“You needn’t clem any more, Bess; I’ll give you all my wages.”
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH.
APPRENTICESHIP.
JABEZ now began his work in earnest, in the packing-room—the very lowest rung of the ladder. Not long did he remain there. The bright colours in the lace and brace rooms had an attraction for him, and he argued with himself that the better he did the rough work assigned him the sooner he should mount above it. And Jabez the plodding Blue-coat boy, was ambitious. That ambition had a threefold stimulus.
Manchester people were then, as a rule, steady church and chapel-goers. Mr. Ashton had two pews at the Old Church; one for his family, the other for servants and apprentices, the attendance of the latter being imperative. Jabez thus came in frequent contact with his old-time friends, from the Blue-coat boys in the Chetham Gallery to the Cleggs, to whom went every penny of his earnings; their distress, like that of others, having deepened with the continuation of the Napoleonic war.
Sometimes old Mrs. Clowes, meeting him in the churchyard, would grasp him by the hand, and leave something in it, as, in her old black stuff dress and coloured kerchief tied over her mob-cap, she hurried homewards to scold dilatory handmaids, and put her Christianity in practice amongst her pensioners.
Now and then Joshua Brookes crossed his path, and if he did not put his hand in his breeches pocket for Jabez—now a well-grown youth—he gave him more than sterling coin in sterling advice, though, unfortunately, in so abrupt and grotesque a manner, its effect was frequently lost. Yet one day when the Blue-coat boy had been barely two years at the Mosley Street manufacturer’s, he put a spur into the sides of his ambition.
“Young Cheat-the-fishes, were you ever in Mrs. Chadwick’s green parlour?”
“Yes, sir—I was there once for half-an-hour.” (The day he took back Miss Ellen’s shilling.)