Between Two Loves/08
CHAPTER VIII.
ANTHONY ASKE'S REVENGE.
"Revenge is but a frailty incident
To crazed and sickly minds; the poor content
Of little souls, unable to surmount
An injury; too weak to bear affront."
"Revenge, at first though sweet,
Bitter erelong, back on itself recoils."
It is a finer thing to conciliate an enemy than to conquer one; but Jonathan Burley did not make any such consideration. He felt himself to have "bested" his son-in-law, and he kept reiterating that she was not afraid of him. What could Aske do to him? He did not believe there was law enough in England to make Eleanor live with her husband if she did not want to do so. True, Aske might divorce her; but the irate father answered the thought promptly. "Let him do it! He'll hev to give her back her money, and she'll get a better husband, easy enough. And as for what folks say—that for it," and he snapped his fingers defiantly at the supposed gossip.
The day had been a wretched one to the undutiful wife, and she had almost determined to tell her father she would go back to her husband and her own home. But the first words Jonathan said convinced her that her repentant resolution had come too late.
"Aske was at t' mills to-day, Eleanor."
"What did he say?"
"What did he say? I hardly know, I was that mad at him; but I know what I said. I called him a liar, a double liar; and I told him thou niver should go back to him; and I dared him to do his worst to me."
"Oh, father! father! I am so sorry."
"Sorry? What's t' matter now, pray? I thought that was what thou wanted."
"I—I don't know."
"Well, if iver I Thou caps all t' women I have come across. Now mind, Eleanor! Thou can't play fast and loose wi' thy father. Thou brought thy quarrel to me, and I hev lifted it; and I mean to fight it out. And make up thy mind to another thing; Anthony Aske hes turned his back on thee forever, and thou'lt just hev to lay upon t' bed thou hes made for thysen."
"Father, I hev you, and there is nobody so loving and so true as you are."
"Now thou talks sensible. We got along as happy as could be before that fellow came between us, and we can do without him varry well indeed for t' future."
She stooped and kissed her Either for answer, and he held her white jewelled hands and stroked them fondly, and felt again very decidedly that he had "bested" his enemy. Still, as the sweet spring days, went by there was a weight upon them. Eleanor was loving and lovely, and she gave to Jonathan's life the sweet womanly flavor he always longed for, but the joy of her presence was like the joy of forbidden pleasure or the sweetness of stolen fruit.
And Anthony Aske's vengeance did not tarry. Jonathan had thought over his own ground carefully, and he had not been able to find any vulnerable place in his life for Aske's attack, excepting through Eleanor, and he imagined he was well prepared on that side. Nor did Anthony at first see in what precise way his father-in-law was to be ruined. But if there was a man in Yorkshire who was able to open his eyes to whatever advantages he had, his lawyer, Matthew Rhodes, was that man, and the very next morning he drove into Leeds to see him.
Rhodes was a very large man; he had an eye like the eagle's, piercing and yet cold, and a neck and head thick and aggressive as a bull's. He was a close and eager partisan, and a good fighter for any cause he espoused. Indeed, he loved a desperate fight, and had been frequently known to defend a criminal whose case appeared to be hopeless for the simple delight such forlorn legal struggles gave him.
"Good-morning, Squire," he said; "what can I do for you to-day?"
"I have a quarrel on hand, Rhodes. I want you to fight with me."
"Hum! Who is it with, Squire? And what is it about?"
"It is with Jonathan Burley."
Then Rhodes became interested at once, "Your father-in-law, Squire?"
"Exactly. It is about my wife. Listen!" and Anthony went over the whole affair, carefully.
"Do you want a divorce?"
"No, no, no! I will not give up my wife."
"There is her dowry, you know, and—"
"I am not thinking of money."
"Is it revenge, then?"
"Yes; it—is—revenge! I want to ruin Burley."
"You are sure you mean it? Quite sure, Squire?"
"I never was more in earnest about anything."
"Are you afraid of spending money for this object?"
"No. I'll spend it freely."
