TOM HULME was most anxious to get back to Whaley-Bridge and the mill, and motherly Bess was equally uneasy to return to her poor little Sim, afraid lest he should tax his grandfather’s strength over-much, or meet with some fresh accident. Yet more than a week elapsed before her husband was fit to travel, and in the interim Mr. Ashton had himself gone thither to ascertain how the new substitute filled the post.
He was still at Carr Cottage when the “Lord Nelson” stopped at the end of the avenue, and Jabez, with fragile Sim mounted on his shoulder, trotted down to the gate to welcome Bess and her invalid home. They had travelled inside, but John Loudon Mac-Adam had not yet been appointed “Surveyor of Roads,” and Tom Hulme had suffered severely from the jolting of the coach.
Bess clasped her child tenderly, and held him up for his father’s kiss; but she put him down to walk on before them (he could not run), whilst she and Jabez helped the injured corporal to ascend the steep incline. Old Simon, who seemed to have got a new lease of life from the invigorating country air and occupation, had already breakfasted, and was in the bean-field gathering the first ripe pods for a dinner of beans and bacon.
“Eh, Tum, lad!” said he, as he entered the house-place, and saw his son-in-law’s pale face against the blue-and-white check cover of the arm-chair, “whoi, thi feace is as whoite as a clout! Tha’ll noan be fit to wark fur one whoile. Thah’s nobbut fit fur t’ sit under th’ sycymoore tree, an’ look at th’ fleawers, an’ watch me put th’ garden i’ fettle.”
“Just so,” said Mr. Ashton, bringing his pleasant face in at the door; “I think Mr. Clegg will have to do duty for you a while longer. And don’t distress yourself about it, Mr. Hulme, for I fancy a little fresh air will do him no harm this hot weather; he has been overworking lately, and does not look too brisk.”
“You are very kind, sir,” responded Jabez, “but I trust a few days’ rest will set Mr. Hulme on his feet again.” He said nothing of himself.
But Tom Hulme had received unsuspected internal injuries, and many weeks went by before he was stout as before—weeks pregnant with fate for Jabez; and not Jabez alone.
Factory hours were long, but the Summer days were longer, and he was glad after work was over to ramble away through the valley of the Goyt, following the winding of the stream, or over the larch-clad hills above Taxal, whence he would return with the rising moon, bringing pockets full of the crisp-brown fir-cones for Sim to play with. In the pine-woods, alone with nature, he could give vent to his emotions, or indulge in meditation at his will.
Mr. Ashton, however, found him other occupation for his spare hours. The landlord of the “White Hart,” bearing in mind that Mr. Clegg had come under his roof first as a travelling artist, had expatiated to Mr. Ashton with much pathos on the deplorable condition of the inn sign, not without sundry broad hints that Mr. Clegg’s temporary residence on the spot was a glorious opportunity not to be neglected. Mr. Ashton had smiled, said “Just so,” taking a pinch from the immense snuff-box lying on the bar-parlour chimney-piece, then fallen back upon his own, gone away, and forgot the dingy sign altogether, until another hint from his tenant refreshed his memory.
As he stood at the inn door waiting for the Manchester coach, an upward sly glance of the jolly host’s caused him to say to the young man by his side, “Do you think you could manage to paint a new sign for the ‘White Hart,’ to oblige Chapman and me?”
Jabez hesitated, not from unwillingness.
“I’m afraid, sir, to attempt. It’s not in my line, and——”
“Oh! you can do it well enough. Remember the banner.”
“I’ve no materials here, sir, else——”
“If that is all, you shall have them in a day or two.”
In a few days an easel, a new sign-board, and colours were sent by the Manchester and Buxton carrier, and Jabez set to work, to the especial wonder and admiration of little Sim, who delighted to stand by his side, and grew rebellious when “bed-time” was announced. Jabez was, however, but an untaught artist, and his painting hours were few; the couchant hart was rubbed in and wiped out over and over again before he was satisfied even with the outline; but then it grew in fair proportion under his brush, until he felt there was something in him beyond the region of tapes and braces.
The graceful animal, resplendent in golden collar and chain, looked mildly out from the easel in the parlour nearest to the passage (used, when the family was there, as an eating-room), and little Sim gravely reported to his elders it only wanted “gass, an’ tee, an’ ky,” when the inmates of Carr Cottage were startled by the arrival of unexpected visitors.
It was the second week in August; the air was heavy with the perfume of clove carnations, honeysuckle, mignonette, lavender, musk, and mint. Golden sunflower and crimson hollyhock were in their glory; bees and wasps hovered over balsams and china asters, or hid themselves in the blue Canterbury bells or the amber nectary of the stately white lily. Fruits were ripe for the gatherer, grain was falling under the sickle. Bess, in a fair white muslin cap, a large check apron over her dark chocolate-and-white-print gown (her blue bed-gown days were over), was moving quietly about the house-place, preparing their early breakfast, no longer restricted to oatmeal porridge.
Tom, looking worn, but clean and neat as loving hands could make him, leaned back in his soft arm-chair, and watched her with well-satisfied eyes. Little Sim was already in the garden with his grandfather, helping to gather raspberries and currants for preserving.
The tall oak-cased clock struck seven, and then, true to time, the guard’s bugle announced the coming of the coach from Manchester. Instinctively Bess went to the door, as was her wont, when the coach came in. She uttered an exclamation of surprise.
“Eh, Tum! aw declare t’ coach is stoppin’ at ar gate. Happen theer’s a parcel or summat for ar Jabez.”
And off she set past the kitchen window and the farm-yard Gothic doorway, and down the avenue, with the light foot of a younger woman. Before she reached the avenue gate, the stuffy vehicle had yielded up three ladies and two bandboxes, and the guard having unlocked the capacious boot (a kind of closet at the back), dragged thence, with much superfluous puffing and straining, two hair trunks of moderate dimensions. Yes, there stood Mrs. Ashton, grandly calm; bright-haired Augusta, tall, slim, and, it must be added, unamiably silent; and Ellen Chadwick, whose black eyes had an absolute glow of expectancy in their depths. Bess put up her hand in amazement.
“Eh, Mrs. Ashton, madam! yo’ han takken us unawares! an’ theere is na a bit o’ flesh meat i’ th’ heause; an’ th’ butcher’s cart wunna be reawnd agen till Setterday! But awm downreet glad to see yo’ an’ th’ young ladies” (she dropped a respectful curtsey), “an’ a’ lookin’ so weel. Aw wur afeard yo’ wur no’ comin’ this Summer.”
“Never mind the butcher’s meat, Mrs. Hulme; having come to Carr we must do as Carr does; I do not doubt we shall fare very well,” said the stately lady, reassuringly. “I trust we shall find your good husband free from pain, and Mr. Clegg and your family in health.”
Bess thanked Mrs. Ashton for her kind inquiries, but somehow she boggled over the “Mr. Clegg.” She was proud enough of his advancement, but to her he was still “Jabez;” and he did not seek to be otherwise.
There was a difficulty about the luggage, no men being about. By this time old Simon was nearly down the hill, little Sim following at his heels, his face, hands, and pinafore stained with fruit.
“I run for Joe,” cried crippled Sim, as Bess tried the weight of a trunk, and Ellen interposed. Run indeed! It was the very travestie of a run!
“Well, yo’ see as heaw o’ Moore’s folk are eawt i’ th’ fields cuttin’ whoats [oats]. Feyther an’ me con carry one on em atween us. They’re noän so heavy.”
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.