Hepplestall's

CHAPTER IX—THE SPY

EDWARD’S “fat elephant” drove from Hepplestall’s meditating his retort to Reuben’s intransigeancy. He held that it was necessary to weld the manufacturers into a solid phalanx of opposition to the legalizing of Trade Unions, and that if Reuben were allowed to stand out, other masters, whom Needham regarded as weak-kneed, would stand out with him. Needham was obstinate and unscrupulous, with a special grudge against “kid-gloved” Hepplestall, and if there were no overt manifestations of discontent in Hepplestall’s factory, his business was to provoke them. There was surely latent discontent there as everywhere else and the good days of Sidmouth and Castlereagh had shown what could be achieved in the way of manufacturing riot by the use of informers. Informers were paid to inform, and lost their occupation if no information were forthcoming; they did not lose their occupation; they were agents provocateurs, and Gentleman Hepplestall was, if Needham knew right from left, to be thwacked into line by the activities of an informer.

He hadn’t much difficulty—he was that sort of man—in laying hands upon a suitable instrument. The name of the instrument was Thomas Barraclough, and it was, indeed, in Needham’s hands already working as a weaver in his factory, not, to be sure, for the purpose of provoking unrest there but merely for decent spying. There is honesty in spying as in other things and the decent spy is the observer and reporter of what others do spontaneously; the indecent spy is he who instigates the deeds he afterwards reports. Barraclough was quite willing, for a higher fee, to undertake to prove to Hepplestall that Trade Unions were murder clubs.

The affair was not stated, even by blunt Needham to his spy, with quite such candor as this, but, “If tha’ sees signs o’ trouble yonder, tell me of ’em; and if tha’ sees no signs tha’s blinder than I tak’ thee for,” was a sufficiently plain direction to an intelligent spy, and Barraclough nodded comprehendingly as he went off to begin his cross-country tramp to Hepplestall’s.

A spy who looks like a spy is disqualified at once, but what are the symptoms of spying? What signs does spying hang out on a man that we shall know him for a spy? Is he bent with a life spent in crouching at key holes? A keen-eyed, large-eared ferret of a man? The fact is that Barraclough was small and bent, and ferretty, that he looked like your typical spy and yet did not look, in the Lancashire of those days, any different from a famished weaver. They were “like boys of fifteen and sixteen and most of them cannot measure more than 5 feet 2 or 3 inches.”

Steam fastened on this generation, stunting it, twisting it, blasting it, and if Barraclough had been reasonably tall, reasonably well-made and nourished he would have been marked at once as something different from the workers who were to accept him as one of themselves. So, in spite of looking like a spy, he was qualified to be a spy in Hepplestall’s because he looked like any other undergrown, underpaid, underfed weaver lad.

And there is good in all things, though Hepplestall was not thinking of the Blackburn riots as good when he was cavalier about them with Needham. There was the good, for Hepplestall’s, that the destruction of the Blackburn looms and their products brought an exceptional rush of orders to Reuben; and Thomas Barraclough, applying for work when he ended his tramp at the factory gates, found himself given immediate employment.

He found, too, that as an honest spy he had no occupation in this place. He could report distress, sullen suffering and patient suffering; he could report the ordinary things and would have to say, in honesty, that here the ordinary things had extraordinary mitigations; and he found nothing of the violent flavor expected by Needham. It remained for him to take the initiative and to provide against disappointing his master’s expectations, but the mental sketch he had made of himself as an effective explosive did not seem likely to be justified in any hurry. The Blackburn riots had not been followed by such ferocity of punishment as had befallen the Luddites a few years previously, but there had been men killed by soldiers during the riots: there were ten death sentences at Lancaster Assizes, reduced afterwards to transportation for life: and thirty-three rioters were sent to prison. That was fairly impressive, as it was meant to be, but much more impressive was the appalling distress which quite naturally fell upon the Blackburn people who had destroyed the looms, and if all this was salutary from the point of view of law and order it was excessively inopportune from the special point of view of Mr. Barraclough.

Here he was, under orders to raise tumult, in a place where not only were there no symptoms of tumult, but where those who might possibly be tumultuously disposed were cowed by the tales, many true and many exaggerated, of Blackburn’s sufferings. The malignant irony of the uses of the agent provocateur was never better exemplified, but it wasn’t for Needham’s trusty informer to chew upon that, but, whatever his difficulties, to get on with his incitements. And he soon decided that Hepplestall’s people, in the mass, were “windbags,” that is, they would listen to him and they would, in conversation, be as vehement as he, but their vehemence was in words not deeds and only deeds were of any use to Barraclough. The method of the Luddites, machinery-smashing, was discredited for ever by the Blackburn example and he gave up hope of any large-scale demonstration at Hepple-stall’s. What was left was the possibility of finding some individual who was capable of being influenced to violent action.

