Hepplestall's

CHAPTER V—SIR HARRY WOOS

TO know one’s duty and to do it are often different things. Sir Harry’s duty, as he knew, was to regard his wild oats as sown, to marry Dorothy, and to go home quietly to Lancashire. In London, he competed on equal terms with men far richer than himself at a pace disastrously too hot for his means, but the competition had been, socially, a triumph for him and to go back now of all times, when temporarily he was under a cloud, was a duty against which his pride fought hard.

He hadn’t compromise in him and compromise, in this case was unthinkable. It was either Lancashire with Dorothy, or London without her. Dorothy in London was not to be thought of: no countrybred wife for him unless on the exceptional terms of her bringing him a great fortune, and what she was to bring was well enough in Lancashire but a bagatelle to be lost or won at hazard in a night in London. Decidedly, she would be a blunder in London: if a man of his standing in society put his head under the yoke, it had to be for a price much greater than Dorothy could pay. He would lose caste by such a marriage.

There remained the sensible alternative, the plan to be good and dutiful, to abandon London, ambition, youth, and to become a dull and rustic husband. Long ago, his father and Luke Vcrners had come to an understanding on the matter, eminently satisfying to themselves, and he had let things remain, vaguely, at that. Certainly he broke no promise of his own making if he avoided Dorothy for ever: and here he was going under escort (and it seemed to him a subtly possessive escort) of Luke Verners to call on Dorothy, to, it was implied, clarify the situation and, he supposed, to declare himself. Well, that was too cool and however things happened they were not going to happen quite like that. He didn’t mind going to survey Dorothy: indeed, Almack’s being closed to him just now by his own action, he must have some occupation; but this Dorothy—positively he remembered her obscurely through a haze of other women—this Dorothy must needs be extraordinary if she were to reconcile him to a duty he resented. It might be necessary to teach these good people their place. Luke seemed to Sir Harry uninstructed in the London perspective and in the importance of being Whitworth.

It was unfortunate that Mrs. Verners clucked over him like a hen who has found a long-lost chicken. Her inquiries after his health seemed to him even more assured in their possessiveness than Luke’s attitude of a keeper. Mrs. Verners was the assertion of motherhood, and on every score but that of hard duty, he was prepared to depreciate Dorothy, when she came in, to the limits of justice and perhaps beyond them. Dorothy might be a miracle, but Mrs. Verners as a mother was a handicap that would discount anything.

Then Dorothy came in, carrying in her arm a kitten with an injured paw. From her room she had heard it crying in Albemarle Street, had run out and for the last ten minutes had been doctoring it somewhere at the back of the house. Mrs. Verners was alarmed: Dorothy was still flushed with running, or, perhaps, with tenderness; her hair was riotous; she was thinking of the kitten, she had the barest curtsy for Sir Harry, she was far from being the great lady her mother would have had her in this moment of meeting with him. And he incontinently forgot that he was there on a sort of compulsion, he nearly forgot that it was his duty to like her. Emotionally, he surrendered at sight to a beautiful unkempt girl who caressed a kitten and, somehow, brought cleanliness into the room. “Good God!” said Sir Harry, his manners blown to pieces along with his hesitations by one blast of honesty.

If they could have been married there and then, it was not Whitworth who would have been backward. All that was best in him was devotedly and immediately hers, and that best was not a bad best either: if he could forget London and his craving to be a figure in the town, a courtier and a modish rake, he had the making of a faithful husband to such a woman, satisfied with her, with country sports and the management of his estate, a good father, and a hearty, genial, eupeptic, hard drinking but hard exercising representative of the permanent best in English life—the outdoor gentleman.

If he could forget—and just now he utterly forgot, with one swift backward glance at London women. What were they to her? Dressmakers’ dummies, perruquiers’ blocks, automata directed by a dancing-master, cosmetical exteriors to vanity, greed, vice, if they were not, like some he hated most, conceited bluestockings parading an erudition that it didn’t become a woman to possess. Whereas, Dorothy! He felt from her a whiff of moorland air, and a horse between his legs and the clean rush past him of invigorating wind and all the zest of a great run behind the hounds with the tang of burning peat in his nostrils and the scent of heather coming down from, the hills. It wasn’t quite—it wasn’t yet, by years—the case of the roué worn by experience who seeks a last piquant emotion in religion or (what seems to him almost its equivalent) in a fresh young girl, but his situation had those elements, with the added glamor of discovering that his duty was not merely tolerable but delicious.

“Good God,” he said again, quite irrepressibly in the spate of his emotion, then realizing that he was guilty of breach of decorum, lapsed to apologetic amenities from which they were to gather that his ejaculations referred to the kitten.

His polite murmur roused Dorothy to self-consciousness. “What a hoyden Sir Harry must be thinking me,” she said confusedly.

“They are wrong,” said Sir Harry, “who call red roses the flower of Lancashire. That flower is the wild heather. That flower is you.”

“Yes,” said Dorothy with whimsical resignation, “the commonest flower that blooms.”

“But a rarity in London,” he said, “and, bloom like yours, rare anywhere. In London, Madam, we have a glass-house admiration for glass-house flowers that wilt to ruin at a breath of open air. I have been guilty of the bad taste to share that admiration. I have been unpardonably forgetful of the flower of Lancashire.” And he bowed to Dorothy in as handsome apology as a laggard lover could make. “We heard a word at the club, Mr. Verner, which, as you observed, had the faculty of annoying me. It annoyed me because in a club one thinks club-wise and club-wisdom is opaque. I should not be annoyed now.”

