A week and a day went by after the banker’s return and there was no run
upon the bank. But afar off, in London and Manchester and Liverpool,
and even in Birmingham, there were shocks and upheavals, failures and
talk of failures, fear in high places, ruin in low. For there was no
doubt about the crisis now. The wheels of trade, which had for some
time been running sluggishly, stopped. It was impossible to sell goods,
for the prudent and foreseeing had already flung their products upon
the market, and glutted it, and later, others had come in and, forced
to find money, had sold down and down, procuring cash at any sacrifice.
Now it was impossible to sell at all. Men with the shelves of their
warehouses loaded with goods, men whose names in ordinary times were
good for thousands, could not find money to meet their trade bills, to
pay their wages, to discharge their household accounts.
And it was still less possible to sell shares, for shares, even sound
shares, had on a sudden become waste paper. The bubble companies,
created during the frenzy of the past two years, were bursting on every
side, and the public, unable to discriminate, no longer put faith in
anything. Rudely awakened, they opened their eyes to reality. They saw
that they had dreamed, and been helped to dream. They discovered that
skates and warming pans were in no great request in the tropics, and
could not be exported thither at a profit of five hundred per cent.
They saw that churns and milkmaids, freighted to lands where the cattle
ran wild on the pampas and oil was preferred to butter, were no certain
basis on which to build a fortune. Their visions of South American
argosies melted into thin air. The silver from La Plata which they had
pictured as entering the mouth of the Thames, or at worst as within
sight from the Lizard, was discovered to be reposing in the darkness of
unopened seams. The pearling ships were yet to build, the divers to
teach, and, for the diamonds of the Brazils which this man or that man
had seen lying in skin packages at the door of the Bank of England,
they now twinkled in a cold and distant heaven, as unapproachable as
the Seven Stars of Orion. The canals existed on paper, the railways
were in the air, the harbors could not be found even on the map.
The shares of companies which had passed from hand to hand at fourfold
and tenfold their face value fell with appalling rapidity. They fell
and fell until they were in many cases worth no more than the paper on
which they were printed. And the bursting of these shams, which had
never owned the smallest chance of success, brought about the fall of
ventures better founded. The good suffered with the bad. Presently no
man would buy a share, no man would look at a share, no bank advance on
its security. Men saw their fortunes melt day by day as snow melts
under an April sun. They saw themselves stripped, within a few weeks or
even days, of wealth, of a competence, in too many cases of their all.
And the ruin was widespread. It reached many a man who had never
gambled or speculated. Business runs on the wheels of credit, and those
wheels are connected by a million unseen cogs. Let one wheel stop and
it is impossible to say where the stoppage will cease, or how many will
be affected by it. So it was now. The honest tradesman and the
manufacturer, striving to leave a competence to a family nurtured in
comfort, were involved in one common ruin with the spendthrift and the
speculator. The credit of all was suspect; from all alike the sources
of accommodation were cut off. Each in his turn involved his neighbor,
and brought him down.
There was a great panic. The centres of commerce and trade were
convulsed. The kings of finance feared for themselves and closed their
pockets. The Bank of England would help no one. Men who had never
sought aid before, men who had held their heads high, waited, vain
petitioners, at its doors.
Fortunately for Ovington’s, Aldersbury lay at some distance from the
centres of disturbance, and for a time, though the storm grumbled and
crackled on the horizon, the town remained calm. But it was such a calm
as holds the tropic seas in a breathless grip, before the typhoon,
breaking from the black canopy overhead, whirls the doomed bark away,
as a leaf is swept before our temperate blasts. Throughout those six
days, though little happened, anything, it was felt, might happen. The
arrival of every coach was a thing to listen for, the opening of every
mail-bag a terror, the presentation of every bill a pang, the payment
of every note a thing at which to wince; while the sense of danger,
borne like some infection on the air, spread mysteriously from town to
village, and village to hamlet, to penetrate at last wherever one man
depended on another for profit or for subsistence. And that was
everywhere.
A storm impended, and no man knew where it would break, or on whom it
would fall. Each looked in his neighbor’s face and, seeing his fear
reflected, wondered, and perhaps suspected. If so-and-so failed, would
not such-an-one be in trouble? And if such-an-one “went,” what of
Blank—with whom he himself had business?
The feeling which prevailed did not in the main go beyond uneasiness
and suspicion. But, in quarters where the facts were known and the
peril was clearly discerned, these days of waiting were days—nay, every
day was a week—of the most poignant anxiety. In banks, where those
behind the scenes knew that not only their own stability and their own
fortunes were at stake, but that if they failed there would be
lamentation in a score of villages and loss in a hundred homes,
endurance was strained to the breaking point. To show a cheerful face
to customers, to chat over the counter with an easy air, to smile on a
visitor who might be bringing in the bowstring, to listen unmoved to
the murmur in the street that might presage bad news—these things made
demands on nerve and patience which could not be met without distress.
