"Thou hes helped me through many a trouble, Ben, but this one is a bit above thy help. It is about my daughter. She and Aske hev got to plain up-and-down quarreling, and she came with her sorrow to me last night. My poor lass! She has no mother, thou sees, and, as she said, I hev to be father and mother both."
"What was it about then?"
"Well, thou sees, he told her he was going to meet the Towton hounds, and he said to her, 'Put on your habit and hev a gallop; it will do you good.' Now, Eleanor wanted to go, but, woman-like, she would not admit it; she looked to be coaxed a bit, happen, but he answered, 'Varry well, she could do as she liked, he would go for his cousin Jane.' Then t' poor lass cried a bit, and he whistled, and when she got varry bad and hysterical with it all, he sent a footman for t' doctor, and so left her by hersen, and went off to t' meet, as if nothing was."
"I think he did just right, Jonathan."
"Then thou knows nowt about it. A man that hes so little human nature in him as to bide a bachelor for more than forty years, like thou hes, isn't able to say a sensible word about womenfolk and their feelings; not he! There's plenty of husbands, Ben, who always say the right thing, and always do the right thing, and, for all that, they are worse to live with than Bluebeards. I can tell thee that."
"St. Paul says—"
"Don't thee quote St. Paul to me about women, and, for that matter, Paul had sense enough when writing about them to say he spoke 'by permission, and not of commandment.' If Jesus Christ hed to suffer with us before he could feel with us, it's a varry unlikely thing that St. Paul could advise about women on instinct. Nineteen hundred years hes made a deal o' difference in women and wives, Ben."
"It's like it hes."
"I hev a mind to go and see Aske. I'm all in t' dark, like, and I'm feared to speak or move for fear I make bad worse."
"I'll tell thee what to do. Take wit with thy anger, and go thy ways to Aske Hall. Use thine own eyes and ears, and then thou wilt put t' saddle on t' right horse, I don't doubt. Aske's wool is a varry fine length, and we could do with all he hes of it. Tetterly got ahead of us last year, so go and speak to Aske for his next shearing, and when thou art on the ground thou can judge for thysen."
"Ay, that will be a good plan, I'll do it." Then, as he hurriedly turned over his letters, "It's a great pity, I think, that I didn't marry again before this time o' day. If I hed a wife now, Eleanor could tell her all her troubles, and she'd give her advice a man niver thinks about."
"But, then, t' wife thou is after, Jonathan, is varry little older than thy daughter; but she's a good lass. It's Sarah Benson, isn't it?"
"Ay, it's Sarah. Dost thou think she'll hev me, Ben?"
"I niver asked her. Ask her thysen. I'm nobbut a bachelor ta knows, and therefore varry ignorant about such inscrutable creatures as women. But nobody could be the worse o' Sarah Benson, and they happen might be the better. Only I'll tell thee one thing: Aske and his wife will be mad as iver was if thou does a thing like that. Thou art a mill-owner now, and a land-owner, too, and Sarah, poor lass, is nobbut a hand."
"I was a hand mysen once, Ben, and ta knows I loved her mother before Sarah was born."
"Varry good; but Squire Aske and Mistress Aske were niver hands; and they know nowt at all about Sarah Benson or her mother. And thou may make up thy mind to one thing, that is, that Sarah Benson isn't t' right kind of peace-maker in any quarrel o' Squire Anthony Aske's."
Jonathan took up his letters again with a vexed face. We are not always pleased with the people who give us sensible advice; and Ben knew well that he had said words bitter as gall to the taste, however they might be by-and-by. Very soon afterwards, however, he saw Burley standing in the mill-yard, while the hostler was getting his gig ready.
"He'll be for Aske Hall," thought Ben, and he went down to the gate and stood there. Six feet two, in a long, blue-checked pinafore and a cloth cap, might not strike people as a figure likely to command respect, but everything is in the circumstances and the surroundings, and Ben, among thousands similarly clad, was a very fine type of a man used to authority. Even Burley was conscious of his moral power, and although he was privately in a very bad temper, he said, "Ben, I'm going to Aske Hall; do whet thou thinks best about Shillingsworth's offer."
"Ay, I'll do that for sure. Good-afternoon to thee."
The Master of Aske
CHAPTER III.
THE MASTER OF ASKE.
"A child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman."
Love's Labour's Lost.
"A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty."
The Taming of the Shrew.
"Down on your knees,
And thank Heaven, fasting, for a good man's love."
As You Like It.
The moral atmosphere, like the physical one, becomes impregnated with certain aromas; absent people rule over us, get hold of us by the forces of antipathy or attraction. As Burley left the mill he was conscious of being under a dominion of this kind. His daughter had taken possession of him. She compelled him to leave his business and his bargains, she called him to her by an attraction which he did not understand, but yet felt compelled to obey.
It was a lovely afternoon, and he had a ride of six miles, a distance not worth naming in connection with the animal he was behind, one of those sturdy Suffolk punches that can be driven one hundred and ten miles in eleven hours; the very best horse in the world before a whip; the only one that will pull twice at a dead weight. Jonathan was very fond of horses, and was very kind to them. It was only his strong religious instincts which had prevented him from being a jockey. "When I was young," he often said, "I was all for horses! My word, I could sit anything, and jump anything right and left! There was Squire Oxley's Rampagious; no one could mount him, and he sent for me. Rampagious stared at me, and I stared at him, then I leaped upon his back and rode him to Oxleyholme, twenty-eight miles!"
Outside his mill Jonathan was never more thoroughly happy than when he was driving a fine horse, and this afternoon, anxious and worried as he was, he felt a certain amount of relief as soon as the reins were in his hand, and he knew himself bowling away into pleasant country lanes. Swift motion seemed, at first, to be just what he most needed, but after a hard run of two miles he felt more inclined to take the distance easily. He was in a lovely road, shaded by branching limes and great elms, in which the wind swayed shadowy masses of thick leaves. The stone walls which bounded it were green with immemorial moss and fern, and fragrant with gadding honeysuckles, and beyond he could see the quiet crofts and pastures where the slow moving cattle were grazing while towards the horizon the undulating country had all the mystery of brooding clouds.
This was a different atmosphere from the noisy mill, and he felt its influence; for as a mother rocks and soothes her child at her breast, so Nature took the troubled man to her still, sweet heart, and he was comforted and knew not how. The last two miles were through the shady beech woods and fine parks of the Aske Manor, and the effect upon Burley's temper was a beneficial one. The man who inherited such a grand old mansion and such rich lands through twelve generations of gentlemen was not one to be rated like a cotton-spinner. He told himself that Aske might have rights peculiarly his own, and that any woman would owe something to the love which had selected her from all the world to share such an honorable position.
Aske had also been peculiarly generous about Eleanor's fortune. He would have married her without a penny, if Burley had not insisted on making over positively the fifty thousand pounds