Then, just as he was despairing of finding the rightly malleable material, Annie Bradshaw’s second son was born and Annie Bradshaw died. She had been almost luxuriously careful about the birth of her first child: she had left the factory three days before his birth and had not returned, with the child at her breast, for a full week afterwards; but second babies were said to come more easily, wages were needed and she had lifted heavy beams before. The child was born on the factory floor, it lived and Annie died. There was no extraordinary pother made about her death, because women were continually defying steam in this way and most of them survived it. Annie did not survive. She was unlucky. That was all.

“Don’t fret for me, lad,” she gasped to John. “I’m going through the Golden Gates. Tak’ care o’ the childer.” The engine did not stop—guns do not cease fire because a soldier falls on the battlefield—and to John Bradshaw, nineteen, widower with two infant sons, it beat a devil’s tattoo of stunning triumph. There were women gathered around her body, somewhere a woman was washing his son, but he was seeing nothing of them, nothing of the life that had come through death. Annie was gone from him, his glorious Annie of the winds and the moors, lying white and silent on the oily floor of a stinking factory, and already the women were leaving her, already they were returning to their several places. If they gave him sympathy, they took bread out of their mouths and sympathy must be so brief as to appear callosity. It was not callosity, and he knew it; knew, too, that he did not want long-winded condolences or any condolences at all, yet their going so quickly from that white body seemed to him a stark indecency adding to the monstrous debt Steam owed him.

He was thinking of the small profanities of this death rather than of the death itself. He hadn’t realized that yet, he was probing his way through the attendant circumstances to the depths of his tragedy. He knew that he would never lie beneath the stars again with Annie while the breeze soughed through the heather and she crooned old songs of the roads in his ear: he knew, but he did not believe it yet. She had been so utterly protective of him. If she took down her hair, and held it from her, and he crept beneath its curious warmth, what had mattered then? He had loved her and by the grace of Phoebe—though he was not thinking of Phoebe now—they had been given leave to love and to enjoy each other in the hours which were not the factory’s.

The engine, thumped horribly on his ear and a gust of passionate hatred struggled to make itself articulate. “You fiend!” he cried. “Curse you, curse you!”

When an overseer came to tell him that a hand-cart was at the gates to take Annie’s body and the baby home, and that Phoebe might go with him, he was lying, dazed, on the floor and mechanically did what he was told to do. He had no volition in him, and Mr. Barraclough, professional observer, noting both his hysteria and his stupor decided that he had found his man at last. Providence had ordained that Annie should die to make an instrument for Richard Needham’s emissary.

In the days of her youth, Phoebe had her follies as she had her prettiness; now, schooled by adversity, an old woman of forty, she was without illusions as she was without comeliness; she had nothing but her son, and, hidden like a miser’s gold, her hatred of the Hepplestalls, of Reuben who betrayed her, of Dorothy whom he married, of his sons who stood where her son should have stood. For two seconds she was weakened now, for two seconds: as she folded Annie’s baby in her shawl and held him closely to her she had the thought that she must go to Reuben with a plea for help, then put that thought away.

“Don’t worry your head about the childer, lad,” she said, “I’ll manage.” She would work in the factory, she would order their cottage, she would rear the babies, she would pay some older woman who was past more active work a small sum (but the accepted rate) to look after the babies while she was in the factory. She would take this burden off his shoulders as she had taken the burden of housework off Annie’s. She had permitted John and Annie to enjoy the luxury of love and now she was permitting John the luxury of woe. She said that she would “manage,” he knew the enormous implications of the word, but knew, because she said it, that she would keep her promise. There was no limit to his faith in Phoebe and he touched her shoulder gently, undemonstratively, saying in that simple gesture all his unspeakable gratitude, accepting what she gave not because he underrated it, not because he did not understand, but because it was the only thing to do.

For her his touch and his acceptance were abundance of reward. Go to Hepplestall! Take charity, when this sustaining faith was granted her? Oh, she would manage though her body cracked. It was a soiling and a shameful thought that these babes were Reuben’s grandchildren.

They were not his and John, please God, would never know who was his father; they were hers and John’s and they two would keep them for their own.

It wasn’t bravado either. It wasn’t a brief heroical resolution begotten of the emotions caused by Annie’s death. She counted the cost and chose her fight, spurning the thought of Hepplestall as if the justice he might do her were an obscenity. She knew what she undertook to do and, providing only that she had ten more years of life, she would do it.

John, mourning for Annie, was not too sunk in grief to be unaware of the fineness of his mother. Would Annie—she who loved her life—have said “Things are,” if she had foreseen how soon the things which were bad were to be so infinitely worse? The factory had killed her, it had taken his Annie from him, it had put upon his mother in her age the burden she took up with a matter of fact resignation that seemed to him the ultimate impeachment of the system which made heroism a commonplace. “Mother!” he cried. “Mother!”

