CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH.APPRENTICESHIP.
JABEZ now began his work in earnest, in the packing-room—the very lowest rung of the ladder. Not long did he remain there. The bright colours in the lace and brace rooms had an attraction for him, and he argued with himself that the better he did the rough work assigned him the sooner he should mount above it. And Jabez the plodding Blue-coat boy, was ambitious. That ambition had a threefold stimulus.
Manchester people were then, as a rule, steady church and chapel-goers. Mr. Ashton had two pews at the Old Church; one for his family, the other for servants and apprentices, the attendance of the latter being imperative. Jabez thus came in frequent contact with his old-time friends, from the Blue-coat boys in the Chetham Gallery to the Cleggs, to whom went every penny of his earnings; their distress, like that of others, having deepened with the continuation of the Napoleonic war.
Sometimes old Mrs. Clowes, meeting him in the churchyard, would grasp him by the hand, and leave something in it, as, in her old black stuff dress and coloured kerchief tied over her mob-cap, she hurried homewards to scold dilatory handmaids, and put her Christianity in practice amongst her pensioners.
Now and then Joshua Brookes crossed his path, and if he did not put his hand in his breeches pocket for Jabez—now a well-grown youth—he gave him more than sterling coin in sterling advice, though, unfortunately, in so abrupt and grotesque a manner, its effect was frequently lost. Yet one day when the Blue-coat boy had been barely two years at the Mosley Street manufacturer’s, he put a spur into the sides of his ambition.
“Young Cheat-the-fishes, were you ever in Mrs. Chadwick’s green parlour?”
“Yes, sir—I was there once for half-an-hour.” (The day he took back Miss Ellen’s shilling.)
“Well did you read the sermons on the walls?”
Jabez answered respectfully—
“I did not see any sermons, sir. I saw some pictures in black frames with gilt roses at the corners.”
“And didn’t look at them, I suppose?” in a harsh grunt.
“Yes, sir, I did! I was waiting till Mrs. Chadwick had done dinner. They were about two boys—a good and bad apprentice.”
“Oh, then, you did use your eyes! The next time they let you inside that room, just use your understanding too. William Hogarth, the artist, from his grave preaches a sermon to you and your fellows, as good as Parson Gatliffe preached from the pulpit this morning, mark that!” and he turned on his heel with an emphasising nod to fixhissermon on the boy’s mind.
The opportunity came before long. It was customary when an apprentice went with a message to leave him in the hall, or send him into the kitchen; but Jabez being sent by Mrs. Ashton with several samples of furniture-binding and fringes for her sister’s use, he was shown with his parcel into the parlour, where Mrs. Chadwick, neatly attired in a brown stuff dress, with a French cambric kerchief lying in folds under the square bodice, sat at work with an upholsteress, in the midst of a mass of chintz and moreen, preparing for the new home of Ellen’s elder sister Charlotte; for, in spite of war, distress, or famine, people will marry and give in marriage. And had not a glorious peace just been concluded?
Ellen, a comely but not pretty girl, about seventeen, whose black eyes and hair were her chief attractions, sat there in a purple bombazine dress, with her sheathed scissors and College pincushion suspended by a chain from her girdle, plying her needle most industriously. He was not accustomed to parlours, and no doubt his bow was as awkward as his blush; but he had a message to deliver, and he did that in a business like manner. He had to wait until pattern after pattern was tried against the chintz, and calculations made. Mrs. Chadwick, seeing his eyes wander wistfully from picture to picture, courteously gave him permission to examine them.
At once Ellen, who was sitting close under one, rose to act as interpreter. She was recalled by the mild voice of her mother.
“Sit down, Ellen; Jabez Clegg does not require a young lady’s help to understand those pictures—they explain themselves.”
Ellen went back to her seat and her sewing with a raised colour, and a private impression that the rebuke was uncalled for, though she spoke never a word. Perhaps Mrs. Chadwick thought condescension should have its limits, and did not believe in a young lady’s impulsive civility to an apprentice Blue-coat boy. Yet that was not like Mrs. Chadwick.
Miss Augusta had been staying with her aunt. Part of his commission was to convoy her home; she was an only child, and too precious to be trusted out alone, though she was in her eleventh year, and the distance was nothing. But so many desperadoes had been let loose by the termination of the war that crime and violence were rampant, footpads infested highways and byways, and Cicily, Augusta’s maid—ex-nurse—was no longer deemed a protection.
He stood before the last engraving when Augusta—in no awe of her father’s apprentice—came dancing into the room in a nankeen dress and tippet, a hat with blue ribands, long washing-gloves which left the elbows bare, and blue shoes tied with a bunch of ribands.
