It may be that his conduct to Bradshaw resulted from this religious mood. Religion is associated with the idea of sacrifice and if the suffering was likely to be Peter’s rather than Reuben’s, Reuben sacrificed, at least, the contemptuous kindliness he felt towards Peter. His first action was to set in motion against Bradshaw the machinery by which he had crushed other small manufacturers out of trade.
In those days, the power-loom had not become a serious competitor of the hand-loom and the hand-weavers chiefly worked looms standing in sheds attached to their cottages or (for humidity’s sake, not health’s) in a cellar below them; but they used by now power-spun yarn which was issued to them by the manufacturers. Reuben had permitted Peter to go on spinning in his factory: he now sent round to the weavers the message that Peter’s yarn was taboo and that if they dealt with Peter they would never deal with Hepplestall. It was enough: the weavers were implicitly Reuben’s thralls, for without his yarn they could no longer rely on supplies at all. Peter was doomed. Reuben had not even, as had been necessary at first, to go through the process of undercutting his prices; he had only to tell the weavers that Peter was banned and they had no alternative but to obey.
So far Peter had been allowed, by exception, to remain in being as a factory-owner, which placed him on a sort of equality with Reuben, as a little, very little brother, and now brotherliness between a Bradshaw and the man on whom Dorothy Verners smiled was a solecism. Reuben could not dictate in other districts—yet—but, in his own, there were to be no people of Bradshaw’s caliber able to say of themselves that they, like Hepplestall, had factories. There would be consequences for Phoebe. He did not give them a second thought. They were what followed inevitably from the placing of Phoebe by Dorothy Verners, they were neither right nor wrong, just nor unjust, they had to be—because of what Dorothy had said when she made, lightly, a dialectical score off Reuben.
He left that fish to fry and went (miraculously directed) to dine with the Verners. He dined more than once with the Verners, he was made to feel that he was at home in the Verners house, so that one suave summer evening, after he had had a pleasantly formal and highly satisfactory little tête-à-tête with Luke as they sat together at their wine, he led Dorothy through the great window on to the lawn and found an arbor in a shrubbery. There was no question of her willingness, and it hardly surprised him that there should be none, for he was growing accustomed to his miracle as one grows accustomed to anything.
“Still, there is a thing which puzzles me,” he said. “You were in London. Did you see Sir Harry Whitworth there?”
Dorothy made a hole in the gravel with her toe, and the hole seemed to interest her gravely. Then she looked up slowly and met Reuben’s eye. “Sir Harry Whitworth is nothing to me,” she said.
And he supposed Sir Harry to have proposed and to have been refused, which was broad truth if it wasn’t literal fact.
Refused Sir Harry? And why? For him! The miracle increased.
“This is the crowning day of my life,” he said. “It is a day for which I lived in hope. I saw this day, I saw you like golden sun on a far horizon. That the day has come so soon is miracle.” He took her hand. “Dorothy Verners, will you marry a manufacturer?”
“I will marry you, Reuben,” she said, and his kiss was sacramental.