Part 5

Joshua Brookes, at odds with his clerical brethren, with his pupils, and half the world besides, was on good terms with Mrs. Clowes. Rough, prompt, and uncompromising was she; rough, irritable and unmannerly was he; both unpromising hard-husked nuts, with sweet and tender kernels. So rough, few ever suspected the soft heart; yet the woman who fed the poor before herself, and the learned clergyman who had a fancy for pigeons, and who cherished the drunken and abusive old crippled shoemaker, his father, to the last, must have intuitively known the inner life of each other.

The day following Augusta Ashton’s christening, it fell within the round of the Reverend Joshua’s duty to read the burial service over a dead townswoman in the churchyard. And now occurred one of those incidents in which the ludicrous and the profane blended, and brought impulsive Joshua into disfavour. As was not unfrequently the case, he broke off in the midst of the service, left the mourners and the coffin beside the open grave, threw his legs over the low wall, and, mounting the steps into the confectioner’s shop, said,

“Here, quick, dame! Give me some horehound drops for my cough.”

On his entrance Mrs. Clowes broke off a narrative over which she and her shopwoman were laughing heartily, in order to reach the required drops, which went into a paper without weighing, and for which no payment was tendered. Back he strode over the church wall to resume the interrupted ceremonial.

It must here be observed that Joshua had remarkably shaggy eyebrows, overhanging his quick eyes like pent-houses, and that it was the wont of the schoolboys and others to annoy him by drawing their fingers significantly over their own. A young sweep sat upon the church wall to witness the funeral, and—young imp of Satan that he was!—he could not forbear drawing a thumb and forefinger over each brow, full in Joshua’s sight, just as he reached the passage—“I heard a voice from heaven saying——”

The shaggy eyebrows contracted; he roared out—

“Knock that little black rascal off the church wall!”

The mischievous little blackamoor was off, with a beadle after him; and the eccentric chaplain, whom no sense of irreverence seemed to strike, concluded the ceremony with no further interruption.

At its close, Mr. Aspinall and another mourner took the clergyman to task for his disrespect to the remains of the deceased Mrs. Aspinall, whose obsequies had been so irregularly performed. They said nothing of disrespect to the Divinity profaned; their own feelings and importance had been outraged, and they forgot all else even by the dust and ashes in the gaping grave; and little Laurence, cloaked and hooded, forgot his grief in watching the chase after the sweep.

“How dare you, sir, give way to these indecencies at the funeral of my wife? It has been most indecorous and insulting, both to the dead and her afflicted relatives.”

“She’s had Christian burial, hasn’t she?” gruffly interrogated Joshua.

“Hardly,” was the hesitating answer.

“She’s been laid in consecrated ground, and I’ve read the burial service over her; what more would you have? Some folk are never satisfied.”

Emptying half his horehound drops into the hand of Master Laurence, Joshua turned on his heel, went to the chapter-house to disrobe, and then back over the wall to Mrs. Clowes.

“I say, dame, you were not at church on Sunday.”

“No, Parson Brookes; I was in Liverpool.”

“Oh!” grunted he, “in Liverpool. Sugar-buying, I suppose?”

“Yea; an’ a fine joke I’ve had.”

Joshua pricked up his ears: he did not object to a little fun.

“You mun know I thought I’d give Branker, the new sugar-brokers, a trial, an’ I went there and asked to see samples; but the young whipper-snapper of a salesman looked at me from top to toe, an’ I suppose, reckoned up the value of my old black bonnet, my kerchief an’ mutch, an’ my old stuff dress, and fancied my pocket must match my gown, for he was barely civil, and didn’t seem to care for the trouble o’ showin’ th’ samples. So I bade my young man good day, and said I’d call again.”

“And didn’t, I suppose. Just like a woman,” put in Joshua.

“Oh, yea, I did. I borrowed my landlady’s silk gown and fine satin bonnet, and put on my lady’s manners; and then Mr. Whipper-snapper could show his samples, and _his_ best manners too. But when I gave my orders by tons, and not hundredweights, he looked at me, and looked again, as if he thought I’d escaped from a madhouse; an’ at last he began to h’m an’ ah, an’ talk of large orders, an’ cash payment, an’ references; an’ I told him to make out th’ invoice and bring it. An’ when I pulled out this old leather pocket-book, and counted the bank-notes to pay him down on the nail, good gracious! how the fellow stared! I reckon I’ll not need to borrow a silk dress when I give my next order. It was as good as a play.”

