IT was fortunate for Jabez that the late rains had raised the level of the Irk: otherwise, that being the shallowest part of the stream, there would not have been sufficient depth of water to buoy him up when he was pitched over the wall; and had his head come in contact with rock or stone, falling from such an elevation, his history would have closed with the last chapter. It was doubly fortunate that sensible Simon had taught him that without which no boy’s education—nor, indeed, any girl’s either—is complete, and that Jabez, from very love of the water, had kept himself in practice whenever a holiday had given him opportunity.
He had gone over the wall backwards, falling into the stream head downwards, but not altogether unprepared; and to him head first, heels first, forward or backward, were all as one. Like a cork he rose, and struck out across the river. The slimy stone embankment seemed to slip from his touch; there was no hold for his hand; it was too steep and smooth to climb; and he felt that the river, swift in its fulness, was bent on bearing him to the Irwell, so dangerously near.
He raised his voice for “help.” Tabitha, listening, answered with a scream and a shout, and, bolting into the house, disturbed the Parson and his besotted father at their tea by the outcry she made, as she rushed on into the street with the alarm of “a lad dreawndin,” just as the conscious culprits slunk past to their own quarters.
Doctor Stone, the first recipient of terrified Kit Townley’s incoherent intelligence, was simultaneously racing at full speed, with a troop of College boys at his heels, down towards Hunt’s Bank and the outlet of the Irk, with the swift consciousness that the only hope of saving life was in the chance of reaching the confluence of the rivers first. He thought the dusk never came down so rapidly. A lamplighter, with ladder and flaring long-spouted oil-can light, was going his rounds.
“Turn back, my man, with ladder and light,” he called out, without stopping; and the man, seeing something unusual was astir or amiss, followed at a canter without question.
At Irk Bridge the librarian took the light from the man, and swung it to cast its reflection over the Irwell; but nothing was to be seen or heard but the full river, and the wash of its waters. To cross the bridge, in fear that the boy was beyond help, was but the work of a moment.
Slower, along the wooden railing of the Irk embankment, he held the lamp low. There was neither eddy or bubble on the water to tell where a drowning mortal had gone down.
“Jabez! Jabez Clegg!” he cried, but there was no response. Again and again he raised his voice—“Jabez! Jabez!” The only answer was from an advancing crowd, with Parson Brookes and Tabitha in their midst, who had rushed to the rescue with ropes and poles down the bridge at Mill Brow.
“I fear it’s no use, Parson Brookes,” said the librarian sadly; “the river’s high, and poor Jabez may have been drifting past Stannyhurst before we were out of the College Yard.”
“Jabez!” exclaimed Joshua aghast, “you cannot mean that Jabez Clegg is the boy drowned!” and he staggered as if some one had struck him.
“Indeed, Parson, if this boy speaks truth, I fear it is so,” and he turned to question his informant; but Kit Townley, seeing his impulsive schoolmaster approach, had edged away, and was gone.
Gruff Joshua drew the back of his hand across his shaggy brows.
“And so the greedy river has swallowed the bright lad at last! He was a boy of promise, Dr. Stone, and his untimely fate is a—a—trouble to me;” and the rough Parson’s harsh voice shook with emotion. “I baptised him, Doctor, and I hoped to see him grow up a credit to us all.”
They, and the dispersing crowd, seeing the uselessness of longer stay, were moving on towards Mill Brow as he spoke.
“Who’s this?” he cried as they neared the bridge, and a working woman, her hair flying loose from the kerchief on her head, rushed across it with an impetus gained in the steep descent.
It was Bess, with Simon at her heels, close as his stiff rheumatic limbs would carry him. She wrung her hands bitterly.
“Is it true?” she cried in anguish, “is it true? Oh, Parson Brucks, is it true that ar Jabez is dreawnded?”
There was the same choking in his voice as he answered—
“I’m afraid so, Bess.”
Simon’s voice now broke in.
