HEPPLESTALL’S

RUMMAGING at a bargain-counter, I came across an object which puzzled me, and, turning to the shopman, I asked him what it was. He took it up contemptuously. “That,” he said. “Dear me, I thought I’d put it in the dust-bin. It’s fit for nothing but destruction.”

“And you call it?” I persisted. “I call it by its name,” he said. “It’s an outworn passion, and a pretty frayed one too. Look at that!”

I watched him pull gently at the passion and it came apart like mildewed fabric. “There’s no interest in that,” he said. “That never led to a murder or a divorce, a feeble fellow like that. If it ever got as far as the First Offenders’ Court, I shall be surprised.”

“Yet it looks old,” I said. “In its youth, perhaps—”

He examined it more closely. “I don’t think it’s a love passion at all,” he said, shaking his head. “My suppliers are getting very careless.”

“You wouldn’t care to give me their address?” I coaxed.

He threw the passion down angrily. “This is a shop,” he said. “I’m here to sell, not to make presents of my trade secrets.”

I apologized. “Of course,” I said, “I will always deal through you. And as to this passion, what is the price of that?”

“I’m an honest man and to tell you the truth I’d rather put that in the dust-bin than sell it. It goes against the grain to be trading in goods that I know won’t satisfy.”

I said things such as that I would take the risk, that I would not hold him responsible for any disappointment the passion might cause me and I ended by offering him sixpence. So taken was he by the generosity of this offer that he not only accepted it, but insisted on my taking, as discount, a piece of newspaper which, he said, would serve very well to wrap round the passion, pointing out, truthfully, that it was a cleanish piece of paper, neither stained, by nor stinking of fried fish.

So we struck that bargain, and leaving the shop, which I have never found again, I carried the passion home and unwrapped it from the paper and put it on the table in my study. After a time, when it was accustomed to its new surroundings, it showed unmistakably that it wished to be friendly with me. At its age, I gathered, and in its outworn condition, it thought fit to be grateful to me for having purchased it at so great a price. The shopman was right; it was not a love passion, it was a hate passion, but superannuated now, and if I cared to watch it carefully it promised that I should see from the first all that happened: how this hate which was so very strong a hundred years ago had died and was now turned to such corruption and kindliness that, before it fell utterly to pieces, it was to show me its career. To me it seems that the story of this hate falls, like the hymns, into two parts, ancient and modern, and I think it properest to begin by telling you the ancient part first. Hates that are to live a hundred years are not born in a day, so I shall first tell you how Reuben Hepplestall turned from petty squire to cotton manufacturing and you will see later for yourselves why this hate began.

HEPPLESTALL’S

PART I

CHAPTER I—REUBEN’S SEAL

EVEN to-day a man may be a Jacobite if he likes to be a Jacobite just as he may read the Morning Post, and in the day when Reuben Hepplestall was young there was a variety of reasons for being Jacobite, though most of them were romantic and sentimental rather than practical or good sense, and Hepplestall’s reason was rank absurdity because it was absurdity unredeemed by conviction. He was Jacobite because Sir Harry Whitworth was Hanoverian, from hatred of Sir Harry, not from love of the Stuarts; but Hepplestall was young and as a general principle perversity in youth is better than perversity in age, leaving the longer time for correction.

Certainly, Hepplestall’s was a risky game, which may have had attractiveness for him. He was strong, even in perversity, and having set his hand to the plow, did not rest until he found himself accepted as a power in the inner councils of the local Jacobites; but there was something nourishing to his self-importance in this furtive prominence and he savored the hazards of it not only because it marked to himself his difference from the hard drinking sportsmen of Sir Harry’s set, but as a mental exercise. He took a gambler’s risk in a gambling age, backing his vigilance against all comers, feeling that to touch the fringe of intrigue lifted him above a society which exercised its gullet more than its wits. His secret, especially a dangerous secret, flattered lus sense of superiority.

In sober fact young Hepplestall was intellectually superior to his contemporaries and, aware of it, resented the deference they paid to Sir Harry, the man of acres, the Beau, the Corinthian, the frequenter of White’s and Almack’s, leader unchallenged of local society. By his clandestine unorthodoxy, by his perpetual balancing on a tight-rope, he expressed to himself his opposition to Sir Harry; and there was Dorothy Verners, predestined in the eyes of the county for Sir Harry, waiting only for a question which would have the force of a command. Reuben had, in secret, his own idea of the future of Dorothy Verners. He aspired where he knew himself fitted to aspire, but the county would have dissolved in contemptuous guffaws at the thought of Reuben Hepplestall in the character of rival to Sir Harry. He brooded darkly in rebellion, outwardly accepting Whitworth’s social despotism, inwardly a choked furnace of ambition.

It was little Bantison who involuntarily played the god in the machine and died that the Hepplestalls might be cotton lords in Lancashire. Bantison was not prepossessing; a short man, gross of body with a face like raw beef and hands offensively white, dressed in his clerical coat on which spatters of snuff and stains of wine smirked like a blasphemy, endowed with fine capacity for other people’s Burgundy and distinguished by an eye that earned him, by reason rather of alertness than deformity, the nickname of “Swivel-Eyed Jack.” Some vicars, like Goldsmith’s, were content with forty pounds a year; the Reverend Mr. Bantison had that limited stipend with unlimited desires, and contrived by the use of his alert eye and the practice of discreet blackmail to lead a bachelor life of reasonable amplitude. Not to be nice about the fellow, he was as unprincipled a wolf as ever masqueraded in a sheepskin; but he is not to infest this narrative for long.

They were at table at Sir Harry Whitworth’s, who dined at six o’clock, latish, as became a man of fashion. There was acquiescence in that foible, but no imitation of a habit which was held to be an arbitrary encroachment on the right to drink. The ladies had, in strict moderation, to be treated civilly—at any rate, the ladies had to eat—so that Sir Harry’s guests rarely drew up to the mahogany for the serious entertainment of the evening before eight o’clock, and a man of a position less assured than his would have been suspected of meanness and too great care for the contents of his cellar. But Whitworth was Whitworth and they shrugged their shoulders. After all, with good will and good liquor one can achieve geniality in an evening not beginning (for serious purposes) until eight.

The ladies dismissed to tea and to whatever insipid joys the drawing-room might hold, the men addressed themselves with brisk resolution to the task of doing noble justice to the best cellar in the county. They were there, candidly and purposefully, to drink, and it was never too late to mend sobriety, but under Sir Harry’s roof the process had formality and the unbuttoned rusticity of native debauchery must be disciplined to the restraint of ordered toasts. A pedantic host, this young baronet, but his wines had quality, and they submitted with what patience they could summon to his idiosyncrasy. There were no laggards when Sir Harry bid them to his board.

Ignoring the parson—which, mostly, was what parsons were for and certainly made no breach of etiquette—Sir Harry himself gave the toast of “The King” with a faintly challenging air habitual to him but démodé. Lancashire sentiment had veered since the forty-five and there was now no need, especially in Whitworth’s company, to emphasize a loyalty they all shared. It was not a fervent loyalty and no one was expected to be exuberant about the Hanoverians, but bygones were bygones, and one took the court one found as one took the climate.

But did one? Did every one? Did, in especial, Reuben Hepplestall, whom Mr. Bantison watched so narrowly as he drank to the King? To Bantison the enigmatic was a provocation and a hope and as a specialist in enigmas he had his private notion that the whole of Hepplestall was not apparent on the surface: he nursed suspicion, precious because marketable if confirmed, that here was one who conserved the older loyalty, and he watched as he had watched before. Finger-glasses were on the table, but so crude a confession of faith as to pass his wine over the water was neither expected nor forthcoming and Hepplest all’s gesture, except that it repeated one which Bantison had noted mentally when “The King” had been toasted on other occasions, was so nearly imperceptible as to seem unlikely to have significance. But it was a repetition, and did the repetition imply a ritual? It was improbable. The risk was high, the gain non-existent, the defiance in such company too blunt, the whole idea of expressing, however subtly, a rebellion in a house of loyalists was unreasonable. Still, as Reuben raised his glass, it hovered for an instant in the air, it made, ever so slightly, a pause and (was it?) an obeisance which seemed directed to his, fob; and when Mr. Bantison sat down he frowned meditatively at the pools of mellow light reflected from the candles on the table and his face puckered into evil wrinkles till he looked like an obscene animal snarling to its spring; but that is only to say Mr. Bantison was thinking unusually hard.

He was thinking of young men, their follies, their unreasoning audacities and how these things happened by the grace of Providence to benefit their wise elders. His face at its best, when he was doing something agreeable like savoring Burgundy or (if so innocent an action is to be conceived of him) when he smelled a violet, was a mask of malice; it was horrible now as he weighed his chances of dealing to his profit with Reuben. Whether he was right or wrong in his particular suspicion, there was plainly something of the exceptional about this dark young man. Hepplestall, considered as prey, struck him as a tough, tooth-breaking victim, and Mr. Bantison had not the least desire to break his teeth. He decided not to hazard their soundness—their whiteness was remarkable—upon what was still conjecture. He wanted many things which money would buy, but an orange already in his blackmailing grip was yielding good juice and every circumstance conspired with the excellence of Sir Harry’s Burgundy to persuade him to delay. His needs were not urgent. And yet, and yet—

But it wasn’t Bantison’s lucky night. As they sat down, Sir Harry cast a host’s glance round the table in search of a subject with which to set the conversational ball rolling again, and saw the spasm of malevolence which marked Bantison’s face in the moment of irresolution. “I’gad,” he cried to the table at large, “will you do me the favor to observe Bantison? A gargoyle come to meat. If it isn’t the prettiest picture I ever saw of devotion incarnate. Watch him meditating piety.”

The company gave tongue obsequiously, ready in any case to dance when Whitworth piped, doubly ready in the case where a parson was the butt. Their mirth happened inopportunely for Bantison, proving at that crisis of his indecision, a turning point. Left alone, he would have remained passive: the taunt awoke aggression.

“I crave your pardon, Sir Harry. I was in thought.”

“The pangs of it gave your face a woundy twist. Out with the harvest of it, man! A musing that gave you so much travail should shed new light on the kingdom of heaven.”

“I was thinking,” said Bantison, “of a kingdom more apocryphal; of the kingdom of the Stuarts,” and his eye, called Swivel, fell accusingly on Hepplestall.

The attack was sudden, with the advantage of surprise, but in that company of slow-moving brains, already dulled by wine, there was none but Reuben who saw in Bantison’s allusion and Bantison’s quick-darting eye an attack at all. So far, the affair was easy. “They have their place,” said Reuben gravely, “in history.”

“And—,” began Bantison combatively, but Sir Harry cut him short. “Drown history,” he said, “and mend your thoughts, Bantison. A glass of wine with you.” Aggression subsided in Bantison; he murmured, and felt, that it was an honor to drink with Sir Harry. For the time, the incident was closed.

Reuben pondered the case of Mr. Bantison, worm or adder, and admitted to disquiet. This devil of an unconsidered parson, this Swivel-Eyed Jack who seemed good for nothing but to suck up nourishment, and to be the target of contemptuous and contemptible wit, had got within his guard, had plainly detected the meaning of the obscure ritual by which he honored the king over the water and mentally snapped his fingers at Sir Harry even while he dined with him. And Reuben Hepplestall did not mean to forego that mental luxury of finger-snapping at Sir Harry. He damned Sir Harry, but damned more heartily this unexpected impediment to the damning of Sir Harry. And if Bantison showed resolution, so much the worse for him; of the two it was certainly not Reuben Hepplestall who was coming to shipwreck; and how much the worse it was for Bantison depended exactly on that reverend gentleman’s movements. The first move, at any rate, had been a foolish one: it had warned Reuben.

The second move was still more foolish: really, Mr. Bantison’s career as a blackmailer had lain in rosy places, and he grew careless through success. Besides, since Sir Harry had silenced him, forgiven him, drunk with him, Mr. Bantison, as blackmailer, was off duty and a man must have some relaxation; but Burgundy plays the deuce with discretion and was, all the time, brightening his wits in the same ratio as it made him careless of Hepplestall’s resentment. An idea, that was not at all a stupid idea, but in itself a dazzling idea, came into his mind, and the glamor of it obscured any discretion the Burgundy might have left him. Hanging from Hepplestall’s fob were several seals. They interested Mr. Bantison.

By this time not a few appreciators of the Whitworth cellar had slid from their chairs to the floor, and there was nothing exceptional about that. For what reason were their chairs so well designed, so strongly made and yet so excellently balanced but that a man might slide gently from them without the danger of a nasty jar to his chin as it hit the table? Chairs beautiful, and—adapted to their users when to be drunk without shame was a habit. Some one was on the floor by Hepplestall, leaving a vacant chair. Bantison, obsessed by his idea, exaggerated slightly a drunkenness by no means imaginary, lurched from his seat on a mission of discovery and took the empty place by Hepplestall. “What’s the hour?” he asked.

Hepplestall gave him his shoulder, glanced at the clock on the wall behind him and stated the time.

“You do not consult your watch,” said Bantison.

“I have the habit,” said Hepplestall, “of doing things in my own way,” and a soberer man than Bantison would have taken warning at his menace. Mr. Bantison was either too far gone to recognize the mettle of his adversary or else he was merely vinous and reckless. With his notable eye on the seal which he suspected (rightly) to be, in fact, a phial containing water, he made a bold snatch at Hepplestall’s fob.

Sir Harry, comparatively sober, no partisan of Hep-plestall’s, but certainly none of the vicar’s, saw the snatch and rose with a “Good God, has Bantison taken to picking pockets?” but there was, even at that demonstration, nothing like a sensation in the room; they were neutrally ready to acquiesce in picking pockets, in an outraged host, in anything. They were country gentlemen late in the evening.

The snatch, ill-timed, had failed of its objective. Mr. Bantison clawed thin air in ludicrous perplexity and Hep-plestall, assured by Sir Harry’s gesture of his sympathy, took his opportunity. He rose, with his hand down Bantison’s neck, clutching cravat, coat, all that there was to clutch, and with a polite: “You permit?” and a bow to Whitworth, carried the parson one-handed to the window. Bantison choked speechlessly, imprecations and accusations alike smothered by the taut neck-band round his throat. Hepplestall opened the window, breathing heavily, lifted the writhing sinner and dropped him through it.

“And that’s the end of him,” commented Sir Harry, more truly than he knew. “You’re in fine condition, sir. A glass of wine with you.”

CHAPTER II—SMOKED HERRING

THAT night ended, as the nights of such gatherings were wont to end, with some safely, others precariously horsed, others bundled unceremoniously by Sir Harry’s servants into coaches where their wives received them without disapproval, and the rest accommodated on the premises. The absence of Mr. Bantison escaped their notice.

The Reverend and unregretted Bantison was absent from the leave-taking because he had already taken leave. Mr. Bantison was dead. To the sorrow of none, and the satisfaction of a few who had paid forced tribute to the observation of his eye, Mr. Bantison was dead. It was agreed at the breakfast table that he died of apoplexy and a very probable end too, though not strictly in accordance with the evidence. Apoplexy implies a spontaneity of termination, and Mr. Bantison’s end had lacked spontaneity.

