“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?”