“Um! You women-folk think yourselves wonderfully clever. But come, I can’t waste my time here.” (Joshua had heard all he went for.) “Give me quarter-a-pound of humbugs; I threw half the other things away,” said he.

“I don’t think it’s much you’ll throw away, Jotty,” replied the old confectioner, with independent familiarity, as she weighed and parcelled the sweets, for which this time he put down the money.

“It’s much you know about it, Mother Clowes,” he jerked out, as if throwing the words at her over his shoulder, as he turned to leave the shop, putting the package in one of the large pockets of his long flap waistcoat as he went.

His own house, not more than three hundred yards away, adjoined the Grammar School; a red-brick building, with stone quoins, now darkened by time and smoke, one gable of which overhung the Irk; the other, pierced for four small-paned windows, almost confronting the antique Sun Inn, at the acute angle of Long Millgate, and quite overlooking an open space, flanked by the main entrance to the College. From this, the east wing of the College, it is separated by a plain iron gateway and palisades on the Millgate side, and by a wall which serves as a screen from the river on the other side; and the enclosed space between rails, wall, College, and the front of the school served as a playground for such scholars as were willing to keep within bounds. It was divided into upper, middle, and lower schools, the last being in the basement, and designed for elementary instruction. The high and middle schools together occupied the same long room above this. Joshua Brookes, as second master, presided over the middle school, and surely never M.A. had so thankless an office. He was placed at a terrible disadvantage in the school, not altogether because he had risen from its lowest ranks—not altogether because a drunken foul-mouthed cripple interfered with their sports, or went reeling to his son’s domicile next door—not because he was unduly severe; other masters were that—but because his own eager thirst for knowledge as a boy had made him intolerant towards indolence, incredulous of incapacity; and his constitutional impatience and irritability made his harsh voice seem harsher when he reproved a dullard. He lost his self-command, and with that went his command over others. Meaning to be affable to the poor, from whose ranks he sprang, he became familiar; and they reciprocated the familiarity so fully as to draw down the contempt of his _confreres_. He was a man to be respected, and they slighted him; a man to be honoured, and they snubbed him. What wonder, then, that eccentricities grew like barnacles on a ship’s keel, or that the boys failed in obedience and respect to a master when their elders set them the example?

This defence of a misunderstood man has not taken up a tithe of the time he gave to his refractory class, to whom he went straightway from the confectioner’s, whose “humbugs” had melted considerably, not wholly down his own throat, before the hour when the boys closed their Latin Grammars and Greek Lexicons, and poured as if they were mad down the steps, and through the gate, to the road. Yet even the sweets he gave to the attentive did not conciliate; they only made the intractable more defiant; and even the recipients felt they were bribed.

Warned by the uproar of a large school in motion, as well as by the long-cased clock, Tabitha, his one servant, had her master’s tea ready for him the instant he came in from the school, as he generally did, fagged and jaded, with the growl of a baited bear.

That day he simply put his head into the house, and bawled, “Tea ready, Tab?” and without waiting for an answer, went on, “Keep it hot till I get back;” then, closing the door, took his way eastwards down Long Millgate. His journey was not a long one. It ended at the bottom of a yard where a sad pale-faced young woman was switching monotonously at a mass of downy cotton, and listening at the same time to the equally monotonous drawl of a youngster in the throes of monosyllabic reading.

“Get larning, lad!—get larning! Larning’s a greät thing. Yo’ shan read i’ this big picture-book when you can spell gradely,” had been Simon’s precept and inducement; and Jabez, to whom that big pictorial Bible was a mysterious unexplored crypt, did try with all his little might.

“J-a-c-k—Jack, w-a-s—was, a g-o-o-d—good, b-o——”

“And I hope you’re a good boy, as well as Jack,” said Joshua Brookes abruptly, as he put his head into the room, and put a stop to the lesson at the same time. “But, hey-day” (observing the swollen nose and bruised forehead), “You’re been in the wars. Good boys don’t fight.”

