CHAPTER THE SEVENTH.17THE REVEREND JOSHUA BROOKES.
JOSHUA BROOKES had a child’s love for toffy and other sweetmeats. These he purchased—or obtained without purchase—from an old woman as odd and eccentric as himself, a Mrs. Clowes, who occupied a bow-windowed shop in Half Street, which literally overlooked the churchyard, three or four steep steps having to be mounted by her customers.
And how numerous were her customers, and how great the demand for her toffy, lozenges, and “humbugs” may be judged from the fact that her workmen and apprentices used up eight or nine tons of sugar every week. Yet she was only a shop-keeper, and had begun business in a very humble way; but she was persevering and industrious, and success followed. She was active and energetic, and expected those around her to be the same. Yet she was kind to them, as may be supposed, for she gave every Sunday a good dinner to fourteen old men and women on whom fortune had looked unkindly, waiting upon them herself, and never tasting her own dinner until her pensioners had dined.
Regular in her own attendance at the old Church, she required her household to be regular too, though she left them little enough time to dress—possibly because her own toilette was so scant. The dress in which she presented herself at church was certainly unique for a woman of wealth. Her gown of sober stuff was well worn; a mob-cap (a fashion which came in with the French Revolution) adorned her head, over which, by way of bonnet, a brown silk handkerchief was tied. On rare—very rare—occasions, an old black silk bonnet covered all.
Joshua Brookes, at odds with his clerical brethren, with his pupils, and half the world besides, was on good terms withMrs. 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 theDivinity 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, andhisbest 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 hisconfreres. 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.