“Eh, lad,” she said, “we’ve got to take what comes.”

She did not, at least, as Annie did, answer his inarticulate revolt with religion, but she had fundamentally the same resignation to the things of this world, and for the same reason. She, too, looked forward to a radiant life above: she saw in her present troubles the hand of God justly heavy upon one who had been a light woman. John, knowing nothing of that secret source of her humility, attributed all to the one cause, to the Factory which crushed and maimed and killed in spirit as in body. He refused his acceptance, his resignation. There was, there must be, something to be done. But what? What?

First, at any rate, Annie had to be buried with the circumstance which seemed to make for decency and for that they had provided through the Benefit Society. This—-decent burial—was the first thought behind the weekly contributions paid, heaven knows at what sacrifice, to the Society and they were rewarded now in the fact that Annie was not buried at the expense of the parish. That was all, bare decency, not the flaunting parody with plumes and gin of the slightly less poor: nor were there many mourners. Leave was given to a select few to be absent for an hour from the factory, and the severe fines for unauthorized absence kept the numbers strictly, with one exception, to the few the overseer chose to privilege. Phoebe and John were granted the full day, without fine, and, of course, without wage, and so, it appeared, was Mr. Barraclough. But Mr. Barraclough was on business, and the fine that he would have to pay would figure in the expenses he would charge Mr. Needham.

One or two old women—old in fact if not in years, incapacitated by the factory, for the factory—had been at the graveside and were going home with Phoebe, and it was natural that John should hold out his hand to Barraclough, this unexpected, this so self-sacrificing sympathizer and that they should fall into step as they moved away together.

“Man, I had to come. I’m that sorry for thee. Coming doan’t mean much for sure, but—”

“It means a day’s wages, choose how,” said John, who knew that Barraclough was not of the few who had been granted an hour’s leave to come.

Barraclough nodded. “And a fine, an’ all,” he said, “but that all counts somehow. Seems to me if it weren’t costing me summat, it u’d not be the same relief it is to my feelings. I didna come for thy sake, I came to please masel’, selfish like. I had to get away from yond damned place that murdered her. I couldna’ stand the sight o’ it to-day.”

“Murdered her!” said John. He had, no doubt, used that word in thought, but it had seemed to him audacious, a thought to be forbidden utterance. And here, shaming him for his mildness was one, an outsider, a stranger, who, untouched intimately by Annie’s death, yet spoke of it outright as murder. John felt that he was failing Annie, that he had not risen to his occasion, that it was this other, this fine spirit, who could not “stand the sight” of the factory on the day of her funeral, who had risen to the occasion more worthily than John, who was Annie’s husband. “Aye,” he said somberly, “it was murder.”

“You never doubted that, surely,” said Barraclough.

“Oh,” said John, “when a woman dies in childbirth—”

“Aye, but fair treated women don’t. What art doing now? I mean for the rest of the day. Looking at it from my point of view, I might as well tak’ the chance to get out o’ sight o’ yond hell-spot. I’m going on moors for a breath of air. Wilt come? Better nor settin’ to hoam brooding, tha’ knows.”

His point was simply to get John in his emotional crisis to himself, but luck was with him in his proposal further than he knew. For John, the moors were a reminder of Annie at her sunniest, but for the moment all that he was thinking of was that strange instinct for the sympathetic stranger rather than for the sympathy, too poignant to be borne, of his mother. And he did not wish to see his sons that day.

“‘Tis better nor brooding,” he agreed, and went. There was virtue, he thought, in talking. Phoebe was all reserve and action, and on this which resolved itself into a day off from the factory, she would be very active in her house. He was quite sure that he did not want to go home. Exercise for his legs, air for his lungs and the conversation, comprehending but naturally not too intimate, of this kindly stranger—these were the things to get him through the day.

But the conversation of Mr. Barraclough was not calculated to be an anodyne.

“Thank God, we’ve gotten our backs to it. We’re walking away from yond devilry, we’ve our faces to summat green.” How often had he not heard something like that from Annie! “It beats me to guess what folks are made of, both the folk that stand factories and t’other folks that drive ‘em into factories. I know I’ve gotten an answer to some of this under my bed where I lodge and I’ll mak’ the answer speak one of these days an’ all.”

“An answer? What answer? I’ve looked and found no answer.”

“No? They looked at Blackburn and found th’ wrong answer an’ all, th’ould answer that the Luddites found and failed wi’. Smashing machines! Burning factories! What’s, the good o’ that? They nobbut put up new factories bigger and more hellish than before and mak’ new machines that’ll do ten men’s work instead of two. Aye, they were on wrong tack in them days. They were afraid to get on right tack.”

