“Stay, Mr. Clegg,” interrupted Mrs. Ashton, as Mr. Chadwick raised his head from its rest on his hands and stick, and made an ineffectual effort to speak. “‘Think twice before you speak once,’ my bro——”
“Oh, madam! there is no need,” Jabez began, but she silenced him with a mere gesture of her raised hand; and Mrs. Ashton, acting as interpreter for her slow-tongued brother-in-law, resumed—
“You have done us some services, Mr. Clegg, but ‘a man will give all he possesses for his life,’ and Mr. Chadwick feels that his debt to you is greater than ours.”
Jabez looked from one to another, bewildered.
Mr. Ashton took up the thread—“Just so! and that brings me to the point we have been driving at. You see, Jabez, Mr. Chadwick is not so capable of managing his business as he used to be; things go wrong he scarcely knows how, and he is desirous to bring some one into his warehouse on whom he can rely. He therefore offers to take you at a higher salary than I think at all suitable for so young a man, and if you prove your competence to take the management within a reasonable time, to give it over into your hands, and ultimately—it may be in a very few years—to give you a small partnership interest in the concern.”
It is difficult to say whether Jabez or Simon was the most completely stunned.
“You must not look on this altogether as a testimony to your business qualifications, Jabez, I think,” continued Mr. Ashton, “but as the outflow of a grateful heart, and the proposition of a man who had no son capable of keeping his trade together. Is not that so?”—turning to Mr. Chadwick.
“Cer—certainly!”
Jabez looked from one to another, then to Simon, but no help was forthcoming from that quarter.