They were all very heartily cynical about it, taking their formidable breakfast at Sir Harry’s, and no one more cynical than Whitworth. A parson more or less, what did it matter? There was none of that overnice regard for the sanctity of human life characteristic of the late nineteenth century, to which the early twentieth brought so drastic a corrective; but though they agreed on their collective attitude, there was nothing to prevent stray recollections coming to mind and the facts of the case were known to more than Whitworth and Hepple-stall. In public, it was apoplexy; in the wrong privacy it was still apoplexy, but in the right, there was censure of Hepplestall. True, the snuffing-out of Bantison was no more reprehensible in itself than the crushing of a gnat, but who knew that the habit of manslaughter, once acquired, might not grow on a man? It wasn’t worse than gossip, and idle whisper, but the whisper reached Hepplestall and he felt that it was not good for the man who hoped to marry Dorothy Verners to be the subject of gossip, however quiet. The gossip was more humorous than malicious, and it was confined to a circle, but that circle was the one which mattered and Reuben felt that in his rivalry with Whitworth he had suffered a rebuff through the death of Mr. Bantison. And there was that matter of the Stuarts. “Curse the Stuarts” was his feeling now towards that charming race; he saw them, with complete injustice, as first cause of his eclipse. Besides, if Bantison had detected him, there was the possibility of other open eyes. Altogether, the symbol of his defiance of Sir Harry seemed ill-chosen and the sooner he changed it the better. Something, he decided, was urgently required, not to silence chatter (for chatter in itself was good, proclaiming him exceptional), but to set tongues wagging so briskly with the new that they would forget to wag about the old. He felt the need of something to play the part of red herring across the trail, and his red herring took the sufficiently surprising shape of a cotton-mill.

It surprised and scandalized the landed gentry, his friends of the Whitworth set, because the caste system was nearly watertight: certainly, of the two chief divisions, the landowners and the rest, Reuben belonged with the first, while cotton spinners were rated low amongst the rest. They were traders, of course, and not, at that stage, individually rich traders: the master spinners were spinners who had been men and rose by their own efforts to the control of other men. This was the pastoral age of cotton, going but not gone. It went, in one sense, when they harnessed machinery to water-power, but isolated factories on the banks of tumbling streams were related rather to the old regime of the scattered cottage hand-spinner and hand-weaver than to the coming era of the steam-made cotton town with its factories concentrated on the coal-fields; and, in the eyes of the gentry, steam was the infamy.

In Reuben’s, steam was the ideal: he knew nothing about it, had hardly heard of Arkwright or Hargreaves, Kay or Crompton who, amongst them, made the water-power factory; and Watt of the practicable steam-engine, Watt who gave us force and power, Watt the father of industrial civilization, the inventor who was not responsible for the uses others made of his inventions, so let us be equitable to his memory, let us not talk of him as either the world’s greatest scapegoat or its most fruitful accident—Watt was almost news to Reuben Hepplestall when he met Martin Everett in Manchester.

The meeting was fortuitous. Everett, an architect, one of Arkwright’s men who had quarreled with him, was kicking his heels in the ante-room of a Manchester lawyer’s office when Reuben was shown in. Certainly, Reuben was not to be kept waiting by the lawyer as Everett, a suppliant, an applicant for capital, was likely to wait, but the lawyer was engaged and the two young men fell to talking. Everett, something of a fanatic for steam, the new, the unorthodox, the insurgent challenge to the landed men, at once struck fire on Hepplestall. He turned lecturer, steam’s propagandist, condemning waterpower as an archaism, and when Reuben admitted he had come to his lawyer for the very purpose of giving instructions for the sale of land and the initiation of plans for a factory on, he suggested, the banks of a river, Everett had small difficulty in converting him to steam.

“I meant to bury Bantison,” said Reuben. “Now we’ll boil him.” Everett was puzzled.

“You burn wood in your house, sir?” he asked.

“And coal. Is it to the point?”

“The coal is. You get it—where?”

“There is a seam.”

“Then that is the site of your factory.”

“God!” said Hepplestall, “it will be a monstrous sight.” He spoke as if that gladdened him.

“The building, sir, will have dignity,” the architect reproved him.

“Aye? But I’m thinking of the engine. The furnace. The coal. A red herring? A smoked herring!”

He relished the thought again. By steam (Lord, was he ever in the camp of those fantastical reactionaries, the Jacobites?), by steam he would symbolize his opposition to Whitworth and the Bloods. He was going into trade and so would be, anyhow, ostracized, but more than that, into steam, gambling on the new, the hardly tried, the strange power that the Bloods had only heard of to deride it; going into it blindly, on general hearsay, and the particular ipse dixit of a young enthusiast who might be (except that Reuben trusted his insight and knew better) a charlatan or a deluded fool; and for Reuben there was the attraction of taking chances, of the impudent, audacious challenge to fortune and to the outraged Bloods.

“Do you know, Everett,” he said, “a man might turn atheist expecting less stricture than I expect who make the leap from land to steam.” It came into his mind that Dorothy Verners was further off than ever now. “Everett,” he said, “extremes meet. We’ll call that factory the ‘Dorothy.’ Gad, if we win! If we win!” He gripped Martin’s hand with agonizing strength and went into the lawyer’s room, leaving Everett to wonder what sort of an eccentric he had hooked.

The lawyer, who had been asked by letter to be prepared with advice, found all that brushed curtly aside: he was to take instructions from a client who knew what he wanted, not to minister to a mind in doubt, and very definite and remarkable instructions he found them. “The whole of your land to be sold, excepting where the presence of coal is, or will be within a week, known? And all for a steam-driven factory! Sir, I advised your father. I believe he trusted me. It is my duty to warn you and—”

“Thankee, sir,” Reuben interrupted him. “I may tell you I looked for this from you, but I don’t appreciate it the less because I expected it. You advised my father, you shall continue to advise me.”

“That you may do the opposite?”

“No. That when I go driving through new country I may have a brake on my wheels.”

“Well... am I to lock your wheels this time?”

“I’m going driving,” said Reuben resolutely, “but you shall find me some one to teach me to handle the reins. I must learn my trade, sir. Find me some factory owner who will sell me his secrets cheap, near my coal-lands if that’s possible, that I may watch Everett at work.”

“If a Hepplestall condescends to trade,” said the lawyer without conscious flattery, “he will be welcomed by the traders. There will be no difficulty about that. Indeed you have one on your own land, Peter Bradshaw, with a factory on a stream of yours and I believe he has both spinning jennies and weaving-looms. Go and hear what Peter thinks of steam.”

“His disapproval will be a testimony to it. I’ll see Peter,” said Reuben, and was away before the lawyer had opportunity to voice the score of stock arguments that age keeps handy for the correction of rash youth. He had then the more to say to Everett, the corrupter, the begetter in Reuben of his mad passion for steam, and it’s little satisfaction he got out of that. Young Everett was to realize a dream, he was to be given, he thought, a free hand to build a steam-driven factory as he thought a steam-driven factory ought to be built, and the prudent lawyer’s arguments, accusations, menaces, were no more to him than the murmurings a man hears in his sleep when what he sees is a vision splendid: it was only some time afterwards that Everett woke up to find in Hepplestall not the casual financier of his dream in stone, but a highly informed, critical collaborator who tempered zeal for steam with disciplined knowledge and contributed as usefully as Everett himself to make the “Dorothy” the finest instrument of its day for the manufacture of cotton.

He got the knowledge chiefly from Bradshaw, partly from others who had carried manufacture beyond the narrow methods of Bradshaw’s water-wheel. It lay, this primitive factory, in a gentle valley amongst rounded hills of gritstone and limestone: a chilly country, lacking the warmth of the red earth of the South, backward in agriculture, nourishing more oats than wheat and, in the bleak uplands, incapable of tillage. Coarse grass fought there with heather, but if there was little color on the moors save when the heather flowered in royal purple and the gorse hung out its flame, there was rich green in the valleys and the polish of a humid atmosphere on healthy trees. A spacious rolling country, swelling to hills which, never spectacular, were still considerable: a clean country of wide views and lambent distances in those days before the black smoke came and seared.

Not many miles away, sheltered amongst old elms, was Hepplestall’s own house; above it the hill known to be coal-bearing, where Everett was to build, on the hill top, the steam-driven factory, a beacon and a challenge to the old order. So, aptly to Reuben’s purpose, lay Bradshaw’s factory and house, the two in one and the whole as little intrusive on the scene as a farmhouse.

When he came in that first day, Peter was in the factory and if Reuben had had any doubts of making this the headquarters of his apprenticeship, the sight of Phoebe Bradshaw would have removed them. To one man the finest scenery is improved by a first-class hotel in the foreground; to another, a stiff task is made tolerable by the presence, in his background, of a pretty woman. Phoebe had prettiness in her linsey-woolsey gown with the cotton print handkerchief about her shoulders; she was small and she was soft of feature. You could not look at her face and say, of this feature or of that, that it had shapeliness, but in a sort of gentle improvisation, she had her placid charm. She sat at needlework, at something obscurely useful, but her pose, as he entered, was that of a lady at leisure, amusing herself with the counterfeit of toil.

Bradshaw’s daughter, had Bradshaw not thrived and lifted himself out of the class of the employed, would have been in the factory, at work like the other girls; but she aspired to ladyhood and, fondly, he abetted her. He was on the up-grade, and let the fact be manifest in the gentility of his daughter! There was pride in it, and somehow there was the payment of a debt due to her dead mother who had worked at home spinning while Peter wove the yarn she spun in a simpler day than this. What the late Mrs. Bradshaw would have thought of a daughter who aped the fine lady, or of a father who encouraged her, is not to the point: Peter idolized Phoebe, and she sat in his house to figure for Reuben as an unforeseen mitigation in his job of learning manufacture.

He proceeded to address himself with gallantry to the pleasing mitigation. She rose, impressed, at the coming to that house of an authentic Olympian. “Pray be seated, Miss Bradshaw,” he said. “For it is Miss Bradshaw?” he added, implying surprise to find her what she was.

“I am Phoebe Bradshaw,” she told him. “You would see my father? He is in the factory. Will you not sit while I go and call him?”

For a man intent upon stern purpose, Reuben felt remarkably unhurried. “My business can wait,” he said, gesturing her again to her chair. “It has no such urgency that you need disturb yourself for me and turn a lady into a message-bearer.” He noted the quick flush of pleasure which rose to her cheeks on the word “lady.”

“Indeed,” he went on, “I find myself blame-worthy and unaccountably a laggard that this is the first time I have made your acquaintance.”

“Oh! I... I am not much in the world, sir.”

“The world is the loser, Miss Bradshaw. But it is not too late to find a remedy for that. They tell us the North is poor soil for flowers and with an answer like you to their lies it would be criminal to hide it.”

Crude flattery, but it hit the target. “I? A flower? Oh, sir—”

“Why call me sir? If you were what—well, to be frank, what I expected to find you, a spinner’s wench, no more than that, why then your sirring me would be justifiable. There are social laws. I don’t deny it.”

“We have no position,” she assented.

“What’s position when there’s beauty? You have that which cuts across the laws. Beauty, and not rustic beauty either, but beauty that’s been worked on and refined... I go too fast, I say too much. Excuse a man in the heat of making a discovery for being frank about what he’s found and forget my frankness and forgive it. I spoke only to convince you that a ‘sir’ from you to me is to reverse the verities.”

“But you are Mr. Hepplestall?”

“Then call me so. I mount no pedestal for you.” Then Peter came in, and Hepplestall retired his thoughts of Phoebe to some secondary brain-cell that lay becomingly remote from Dorothy Verners and from his immediate plan of picking up knowledge from Peter. The lawyer had been right: there was no question of Peter’s setting a price upon his trade secrets, he was ravished by the interest his ground-landlord was pleased to take in his little factory and if he was puzzled to find Hepplestall intelligent and searching in his questions, there was none more pleased than Peter to answer with painstaking elaboration. Once Reuben asked, “Are there not factories driven by steam?”

And Peter was wonderfully shrewd. “There are fools in every trade,” he said, “hotheads that let wild fancies carry off their commonsense.”

“Steam is a fancy, then? It does not work?”

“I have never seen it work,” said Peter, which was true; but he had not gone to look as, presently, Reuben went, sucking up experience everywhere with a bee-like industry. Meantime, he astonished Peter by proposing himself as paying guest while he worked side by side with the men and women in the factory.

“I have the whim,” said Reuben and saw astonishment fade from Peter’s face. They had their whims, these gentry, and indulged them, and if Hepplestall’s was the eccentric one of wishing to experience in his own person the life of a factory hand, why, it wasn’t for Bradshaw to oppose him. And Peter smiled aside when Reuben said that he would try it for a week. A week! A day of such toil would cure any fine gentleman of such a caprice. But Peter was to be surprised again, he was to find Reuben not tiring in a day, nor in a week, not to be tempted from the factory even by a cock-fight to which Peter and half his men went as a matter of course, dropping the discipline of hours and forgetting in a common sportsmanship that they ranked as master and man—oh, those gentler days before the Frankenstein, machinery, quite gobbled up man who made him!—but as time went on, still, after three months, working as spinner at Peter’s water-driven jennies and becoming as highly skilled as any man about the place. Even when the truth was out, when most of Hepplestall’s acres had gone to the hammer, and one could see from Bradshaw’s window the nascent walls of Reuben’s factory, Peter was still obtuse, still happy at the thought of the honor done to cotton by the Olympian, still blind to the implications of the coming into spinning, so near to him, of a capitalist on the greater scale. He was to be cured of that blindness, but what, even if he had foreseen the future from the beginning, could he have done? In the matter of Phoebe, no doubt, he could have acted, he could have sent her away; but Hepplestall in other matters was not so much mere man as the representative of steam. What could he have done to counter steam? Bradshaw was doomed and steam was his undoing, and, though the particular instrument, Hepplestall, was to have, for him, a peculiar malignancy, the seeds of his ruin were sown in his own obstinate conservatism. He had seen visions of a great progress when water-power superseded arm-power, but his vision stopped short of steam. Peter was growing old.

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.

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.”

CHAPTER VII—THE EARLY LIFE OF JOHN BRADSHAW

ONCE upon a time, a West Indian slave owner was in conversation with three master-spinners and they spoke of labor conditions in the North of England. “Well,” he said, “I have always thought myself disgraced by being the owner of slaves, but we never in the West Indies thought it possible for any human being to be so cruel as to require a child of nine years old to work twelve and a half hours a day, and that, you acknowledge, is your regular practice.”

That, and worse, was the early life of John Bradshaw, son of Reuben Hepplestall. Peter went into Reuben’s factory: he took the meatless bone Reuben contemptuously threw to a dog: he became an overlooker. Once he had been a fighter, when he was raising himself from the ranks into the position of a small factory owner: then contentment had come upon him and fighting power went out of him. Whom, indeed, should he fight? He was not encountering a man but a Thing, a System, which at its first onslaught seemed to crush the spirit of a people.

The later Hepplestalls looked back to Reuben, their founder, and saw him as a figure of romance. The romance of Lancashire is rather in the tremendous fact that its common people survived this System that came upon them from the unknown, that, so soon, they were hitting back at the Thing which stifled life. Capital, unaggravated, had been tolerable; capital, aggravated by steam, made the Factory System and the System was intolerable.

Reuben might have chosen to make exceptions of the Bradshaws, but he did not choose it. They had to be nothing to the husband of Dorothy Hepplestall, they had to go, with the rest, into the jaws of the System. So Peter lost his liberties and found nothing in the steam machines to parallel the easy-going familiarities between master and man which had humanized his primitive factory. A bell summoned him into the factory, and he left it when the engines stopped, which might be twelve and a half or might be fifteen hours later. He gave good work for bad pay and his prayer was that the worst might not happen. The worst was that Phoebe might be driven with him into the factory, and the worst beyond the worst was that Phoebe’s son might be driven with her. So he gave of his best and tried with a beaten man’s despair to hold off the worst results of the creeping ruin that came upon his home.