And every hour that passed, every post that came in, added to the
strain.
Under this burden Ovington’s bearing was beyond praise. The work of his
life—and he was over-old to begin it again—was in danger, and doubtless
he thought of his daughter and his son. But he never faltered. He had,
it is true, to support him the sense of responsibility, which steels
the heart of the born leader, even as it turns to water that of the
pretender; he knew, and doubtless he was strengthened by the knowledge,
that all depended on him, on his calmness, his judgment, his resources;
that all looked to him for guidance and encouragement, watched his
face, and marked his demeanor.
But even so, he was the admiration of those in the secret. Not even
Napoleon, supping amid his marshals, and turning over to sleep beside
the watch-fire on the night before a battle, was more wonderful. His
son swore fealty to him a dozen times a day. Rodd, who had received his
money in silence, and now stood to lose no more than his place,
followed him with worshipping eyes and, perhaps, an easier mind. The
clerks, who perforce had gained some inkling of the position, were
relieved by his calmness, and spread abroad the confidence that they
drew from him. Even Arthur, who bore the trial less well, admired his
leader, suspected at times that he had some secret hope or some
undisclosed resources, and more than once suffered himself to be
plucked from depression by his example.
The truth was that while financial ability was common to both, their
training had been different. The elder man had been always successful,
but he had been forced to strive and struggle; he had climbed but
slowly at the start, and there had been more than one epoch in his
career when he had stood face to face with defeat. He had won through,
but he had never shut his eyes to the possibility of failure, or to the
fact that in a business, which in those days witnessed every twenty
years a disastrous upheaval, no man could count on, though with
prudence he might anticipate, a lasting success. He had accepted his
profession with its drawbacks as well as its advantages. He had not
closed his eyes to its risks. He had viewed it whole.
Arthur, on the other hand, plunging into it with avidity at a time when
all smiled and the sky was cloudless, had supposed that if he were once
admitted to the bank his fortune was made, and his future secured. He
knew indeed, and if challenged he would have owned, that banking was a
precarious enterprise; that banks had broken. He knew that many had
closed their doors in ’16, still more on one black day in ’93. He was
aware that in the last forty years scores of bankers had failed, that
some had taken their own lives, that one at least had suffered the last
penalty of the law. But he had taken these things to be
exceptions—things which might, indeed, recur, but not within his
experience—just as in our day, though railway accidents are not
uncommon, no man for that reason refrains from travelling.
At any rate the thought of failure had not entered into Arthur’s mind,
and mainly for this reason he, who in fair weather had been most
confident and whose ability had shone most brightly, now cut an
indifferent figure. It was not that his talent or his judgment failed;
in these he still threw Clement and Rodd into the shade. But the risk,
suddenly disclosed, was too much for him. It depressed him. He grew
crabbed and soured, his temper flashing out on small provocation. He
sneered at Rodd, he snubbed the clerks. When it was necessary to refuse
a request for credit—and the necessity arose a dozen times a day—his
manner lacked the suavity that makes the best of a bad thing.
In very truth they were trying times. Men who had bought shares through
Ovington’s, and might have sold them at a profit but had not, could not
understand why the bank would not now advance money on the security of
the shares, would not even pay calls on them, and had only advice, and
that unpalatable, at their service. They came to the parlor and argued,
pleaded, threatened, stormed. They would close their accounts, they
would remove them to Dean’s, they would publish the treatment that they
had received! Again, there were those who had bought railway shares,
which were now at a considerable discount and looked like falling
farther; the bank had issued them—they looked to the bank to take them
off their hands. More trying still were the applications of those who,
suddenly pressed for money, came, pallid and wiping their foreheads
with bandanna handkerchiefs, to plead desperately for a small
overdraft, for twenty, forty, seventy pounds—just enough to pay the
weekly wage-bill, or to meet their household outgoings, or to settle
with some pressing creditor. For all creditors were now pressing. No
man gave time, no man trusted another, and for those in the bank the
question was, How long would they trust Ovington’s? For every man who
left the doors of the bank after a futile visit, every man who went
away with his request declined, became a potential enemy, whose
complaint or chance word might breed suspicion.
“Still, every day is a day gained,” the banker said as he dropped his
mask on the Friday afternoon and sank wearily into a chair. It was
closing time, and the clerks could be heard moving in the outer room,
putting away books, counting the cash, locking the drawers. Another day
had passed without special pressure. “Time is everything.”
Arthur shrugged his shoulders. “It would be, if it were money.”
“Well, I think that we are doing capitally—capitally so far,” said
Clement.
“I am glad you are satisfied,” Arthur retorted. “We are four hundred
down on the day! I can’t think, sir”—peevishly—“why you let Purslow
have that seventy pounds.”
