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.
Tom Hulme was slowly recovering, under the care of a Buxton doctor who came thrice a week. He could walk about the garden with a stick, but there was no sending him to the dank cellar for anything. The doctor had ordered him port wine, and Bess, who kept the key, had asked Mr. Clegg to fetch a couple of bottles from the cellar.
Tea was over, but he fancied there was sufficient light to guide him without a lantern. He had got the wine, and was approaching the cellar door at the foot of the sunken steps when he heard the sound of voices coming along the walk from the direction of the moor.
Every pulse in his body seemed to grow still as he recognised the tones of Augusta Ashton and Laurence Aspinall, and heard with deepening anguish the unmistakable sound of kisses interchanged. They had apparently paused close to the stair-head for that embrace; and then he heard—and thanked God that he was there to hear, though that hearing blighted every hope he had—his rival, with every argument which passionate love or skilful sophistry could employ, persuade her to elope with him the following night.
Backwards and forwards they walked in the gathering dusk, but never beyond the length of the premises; and now and then they stopped, and drove him mad with their caresses. The place was so retired and lonely, precaution was neglected; and Jabez, chained to the spot as it were, gathered that proposals for her hand, made by Laurence himself, had been peremptorily rejected by Mr. Ashton, who was set down as a despot and a tyrant for refusing to surrender a silly girl of seventeen to a rake of two-and-twenty. He heard her tell that Jabez Clegg had found her sobbing at the separation, even whilst her darling’s letter was at the gates. And he heard it said that the elder Aspinall not only countenanced this secret courtship, but had furnished funds for the proposed elopement. This generosity was set against the cruelty of her own parents; her affection, her pride, the romance in her nature were appealed to, but still Augusta’s better angel held her safe, until, coward that he was, Laurence terrified her with a threat to “blow his brains out” if she refused him.
She wept her assent upon his breast, and then Jabez, already half-stunned, heard the details of evidently previously concocted arrangements for their elopement and marriage at Gretna Green, professedly with his father’s sanction.