CHAPTER III—PHOEBE BRADSHAW
IF Hepplestall calculated much, which is a damnable vice in youth, it is possibly some consolation to know that he miscalculated the effect upon the county of his plunge, for at this stage his eclipse was total and he had not anticipated that. They did not forget Bantison in remembering the rising walls of his factory, and still less in the thought that Reuben who had sat at their tables was working with his hands as a spinner. They added offense to offense; if he was seen he was cut; and their chatter reached him even at Bradshaw’s where, as he knew very well, gentry talk must be loud indeed to penetrate.
He had overestimated his strength to resist public opinion. He was a proud man and he was outcast and, set himself as he did with ferocious energy to his task, he fell short of forgetfulness. Dorothy Verners was at the end of a stony, tortuous road; it would be, at the best, a long time before he reached the end of that road and the chances that she would still be there, that Whitworth, carelessly secure as he was, would wait long enough to leave her there for Hepplestall, seemed to him, in these days of despondency, too remote for reason. He would never bridge the gulf in time and his patience ebbed away. Not that he ever doubted that, in the end, in money, position, reputation, he would outdistance Whitworth, but Dorothy Verners, as a symbol of his ascendancy, was dwindling to the diminished status of an ambition now seen to be too sanguine. He had not realized how much he would be irked by the contempt of the county. If, at the end of all, he had them at his feet! Aye, so he would, but wouldn’t it be more humbling for them if they came licking, along with his, the feet of a wife of his who was not of their order? Wouldn’t he so triumph the more exultantly? He argued the case against his first intentions, seeking justification for falling honestly in love with Phoebe Bradshaw.
Honest love was, at first, very far from his purpose. A gentleman didn’t seduce his host’s daughter, but that rule of conduct postulated that the host be equally a gentleman and Bradshaw seemed, when Reuben came, un-fathomably his inferior, and Bradshaw’s daughter, for all her airs, the sort of flower hung by the roadside to be plucked by any grand seigneur. Nor did he ever, at the back of his mind, move far from that attitude. His tolerant association with these people was an immense condescension, justified only by ulterior purpose. But if marriage with Phoebe fitted his purpose, as in his first reaction from the disdain of the county it seemed to do, why, then, though he never thought of himself as belonging with the manufacturers, it might in the long run prove a famous score against the county.
Phoebe had advantages. She was at hand, he saw her every day at meals and was ready to believe that she revealed every day some new, shy prettiness, she was tractable, malleable in the future and his without effort in the present, and it was comforting to think of her softness when all his else was harsh endeavor and wounded pride and a long stern struggle to success. While Dorothy Verners was of the struggle, yet a man must relax sometimes, as Mr. Bantison had thought when he put Burgundy before the discretion which becomes a blackmailer. Reuben chewed upon it, not reconciled to surrendering Dorothy, not quite convinced by the most convincing of arguments he addressed to himself, unwilling, even if they had convinced, to let go any part of his full scheme, but inclining, feeling himself a bit of a fool, a bit of an apostate, and very much more a prodigy of generosity, to look upon Phoebe as one whom he might make his wife.
Thus (on the whole) well-intentioned towards her, he proposed one summer’s morning to take her out walking, which was partly a gesture addressed to his hesitations, and partly a deliberate means to a closer acquaintance than he could compass indoors in the single living-room where Peter hampered by too faithful attendance on his pupil. He mentioned his wish, a little too grandly, a little too much like a royal command.
Phoebe had her wisdom and the weeks of their intercourse had rubbed away the first bloom of his divinity: he ate like other mortals, and, like the sort of mortals she despised in her pose of ladyhood, he labored in the factory. She had conceived ambition which, as he seemed to level himself down to her, looked not impossible to realize, if she sustained in his eyes her quality of ladyhood. And to go out had its perils. She flowered indoors and her little graces withered in the open air, when she knew she reverted to type, walked freely with great strides and swung across the moors like any weaver’s lass hurrying to work. These things, she thought, were discounts off her value: but they might, just possibly, be a winning card. They might announce that she had variety.
“To walk,” she said, “with you?”
“Oh, not too far for a lady,” he assured her, “and not too fast.”
“You,” she retorted, “ride too much. I’ll walk you off your legs.” So she challenged him, with wisdom.
