Take Courage by Phyllis Bentley Page B

whose notions, whether of cloth or of godliness, were not as lofty as his son’s, but he gave him a strict and perfect obedience. I trusted John, and did not hesitate to tell him fully what was in my mind, and ask him to cast the week’s accounts for my father.
    John looked grave.
    â€œThis is not an easy thing, Penninah,” he said. “It is an invasion of your father’s private business, which no man suffers gladly.” Seeing that I did not take his meaning, he explained: “If I do this I shall know all your father’s moneys, his stocks of wool and cloth, the merchants to whom he sells, just as I know my father’s.”
    â€œMy father has no son to help him,” I murmured, somewhat at a loss.
    John’s eyes flashed. “I should be very glad to be a son to your father,” he said promptly.
    There was a warmth in his tone the significance of which I did not then catch; I took his words simply for acceptance of the task I offered him, and as I thought I heard my father stirring, I proposed we should go up together to him.
    â€œI think it better I should go alone,” said John after a moment’s thought.
    He came down after a little to say that my father was not well enough to go to market; he himself would do his business for him, and return that night to give an account of it.
    All this he did, and was closeted for a long while that night in the loom-chamber with my father. The length of their discussion, and the sound of their voices rising and falling, John’s ever seeming to question and my father’s to answer, made me uneasy; and indeed when they at last came down to supper John looked grave and my father tired and troubled. Next day my father bade me be a little stricter in the housekeeping; there had been much adversity in the cloth trade of late, he said, what with wars abroad and political dissensions at home, and the plague, it seemed,hanging about the country; his accounts had grown a little confused, and now John had put them in order he saw that we should need to be careful for a while. I gladly assented; if this were all that troubled him, I thought, we should soon make him well again, for Sarah was very honest and loved us all though she had a queer harsh way of showing it, and it was easy for me to be frugal since my heart was not set on outward shows or luxuries. We all agreed that David, being young and growing, should not know any curtailment.
    To cut down our expenses was easy, and John, coming every week on the eve of Market Day to cast our accounts, gave me praise for our retrenchment which I scarcely deserved, but it was not so easy to cure my father, whose melancholy grew every day upon him. Bishop Laud continually gave orders about communion tables, candles, saints, and so on, which to my father appeared pure papistry, but instead of exciting him as of old, these served merely to depress him, now that there was no Parliament sitting to take the lead in resistance. When it was ordained by those in authority that the afternoon exercises in church should be no longer sermons, but consist only of catechism out of the Prayer Book, he seemed to despair of religion and freedom.
    â€œIt is the death of all pious learning,” he muttered dejectedly, his head on his breast.
    â€œAye, if it be observed,” said John. “But it won’t be observed in Bradford.”
    His staunch steady tone gave my father some comfort, and his face brightened, only to slip back, when John had gone, into its now customary look of wistful sadness.

4
FRANCIS APES THE SOLDIER
    It was indeed a sad time for me, for beside the grief of my father’s slow decay, I had another trouble.
    As peace was shortly made with Spain, though I think more for lack of supplies on our King’s part than for any result accruing to the war, certain of our armies returned from those ill-fated expeditions of Buckingham’s abroad about which Parliament and all honest