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.”