If they were to make a walking match of it, at least they were not to be philanderers, they were not going out only as far as the first heather, there to sit together in a solitude that might spell danger. And she announced spirit to a man who would (she knew) appreciate it, she declared that if her inches were few they had vigor, that if she had ladyhood it was skin-deep, that she wasn’t a one-volume abridgment of imbecility, not his for the beckoning; and she went defiantly, to put on a bonnet and a shawl which would have been a violent and successful assault on any complexion less admirable than hers. She was, indeed, playing her gambling card.
And, to his surprise, he liked it. This, if it were not mere flicker, if it were not instinctive counterfeiting of a feminine move in a sex-game, was a spirit which would serve her well, and him too, in the drawing-rooms of the county in the future he was contemplating for them both. Wasn’t it fact that my Lord Montacute had married his cook and that she had made him a notable Lady? And he wasn’t a lord nor Phoebe a cook.
Small Phoebe kept her promise, too. She came of hardy stock, and she hadn’t spent the day, as he had, standing at a spinning-jenny. He had to cry her mercy, flinging himself exhausted on the heather.
“I said you ride too much,” she exulted, secure that he did not feign fatigue, standing over him while the blood raced happily through tingling limbs.
“And you,” he retorted, “too little.”
“I? I do not ride at all. You know we have no horses.”
“It will be necessary for you to ride,” he said.
“Why so?” she asked him. “Haven’t I proved that I can walk?”
“Still,” he said, “I shall have horses brought tomorrow. Will you have me for riding master?”
“To ride I should need a habit.”
“Which I provide.”
She held her breath. For what was it “necessary” for her to ride if not that he was thinking of a future for her that jumped giddily with her ambition? Still, she kept her head; still, she sensed the value of offering this man persistent opposition, and all she said was “Are you rested now?”
He rose, to find himself aware of strange tremblings, not to be accounted for by tiredness, of a dampness on his brow, and, when he spoke, of a thickened voice. “You shall have the habit to-morrow,” he promised her.
“They burned warlocks once,” she mocked him. A warlock is a wizard. “Habits do not come in a day except by magic.”
“Yours will come by road, from Manchester. I ride in for it to-morrow.”
“Neglecting your work?”
“I choose my work,” he said, and strode off, leaving her to follow as she might, but if he thought to outdistance her, he reckoned without the grit of Phoebe. As a lady, he could find a dozen chinks a day in her Brummagen armor; as a country lass she had a native energy that all her vanities left unimpaired, and set what hot pace he could, she kept level with him like a taunt which refuses to stop ringing in a man’s ears. If this was a duel, Phoebe was scoring winning points that night. “But a horse will test your mettle, my wench,” he was thinking savagely, and with relief that the idea of a horse had come to him.
“When I go driving through new country,” he had told the lawyer, “I like a brake on my wheels,” and he was feeling very urgently the need of a brake on his wheels in the new country through which he suddenly discovered himself to be driving now. He put it to himself in phrases that may or may not be paradoxical.
“Damn her, I love her,” he said aloud as he undressed that night.
Phoebe, in her room across the passage, mingled fear with triumph. If one is not born to horses, horses terrify. In that, more than in anything else, lay the difference between Phoebe’s world and Reuben’s. If her ladyhood was pretentious and calculated instead of instinctive, well, theirs did not go very deep either. There was culture in that age, but not, extensively, in Lancashire. Culture hugged the capital, throwing outposts in the great houses of the Home Counties. In Manchester itself there were bookish people, but in the county sport was the touchstone, and if horsemanship in the skilled sense was not expected of a woman, she must at any rate be not shy of a horse. It was almost the test of gentry.
When the thought came to him as he panted on the heather it had not, indeed, been as a test of her quality. At first, he was more generous than that. To be his wife, she must ride; she did not ride; and he must teach her. Only later did he see it as a trial of her fitness, as she, at once, saw it, gathering courage for an ordeal. If she must ride to win this husband, then, cost what it might, she would ride.
He kept his word, taking for the first time a full day off from his education as a spinner, demanded measurements of her at breakfast, rode with them into Manchester, was back by early evening with a habit and, from his stables, a horse used to a side-saddle: doing all with characteristic concentration of energy that brooked no opposition from any such bombastical pleader for delay as the outraged habit-maker.
Hepplestall commanded, and Hepplestall received.