“Is there a tack that’s right?” he asked.

“There’s shooting,” said Barraclough.

“Shooting? Tha’ canna shoot an engine, nor a factory.”

“No, and that’s the old mistake. Trying to hit back at senseless brick and iron. There’s men behind the factories, men that build and men that manage. Men that own and tak’ the profits of our blood and death. For instance, who killed thy wife?”

“Why... why...” hesitated John, who was still intrigued obscurely with the idea that he, the father of her child, was author of her death.

“She died o’ th’ conditions o’ Hepplestall’s factory and yo’ canna’ bring yer verdict o’ willful murder against conditions. Yo’ bring it against the fiend that made the conditions. Yo’ bring it against Reuben Hepplestall.”

“Maister Hepplestall!”

“Aye, Maister. Maister o’ us fra’ head to heel. Maister o’ our lives and deaths, and gotten hissel’ so high above us that I can see tha’s scared to hear me talk that road of him.” That was true, Barraclough seemed to John almost blasphemous. Hepplestall was high above them, so that to make free with his name in this manner was something outrageous. “Aye, the spunk’s scared out of thee by the name of Hepplestall as if tha’ were a child and him a boggart. But I tell thee this, he isna a boggart. He’s a man and if my bullet gets him, he’ll bleed and if it gets him in the right place, he’ll die, and there’ll be one less in the world o’ the fiends that own factories and murder women to mak’ a profit for theirselves.”

“You’d do that! You!”

“Some one must do the job. Th’ gun’s to hoam under my bed, loaded an’ all. Execution of a murderer, that’s what it’ll be. Justice on the man that killed thy wife.” John halted abruptly. “What’s to do?” asked Barraclough. “Let’s mak’ th’ most of this day out o’ factory. Folks like thee and me mustna’ think too much of causes o’ things. The cause of this day off was thy wife’s death, but we’ve agreed tha’s not to brood. So come on into sunshine and mak’ the most of what we’ve gotten.”

“We’ll mak’ the most of it by turning to hoam,” said John.

“Thy hoam’s no plaice for thee to-day.”

“No. But thy hoam is,” said John. “I want to see yon gun. I’m thinkin’ that’ll be a better sight for me nor all the heather in Lankysheer.”

“For thee?” Mr. Barraclough was greatly surprised. “Nay, I doubt I was wise to mention my secret to thee.”

“Art coming?” John was striding resolutely homewards.

“Well, seeing I have mentioned it, I suppose there’s no partiklar harm in showing it. O’ course, tha’ canna’ use a gun?”

“Can’t I? No, you’re reight there. I’m not much of a man, am I? As tha’ told me, I’ve gotten no spunk, but I’ve spunk enough now. It weren’t more than not seeing clear and tha’s cleared things up for me wonnerful.”

“I have? How?”

“Tha’ can shoot, if I canna’, Barraclough.” Which was disappointing to the spy, who thought things were going better than this.

Still he could bide his time and “Aye, I can shoot,” he said. “I’ve been in militia.”

“Then tha’ can teach me,” said John, to Mr. Barraclough’s relief. “I’ll be a quick learner.”

“Well, as tha’s interested, I’ll show thee how a trigger’s pulled,” and Barraclough was, in fact, not intending to go further than that in musketry instruction. Hepplestall killed might, indeed, encourage the others, it might array the manufacturers solidly under Needham’s reactionary standard, but Barraclough read murder as going beyond his directions, and supposed that if Reuben were fired on and missed (as he would be by an amateur marksman), the demonstration of unrest at Hepplestall’s would have been satisfyingly made.

He was, therefore, sparing in his tutorship when they had come into his room and handled the gun together. “We munna call the whole neighborhood about our ears by the sound of a shot,” he said.

“No,” said John, “but if tha’ll lend me this, I’ll find a plaice for practicing up on moors.”

“Lend thee my gun! Nay, lad, tha’s asking summat. It wenna do to carry that about in daylight.”

“I’ll tak’ it to-neight, and bring un back to-morrow neight.”

“To-neight? Tha’ canna’ practice in the dark.”

“Maybe I’ll ha’ no need to practice. Maybe there’s justice and summat greater nor me to guide a bullet home. I can nobbut try and I’m bound to try to-neight—the neight o’ the day I buried her, the neight when I’m hot. I’m poor spirited and I know it, and I’m wrought up now. To-morrow I’ll be frit.”

Barraclough balanced the gun in his hands. “I had my own ideas o’ this,” he said—the idea in particular, he might have added, had this been an occasion for candor, that such precipitancy was contrary to the best interests of an informer. Before an event occurred, a sagacious spy should have prophesied it and here was this ardent boy in so desperate a hurry for action that Barraclough was like to be cheated of the opportunity of proving to Needham that he was dutifully accessory before the fact.