Reuben was guiltless of personal malignancy. He had decided that the Bradshaws must not be favorites, that they must do as others did, which was a judgment, not a spite, and Reuben did not control the system, but was controlled by it. He, like the Bradshaws, must do as others did. He could, of course, have got out: his difference from them was that he could abjure cotton. But he did not do that, and so long as he stayed in, a competitor with other manufacturers, he was obliged, if he would survive commercially, to use the methods of the rest. They may or may not have been methods that revolted him by their barbarity, and it is probable that, even in that callous age, what of the true gentleman was left in him was, in fact, revolted. That is, at least, to be deduced from the completely isolating veil he hung between Dorothy and the factory. His house was the old home of the Hepplestalls, near the factory but not, like many manufacturers’ houses, adjacent to it. It was sufficiently far away for him, practically, to live two lives which did not meet. He was a manufacturer and he was the husband of Dorothy’ Hepplestall; in the factory one man and at home another, not lying at home about steam because there he never spoke of it, preserving her romantic illusions about his work by keeping her remote from it. She might have had her curiosities, but she loved Reuben, she consented at his will to be incurious and the habit remained. It might have remained even if love had faded, but their love was not to fade. And the county took it that if Dorothy Verners had married a manufacturer, the factory was not to be mentioned before her. In the presence of ladies they did not mention it to Reuben, though, in the bad times, when the poor-rate rose and half the weavers came upon the parish, Reuben was roasted to his face with indignant heat after the ladies had left the table.

He was neither of the best nor of the worst. He was not patriarchal like the Strutts and the Gregs who, while conforming to the System, qualified it with school-houses and swimming baths, nor did he go to the extreme of ordering his people into the cottages he built and compelling them to pay rent for a cottage whether they occupied it or not. He didn’t run shops, charging high prices, at which his people had to buy or where they had to take goods in part payment of wages. Such devices, though general, seemed to him petty and extraneous to the factory; but in the factory he was a keen economist and one of the results of the System was that the masters looked on wages not as paid to individuals but to families. That was so much the normal view that a weaver was not allowed to go on the parish unless he proved that his wife and children worked in the mills and that the whole family wage was inadequate for their support.

Phoebe had to go and, when he was old enough, that is to say at five, John also went. The legal age for apprentices was seven—they were workhouse children bound to the master till they were twenty-one—but John was a “free” laborer, so, until the Act of 1819, which made nine years and twelve working hours the minimum, John was “free” to work at five, to be a breadwinner, to add his magnificent contribution to the family wage which kept the Bradshaws from the workhouse.

The factory bell was the leit motif of his life, but the Bradshaws had a relic of their past which made them envied. They had a clock, and the clock told them when it was time to get up to go to the factory. Others, clockless, got up long before they needed and waited in the chill of early morning, at five o’clock, for the door to open. The idea of ringing the bell as a warning half an hour before working hours began had not occurred to any one then, and people rose in panic and went out, cutting short sleep shorter, stamping in snow (or, if snow is sentimental, is it ever particularly joyous to rise, with a long day’s work ahead, at five and earlier?), waiting for the doors to let them in to warmth. No one was ever late. The fines made it expensive to be late, and the knocker-up, the man who went round and for a penny or tuppence a week rattled wires at the end of a clothes-prop against your bedroom window till you opened the window and sang out to him—the knocker-up was a late Victorian luxury. In John’s day, there was only the factory bell, and one was inside the factory when it rang. The bell was the symbol of the system, irritating the weavers especially, as the power-loom increased in efficiency, and drove more and more of them to the factories. The spinners, indeed, had had the interregnum of the water-factory: it was not, for them, a straight plunge into the tyranny of the system. The old hand-weaver, whose engine was his arms, began and stopped work at will, which is not to say that he was a lazy fellow, but is to say that he had time to grow potatoes in a garden, to take a share in country sports and, on the whole, to lead a reasonable life: and his wife had the art and the time to cook food for him. When she worked in the factory, she had no time to cook, and there was nothing to cook, either, and if she had worked from childhood, she had never learned how to cook, and there was no need. They lived on bread and cheese, with precious little cheese. They rarely lived to see forty.

John, son of Reuben (though he did not know that), came to the factory at five in the morning and left it, at earliest, at seven or eight at night, being the while in a temperature of 75 to 85. As to meal-times, why, adults got their half hour or so for breakfast and their hour for dinner and the machinery was stopped so that was just the time for the children to nip under and over it, snatching their food while they cleaned a machine from dust and flue. Bad for the lungs, perhaps, but the work was so light and easy. John, who was small when he was five, crawled under the machines picking up cotton waste.

There was a school of manufacturers who held, apparently without hypocrisy, that this was a charming way to educate an infant into habits of industry: a sort of work in play, with the cotton waste substituted for a ball and the factory for the nursery. And they called the work light and easy.

John was promoted to be a piecer—he pieced together threads broken in the spinning machines, and, of course, the machine as a whole didn’t stop while he did it, and it was really rather skilled work, done very rapidly with a few exquisitely skilled movements: and that was hardly work at all, it was more amusement than toil. Only one Fielden, an employer who, many years later, tried the experiment for himself, found that in following the to-and-fro movements of a spinning machine for twelve hours, he walked no less than twenty miles! Fielden was a reformer; he didn’t call this light and easy work for a child, but others did.

It would happen that—one knows how play tires a child—John would feel sleepy towards evening. He didn’t go to sleep on a working machine, or he would have died, and John did not die that way: he didn’t go to sleep at all. He was beaten into wakefulness. Peter often beat him into wakefulness, and Peter did it not because he was cruel to John but because he was kind. If Peter had not beaten him lightly, other overseers would have beaten him heavily, not with a ferule, but with a billy-roller, which is a heavy iron stick. John also beat himself and pinched himself and bit his tongue to keep awake. As the evening wore on it became almost impossible to keep awake on any terms: sometimes, they sang. Song is the expression of gladness, but that was not why they sang. And they sang—hymns. It would have been most improper to sing profane songs in a factory.

As to John’s home life, he went to bed: and if it hadn’t been for Phoebe or Peter who carried him, he would often not have reached bed. He would have gone to sleep in the road, and because he had never known any other life than this, it was reasonable in him to suppose that the life he led, if not right, was inevitable.

He did not suppose it for long. You can spring surprises on human nature, you can de-humanize it for a time, but if you put faith in the permanent enslavement of men and women, you shall find yourself mistaken. Even while John was passing from a wretched childhood to a wretched adolescence, the reaction was preparing, and mutely, hardly consciously at all, he was questioning if the things that were, were necessarily the things that had to be. There was the death of Peter, in the factory, stopping to live as a machine stops functioning because it is worn out, and there was the drop in their family wages, though John was earning man’s pay then. And there was the human stir in the world, the efforts of workers to combine for better conditions, for Trade Unions, for Reformed Parliaments, and the efforts of the ruling classes, qualified by the liberalism of a Peel or the insurgency of a Cobbett, to repress. There were riots, machine-breaking, factory-burning, Peterloo, the end of a great war, peace and disbanded soldiery, people who starved and a panic-stricken Home Secretary who thought there was a revolution.

Most of it mattered very little to John, growing up in Hepplestall’s factory, which escaped riot. It escaped not because its conditions were not terrible but because conditions were often more terrible. As employer, Reuben trod the middle way, and it was the extreme men, the brutes who seemed to glory in brutality, at whom riots were aimed. John knew that there were blacker hells than his, which was a sort of mitigation, while mere habit was another. If life has never been anything but miserable, than misery is life, and you make the best of it. One of the ways by which John expected to make the best of it was to marry. He married at seventeen, but when it is in the scheme of things to be senile at forty, seventeen is a mature age. The family wage was also in the scheme of things: the exploitation of children was the basis of the cotton trade: and though love laughs at economics as heartily as at locksmiths, marriage and child-bearing were not discouraged by misery, but encouraged by it. John did not think of these things, nor of himself and Annie as potential providers of child-slaves. He thought, illogically, of being happy.

And, considering Annie, not without excuse. She was of the few’ who stood up straight, untwisted by the factory, though it had caught her young and tamed her cruelly. There was gypsy blood in her. She, of a wandering tribe, had been taught “habits of industry,” and the lesson had been a rack which, still, had not broken her. It hadn’t quenched her light, though, within him, John had the fiercer fire. With him, the signs of the factory hand were hung out for all to see. Pale-faced and stunted, with a great shock of hair and weak, peering eyes, he was more like some underground creature than a man living by the grace of God and the light of the sun—he had lived so much of life by the artificial light of the factory in the long evenings and the winter mornings; but he had a kind of eagerness, a sort of Peeping Tom of a spirit refusing to be ordered off, and a suggestion of wiriness both of mind and body, which announced that here was one whose quality declined obliteration by the System.

Lovers had a consolation in those days. Bone-tired as the long work-hours left them, it was yet possible by a short walk to get out of the town that Hepplestall had made. These two were married, and a married woman had no manner of business to steal away from her house when the factory had finished with her for the day, but that was what Phoebe made Annie do. That was Phoebe’s tribute to youth, and a heavy tribute, too. She, like them, had labored all day in the factory and at night she labored in the home, sending them out to the moors as if they were careless lovers still—at their age! Phoebe kept her secret, and she had the sentiment of owing John reparation. It was not much that she could do, but she did this—growing old, toil-worn, she took the lion’s share of housework, she set them free, for an hour or so, to go upon the moors. And Annie was grateful more than John. Already, he was town-bred, already he craved for shelter, already the overheated factory seemed nature’s atmosphere to John.

She threw herself on the yielding heather, smelling it, and earth and air in ecstasy, then rolled on her back and looked at the stars. “Lad, lad,” she cried, “there’s good in life for all that.”

“Aye, wench,” he said, “there’s you.”

“Me? There’s bigger things than me. There’s air and sky and a world that is no beastly reek and walls and roofs.”

“It’s cold on the moor to-night,” he said, shivering.

She threw her shawl about him. “You’re clemmed,” she said, drawing him close to the generous warmth of her. “Seems to me I come to life under the stars. Food don’t matter greatly to me if there’s air as I can breathe.”

“We’re prisoned in yon factory, Annie. Reckon I’m used to the prison. There’s boggarts on the moor.”

She laughed at his fears. “Aye, you may laugh,” he said, “but there was a gallows up here, and boggarts of the hanged still roam.”

The belief in witches, ghosts and supernatural visitants of all kinds was a common one and it was not discouraged by educated people who hoped, probably, to reconcile the ignorant to the towns by allowing terrifying superstitions of the country to remain in circulation. But Annie’s gypsy strain kept her immune from any such fears: her ancestors had traded in superstition. “And,” he went on seriously, “when the Reformers tried to meet on Cronkey-shaw Moor, it’s a known fact that there were warlocks seen.” What was seen was a body of men grotesquely decked in the semblance of the popular notion of a wizard, with phosphorescent faces and so on. Somebody was using a better way to scotch Reform than soldiers, but the trick was soon exposed and meetings and drillings on the moors were phenomena of the time.

“You make too much o’ trouble o’ all sorts, John,” she said.

“I canna keep fro’ thinking, Annie,” he apologized. “I’m thinking now.”

“Aye, of old wives’ tales,” she mocked.

“No. I’m thinking of my grandfer and of Hepplestall’s factory.”

“I’m in the air,” she said. “That’s good enough for me.” She was slightly jealous of John, who had known his grandfather. Very soundly established people had known two grandfathers: John had known one, but Annie none. However, he was not to be prevented from speaking his thought.

“I’ve heard my grandfer tell o’ times that were easier than these. He had a factory o’ his own—what they called a factory them days. Baby to Hepplestall’s it were. I’ll show you its ruin down yonder by the stream some day. He’s dead now, is grandfer. Sounds wonder-ful to hear me talk of a grandfer wi’ a factory o’ his own.”

“Fine lot of good to thee now, my lad. I never had no grandfer that I heard on, but I don’t see that it makes any difference atween thee and me to-day.”

“I’m none boasting, Annie,” he said. “I’m nobbut looking back to the times that used to be. Summat’s come o’er life sin’ then, summat that’s like a great big cloud, on a summer’s day.”

“Well,” said Annie, “we’ve the factory. But there’s times like this when I’ve my arms full of you and my head full of the smell of heather. And there’s times like mischief-neet”—that is, the night of the first of May—“and th’ Bush-Bearing in August. I like th’ Wakes, lad... oh, and lots of times that aren’t all factory. There’s Easter and Whitsun and Christmas.” There were: there were these survivals of a more jocund age, honored still, if by curtailed celebrations. The trouble was that the curtailments were too severe, that neither of cakes nor ale, neither of bread nor circuses was there sufficient offset against the grinding hardships of the factories. Both John and Annie had so recently emerged from the status of child-slavery that the larger life of adults might well have seemed freedom enough; to Annie, aided by Phoebe’s sacrifice, to Annie, living more physically than John, to Annie, who rarely looked beyond one short respite unless it was to the next, the present seemed not amiss. Except the life of the roads and the heaths, to which she saw no possibility of return, from which the factory had weaned her, she had no traditions, while he had Peter Bradshaw for tradition. He had slipped down the ladder, and there was resentment, usually dormant, of the fact that he saw no chance to climb again.

“Things are,” was her philosophy. “I’m none in factory now, and I’m none fretting about factory and you’d do best to hold your hush about your grandfer, John. His’n weren’t a gradely factory.”

That was it. She accepted Hepplestall’s, while John accepted the habit of Hepplestall’s, dully, subterraneously resenting it. She almost took a pride in the size of Hepplestall’s. “And,” she said, good Methodist as she was, “there’s a better life to come.”

He had no reply to make to that. The Methodist was the working class religion, as opposed to the Church of the upper classes and, at first, the rulers had seen danger in it, and in an unholy alliance of Methodism with Reform. There was something, but not a great deal in their fear. There was the fact, for instance, that in the Methodist Sunday Schools reading and writing were taught. “The modern Methodists,” says Bamford in his ‘Early Days,’ “may boast of this feat as their especial work. The church party never undertook to instruct in writing on Sundays.” That far, but not much farther, the Methodists stood for enlightenment. Cobbett gave them no credit at all. He said, in 1824, “the bitterest foes of freedom in England have been, and are, the Methodists.” Annie had “got religion”: the sufferings and the hardships of this life were mere preparations for radiant happiness to come, and a religion of this sort was not for citizens but for saints; it gave no battle to the Devil, Steam.

John stirred uncomfortably in her arms. He had an aching sense of wrong, beyond expression and beyond relief. If he tried to express it, his fumbling words were countered by her opportunism and, in the last resort, by her religion. Things were, and there was nothing to be done about them.

CHAPTER VIII—THE LONELY MAN

A MAN with a foot in two camps is likely to be welcomed in neither and to be lonely in his life. The cotton manufacturers had grown rich, they were established, they were a new order threatening to rival in wealth and power the old order of the land interest, and they were highly self-conscious about it. Land had no valid cause to be resentful of the new capitalists. Land was hit by the increase in the poor rates, but handsomely compensated for that by the rise in land values. But a new power had arisen and land was jealous of its increasing influence in the councils of the nation.

Reuben never forgot that he belonged to the old order, was of it, and had married into it. In business affairs, it was necessary to have associations with other manufacturers, but he had no hospitalities at home for them on the occasions when they met to discuss measures of common policy. He entertained them at the factory, he kept home and affairs in separate water-tight compartments, and was loved of none. He was his own land-owner and his own coal-owner, both long starts in the race, and he was at least as efficient and enterprising as his average competitor. A gentleman had come into trade and had made a great success of it. More galling still, he insisted that he remained a gentleman in the old sense, a landed man, “county.” Not in words but by actions and inactions which bit deeper than any words he proclaimed his superiority.

And why not? He was superior, he was the husband of Dorothy Hepplestall and it was that fact—the fact that he had married Dorothy and made a success of their marriage—which counted against him with the county far more than his having gone into trade and having made a success of that. They would have welcomed a failure somewhere, and he had failed at nothing. So though he had their society, he had it grudgingly.

He was then driven back, not unwillingly, on Dorothy. She was, for Reuben, the whole of friendship, the whole of companionship, the whole of love; after all, she was Dorothy and certainly he made no complaint that he had no other friends and that he was a tolerated, unpopular figure in society. His days were for the factory, his evenings for Dorothy and their children and, when the children had gone to bed, for Dorothy and his books. Books, though they were not unduly insisted upon in the country districts of Lancashire, went then with gentlemanliness and Reuben was not idiosyncratic, but normal, in becoming bookish in middle-age. In Parliament they quoted the classics in their speeches, and the Corinthian of the Clubs, whatever his sporting tastes, spared time to keep his classics in repair. Bookishness, in moderation, was part of the make-up of a man of taste, and for Reuben it had become a recourse not for fashion’s sake but for its own.

