Jabez Ebsleigh, M.P. A novel

Front matter

JABEZ EBSLEIGH, M.P. 2l £obel. BY MRS. EILOART, AUTHOR OF /) "SOME OF OUR GIRLS," "THE LOVE THAT LIVED^T'jUST A WOMAN," " THE CURATE'S DISCIPLINE," " ST. BEIJB'S$4 ETC, ETC. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. 'gontson : SAMUEL TINSLEY, io, SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND. 1876. (All rights reserved.) CONTENTS OF VOL. I. CHAPTER PAGE I. A SMALL PARTY ON A LARGE SCALE . . I II. GOING OUT IN THE RAIN . . . -31 III. JOHN CROOKE AT HOME . . . -47 IV. BERNARD RUSHWORTH'S SUPPER-PARTY . 60 V. LADY ELIZABETH TALWYNNE . . -74 VI. THE OLD AND THE YOUNG . . .89 VII. MISS LUCY HUNT'S ASPIRATIONS . . 1 19 VIII. TOM WATTS IN TROUBLE .... 141 IX. A FRIEND'S HOUSE . . . . -175 X. NEW FORTUNES AND NEW HOPES . -195 XI. BERNARD RUSHWORTH'S LOVE . . .205 XII. WHAT THE PROFESSOR HAD TO SAY . .224 XIII. LUCY MARRIED JABEZ EBSLEIGH, M.P.

Chapter I

A SMALL PARTY ON A LARGE SCALE. It was the dirtiest, muddiest, murkiest night in the whole year. There was a per sistent drizzle, almost as fine as a Scotch mist, and against which it hardly seemed worth while to raise one's umbrella, but which chilled to the very bone, while the heavy, soddened air had the effect of de pressing to the very soul. The pavement was more like that of a London street than of a tidy provincial town — a compound of soot and grease, through which you VOL. I. I Jabcs Ebsleigh. 2 struggled wearily and painfully, to the detriment of your boots and the lower portion of your garments. As to the star less, heavy darkness, gas was powerless to fight against it. Every street lamp threw a faint yellow light around its immediate vicinity, and gave up in despair the hope of doing anything towards a general lighting up.

Altogether, it was our English climate at its very worst, when, to endure it with any degree of philosophic composure, there seemed nothings for it but to shut doors and <Z> windows against the evil influences with out, and to remain a fixture by one's own fireside. And yet, in the old county town of Ark leigh, this night, with all its mud and its dreariness, would shine out as the brightest of the year in the memory of some hundreds of its smaller population. It was the night of the Professor's " tea-party," when, from the streets and the lanes, the ragged schools and the workhouses (the inmates of these last being, in right of their whole and sound apparel, and their better-fed appearance, the aristocrats of the party), he gathered together some hundreds of the town children, and feasted his eyes, and his heart too, by watching the way in which his guests feasted after quite another manner on the thick slices of cake, and the yet thicker bread-and-butter provided for them.

The Professor stood on a platform upon which were several people interested, like himself, in the proceedings of the evening — a kindly-looking white-haired clergyman who had the largest and the poorest parish in the town for his cure, and who had come there with the intention of saying a word in season ; a couple of well-dressed young men ; the Professor's housekeeper, who was making tea for her master and the others on the platform ; a few ladies and gentlemen of middle age ; and the Mayor, who was there because the Doctor had asked him to come, and he supposed that it was a thing he was bound, in virtue of his office, to do. i — Jabez Ebsleigh. 4 It was a sio-ht to thrill a woman's heart to see all those children — motherless — fatherless — most of them, and some of them with mothers and fathers whom they would have been far better without.

From the narrowest streets and the dirtiest alleys of the town they had come with their sharp keen faces, their thin limbs and their scanty clothing. The workhouse children were better fed and clothed, but they looked less intelligent than their com panions. Right down the large hall were placed tables flanked by forms, and these were all occupied by boys and girls looking for the most part intensely hungry, but at the same time intensely happy, and the Pro fessor, who ought to have been getting his own tea, and whose housekeeper every now and then gave him an anxious reminder that it was time he did so, still stood on the platform, looking right and left, up and down, as if taking note of every individual child' there present. He would have liked nothing better than to have been amono-st them, supplying their wants with his own hands, and seeing that all the boys and girls had just as much cake and bread-and-butter as, and perhaps a little more than, was good for them.