There are degrees in habits? Then this was a habit of high degree. Whether it was a lover’s free-handed gift or the circumstance of a trial by ordeal, it was the best it could be, and Phoebe’s prettiness was equal to it. Indeed, she trended by choice to a fluffiness of dress and a cheapness in taste that Reuben, who was not fastidious, had not failed to note. You have seen, perhaps, a modern hospital nurse in uniform and the same nurse in mufti? That was the difference between Phoebe in her habit and Phoebe as he had seen her hitherto. More than ever, he felt conviction that no ill-judged passion was leading him astray, that here, when good dressmakers had clothed her, was his match and the match for the county. He tried to be skeptical, to criticize, and found, at the end of a scrutiny too frank to be well-mannered, that there was nothing here to criticize.
She smiled, bravely, aware from her glass that what he saw was good, aware that he could not see how big a thing her horse appeared to her, how far above the ground the saddle was, how shrunken small she felt. But it was consoling to know that if she was going to break her neck, she was to do it in the finest clothes she had ever worn. His look of candid admiration was a tonic.
“This is your horse,” he said. “We called him Hector.” She made Hector’s acquaintance prettily, but, plainly, she missed his point, and he made it more definitely. “Of course, you may rename him now that he is your own.”
“Mine? My horse? But, Mr. Hepplestall—”
“Have you your salts?” he asked, cutting short her cry of surprise. A horse more or less, he would have her think, was triviality when Reuben Hepplestall was in the mood to give.
“Salts?” she repeated, puzzled.
“In case you swoon,” he said gravely, and not ironically either. It was the swooning age.
But not for Phoebe. Did ladies swoon at a first riding-lesson? She doubted it: they took that lesson young, as children, in the years before they were modish and swooning, and, in any case, it wasn’t her ladyhood that was in question now; it was her courage. “I shall not swoon,” she said, and he relished the bravado of it.
Spirit? Aye, she had spirit to be wife of his, and it behoved him not to break it. If he had had thoughts, brutally, of making this test of her as harsh as he could, that was all altered now by the sight of her adorning the habit instead of overwhelmed by it, caressing Hector instead of shrinking from him, and he saw tenderness as the prime virtue of a riding-master. She wasn’t going to take a fall if he could prevent it.
Between them, between Reuben and Hector, a sober animal who had carried Reuben’s mother and hadn’t forgotten his manners in the years since her death, and between these two and Phoebe’s pluck, they managed a lesson which gave her confidence for later lessons when the instructor’s mood was less indulgent. Reuben hadn’t tenderness as a habit. Neither had she very staunchly the habit of courage, but all the courage she had was wrought up for these occasions and, thanks to the sobriety of the good Hector, it served. She took a toss one day, but fell softly into heather and rose smiling before he had leaped to the ground. His last doubts that he loved her fled when she smiled that day. “’Fore Gad,” he cried, “you’re thoroughbred.” It was the sweetest praise.
That was a moment of supreme exaltation, but, all the time, Phoebe was living now in upper air. For her, manifestly and openly for her, he was neglecting what had seemed the only thing he lived for; he spent long days riding with Phoebe instead of laboring to learn in the factory. Once or twice when he had the opportunity of inspecting some steam-driven works not too remote, he took her with him, leaving her in state obsequiously served in an inn while he studied the engine-house and the driving bands and the power-looms of the factory, refusing the manufacturer’s invitation to dinner and offending a host to come back where she waited for him at the inn. Peter might croak, and Peter did croak like any raven and shake his head, and Peter was told he was old-fashioned, and was put in his place as parents have always been put in their place when young love takes the bit between its teeth. Hepplestall, and his lass? It was a piece of luck too rare to be true. He prophesied sad fate for her, he wished she had a mother—men are handicapped—he spoke of sending for her aunt: all the time, too overawed by Hepplestall’s significance to be more effective as an obstacle than a cork bobbing on the surface of a flood. Protest to Reuben himself, or even appeal, was sheer impossibility for Bradshaw, who was almost feudal in his subservience to gentry. He saw danger, warned Phoebe, was laughed at for his pains and turned fatalist. Phoebe cared for neither his spoken forebodings nor his morose resignation. Phoebe was happy, she tasted victory, she was sure of Reuben now and so sure that she began to look beyond the fact that she had got him and was holding him, she began to concede herself the luxury of loving him.
Phoebe was a sprinter, capable of effort if the effort need not be sustained. She had attracted Reuben, and in the doing it had submitted to severe self-discipline, to a vigilance and a courage which went beyond those of the normal Phoebe. Accomplishment went to her head like wine; she wasn’t prudent Phoebe on a day when, as their horses were at the door, a message came from Everett asking Reuben to go at once to discuss some detail of equipment of the now nearly completed factory. She wasn’t prudent or she would never have taken such an occasion to plead that he had promised her that day for riding. She knew what his factory meant to him, knew, too, how jealous he was of his hard-won knowledge, how keen to match it against Everett’s older experience; yet she asked him to imply, by keeping a promise to ride, that she came before the factory. And he loved her. Whatever the depth of his love, whatever the chances that this was the love that lasts, he loved her then. “Tell Mr. Everett,” he said to the messenger, “that I authorize him to use his own judgment.”