“Then what did Bill Barnes throw stones at ar pussy for? Good boys dunnot hurt kittlins,” said Jabez, nothing daunted.

Bess explained.

“Um!” quoth Joshua, when she had finished, “he’s fond of his kitten, is he?” and drawing Jabez towards him by the shoulder, with one finger uplifted as a caution, he looked down on the shrinking child, and said, impressively—

“Never fight if you can help it, Jabez; but if you fight to save a poor dumb animal from ill-usage, or to protect the weak against the strong, Jotty Brucks is not the man to blame you. Here, lad,” and into the pinafore of Jabez went the remainder of the “humbugs.”

He patted the boy on the head, bade him get on with his reading, he did not know what good fortune might come of it, told him to come regularly to church, to love God and God’s creatures, and went away, leaving Bess to prepare her father’s porridge (tea was from twelve to sixteen shillings a pound, and beyond their reach).

Almost on the threshold he encountered Simon.

“Can’t you keep that young sprig out of mischief? If he begins fighting and quarrelling at six years old, what will he do when he is sixteen?” he cried, gruffly, as he brushed past the tanner, and was far up the yard before the man could think of a reply.

A couple of young pigeons were sent for Jabez about a week after, with a large bag of stale cakes and bread to feed them with. The name of the sender was unknown, but anyone acquainted with the habits of Joshua Brookes (who contracted for Mrs. Clowes’s waste pastry, to fill the crops of his own feathered colony) would not have been troubled to guess.

Simon stroked his raspy chin, and seemed dubious, cost of keep being a question; but Jabez looked so wistful, his foster-father borrowed tools and answered the appeal by making a triangular cote for them, and Jabez found fresh occupation in their care. Yet occupation was not lacking, young as he was. He could fetch and carry, run short errands, and help Bess to clean. Their living-room no longer waited a week to be swept and dusted, Jabez did it every day, standing on a chair to reach the top of the bureau, where lay the cynosure of his young eyes. He still took his Sunday lessons in field or stream with Simon, and through the week clambered up from monosyllables to dissyllables with Bess.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH.

THE BLUE-COAT SCHOOL.

The children of the poor begin early to earn their bread. Legislature has stepped in to regulate the age and hours for labour in manufacturing districts, and to provide education for the very humblest. Jabez Clegg was not born in these blissful times, and he only narrowly escaped the common lot.

He was not eight years old, yet Simon, on whom war-prices pressed as heavily as on his neighbours, began to discuss with Bess the necessity for sending the lad to Simpson’s factory (where Arkwright’s machinery was first set in motion).

“He mun goo as sune as the new year taks a fair grip,” decided Simon, and 1805 was at its last gasp as he said it.

But the new year brought Jabez a reprieve by the uncourtly hands of Joshua Brookes. Meeting Simon and Jabez at a stall in the Apple-market, where, the better to bargain, he had laid down a pile of old classical school-books (Joshua was a collector of these, which he retailed again to the boys at prices varying with his mood, or his estimate of the purchaser’s pocket), he accosted the former.

“Well, old Leathershanks, what are you going to make of young Cheat-the-fishes there? I suppose he’s to follow your own trade, he began to _tan hides_ so early?” And the glance which shot from under his shaggy brows caused the boy to blush, and shrink behind his protector.

Simon’s eyes twinkled, but he shook his head as he answered:

“Nay, Parson Bruks, we’n thowt o’ sendin’ him t’ th’ cotton fact’ry; but it fair goos agen th’ grain to send th’ little chap through th’ streets to wark Winter an’ Summer, weet or dry, afore th’ sun’s oop an’ abeawt _his_ wark. But we conno’ keep him bout it—toimes are so bad.”

“H’m! Then what a stupid old leather-head you must be not to think of the College, where he’d be kept and fed and clothed and educated!—_educated_, man—do you hear?”

Simon heard, and his eyes again twinkled and winked at the new idea presented to him.

“And apprenticed!” he echoed, with a long-drawn, gasping breath.

“Ay, and apprenticed.”

The parson, cramming his pockets with apples, for which he had higgled with much persistence, handed one to Jabez with the question—

“How would you like to be a College boy, Jabez, and wear a long blue coat, like that fellow yonder” (pointing to a boy then crossing the market on an errand), “and learn to write and cipher, as well as to read?”

