It was what Jack most needed. His slight, graceful figure filled out and became very straight, losing a stoop it had, so that he grew to be a well-built, active young fellow, rosy, and quite too pretty, with his blond locks. After our third month began, Lowry married a widow, and moved away to her farm up the country and beyond the Blue Bell tavern, where he carried on his business, and where he was to appear again to me at a time when I sorely needed him. It was to be another instance of how a greater Master overrules our lives for good.
Just after we had heard the news of the widow, my father came into the forge one day with Joseph Warder. He stood and watched me shoe a horse, and asked Lowry if I had learned the business. When he replied that we both might become more expert, but that we could make nails, and shoe fairly well, my father said:
“Take off these aprons, and go home. There will be other work for both of you.”
We were glad enough to obey, and, dropping our leathern aprons, thus ended our apprenticeship. Next week Tom Lowry, our master, appeared with a fine beaver for me, saying, as I knew, that it was the custom to give an apprentice a beaver when his time was up, and that he had never been better served by any.
My Aunt Gainor kept away all this time, and made it clear that she did not wish my black hands at her table. My father, no doubt, felt sure that, so far as I was concerned, she would soon or late relent. This, in fact, came about in midwinter, upon her asking my mother to send me to see her. My father observed that he had no will to make quarrels, or to keep them alive. My mother smiled demurely, knowing him as none other did, and bade me go with her.
In her own room she had laid out on the bed a brown coat of velveteen, with breeches to match, and stockings with brown clocks, and also a brown beaver, the back looped up, all of which she had, with sweet craftiness, provided, that I might appear well before my Aunt Gainor.
“Thou wilt fight no one on the way, Hugh. And now, what shall be done with his hands, so rough and so hard? Scrub them well. Tell Gainor I have two new lilies for her, just come from Jamaica. Bulbs they are; I will care for them in the cellar. I was near to forget the marmalade of bitter orange. She must send; I cannot trust Tom. Thy father had him whipped at the jail yesterday, and he is sulky. Put on thy clothes, and I will come again to see how they fit thee.”
In a little while she was back again, declaring I looked a lord, and that if she were a girl she should fall in love with me, and then—“But I shall never let any woman but me kiss thee. I shall be jealous. And now, sir, a bow. That was better. Now, as I curtsey, it is bad manners to have it over before I am fully risen. Then it is permitted that les beaux yeux se rencontrent. Comme ca. Ca va bien. That is better done.”
“What vanities are these?” said my father at the door she had left open.
She was nowise alarmed. “Come in, John,” she cried. “He does not yet bow as well as thou. It would crack some Quaker backs, I think. I can hear Friend Wain’s joints creak when he gets up.”