But, he reflected, he had not found Hepplestall’s a fertile earth for his seeds, and if he played pranks with this present opportunity, if he attempted delay with a boy like John, a temperamentalist now in the mood to murder, he might very well lose his only chance of justifying himself. Besides, he could yet figure as a prophet and at the same time establish a sound alibi for himself if immediately after handing the gun over to John, he set off to report to Needham. On the whole, he saw himself accomplishing the object of his mission satisfactorily enough.

“Who’s gotten the better right?” John was saying. “Thou that’s not had nobhut a month o’ the plaice, or me that buried a wife this day killed by Hepplestall?”

Barraclough bowed his head. He thought it politic to hide his face just then, and the motion had the seeming of a reverent assent. “I’ve no reply to that,” he said.

“Thy claim is strongest. Come when it’s dark, and tha’ shall have the gun.”

John moved to the door.

“Where’st going now?” asked Barraclough, apprehensive of the slackening of the spring he had wound up.

“To her grave,” said John, and Barraclough nodded approvingly. He trusted Annie’s grave; there would be no slackening of the spring and mentally he thanked John for thinking of a grave-side vigil. Barraclough had not thought of anything so trustworthy; he had thought of an inn, to which the objections were that he had no wish to be seen in company with John, and that alcohol is capricious in effect.

Barraclough had given him a goal, and an outlet for all his pent-up emotion. There was his dreadful childhood in the factory, then the splendid mitigation whose name was Annie, and the tearing loss of her: behind all that, there was the System and above it now was Hepple-stall. He had an exaltation by her grave. There was a people enslaved by Hepplestall and there was John Bradshaw, their deliverer, John Bradshaw magnified till he was qualified for the high rôle of an avenging angel. He was without fear of himself or of any consequences, he had no doubts and no loose ends, he had simply a purpose—to kill Hepplestall. To be sane is to think and John did not think: he felt.

There was some reason why he could not kill Hepplestall till it was dark. Once or twice he tried, vaguely, to remember what the reason was, then forgot that he was trying to remember anything. When it was dark he was to go to Barraclough’s for the gun with which he would kill Hepplestall. He was cold and hungry, shivering violently and aware of nothing but that he was God’s executioner.

When dusk came he left the grave and went, dry-lipped, stumbling like a man walking in a dream, to Barra-clough’s. At the sight of him, Barraclough had more than doubt. Of what use a gun in these palsied hands? What demonstration, other than one palpably insane, could this trembling instrument effect?

But Bradshaw was the one hope of the agent and since there was nothing else to trust, he must trust his luck.

“The gun! The gun!”

Barraclough placed it in his hands without a word and John turned with it and was gone. The canny Barraclough, taking his precautions in case the worst (or the best) happened, slept that night in a public-house midway between Needham’s and Hepplestall’s. He had made himself pleasant to several passers-by on the road; he had asked them the time; he had established his alibi.

CHAPTER X—DOROTHY’S MOMENT

WHEN Edward came home on the day of his introduction to the factory, Dorothy met him with an anxious, “Well, Edward?” and, “Oh, Mother,” he had said, “I have to think of this. Pray do not ask me now.”

That was all and, if she liked, she could consider herself snubbed for attempting an unwomanly inquisitiveness into the affairs of men, but he intended no snub nor did she interpret him as side-tracking her. It was, simply, that he refused to involve Dorothy in this trouble.

He might be forced to take some desperate measure—nothing more hopeful than his first thought of enlistment had yet occurred to him—and if things were to come to an ugly pass like that he wasn’t going to have his mother concerned in them. He declined the factory, and discussion would not help.

Reuben felt no surprise at Edward’s silence. The boy was, no doubt, considering his situation and would come in time to the right conclusions about it; he would see that this was not a thing to be settled now, but one which had been settled twenty years ago by the fact that Edward was Reuben’s firstborn son. No: he was not anxious about Edward, with his jejune opinions, his young effervescence, his failure, from the polities of Oxford, to perceive that life was earnest. Edward wanted, did he, to play at being a lawyer: so had Reuben once played at being a Jacobite. Youth had its green sickness. But Dorothy was different: he couldn’t disembarrass himself so easily about Dorothy.

They were all putting a barrier between their thoughts and their words, but marriage had not blunted, it had increased, his sensitiveness to Dorothy’s moods, and he was aware that she was troubled now more deeply than he had ever known her moved before. She seemed to him to be badly missing the just perspective, to be making a mountain of a mole-hill, to be making tragedy out of the commonplace comedy of ingenuous youth, to be too much the mother and too little the wife, to be, by unique exception, unreasonable: but all this counted for nothing with him when Dorothy was pained. Yet he couldn’t, in justice, blame Edward as first cause of her grief when the cause was not Edward, or Edward’s youth, but the universal malady of youth. He reminded himself again of that fantastic folly of his own youth, Jacobitism, and it was notably forebearing in him to remember it now and to decide that his own green sickness had been less excusable than Edward’s.