“Well, he is a very old customer,” the banker replied patiently, “and
he’s hard hit—he wanted it for wages, and I fear that he’s behindhand
with them. And if we withhold all help, my boy, we shall certainly
precipitate a run. On Monday those bills of Badger’s fall due, and I
think will be met. We shall receive eleven hundred from them. On
Tuesday another bill for three hundred and fifty matures, and I think
is good. If we can go on till Wednesday we shall be a little stronger
to meet the crisis than we are to-day. And we can only live from day to
day”—wearily. “If Pole’s bank goes”—he glanced doubtfully at the
door—“I fear that Williams’s will follow. And then——”
“There will be the devil to pay!”
“Well, we must try to pay him!”
“Bravo, sir!” Clement cried. “That’s the way to talk.”
“Yes, it is no use to dwell on the dark side,” his father agreed. “All
the same”—he was silent a while, reviewing the position and making
calculations which he had made a hundred times before—“all the same, it
would make all the difference if we had that twelve thousand pounds in
reserve.”
“By Jove, yes!” Arthur exclaimed. For a moment hope animated his face.
“Can you think of no way of getting it, sir?”
The banker shook his head. “I have tried every quarter,” he said, “and
strained every resource. I cannot. I’m afraid we must fight our battle
as we are.”
Arthur gazed at the floor. The elder man looked at him and thought
again of the Squire. But he would not renew his suggestion. Arthur knew
better than he what was possible in that quarter, and if he saw no
hope, there doubtless was no hope. At best the idea had been fantastic,
in view of the prejudice which the Squire entertained against the bank.
While they pondered, the door opened, and all three looked sharply
round, the movement betraying the state of their nerves. But it was
only Betty who entered—a little graver and a little older than the
Betty of eight or nine months before, but with the same gleam of humor
in her eyes. “What a conclave!” she cried. She looked round on them.
“Yes,” Arthur answered drily. “It wants only Rodd to be complete.”
“Just so.” She made a face. “How much you think of him lately!”
“And unfortunately he’s taken his little all and left us.”
The shot told. Her eyes gleamed, and she colored with anger. “What do
you mean? Dad”—brusquely—“what does he mean?”
“Only that we thought it better,” the banker explained, “to make Rodd
safe by paying him the little he has with us.”
“And he took it—of course?”
The banker smiled. “Of course he took it,” he said. “He would have been
foolish if he had not. It was only a deposit, and there was no reason
why he should risk it with us—as things are.”
“Oh, I see. Things are as bad as that, are they? Any other rats?”—with
a withering look at Arthur.
“I am afraid that there is no one else who can leave,” her father
answered. “The gangway is down now, my dear, and we sink or swim
together.”
“Ah! Well, I fancy there’s one of the rats in the dining-room now. That
is what I came to tell you. He wants to see you, dad.”
“Who is it?”
“Mr. Acherley.”
Ovington shrugged his shoulders. “Well, it is after hours,” he said,
“but—I’ll see him.”
That broke up the meeting. The banker went out to interview his
visitor, who had been standing for some minutes at one of the windows
of the dining-room, looking out on the slender stream of traffic that
passed up and down the pavement or slid round the opposite corner into
the Market Place.
Acherley was not of those who go round about when a direct and more
brutal approach will serve. Broken fortunes had soured rather than
tamed him, and though, when there had been something to be gained by
it, he had known how to treat the banker with an easy familiarity, the
contempt in which he held men of that class made it more natural to him
to bully than to fawn. Before he had turned to the street for amusement
he had surveyed the furniture of the room with a morose eye, had damned
the upstart’s impudence for setting himself up with such things, and
consoled himself with the reflection that he would soon see it under
the hammer. “And a d—d good job, too!” he had muttered. “What the
blazes does he want with a kidney wine-table and a plate-chest! It will
serve Bourdillon right for lowering himself to such people!”
When the banker came to him he made no apology for the lateness of his
visit, but “Hallo!” he said bluntly, “I want a little talk with you.
But short’s the word. Fact is, I find I’ve more of those railway shares
than it suits me to keep, Ovington, and I want you to take a hundred
off my hands. I hear they’re fetching two-ten.”
“One-ten,” the banker said. “They are barely that.”
“Two-ten,” Acherley repeated, as if the other had not spoken. “That’s
my price. I suppose the bank will accommodate me by taking them?”
Ovington looked steadily at him. “Do you mean the shares you pledged
with us? If so, I am afraid that in any event we shall have to put them
on the market soon. The margin has nearly run off.”
“Oh, hang those!”—lightly. “You may as well account for them at the
same price—two and a half. I’ll consider that settled. But I’ve a
hundred more that I don’t want to keep, and it’s those I am talking
about. You’ll take them, I suppose—for cash, of course? I’m a little
pressed at present, and want the money.”