But the Professor was the presid ing' genius of the eveningand therefore the platform was his place. However, he had an admirable deputy below, in the person of Mr. Simon Reed, a thin, active man, of about the middle height and age, who was here, there, and everywhere, looking after each child as if he loved it, carrying huge dishes of bread-and-butter from one to the other, calling to the assistants to replenish the mugs that were held aloft to show their emptiness, and giving a kind word here and a pleasant one there, as if — old bachelor as he was — to minister to hungry children was the. chief pleasure of his life. Perhaps it was, for, as year after year came round, Simon Reed was to be found in his place at the Professor's tea-party, and no Lord Mayor's banquet or kingly revel ever knew a defter or more assiduous waiter.

Jades Edsleigh. 6 The Professor was above the middle height, of a well-built, if massive figure. As to his eyes, you could never see them on account of his spectacles, which some boys and girls in the town believed he went to bed in. He might be fifty, and his hair was grizzled, as were his beard and mous tache ; he had a broad forehead, and the face that you would have said ought to belong to a man who was father and orandfather to children by the dozen ; and yet, like Simon Reed, he was a bachelor. It was only these children, for whom he had striven hard to give them one short glimpse of sunshine in their darkened lives, that woke any parental feeling in him. There was a sort of compensation in it. Instead of being the father of half-a-dozen tidy, well-dressed little mortals, with nurses and governesses to attend to them, the Pro fessor was, in a manner, the nearest ap proach to a father that scores of neglected, uncared-for little creatures in the old town of Arkleigh had ever known.

Why had he come there ? It was a dull, middle-class commercial town, with pretty scenery around it; but then there are scores of towns in England with prettier. It had its river, in which the Eastshire people believed intensely as a rival to the Dart, and if you had never sailed up or down that river on a summer's day, and carried away a memory to make your heart ache with the pain of its beauty for ever, why, the Ore did well enough as its substitute ; but there was nothing in the town itself. The people were thoroughly provincial, with a great belief in their own little town as being a place on which the eyes of the world delighted to dwell. They had no taste forart, and were shy of artists, although they would have shrunk from owning either feeling. They looked upon all authors, of whatever standing, as pretty much on a level — Bohemians, whom it was as well perhaps to tolerate, but at the same time not to be on terms of intimacy with.

In deed, they had a vague idea that all of them Jades Edsleigli. 8 were more or less connected with the newspaper press; the more imaginative as pennya-liners ; the more matter-of-fact as shorthand reporters. Arkleigh was dull, slow, respectable, not very rich, except in the persons of two or three of its manufacturers and leading tradesmen ; indeed, it would be difficult to find a poorer class of professional men, or a set of gentry with greater pretensions and smaller incomes. But these latter made up for all shortcomings in purse by the unflinching tenacity with which they held by their order; and to judge by the disdain with which they treated the wealthier burghers of their town, one would have thoug-ht that nothing* in o >____> the world could possibly be in such bad taste as to be in good circumstances.

Whatever had brought Professor Heil bronn to the town ? He was a well-bred man and a gentleman, but then his very donhomic, his utter indifference to all class distinctions, were enough to neutralise these good qualities in the eyes of the upper ten of Arkleigh. And they (-/^neutralise them. With the elite of Arkleigh the Professor had very little to do. Mrs. Launcelot Chastelard, the wife of its chief solicitor, and a woman of excellent family, said that he was dangerous and revolutionary, and could not have held more aloof from him if he had carried a loaded revolver in his pocket. Her husband, who was a clever man, and of a family as good as her own, said that the Professor was well-meaning, and would do good, if only he did not go too far. As to his father, who was a Tory of the past generation, while Mr. Launcelot was only a Conservative of this, he looked as shyly and stiffly at the Professor as ever his daughter-in-law did, and said that he was hurrying on matters to that inevitable ruin which Bright and Gladstone between them seemed bent on bringing about as fast as they could.

And such being the opinions of the Chastelards — who were the aristo crats of the town — other people thought it only due to their position to echo them, so that if the Professor had cared to stand well in the eyes of " society," he would have cer tainly been very much disappointed. But that was just the one thing for which the Professor did not care the most infini tesimal part of a fraction. He lived his life, and went his way, and did — God bless him! — whatever good he could; and, till the last day come, who shall say how much good that was ? — quite undisturbed by whatever remarks his oddities — the said oddities being his persistence in benefiting his fellow creatures — might call forth. He had to labour for his living just as much as did any of the " working classes," whom it was the object of his life to elevate, and perhaps Arkleigh suited him as a place to do this work in.