Bright, beautiful, buoyant—she was a picture in herself; and Jabez turned from the dingy engraving to think so. She often came tripping into the warehouse or the kitchen, and exchanged a bright word with one or other, and away again; but Jabez had thought of her only as a pretty playful child until that afternoon. Joshua Brookes pointing Hogarth’s lessons had given the one spur; that lovely brown-eyed, brown-haired maiden, with her simple, “Come, Jabez—I’m ready,” had given another.
She put her little gloved hand in his, after bidding her aunt and cousin good-bye, and went dancing, skipping, and chattering by his side down Oldham Street, and let him lift her over the muddy crossing to Mosley Street, unconscious of the chimerical dreams floating through his apprentice brain all the while. His original ambition to make a home for Simon and Bess, where neither penury nor care should trouble them, dwarfed before the new ideas crowding upon his mind. He had read the sermon on the wall, but the old “Knave of Clubs,” as Joshua was called, little thought how that pretty piquant little fairy, the “master’s daughter,” would point it with something higher than ambition.
There were at that period in Manchester two schools foryoung ladies, which, being celebrated at the time, deserve to be mentioned. The one was situated at the extreme end of Bradshaw Street, looking through its vista across Shudehill to the gaps in brickwork called Thomas Street and Nicholas Croft, where in highly genteel state Mrs. (or Madame, as she insisted on being called) Broadbent superintended the education of a large and very select circle.
Education must have been at a low ebb when the chief manufacturers of the town consigned their daughters to this pompous, pretentious woman, who could not speak correctly the language she professed to teach. In her attempt to appear the print and pattern of a lady, she “clipped the King’s English,” and made almost as glaring errors as Mrs. Malaprop. Yet, strange to say, she turned out first-class pupils (for the period). The fact is, she was shrewd enough to know her own deficiencies, and delegated her duties to others who were in all respects efficient.
Then she was a wonderful trumpeter of her own fame; made frequent visitations at houses where she was well entertained, and her bombast was listened to for the sake of her young charges; held half-yearly recitations, and also exhibitions of the plain sewing, embroidery, knitting, knotting, filigrees, tambour, and lace work of her pupils; and matrons proud of their own daughters’ achievements seldom paused to reckon up the tears, the headaches, the heartaches, the sore fingers which those minutely-stitched shirts, those fine lace aprons and ruffles, those pictures and samplers had cost. For Madame Broadbent, besides being a martinet rigid in her rule—having a numbered rack for pattens and slippers, numbered pegs for cloaks and hats, book-bags and work-bags, safe-guards (receptacles for sewing, &c., like a huckster’s pocket) and slates, all numbered likewise—was not of too mild a temper, and had apenchantfor pinching her pupils’ ears until the blood tinged her nails; and stocks for the feet, backboards for the shoulders, and dry bread diet were her prescriptions for the cure of such delinquencies as an unauthorised word, an omitted curtsey, a bag or garment on the wrong hook, a dropped stitch in knitting, a blotted copy, a puckered seam; and work had to be done and undone until stitches were almost invisible, and little eyes almost blind. She had other peculiarities, had Madame Broadbent—but my portrait is growing too large for its frame, and she was not a large personage at all.
It was to this delectable individual’s school (“establishments”had not been invented then, or hers would have been one) that Miss Augusta Ashton was consigned for conversion into a well-behaved, well-informed, useful, and accomplished young lady.
Her cousins, the Misses Chadwick, had in their turn escaped from this penitentiary for the manufacture of ladyhood. But in Piccadilly was a school of a very different description, where young ladies of talent and fortune went to qualify forwifehood; and here at this time Ellen Chadwick was finishing her education, with many others, in learningthe culinary artin all its branches.
How came it that Madame Broadbent’s school flourished and survived the decay of its neighbourhood, being in existence when the writer of this was a child, and the other had died and been forgotten, save by the antiquary, before she was born?
To fetch Miss Ashton home from Madame Broadbent’s on dark or stormy afternoons, was the understood duty of one or other of the apprentices; but Kit Townley, having no more liking for wet weather than a cat, generally contrived to be out of earshot when his services were required. It devolved on Jabez, therefore, to carry the grey duffel hooded cloak with which to cover the dainty one of scarlet kerseymere, to tie the pattens on the tiny feet, to carry the school-bag, and hold the brilliant blue gingham umbrella over the head elevated by the pattens so much nearer to his shoulder, and to be thanked by one of the sweetest voices in the world.
It was dangerous work, though no one knew it, least of all Jabez. True, she was only a child, but she was tall for her age. And was he much more than a boy? A boy let out from the seclusion of an almost monastic institution, to whom her little airs and graces, her petty vanities, her very waywardness and caprice, only made her beauty more piquant.
