“No excuse for the brute, madam, certainly; but a reason why a reasoning man should forgive the brute incapable of reason.”
“Just so, Parson!” chimed in Mr. Ashton laying his Barcelona handkerchief across his knee.
“I don’t see it, sir,” argued Mrs. Ashton, handing a willow-patterned cup and saucer, with his tea, to her interlocutor; “a man who is a brute when intoxicated should keep sober. For my own part, I should be loth to let the same stick beat me twice. Our apprentice has borne quite too much from that fellow” (she waxed indignant), “and there is a limit to forgiveness.”
“Yes, madam,” answered the Parson snappishly, “there is a limit to forgiveness; but the limit is ‘not seven times, but seventy times seven!’”
There was no more to be said. The rough chaplain spoke with authority, and from experience, and Jabez knew it.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND.
MR. CLEGG!
HOWEVER grateful Mrs. Ashton might be she never lost sight of her personal dignity, and had no idea of admitting Jabez on terms of equality after that first reception.
In his helpless condition he required attention, which she could not condescend to render personally; yet she was as little inclined to delegate the duty to Kezia, who was never over well-disposed towards him, and who might have resented the call to “wait on a ’prentice lad,” or to Cicily, who was too young to have the run of a young man’s chamber. It was like herself to hit on the happy mean, and invite Bess Hulme at once to satisfy her own longings, and meet the requirements of the case, by waiting on her foster-child in his helplessness, bringing with her her own boy, now two years old, to be committed to willing Cicily’s care when the mother was herself engaged.
Yet the apprentice never again sank into the old ruts. His bed in the attic was turned over to his successor. From that parlour where he had lain and listened to Augusta’s music, and Parson Brookes’s dictum; where Mrs. Ashton had placed his pillows, and Ellen Chadwick had supplied his wants with such intuitive perception at tea-time; from that room he went to a chamber on an upper floor, furnished neatly but plainly, with due regard to comfort.