“If you please’n, aw’d loike it moore nor eawt.” And his animated face was a clearer answer than his words.

Joshua then read the lad a brief homily to the effect that only good and honourable boys could find admission, winding up with—

“If you’re a _very_ good lad, I’ll see what can be done for you.”

He interrupted thanks with—

“Easter’s very near, Sim, so you’ll have to stir your stumps to prove that our _honourable_ young friend came honourably into the world. I’ll get the forms and fill them up for you, and his baptismal register too.”

He snatched up his books and was off, the tassel of his collegiate cap and the cassock he wore flying loose as he hurried away muttering to himself—

“What an old fool I am to bother about the lad! I daresay he’ll turn round and sting me in the end, like the rest of the snakes I have warmed. As great an idiot as old dame Clowes!”

Chetham’s College, or Hospital, is a long, low, ancient stone edifice, built on the rock above the mouth of the Irk, with two arms of unequal length, stretching towards church and town, and embracing a large quadrangle used as a playground, which has for its fourth and southern boundary a good, useful garden.

It is needless to grope upward from the time when the Saxon Theyn built a fortified residence on its site; sufficient for us that Thomas de la Warr, youngest son of the feudal baron of Manchester, was brought up to the Church, and in the fourteenth century inducted into the Rectory of Manchester, his father being patron. His elder brother dying at the close of the century, the rector (a pious Churchman) became baron. And then he put his power and wealth to sacerdotal uses. He petitioned the king, obtained a grant to collegiate Christ Church, erected the College, endowed it with lands; and here at his death the Warden of the Collegiate Church had his residence. Of these wardens, the celebrated Dr. Dee, whose explorations into alchemy and other occult sciences brought him into trouble with Queen Elizabeth, was one; and Dr. Dee’s room is still extant—in occupation of the governor.

In 1580, at Crumpsall Hall, Humphrey Chetham was born; and he, a prosperous dealer in fustians, never marrying, at his own expense fed and clothed a number of poor boys; and, by his will, not only bequeathed a large sum of money to be expended in the foundation and endowment of a hospital for the maintenance, education, and apprenticing of forty poor boys for ever, but one thousand pounds to be expended in a library, free to the public—_the first free library in Britain_.

The estate was vested in feoffees, and with them lay the power alike to elect boys and officials. From the townships of Manchester, Droylsden, Crumpsall, Bolton-le-Moors, and Turton, the boys were to be elected between the ages of six and ten, and were required to be of honest, industrious parents, and neither illegitimate nor diseased; and baptismal registers had to be produced. They had to be well maintained, well trained, and carefully apprenticed at fourteen, a fee of four pounds (a large sum in Humphrey Chetham’s time) being given with them. The churchwardens and overseers were to prepare lists of boys, doubling the number of vacancies, stating their respective claims, which lists they had to sign.

Easter Monday was the period for election, after which the feoffees dined together in Dr. Dee’s quaintly-carved room.

Joshua Brooks was as good as his word. He procured a blank form from the governor, and, Simon being no great scholar, filled it in for him. He found him the baptismal register without charging the regulation shilling, got the name of Jabez inserted in the churchwardens’ list, and such influence as he had with the feoffees he exerted to the utmost, for the case was one involving doubt and difficulty.

Nor had Simon Clegg been idle. He and his crony Matthew scoured Smedley and Crumpsall, and more successful than in their quest for Tom Hulme, discovered the nurse who presided at the birth of Jabez. Her testimony, so far as it went, was important. He had interested both Mr. and Mrs. Clough in the election of the foundling, and where the influence of the gentleman failed, that of the lady prevailed; so that when the important Easter Monday arrived, two-thirds of the feoffees were fully acquainted with his peculiar case, and more or less impressed in his favour.

It was on the 18th of April, bright, sunny, joyous. Compared with its present proportions, Manchester, then was but as a cameo brooch on a mantle of green; and that green was already starred with daisies, buttercups, primroses, and cowslips. By wells and brooks, daffodil and jonquil hung their heads and breathed out perfume. Bush and tree put out pale buds and fans of promise. The tit-lark sang, the cuckoo—to use a village phrase—had “eaten up the mud;” and the town was alive with holiday-makers from all the country round about.

