“I am to go to the workhouse. Is not that enough? I to that place and his children with me, John to—to the gallows, and why? Why? Because through all these years I have given you a gift. The gift of my silence. You are going to hang my son because I did not tell him he was your son. You could save him and you don’t because he did not know. Reuben, is there no mercy in you?” There was none. John had killed Dorothy. “Then, if I shriek the truth aloud? If I cry out now so that your clerks can hear me, that John is your son? If—”
“It would make this difference, Phoebe. You would go to the madhouse, instead of to the workhouse. In the one you would be alone. In the other you would sometimes see John’s brats.” He rang the hand-bell on his desk.
“And teach them,” she said, “teach them to speak their first words, ‘I hate the Hepplestalls.’”
Perhaps he heard her through the sound of the bell, perhaps not. A well-drilled clerk came promptly in upon his summons. “This woman is to go at once to the workhouse, with two children,” he said. “If there are forms to go through refer the officials to me.”
In the factory they called him “Master.” He was master of them all. She did not doubt it and she went.
Reuben finished reading his letters before he went home to breakfast. He read attentively, doing accustomed things in his accustomed way because it seemed that only so could he drug himself to forgetfulness of Dorothy’s death, then gravely, with thoughts held firmly on business affairs, he mounted his horse to where skilled hands had made death’s aftermath a. gracious thing.
Edward had spoken to his brothers. “Give me five minutes alone with Father when he comes in,” he said. It seemed to him this morning that once, a prodigious while ago, he had been fatuously young and either he had quarreled with his father or had come near to quarreling—he couldn’t be expected to remember which across so long a time as the night he had passed since then—about so obvious a certainty as his going into the factory. Dorothy, in that moment when she held their hands together, had made him see so clearly what he had to do. A moment of reconcilement and of clarification, when she had indicated her last wish. It was a law, indeed, and sweetly sane. “Why, of course, Mother,” he had been telling her through the night, “Father and I must stand together now.” He told, and she could not reply. She could not tell him how grotesquely he misinterpreted her moment.
He met Reuben at the door. “Father,” he said, “there is something you must let me say at once. My mother joined our hands last night. May we forget what passed between us earlier? May we remember only that she joined our hands last night, and that they will remain joined?”
“I hope they will,” said Reuben, not quite certain of him yet.
“The man who killed her came from the factory. I should like your permission to omit my last term at Oxford. I want very deeply to begin immediately at the factory.” His voice rose uncontrollably. “‘Drive or be driven,’ sir, you said the other day. And by God, I’ll drive. I’ll drive. That blackguard came from there.”