But he couldn’t leave it at that: he couldn’t be light and accept lightness about steam. “A foible is a careless thing,” he said. “I am passionate about my steam-engines.”
“Indeed, you have a notable great place up there,” said Luke.
“It will be greater,” said Reuben. “I am to grow and it with me.” Then some sense either that he was knocking at an open door or merely of the convenances made him add, “My hobby-horse is bolting with me, but I felt a need to be definite.”
He was not, he meant, to be bribed out of his manufacturing by being countenanced. He wanted Dorothy, but he wanted, too, his leadership in cotton. And Dorothy was contrasting this man’s passion with Sir Harry’s, which she took justifiably, but not quite justly, to be liquor, while steam seemed romantically daring and mysterious. She knew what drink did to a man and she did not know what steam was to do. Reuben seemed to her a virile person; she was falling in love with him.
Mrs. Verners, inwardly one mark of interrogation, was taking her cue from the others who so amazingly welcomed a prodigal, swallowing a pill and hiding her judgment of its flavor behind a civil smile. “Does Mr. Hepplestall know that we have been to London?” she asked.
Luke felt precipices gape for him; this was the road to revelations of his motives, but Reuben turned it to a harmless by-path. “So I have heard,” he said. “I was promised news of the fashions.” And fashions, and the opinions of Mrs. Verners on fashions, gently nursed to its placid end a call of which Luke had expected nothing short of catastrophe. Reuben was sedulously attentive to Mrs. Verners, wonderfully in agreement with her views, and Luke, returning from seeing him to his horse, had the unhoped for satisfaction of hearing her say, “What a pleasant young man Mr. Hepplestall is, after all.”
He took time by the forelock then. “His enterprise,” he said, “is the talk of the London clubs. We have not been seeing what lies beneath our noses. They think much of Hepplestall in London. They watch him with approval.”
“I confess I like the way his hair grows,” said Mrs. Verners, and Dorothy said nothing.
While as to Reuben, there is only one word for the mood in which he rode home—that it was religious. Sincerely and reverently, he thanked his God for Dorothy Verners, and to the end he kept her in his mind as one who came to him from God. A miracle had happened—Luke was God’s instrument bringing him to that drawing-room where Dorothy was—and Reuben had a simple and a lasting faith in it.
Not that in the lump it softened him, not that he wasn’t all the same a devil-worshiper of ambition and greed and hatred, for he was all these things, besides being the humbly grateful man for whom God wrought the miracle of Dorothy Verners. She was on one side, in her place apart, and the rest was as it had been.