Which Everett very gladly did, promptly and, he thought, irremediably. It was a point on which he had his own ideas, differing from Reuben’s, and carte blanche at this stage, after the endless controversies, of Reuben’s obstinate collaboration, was a godsend that Everett wasn’t going to throw away by being dilatory.
It resulted that when Reuben next visited the works, he was confronted by a fait accompli, and by Everett’s hardly concealed smirk of glee. “The thing, as you see, is done now. I had your authority to do as I thought best,” said Everett.
“Then undo and re-do,” said Reuben, sourly.
“Pull down!” gasped Everett. “But—”
“You heard me,” growled Reuben, turning on his heel from a disgruntled architect who had been too previous with self-congratulations on getting his own way for once.
And Phoebe was triumphing at home, secure of her Reuben, in ecstasy at her tested power over him.
Reuben, too, was thinking of that power, of how he had yielded to it, of Samson and Delilah and of the dry-rot that sets in in a man’s strength when he delivers his will into a woman’s keeping. It was a dark, inscrutable Reuben who came home that night to Bradshaw’s; beyond Phoebe’s skill to smooth away the irritation furrows from that brow. She used her artless remedy; she fed him well, and persuaded herself that no more was wrong than that he came in hungry. He was watching her that night with critical eyes and she was aware of nothing but that his gaze never left her: its fidelity rejoiced her.
He flung himself vigorously at work, after that. There was woman, a snare, and work, the sane alternative, there was the zest of it, the mere exercise of it to sweat evil humors out of a man. By now he knew all that Bradshaw’s factory could teach him, and, by his inspections of modern factories, much more; but his own place was not quite ready, his organization was complete on paper and till the day came for applying his knowledge, time had to be filled somehow and as well at Bradshaw’s as anywhere else. Phoebe found herself neglected. He did not ride, or, if he did, it was alone. It came to her that she had made too sure of him; he hadn’t mentioned marriage, he was drifting from her. What could she do to bind him to her?
Then he relented. She was suffering and he thought, in a tender mood, that it hurt him to see her suffer. Wasn’t he making a mountain of a molehill, wasn’t he unjust to blame her for the consequences of his weakness? He was a most chivalrous gentleman when he next invited her to ride with him, and she accepted, meekly. There lay the difference between the then and the now. Then they were comrades, now he condescended and he did not know it. But it was still his thought that Phoebe was to be his wife, and in the comfortable glow of forgiveness, in horse-exercise on a pleasant afternoon with one whose complexion was proof against any high light, who was a plucky rider and his accustomed fellow on these rides, they achieved again a genuine companionship. His doubts and her fears alike dissolved in what seemed the mellowed infallibility of that perfect afternoon.
Two other riders came in sight, meeting them, along the road—a lady, followed by her groom. Dorothy Verners sitting her horse as if she had been cradled on it, straight, tall Dorothy whose beauty was so different from Phoebe’s soft prettiness. Dorothy had beauty like a birthright. She came of generations of women whose first duty was to be admirable, who had, as it were, experimented long ago with beauty and had fixed its lines for their successors. Where Phoebe suggested a hasty improvisation of comeliness, where, in her, comeliness was unexpected and almost an impertinence, in Dorothy it was authentic and assured.
Had Reuben, seeing Phoebe in the magic vision of his love, called her a thoroughbred because she took a fall without blubbering? It was a compliment, and he had meant it. He had meant it because she had, surprisingly, not flinched. But of the real thoroughbreds, of those who were, without compliment, thoroughbred, one would take for granted that they did not flinch and the surprise would be not that they did not flinch, but if they did. He had not been seeing Dorothy Verners lately; he had been forgetting her authenticity; and he hadn’t the slightest doubt, watching her approach, that he belonged with her order, that he was an aristocrat who, if he stooped to trade, stooped only to rise again. He saw himself through his own eyes.