“But are yo’ sartain, Parson? Ar Jabez couldn swim loike a duck. An’ how cam he i’ th’ wayther, aw shouldn loike to know?”
“Swim, did you say?” interrogated Dr. Stone. “Then there may be hope yet. If the eddies would not let him land at Waterworth Field, he might swim ashore at Stannyhurst.”
“Pray God it be so!” ejaculated Bess, from a full heart.
Dr. Stone, hurrying forward, continued:
“Follow me to the College for lanterns to renew the search.” And no second invitation was needed.
And where was Jabez? He heard Tabitha’s cry, but it came from the wrong side, and he had sense to know was useless to save, unless he could withstand the current till help came round. But the strong stream was bearing him on against his will. Suddenly he bethought him of the dairy steps, and, with a stroke of his left arm, swerved towards the hoary building looming through the twilight. One moment later, and the steps had been passed, not to be recovered, for the current was stronger than he; but that providentially abrupt turn, and a few skilful strokes, brought him upon them. Literally upon them, for the water was within a step or two of the door. With difficulty he obtained a footing, they were so slippery. Once above the water, he hammered at the door and called, but his voice was weakened by exertion and the shivering consequent on cold, wet, clinging garments. Again and again he knocked and called, but everyone was out in the quadrangle, or away in search of him, and no one heard.
He had been excited and over-heated in his prolonged struggle with his persecutors, and, short as was the distance he swam, his efforts to stem the overmastering current had exhausted him. Cold and exposure did the rest. He sank on the topmost step with his head against the door, in the angle it formed with the wall, his feet in the water; and there he lay, too faint to respond when Dr. Stone’s voice fell on his ear as on that of a dreamer. His dark robe, his position, the jutting wall—all contributed to hide him from the poor rays of the one oil-lamp which was flashed along the stream to find him.
And there he might have lain and died had not Nancy, for lack of a boy at hand to wait on her, gone down to the cellar for milk for the boys’ supper. As she filled the wooden piggin she had taken with her, she fancied she heard a moan, and listening breathless, heard another, and another, from the outside of a door which was (to her thought) inaccessible to mortal.
Down went the piggin and the milk (she was not a strong-minded woman, and it was a superstitious age), up the steps she stumbled in her fright, crying—
“Oh! theer’s a boggart in th’ dairy!—theer’s a boggart!”
Dr. Stone and his companions came in at the porch as she fled upwards towards the kitchen. The firelight gleaming on her frightened face caught his attention. Half fainting, she repeated her exclamation, adding—
“It moaned like summat wick.”
“Moaned, did you say? Goodness! If it should be——”
Not stopping to finish his sentence, he snatched a light from the table, and was unbolting the cellar-door before the governor or anyone else could comprehend his movements. They understood well enough when he came back into their midst, burdened with the limp, dripping form of Jabez, white and insensible, and depositing him on a settle near the kitchen fire, cried out for restoratives.
That was a terrible next morning, when the young miscreants, as much afraid to play truant as to face possibilities at school, sneaked to their places and set to their studies with industry out of the common. Laurence Aspinall, boarding with a master, had no choice in the matter.
How Jabez got into the water was not clear; he was too ill to be questioned over-night, and was in a fever and delirious by noon the next day. But he had never been known to loiter or go astray when sent on an errand. Kit Townley’s impulsive cry of alarm had suggested foul play, and neither Joshua Brookes nor Governor Terry had let the night pass without an effort to dive into the truth.
Dr. Stone had conjectured Kit Townley to be a Grammar School boy, although personally unknown to him; and that conjecture recalled to Joshua his father’s ravings of ill-usage, which he had at the time regarded as drunken maudling. It was ascertained that the boy had been at Harrop’s. Inquiry, and the search for the missing parcel, resulted in the discovery of a trampled play-ground, broken whiplashes, a string of cob-nuts, and, neatly marked in red cotton with his initials, one of Laurence Aspinall’s cambric ruffles, torn and muddy.