There was a free public library in the town, which gave access to books that were of some assistance to the Professor in his antiquarian researches. There were some public grounds for him to stroll in during the intervals of his labour, where he might be as undisturbed as in the fields without the town, and yet not have the trouble of going so far, and the air was good, and rents were low, and living not expensive ; and, to sum up all, perhaps the Professor had found himself in the little town one bright sunshiny day, when it was looking its best, and seeing that it was as good a spot as any in which to work for his own well-being, and likely to afford him plenty of facilities for labouring for the well-being of others, had concluded that, on the whole, he might as well remain where he was, as go farther.

He was great both in languages and science. The people in Arkleigh said he knew fifty of the former, and all that man could know of the latter. However, he certainly knew enough of both to get a very fair livelihood, by making translations for the publishers, such as no one in Eng land but himself could have done ; and, Arkleigh being only seventy miles from London, it was easy for him to run up to town whenever business required that he should do so. And out of the thirty thousand souls who composed the popula tion of Arkleigh, a very large proportion were working men, employed in the foun dries and factories of those well-to-do townsmen whom " society " ignored, and who, perhaps, if the truth were to be told, looked up to their superiors with a con tempt as disdainful as that with which those small aristocrats looked down on them.

And so these men, with their hard lives and their hard hands, were just the class whom the Professor delighted to come amongst when he had done his own day's task, and talk and reason with, instruct or help, as if their well-being and their well doing were the chief aim and object of his life — as they were. In London he could not have worked to such good purpose. There the area was too large, the workers too scattered, and the employers too apt to live far away from their people. Arkleigh was a large and yet a compact sphere of usefulness, and so the Professor had been content to live and labour there for the last ten years, during which, if he had not — as the aristocrats of Arkleigh said he had — done his very best to revolutionise the wofking men, by mak ing them feel that the ballot-box and uni versal suffrage were their born and incon testable rights, he had done what was an infinitely better thing — put them in the way of exercising such rights judiciously if ever they won them.

The Professor had great help in the place, but gentility was true to itself and gave him scarcely any. The great iron-founders, to whom the town owed so much of its well being*, and the wealthier tradesmen, were ready to assist, and did assist loyally ; but the doctors and the lawyers, with one or two exceptions, kept aloof; so did the lead ing families, just as they kept aloof from anything of a progressive nature in the town. If a scientific lecture was given, gentility voted it dull ; if a humorous one, gentility said it was vulgar. And so with the children's gathering to-night, not one of the toys which were to be given to them at the close of the entertainment was fur nished by the ladies of Mrs. Launcelot Chastelard's set, and not a shilling to de fray its expenses had been given by any gentleman who stood on the same footing as her husband.

There was one gentleman there, how ever, whom gentility would gladly have claimed for its own, even in despite of his being a pupil at the works of Messrs. Ridge and Co., mechanical engineers. But then his mother had been Lady Alice Tal wynne, a daughter of one of the oldest — if not the very oldest — families in Eastshire, while his father, if of no particular family at all, and, in fact, nothing originally but a Manchester manufacturer, still had married a Lady Alice, and thus, in a measure, en nobled all his descendants. All the "good families " in Arkleigh would have been very glad to have enrolled Bernard Rushworth A Small Parly on a Large Scale. 15 in their circle, and have forgotten the fact of his working at the anvil and climbing his way, step by step, through the " shop," as steadily as if he had been the son of the poorest workman in it.

But Bernard Rush worth cared no more for gentility than did the Professor. He was doing* his best to learn his business thoroughly ; and when business hours were over, on the principle, perhaps, that " change of work is as good as play," he was helping those who were trying to help themselves to some better education, in the Working Men's Institute, than their parents or the national school might have given them, or strolling out into the country, with his hands, generally speaking, in his pockets, thinking over those articles in which he was for ever pro pounding in some weekly, or monthly, or quarterly, the difficult problem as to the why and the wherefore of everything he saw going wrong around him. He had not exactly quarrelled with his family, but they did not like his ways, and perhaps he did not like theirs.

His father, after the fashion of wealthy manufacturers, had intended to purchase an estate and found a family. It was the least any man could do whom a Lady Alice had been good enough to marry. But then there came a financial crisis — one of those com mercial whirlpools in which so many are sucked down like straws — and there was no further thought of the estate. Lady Alice, who was apt to speak with rather more energy than is always necessary, said that they were ruined ; but there was still the handsome house and grounds at Green hays, and the house in town, where she had been in the habit of spending every season since her marriage. But there was no chance of the estate now, or of her beino a great county lady — a role for which she considered herself pre-eminently fitted. She thought herself deceived and ill-used by her husband ; she did not say so in so many words, but there are ways of tellino a thing without speaking, and Mr. Rushworth learned, what he had perhaps sus pected — that his wife would never have married him if she had thought that the house at Greenhays, and the other in Cum berland Place, were all that he could give her.