Life for Reuben had its mellowness; he had struggled and he had won; he was owner and despot, hardly bound by any law but that of his will, of the several factories contained within the great wall, of a coal-mine, of the town of cottages and shops about. The conditions of labor were the usual conditions and they did not trouble his conscience. Things were, indeed, rather smoother for Hepplestall’s workers than for some others; he was above petty rent exactions and truck shops, as, being his own coal supplier, he could very well afford to be.

What drawbacks there were to his position were rather in matters of decoration than reality, but it was decided proof of his unpopularity in both camps of influence that Hepplestall was not a magistrate. Other great manufacturers, to a man, were on the bench and took good care to be, because administration of the law was largely in the hands of the magistrates and the manufacturers wanted the administration in trusty hands—their own. It was a permanent rebuff to Reuben that he was not a magistrate; there were less wealthy High Sheriffs.

It was a puny irritation, symptomatic of their spite, and it didn’t matter much to Reuben, who was sure of his realities, sure, above all, of the reality of Dorothy’s love. No love runs smooth for twenty years and probably it would not be love if it did, but only a bad habit masquerading as love, so that it would not be true to say of Reuben and Dorothy that they had never had a difference. They had had many small differences, and in this matter of love what happens is that which also happens to a tree. Trees need wind; wind forces the roots down to a stronger and ever stronger hold upon the earth. And so with love, which cannot live in draughtless hothouse air, but needs to be wind-tossed to prove and to increase its strength. Impossible to be a pacifist in love! Love is a tussle, a thing of storms and calms: like everything in life it cannot stand still but must either grow or decay, and for growth, it must have strife. Sex that is placid and love that is immovable are contradictions in terms. Love has to interest or love will cease to be, and to interest it cannot stagnate.

The children came almost as milestones in the road of their love; each marked the happy ending of a period of stress. They were not results of a habit, but the achievements of a passion, live symbols of a thing itself alive. These two hearts did not beat all the time as one, and the restlessness of their love was as essential as its harmony.

But the shadow of a difference that might grow into a disaster was being cast upon them. In a way, it was extraneous to their love, and in another way was part and parcel of it. The question was the future of Edward, the eldest son.

Dorothy lived in two worlds, in Reuben and in the county, and Reuben lived in three, Dorothy, the factory and the county. He put the factory second to Dorothy and she put it nowhere. There was a bargain between them, unspoken but understood, that she should put it nowhere and yet he was assuming, tacitly, that Edward was as a matter of course to succeed him as controller of the factory and the mine: of these two he always thought first of the factory and second of the mine.

She might have reconciled herself to the mine. There were Dukes, like the Duke of Bridgewater, who owned coal-mines and her Edward might have gained great honor, like that Duke, by developing canals. But she had not moved with the times about factories, nor, indeed, had the times, that is, her order of the old gentry, moved very far. The Secombes were still exceptional, the Luke Verners still trimmers, land was still land and respectable, steam was steam and questionable, and it is to be supposed that though the coal of the Duke was used to make steam, coal was land and therefore on the side of the angels, whatever the devils did with it afterwards. Prejudice, in any case, has nothing to do with consistency. She had no prejudice against Reuben’s connection with the factory; he was her “steam-man” still, but she did not want Edward to be her steam-son.

Edward himself was conscious of no talent for factory owning and hardly of being the son of a factory owner.

The management of her children’s lives was in Dorothy’s hands, involving no mention of the factory, and in her hands Reuben was content to leave their lives until his sons had had the ordinary education of gentlemen, until they were down from their Universities. He had not suffered himself as a manufacturer because he was educated as a gentleman and saw no reason to bring up his sons any differently from himself. Throw them too young into the factory, and they would become manufacturers and manufacturers only: he had the wish to make them gentlemen first and manufacturers afterwards.

Edward had ideas of his own about his future, and it came as a surprise to be invited at breakfast to visit the factory one day during vacation from Oxford. Instinctively he glanced, not at his mother, but at his clothes. He was not precisely a dandy, but had money to burn and burned a good deal of it at his tailor’s.

“The factory, I said, not the coal-mine,” Reuben said, noting his son’s impulse. “You have looked at your clothes. Now let us go and look at the first cause of the clothes. As a young philosopher you should be interested in first causes.”

“Oh, is it necessary, Reuben?” pleaded Dorothy.

“Sparks should know where the flames come from,” said Reuben.

“I have great curiosity to see the factory, sir,” said Edward. “I showed surprise, but that was natural. You have hidden the factory from us all as if it were a Pandora’s box and if you judge the time now come when I am to see the place from which our blessings come, I assure you I am flattered by your confidence. But I warn you I am not persuaded in advance to admire the box.”

Reuben smiled grimly at his hinted opposition. “If you look with sense, you will admire,” he said. “Factories run to usefulness, not beauty. Shall we go?”

They went, and Reuben exhibited his factory with thoroughness, with the zest of a man who had created it, but now and then with the impatience of the expert who does not concede enough to the slow-following thought of the lay mind. Edward began with every intention to appreciate, but as Reuben explained the processes, found nothing but antipathy grow within him.

He breathed a foul, hot, dust-laden air, he hadn’t a mechanical turn of mind and was mystified by operations which Reuben imagined he expounded lucidly. Once the thread was lost, the whole affair was simply puzzlement and he had the feeling of groping in a fog, a hideously noisy fog, where wheels monotonously went round, spinning mules beat senselessly to and fro and dirty men and women looked resentfully at him. It seemed to him a hell worse than any Dante had described, with sufferers more hopeless, bound in stupid misery. He was not thinking of the sufferers with any great humanitarianism: they were of a lower order and this no doubt was all that they were fit for. He was thinking of them with disgust, objecting to breathe the same air, revolted by their smells, but he was conscious of, at least, some sentiment of pity. If he had understood the meaning of it all, he felt that he would have seen things like these in true perspective, but he missed the keys to it, was nauseated when he ought to have been interested and his attempted queries grew less and less to the point.

Reuben perceived at last that he was lecturing an inattentive audience. “Come into the office,” he said, and in that humaner place, with its great bureau, its library of ledgers and its capacious chairs for callers, where the engine throbbed with a diminished hum, Edward tried to collect his thoughts. “This,” Reuben emphasized, “is where I do my work. I go through the factory twice a day, otherwise, I am to be found in here. A glass of wine to wash the dust out of your throat?”

Edward was grateful: but wine could not wash his repugnance away. “Well, now,” asked Reuben, “what do you think?”

“Frankly, sir, I am hardly capable of thought.”

“No,” said Reuben meditatively. “No. Its bigness takes the breath away.”

But Edward was not thinking of bigness. “If I say anything now which appears strange to you, I hope you will attribute it to my inexperience. I am thinking of those people I have seen. To spend so many hours a day in such conditions seems to me a very dreadful thing.”

“Work has to be done, Edward, and they are used to it. You will find that there are only two sorts of people in this world, the drivers and the driven.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Which are you going to be?”

“I?” The personal application caught him unawares, then he mentally pulled himself together. If he was in for it, he could meet it.

“I did not bring you here as an idle sight-seer. At first blush you dislike the factory, but it is my belief that you will come to like it as well as, I do.” Edward stared at his father who was, he saw, serious. He veritably “liked” the factory. “In fact,” Reuben was saying, “I can go further. I love this place. I made it; it is my life’s work; and I am proud of it. Hepplestall’s is a great heritance. When I hand it on to you, it will be a great possession, a great trust. How great you do not know and if I showed you now the figures in those books you would be no wiser. As yet you do not understand. Even out there in the works where things are simple you missed my meaning, but there is time to learn it all before I leave the reins to you.”

“I am to decide now?”

“Decide? Decide? What is there to decide? You are my eldest son.”

Edward made an effort: Reuben was assuming his consent to everything. “May I confess my hope, sir? My hope was that when I had finished at Oxford, you would allow me to go to the bar.”

“The bar? A cover for idleness.” Sometimes, but Edward had not intended to be idle. The bar was an occupation, gentlemanly, settling a man in London amongst his Oxford friends; it seemed to Edward that the bar would meet his tastes. If it had been land that he was to inherit, naturally he would have taken a share in its management, but there was no land: there was a factory, and he felt keen jealousy of Tom, his younger brother. It was settled that Tom should follow his uncle, Tom Verners, who was Colonel Verners now, into the Army, while he, the eldest son, who surely should have first choice, he was apparently destined will he, nill he, for this detestable factory!

“I will have no son of mine a loafer. You would live in London?”

“I should hope to practice there.”

“I’ll have no idlers and no cockneys in my family, Edward. Hepplestall’s! Hepplestall’s! and he sneers at it.”

“Oh, no, sir. Please. Not that. I feel it difficult to explain.”

“Don’t try.”

“I must. I think what I feel is that if we were speaking of land I as your eldest son should naturally come into possession. I should feel it, in the word you used, as a trust. But we are not speaking of land.”

Reuben gripped his chair-arms till his hands grew white and recovered a self-control that had nearly slipped away. The boy was ready to approve the law of primogeniture so long as he could be fastidious about his inheritance, so long as the inheritance was land. As it was not land, he wanted to run away. He deprecated steam. He dared, the jackanapes! “No,” said Reuben, “we are not speaking of land. We are speaking of Hepplestall’s.”

“If it were land,” Edward went on ingenuously, “however great the estate, you would not find me shirking my responsibility.”

“I see. And as it is not land? As it is this vastly greater thing than land?” Then suavity deserted him. “Boy,” he cried, “don’t you see what an enormous thing it is to be trustee of Hepplestall’s?”

“Oh,” said Edward, “it is big. But let me put a case.”

“What? Lawyering already?” scoffed Reuben. “Suppose one dislikes a cat. Fifty cats don’t reconcile one.”

“You dislike the factory?”

“I may not fully understand—”

“Then wait till you do. Come here and learn.”

“That would be the thin end of the wedge.”

“It is meant to be,” said Reuben, and on that their conversation was, not inopportunely, interrupted. A clerk knocked on the door and announced Mr. Needham. “Don’t go, Edward,” said Reuben, “this can figure as a detail in your education,” and introduced his son to the caller.

Edward looked hopelessly at the visitor. Reuben had told him that the office was the place where his business life was spent and therefore Edward’s contacts, if he came to the factory, would not be with the squalid people he had seen at work, but with people who visited the office. He looked at Mr. Needham, and decided that he had never seen a coarser or more brutal man in his life. There were certain fellows of his college justly renowned for grossness; there was the riffraff of the town, there were hangers-on at the stables, there were the bruisers he had seen, but in all his experience he had seen nothing comparable with the untrammeled brutishness of Mr. Richard Needham. If this was the company he was asked to keep, he preferred—what did one do in extremis? Enlist? Well, then, he preferred enlistment to the factory.

Needham was, however, not quite the usual caller, who was a merchant come to buy, or a machinist come to sell, rather than, as Needham was, a manufacturer and a notorious one at that. By this time, the repeal of the Combination Acts had given Trade Unionism an opportunity to develop in the open, and manufacturers who had known very well how to deal with the earlier guerilla warfare of the then illegal Unions were seriously alarmed by its progress. There was a strong movement to force the reënactment of the Combination Laws. Contemporaneously, the growth and proved efficiency of the power-loom drove the weavers to extremes. Needham was self-appointed leader of the reactionaries amongst the manufacturers: a man who had risen by sheer physical strength to a position from which he now exercised considerable influence over the more timid of the masters.

He had the curtest of nods for Edward. “My God, Hepplestall, we’re in for a mort of trouble,” he said, mopping his brow with a huge printed handkerchief and putting his beaver hat on the desk. He sank into a stout chair which groaned under his weight, and Edward thought he had never seen anything so indecent as the swollen calves of Mr. Needham.

Reuben silently passed the wine. It seemed a good answer.

Warts are a misfortune, not a crime: but the wart on Mr. Needham’s nose struck Edward as an obscenity—and his father loved the factory! He didn’t know that he was unduly sensitive, but certainly Needham on top of his view of the workpeople made him queasy.

Needham emptied and refilled a glass. “I’d hang every man who strikes,” he said. “Look at ‘em here,” he went on, producing a hand-bill which he offered to Reuben.

“After the peace of Amiens,” it read, “the wages of a Journeyman Weaver would amount to 2/7 1/2 per day or 15/9 per week, and this was pretty near upon a par with other mechanics and we maintained our rank in society. We will now contrast our present situation with the past, and it will demonstrate pretty clearly the degraded state to which we have been reduced.

“During the last two years our wages have been reduced to so low an ebb that for the greatest part of that time we have... the Journeyman’s Wages of 9d or 10d a day or from 4/6 to 5/—per week, and we appeal to your candor and good sense, whether such a paltry sum be sufficient to keep the soul and body together.”

“What do you think of that?” asked Needham. “Printing it, mind you, spreading sedition and disaffection like that. Not a word about their wives and children all taken into the factories and all taking good wages out. If commerce isn’t to be unshackled and free of the attacks of a turbulent and insurrectionary spirit, I ask you, where are we? Where’s our chance of keeping law and order when the law permits weavers to combine and yap together and issue bills like yond? It’s fatal to allow ‘em to feel their strength and communicate with each other without restraint. Allow them to go on uninterrupted and they become more licentious every day. What do you say, Hepplestall?”

“Why, sir, it’s you who are making a speech, and I may add a speech containing many very familiar phrases.”

“Aye, I’ve said it before, and to you. I might have spared my breath. But hast heard the latest? Dost know that the strikers in Blackburn destroyed every power-loom within six miles of the town and... and...” Mr. Needham drew in breath... “and they’ve been syringing cloth wi’ vitriol. Soft sawder in yond hand-bill, ‘appeal to your candor and good sense,’ aye and vitriol on good cloth when it comes to deeds.”

“Yes, I heard of that. A nasty business, though I understand the authorities have dealt strongly with the outbreak.”

“Aye, you’re a philosopher, because it happened at a distance from you. It’s some one else’s looms that’s smashed, and some one else’s cloth that’s rotted. What if it were youm, Hepplestall?”

“We don’t have Luddites here.”

“You allays think you’re out of everything. Now I’ve brought you the facts and you know as well as I do what’s the cause of this uppishness of the lower orders. It’s Peel, damn him. One of us, and ought to know better. Sidmouth’s the man for my money. Sidmouth and Castlereagh. There was sense about when they were in charge. Now, we let the spinners combine and the weavers combine and they’re treading on our faces. Well, are you standing by your lonesome as usual or are you in it with the rest of us to petition against workmen’s combinations? That’s a straight question, Hepplestall.”

“I shall take time to answer it, Mr. Needham. I have acted with you in the past and I have taken leave to doubt the wisdom of your actions and I have on such occasions acted neither with you nor against you. This time—”

“This time, there’s no chance of doubt.”

“But I do doubt, sir. I doubt whether a factory, controlled by a strong hand, has anything to fear from Workmen’s Combinations.”

“Damn it, look at Blackburn!”

“You shall have my decision when it is ready. At this moment, I tell you candidly I do not incline to join you.”

“But union is strength. They’ve combined. So must we.”

“We always have, in essentials. I promise you I will give this matter every thought.”

Needham looked angry, and then a cunning slyness passed across his face. “I’m satisfied with that,” he said. “Aye, I’m satisfied, though you may tell me I’ve come a long road to be satisfied wi’ so little at the end o’ it.” Reuben rose, bowing gravely. “I am glad to have satisfied you, Mr. Needham,” he said, blandly ignoring the hint that an invitation to dinner was the natural expectation of a traveled caller.