Madame Broadbent’s infallibility being taken for granted, all attempts to make known school troubles and grievances were met with “Never tell tales out of school,” from Mrs. Ashton, but they were poured fresh and warm into the ear of Jabez, as she trotted by his side; and he, his school-days unforgotten, listened with ready sympathy. And this went on as months and years went by, adding to her stature, narrowing the space between them; and he still did duty as her humble escort, unless when Kit Townley was especially told off for the service and went reluctantly, grumbling at being made “lackey to a school miss.”
Yet Kit Townley did not think it any degradation to play practical jokes on Jabez, or on Kezia, leaving the younger apprentice to bear the blame. Billets of wood, scuttles of coal,pails of water brought in for her use by Jabez, were dexterously removed to doorways and other unsuspected places, where “cook” was sure to stumble over them, and then cuff Jabez for his carelessness or wilfulness, all protestations on his part being disregarded. Creeping behind the settle where Jabez sat watching, and perhaps basting the roast for the master’s table for late dinners on company days, he would steal his sly arm round the corner, himself unseen, and lifting the wheel of the spit out of the smoke-jack chain, bring spit and all thereon into the dripper, with a splash which brought the irate Kezia down on astounded Jabez with whatsoever weapon of offence came nearest to her hand, from the paste-pin to the basting-ladle, or even a saucepan lid; it was all one to Kezia.
From Kezia, however, these frequent chances and mischances went to Kezia’s mistress; and appearances being against him, the very steadiness of denial, unaccompanied with any accusation of another (other waggeries of Kit Townley in the warehouse being also laid on his shoulder), Mrs. Ashton’s faith in the youth was somewhat shaken, and he was conscious of being under a cloud. But still he kept on his way and looked to the end.
The cloud dispersed after a while. Kit Townley was something of a glutton, with a very boy’s love of pastry and sweets. It so happened that on a special occasion (rejoicing for peace or something) Kezia had set aside in her roomy pantry, the door of which fastened only with a button, a tray of tartlets, custards, a trifle, moulds of jelly and blanc-mange, and other dainties for a large party. Kit’s mouth watered to get at these things. Often and often had he stolen the fruit from under a pie-crust, and sat silent while Jabez bore the blame, but now he meditated a more sweeping raid. There was a fine retriever in the yard. Watching Kezia out of the way, he crammed mouth and pockets with the pastry, and made an inroad into the trifle. Then he whistled to Nelson, raised the dog on his hind feet, and printed the forepaws on the pantry-shelf, dishes, and tart-tray, and round the button of the door.
But he was compelled to wait until bed-time to fairly enjoy his spoil, and then could not manage it unknown to his companion. Hoping to close the other’s mouth literally and figuratively, he offered him a share, but Jabez told him he was not a receiver of stolen goods, and left him to digest that with his feast. It was a harder morsel than even Jabez knew.
The next morning before breakfast they were in the warehouse, when there was heard a terrible commotion in theyard. From the back windows Kezia was seen belabouring Nelson with a broomstick, her face redder than ordinary, whilst the poor beast whined piteously.
Jabez ran down to interpose, and the infuriated woman turned on him, then ran in her rage to fetch her mistress to witness the damage done, and the footprints of the depredator, and to own that punishment was just.
But as Mrs. Ashton ascended the warehouse stairs that afternoon, she heard Jabez and Kit loud in altercation, and before they were aware she possessed a clue to much that had gone before.
Something Jabez had said was answered by a loud guffaw from Kit, and the words—
“Let them laugh that win. I call it a deuced good joke.”
“And I call it cowardly and dishonourable to let the poor beast suffer for your greediness,” Jabez answered, indignantly.
“Now don’t you put in your oar, young yellow-skirt. I’ll let no charity-boy hector over me,” blustered Kit.
Jabez put down a bundle of umbrella whalebones he had on his shoulder, to confront the other, then counting ferules into dozens. Umbrellas used to have brass ferules, like elongated thimbles, on the sticks.
“Look you, Kit, I’ve borne many a scurvy trick of yours without saying a word, but I will not even give the sanction of silence to dishonesty, and will not see a noble animal ill-used to screen a coward.”
“Won’t you?” sneered Kit, “then we’ll see whose word weighs heaviest.”
Mrs. Ashton came into the room.
“Townley,” said she, “your word will not weigh down a feather henceforth,” adding in the same dignified tone, “Are those ferules counted? Jackson is waiting for them.”
No further notice was taken, but Jabez soon found he stood on a firmer footing in house and warehouse. Mrs. Ashton remarked to her husband, as she finished dressing for their dinner-party—
“It was a slight circumstance, William, but straws show which way the wind blows.”
And he tapped his silver snuff-box, and said “Just so;” then courteously offering his hand to his fine-looking wife, led her from the room, her purple velvet robe trailing after her, the plumes on her head nodding as they went.