It was the great College anniversary, not only election day, but one set apart for friends to visit Blue-coat boys already on the foundation, and for the curious public to inspect the Chetham Museum.

The main entrance in Millgate (said to be arched with the jaw-bone of a whale) and the smaller gate on Hunt’s Bank, were both thrown open. A stream of people of all grades, in festival array, poured in and out, and College cap and gown seemed to be ubiquitous.

The pale, sad widow or widower, holding an orphan boy by the trembling hand, the uncle or next of kin to the doubly-orphaned candidate were there, standing in a long line ranged against the building, and representing hopes and fears and eventualities little heeded by the shifting stream of gazers.

For the previous week Mrs. Clowes and her assistants had been working night and day: her shop was in a stage of siege. Every boy, and every boy’s friend, seemed to have pocket-money to spend, and to want to spend it over her counter. Then it was the great wedding-day of the year, and the churchyard swarmed like a hive; from every one of the many public-houses round College and Church, music and mirth, clattering feet, and loud-voiced laughter issued. “The Apple Tree,” “The Pack Horse,” “The Ring o’ Bells,” “The Blackamoor’s Head,” were filled to repletion with wedding guests; whilst “The College Inn,” and the old “Sun Inn,” held a less boisterous quota of the Collegians’ friends and relatives.

On those wet days when outdoor play was impossible, the boys, besides darning their stockings, occupied their spare hours in carving spoons and apple-scrapers out of bone, in working balls and pincushions with coloured worsted in fanciful devices, and a stitch locally known as “colleging:” and with these, on Easter Monday and at Whitsuntide, they reaped a harvest of pocket-money, having liberty to offer them for sale. And when it is remembered that our notable female ancestors, poor and rich, wore indoors a pincushion and sheathed scissors suspended at their sides, it is not to be wondered that these found ready purchasers as memorials of the visit.

But in that College Yard were anxious and expectant as well as buoyant faces. And there in that line, waiting to be called when their turn came, stood Jabez between Simon Clegg and Bess, with Matthew and the nurse on either hand. And ever and anon their eyes went up to the oriel window which faced the main entrance, for in the room it lighted the arbiters of the boy’s destiny sat in judgment on some other orphan’s claim. At length the summons came for “Jabez Clegg.”

With palpitating hearts—for any body of men with irresponsible powers is an awful tribunal—they passed under the arched portal at the western angle of the building, following their guide past the doors of the great kitchen on the right hand, and Dr. Dee’s room and the boys’ refectory on the left, up the wide stone staircase, with its massive carved oak balusters, along the gallery, at once library and museum, where gaping holiday-folk followed a Blue-coat cicerone past shelves and glass cases, and compartments separated for readers’ quiet study by carven book-shelf screens, hearing but heeding little of the parrot-roll the boys checked off: “Here’s Oliver Crummle’s sword; theer’s a loadstone; theer’s a hairy mon; theer’s the skeleton of a mon;” and so forth, but following their own guide to the nail-studded oaken door of the feoffees’ room—that door which might open to hope, only to close on disappointment.

The feoffees’ room—now the reading-room of the library—deserves more than a passing notice. It is a large, square, antique chamber, with a deeply recessed oriel window, opposite the door, containing a table and seats for readers. There are carved oak buffets of ancient date, ponderous chairs, and still more ponderous tables, one of which is said to contain as many pieces as there are days in the year. Dingy-looking portraits of eminent Lancashire divines stare at you from the walls; but the left-hand wall contains alone the benevolent presentment of Humphrey Chetham, the large-hearted clear-headed founder. Its place is over the wide chimney-piece, which holds an ample grate; and on either hand it is flanked by the carved effigy of a bird, the one a pelican feeding its young brood with its own blood, the other a cock, which is said (and truly) to crow when it smells roast beef.

But we smell the feoffees’ dinner, and must not delay the progress of Jabez and his friends. A large body of feoffees were present, many in the uniforms of their special volunteer regiments.

“So this is the little fellow who was picked up asleep in a cradle during the flood of August, 1799,” observed rather than inquired one of the gentlemen, who appeared as spokesman.