“Are we to know what the word was?” asked Mrs. Verners not too discreetly.

Sir Harry raised his eyebrows slightly. Decidedly, he thought again, a clucking hen, but his management of her could wait: this was his hour of magnanimity. “At the club, Madam,” he said, “we were allowed to hear a Mr. Seccombe recommending me to visit my estates.” Sir Harry looked at Dorothy. “And it is in my mind that Seceombe counseled well.”

Considering the man and remembering the wager with Godalming, that was an admission even more handsome than his apology. It fell short, but only short, of actual declaration and perhaps that might have come had not Mrs. Verners attempted to force a pace which was astonishingly fast. She saw her expedition turning in its first engagement to triumphant victory, but she wanted the spoils of victory, she wanted a spade to be called unmistakably a spade, she wanted his declaration in round terms before he left that room.

“We are to see you back in Lancashire?” she said insinuatingly.

Sir Harry shuddered at her crude persistence, but, gallantly, “I have good reason to believe so,” he replied, scanning the reason with an admiration qualified now by wonder if she would become like her mother.

“And you will come to stay?”

“That I cannot say,” he was goaded to reply. Damn the woman! She was arousing his worst, she was reawakening his rebellion to the thought that he had had his fling, she was tempting him to continue it in the hope that when his fling was ended, Mrs. Verners would have, mercifully, also ended. He took his leave with some abruptness, treading a lower air than that of his expectancy.

But Dorothy held her place with him. For wife of his, this was the one woman and Mrs. Verners, in retrospect, diminished to the disarmed impotence to hurt of a spikeless burr.

He weighed alternatives—Dorothy, heather, the moors, domesticity, estates, his place in the county against the stews of St. James, the excitement of gambling on a horse, a prizefighter or the dice, the hot perfumes of balls, Ranelagh, the clubs, women. He even threw in Prinny and his place at Court, and against all these Dorothy, and what she stood for, held the balance down. He formed a resolution which he thought immutable.

He assumed, and Mrs. Verners had fed that assumption, that there were to be no difficulties about Dorothy and, fundamentally, she meant to make none. She had looked away from Hepplestall when she met him on a road, and many times since then she had looked back in mind to Hepplestall, but Sir Harry was her fate and she did not quarrel with it. He had, though, been bearishly slow in accepting her as his fate and she saw no reason in that to smooth his passage to the end now that, clearly, he was in the mood to woo. His careless absence had been one long punishment for her: let her now see how he would take the short punishment of being impaled for a week or two on tenterhooks about her.

He came again, heralded by gifts, with hot ardor to his wooing. He brought passion and buttressed that with his self-knowledgeable desire to force the issue, to make a contract from which there could be no retreat: and thereby muddied pure element with lower motive. He complimented her upon a new gown.

“It pleases you?” she asked.

“Much less than the wearer.”

“You are a judge of ladies’ raiment, are you not, Sir Harry?”

“No more than becomes a man of taste.”

“One hears,” she said, “of Lady Betty Standish who was at choosing patterns with her dressmaker, and of a gentleman shown into the room that chose her patterns for her, and of the bills that Lady Betty sent to the gentleman, and of how he paid them.”

“You have heard of that?” he said. “Well, there are women in town capable of such bad taste as that.”

“The bad taste of allowing you to choose her gowns? But were you not competent to choose?”

“The bad taste,” he said, “of sending the bills to me. Would you have had me decline to pay them?”

“Again,” she said, passing no judgment, “there is a story of a merchant that lived in Hampstead and drove one night with a plump daughter in a coach to eat a dinner in the City. The coach was stopped on the Heath by a highwayman who wanted nothing of the merchant, but was most gallant to his daughter.”

“I kissed the girl,” said Sir Harry. “It was done for a wager and I won it. A folly, and a harmless one,” but he wondered, if she had heard of these, if there were less innocent escapades that she had heard of. There was no lack of them, nor, it appeared, of babblers eager to gossip, to his disservice, about a man on whom the Regent frowned.

“One hears again,” she said, “that at Drury Lane Theater,”—he blushed in good earnest: would she have the hardihood to mention a pretty actress who—? and then he breathed again as she went on—“there was once an orange wench—”

“That was a bet I lost,” he said. “I was to dress as a woman and stand with my basket like the rest, and I was not to be identified. I was identified and paid. But what are these but the freaks we all enjoy in London? Vain trifles, I admit it, in the telling. Not feats to boast of, not incidents that I take pleasure in hearing you refer to, but, I protest, innocent enough and relishable in the doing.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “And while you relished them in London, did you give thought to what I did at home?”

“You? To what you did? What did you do?” Sir Harry was flabbergasted at her question.

“I was at home, Sir Harry.” She spoke without bitterness, without emphasis, and when he looked sharply at her, she seemed to interpret the look as an invitation and rose. “My mother, I think, is ready to accompany us if you care to take me walking in the Park.”

Decidedly a check to a gentleman who proposed to make up for past delays by a whirlwind wooing. She was at home, while he ruffled it in London. And where else should she be? What did she imply? At any rate, she had embarrassed him by the unexpectedness of her attack. Of course she was at home, and of course he was a reveler in London. He was man, she woman, and he hoped she recognized the elementary distinction. Whatever her object, whether she had the incredible audacity to accuse him—him, open-handed Harry—of something only to be defined as meanness, or whether she was only being witty with him, she had certainly discouraged the declaration he came to make.

Mrs. Vemers found him a moody squire of dames in the Park, while his sudden puzzlement gave Dorothy a mischievously happy promenade. He brought them, after the shortest of walks, to their door.

