woman!” he thought, as he found her fingers rattling over the keys of her piano in accompaniment to the merriest ditty he had heard from her lips since she was a child.

There was a strange sparkle in her eyes, a vivacity in her manner so opposed to her sadness that he asked himself if he had been dreaming before, or was dreaming then. She blushed over her willow-pattern plate as she took her seat, but, after that first token of susceptibility, chatted with a volubility unusual to her, and curiously in contradiction to the silence and reserve of Ellen Chadwick. In the morning he had debated whether that secret trouble came within the category of “unusual” things Mrs. Ashton required to be informed of, and, behold! it was gone!

She rallied both Jabez and Ellen on their gravity, and at length, as if on a sudden inspiration, asked, playing with her green-handled, two-pronged fork—

“Shall you be very busy at the mill this afternoon, Mr. Clegg?”

It was an unusual question. He answered—

“Rather. Some bales of twist have come in from Messrs. Evans, of Darley-Abbey Mills. I must see them unpacked, and compare the twist with samples. But—your motive for asking?”

“Oh, if you are busy—— Well, perhaps after tea will be better; it will be cooler. I wish you would just take Ellen a good long walk; I found her fainting with the heat this morning.”

Ellen coloured vividly.

“Augusta!” she remonstrated.

“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.