"Hundreds?—thousands?"
"Tens of thousands, if necessary."
"Then I understand you. Leave me for an hour to think it over, when you come back, and I will tell you what to do."
When Aske returned Rhodes had entered fully into his client's quarrel. Indeed, he had wrought himself so completely to Anthony's mood, that Burley had become almost personally offensive to him. The squire felt the accord at once, and the two men sat down together.
"You have been badly treated, Aske, shamefully treated, disgracefully treated, by both Burley and his daughter."
"Leave my wife out of the question. I prefer that she should not be named."
"Very well; Burley ought to be punished, severely punished. To come between a man and his wife is a crime, Squire; and I'm sorry the law finds no adequate punishment for it. There is no adequate punishment, so we must take the law somewhat in our own hand; and I think we can make Burley smart. Yes, I really think we can! If I remember right, he bought the land on which his mill stands from your father?"
"Yes, he did."
"And the land above it is still yours?"
"Both above and below."
"Never mind that which is below. You own the land above it, as far up the stream as Black Force?"
"Yes, I do."
"Then build a mill upon it. Build as large a mill as you can, and fill it with the newest and finest machinery."
"I see what you mean, Rhodes; but I don't want to meddle with trade and spinning. I am a county gentleman, and my ancestors—"
"I want you to do nothing the ancestors will object to. You need not appear at all. I know the man who will attend to the business for you."
"But that would be a mere question of competition; and it is likely Burley would have the best of it. He is clever in business, and he has the reputation of being clever. Everything is in his favor. I do not believe I could injure him in that way, and I might injure myself."
"Squire, you don't see as far through a stone wall as I thought you could," and he stooped forward and said a few words in a lower voice to Anthony.
Then the squire leaped to his feet with a laugh. "Thank you, Rhodes," he cried; "the plan is capital. No one but you would ever have dreamed of such a revenge."
"But my thoughts must depend on your money."
"Draw upon me for all you require; and, remember, I am patient. Do not lose an hour."
"It isn't my way. You can go home, squire; you will not have long to wait for the declaration of war."
Rhodes kept his word. Within a week a large force of men had begun to dig the foundations for another mill, higher up the stream than Burley's. Jonathan winced at the coming competition; but he had not, during the months it was in process of erection, any idea of the deeper wrong that was to follow.
But it was bad enough to see the edifice growing as rapidly as unstinted money and labor could produce it; and it soon became an almost intolerable eyesore to him. Aske never appeared in the new enterprise. A man from Halifax, called Sykes, was the nominal proprietor, but Burley knew well whose money and power was behind him. And Sykes, too, was a blustering, hectoring fellow, whose manner was especially offensive to Jonathan; a very Mordecai passing his mill-gates.
When the new mill-building was completed it was filled with machinery and looms of the best description, and such high wages were offered to first-class hands as speedily robbed Burley of most of his fine workers. Almost every day there was some irritation of this kind; and the rivalry between the two masters—Burley and Sykes—soon began to infect all their hands; so that the "letting out" every night was a turbulent scene of ill words, too often ending in blows. And it was not many weeks before a spirit of hatred and quarrelling entered every cottage, and in some cases separated friends and families.
At this point Aske's real motive was manifested. One morning a large body of men were observed at work upon the stream. They were engaged in building a lock. Burley was naturally very indignant. Sykes, in his insolent way, said "their machinery would at times need more water than the ordinary run would afford; and in such circumstances they would be obliged to lock the water for a supply."
"That will allow you at any time to shut off my supply of water, and so virtually to stop my mill. It is an outrage! You have no right to lock a mill-stream," said Burley, passionately, "and I will appeal to the law to protect me."
"And if the law orders me to remove the lock I will do it. Not till," answered Sykes, turning on his heel indifferently.
But going to law was a remedy as bad as the disease, and Burley began to perceive that it was exactly what Aske had been driving him to. For Aske knew well that he had no right to lock a mill-stream, and he knew also that the law would act sustain him in such an act; but all the same, during the trial of the case, which might be indefinitely prolonged, Burley could be effectually and permanently crippled in business.