“You have been very silent, Sir Harry,” Mrs. Verners told him, with her incurable habit of stating the obvious. “Are you not well to-day?”

“Perfectly, I thank you, Madam.”

“Oh, Lud, mother, it is but that you do not appreciate Sir Harry’s capacity for disguise. In the past, he has been—many things. To-day we are to admire him in the character of a thunderstorm.”

“Indeed?” he said. “Thunderstorms break.”

“But not on me,” said Dorothy, and ran into the house.

Sir Harry turned away with the scantest bow to Mrs. Verners. This was a new flavor and he wanted to taste it well, to make sure that he approved a Dorothy who could be a precipitate hoyden rushing out-of-doors to an injured kitten and a woman of wit that stabbed him shrewdly. She had variety, this Dorothy; she wasn’t the makings of a dull, complacent wife. Well, and did he want dullness and complacency? He was going to Lancashire, to a life that a Whitworth must live as an example to others: there was to be nothing to demand a wife’s complacency. And as to dullness, heaven save him from it—and heaven seemed, by making Dorothy Verners, to have answered that prayer. He decided to be more in love with Dorothy than before—which, as she wasn’t willing to fly into his arms when he crooked a beckoning finger, was only natural; and went into a shop from which he might express to her the warmth of his sentiment at an appropriate cost. She should see if he was mean!

In the shop he found my Lord Godalming who was turning over some bright trinkets intended for a lady who was not his wife. Godalming was surly, eyeing Whitworth as he called for the best in necklaces that the shopman had to show. “Oh, yes,” said his lordship, “bring out the best for Sir Harry Whitworth. Jewels for Sir Harry and paste for me. I am only a lord.”

“What’s put you out, Godalming?”

“Ain’t the sight of your radiant face enough to put me out? I hate happiness in others.”

“Then I can offer you the consolation of knowing that my happiness will not be visible to you long. I propose very shortly to go North, my lord, and to stay there.” Godalming flopped back against the counter like a fainting man who must support himself and, indeed, his astonishment was genuine enough. “Go North?” he gasped. “Are you gone stark mad?”

“I have flattered myself to the contrary,” said Sir Harry, with complacency. “I have believed that I have recovered my senses.”

“Rot me if I understand you,” said his lordship.

“Yet you find me in the article of choosing a necklace.”

“Damme, Whitworth, are there no women nearer than the North Pole? Is there no difference between gallantry and lunacy?”

“I am thinking of marriage, my lord.”

“Oh, Lud, yes, we’ve all to come to that. But we don’t come to it happily. We don’t think of it with our faces like the August sun. I’m the last man to believe your smirking face covers thoughts of marriage. I know too well what it does cover.”

“Indeed? And what?”

“What? Burn me if you are not the most exasperating man alive. Have you no recollections of a wager?”

“I am bound to make you an admission, Godalming. Occupied with other matters, I had for the moment forgot our wager. But you need have no fears. I pay my debts.”

“Pay? Where in the devil’s name have you been hiding yourself if you don’t know you’ve won the wager?”

“Won it?” cried Sir Harry.

“What else are you happy for?”

“I give you my word I did not know of this, Godalming.”

“The news has been about the town these last two hours. A courier has ridden in from Brighton summoning you to Prinny’s table to-morrow. He is tired of his shoe buckle and vows that you are right about it. They say he wrote you the recall with his own gouty hand. There’s condescension, damn you, and you let me be the one to tell you news of it, me that loses a thousand by it!”

“I have been some hours absent from my rooms,” apologized Sir Harry. “But this! This!” And if his face glowed before, it blazed now in the intoxication of a great victory. He wasn’t thinking of the wager he had won, and still less of the lady who was his to win: he was thinking of a fat, graceful, capricious Prince who used his male friends as he used his female, like dirt, who drove a coach with distinction and hadn’t another achievement, who had taken Harry Whitworth back into a favor that was a degradation; and Harry Whitworth thought of his restoration to that slippery foothold as a triumph and a glimpse of paradise! The Regent had forgiven him and nothing else mattered.

He savored it a while, then became conscious of a shopman with a tray of jewels, and of why he came into the shop. He had the grace to lower his voice from Godaiming’s hearing as he said, “You must have finer ones than these. I desire the necklace to be of the value of one thousand guineas.”

He chose, while Godalming bought his pretentious trifle, and gave Dorothy’s address. Then, “I believe that I am now entitled to the freedom of Almack’s Club, my lord,” he said. “Do you go in that direction?” And Godalming, who was not a good loser, was too sensitive to the social ascendency of the man whom the Regent forgave to decline his proffered company. The wind blowing South for Whitworth, it wasn’t desirable that word of Godalming’s wagering on its remaining North should be carried to royal ears: he had better, on all counts, make light of his loss and be seen companionably with this child of fortune.

Not to mention the simpler fact that Godalming was a thirsty soul and that such a reversal of fortune as had come to Harry was only to be celebrated with high junketing. Indirectly, in his person of loser of the wager, Godalming was the host and it wasn’t proper for a host to be absent from his own table.

Intrinsically, a wager of a thousand guineas was nothing to lift eyebrows at: Mr. Fox once played for twenty-two hours at a sitting and lost £500 an hour, and the celebration of a victory was what the victor cared to make it. Sir Harry had more than the winning of a bet to celebrate, he had a rehabilitation and proposed to himself the considerable feat of making Almack’s drunk. It was afternoon, but any time was drinking time, and only the darkness of mid-winter lasted long enough to cloak their heroic debauchery. Men were not rare who kept their wits and were steady on their legs after the sixth bottle, and why indeed cloak drunkenness at all, if at the seventh bottle a gentleman succumbed? There was no shame in falling in a good fight: the shame was to the shirker and the unfortunate born with a weak head, a puny three-bottle man.

