Neither coach-making nor road-making had reached the acme of perfection, and Augusta’s removal home, without the displacement of the bone, had to be considered.
A sedan chair—the last in the town—was still kept for invalid use at the Infirmary. Jabez was aware of this, and before Dr. Hull could make the suggestion he had proposed to go for it, and was back with the black, brass-nailed sedan long before the doctors thought their patient fit to be removed.
As the unfamiliar vehicle waited at the “Academy” door, it attracted the notice not only of neighbours and returning school-girls, but of passers-by, until Madame Broadbent was in a fever. The reputation of her school was at stake, and she felt that every extra moment that hand-carriage and wheel-carriage remained standing there, the bruit of the lamentable occurrence was spreading farther afield.
There had been no cessation of afternoon school duties, albeit the teachers alone presided, and discipline was somewhat relaxed. But when patient, doctors, friends, and vehicles had gone their way, and the school was soon after dismissed, the harrassed, agitated, and prescient disciplinarian surrendered herself to alternate fits of hysteria, passion, lamentation, and overweening assumption.
That first outburst over, the self-important dame stood on her “right to maintain discipline,” even when confronted by Mr. Ashton, no longer the easy-going, pleasant parent of a paying pupil, but the angry father of an injured only child, who had posted from Whaley-bridge, on the first intelligence of the mischance, leaving his business incomplete.
Not alone to the inmates of the house in Mosley-street was Augusta Ashton precious. Notwithstanding her sometime waywardness (the result of her father’s over-indulgence), she had endeared herself, by her affectionate heart and winsome ways, to a wide circle of friends; even Joshua Brookes was less grim with Augusta; so no wonder Jabez was secretly devoted to her heart and soul. Great and general was the sympathy expressed on the occasion.
Mrs. Chadwick and Ellen were with Mrs. Ashton before the afternoon was out, and at Augusta’s eager desire her cousin remained behind, not only for companionship, but as chief nurse, an office for which Ellen had that peculiar fitness observable in some women, coupled with the deftness and experience gained in long attendance on her father.
And now, leaving Augusta in the hands of love and skill, with all that affection and wealth can lavish upon her in furtherance of recovery, let us step backwards to the previous September, when Peterloo was fresh, and Jabez yet wore his left arm in a sling.
Whaley-bridge has been mentioned more than once, for in that village, near the high road from Manchester to Buxton, Mr. Ashton possessed a water-mill on the picturesque banks of the river Goyt, which there divided the counties of Cheshire and Derbyshire. It had been established in the previous century, together with another in the contiguous vale of Taxal, by a speculative ancestor of Mrs. Ashton, whose old hall was in the locality. The two places had been chiefly colonised by his workpeople, many of whom had been pauper apprentices from Manchester and Warrington.
Besides the mill, Mr. Ashton owned the “White Hart” Inn, close to the bridge, where the Buxton coaches stopped; and Carr Cottage, a long, low, rough-cast building, nestling under the shadow of a fine old farm-house which crowned the elevated ridge of Yeardsley-cum-Whaley, lang-syne the Gothic stone Hall of the warlike Yeardsleys.