“Aye,” said Needham, “Aye.” He finished the bottle, since nothing more substantial was forthcoming, and rose to go. “Then I’ll be hearing from you?”

“Yes,” Reuben assured him. “I will see you to your horse.”

“Nay, you’ll not. They don’t breed my make of horse. I’ve a coach at door, and extra strong, too.”

“Then I will see you to your coach.” Needham nodded to the silent Edward, and went out with Reuben. There was no strategical issue between Needham and Hepple-stall. Needham, when he spoke, used phrases taken from the writings of manufacturers more literate than himself, and so stated, by such a man, his point of view sounded preposterously obscurantist. But it was, in essence, Reuben’s view also, with the difference that Reuben looked on attempts to combat the principle of Unionism as tactical error. The Combination Acts, he felt, had gone for ever, and the common policy of the masters should not be in the direction of reviving those Acts but of meeting the consequences of their repeal.

He was, indeed, habitually averse from open association with his fellow manufacturers because of his self-conscious social difference, and, where such a man as Needham led, was apt to pick more holes in his policy than were reasonable. It was quite likely in the present case that he would come round to Needham’s view, but certainly he would not hurry. The troubles at Blackburn were remote from him and he felt his own factory was out of the danger zone, and that if he threw in his weight with the Needham petition it would be altruistically, and perhaps a waste of influence which could have found better employment. His own people were showing no signs of restiveness, and he didn’t think Unionism was making much headway amongst them. Reason and self-interest seemed allied with his native individualism to resist Needham’s policy.

He returned to find Edward staring gloomily at his boots. “Well, Edward?” he asked cheerily. “Did you like your lesson?”

“The thing I liked, sir, the only thing I liked, is that you are not to act with Mr. Needham.”

“Am I not?”

“It did not sound so. Tell me, is that a fair specimen of the type of man you meet in business?”

“No. In many ways he is superior to the most.”

“Superior! That fat elephant!”

“Needham is one of the strongest men in the cotton trade, Edward.”

“Oh, I called him elephant. Elephants have strength.”

“And strength is despicable?”

“No. But—”

“But Needham is a gross pill to swallow. Well, if it will ease your mind, I do not propose to act with him on this issue. You need not swallow this pill, Edward. But I am not looking to a son of mine to be a runaway from duty, to be a loiterer in smooth places. You have Oxford which is, I hope, confirming you as a gentleman and you have the factory which will confirm you as a man. I could make you an appeal. I could first point out that I am single-handed here in a position which grows beyond the strength of any single pair of hands. I could dub you my natural ally at a time when I have need of an ally. But I shall make you neither an appeal nor a command. Hepplestall’s is a greater thing than I who made it or than you who will inherit it, and there is no occasion for pressure. You are, naturally, inevitably, in its service.” Edward felt rather than saw that somewhere at the opening of the well down which this plunged him there was daylight. “I do not perceive the inevitability,” he cried. “You doom me to a monstrous fate.”

“You are heroical,” said Reuben, “but as to the inevitability, take time, and you will perceive it.”

“Daylight! Give me the daylight!” was what Edward wanted to say, but he repressed that and hardly more happily he asked, “Is there no beauty in life?”

“There is beauty in Hepplestall’s,” said Reuben, and meant it. He had created 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.

CHAPTER XI—THE HATE OF THE HEPPLESTALLS

PHOEBE made all reasonable, and a few indulgent, allowances for the weaknesses of manflesh, but when she awoke to the knowledge that John had not been home all night, she was downright angry with him. A bereaved husband might accept the consolation offered by his friends on the day of his wife’s funeral, and might go on accepting it late into the night. She had left the door on the latch for him with the thought that it wasn’t like John to drown his sorrow, but men were men, even the best of them, and she had put a lot of housework behind her that day. He would have been constantly getting in her way with his clumsy efforts to help, and if he had found forgetfulness, no matter how, they had both of them come through the day very well.

But he had not come home at all; he had forgotten too thoroughly, and Phoebe intended to give him “the rough side of her tongue” the moment she came across him in the factory. It never occurred to her that he would not be in the factory. To be out all night was a departure from his custom, and on such a night a departure from decency, but to be absent from work was more than either of these; it was defiance of necessity, a treachery to her and to his children and she knew her John better than to suspect him of conduct like that. He might be grief-stricken and, after that (homeopathically), ale-stricken, but the law of nature was “Work or Clem,” and John would be at work.

He was not at work, and that was not the only thing to be remarked that morning. Nobody appeared to have a word for her, though there was an exceptional disposition to gossip. Even the overseers had caught the infection and formed gossiping groups to the detriment of discipline. She was too preoccupied at first to notice that she was their cynosure or to wonder what it meant, but she couldn’t for long be unconscious of their gaze.

They were looking at her, every one was looking at her, and her first impulse was to be angry with them for staring so curiously and her second was to conceal her awareness of their gaze. They stared? Let them stare. She had not been at the factory on the previous day, but she had had leave of absence. She had been burying her daughter-in-law, and if they wanted to stare at her for that, they could stare. And then she connected their fixed regard with John’s absence. There was something serious then? Something about John of which they knew and she did not? She dropped abruptly her pretense of unconsciousness.

“For God’s sake tell me what’s to do,” she cried. “If it’s John, I’m his mother and I’ve the right to know.”

Will Aspinall, the overseer, detached himself from his group. “Get at work,” he bawled at large, then with a rare gentleness, led Phoebe aside. “Either tha’s gotten th’ brassiest faice i’ Lankysheer, or else tha’ doan’t kna’,” he said.

“Is it to do with John?” she asked.

“Aye,” he said, “it’s all to do wi’ thy John.”

“I know nothing beyond that he’s not been home all night.”

“A kna’ he’s not bin hoam. He’s done wi’ coming hoam.”

“Why? Why? What has happened?”

“A’m, striving to tell thee that. Th’ job’s not easy, though.” He looked at her. “Wilt have it straight?”

“I’m never afraid of truth.”

“Truth can hit hard. Well, I’ll tell thee. Thy John shot at th’ maister’s wife last neight an’ hit her. They’ve gotten him.” He upturned a waste-bin. “Now, A’m real sorry for thee and it weren’t a pleasant job for me to break th’ news. That’s over, though, and tha’ knaws now. Next sit thee down on this. It’s in a corner, like, and folks canna watch thee. When tha’ feels like work, come and tell me.” He left her with rough kindliness, and relieved his feelings by cuffing a child who was peering round a loom at them. He was paid to be brutal, and the child, gathering himself up from the floor, might have thought that the overseer was earning his wages: but the shrewd blow was rather a warning to the rest and an expression of his sympathy with Phoebe than an episode in his day’s work.

That Aspinall, and not he alone but the general sense of the workers, should be sympathetic towards her was in its way remarkable enough. They expected naturally that John would hang, but they had definitely the idea that retribution for his deed would not stop at the capital punishment of the actual malefactor. Hepplestall would “tak’ it out of all on us,” and “We’ll go ravenous for this,” “Skin an’ sorrow—that’s our shape,” and (from a humorist) “Famished? He’ll spokeshave us” were some of the phrases by which they expressed their belief in the widespread severity of Hepplestall’s vengeance.

Yet they had no bitterness against John, nor against Phoebe who, as his mother, might be supposed to have a special responsibility. It was a dreadful deed and the more dreadful since his bullet had miscarried and had killed a woman; but it had fanned to quick fire their smoldering hatred of Hepplestall and there was more rejoicing than regret that he was, through Dorothy, cast down. They would have preferred to know that John had hit the true target but, as it was, it was well enough and they were not going to squeal at the price they expected to pay. Their commiseration was not for the bereaved master, but for the about-to-be-bereaved mother of the murderer.

Somebody moved a candle so that Phoebe in her corner should be the more effectually screened from observation. It was a kindly act, but one which she hardly needed. Her thoughts were with John, but not with a John who was going to be hanged; they were with a John who was going to be saved.

Murderers were hanged and so for the matter of that were people convicted of far less heinous crimes. That was the law, but she had never a doubt but that Hepplestall was above the law, that he was the law, and that John’s fate was not with an impersonal entity called justice but, simply, with Hepplestall. Probably two-thirds of her fellow-workers were firmly of the same belief in his omnipotence, though they hadn’t, as she supposed she had, grounds for thinking that he would intervene on John’s behalf.

When Annie died she had told herself vehemently that she would never go, a suppliant, to Hepplestall, she would never let him share in John’s children wrho were his grandchildren; but that resolution was rescinded now. Reuben had never hinted since the day when Peter and Phoebe went to him, aghast at the edict which broke Peter’s factory, that he remembered he had had a son by Phoebe. It was so long ago and perhaps he had indeed forgotten, but she must go to him and remind him now. She must tell him that John Bradshaw was his son. He could not hang his son.

Daylight was penetrating through the sedulously cleaned windows of the factory. It was the hour when expensive artificial light could be dispensed with and candles were being extinguished; it was the hour, too, when Reuben might ordinarily be expected in his office. He had the usual manufacturers’ habit of riding or walking to the factory for half an hour before breakfast, and to-day word was passed through the rooms that he had, surprisingly, arrived as usual.

The word had not reached Phoebe, but she expected nothing else. She had to speak with Reuben, and therefore he would be there. She came from her corner and told Aspinall what she intended.

“Nay, nay!” he said.

“Please open the door for me.”

“A canna’,” he said. “Coom, missus, what art thinking? He’ll spit at thee.”

“I have to speak to him about John,” said Phoebe. “Open the door and let me through.”

“It’s more nor my plaice is worth,” he said, but, nevertheless, he was weakening. She was not making a request, she was not a weaver asking a favor of an overseer, she was Phoebe Bradshaw, whom Peter had brought up to be a lady, giving an order to a workman in the tone of one who commands obedience as a habit.

He scratched his head in doubt, then turned to a fellow-overseer and consulted with him. They murmured together with a wealth of puzzlement and headshaking and, presently, “Now, Mrs. Bradshaw,” said Aspinall, “tak’ heed to me. Yon door’s fast, but me an’ Joe here are goin’ to open it on factory business, understand. If happen tha’s creeping up behind us, it’s none likely we’ll see thee coomin’ and if tha’ slips through door and into office while we’ve gotten door open on our business, it’s because tha’ was too spry for us to stop thee. That’s best we can do for thee and it’s takkin’ big risks an’ all.”

“I’m grateful,” said Phoebe.

They opened the door and made loud sounds of protest as she slipped through, causing Reuben to look up from the bureau where he was opening his letters and to see both Phoebe standing in his office and the actors at the door. He waved them off and, when the door was closed, “Well?” he said.

“Reuben!” said Phoebe.

He rose with an angry cry. How dared she, this weaver, this roughened, withered old woman, address him by his Christian name? This gray wraith, whose hair hung mustily about her like the jacket of lichen about a ruined tree, she to call him by the name his Dorothy alone had used! That morning of all mornings it was outrage of outrages.

He did not know her whom once he nearly loved. Twenty years ago he had put her from him and had excluded her from his recollection. Long ago the factory had outgrown the stage when an employer has knowledge of his workpeople as individuals; he did not know her nor had the identification of the prisoner as John Bradshaw, a spinner in the factory, conveyed any personal significance to him. Bradshaw was a common name, and he had never known that Phoebe had called their son John.

“But I am Phoebe,” she said, standing her ground before his menacing advance. “Phoebe, Reuben. Phoebe, who—Phoebe Bradshaw.”

He remembered now, he had remembered at the second “Phoebe”—and at the second “Reuben.” He was even granting her, grimly, her right to call him by that name when the “Bradshaw” struck upon his ear.

“Bradshaw?” he repeated. “Bradshaw?” And this second time, there was an angry question in it.

“I came about John,” she said. “John is our son, Reuben. Of course he did not know, but—” Reuben had covered the space between them at a bound. He was holding her hands tightly, he was looking at her with eyes that seared. In moments like these, thought outspaces time. John, his wife’s murderer, was his son, and the son of Phoebe Bradshaw whom he had—well, he supposed he had betrayed her. She had told the son, of course. He had nursed a grievance, he had shot Dorothy in revenge. Whether he had aimed at Reuben and hit Dorothy, or whether he lied when he had made that statement to the constable and had, in fact, aimed at Dorothy, they had the true motive now. Reuben might have put it that his sin had found him out, but his thought did not run on those lines. Then, what was she saying? “Of course, he did not know.” Oh, that was absurd, that took them back for motive to what John had been telling the constable—that he shot at Hepplestall to—to—(what was the boy’s wind-bagging phrase which the constable reported?)—“to set the people free from a tyrant.”

“Say that again,” he said.

She met his eye fearlessly. “Of course he did not know. You could not think that I would tell of my shame. Father and I, we invented a second cousin Bradshaw whom I married, who died before John was born.”

Yes, she was speaking the truth, and, after all, he didn’t know that it mattered very much. Dorothy was dead, either way, but, yes, it did matter. It mattered enormously, because of Dorothy’s sons. If John had known, there must have been disclosures at the trial, things said against Reuben, ordinary enough but not the things he cared to have Dorothy’s sons know about their father.

It wasn’t criminal to have seduced a woman twenty years ago, and the exceptional thing about Reuben was that he had seduced no more women, that he had not abused his position as employer. Needham was known, with grim humor, as “the father of his people.” Whereas Reuben had been Dorothy’s husband.

He saw the trial and that disclosure insulting to Dorothy’s memory. He heard the jeers of Needham and his kind. Hepplestall, Gentleman Hepplestall, reduced by public ordeal to a common brutishness with the coarse libertines he had despised! He saw Dorothy’s sons contemptuous of their father. This, they would take occasion to think, was where factory-owning led a man.

“You’re sure of this?” he asked. “You’re absolutely sure he did not know he is my son?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

“Ah,” he said, “that’s good. If he had known, I believe I must have taken measures to defeat justice. I should have done all in my power to have spirited him away before the trial, and I believe I should have contrived it. I feel quite keenly enough about the matter to have done that.” Which was, to Phoebe, confirmation of her belief in his omnipotence. “But, as it is,” he went on, “as it is, thank God, the law can take its course.” He was back in his chair now, looking at her with a relief that was almost a smile, if tigerish. She, he was thinking, might still speak to his discomfiture if she were put in the box at the trial, but he would see that she was not called. There was no need to call her to establish John’s absence from home that night, when he had been caught red-handed. They could do without Phoebe, and he would take care they should.

“Can take its course,” she repeated, bewildered. What had Reuben meant if not, incredibly, that had she told John of her “shame,” he would have been saved now, but that, as it was, John must—“But it cannot tak’ its course, John is your son. Your son. Reuben, he’s your son. You cannot hang your son.”

“He killed my wife.”

“But you haven’t understood. They haven’t told you. John was not himself. He—”

“Drunk?”

“No, no. Oh, Reuben. He was crazed with grief on account of his wife. Don’t they tell you when the likes of that chances in the factory? Annie Bradshaw, that was John’s wife and your daughter-in-law—she bore a child on the floor in there and died. You must have heard of it.”

Reuben nodded. “These women,” he said, “are always cutting it too fine.” His gesture disclaimed responsibility for the reckless greed of women.

“Yes,” she said, brazenly agreeing with his monstrous imputation, “but John loved Annie and he’s been in a frenzy since she died and in his mazed brain we can see how it seemed to him. We can, can’t we, Reuben? She died in the factory and it looked to him that the factory had killed her. And then he must have got a gun. I don’t know how, but we can see the crazy lad with a gun in his hands and the wild thought in his mind that the factory killed Annie. It’s your factory, it’s Hepple-stall’s, and it ‘ud seem to him that Hepplestall killed. Annie, so he took his gun and came to your house and tried to kill you. A daft lad and a senseless deed and an awful, awful end to it, but we can read the frantic thoughts in his grief-struck brain, we can understand them, Reuben—you and I.” She sought to draw him into partnership with her, to make him share in the plea which she addressed to him.