This is to generalize, which, perhaps, is better than a particular description in this squeamish day of the occasion when Harry Whitworth made his re-appearance at Almack’s resolved to write his name large in the Bacchanalian annals of the Club. He was to dine in the Pavilion at Brighton with his Royal Highness next night, and, by the Lord, Almack’s was to remember that he had come into his own again.

Some crowded hours had passed when the memorialist at the table’s head unsteadily picked up a glass and saying mechanically, “A glass of wine with you, sir,” found himself isolating from a ruddy haze the flushed face of Mr. Verners.

“Verners!” he cried. “Verners! What’s the connection? Dorothy, by Gad! Going Brighton kiss Prinny’s hand to-morrow, Verners. Going your house kiss Dorothy’s hand to-night. Better the night, better the deed. Dorothy first, Prinny second. Gentlemen, Dorothy Verners!”

There wasn’t more sobriety in the whole company than would have sufficed to add two and two together, and nobody noticed, let alone protested, when the host reeled from the table, linked his arm in that of Mr. Verners and left the room. Mr. Verners’ mind was a blessed blank gently suffused with joy. Incapable of thought, he felt that he had on his arm a prisoner whose capture was to do him great honor. The servants put them tenderly in a coach for the short drive to Albemarle Street.

“I shall call you Father,” said Sir Harry, and the singular spectacle might have been observed, had the night been light and the coach open, of an elderly gentleman endeavoring to kiss the cheek of a younger, his efforts frustrated by the jolting of the coach, so that the pair of them pivoted to and fro on their bases like those absurd weighted toy eggs the pedlars sell, and came, swaying in ludicrous rhythm, to the Verners’ lodging.

During the afternoon the necklace had been delivered, and if Dorothy was no connoisseur of jewels she was sufficiently informed to know that here was a peace-offering of royal value. She had twitted Sir Harry with his follies, she had watched him draw the right conclusion from her recital of some of them—the conclusion that she resented his preference for such a life to coming, long ago, to where she and duty and she and love were waiting for him—she had mocked him at her door, and had mocked his sullen face when she compared him with a thunderstorm: and she wondered if she had not gone too far, been too severe. Mrs. Verners lectured her unsparingly on her waywardness, and Dorothy inclined to think that she deserved the lecture. Then the necklace came and if a gift like that was not as plain a declaration as anything unspoken could be, Dorothy was no judge, or her mother either. The lecture ended suddenly, turned to a gush of admiration of such magnificence. Harry had won forgiveness, Dorothy decided, and if he came next day in wooing vein it wasn’t she who would check his ardor a second time. One need not be called a materialist because a symbol that is costly convinced at once, when a cheap symbol would be ineffective.

She was ready for Sir Harry, but not for this Sir Harry. The giver of princely gifts should live up to his princedom, not in the sense of His Royal Highness, George, but in the romantic sense. She had been idealizing Harry since the precious token came and he came—like this, lurching, thick-voiced, beastly. True, a gentleman lost nothing of gentlemanliness by appearing flushed with wine before ladies; but there were degrees and his was a condition beyond the most indulgent pale. Old husbands—Mr. Verners is the example—might have no surprises for their wives, but to come a-wooing in his cups was outrage.

Mrs. Verners made an effort. “Dorothy,” she whispered, “remember the necklace. Don’t be too nice.” Dorothy remembered nothing but that this beast that had been a man was reeling towards her, making endearing noises, with the plain intention of kissing her. Her whole being seemed to concentrate itself to defeat his intention: she hit him, and hit hard, upon the face and Sir Harry sat stupidly on the floor. Then, defying her mother with her eye, she remembered the necklace.

His man, undressing him that night, found an exceptional necklace round his neck beneath his ruffles. He thought of Sir Harry and his condition, of the obliterating effect of much alcohol, of theft and of the hanging that befell a convicted thief and, after balancing these thoughts, he stole the necklace. There were no inquiries made.

CHAPTER VI—THE MAN WHO WON

IT is said that the Chinese use a form of torture consisting in the uninterrupted dripping, drop by drop, of water on the head of a victim who eventually goes mad. Mrs. Verners, though not Chinese, used a similar form of torture as they drove North from London in the coach, but Dorothy did not go mad under the interminable flow of bitter comment. Instead, she watched the milestones and, as each was passed, made and kept the resolution not to scream, or to jump out or to strike her mother until they reached the next, and so, by a series of mile-long constraints, disciplined herself to bear the whole.

After Mrs. Verners had said that Dorothy was a graceless girl who had made them all into laughing-stocks and an affected prude whose nicety was monstrous, and a conceited, pedantic, prim ignoramus who had the bumkinly expectation that men were saints, and a pampered milksop who had made her unfortunate parents the jest of the town, there really was not much more to say, but the lady had suffered disappointment and did not suffer it silently.

Occasionally, for a change, she turned her batteries on Mr. Verners who, poor man, was paying by an attack of gout for his London indulgences and couldn’t sleep the miles away. There was some justice in her attacks on Mr. Verners. He was first cause of Dorothy’s conduct to Sir Harry: he had brought Sir Harry home to them that night: he was accessory to their disaster.

“Well, well, but it is over,” he said a dozen times.

“But—,” and she began again with stupid and stupefying iteration.