What it came to was that some one must clear the air, some one must break this painful silence they were, by common consent, keeping about the subject uppermost in their minds. In a few days now Edward would return to Oxford for his last term and it must be understood, explicitly, that when he came home it was to begin his apprenticeship at the factory. Get this thing finally settled, get it definitely stated in terms on both sides, and Dorothy would cease to make a grief of it. It was the inconclusiveness, he thought, which perturbed her.

Edward had a Greek text on his knee when Reuben went into the drawing-room: he might or he might not have been reading it. He might have been conscious that Dorothy had suddenly got up and thrown the curtains back from the window and had opened it and stood there now as if she needed air. Reuben had the tact to make no comment.

He sat down. Then he said, “Edward, I have been thinking of the time when I was your age and it came into my mind that had I then been shown a factory such as I showed you the other week, I should have thought it a very atrocious sight. I couldn’t, of course, actually have been shown such a place when I was your age, for there were no such places. Steam was in its infancy. But I put the matter as I do to show you that I understand the feelings you did not trouble to conceal.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Edward. “I have to acknowledge that I was not complimentary to your achievement. I was not thinking of it as an achievement, but I, too, have been thinking and I see how cubbishly I failed in my appreciation.”

“Come,” said Reuben, “this is better.”

“As far as it goes, sir, yes. But I am not to go much further. In the shock of seeing the ugliness of that place, I believe that I forgot my manners—more than my manners. I forgot your mastery of steam. I forgot that having turned manufacturer, you became a great manufacturer. I—” he hesitated. “I am not trying to be handsome. I am trying to be just.”

“Just?”

“And, believe me, trying not to be smug. I only plead, sir, that I am old enough to know my own tastes.”

“Are you? I can only look back to myself, Edward, and I am certain that when I was your age, I had no taste for work.”

“A barrister’s is a busy life, sir. That is what I seek to persuade you.”

“And I grant you that it may be. I will grant even that you may have a taste for work, and work of a legal kind. And I have still to ask you if you think it right to put selfish tastes in front of plain duty.”

“Oh, why did you send me to Oxford, sir? Why, if you destined me for the factory, did you first show me the pleasantness of the world?”

“I wished my son to be an educated gentleman. You have seen Richard Needham. He is a product, extreme, but still a product, of the factories and nothing but the factories. He is, as I told you, an able man. But he is coarse. He is a manufacturer who has no thought beyond manufacturing. That is why I sent you to Oxford, where you went knowing that you were heir to Hepplestall’s. You have treated this subject now as if the factory was a surprise that I have sprung upon you.”

“In theory, sir, I suppose I knew what you expected of me. But I had never seen the factory and the factory, in practice, after Oxford, after some education, some glimpse of the humanities, is—”

“I, too,” Reuben warned him, “had my education.”

“Yes,” said Edward. “Yes,” and looked at his father with something like awe. It was true that Reuben was educated—if Edward wanted proof, there was that bookishness of his which bordered at least on scholarliness—and he had stomached the factory; he had stomached it and remained a gentleman! He impressed Edward by his example: he had had the cleverness, in this conversation, to suggest that Edward, young, was in the same case as Reuben, young, had been.

As a fact, their cases were not parallel at all. Circumstances such as Mr. Bantison had pressed Reuben into manufacturing: he had discovered, almost at once, his enthusiasm for steam: he had surrendered himself with the imaginative glamor of the pioneer and if the road was stony, if once he had strayed down the by-path whose name was Phoebe, he had, at the end of it, Dorothy, that bright objective. Edward had none of these. Edward came from Oxford, with his spruce ambition to cut a figure at the bar, and was confronted with the menacing immensity of the great factory, full-grown in naked ugliness. He was without motive, other than the commands of his father, to do outrage on his prejudices.

But it was not for Reuben to point out these differences, nor, it seemed, for Dorothy to intervene with word of such of them as she perceived. She was all with Edward in this struggle, but she was loyal to Reuben and he did her grave injustice if he thought she had made alliance with her son against her husband. She had kept silence and she meant to keep silent to the end—if she could, if, that is, Reuben did not drive too hard: and she had to acknowledge that, so far, he had not used the whip. As for her private sufferings, she hoped she had the courage to keep them private. That was the badge of women.

“Then I can only admire,” Edward was saying. “I can only give you best. I can only say you are a stronger man than I.”