And Dorothy looked at him through hers, seeing a dark man, not unhandsome, who was of good stock, but a nonentity until he had brought unpleasant notoriety upon himself by too summary a method of dealing with Mr. Bantison and, after that, had stepped down to association with the manufacturers. No doubt it was a manufacturer’s daughter with whom he took his ride. Some of them she had heard, upstarts, did ride. A man who had lost caste, a man to be ignored. Would it hurt him to be, emphatically, ignored by her? He deserved to be hurt, but probably his skin was thick and, in any case, why was she wasting thought on him? He was cut by the county: she had not to create a precedent. She did what she knew others did. She cut him dead, and it came, unreasonably, as a shock to Hepplestall.
He was used to the cut direct, he didn’t even tighten his lips now when one of his former acquaintance passed him by without a glance. But he hadn’t anticipated this, he hadn’t included Dorothy, and her contempt struck at him like a blow. It wasn’t what Dorothy stood for, it wasn’t that she was the reigning toast, and that to carry her off was to have been his splendid score off Whitworth. It was, simply, that she was the one woman, and, yes, he admitted her right to be contemptuous; he had permitted her to see him in demeaning company. He looked at Phoebe with intolerable hatred in his eyes, he could have found satisfaction in lashing her with his whip till he was exhausted. Well, he didn’t do that.
But Phoebe comprehended something of his thought. She tried—God knows she tried—to win him back to her as they rode home. She chattered gayly, keeping it up bravely while jealousy and fear gnawed her heart, and Hepplestall stared glumly straight ahead with never a word for Phoebe. Her words were like sea foam breaking idly on granite.
Words didn’t do. Then, what would? Desperately, she came to her decision. He was slipping from her, there was wreck, but there was still the possibility of rescue. When she said “Good night,” there was invitation in her eye; and something, not love, took him, later, across the passage to her room. Phoebe’s last gambling card was played.
CHAPTER IV—ALMACK’S CLUB
MR. LUKE VERNERS put on his boots in his lodging in Albemarle Street, St. James, in a very evil mood. He was in London, and ordinarily liked to be in London although it was a place where a man must remember his manners, where he wasn’t a cock crowing on his dung-hill, but a mighty small atom in a mighty big crowd; but London with his wife and his daughter was a cruel paradox. Why the plague did a man cramp his legs in a coach for all those miles from Lancashire to London if it wasn’t to get away from wife and daughter? And here he was tied to the family petticoats, in London. It was enough to put any man into bad temper.
As a rule, Mr. Verners was a tolerant person. In a squat little volume published in the year 1822 and called “A Man of the World’s Dictionary,” a Virtuous Man is defined as “a being almost imaginary. A name given to him who has the art of concealing his vices and shutting his eyes to those of others,” and so long as the vices of others did not interfere with his own, and so long as the others were of his own order, Mr. Verners was a candidate for virtue, under this definition. But the man born to be a perfect individualist is at a disadvantage when he owns an estate and feels bound by duty to marry and beget an heir: it isn’t the moderns who discovered that marriage clogs selfishness.
Mr. Verners had an heir, but not, as it happened, till Dorothy had come first. If she hadn’t come first, she would not have come at all; but she came, and dazzlingly, and if there is something agreeable in being the father of a beauty, there is also something harassing. A wife, after all, is only a wife, but with a monstrous fine lady of a daughter about the house a man has to mind his p’s and q’s. Mr. Verners was a sort of a gentleman and he minded his p’s and q’s, but he wasn’t above admitting that he looked forward to the day when, Dorothy well and truly married, he could relax to reasonable carelessness at home.
And not only did Dorothy not get married, not only did Whitworth procrastinate and play card games in London instead of the love-game in Lancashire, but Dorothy, instead of waiting patiently, became strangely restive. The queer thing is that her discontent began to show itself soon after she had met Reuben Hepplestall riding in the road one day now a year ago. She hadn’t mentioned the meeting at home. Why should she mention a creature who was outcast? Why give him a second thought? What possible connection could there be between the meeting and this change in her hitherto entirely submissive habit of waiting for Whitworth? None, to be sure, and no doubt Luke was perfectly right when he said it was all the vapors.
“But the vapors,” said Mrs. Verners, “come from Sir Harry’s absence.”
And “Tush,” said Mr. Verners, who was not without his envious sympathy of that rich bachelor in London, and there, for that time, they left it.
But the vapors came again, they turned endemic while Sir Harry continued a parishioner of St. James’, a gay absentee from his estates and his plain duty of marrying Dorothy, and Mr. Verners’ sympathy wore thin. A tolerant man, but a daughter who (he held) moped and a wife who (he told her in set terms) nagged, played the deuce with his tolerance and so, finally, against his better judgment, they were come to London, “To dig the fox out of his earth,” he said. “Aye, but do you fancy the fox will relish it?”
