“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.”