Mr. Verners, after a trip to town, was matter apt for stupefaction. It would need days of hard riding on penitential diet at home to sweat the aches out of him, but even while Mrs. Verners was elaborating the theme that all was lost, he was conscious of a reason, somewhere at the back of his mind, for believing that all was not lost. He couldn’t dredge the reason to the surface, and he couldn’t imagine what grounds for cheerfulness there were, but he felt sure that something had happened in London, or that something had been said in London which offered new hope to a depressed family. For three days he fished vainly in the muddied waters of his recollection for that bright treasure-trove, then, when they were reaching their journey’s end and were within a few miles of home, he saw Hepplestall’s factory crowning the hill-top, with its stack belching black smoke, and remembered how unexpectedly significant this Hepplestall had loomed in a conversation at Almack’s Club.

He didn’t at first associate that strange significance of Hepplestall with his sense that he had brought hope with him from London. True, there was this difference between his wife’s motives and his—that she had wanted to see Dorothy married to Whitworth, and he wanted to see Dorothy married. Dorothy in any man’s home, within reason; but his was the ideal of the father who felt in her presence a cramping necessity to restraint, and, if any man’s, why should he think of Hepplestall’s in particular, when, since Sir Harry was out of the running, there was a host of sufficiently eligible young men and when now he watched his wife’s resentful glare as she looked at that unsightly chimney?

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her at once that Whitworth was not their only neighbor to be spoken of respectfully, but on second thoughts that had better wait till Dorothy was not present to hear her mother’s inevitable first pungencies. He wanted Dorothy married, and it was easy to marry her to almost any bachelor in the county; yet here was Luke Verners settling it obstinately in his mind that Hepplestall was the husband he wished for her. Hepplestall had been heard of in London, which was one wonder, and had been the subject of a serious discussion at a gaming club, which was a greater wonder, and Verners, who had helped to dig the gulf between Reuben and the county, was now considering how the gulf was to be bridged. Was steam atrocious, when it gained a man the commendation of Mr. Seccombe? He recalled Seccombe’s comparison of the factory and its surrounding cottages with the feudal chieftain’s keep, and as he looked again at Hepplestall’s creation, he saw how apt the comparison was, he saw alliance with Reuben as an astute move that might give him footing on the winning side, as, emphatically, a “deep” thing. If steam were a success, it couldn’t be an atrocity.

Whether it were atrocity or not, there was no question but that steam, in Reuben’s hands, was a success. He was working with a tigerish energy that left no stone unturned in the consolidation of his position. As yet he was a monopolist of steam in the district, but that was an advantage that couldn’t last and he meant when he had to meet more up-to-date competition than that of the water-power manufacturers to be impregnably established to meet it. He hadn’t time to think of other things—such as women, or the county, or Dorothy Verners or even Phoebe Bradshaw.

Phoebe had borne him a son. Reuben had not decided—he had not had time to decide—but he didn’t think that mattered. If he was going to marry her—to silence her he had promised marriage and, so far as he knew, intended to keep his promise—it was because he had a fondness for her but, beyond that, because he hoped to see the county cringe to his wife, and if it was going to please him to watch them cringe to a Mrs. Reuben Hepplestall who was Peter Bradshaw’s daughter, it was going to please him more to watch them cringe to a woman who was the mother of his son before he married her. That was his present view, and because of it he permitted Peter to jog on at his little factory, he didn’t starve Peter out of existence as he was starving the other water-power manufacturers of the neighborhood, he wasn’t forcing Peter’s workpeople into the steam factory by the simple process of leaving them no other place in which to find employment. Peter was privileged, a King Canute miraculously untouched by the tide of progress; but, for the rest of them, for Peter’s like who were unprivileged, Reuben was ruthless. He wanted their skilled laborers in his factory, and he undercut their prices, naturally, thanks to steam, and unnaturally, thanks to policy, till he drove them to ruin, filled his factory with their workpeople, sometimes flinging an overseer’s job to the manufacturer he had ruined, sometimes ignoring him. He was building a second factory now, out of the profits of the first. He had to rise, to rise, to go on rising till he dominated the county, till the gentry came to pay court to the man they had flouted. That was the day he lived for, the day when they would fawn and he would show them—perhaps with Phoebe by his side—what it meant to be a Hepplestall in Lancashire. In his mine there were hewers of coal, in the factory men, women and children, laboring extravagant hours for derisory pay to the end that Hepplestall might set his foot upon the county’s neck.

All this was background; motive, certainly, but motive so covert beneath the daily need to plan fresh enterprise, to produce cotton yarn by the thousand pounds and cloth by the mile as never to obtrude into his conscious thought at all. This was his interim of building and till he had built securely he could not pause to think of other issues. The county, for example: he wasn’t speculating as to where he stood with the county now: the time for the county’s attention would come when he stood, a grown colossus, over it and he was only growing yet. He didn’t anticipate that the county would make advances at this stage, that to some of them this stage might seem already advanced while to him, with his head full of plans for development, the stage was elementary. He didn’t anticipate Luke Verners.

Mr. Verners, diplomat, came into the factory-yard leading a horse which had shed a shoe, and called to a passing boy to know if Mr. Hepplestall were in. Reuben was in, in the office, in his shirt-sleeves, and though Verners did not know this, it was a score for the bridge-builder that Reuben, on hearing of his presence, placed his pen on his desk instead of behind his ear and put on his coat before going out.

“I deem this good fortune and not bad since it happened at your gates, Hepplestall,” said Luke. “If you have a forge here, can I trouble you? If not there’s a smithy not a mile away.” He gave Reuben a choice: his advance was to be accepted or rejected as Reuben decided.