Months of terrible anxiety followed. Burley, deprived of water-power, found himself unable to fill orders with any degree of punctuality. The prosecution of his case took all his spare time and money. He was going to financial ruin at a frightful pace. Every small loss paved the way for a great one, and he foresaw that when his verdict was gained he would be a ruined man. True, he could then sue Aske for damages, but, weary and impoverished, bow would he be able to go through another prolonged litigation.
At first the wicked injustice of the whole scheme for his ruin almost made him insane. He went about his mill like a baited wild beast; there were hours when even Ben Holden kept out of his way. All the worst points of Jonathan's character were developed by such an ordeal, for he had a distinct under-consciousness that it was of his own bringing on, that he had wilfully taken a bad road, and that just so long as he chose to pursue it, he need not expect to meet with any good.
He saw the business of which he was so proud, which he had built up by years of industry and prudence, decreasing day by day. No amount of skill or intelligence or caution could avert its decay. He loved his money. Every shilling of it had been honestly made, and was a testimony to his integrity. He felt keenly that he was being "rogued out of it" with a slow, implacable persistence that he could neither resist nor escape. All his life's labor was going at a sacrifice, and his foes hid themselves behind the bulwark of the law, and from that vantage-ground baited him into an agony of imprudent struggles against the iniquity of their injustice.
In a very short time after the lawsuit began it usurped every faculty and feeling of Jonathan's nature. He had no time for anything but the unnatural fight upon which he had entered. He resigned his management of the chapel affairs, and soon became irregular in all those public religous duties which had once been such a delight to him. Ben watched the mill with a vigilant eye, but in spite of every effort the number of looms at work gradually decreased. Jonathan could not bear to see it, and he seldom went through the weaving-sheds.
Even the sympathy of his hands, manifesting itself in a subdued manner, or by a more marked respect, hurt him. Besides, Sarah's face was a reproach he could not meet. In a moment's passion he had taken his daughter home and espoused her quarrel, and he quickly understood that by the act he had put another barrier between Sarah and himself. In all his subsequent proceedings he had also sacrificed her to the evil passions which were eating his own heart and substance away. As time went on he avoided her altogether. He had a dim kind of perception that Steve was doing very badly, but he did not feel as if he had either the right or the inclination to interfere again in his affairs. One day Ben Holden began to speak of him, and he stopped the subject with a few curt words.
"Let Steve Benson alone, I say. When he works, pay him. When he's idle, dock him. We are both going to ruin about as fast as we can; only he tak's one way, and I tak' another."
"If ta knows thou art going to ruin, for God's sake stop, Jonathan."
"Nay, I'm in for t' fight. I'll hang on till t' last moment. Does ta think I'd back out of any fight? I'm not that kind."
"I wish ta was."
"Well, I am not."
But even the men in the thick of the battle are not to be half so much pitied as the women who sit at home, watching, watching, watching for some good coming, and weeping, because there is nothing comes but disappointment and despair. Of all the sufferers in this unhappy quarrel, Eleanor was the greatest. Certainly her father never said a word of reproach to her. But words are not the only form of speech. His gloomy, haggard face, his restlessness and silence, the gradual but constant retrenchments in the once splendidly generous household, taught her better than any lecture could have done some forcible lessons regarding wilful sin and its consequences.
The old home, which she had looked back so fondly to, had greatly changed. It was so, indeed from the first hour of her return. Nature, even in the household and the affections, abhors a vacuum, and as soon as Eleanor married, she began to efface her place in Burley House, and order it to new ways and new hopes. Jonathan had got used to his solitary dinner, and his quiet hour with his pipe. There were very few hours in which he really regretted the company, and the dressing, dining, and merry-making which had been naturally enough a part of Eleanor's reign there.