Reuben thought so too, but “Pooh,” he said, “an older man.”

“But you were young when you took up manufacturing. I—I cannot take it up. Let me be candid, sir. I abhor the factory.”

“We spoke just now of tastes. Will it help you to think of the factory as an acquired taste? You are asked to make a trial of it and it is not usual to refuse things that are known to be acquired tastes—olives, for example—without making fair trial of them.”

“No,” said Edward, meeting his father’s eye. “But it is usual to eat olives. It is not usual for a gentleman to turn manufacturer.”

“Edward!” Dorothy broke silence there.

“Oh!” said Reuben, “this is natural. Our limb of the law has ambitions. Already he is fancying himself a judge—my judge.”

“I apologize, sir,” said Edward. “I acknowledge, I have never doubted, that you are both manufacturer and gentleman. But I cannot hope to repeat that miracle myself.”

“You can try.”

“I have the law very obstinately in my mind, sir. I could, as you say, try to become a manufacturer. One can try to do anything, even things that are contrary to one’s inclinations and beyond one’s strength.”

“I will lend you strength.”

“You could do that and I am the last to deny you have abundance of strength. But I believe in spite of your aid that I should fail, and the failure would not be a single but a double one. After failing here as manufacturer, I could hardly hope to succeed elsewhere as a barrister. I should have wasted my most valuable years in demonstrating to you what I know for myself without any necessity of trial, that I am unfitted for trade.”

“You believe yourself above it. That is the truth, Edward.”

It was the truth. Reuben had stooped and Edward did not intend to perpetuate the stoop. Edward was a wronged man cheated of his due, robbed by the unintelligible apostasy of his father of his birthright of land ownership and if the attitude and the language with which he now confronted Reuben were unfilially independent, they were, at least, reticent and considerate expressions of what he actually thought. Reuben imagined him youthfully extravagant: he was, on the contrary, a model of self-restraint, he was a dam unbreakable, withstanding an urgent flood. The indictment he could fling at his father! The resentments he could voice! And, instead, he was doing no more than refusing to go into a disreputable factory. Above it? He should think he was above it.

“I used the word ‘unfitted,’” he said. “Shall we let that stand?”

“Till you disprove it, it may stand. When you come down from Oxford, you will go into the factory and disprove it.”

“No.”

“I have been very patient, Edward. I have let you talk yourself out, but—”

“Lord, sir, the things I haven’t said!”

“Indeed? Do you wish to say them?”

Edward did, but he glanced at his mother, whose one contribution to their discussion had been a reproof of him, of him, who had been so splendidly restrained! Why, then, should he spare her? Why, if she had deserted to the other side, should he not roll out his whole impeachment? Why not, even though it implicated her, even though he must suggest’ that she was accessory to the weaving of the web in which he struggled? He thought she was, because of that one sharp cry, on Reuben’s side in this.

She read that thought. She saw how wildly he who should have known better was misunderstanding her, and it added to a suffering she had not thought possible to increase. Was this her moment, then? Sooner or later, she must intervene, she must throw in her weight for Edward at whatever strain upon her loyalty to Reuben, but it must be at the right moment and probably that moment would not come yet, when Edward was present to confuse her by his indiscretions, but later, when she was alone with Reuben. It was enormously, it was vitally important that she should choose her moment well. If she spoke now, she would of course correct the mistake that Edward was so cruelly making about her, but that was not to the main point. She would not, if she could help it, speak till she was sure that the favorable moment had arrived. All else was to be subordinate to that.

Reuben followed Edward’s glance. “Yes,” he said, “you are distressing your mother,” and, certainly, she felt her moment was escaping her. If she spoke now she must say, “No, Reuben. You, not Edward, are the cause of my distress,” and she could not say that. She could only wait, feeling that to wait was to risk her moment’s never coming at all.

“I see we are distressing her,” said Edward, studiously abstaining from putting emphasis upon the “we.”

“And the many more things that I might say shall not be said. I will take a short cut to the end. The end is my absolute refusal to go into the factory upon any terms whatever.”

Reuben rose, with clenched fists. He had not the intention of striking his son, but the impulse was irresistible to dominate the slighter man, to stand menacingly over him. How in this should she find her moment? Where if temper rose, if Reuben did the unforgivable, if he struck Edward, where was her opportunity to make a peace and gain her point? As she had cried “Edward!”, so now, “Reuben!” she cried, and put a hand on his.

He responded instantly to the sound of her voice and the touch of her hand. “You are right, Dorothy,” he said. “We must not flatter our young comedian by taking him gravely.”

“That is an insult, sir,” said Edward.

“In comedy,” Reuben smiled suavely at him, “it may be within the rules for a father to insult a vaporing son. In life, such possibilities do not exist.”

