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.