But “He killed my wife,” Reuben said again.

She had a momentary vision of Reuben and Phoebe twenty years ago riding home to Bradshaw’s on the afternoon when they had met Dorothy in the road, and Dorothy had cut him. She had talked then, she had chattered, she had striven to be gay and her talk had rebounded, like a ball off a wall, from the stony taciturnity of his abstraction and that night, that very night.... It had been Dorothy then, and it was Dorothy now. “He killed my wife.”

“But, Reuben, he was mad.”

“Still—”

She flung herself upon her knees. “Reuben, you cannot hang your son. Not your son, Reuben.”

“Quiet,” he commanded. “Quiet.”

“Oh, I will be very quiet.” She lowered her voice obediently. “If there are clerks through that door, they shall not hear. No one shall ever know he is your son. You can save him and you must. He is your son and there are babies, two little boys, your grandchildren, Reuben. What can I do alone for them? Give John back to me and we can manage. It will be mortal hard, but we shall do it.”

The woman was impossible. Actually she was pleading not only for the murderer’s release, but for his return. His wife, Dorothy, lay dead at this boy’s hands, and Phoebe was assuming that nothing was to happen! But, by the Lord, things were going to happen. Crazy or not that phrase of John’s stuck in his throat—“to set the people free from a tyrant.” Where there was one man thinking that sort of thing, there were others; it was a breeding sort of thought. Well, he’d sterilize it, he’d bleed these thinkers white. Meantime, there was Phoebe, and, it seemed, there were two young encumbrances. “There is the workhouse,” he said.

“Not while I live,” said Peter Bradshaw’s daughter.

“But to live, Phoebe, you must earn, and there will be no more earning here for you.” The workhouse was a safe place for a woman with a dangerous story and anything that escaped those muffling walls could be set down as the frantic ravings of a hanged man’s mother. This side-issue of Phoebe was a triviality, but he had learned the value of looking after the pence—as well as the pounds.

“Oh, do with me what you like. You always have done. But John—John!”

He looked his unchanging answer.

“I am to go to the workhouse. Is not that enough? I to that place and his children with me, John to—to the gallows, and why? Why? Because through all these years I have given you a gift. The gift of my silence. You are going to hang my son because I did not tell him he was your son. You could save him and you don’t because he did not know. Reuben, is there no mercy in you?” There was none. John had killed Dorothy. “Then, if I shriek the truth aloud? If I cry out now so that your clerks can hear me, that John is your son? If—”

“It would make this difference, Phoebe. You would go to the madhouse, instead of to the workhouse. In the one you would be alone. In the other you would sometimes see John’s brats.” He rang the hand-bell on his desk.

“And teach them,” she said, “teach them to speak their first words, ‘I hate the Hepplestalls.’”

Perhaps he heard her through the sound of the bell, perhaps not. A well-drilled clerk came promptly in upon his summons. “This woman is to go at once to the workhouse, with two children,” he said. “If there are forms to go through refer the officials to me.”

In the factory they called him “Master.” He was master of them all. She did not doubt it and she went.

Reuben finished reading his letters before he went home to breakfast. He read attentively, doing accustomed things in his accustomed way because it seemed that only so could he drug himself to forgetfulness of Dorothy’s death, then gravely, with thoughts held firmly on business affairs, he mounted his horse to where skilled hands had made death’s aftermath a. gracious thing.

Edward had spoken to his brothers. “Give me five minutes alone with Father when he comes in,” he said. It seemed to him this morning that once, a prodigious while ago, he had been fatuously young and either he had quarreled with his father or had come near to quarreling—he couldn’t be expected to remember which across so long a time as the night he had passed since then—about so obvious a certainty as his going into the factory. Dorothy, in that moment when she held their hands together, had made him see so clearly what he had to do. A moment of reconcilement and of clarification, when she had indicated her last wish. It was a law, indeed, and sweetly sane. “Why, of course, Mother,” he had been telling her through the night, “Father and I must stand together now.” He told, and she could not reply. She could not tell him how grotesquely he misinterpreted her moment.

He met Reuben at the door. “Father,” he said, “there is something you must let me say at once. My mother joined our hands last night. May we forget what passed between us earlier? May we remember only that she joined our hands last night, and that they will remain joined?”

“I hope they will,” said Reuben, not quite certain of him yet.

“The man who killed her came from the factory. I should like your permission to omit my last term at Oxford. I want very deeply to begin immediately at the factory.” His voice rose uncontrollably. “‘Drive or be driven,’ sir, you said the other day. And by God, I’ll drive. I’ll drive. That blackguard came from there.”

“Come with me after breakfast,” Reuben said, shaking the hand of his heir. And in that spirit Edward went to Hepplestall’s to begin his education.

Dorothy had died happy in the bright certainty of her authentic moment!

PART II

CHAPTER I—THE SERVICE

IF there is a man whose job I’ve never envied, it’s the A Prince of Wales,” groaned Rupert Hepplestall, looking in his mirror with an air of cynical boredom and fastening white linen round a bronzed neck. “And I’m going to get the taste of it to-day.”

The point was that it was Rupert’s sixteenth birthday, and the sixteenth birthday of a Hepplestall was an occasion of such moment that he had been brought back from Harrow to spend that day at home.

On their sixteenth birthdays, the Hepplestall boys, and some others who were favored though only their mothers were Hepplestalls, were received in the office and from thence escorted through the mills by the Head of the Firm with as much ceremonious aplomb as if they were Chinese mandarins, Argentine financiers, Wall Street magnates, Russian nobles, German professors or any of the miscellaneous but always distinguished foreigners, who, visiting Lancashire, procured invitations: to inspect that jewel in its crown, the mills at Staithley Bridge. For the boys it was the formal ritual of initiation into the service of the firm. A coming of age was nothing if not anti-climactic to the sixteenth birthday of a Hepplestall.

Not all Hepplestalls were chosen; there were black sheep in every flock, but if a Hepplestall meant to go black, he was expected to show symptoms early and in Rupert’s case, at any rate, there was no question of choice. Rupert was the eldest son.

He would return to school, he would go to a university, but to-day he set foot in the mills, and the step was final. The Service would have marked him for its own.

Rupert was cynical about it. “It’s like getting engaged to a barmaid in the full and certain knowledge that you can’t buy her off,” he said and that “Barmaid” indicated what he secretly thought of the show-mills of Lancashire. But he was not proposing resistance; he was going into this with open eyes; he knew what had happened to that recreant Hepplestall who, so to speak, had broken his vows—the man who bolted, last heard of as a hanger-on in a gambling hell in Dawson City, “combined,” the informant had said, “with opium.” It wasn’t for Rupert. He knew on which side his bread was buttered. But “Damn the hors d’ouvres,” he said. “Damn to-day.” Then, “Pull yourself together. Won’t do to look peevish. Come, be a little prince.”

He composed in front of the mirror a compromise between boyish eagerness and an overwhelming sense of a dignified occasion, surveyed his reflection and decided that he was hitting off very neatly the combination of aspects which his father would expect. Then he jeered at his efforts and the jeer degenerated into an agitated giggle: he was uncomfortably nervous; “This prince business wants getting used to,” he said, recapturing his calculated expression and going downstairs to the breakfast room.

Only his father and mother were there. To-night there would be a dinner attended by such uncles as were not abroad in the service of the firm, but for the present he was spared numbers and it seemed a very ordinary birthday when his mother kissed him with good wishes and his father shook his hand and left a ten pound note in it.

He expected an oration from his father, but what Sir Philip said was “Tyldesley’s not out, Rupert. 143. Would you like to go to Old Trafford after lunch?”

“To-day!” he gasped. Could normal things like cricket co-exist with his ordeal?

“Yes, I think I can spare the time this afternoon,” and so on, to a discussion of Lancashire’s chances of being the champion county—anything to put the boy at his ease. Sir Philip had been through that ordeal himself. He talked cricket informally, but what he was thinking was “Shall I tell him he’s forgotten to put a tie on or shall I take him round the place without?” But he could hardly introduce a tie-less heir to the departmental managers, who, if they were employees had salaries running up to fifteen hundred a year, with bonus, and were, quite a surprising number of them, magistrates. So he proceeded to let the boy down gently. “Heredity’s a queer thing,” he said. “It’s natural to think of it to-day, and I shall have some instances to tell you of later, when we get down to the office. But what sets me on it now is that precisely the same accident happened to me on my sixteenth birthday as has happened to you. I forgot my tie.”

“Oh, Lord!” Rupert was aghast, feeling with twitching fingers for the tie that wasn’t there.

“I take it as a happy omen that you should have done the same.”

“You really did forget yours, dad?”

“Really,” lied Sir Philip.

“Then I don’t mind feeling an ass,” said Rupert, and his father savored the compliment as Rupert left the room. It implied that the boy had a wholesome respect for him, while, as to his own diplomacy, “The recording angel,” he said, turning to his wife, “will dip in invisible ink.”

Lady Hepplestall touched his shoulder affectionately, and left him to his breakfast-table study of the market reports.

The baronetcy was comparatively new. Any time these fifty years the Hepplestalls could have had it by lifting a finger in the right room; and they had had access to that room. But titles, especially as the Victorian shower of honors culminated in “Jubilee Knights,” seemed vulgar things, and Sir Philip consented to take one only when it seemed necessary that he should consent, after much pressure from his brothers. It seemed necessary in 1905 and the Hepplestall baronetcy, included amongst the Resignation Honors conferred by the late Balfour administration, was a symbol of the defeat of Joseph Chamberlain and “Tariff Reform.” It advertised the soundness of the Unionist Party, even in the thick of the great landslide of Liberalism, it registered the close of the liaison with Protection. If Hepplestall of Lancashire, Unionist and Free Trader, accepted a baronetcy from the outgoing Government, the sign was clear for all to read; it could mean only that Hepplestall had received assurances that the Party was going to be good, to avoid the horrific pitfalls of “Tariff Reform.” Lancashire could breathe again and Sir Philip, sacrificing much, immolated his inclinations on the twin altars of Free Trade and the Party. If ever man became baronet pour le bon motif, it was Sir Philip Hepplestall. A gesture, but a gallant one.

Rupert spoke many things aloud in lurid English to his reflection in his mirror; the banality of having so carefully studied his facial expressions while not perceiving the absence of a tie struck him as pluperfect, but his vituperative language was, happily, adequate to the occasion and he successful relieved his feelings. One combination of words, indeed, struck him as inspired and he was occupied in committing it to memory as he went downstairs to Sir Philip.

“I feel like the kid who had too much cake and when they told him he’d be ill, he said it was worth it,” he announced. “It was worth it to forget my tie.”

“In what way in particular?” asked Sir Philip, mentally saluting a spirited recovery.

“Will you ask me that next time I beat you at golf and words fail you? I’ve got the words.”

Anyhow, he’d got his impudence back and Sir Philip, knowing the massive impressiveness of the mills, was glad of it. He wanted his boy to bear himself well that day, and he was not afraid of levity or over-confidence when he confronted him with Hepplestall’s. He had, he admitted to himself, feared timidity; he had, at any rate, diagnosed acute nervousness in Rupert’s breakfast-table appearance, and feeling that the attack was vanished now, he rang for the car with his mind easy.

The site of old Reuben’s “Dorothy” factory was still the center whose extended perimeter held the mills known to Lancashire, and nearly as well known to dealers in Shanghai, or in the Malji Jritha market, Bombay, as Hepplestall’s, but the town of Staithley Bridge lay in the valley, extending down-stream away from the mills, so that there was country still, smoky but pleasant, between the Hall and the town. Electric trams bumped up the inclines through sprawling main-streets off which ran the rows upon uniform rows of cell-like houses, back-to-back, airless, bathless, insanitary, in which the bulk of the workers lived. Further afield, there were better, more modern houses, costing no more than those built before the age of sanitation—and these were more often to be let than the houses of the close-packed center. It may have been considered bumptious in Staithley to demand a bath, and a back-garden; it may have been held that, if one lived in Staithley, one should do the thing thoroughly; or it may have been that cleanliness too easily attained was thought equivalent to taking a light view of life. In their rooms, if not in their persons, they were clean in Staithley, even to the point of being “house-proud” about their cleanliness; but medicine that does not taste foul is suspect, and so is cleanliness in a house when it is attained without the greatest possible mortification of female flesh. You didn’t, anyhow, bribe a Staithley man by an electric tram and a bright brick house with a bath to “flit” from his gray stone house in an interminable row when that house was within reasonable walking distance of the mills or the pits. No decentralization for him, if he could help it: he was townbred, in a place where coal was cheap and fires extravagant, and a back garden was a draughty, shiversome idea.

But all this compress of humanity, and the joint efforts of the municipality and the jerry-builder to relieve it, lay on the side of the mills remote from the Hall—old Reuben had seen far enough to plant the early Staithley out of his sight, and where he planted it, it grew—and the short drive through dairy farm-land and market-gardens was not distressing to eyes accustomed to the pseudo-green, sobered by smoke, of Lancashire. Nor had the private office of the Hepplestalls any eyesores for the neophyte. He had been in less comfortable club-rooms.

Indeed, this office, with its great fireplace, its Turkey carpet, its shapely bureau that had been Reuben’s, and its chairs, authentically old, chosen to be on terms with the historic bureau, its padded leather sofa and the armchairs before the fire, and above all, the paintings on the wall, had all the appearance of a writing-room in a wealthy club.

“This is where I work, Rupert,” said Sir Philip, and Rupert wondered if “work” was quite the justifiable word. He thought the room urbane and almost drowsily urbane, he thought of work rather as the Staithley people thought of cleanliness, as a thing that went with mortification of the flesh, and things looked very easy in this room. But he reserved judgment. Sir Philip was apt to come home looking very tired. Perhaps the easiness was deceptive.

A telephone rang, and his father went to the instrument with an apology. “This is your day, Rupert, but I must steal five minutes of it now.” He spoke to his broker in Liverpool, and there were little jokes and affabilities mingled with mysterious references to “points on” and other technicalities. There was an argument about the “points on,” and Sir Philip seemed very easily to get the better of it, and then, having bought a thousand bales of raw cotton futures, he put the telephone down and said, “That’s the end of business for to-day.” An insider would have known that something rather important had happened, that the brain of Sir Philip had been very active indeed in those few minutes when he lingered over the market-reports at the breakfast-table, that trained judgment had decided a largish issue and that a brilliant exhibition of the art of buying had been given on the telephone. Rupert’s impression was that some enigmatic figures had casually intruded while Sir Philip passed the time of day with a friend in Liverpool who had rather superfluously rung him up. At Harrow, veneration of the business man was at a discount, and he believed Harrow was right. To write Greek verse was a stiffer job than to be a cotton-lord—on the evidence so far before the court.

“Well,” said Sir Philip, “I’m going to try to show you what Hepplestall’s is, and the portraits on these walls make as good a starting-point as I can think of. That is Reuben, our Founder. There are a few extant businesses in Lancashire founded so long ago as ours; there are even older firms. But such age as ours is rare. It’s been an in-and-out business, the cotton trade. You know the proverb here that ‘It’s three generations from clogs to clogs.’ That is, some fine fellow born to nothing makes a mark in life, rises, fights his way, and beginning as man ends as master, giving the business he founded such momentum as carries it along for the next generation. His son is born to boots, not clogs, but he hasn’t as a rule the strength his father had. He’s lived soft and his stock degenerates through softness. The business of the old man doesn’t go to pieces in the son’s time, but it travels downhill as the momentum given it by its founder loses force. And the grandson of the founder is apt to be born to boots and to die in clogs; he begins as master and ends as man. That is the cycle of three generations on which that proverb is founded, and not unjustly founded. It’s one of the points about the cotton trade that a strong man could force his way out of the ranks, but it’s the fact that his successors were more likely to lose what he left them than to keep it or improve upon it. I’ll go so far as to say that making money is easier than keeping it.