He knew how he, in the character of fox, would have received this hunt. “But we come naturally to London, for clothes for Dorothy and me,” said Mrs. Verners.
“Do we?” he growled. “It’s heads I win and tails you lose every time with a woman. What the hangment do I get except an empty purse?”
If the gods smiled, he got rid of Dorothy, but that wasn’t to be emphasized now any more than was his very firm intention to spend on himself the lion’s share of the contents of that purse. These things were not to be mentioned because it was good to have a grievance against his wife, to throw responsibility for their enterprise on her shoulders, to seem wholly, when he was only half, convinced that they were doing an unwise thing.
“Dorothy must come to London sometimes,” said Mrs. Verners placidly, “and Sir Harry is hardly to be reminded by letter of his negligence, whereas the sight of Dorothy—”
“Well, well,” said Luke, “you’re proud of your poppet.” Secretly, he would have backed the looks of his daughter against those of any woman in the land. “But,” he went on, “we’re in London now, and London’s full of pretty women. Your wench may be the pride of Lancashire, but you’re pitting her here against the full field of the country—”
“Mr. Verners, you are vulgar.”
“I’m stating facts,” he said. “We’re here to catch Whitworth and I am indicating to your woman’s intelligence and your motherly prejudice that the bait you’re offering may not look so juicy here as it did at home where it hadn’t its peer.”
So he insured himself against failure, and the particular source of his ill-humor as he prepared to go out on the day after their arrival in town was not mental but physical. To jam gouty feet, used to roomy riding boots, into natty gear ought to be nothing. In the past it had been nothing, when he had drunk in the London air and found it the well of youth, but, this time, remarkably, the boots pinched unforgettably, and the realization that he hadn’t the resilience of youth, that he was in London yet hipped, in a play-ground yet grave, disheartened Mr. Verners, and it wasn’t till that skilled diplomat, the porter at Almack’s, recognized him instantly with a salute that Mr. Verners felt petulance oozed from him. It was a wonderful salute; it indicated the porter’s joy at seeing Mr. Verners, his regret that Mr. Verners was only an occasional visitor, his personal feeling that, but for the occasional visits of Mr. Verners, the life of the porter of Almack’s Club would not be worth living; it welcomed him home with a captivating, deferential flattery and the mollified gentleman was to meet with further balm inside the club, where play was not running spectacularly high and there were idle members eager for the simple distraction to be had from any face not wearisomely familiar. Besides, Mr. Verners came from Lancashire; London had heard of Lancashire recently and was willing to hear more.
He came in without much assurance, but hesitation fled when he found himself the center of an interest not at all languid.
“Damme, it’s Luke Verners come to town. Business for locksmiths here,” was the coarse-witted welcome of a lord.
“Locksmiths?” asked Verners.
“Ain’t it locksmiths one employs to put bolts and bars on one’s wife’s bedroom?”
“You flatter me, my lord,” said Verners.
The dandy eyed him appraisingly. “Perhaps I do, Verners, perhaps I do. You are past your prime.”
“Does your lordship care to give me opportunity to prove otherwise, with pistols, swords or—her ladyship?” A hot reception? Music in the ears of Mr. Verners, who relished it for its coarseness, for what seemed to him the authentic note of London Town, a greeting spoken propitiously by a lord. And if this was a good beginning, better was to follow. Mr. Seccombe rose from the chair where he was drowsing, recognized Verners with a start and came up to him interestedly. “Rot your chaff, Godalming,” he said. “Verners will give you as good as he gets any day. Tell us the news of the North, man. Are things as queer as they say?”
“What do they say?” asked Luke.
“They speak of steam-engines.”
“Oh, Lord,” groaned Godaiming. “Old Seccombe’s on his hobby-horse.”
“Of steam-engines,” repeated Mr. Seccombe severely, “and of workers whose bread is taken out of their mouths by machinery, so that they are thrown upon the poor-rates that the landlords must pay.”
“Gospel truth, Mr. Seccombe,” said Luke feelingly, “and yond fellow Arkwright, that began it, made a knight and a High Sheriff for doing us the favor of ruining us. What’s the country coming to?”
“Corruption and decay,” said his lordship.
“Is that so sure?” queried Seccombe. “What is your word on that, Verners?”
“Beyond doubt, it is the end of all things when landlords are milked through the poor-rates,” said Luke.