“I have the means to shoe my wagon horses,” said Reuben, indicating at once that his was a self-supporting and a trading organization. If Verners cared to have his horse shod on Reuben’s premises, the shoeing would be good, but it would bring Luke into contact with trade.

Luke nodded as one who understood the implications. “I shall take it as a favor, Hepplestall,” he said, and Reuben gave his orders, then, “I can offer you a glass of wine,” he said, “but it will be in the office of a manufacturer.” And the astonishing Mr. Verners bowed and said, “Why not? Although an idle man must not waste your time.”

“I turned manufacturer,” said Reuben, “not slave,” and led the way into the office. Followed amenities, and the implicit understanding that there had never been a breach, that for Hepplestall to set up a factory was the most natural thing in the world and when, presently, his horse was announced to be ready, “When,” asked Luke, “are we to see you at dinner, Hepplestall?”

Reuben felt that the olive branch oozed oil. “I have not dined much from home of late,” he said, doubtfully. “Then let me make a feast to celebrate your return.”

“To what fold, Mr. Verners?”

“Well,” said Luke, “if you are doubtful, let me tempt you. Let me tell you of my wife and of my daughter but new returned from London with the latest modes.”

“Thankee, Mr. Verners,” said Reuben, “it is not in my recollection that I ever met you face to face and that you did not know me. But it is firmly in my mind that Mistress Dorothy Verners gave me the cut direct.”

“I did not know of this,” said Luke, truthfully.

“No? Yet she acted as others have acted. You will do me the justice to note that if I find your invitation remarkable, I have reason.”

“Then I repeat it, Hepplestall. I press it. Dorothy shall repent her discourtesy. I—” (he drew himself up to voice a boast he devoutly hoped he could make good) “I am master in my house.”

“No,” said Reuben, “No, Mr. Verners, I will not come to dinner when my appearance has been canvassed and prepared for. But I will ride home with you now, if you are willing, and you shall tell me as we go what, besides purchasing the latest modes, you did in London.”

Luke was regretting many things, the impulse which brought him riding in that direction and made him loosen a horse-shoe up a lane near the factory, and the cowardice that had prevented his mentioning his intention to Mrs. Verners who had not yet been given an opportunity to look at Reuben Hepplestall through the sage eyes of Mr. Seccombe of Almack’s Club. To take Reuben home now was to introduce a bolt from the blue and Mr. Verners shuddered at the consequences. He couldn’t trust his wife, taken by surprise, to be socially suave, and Dorothy, whom he thought he could trust, had been rude to Reuben—naturally, inevitably, in those circumstances quite properly, but, in these, how disastrously inaptly! By Luke’s reading of the rules of the game, Reuben should have been grateful for recognition on any terms, and, instead, the confounded fellow was aggressive, dictating terms, impaling Mr. Verners on the horns of dilemma. He had said, “If you are willing,” but that, it seemed, was formal courtesy, for Reuben was calmly ordering his horse to be saddled.

Had he no mercy? Couldn’t he see how the sweat was standing out on Mr. Verners’ face? Was this another example like the case of Mr. Bantison of doing what Seccombe admired, of grasping a nettle boldly? Mr. Verners objected to be the nettle, but didn’t see how he was to escape the grasp. The grasp of Reuben Hepplestall seemed inescapable.

He committed himself to fate, with an awful sinking feeling that he whose fate it is to trust to women’s tact is lost.

“And in London,” asked Reuben as they rode out of the yard. “You did?”

Luke chatted with a pitiful vivacity of all the noncommittal things he could, while Reuben listened grimly and said nothing. Did ever a sanguine gentleman set out to condescend and come home so like a captive and a criminal? He had the impression of being not only criminal but condemned when Reuben said, dismounting at Verners’ door, “So far I have not found the answer to this riddle, sir. Perhaps it is to be found in your drawing-room?”

Mrs. Verners and Dorothy were to be found in the drawing-room, and if Luke had been concerned about his wife’s attitude he might have spared himself that trouble. She gave a little cry and looked helplessly at Reuben as if he were a ghost, and he gave a little bow and that was the end of her. She could have fainted or gone into hysterics or made a speech as long as one of Mr. Burke’s and Reuben would have cared for the one as little as the other. He was looking at Dorothy.

“I have brought Mr. Hepplestall home with me,” was Luke’s introduction.

“And,” said Reuben to Dorothy, “is Mr. Hepplestall visible?”

“Perfectly,” she said and bowed.

“I rejoice to hear,” he said gravely, “of the restoration of your eyesight. You see me better than on a day a year ago?”

“I see you better,” said Dorothy, meeting his eye, “because I see you singly,” and he had to acknowledge that a spirited reply to his attack. It put him beautifully in the wrong, it suggested that he had permitted himself to be seen by a lady when in the company of one who was not a lady, it implied that the cut was not for him but his companion, that there was no fault in Dorothy but in him who carried a blazing indiscretion like Phoebe Bradshaw into the public road, and that he was tactless now to remind Dorothy of her correct repudiation of him when he paraded an impropriety.

She flung Phoebe to the gutter, she made a debating point and showed him how easy it was to pretend that he had never been refused recognition. All that was necessary for his acceptance of her point was his agreement that Phoebe was, in fact, of no importance.

And Reuben concurred. “I have to apologize for an indiscretion,” he said, deposing Phoebe from her precarious throne, and giving her the disreputable status latent in Dorothy’s retort.