Ridicule! Edward could fight against any weapon but this. “You treat me like a child,” he said in plaintive impotence.

“Oh, no,” said Reuben. “So far, I have given you the benefit of the doubt. I have not whipped you yet.”

“Whipped!”

“A method of correction, Edward, used upon children and sometimes on those whose years outstrip their sense.”

“Do you seriously picture me, sir, remaining here to be a whipping block?”

“Children run away: and children are brought back.” Her moment! Oh, it was slipping from her as they squabbled, Edward’s future was at stake, and not his alone. If young Tom Hepplestall was for the army, there were still her younger sons; there were Edward’s own unborn sons. The stake was not Edward’s future only, it was the future of the Hepplestalls and all her landed instincts were in revolt against the thought that her sons were to follow Reuben in his excursion, his strange variation, from the type she knew. Once his factory had seemed mysterious and romantic. Now, she was facing it, she was seeing it through Edward’s outraged eyes. Incredible mercy that she had not seen it before, but not incredible in the light of her love for Reuben. It had been a thing apart from her life and now, implacably, was come into it. There was no evading the factory now; there was no facile blinking at it as a dark place in Reuben’s life about which she could be incurious, it was claiming her Edward, it had come, through him, into her life now.

It was crouching for her, like a beast in the jungle and what was to happen when the beast sprang, to her, to Reuben, to their love? She had held aloof from the factory and she had kept Reuben’s love. Were these cause and effect and was her aloofness a condition of his love? Was her hold on him the hold of one consenting to be a decoration, and no more than a decoration in his life? Had she shied from facts all these years, and was retribution at hand?

These were desperate questionings, but Edward was her son and she must take her risks for him, even this risk imperiling her all, this so much greater risk than the life she risked for him when he was born. But when to speak? When to put all to the test? Surely not just now when this pair of men, one calling the other “child,” both, one as bully, the other as Gasconader, were behaving like children. She groped helplessly for her moment.

Then, suddenly, as she seemed to drown in deep water and to clutch feebly upwards, she knew that her moment was come. She had not heard the sound of the shot coming from the shrubbery and felt no pain. She only knew that she was weak, that her moment, safely, surely, was come, and that she must use it quickly.

Because she was lying on the floor and Reuben and Edward were bending over her, she was looking up into their faces. That seemed strange to her, but everything was strange because everything was right. In this moment, there was nothing jeopardous; she had only to speak, indeed she need not actually trouble to put her message into words, and Reuben would infallibly agree with her. There were no difficulties, after all. She had felt that it was only a question of the right moment, and here was her moment, exquisitely, miraculously, compellingly right.

Her hand seemed very heavy to lift but, somehow, she lifted it, somehow she was holding Reuben’s hand and Edward’s, somehow she was joining them in friendship and forgiveness. It was right, it was right beyond all doubt. Reuben would never coerce Edward now, and she smiled happily up at them.

“Reuben,” she said, then “Edward,” that was all. Her hand fell to the floor.

Edward looked up from Dorothy’s dead face to see his father disappearing through the window, but Reuben need not have hurried. John Bradshaw was standing in the shrubbery twenty yards from the window, making no effort to run. There was no effort left in him. He was the spring wound up by Mr. Barraclough; now he had acted and he was relaxed; he was relaxed and happy. A life for a life, and such a life—Hepplestall’s! He had led his people out of slavery. He had shot Hepplestall.

And in the light from the window, he saw rushing at him the man who was dead. There was no Annie now to laugh his superstitious fears away and to fold him in her protective arms: there was no one to tell him that the silent figure was not Hepplestall’s ghost. He believed utterly that a “boggart” was leaping at him.

True, there was a leap, and a blow delivered straight at his jaw with all the force of Reuben’s passionate grief behind it, and the blow met empty air. John, felled by a mightier force than Reuben’s, felled by his ghostly fear, lay crumpled on the ground and Hepplestall, recovering balance, flung him over his shoulder like a sack and was carrying him into the house before the servants, alarmed by the shot, had reached the room.

Edward met him. “I am riding for the doctor, sir,” he said.

“Doctor?” said Reuben. “It’s not a doctor that is needed now, it’s a hangman. Lock that in the cellar,” he said to the servants, dropping his sprawling burden on the floor, “and go for the constables.” Then, when they were gone, when he had silenced by one look their cries of horror and they had slunk out of the door as if they and not the senseless boy they carried were the murderers, “Leave me, Edward, leave me,” he said.

Edward stretched out his hand. There was sympathy in his gesture and there was, too, a claim to a share in the sorrow that had come to them. Dorothy was Edward’s mother.

“Go,” said Reuben fiercely; and Edward left him with his dead.

The beast had made his spring. Dorothy had not gone to the factory, and the factory had come to her.