Also, he had begun to picture to himself another woman in her place as mistress. Into all his fair, large rooms he had brought Sarah, in imagination. Her quiet movements, her calm, sweet face, her soft, homely speech, had become a part of all his dreams and hopes for the future. Do as he would, Eleanor appeared to him somewhat in the light of a guest. She had given up her place, and he could not put her in it again. Aske's wife was not altogether the same thing as his very own daughter. He would have been puzzled to define the difference; he would, very likely, have denied it, but there it was.
And Eleanor, in the same vague, indeterminate way, was sensible of it. Her rooms were precisely as she left them, but she had outgrown all their belongings. She wondered she had ever cared for the books on the shelves. The pretty furniture appeared childish in its taste, and paltry in its quality, after the splendor of her apartments in Aske Hall. She could not help a feeling of contempt for the mementos of the very days that in her memory had been bathed in a rosy light.
So that in the earliest hours of her wicked desertion from duty, she felt that she had made a grave mistake. But alas, alas, how hard are the backward steps to a forsaken home! And after her father's open defiance of Aske, the road seemed barred to her. She was powerless to struggle against the forces, internal and external, that bound her to her transgression. Then she made an effort to resume her old place in Burley House, and among the society which she had been wont to gather there. But she was no longer a bright young girl surrounded by lovers, with the glory of a high social position before her. She was a deserted wife, with a shadow upon her name.
In the heyday of her youth and beauty and prosperity, she had not been very careful of other women's feelings, and she did not find them in her trouble inclined to return good for evil. Very few ladies called upon her. The gentlemen she met treated her with restraint and evident disapproval, or else with a sympathy that was still more painful and offensive.
It was Jane Bashpoole's hour of revenge, and she used it pitilessly against her rival. The story of the sapphire necklace, set in Miss Bashpoole's own designing, passed from lip to lip. "Poor Cousin Anthony" was the subject of her commiseration, and without a dissenting feminine vote Eleanor was adjudged unworthy of the love and position which he had given her. And though Squire Bashpoole said few words about the matter, every single word, and every shrug of his broad shoulders, condemned his nephew's wife. And the country gentlefolks wondered "how Aske could expect anything else from people who had only their money to recommend them, and who had not been taught through generations of culture the self-restraints of good birth and good breeding."
A month after the quarrel began, Aske left Yorkshire; but the work of his revenge went steadily on. Still, few things grow desperate at once. For months, Burley had intervals in which he not only disregarded but defied his enemy, "He'll get more than he's building for, Ben." he would say, after an unusually prosperous week, "If he thinks he can take my business from me, he's a bit mistaken! Who's Sykes of Halifax? Nobody knows him. Jonathan Burley, he's a good name from t' Tweed to t' Thames."
But, from the hour in which Aske's tactics developed themselves in the locked stream, Jonathan plainly foresaw his financial ruin; and the conflict resolved itself into that desperate, despairing pertinacity which makes soldiers hold a fort they know must finally be surrendered, or doctors struggle with a cancer they are certain will, in the end, destroy life.
It was the facing of this hopeless fight which made Burley hard and parsimonious. He wanted every shilling to continue it as long as possible, and he began retrenchment first in his home. All his horses were sold but the one roadster he needed for his gig; all the servants dismissed but such as were absolutely necessary to prevent things from going to waste. Eleanor, who was fond of luxurious appointments, and especially of rich clothing, found it no light addition to her sorrows to learn the want of money, and to be compelled to fold over her aching heart faded and shabby silk. One night, nearly three years after she had left Aske, Eleanor was standing at the windows just at gloaming. It was the month of March, and the ground was white, and the trees restlessly tossing their bare branches above the neglected avenue. All was still in the house, all was still in the park, except the cawing of the rooks, sailing homeward in straggling flight. Never had. Eleanor been so conscious of the punishment of her sin as during that dreary day. Her father, full of trouble and anxiety, had gone to York, and had forgotten to bid her good-by. She had long felt that she was a trouble to the two women-servants, and that they heartily wished her in her own home. All outside sympathy for her was long ago dead. She was utterly forsaken and forlorn.