“Yet steam would appear to have possibilities?”
“Oh, Seccombe’s a hopeless crank,” said Godalming.
“Possibilities for whom, Mr. Seccombe?” asked Vemers. “For a barber like this Arkwright? Yes, he throve on steam, but what is that to us? Will steam grow corn?”
“Steam is an infamy,” stated a gentleman called Collinson.
“You do not agree, Seccombe? No, why should you? You own houses in London. Easy for you to play the philosopher. Those of us with land are beginning to watch the trading classes closely, and steam has the appearance of an ally to trade and enemy to us.”
“Then let the alliance be with us, Mr. Collinson,” said Seccombe. “Indeed, I am making no original suggestion. We have had the cases mentioned here of more than one man of our own order who—”
“Traitors! Outcasts!” cried Godalming.
“Or, perhaps, wise men, my lord. I do not know.”
“You don’t know if it is wise to sell your soul to the devil?”
“Personally,” said Mr. Seccombe, “I should regard that transaction as precarious, but not to the present point. There was mentioned the example of one Hepplestall.”
“You have heard of him—here?” Mr. Verners was astonished.
“We were interested to hear,” said Mr. Collinson.
“Of a perversion,” said Godalming.
“Godalming withholds from Mr. Hepplestall the light of his approval,” said Mr. Seccombe, “but—”
“Approve a turn-coat that was once a gentleman? Why, he has dined at Brooks’ and now blacks his sweaty hands with coal. Is there defense for him?” asked Godalming.
“I am prepared to defend him,” said Seccombe.
“Then you’re a Jacobin.” Godalming turned an outraged back.
“Verners will correct me if I am wrong,” said Collinson, “but we hear of Mr. Hepplestall that he has a great steam-driven factory, with a small town at its feet, and by his steam is driving out of trade the older traders in his district. Is that true?”
“Entirely,” said Mr. Verners, “though it staggers me that news of so small a matter has traveled so far and so fast.”
“Some of us have our eyes on steam,” said Seccombe, “and some of us,” he eyed Godalming with severity, “some of us prefer that a power like steam should be in the hands of men of our order.”
“But they cannot be of our order,” protested Verners, scandalized. “They cease, of their own conduct, to be of our order.”
“You do not dispute the facts about Hepplestall?”
“No. It’s your conclusions I find amazing.”
“Oh,” said Godalming, “this isn’t Almack’s Club at all. We’re in France, and Mr. Collinson is wearing a red cap, and Mr. Seccombe has no breeches and—rot me if I ever expected to hear such damned revolutionary sentiments from an Englishman.”
“Will you do me the favor, my lord, to consider the picture Mr. Verners has assented to be veracious?” Mr. Seccombe said, leaning back in his chair and looking like nothing so much as Maclise’s Talleyrand in the Fraser Portraits; elbows on the arms of his chair, hands caressing his stomach, knees wide apart, the sole of one shoe rubbing against the other, a look of placid benignity on his face. “That large factory, dominating a town of cottages where its workers live, under the owner’s eye, and that owner a gentleman who has extinguished the small lower-class manufacturers of his neighborhood. I ask you to consider that picture and to tell me what there is in it that you feel undesirable. To me, my lord, it is an almost feudal picture. The Norman Keep, with a village clustered around its walls, is to my mind the precedent of Mr. Hepplestall’s factory with its workers in their cottages about it. I confess to an admiration of this Hepplestall, whom you regard as a traitor to our order and I as a benefactor to that order. You will hardly assert that our order is unshaken by the deplorable events in France, you will hardly say that, even before that unparalleled outbreak of ruffianism, our order had maintained the high prestige of the Feudal days. A man in whose action I see possibilities of restoring in full our ancient privileges is a man to be approved and to be supported by us. If we do not support him, and others like him, what results? Abandoned by us, he must consort with somebody and he will consort naturally with other steam-power manufacturers, adding to their strength and weakening ours. It seems to me that this steam is a notable instrument for keeping in their places those classes who might one day follow the terrible French example: and the question is whether it is better for us ourselves, men of our order, directly to handle this instrument, or whether we are to trust it in the hands of the manufacturing class. For my own part, I distrust that class, I like a man who grasps his nettles boldly and I applaud Mr. Hepplestall.”
Several men had joined the circle by now, and Mr. Seecombe ended to find himself the center of an attention close but hostile. Phrases such as “rank heresy” and “devil’s advocate” made Mr. Collinson feel heroic when he said, “Speaking for myself, I stand converted by your argument, Seecombe.”