“We Hepplestalls have had the gift of keeping it. What a father won, a son has not let go. The sons have been fighters like their fathers before them and with each son the battleground has grown. Well, that might terrify you if I don’t explain that long ago, in your great-grandfather’s time indeed, the firm had outgrown the power of any one man to control it utterly. There were partnerships and a share of the responsibility for the younger sons. More recently, in fact when my father died, we made a private limited company of it. Two of your uncles, Tom and William, in charge in Manchester, have great authority, though mine is the final word. What I am seeking to tell you is that while it is a tremendous thing—tremendous, Rupert—to be the Head of Hepplestall’s, the burden is not one which you will ever be called upon to bear single-handed. The day of the complete autocrat went long ago. But this is true, that the Head of Hep-plestall’s has been the general in command, the chief-of-staff, the man who guarded what his ancestors had won and who increased the stake. That is the Hepplestall tradition in its minimum significance.”

Rupert started. In spite of his boyish skepticism he was already seeing himself as the Lilliputian changeling in a house of the Brobdingnagians, and if this were the minimum tradition, what, he wondered, was the maximum?

“We have the tradition of trusteeship,” Sir Philip proceeded. “And the trusteeship’ of Hepplestall’s is an anxious burden. It includes what I have spoken of already; it includes our family interests, but they are the smallest portion of the whole. We are trustees for our workpeople: we do not coddle them, but we find them work. That is a serious matter, Rupert. I have of course become accustomed to it as you will become accustomed to it, but the thought is never absent from my mind that on us, ultimately on me alone, is laid the burden of providing work for our thousands of employees. Trade fluctuates and my problem is, as far as is humanly possible, to safeguard our people against unemployment.”

“I never thought of it like that,” said Rupert, whose crude ideas of Labor were rather derived from his public school, and occasional reading of reactionary London newspapers, than from his home. “I wonder if they are grateful?”

“Their gratitude or their ingratitude has no bearing on my duty,” said Sir Philip.

“But aren’t there strikes?”

“You might put it that since ’ninety-three we have bowdlerized strikes in Lancashire. We fight with buttons on our foils, thanks to the Brooklands agreement.”

Rupert tried to look comprehending, but he could only associate motor-racing with Brooklands. “Still,” he said, “I don’t believe they are grateful. There’s that Bradshaw beast.”

“Ah!” said Philip, “Bradshaw! Bradshaw!” The name pricked him shrewdly. “But no,” he said, “he’s not a beast.”

“He’s Labor Member for Staithley,” said Rupert. “I see their gratitude less and less.”

“Well,” said his father, “we were speaking of tradition. The Bradshaws come into the Hepplestall tradition. A wastrel gang and queerly against us in every period. A Bradshaw was hanged for the murder of Reuben’s wife. There were Chartist Bradshaws, two turbulent brothers, in my grandfather’s day. In my day, Tom Bradshaw was strike leader here in the great strike of ’ninety-two.”

“And they sent him to Parliament for it,” said Rupert hotly.

“Tom’s not a bad fellow, Rupert. I admit he’s their masterpiece. The rest of the Bradshaws are work-shys and some of them are worse than that. But they do crop up as a traditional thorn in our flesh and I daresay you’ll have your battle with a Bradshaw. Nearly every Hepplestall has had, but if he’s no worse a chap than Tom, M. P., you’ll have a clean fighter against you. But there’s a more serious tradition than the Bradshaws, a fighting tradition, too, a Hepplestall against a Hepplestall, a son against a father.”

“Oh!” Rupert protested.

“Yes. I expect to have my fight with you. It’s the march of progress. Look at old Reuben there and Edward his son. Reuben was a fighter for steam when he was young. Other people thought steam visionary then if they didn’t think it flat blasphemy. But he grew old and he couldn’t rise to railways. Edward brought the railway to Hepplestall’s, right into the factory yard, in the teeth of Reuben’s opposition and when Reuben saw railway trains actually doing what Edward said they would do, carrying cotton in and goods out and coal out from the pit-mouth, he retired. He gave Edward best and went, and Edward lit the factory with gas, made here from his own coal, and Reuben prophesied fire and sudden death and the only death that came was his own.

“That portrait is of William, Edward’s son. Their fight was over the London warehouse. William did not see why we sold to London merchants who re-sold to shops; and William had his way, and later quarreled with his son Martin over so small a thing as the telegraph. That was before telephones, and you had an alphabetical switchboard and slowly spelt out sentences on it. William called it a toy, and Martin was right and saved thousands of valuable hours. But I had the honor of telling my father, who was Martin, that he had an intensive mind and that lighting the mills by electricity, and rebuilding on the all-window design to save artificial light and installing lifts and sprinklers (to keep the insurance low) were all very useful economies but they didn’t extend the trade of Hepplestall’s. I went round the world and I established branches in the East. I didn’t see why the Manchester shipping merchants should market Hepplestall’s Shirtings in Shanghai and Calcutta. My father told me I had bitten off more than I could chew, but he let me have the money to try with. Well, there’s your uncle Hubert in charge at Calcutta now, and your uncle Reuben Bleackley at Shanghai, you’ve cousins at Rio and Buenos Aires and Montreal and on the whole I can claim my victory. I wonder,” he looked quizzically at Rupert, “what your victory over me will be? To run our own line of steamers? To work the mills by electricity? I give you warning here and now that I’m against both. Oil—oil’s a possibility; but we needn’t go into those things now.

“I hope I shall never oppose you, sir,” said Rupert.

“Then you’ll be no true Hepplestall—and you are going to be. You’ll go through it as the rest of us went through it, and you’ll come out tried and true. I’ll tell you what I mean by going through it. That’s no figure of speech. We are practical men, we Hepplestalls, every man of us. We’ve diverse duties and responsibilities, but we’ve a common knowledge, and an exact one, of the processes of cotton manufacture. We all got it in the same way, and the only right way—not by theory, not by looking on, but by doing with our own hands whatever is done in these mills—or nearly everything. You’re going to be a carder and a spinner and a doubler and a weaver. You’re going to come into the place at six in the morning with the rest of the people and the only difference between you and them is that when you’ve learned a job you’ll be moved on to learn another. You’ll come to it from your university and you’ll hate it. You’ll hate it like hell, and it’ll last two years. Then you’ll have a year in Manchester and then you’ll go round the world to every branch of Hepplestalls. In about five years after you come here, you’ll begin to be fit to work with me, and if you don’t make a better Head than I am, you’ll disappoint me, Rupert.”

Rupert was conscious of mutinous impulses as his father forecasted the rigorous training he was expected to undergo. How cruel a mockery was that suave office of Sir Philip! And Sir Philip himself, and all the Hepplestalls—they had all submitted to the training. They had all been “through it.” And they called England a free country! Well, he, at any rate—

He felt his father’s hand upon his knee, and looked up from his meditations. “It is a trust, Rupert,” said Sir Philip.

Rupert began to hate that word and perhaps his suppressed rebellion hung out some signs, for Sir Philip added, almost, but not quite, as if he were making an appeal, “always the eldest son has been the big man of his time amongst the Hepplestalls. It hasn’t been position that’s made us; each eldest son has made himself, each has won out by merit, My brothers were a tough lot, but I’m the toughest. And you. You won’t spoil the record. You’ll be the big man, Rupert. And now we’ll go through the mill,” he went on briskly, giving Rupert no opportunity to reply.

Rupert was shown cotton from the mixing room where the bales of raw material were opened, through its processes of cleaning, combing, carding to the spinning-mill whence it emerged as yarn to go through warping and sizing to the weaving sheds and thence to the packing rooms where the pieces were made up and stamped for the home or the foreign markets. Hepplestall’s had their side-lines but principally they were concerned with the mass production of cotton shirtings and Rupert was given a kinematographic view of the making of a shirting till, stamped in blue with the world-famous “Anchor” brand, it was ready for the warehouse, which might be anywhere from Manchester to Valparaiso or Hongkong; and as they went through the rooms he was introduced to managers, to venerable overseers who had known his grandfather, fine loyalists who shook his hand as if he were indeed a prince, and everywhere he was conscious of eyes that bored into his back, envious, hostile sometimes, but mostly admiring and friendly. He was the heir.

He walked, literally, for miles amongst these men and women and these children (there were children still in the mills of Lancashire, “half-timers,” which meant that they went to the factory for half the day, and to school the other half, and much good school did them after that exhilarating morning!), and he bore himself without confessing openly his consciousness that he was not so much inspecting the factory as being inspected by it. All that he saw, he loathed, and he couldn’t rid his mind of the thought that he was condemned to hard labor in these surroundings. But there were mitigations.

“And,” said a white-haired overseer as he shook Rupert’s hand, “’appen we shall see you playing for Lanky-sheer one of these days.”

“You have ambitions for me,” he smiled back.

“Well, you’re on the road to it.”

That was the delightful thing, that they should know that he was on the road to it. They must be keenly interested to know so much when his place in the Harrow first eleven was only a prospect—as yet—a pretty secure prospect, but one of those intimate securities which were decidedly not published news. It was a reconciling touch, bracing him to keep up his gallant show as they made their progress, but neither this nor the self-respecting deference of the high-salaried, efficient managers resigned him to the price he was expected to pay for being Hepplestall. That dour apprenticeship, which Sir Philip had candidly prophesied he would “hate like hell,” daunted him; those five years out of his life before he “began to work.” It was a tradition of the service, was it? Then it was a bad tradition. He didn’t object to serve, but this was to make service into slavery.

Allowing for school and university, he wouldn’t come to it for another six years yet, and by then he ought to be better equipped for a rebellion. But—the infernal cunning of this sixteenth-birthday initiation—it would be too late then. From to-day, if he let the day pass without protest, he wore the chains of slavery, he was doomed, marked down for sacrifice, and he was so young! He resented the unfairness of his youth pitted in unequal conflict with his father.

“One last tradition of the Hepplestalls, Rupert,” Sir Philip said as they returned to his office, “though I expect you’re hating the word ‘tradition.’” Oh, did his father understand everything and forestall it? “The eldest sons have not come to it easily. Sometimes there’s been open refusal. There’ve been ugly rows. There’s always been a feeling on the son’s part that the terms of service were too harsh. Well, I have come to know that they are necessary terms. We are masters of men, and we gain mastery of ourselves in those days when we learn our trade by the side of the tradesmen. We cannot take this great place of ours lightly, not Hepplestall’s, not the heavy trust that is laid upon us. We cannot risk the failure of a Hepplestall through lack of knowledge of his trade or through personal indiscipline. Imagination, the gifts of leadership are things we cannot give you here; either you have them in you or you will never have them, and it is reasonable to think you have them. They have seemed to be the birthright of a Hepplestall. But we can train you to their use.

“There is that Japanese ideal of the Samurai. I don’t think that it is absent from our English life, but perhaps we have not been very explicit about our ideals. There’s money made here, and if I told some people that what actuates me is not money but the idea of service, I should not be believed. I should be told that I confused Mammon with God: but I am here to serve, and money is inescapable because money is the index of successful service in present day conditions. Service, not money, is the mainspring of the Hepplestalls, the service of England because it is the service of Lancashire. We lead—not exclusively but we are of the leaders—in Lancashire. We are keepers of the cotton trade, trustees of its efficiency, guarantors of its progress.

“I am earnest with you, Rupert. Probably I’m offending your sense of decent reticence. Ideals are things to be private about, but let us just for once take the wrappings off them and let us have a look at them.... Well, we’ve looked and we’ll hide them again, but we won’t forget they’re there. I suppose we keep a shop, but the soul of the shopkeepers isn’t in the cash-register.”

How could he reply to this that the training which had been good enough for his father and his uncles was not good enough for him? Somewhere, he felt certain there were flaws to be found and that Sir Philip was rather a special pleader than a candid truth-teller, but he impressed, and Rupert despised himself for remaining obstinately suspicious of his father’s sincerity.

“And you’re a Hepplestall. That is not to be questioned, is it, Rupert? In the present and in the future, in the small things and the large, that is not to be questioned.”

It was now or never for his protest. Mentally he wriggled like a kitten held under water by some callous child and as desperately. He would drown if he could not reach the aid of two life-buoys, courage to outface Sir Philip and wits to put words to his thoughts.

“No, sir, that is not to be questioned,” he heard himself, unexpectedly, say, and Sir Philip’s warm handshake sealed the bargain. He had not meant to say it; he did not mean to stand by what he had said, but his hand responded heartily to his father’s and his eye met Sir Philip’s gaze with the charming smile of frank, ingenuous youth.

He was thinking that six years were a long time and that there were men who had come to great honor after they had broken vows.

CHAPTER II—THE VOICE FROM THE STREET

THE room held a grand piano, a great fire and two men of fifty who were playing chess. The stout, bullet-headed man with the mustache which did not conceal the firmness of his mouth was Tom Bradshaw; the lean man with the goatee beard, who wore spectacles, was Walter Pate. Both were autocrats in their way. Tom ran the Spinners’ Union and was M. P. in his spare time, Walter ran music in Staithley Bridge and had no spare time except, on rare occasions, for chess.

Tom made a move. “That’s done you, you beggar,” he said, gleefully rising and filling a pipe.

Walter’s fine hand flickered uncertainly over the board. He saw defeat ahead. “If I weren’t a poor man, I’d have the law on you,” he said.

“You can’t play chess, Walter. It’s a question of brain.”

Pate shied the matches at him, and Tom sat at the piano and picked out a tune with one hand.

“Stop it!” cried Walter.

“On terms,” said Tom.

“I hate you,” said Walter. “Come away.”

“The terms are the Meistersinger,” said Tom.

“On a piano! You’re a Goth.”

“No. I’m paying you a compliment you deserve. Get at it.”

Walter got.

Young Rupert in his Slough of Despond had been too busy with himself to wonder why Sir Philip had corrected him when he described Tom Bradshaw as a “beast.”

At his mother’s knee, Tom, like all the Bradshaws of the seed of John, had lisped, “’A ’ate th’ ’epplestalls,” and, when he was a little older, had learned that he hated them “Because they’re dirty thieves. Because yon mills o’ theirn are ourn by rights.” This was not socialism and had nothing to do with the doctrine that all property is theft; it was the family superstition of the Bradshaws, and they believed it as the first article of their faith.

They believed it blindly and perhaps none of them were eager to have their eyes opened because other people’s eyes might have been opened at the same time and, as things usefully were, it was romantic to be the wronged heirs to Hepplestall’s. It excused so much, it invited compassion for the victims of injustice, it extorted charity for these martyrs to foul play. Details were conspicuously lacking, but the legend had life and won sympathy for the view the Bradshaws took of themselves—that they couldn’t be expected to go to work in the mills of the usurping Hepplestalls. As a family, they were professional cadgers whose stock-in-trade was their legend, and Staithley held enough people who were credulous or who were “agin the government” on principle (whether they took the Bradshaw claim seriously or not) to make the legend a profitable asset. Repetition is infallible, as the advertiser knows, and these ragged Ortons of the Staithley slums had plenty of adherents.

There were several scores of ways of earning a livelihood in Staithley without working at Hepplestall’s, but the average Bradshaw pretended that as a natural pride prevented him from serving the despoiler, he was barred from work entirety, though he did not object to his children working for him, and Tom began as a half-timer in the mills. A bad time he had of it too at first. He did not say it for himself, but the other half-timers said it for him: he was the “lad as owned Hepplestall’s,” and if there was any dirty work going, the owner did it, nursing anger against his family and coming young to a judicious opinion of their pretensions.

He had his handicap in life, but soon gave proof that if he was a Bradshaw it was an accident which other people would be wise to forget, fighting his way from the status of a butt till he was cock of the walk amongst the half-timers. There is much to be said for a wiry physique as the basis of success, but Tom shed blood and bruised like any other boy and the incidents of his battling career amongst the half-timers at Hepplestall’s did nothing to disturb that first lesson of his life, “’A ’ate th’ ’epple-stalls.”

