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 He had seen visions of a great progress when water-power superseded arm-power, but his vision stopped short of steam.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.
CHAPTER III—PHOEBE BRADSHAW
IF Hepplestall calculated much, which is a damnable vice in youth, it is possibly some consolation to know that he miscalculated the effect upon the county of his plunge, for at this stage his eclipse was total and he had not anticipated that. They did not forget Bantison in remembering the rising walls of his factory, and still less in the thought that Reuben who had sat at their tables was working with his hands as a spinner. They added offense to offense; if he was seen he was cut; and their chatter reached him even at Bradshaw’s where, as he knew very well, gentry talk must be loud indeed to penetrate.
He had overestimated his strength to resist public opinion. He was a proud man and he was outcast and, set himself as he did with ferocious energy to his task, he fell short of forgetfulness. Dorothy Verners was at the end of a stony, tortuous road; it would be, at the best, a long time before he reached the end of that road and the chances that she would still be there, that Whitworth, carelessly secure as he was, would wait long enough to leave her there for Hepplestall, seemed to him, in these days of despondency, too remote for reason. He would never bridge the gulf in time and his patience ebbed away. Not that he ever doubted that, in the end, in money, position, reputation, he would outdistance Whitworth, but Dorothy Verners, as a symbol of his ascendancy, was dwindling to the diminished status of an ambition now seen to be too sanguine. He had not realized how much he would be irked by the contempt of the county. If, at the end of all, he had them at his feet! Aye, so he would, but wouldn’t it be more humbling for them if they came licking, along with his, the feet of a wife of his who was not of their order? Wouldn’t he so triumph the more exultantly? He argued the case against his first intentions, seeking justification for falling honestly in love with Phoebe Bradshaw.
Honest love was, at first, very far from his purpose. A gentleman didn’t seduce his host’s daughter, but that rule of conduct postulated that the host be equally a gentleman and Bradshaw seemed, when Reuben came, un-fathomably his inferior, and Bradshaw’s daughter, for all her airs, the sort of flower hung by the roadside to be plucked by any grand seigneur. Nor did he ever, at the back of his mind, move far from that attitude. His tolerant association with these people was an immense condescension, justified only by ulterior purpose. But if marriage with Phoebe fitted his purpose, as in his first reaction from the disdain of the county it seemed to do, why, then, though he never thought of himself as belonging with the manufacturers, it might in the long run prove a famous score against the county.