At which Godalming gave the theorist and his supporter the name of “a brace of begad trucklers to Satan,” and such a whoop of applause went up as caused Mr. Seccombe to look round quickly for cover. It was clear that to touch steam was not condoned as an attempt to revitalize the Feudal system: to touch steam was to defile oneself and to propose a defense of a gentleman who stooped to steam was to be unpopular. Mr. Seccombe liked his views very well, but liked popularity better and, catching sight of Whitworth in the crowd, saw in him a means of distracting attention from himself.
“Have you a word on this, Whitworth?” he asked. “You come from Lancashire.”
“My word on this,” he said, “is Mr. Verners’ word. Like him I am the victim of these steaming gentlemen, and I have only to remember my bailiff’s accounts to know how much I am mulcted in poor-rates.”
“Imagine Harry Whitworth perusing an account!” said Godalming.
“One has one’s duties, I believe,” said Sir Harry. “But I have been too long away from Lancashire to be a judge of this matter. I can tell you nothing of Hepplestall and his factory, for this is the first I heard of it, but I can tell you of Hepplestall and a parson.” And he told the tale of Mr. Bantison.
“This is the stuff your hero is made of, Seccombe,” jeered Godalming.
“Not bad stuff,” Seccombe heard an unexpected ally say. “The stuff, as Seccombe put it, that grasps a nettle firmly.”
“Oh,” conceded Sir Harry, “Bantison was nettle enough. But as to steam—!” He shrugged his shoulders, and gave Mr. Seccombe the opening for which he angled.
“It does not appeal to you to go to Lancashire and better Hepplestall’s example?” he asked blandly.
“Good God!” said Sir Harry, and the Club was with him.
“There might be wisdom in a visit to your estates,” said Mr. Seccombe, and the Club was, vociferously, with him. Mr. Seccombe smiled secretly: he had, gently but thoroughly, accomplished his purpose of turning the volatile thought of the Club away from his argument. He had raised a laugh at Whitworth’s expense, a brutal laugh, a “Vae Victis” laugh: he had focused attention on the case of Sir Harry Whitworth.
It was not an unusual case. This society had a leader known, with grotesque inappropriateness, as the First Gentleman in Europe and the First Gentleman in Europe had invented a shoe-buckle. Whitworth tripped over the buckle; he criticized it in ill-chosen company and news of his traitorous disparagement was carried to the Regent. Whitworth was in disgrace.
The usual thing and the discreet thing was to efface oneself for a time, but Harry Whitworth had the conceit to believe himself an ornament that the Prince could not dispense with. He stayed in town, daily expecting to be recalled to court: and the frank laughter of Almack’s was a galling revelation of what public opinion thought of his prospects of recall.
It was a humiliation for a high-spirited gentleman, and an embarrassment. To challenge a Club was to invite more ridicule, while to single out Mr. Seccombe, the first cause of his discomfiture, was equally impossible; Seccombe was too old for dueling; one did not go out with a man old enough to be one’s grandfather. There was Godalming, but, again, he feared ridicule: Godalming’s special offense was that he laughed loudly, but Godalming habitually laughed loudly and one couldn’t challenge for insulting emphasis a man who was naturally emphatic.
Whitworth saw no satisfactory way out of it, till Verners, mindful of Dorothy, supplied an opportunity for retreat.
“I may be able to give Sir Harry some little information about his estates. They are in good hands, and though naturally we in Lancashire would welcome amongst us the presence of so notable a landowner, the estate itself is well managed by his people.” Which was quite a pretty effort in tact from one unaware of Sir Harry’s misfortune, and puzzled by the laughter.
Whitworth snatched at the opportunity, meager as it was. “I will come with you to hear of it, Verners.” Then as he turned, a feeling that he was making a poor show of it tempted him to say, “Gentlemen, I heard you laugh. Next time we meet, next time I visit Almack’s, the laugh will be upon the other side. Godalming, will you wager on it?” He could issue that simulacrum of a challenge, at any rate. Men betted upon anything.
“A thousand guineas that you never come back,” suggested Godalming.
“A thousand that I am back—back, you understand me—in a month.”
“Agreed,” said Godalming. “I back Prinny’s resolution for a thousand for a month.”
“Shall we go, Mr. Verners?” said Sir Harry to the mystified squire, and “Gad, they’re betting on a weather-vane,” murmured Mr. Seccombe in the ear of his friend, Mr. Collinson.