Hatred is a motive, like any other, and a strong one. It resulted in Tom’s conceiving the ambition, while he was a “little piecer,” that he would some day be secretary of the Spinners’ Union and in that office would lead labor against the Hepplestalls. He was his own man now, living not at home but in lodgings, hardily keeping himself on the wages of a “little piecer” of eighteen, reading the Clarion, and presently startling a Sunday School debating society with the assertion that he read Marx and Engels in the original. It was not long after that astonishing revelation of his secret studies that he became unofficial assistant to the local secretary of the spinners, and might regard himself as launched on a career which was to take him in 1906 to the House of Commons.

An election incident accounted chiefly for Sir Philip’s good opinion of Tom Bradshaw. Tom might forget the legend, but the legend could not forget a candidate, and it was thrown into the cockpit by some zealous supporter who imagined that Tom would ride that romantic horse and win in a canter. Tom thought otherwise; a story obscurely propagated amongst Staithley’s tender-hearted Samaritans was one thing, emerging into the fierce light which beats upon a candidate it was another. He was out to win on the merits of his case, not by means of a sentimental appeal which, anyhow, might be a boomerang if the other side took the matter up with the concurrence of the Hepplestalls.

But it was not that afterthought, it was purely his resolution that the issues should not be confused, that took him straight to Sir Philip. Sir Philip looked a question at him.

“It might be Union business,” said Tom, “but it isn’t. It’s the election and I’m here, which is the other camp, to make you an appeal. There’s a thing being said in Staithley that touches you and me. I haven’t said it, but it was said by folk that thought they spoke on my behalf. You’ll have heard tell of it?”

“I’ve heard,” said Sir Philip.

“Well,” said Tom, “there’s always a lot of rubbish shot at elections, but the less the better. Will you help me to get rid of this particular load of rubbish? Will you help me to tell the truth?”

“Is there question of the truth?”

“Not in my mind. But in theirs, there is. They believed what they said of you and me.” And he went on to tell Sir Philip of the belief of the Bradshaws and of its acceptance by others. “You can put it that it’s never been an easy thing for me to be a Bradshaw in Staithley. We’re known as the Begging Bradshaws and it’s been a load I’ve had to carry that I’m one of them by birth. They’ve begged on the strength of this story. But it’s only hurt me up to now. It’s going to hurt others to-day, it’s going to hurt my cause and I’m here not to apologize for folks that have done no more than said what they believe: I’m here to ask if you will join with me in publishing the truth.”

“Shall I tell you the only fact known to me which may have bearing on your family’s belief, Mr. Bradshaw?”

“I wish you would. That there’s a fact of any sort behind it is news to me.”

“A man called Bradshaw was hanged for the murder of an ancestress of mine. It is possible you are descended from this man.”

“By gum!” said Tom. “That’s an ugly factor. I didn’t know I was in for one like that when I came here asking you to help me with the truth. Well, we’ll publish it. It’ll not help me, but I’m for the truth whether it’s for me or against me.”

Sir Philip crossed the room to him. “Shake hands, Mr. Bradshaw,” he said. “We’ll tell the truth in this together, but at the moment we’ve not gone very far. Your opinion of your family in general makes you rather too ready to believe that they are in fact the descendants of this murderer.”

“Thank you, Sir Philip,” said Tom. “But I’m not doubting it.”

“What we can do, at any rate, is to go together through the records of the firm. Or I will employ some one who is accustomed to research and we will issue his report. My cupboard may have a skeleton in it, but it is open to you to investigate.”

Tom Bradshaw sweated hard. “It’s making a mountain out of a mole hill,” he said. He had never, since the half-timers taught him commonsense, had anything but contempt for the legend of the Bradshaws; at every stage of his upward path it had embarrassed him, but never had he felt before to-day that it pursued him with such poisonous malignity. He had no hope that any point favoring the Bradshaws would emerge from an examination of the records; it would be a fair examination of dispassionate title deeds and its fairness would be the more damaging. And he had pleaded for the truth, he had put this rapier into his political opponents’ hands! The Labor candidate was the descendant of a murderer!

“Thank you again,” he said.

“Oh, as to that,” said Sir Philip, “the existence of this belief interests me. If our searcher finds any grounds for it here or in parish registers or elsewhere, I shall of course acknowledge them. But the odds are that the legend springs from a perverted view of the murder of which I have told you, and if that is so, I fear the disclosure will hardly profit you.”

“It won’t,” said Tom gloomily. “But it’ll shut their silly mouths.” If, he reflected, it did not open them in full cry on a new and odious scent.

“So we go on with it?”

“We go on.”

“May I say this, Mr. Bradshaw? That your attitude to this affair increases an admiration of you which was considerable before? If you beat us in this election we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that we are beaten by a man.” Which was handsome, seeing that there was the stuff of libel in the statements of Tom’s well-meaning supporter. Amenities, but Tom did not doubt their sincerity, and his sentiment of personal hatred, already weakened by contact with the Hepplestalls in his Union affairs, merged into his general and tolerantly professional opposition to capitalists.

In the event, what was issued was a statement simply denying, on the authority of a historian, of Sir Philip and of Tom, that the claim made by the Bradshaw family, and repeated during the election, had any foundation whatsoever, and whether the denial had effect or not, it cannot have made much difference to Tom’s candidature. He had a clear two thousand majority over both Liberal and Unionist opponents, and had held the seat ever since, while the legend of the Bradshaws, like any lie that gets a long start of the truth, flourished as impudently as ever. In Bradshaw opinion, Tom Bradshaw had been bought, and they found fresh evidence for this view whenever Tom’s matured attitude toward the Masters’ Federation earned for him the disapproval of extremists. They did not cease to teach their children that if every one had their own, Hepplestall’s was Bradshaws’. “A gang of wastrels,” Sir Philip had called them to Rupert, and could have quoted chapter and verse for his opinion. As he read the history dredged by his searcher, the Bradshaws began with John, a murderer, and ended in a family of beggars; but he excepted Tom. When the Union spoke to him through Tom, there was no bitterness between them; there was a meeting on equal terms between two men who respected each other. Sir Philip recalled the Bradshaws as they figured in his historian’s report, and he recalled the Hepplestalls. “Dying fires,” he thought; Tom Bradshaw was eminently the reasonable negotiator.

Walter Pate crashed out the final chords.

“Aye,” said Tom, “aye. A grand lad, Wagner. And when I hear you play him, it’s a comfort to know I can wipe the floor with you at chess.” Which Mr. Pate accepted as a merited salute to a brilliant performance, and unscrewed the stopper from a bottle of beer. A moment later Tom stared at his friend in blank amazement; he was staggered to see Pate raise the glass to his lips and put it down again.

“Man, are you ill?” he cried. The beer foamed assuringly, but, to be on the safe side, Tom tasted it. “The beer’s fine, what’s to do?”

“Shut up, you slave to alcohol. Shut up and listen.”

Walter opened the window, the cold night air blew in and with it came from the street the strains of “Lead Kindly Light,” sung in a fresh girlish voice.

Fires are fires in Staithley, as Tom was in the habit of telling Londoners who put coal by the dainty shovelful into a doll’s house grate, and if he was commanded to shut up he could do it, but the open window was a persecution. There was a silent pantomime of two elderly gentlemen one of whom struggled to close a window, the other to keep it open, then Tom turned to the defeated Walter with a “What the hangment’s come over you?”

“Have you no soul at all, Tom? Couldn’t you hear her?”

“I heard a street-singer.”

“You heard a class voice, and you’re going to hear it again.” Mr. Pate was at the window.

“Then bring her in,” said Tom. “I’ll freeze for no fad of yours. A class voice in Staithley streets!”

“A capacity to play chess is a limiting thing,” was fired at him as Mr. Pate left the room. Tom took an amicable revenge by emptying both glasses of beer. “I’ve cubic capacity, choose how,” he said, indicating their emptiness as Walter returned with the girl who had been singing.

“Get warm,” said Walter to her. “Then we’ll have a look at you.”

She had, clearly, the habit of taking things as they came, and went to the fire with as little outward emotion as she had shown when Walter pounced upon her in the street. She accepted warmth, this strange, queerly luxurious room, these two men in it, as she would have accepted the blow which Walter’s upraised hand and voice had seemed to presage in the street—with a fatalism full of pitiable implications.

She was of any age, beyond first childhood, that went with flat-chested immaturity; she was dirty beyond reason, but she had beauty that shone through her gamin disorder like the moon through storm-tossed cloud. Her tangled hair was dark auburn, her eyes were hazel and as the fire’s heat soaked into her a warm flush spread over her pinched face like sunshine after rain on ripening corn.

“Can you sing anything besides ‘Lead Kindly Light?’” asked Walter.

“Of course she can’t,” said Tom. “It’s the whole of the beggar’s opera.” He was sore about that opened window and resented this girl who had disturbed a musical evening. He had appetite for more than the “Meister-singer,” and seemed likely, through the intruder, to go unsatisfied.

She looked pertly at Tom. “’A can, then,” she said. “Lots more, but,” her eyes strayed round the room, “’a dunno as you’d fancy ’em.”

“Go on,” said Walter. “There’ll be supper afterwards.”

“Crikey,” she said, and sang till he stopped her, which was very soon. They had a taste in the meaner public-houses of Staithley for the sort of song which it is libelous to term Rabelaisian. Her song, if she did not know the meaning of its words, was a violent assault upon decency; if she did know—and her hesitation had suggested that she did—it was precocious outrage.

“Stop it,” cried Walter, horrified.

Tom spat into the fire. “My constituents!” he groaned. “Walter, it’s a queasy thought.”

“I thought you favored education,” said Walter.

“I do, but—”

“Go on favoring it. It’s a growing child.”

“Thanks,” said Tom gratefully. “You’re right. This is foul-tasting tonic, but it’s good to be reminded how far we haven’t traveled yet.”

Walter’s hand strayed gently to his friend’s shoulder.

“Short fights aren’t interesting,” he said, and turned to the girl, whose patient aloofness through this little conversation, so unintelligible to her, was, again, revealing.

“Go back to the hymn,” he said.

“A hymn?” The word had no meaning for her.

“‘Lead Kindly Light,’” he explained.

“Oh, that,” she said, and sang it through without interruption. It was street singing, adapted to penetrate through the closed windows of Staithley and by sheer shrillness to wring the withers of the charitable. Tom Bradshaw, amateur of music, found nothing in this insistent volume of song to account for Walter Pate’s interest; she made, tunefully, a great noise in a little room, and he wished that Walter would stop her, though not for the same reason as before. But Walter did not stop her, he listened and he watched with acute absorption and when she had finished, “again,” he said, gesturing Tom back into his chair with a menacing fist.

“It goes through me like a dentist’s file in a hollow tooth,” Tom protested.

“You fool,” said Mr. Pate pityingly, and, to the girl, “Sing.”

“Now,” he said when she had ended, “I don’t say art. Art’s the unguessable. I say voice and I say lungs. I say my name’s Walter Pate and I know. Give me two years on her and you’ll know too. If you’d like me to tell you who’ll sing soprano when the Choral Society do the ‘Messiah’ at Christmas of next year, it’s that girl.”

“’Oo are you gettin’ at?” she asked.

“I’m getting at you, getting at you with the best voice-producing system in the North of England—Walter Pate’s. And when I’ve finished with you, you’ll be—well, you won’t be singing in the street.”

“Well, I can’t see it, Walter,” said Tom.

“You’ve the wrong letters after your name to see it,” said Walter, “but I’ve made a find to-night, and I’m gambling two years’ hard work on the find’s being something that will make the musical world sit up. Buy a cheap brooch and it’s tin washed with gold. That voice is the other way round. It’s tin on top and gold beneath and I’m going digging for the gold.” Not, he might have added, because gold has value in the market. If Walter Pate had discovered a voice which, under training, was to become the pride of Staithley, that was all he wanted; he wouldn’t hide under a bushel his light as the discoverer and the instructor, but all he wanted else was proof in support of his often expressed opinion that musically Staithley led Lancashire (the rest of the world didn’t matter) and he thought he had found his proof in—he turned to the girl. “You haven’t told us your name,” he said.

“Mary Ellen Bradshaw,” she told him, and “Lord!” said Tom. “You’ll waste your time.”

“I shan’t,” said Walter. “There’s grit amongst that tribe. You’re here to prove it.”

“Where do you live?” Tom asked her.

“Brick-yards, mostly,” she said. “I’m good at dodging bobbies.” There is warm sleeping by the kilns, and the police know it.

“Got any parents, Mary Ellen?”

“’A dunno. They was there last time ’A went to Jackman’s Buildings. There weren’t no baggin’ there, so ’a ’opped it. That’s a long time sin’.”

“This gentleman is called Bradshaw,” said Walter, to Tom’s annoyance.

“Is ’e?” she said. “’A ’ate th’ ’epplestalls.” It might have been a password, and Tom thought she had the intention, in speaking it, to curry favor with a rich relation, but as it happened Mary Ellen was sincere. She did not say she hated the Hepplestalls to please Tom Bradshaw. She said it because it was true.

Tom certainly wasn’t pleased. He reached for his hat. “I’m off out of this,” he said, and when Walter looked at him with surprise, “Man,” he said, “it’s beyond all to find that old ghost jibbering at me when I’ve sweated blood to lay it. You do not hate the Hepplestalls,” he roared at Mary Ellen. “They’re decent folk and you’re mud.”

“Aye,” she said submissively. That she was mud, at any rate, was not news to her.

“Aye, what?”

“What yo’ said.”

“Come,” said Walter. “There’s tractability.”

“I call it cunning. Beggar’s cunning. She’s a Bradshaw.”

“Not to me. She’s a Voice, and, by the Lord, I’ll train her how to use it.”

“What are you going to do, Walter?” Tom put his hat down, feeling that it was ungenerous to leave his friend in the grip of a mistaken impulse.

“Steal her. Well, no. That’s not to do; it’s done. She’s here. Mary Ellen, you’re going to sleep in a bed to-night, with sheets and a striped quilt on it like you see in the windows of the Co-op.”

“Oo—er,” said Mary Ellen.

“But,” said Walter, “you’re going to be washed first. The water won’t be cold. It’ll be warm, and it’ll be in a bath. You’ve heard of baths?”

She nodded. “Aye,” she said, “you ’ave ’em when you go to quod.”

Tom turned suddenly away and when he looked round there were marks of suffering on his face. “I’ve been living too soft, Walter,” he said. “I’ve been forgetting.”

“No,” said Walter, “your whole life is remembering. Education, Tom. Isn’t that the sovereign remedy?”

“I’m believing in nothing just now,” said Tom Bradshaw.

“Then I am. I’m believing in the voice of Mary Ellen and I’m going to educate it.”

“Will it ’urt?” asked Mary Ellen.

“No,” said Tom, “but I will if you’re not grateful to Mr. Pate. I’ll break your neck.”

Hepplestall's

HEPPLESTALL’S

By Harold Brighouse

New York: Robert M. McBride & Company

1922

FOREWORD

HEPPLESTALL’S

PART I

CHAPTER I—REUBEN’S SEAL

CHAPTER II—SMOKED HERRING

CHAPTER III—PHOEBE BRADSHAW

CHAPTER IV—ALMACK’S CLUB

CHAPTER V—SIR HARRY WOOS

CHAPTER VI—THE MAN WHO WON

CHAPTER VII—THE EARLY LIFE OF JOHN BRADSHAW

CHAPTER VIII—THE LONELY MAN

CHAPTER IX—THE SPY

CHAPTER X—DOROTHY’S MOMENT

CHAPTER XI—THE HATE OF THE HEPPLESTALLS

PART II

CHAPTER I—THE SERVICE

CHAPTER II—THE VOICE FROM THE STREET