She was weeping silently, and almost unconsciously, when the house-maid, a woman forty years old, entered the room with coals to replenish the fire. Eleanor's white cheeks and hopeless air made the woman sorry for her. She set down the empty scuttle, and said, "Mistress Aske, I am grieved for thee. Why doesn't thou go and mak' up with thy husband? Depend upon it, he'll niver be able to say a cross word to thee."
"Oh, thank you, Martha! You are the only person that has had a kind word for me for so long! I would go to the squire if I knew where he was. I think I would go to the end of the world if I could only put an end to this trouble."
"Nay, then, thou need only go to thy own place. T' squire came home yesterday, and varry old and bad he looks, so Jane Arkroyd says. I'd tell Jimmy to drive thee oover to Aske, and for thy own sake and for Master Burley's sake, I'd try and put a stop to a' this worriting and waste o' good brass."
"I have a great mind to take your advice, Martha. I am sure it is good advice. But I won't have Jimmy. If I go, no one but you shall know; then, if I fail, I am sure you will keep my fresh sorrow and shame in your own heart."
"I don't believe thou will fail; and if ta does, I'll niver say a word about it to any one. Thou can't walk to Aske, though, and in t' dark, too."
"Yes, I can. It is only four miles over the common. Many an afternoon I walk double that, without any motive but to tire myself to sleep. I'll go now, Martha, I won't wait until to-morrow. It may be wet then, and a day may make all the difference between too late and not too late."
She dressed carefully, and covered herself with one of the large mantles then worn. In a little more than an hour she was at the gates of Aske Park. It was quite dark and the gates were shut, and she had no alternative but to ring the bell and take old Geoffrey into her confidence. He listened to her with reluctance. "T' squire will never forgive me mistress," he said, "and I doan't think it kind in thee to put an owd man like me in such a box."
"But let me warm myself at your fire, Geoffrey. I am damp and cold."
He was not able to resist this plea, and when he saw how three years of suffering had changed her, his heart was troubled for the woman he had first seen in all the pride and joyousness of her bridehood.
"I won't harm you, Geoffrey. I only want to see my husband—to see if there is any chance of him forgiving me."
"Now then, mistress, thou talks well. Go thy ways, and God bless thee!"
She walked rapidly through the park, and as she neared the house she saw that there were lights in the small dinner-parlor. The blinds were not drawn, but before the windows there was a clump of thick laurel-trees. It was Anthony's custom, when he dined alone, to smoke his cigar on the terrace before the drawing-room, and she meant to watch behind the shrubs until he came out. Then she could approach him unseen by the servants, and she thought that if Anthony was left without anything to consider but the forgiveness she meant to plead for, he would not turn her away.
Cautiously she advanced to the laurel-bushes, and peered through them into the room. Matthew Rhodes was sitting with Aske. They were smoking and talking with great earnestness. The table was covered with papers, and Eleanor observed her husband's face darken as he examined them. She guessed rightly enough that they were bills of expenses, and probably their amount staggered even Anthony's conception of the value of such a revenge as he was taking, for he soon rose, and began to walk about the room in a mood whose concentrated passion she was quite familiar with. Rhodes terrified her. She had never seen the man before, but she had heard many a story of his relentless persecution of those whom he hated, and his dark, heavy face made her shrink back trembling into the covert of the laurels. She did not dare to call Anthony's attention while Rhodes was near him. Shivering with cold and sick with fear, she waited and waited until the two men went out of the room together.
Perhaps Anthony might come on to the terrace now. She lingered for another half-hour, until she had no longer any strength or courage left. Then, with slow and painful steps, she went back to the keeper's lodge. He let her in without a word, and she stood a few minutes by his fire, and dried and warmed her wet, cold feet. Her wretched face, her pallor, and silent, heavy weeping, commanded his pity. He asked her no questions, but quietly put a cup of milk and a slice of bread-and-meat on the table. With a look of gratitude she drank the milk, and then, weeping bitterly, went out again into the dark, and so across the lonely common dividing Aske from Burley on the northern side.