“Madam, that night’s savage attack cancelled every debt of gratitude I owed the calculating knave who turned his back on my father’s £500, thinking to multiply it by thousands from your father!”
“It is not true!” she dared to say, her sense of justice and her spirit of resistance rising in defence of one she knew to be foully aspersed. Not because he was Jabez Clegg but because he was an absentee maligned.
A shriek rang through the big house, and servants came scurrying up, with Mr. Aspinall in their midst; and Cicily, the first to dash between them, caught on her well-covered back the blow from the madman’s brace, which would else have fallen afresh on the naked shoulders of his wife, already scored by it with livid welts.
Carry away the fainting lady—soothe the infuriated savage—apply raw beef to shoulders as red, if not as raw—let the brute steep himself in brandy unto stupefaction. The morning will come, when the fumes of passion and brandy will alike have passed away, and the man will repent him of his cruelty. But the sting of groundless jealousy will remain, and the broad livid stripes across the white shoulders. Time and care will efface those marks, but neither kisses, nor caresses, nor presents, nor time itself can obliterate the hieroglyphics stamped with that buckskin brace on the young wife’s heart. He has fixed the name of Jabez Clegg there, and in conjunction “brute” and “liar,” as equivalent to his own.
It might have been expected after this that the Aspinalls would have been conspicuous by their absence from the cousin’s wedding, or that Augusta might have laid her wrongs before her mother. But, no; your jealous man never spares himself a pang if he hopes to inflict one; and the wilful woman who finds she has made a mistake in marriage is the last to confess it.
Cold weather and recent indisposition served as an apology for the violet velvet spencer which, worn above the pale lilac silk, covered bust and neck; and it was far from unbecoming to the young matron or the occasion.
Old Mrs. Clowes—who had kept her word anent the cake, which was a triumph of confectionery skill—from some long-closed coffer brought forth a stiff brocade of ancient make and texture, placed a bonnet on her unaccustomed head, and from a far seat in the choir watched Jabez Clegg enter with his college friend and groomsman, stalwart George Pilkington, though she did not see them linger to read the inscription over the grave of Joshua Brooks, or look up with grateful remembrance to the Chetham Gallery, where they had worshipped together. But she remembered them as boys in long blue gowns and yellow under-skirts, and could not help contrasting the college dress of the past with the high-collared bright blue coats, the gilt buttons, lemon-coloured vests, light trousers, and white kid gloves, in which they found their way to her to shake hands, whilst waiting for the trembling white-robed bride and her friends.
And there Mrs. Clowes sat and listened to the irrevocable words which bound Jabez to “love and cherish” the woman who loved him with her whole soul; whilst in spite of himself his very brain was reeling with memories of that other wedding-day, when Laurence Aspinall and Augusta Ashton, now standing calm and beautiful in the background, had breathed the selfsame vows before that altar; and somehow the old dame had a secret misgiving when all was over that it was “not the reet one after all.”
“All over!” had been the cry from the heart of Jabez then. “All over!” was the echo now, as the last “Amen” sounded, and he registered a silent oath, not down in the rubric, to keep the troth he had plighted, although no electric thrill answered the shy touch of Ellen’s hand, or the dumb devotion of her glance, and although Augusta’s greeting of her new “cousin” jarred a still sensitive nerve.