He was not ruined ; there was no question of giving either of these up ; but still, that place near Leamington, with its hundreds of acres, and the territorial im portance they would have given, must be given up, and their sons (as Lady Alice said, with her laced handkerchief to her eyes) — -that was the cruellest stroke of all — must devote themselves to the ignoble occupation of making money, instead of the more gentlemanly one of spending it. After that Lady Alice took to confirmed invalidism. When one comes to think of it, what a blessing invalidism is to so many lives ! What would such as Lady Alice Rushworth do if the delicious occupation of taking; care of themselves were withheld from them ! Lady Alice went to Scarborough and Torquay, to Harrogate and Hastings ; vojl. 1. sometimes she wanted a bracing climate, sometimes a mild one ; but at least the constant change gave her something to do, and at last, two or three years before the opening of this narrative, she had made what we may presume to be the final change of all, by exchanging this world for another.

Her eldest son, who was to have entered the Guards, remained at Manchester, work ing under his father. The second, who was to have gone to the bar, preferred, rather against his father's wishes, entering the firm of Messrs. Ridge and Co., and some of Lady Alice's more intimate friends said that it was a good thing for her she had been taken away before she saw the evil of her son's ways. Bernard Rushworth, having taken his cup of tea from the hands of Mrs. White, the Professor's housekeeper, was now standing near her employer, looking down upon the children. I wish I could paint that look ! I wish I could paint him as he stood there, young, strong, and a man to the very core, in the very pride and promise of his early life, but with a look in his eyes which man hood, full of its own hopes, its own pros pects, so seldom wears.

If you could believe in such a thing as the transmigration of souls, and fancy that for a little time the spirit of a woman and a mother had passed into the body of a man in his earliest prime, and was teaching him the sorrowful ex periences, the pitiful yearnings, the all embracing love of a woman who has been taught, by the love and the loss of children of her own, to treasure all other children, and most of all the pitiful outcasts of humanity, the little wretched pariahs of our streets and gutters, then you might understand that look. He was asking him self why all this misery should beset the earliest infancy in our cities, and, not con tent with that question alone, asking him self that other, how should such misery be met, and how should it be crushed and — unless it were in instances of domestic 2 — sin and misery, which no earthly millennium should ever do away with — extirpated ?

He was a noble figure, standing there, for he had more good looks than fall to the share of nineteen men out of twenty, and, with all that womanish tenderness in his face, the prevailing impression that he gave was that of strength, self-reliant and self sustained ; and he looked, too, an English gentleman. A believer in the virtue of blue blood would have said that the Tal wynnes had asserted themselves in him to the complete extinction of the more ignoble line. By his side — quite unconscious of the contrast he offered to the fine proportions of Bernard Rushworth — stood a smaller man of about his own age, and, to say the least, as carefully dressed. Hands, nails, teeth, necktie— everything about him gave you the impression at once of the most sedulous care on his own part and his tailor's. But by no possibility could he have been taken for a gentleman.

He might be a shop-walker in a linendraper's establishment; he might be a clerk in a merchant's or a solicitor's office, and this last indeed was his avocation ; but you would never have placed Jabez Ebsleigh on a social level with the man by his side, any more than by any craft of the physician's you could have raised him to the same physical standard. He was looking at the children too ; not with the same fulness, painfulness of pity, with which Bernard Rushworth was re garding them, but still good-naturedly enough ; for at this time of his life, before he had soared too high, and, as a natural consequence, had fallen too low, Jabez Ebsleigh was neither ill-natured nor hard hearted ; but there was something of super ciliousness, and almost of patronage, in the look. Indeed, he was thinking much less of the children than of the article he should write about them for theEaslshireC/ironicle.

He filled up his time, and added to his small income, by doing such odd work for that paper. He wrote leading articles occasionally. He had a certain turn for writing, a pleasant, facile style, which gave some people — himself most assuredly the foremost amongst them — an idea that he had a great deal more talent than he really possessed. Clever he was, certainly, with that shallow, superficial cleverness which is as far remote from genius as is the thickest and most Bœotian of stupidity, and this cleverness of his was magnified very greatly in his own eyes, and in the eyes of one or two others. Following the motions of Mr. Simon Reed, and trying to emulate him in his attentions to the children, was a large, awkward man, who might be any age from forty to sixty. He was bald, but he had been so from the time he was twenty-five, and he had the placid, pasty look which men so often have who work in-doors con stantly.

