He threatened, and she answered—
“Threatened folk live long. You had best, Mr. Aspinall, keep your breath to cool your porridge. Augusta’s friends will defend her from her only enemy. Pending separation you see her no more.”
He never saw her more. The deed of separation was sealed but never signed.
With Augusta, all good angels seemed to have flown from Fallowfield. In his demoniac passion, he strove to blacken her character, to find himself met with laughter—his own life had been so chaste! Whilst, as if to refute him, when she took refuge with her mother, Jabez deemed it a point of honour to retreat. Accordingly he took up his temporary abode with Travis, in delicacy towards her, and as a check upon himself. No act, or thought, or word of his must give an evil tongue a chance to foul that spotless woman with its slime.
In the midst of all this, Aspinall’s embarrassments increased. Creditors pressed; writs showered in upon him; Barret foreclosed, and men were put in possession of the Grange. He flew to his old remedy, and it drove him mad. Lancaster Gaol for debtors loomed upon him. From his chamber window he beheld a sheriff’s officer approach with a warrant. His cavalry-pistols were in his dressing-room. A sharp report rang through the house. Laurence Aspinall, in the prime of life, delirious with drink, driven to desperation by his own profligate excess, set a blood-red seal on the deed of separation.
Ten years had passed from the partnership of Ashton, Chadwick, and Clegg—years in which money well employed had multiplied itself. Jabez was a rich man—a man of influence in the town; no longer the amateur artist, but the patron of art, as well Henry Liverseege and others could have told. As he had been one of the first promoters and directors of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution, so was he now the supporter of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Art; and seeing farther than Mr. Ashton, who, as a member of the New Quay Navigation Company, had opposed the Act for a railway between Manchester and Liverpool, he threw his energy into the project, and helped to carry it out, his cousin Travis working with him.
His widowerhood had cast a gloom over him for a time, but he left himself small leisure for morbid reflection, and that was cheered by the prattle of his little Nelly. Then came the crash at Fallowfield, and when darkness set upon Aspinall and his deeds, light broke upon the path of Jabez Clegg—at first a mere ray, but he worked the more cheerfully in its light. It was not hope for himself; it was merely a joyful consciousness that there was hope and calm in the sky over the head of their fluttering and wounded dove, and that Augusta could now rest in peace with her mother in the house at Ardwick, with no dread of a brutal husband bursting on them unawares.
He came and went as friend and executor, but it was long before it flashed across his comprehension that the fearful ordeal through which Augusta had passed but brought his old master’s daughter closer to him; or that the prayer old Simon had taught was being answered to the full. That which was “above rubies” had blessed his life and kept his human heart warm whilst his “coast had enlarged;” he had been kept from the evil of a wilful and capricious wife; and at last when he had resigned all prospect of setting the purified pearl as a star on his own breast, it dropped into his hand, unsought, unsolicited.