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.