So much for Phoebe, whereas he, wonderfully, was being smiled upon by Dorothy Verners. The gracious bow with which she accepted his apology was an accolade, it was a sign that if he was a manufacturer he was nevertheless a gentleman, that for him manufacturing was, uniquely, condoned. But he thought it needful to make sure of that.

“There is a greater indiscretion,” he said, “for which I do not apologize. I am a trader and trader I remain, unrepentant, Miss Verners, unashamed.”

“I have heard of worse foibles,” said Dorothy, thinking of Sir Harry.

But he couldn’t leave it at that: he couldn’t be light and accept lightness about steam. “A foible is a careless thing,” he said. “I am passionate about my steam-engines.”

“Indeed, you have a notable great place up there,” said Luke.

“It will be greater,” said Reuben. “I am to grow and it with me.” Then some sense either that he was knocking at an open door or merely of the convenances made him add, “My hobby-horse is bolting with me, but I felt a need to be definite.”

He was not, he meant, to be bribed out of his manufacturing by being countenanced. He wanted Dorothy, but he wanted, too, his leadership in cotton. And Dorothy was contrasting this man’s passion with Sir Harry’s, which she took justifiably, but not quite justly, to be liquor, while steam seemed romantically daring and mysterious. She knew what drink did to a man and she did not know what steam was to do. Reuben seemed to her a virile person; she was falling in love with him.

Mrs. Verners, inwardly one mark of interrogation, was taking her cue from the others who so amazingly welcomed a prodigal, swallowing a pill and hiding her judgment of its flavor behind a civil smile. “Does Mr. Hepplestall know that we have been to London?” she asked.

Luke felt precipices gape for him; this was the road to revelations of his motives, but Reuben turned it to a harmless by-path. “So I have heard,” he said. “I was promised news of the fashions.” And fashions, and the opinions of Mrs. Verners on fashions, gently nursed to its placid end a call of which Luke had expected nothing short of catastrophe. Reuben was sedulously attentive to Mrs. Verners, wonderfully in agreement with her views, and Luke, returning from seeing him to his horse, had the unhoped for satisfaction of hearing her say, “What a pleasant young man Mr. Hepplestall is, after all.”

He took time by the forelock then. “His enterprise,” he said, “is the talk of the London clubs. We have not been seeing what lies beneath our noses. They think much of Hepplestall in London. They watch him with approval.”

“I confess I like the way his hair grows,” said Mrs. Verners, and Dorothy said nothing.

While as to Reuben, there is only one word for the mood in which he rode home—that it was religious. Sincerely and reverently, he thanked his God for Dorothy Verners, and to the end he kept her in his mind as one who came to him from God. A miracle had happened—Luke was God’s instrument bringing him to that drawing-room where Dorothy was—and Reuben had a simple and a lasting faith in it.

Not that in the lump it softened him, not that he wasn’t all the same a devil-worshiper of ambition and greed and hatred, for he was all these things, besides being the humbly grateful man for whom God wrought the miracle of Dorothy Verners. She was on one side, in her place apart, and the rest was as it had been.

It may be that his conduct to Bradshaw resulted from this religious mood. Religion is associated with the idea of sacrifice and if the suffering was likely to be Peter’s rather than Reuben’s, Reuben sacrificed, at least, the contemptuous kindliness he felt towards Peter. His first action was to set in motion against Bradshaw the machinery by which he had crushed other small manufacturers out of trade.

In those days, the power-loom had not become a serious competitor of the hand-loom and the hand-weavers chiefly worked looms standing in sheds attached to their cottages or (for humidity’s sake, not health’s) in a cellar below them; but they used by now power-spun yarn which was issued to them by the manufacturers. Reuben had permitted Peter to go on spinning in his factory: he now sent round to the weavers the message that Peter’s yarn was taboo and that if they dealt with Peter they would never deal with Hepplestall. It was enough: the weavers were implicitly Reuben’s thralls, for without his yarn they could no longer rely on supplies at all. Peter was doomed. Reuben had not even, as had been necessary at first, to go through the process of undercutting his prices; he had only to tell the weavers that Peter was banned and they had no alternative but to obey.

So far Peter had been allowed, by exception, to remain in being as a factory-owner, which placed him on a sort of equality with Reuben, as a little, very little brother, and now brotherliness between a Bradshaw and the man on whom Dorothy Verners smiled was a solecism. Reuben could not dictate in other districts—yet—but, in his own, there were to be no people of Bradshaw’s caliber able to say of themselves that they, like Hepplestall, had factories. There would be consequences for Phoebe. He did not give them a second thought. They were what followed inevitably from the placing of Phoebe by Dorothy Verners, they were neither right nor wrong, just nor unjust, they had to be—because of what Dorothy had said when she made, lightly, a dialectical score off Reuben.

He left that fish to fry and went (miraculously directed) to dine with the Verners. He dined more than once with the Verners, he was made to feel that he was at home in the Verners house, so that one suave summer evening, after he had had a pleasantly formal and highly satisfactory little tête-à-tête with Luke as they sat together at their wine, he led Dorothy through the great window on to the lawn and found an arbor in a shrubbery. There was no question of her willingness, and it hardly surprised him that there should be none, for he was growing accustomed to his miracle as one grows accustomed to anything.

“Still, there is a thing which puzzles me,” he said. “You were in London. Did you see Sir Harry Whitworth there?”

Dorothy made a hole in the gravel with her toe, and the hole seemed to interest her gravely. Then she looked up slowly and met Reuben’s eye. “Sir Harry Whitworth is nothing to me,” she said.

And he supposed Sir Harry to have proposed and to have been refused, which was broad truth if it wasn’t literal fact.