There was a conference with Dr. Jeremiah Smith before the night was out. A messenger was sent to Mr. Aspinall in Cannon Street the next morning, as well as to the trustees of the school.
The following day saw such another conclave as before in the Grammar School. Dr. Stone, who was present, picked out the boy who had given the alarm; and Kit Townley, trembling for himself, told all he knew. Ben Travis, at the outset, in his indignation, proffered his evidence, which went to prove malice prepense.
The boys, asked what they had to say for themselves, simply answered they had done it for “sport”—that they did not mean to throw him over, but only to frighten him to “hold his tongue,” and excused their running home on the plea that they were “afraid.” Laurence Aspinall boldly said that he knew the boy could swim, and did not think a ducking would do him much harm, and offered to jump off the wall and swim down the river himself. Liar as well as boaster, he received a summary check from Dr. Smith, apart from the reprimand administered to him as the proven ring-leader.
In these days such a case of outrage would have been brought before a magistrate, and the offenders’ names sent flying through newspaper paragraphs. Then, whether to spare the parental feelings of such influential men as Mr. Aspinall, or to save from tarnish the fair fame of the school, or to avert the further debasement of the boys from prison contact, and give them a chance to amend, the school tribunal was allowed to be all-sufficient.
Ignominious expulsion was dealt out not only to Laurence Aspinall and to Ned Barret, but to each of the conspirators—Kit Townley, honourably acquitted by them of participation in the final attack, alone escaping with a caution, a severe reprimand, and as severe a flogging; which special immunity he had purchased by running white-faced to give the alarm. It is possible he scarcely estimated the value of that immunity at the time.
But the loud hurrahs which hailed this sentence testified how the Grammar School boys valued their honour as a school, and how proud they were to be purged of such offenders.
Mr. Aspinall, too much agitated to witness his son’s public disgrace, waited the result of the inquiry in the head-master’s house; and if ever Laurence Aspinall felt ashamed of his own misconduct, it was when his father refused to take his unworthy hand as they left the door-step, and he heard Dr. Smith’s closing words of reproof mingled with compassion for the father, in whose eyes were signs of tears a bad son had drawn.
Long before Jabez was able to resume his own place in the school, Laurence Aspinall had been removed to an expensive boarding-school at Everton, near Liverpool; and this time the merchant laid stress on his tendency “for vicious and low pursuits,” and begged that no efforts or expense might be spared to make him a gentleman in all respects. Still he tampered with the truth, lest the school-master (he would be called a Principal in these factitious days) should refuse to admit a pupil with such antecedents, and decline the task of eradicating cruelty and ingratitude.
Here Laurence certainly mixed only with boys of his own class, from whom money could buy neither flattery nor favour, and where only his own merits could procure either. And here we must leave him, to pursue the fortunes of the boy whose life he had wantonly imperilled.
Had anything been wanting to bespeak Joshua Brookes’s good-will, Jabez supplied it when he interfered to protect the elder Brookes from the derisive indignities of others. Not only to Mrs. Clowes did he rehearse in his own peculiar manner the story, as told by Ben Travis, with its supplementary drama which had so nearly proved a tragedy, but at such tables as he frequented—Mr. Chadwick’s among the rest.
Mr. Ashton, who was present, spoke of being himself a witness to the former scene, and, whilst presenting his inevitable snuff-box to the eccentric chaplain, repeated his previous observation—“I must look after that boy—I must indeed.”
If the parson had been commonly observant he would have noticed a pair of black eyes fixed in eager attention on his, as he, who rarely uttered a commendation, held forth in praise of his father’s champion, the Blue-coat boy; the said black eyes being matched by the black hair, and somewhat dark skin, of the plain but intelligent daughter of his host.
But girls of fifteen were then counted in the category of children, and were taught only to “speak when spoken to,” so Ellen Chadwick passed no other commentary on the actions of Jabez than was expressed by her glowing cheeks and eloquent eyes.