“No, sir, all’s right at the factory. There’s no harm done anywhere at present. If you will please to come down, I hope there may be time to prevent that which is threatened.”
“Just so, I’ll be down directly.”
There were no lucifer-matches with which to procure instantaneous light, but during this brief colloquy, Mrs. Ashton had been groping on the tall chimney-piece for their precursors the Prometheans, and having found them, by dipping a small chemically prepared match into a tiny bottle of fluid, she obtained a light as soon as the window was closed and the draught shut out.
Too uneasy to waste much time in dressing, before many minutes had flown, Mr. and Mrs. Ashton, whose fears had equally pointed to their daughter—the one in a roquelaire, and the other in her warehouse overall—were both listening with agitated and anxious faces to Mr. Clegg’s communication, made with a discomposure great as their own.
“Elope!” both parents exclaimed, simultaneously.
“Elope!” reiterated the mother! “our daughter consent to elope, and with a reprobate like him? It is not possible!”
“So I should have said, madam, yesterday,” rejoined Jabez, sadly, as he sank on a chair, overpowered more by the strain on his feelings than by the fatigue of his long, wet, midnight ride; “and I would have given the world to have been able to doubt the evidence of my own ears.”
Mrs. Ashton, with clasped hands up, sat opposite to Jabez; Mr. Ashton, lacking the consolation and inspiration of his snuff-box, walked about the room with one hand to his head in a state of distressing perturbation. He stopped in his walk to ask, “What’s to be done?” as Jabez made this declaration, unconscious of its force.
The light of the chamber candle fell upon the haggard face and drenched garments of the young man. The elder one looked full at him, paused, then drawing near and laying his right hand heavily on the other’s wet shoulder, asked in a troubled voice, with an inquisitorial but not unkind manner—
“My lad, did no other motive than duty to your employers bring you eighteen miles through the rain this dark night to save Miss Ashton from an imprudent marriage?”