Refused Sir Harry? And why? For him! The miracle increased.

“This is the crowning day of my life,” he said. “It is a day for which I lived in hope. I saw this day, I saw you like golden sun on a far horizon. That the day has come so soon is miracle.” He took her hand. “Dorothy Verners, will you marry a manufacturer?”

“I will marry you, Reuben,” she said, and his kiss was sacramental.

He kissed her as man might kiss an emblem, or the Holy Grail, with a sort of dispassionate passion that was all very well for a symbol or a graven image, but not good enough for Dorothy, who was flesh and blood.

“No, no!” she cried. “Reuben, what are you thinking me? I am not like that.”

“Like what?” he said. “I think you miracle.”

“Yes, but I’m not. I’m a woman—I’m not a golden sun on a far horizon. I’m nearer earth than that.”

“Never for me,” he protested.

“Yes, always, please. Oh, must you drag confession from me? I love you, Reuben, you, your straight clean strength. I went in shadows and in doubt, I waded in muddied waters until you came and rescued me. You touch me, and you kiss me now as if I were a goddess—”

“You are my goddess, Dorothy.”

“I want us to be honest in our love. You’ve shown me a great thing, Reuben. You have shown me that there is a man in the world. My man, and not my god, and, Reuben, don’t worship me either. Don’t let there be fine phrases and pretense between us two.”

“Pretense?”

“The pretense that I am more than a woman and you more than a man.”

“You are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

She was looking at him quaintly. “Yes, if you please,” she said. So long as it was admitted she was human, she liked to be lifted in his eyes above the rest of feminine humanity. This was right, this was reasonable, this wasn’t the fantastic blossom of love-making that must needs wither in the chilly air of matrimony, this gave them both a chance of not having to eat indigestible words afterwards, of not having to allow in the future that they began their life together in a welter of lies. She was a woman and she was beautiful and it was no more than right that he should think her woman’s beauty was unique. “And I’ve told you what I think of you,” she said. “I shall not change my mind on that.”

“I shall never give you need,” he said, but he was finding this the ultimate surprise of all. “I had supposed that women liked to be wooed.”

“I think they do. I’m sure I do, but I’m a plain-dealer, Reuben.”

“I find you very wonderful,” he said, and kissed her now as she would have him kiss, with true and honest passion that had respect in it but wasn’t bleached with reverence—and very sweetly and sincerely, she kissed him back.

That was their mating and she brought it at once from the extravagant heights where he would have carried it, into deep still waters. It came quickly, it was to last permanently. These two loved, and the coming and the lasting of their love had no more to do with reason than love ever has. If Mr. Verners had the impression that he was a guileful conspirator who had made this match, he flattered himself; at the most he had only accelerated it. Inside, he sat looking forward to the quick decline in his table manners which would follow upon the going of Dorothy from his house; outside, two lovers paced the lawn in happiness, and they did not look forward then. To look forward is to imply that one’s present state can be improved.

Two months ago, they were in London; two months ago the idea that they should entertain Hepplestall, the manufacturer, the gentleman who was, in that tall Queen Anne Verners house which stood on the site of a Verners house already old when the Stuarts came to reign, would have seemed madness; the house itself would fall in righteous anger on such a guest. Now he was coming into the drawing-room with Dorothy’s hand in his, accepted suitor, welcomed son. Something of this was in Dorothy’s mind as she led him, solemn-faced and twinkling-eyed round the room. On the walls in full paintings or in miniatures, old dead Verners looked at her, and to each she introduced him. “And not one of them changed their color,” she announced.

Mrs. Verners had a last word to say. “But there is Tom.” Young Tom Verners was with his regiment in the Peninsula.

“Tom!” cried Dorothy. “I’ll show you what Tom thinks of this.” She raised a candlestick to light the face of her grandfather’s portrait on the wall. Tom, they said, was the image of his grandfather who had been painted in his youth in the uniform of a cornet of horse when he brought victory home with Marlborough. She waved the candle and as she knew very well it would, the minx, its flicker brought to the portrait the sudden appearance of a smile. “That,” she said, “is what Tom thinks,” and Mrs. Verners wept maudlin tears and felt exceedingly content. There was happiness that night in the Verners house.

When he had mounted his horse, and had set off, she came running down the steps after him. “Stop!” she cried. “No, don’t get off. Just listen. My man, my steam-man, I love you, I love you,” and ran into the house.

In his own house, when he reached it, he found Peter and Phoebe Bradshaw waiting for him, sad sights the pair of them, with drawn, suffering faces and the sense of incomprehensible wrong gnawing at their hearts. They couldn’t understand, they couldn’t believe; hours ago they had talked themselves to a standstill, and waited now in silent apprehensive misery.

“Well?” asked Reuben.

“The weavers tell me of an order of yours. I can’t believe—there must be some mistake.”

“I gave an order.”

“But—”

“I gave an order. It closes your factory? Come into mine. You shall have an overlooker’s job.” Peter was silent. He was to lose his factory, his position, his independence. He who had been master was to turn man again, to go back, in the afternoon of life, to the place from which as young man he had raised himself. What was Hepplestall saying? “You had no faith in steam, Bradshaw. This is where disbelief has brought you. I did not hear your thanks.”

“Thanks?” repeated Peter.

“I offer you an overlooker’s job in my factory.”

“But Reuben,” said Phoebe, “Reuben!”

He turned upon her with a snarl. She used his Christian name. She dared! “Reuben!” she said. “The boy. Our boy. Our John?”

“He will be—what—five months old?”

“Yes,” she said.

“At five years old, I take children into the factory. Good-night.”