He was respectably dressed, but you saw in a moment that they were his Sunday clothes he was wearing, and that he moved more awkwardly and stiffly on account os having them on. He looked good-natured, and he tried to be jocose with the children ; but it was the jocularity of a man to whom children are little known, and his movements were slow and embar rassed, compared to those of his slight and active coadjutor. But, however, his heart was in his work ; he looked pleased as the little ones stretched out their hands for the slices of cake on the plate he held, and it was he who at some cost of time and labour — which to him meant money, that he could ill spare — had painted and fixed the huge mottoes round the room, in which all present were wished a " Welcome," and a " Happy New Year." This was John Crooke, bookbinder.

He — like the Pro fessor and Mr. Simon Reed — was a bachelor. It was a slight incongruity that these especial entertainments should al ways call forth such exertions on their part ; it was the childless labouring for the father less — or those who were worse than father less. " These young ones are making the most of their opportunity," said Jabez Ebsleigh, with a smile of as much ineffable complacency as if he had never munched bread-and butter and devoured plum-cake in his life. " Poor little wretches ! they don't often have such a chance." Then he turned to the Professor, who, with a cup of tea in one hand and a piece of bread-and-butter in the other, was moving restlessly to and fro on the platform, despite his housekeeper's injunctions to sit down and make himself comfortable. "Your little guests are having a good time of it, Professor ; they do your hospitality justice."

" I wish justice was done to tliem" said the Professor, looking round with a glance in which, if there was some satisfaction for the present happiness he witnessed, there was more regret that it should be so evan escent. " Justice !" he added, with an em phasis, "little enough justice has ever been done to these poor waifs and strays." The Professor spoke with a slight accent, that had the double effect of softening and feminising (if I may dare to coin the word), and at the same time of making his sterner utterances sound with redoubled vigour. He was not English born, being a native of Strasburg, which at that time was con sidered French, although some of its older families, amongst whom were the Heil bronns, thought themselves as much Ger man as on the day before their separation from the fatherland ; and if there was one man whom the Professor held in utter scorn, it was his liege lord and sovereign, the Em peror Napoleon III.

" It will come, Professor — it will come, with all the good things for which, each in our way, we are working and striving," said Jabez Ebsleigh, with that satisfied smile and that fluent utterance of his. " We have only to wait, and meanwhile do each what we can towards it." From under the thick grey eyebrows of the Professor, there stole such a glance as might have made Jabez Ebsleigh feel a little uncomfortable if he had perceived it. But the large silver-mounted spectacles, that the Professor wore so constantly that some people said he slept in them, prevented his seeing that look, which might else, in spite of his self-complacency, have made him feel that the Professor at least did not entertain quite so good an opinion of him as he did of himself. And the Professor did not. For a man who was kindliness and simplicity itself there never yet was one with a keener perception of a sham, a greater horror of a lie.

And he did believe that Jabez Ebs leigh was a sham. He might not know it as yet ; he might believe that when he called himself a man of the people, he meant what he said, and that, with his whole heart and soul, he was bent on rais ing the classes who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow. Had not the editor of the Eastshire Clironicle, liberal as was that paper, warned him more than once that he was going too far, and that his tone was too aggressive and advanced, even for a paper which was considered to be more aggressive and advanced than any other in Eastshire. Did he not take a class for English composition and history three times a week at the Working Men's Institute ? Had he not devoted the first fruits of his savings to the purchase of a small freehold, so that he might have a vote for the county, and so do whatdittle he could in opposition to the Conservative in terests, which were so prevalent in all East shire ?

Granted — the Professor granted it all — and yet he did not like Jabez Ebs leigh. He was not true " all through," said the Professor to himself ; and some day, if Jabez saw his way to being a little gen teeled, a little higher in the social scale, why, the working classes might say good bye to the man of the people. But the Professor had no time, now, for such thoughts. He had all his young people to entertain, and the whole proceedings of the evening to direct. Tea was cleared away with wonderful rapidity, Mr. Simon Reed packing cups and saucers on the trays, which the other men — not one of them hired — carried out. John Crooke did his best to be useful too ; but it was after a shiftless fashion. He was not a handy man, his old mother had spoiled him too much ; but he did his best, and did not break anything, which was more than Simon Reed expected of him, and he ban tered the girls and joked with the boys like an elephant who feels himself bound by etiquette to dance a hornpipe, and goes through it as if it were a matter of conscience. 4 When the tea-things were removed, and the tables — boards upon tressels — taken away, the seats were turned round, so that the chil dren should face the platform; and then the Professor announced, with due solemnity, that the young ladies from the Union would commence proceedings by singing a Christ mas carol.