Hepplestall's

by Harold Brighouse

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.