“I am afraid that I must say, no,” Ovington said. “We are not buying
any more, even at thirty shillings. As to those we hold, if you wish us
to sell them at once—and I am inclined to think that we ought to——”
“Steady, steady! Not so fast!” Acherley let the mask fall, and, drawing
himself to his full height—and tall and lean, in his long riding coat
shaped to the figure, he looked imposing and insolent enough—he tapped
his teeth with the handle of his riding whip. “Not so fast, man! Think
it over!”—with an ugly smile. “I’ve been of use to you. It is your turn
to be of use to me. I want to be rid of these shares.”
“Naturally. But we don’t wish to take them, Mr. Acherley.”
Acherley glowered at him. “You mean,” he said, “that the bank can’t
afford to take them? If that’s your meaning——”
“It does not suit us to take them.”
“But by G—d you’ve got to take them! D’you hear, sir? You’ve got to
take them, or take the consequences! I went into this to oblige you.”
“Not at all,” Ovington said. “You came into it with your eyes open, and
with a view to the improvement of your property, if the enterprise
proved a success. No man came into it with eyes more open! To be frank
with you——”
But Acherley cut him short. “Oh, d—n all that!” he cried. “I did not
come here to palaver. The long and short of it is you’ve got to take
the shares, or, by Gad, I go out of this room and I say what I think!
And you’ll take the consequences. There’s talk enough in the town
already as you know. It only needs another punch, one more good punch,
and you’re out of the ring and in the sponging house. And your
beautiful bank you know where. You know that as well as I do, my good
man. And if you want a friend instead of an enemy you’ll oblige me, and
no words about it. That’s flat!”
The room was growing dark. Ovington stood facing such light as there
was. He looked very pale. “Yes, that’s quite flat,” he said.
“Very good. Then what do you say to it?”
“What I said before—No! No, Mr. Acherley!”
“What? Do you mean it? Why, if you are such a fool as not to know your
own interests——”
“I do know them—very well,” Ovington said, resolutely taking him up. “I
know what you want and I know what you offer. It is, as you say, quite
flat, and I’ll be equally—flat! Your support is not worth the price.
And I warn you, Mr. Acherley, and I beg you to take notice, that if you
say a word against the solvency of the bank after this—-after this
threat—you will be held accountable to the law. And more than that, I
can assure you of another thing. If, as you believe, there is going to
be trouble, it is you and such as you who will be the first to suffer.
Your creditors——”
“The devil take them! And you!” the gentleman cried, stung to fury.
“Why, you swollen little frog!” losing all control over himself, “you
don’t think my support worth buying, don’t you? You don’t think it’s
worth a dirty hundred or two of your scrapings! Then I tell you I’ll
put my foot on you—by G—d, I will! Yes! I’ll tread you down into the
mud you sprang from! If you were a gentleman I’d shoot you on the Flash
at eight o’clock to-morrow, and eat my breakfast afterwards! You to
talk to me! You, you little spawn from the gutter! I’ve a good mind to
thrash you within an inch of your life, but there’ll be those ready
enough to do that for me by and by—ay, and plenty, by G—d!”
He towered over the banker, and he looked threatening enough, but
Ovington did not flinch. He went to the door and threw it open.
“There’s the door, Mr. Acherley!” he said.
For a moment the gentleman hesitated. But the banker’s firm front
prevailed, and with a gesture, half menacing, half contemptuous,
Acherley stalked out. “The worse for you!” he said. “You’ll be sorry
for this! By George, you will be sorry for this next week!”
“Good evening,” said the banker—he was trembling with passion. “I warn
you to be careful what you say, or the law will deal with you.” And he
stood his ground until the other, shrugging his shoulders and flinging
behind him a last curse, had passed through the door. Then he closed
the door and went back to the fireplace. He sat down.
The matter was no surprise to him. He knew his man, and neither the
demand nor the threat was unexpected. But he knew, too, that Acherley
was shrewd, and that the demand and the threat were ominous signs. More
forcibly than anything that had yet occurred, they brought before him
the desperate nature of the crisis, and the likelihood that, before a
week went by, the worst would happen. He would be compelled to put up
the shutters. The bank would stop. And with the bank would go all that
he had won by a life of continuous labor: the position that he had
built up, the status that he had gained, the reputation that he had
achieved, the fortune which he had won and which had so much exceeded
his early hopes. The things with which he had surrounded himself, they
too, tokens of his success, the outward and handsome signs of his rise
in life, many of them landmarks, milestones on the path of triumph—they
too would go. He looked sadly on them. He saw them, he too, under the
hammer: saw the mocking, heedless crowd handling them, dividing them,
jeering at his short-lived splendor, gibing at his folly in surrounding
himself with them.
Ay, and one here and there would have cause to say more bitter things.
For some—not many, he hoped, but some—would be losers with him. Some
homes would be broken up, some old men beggared: and all would be laid
at his door. His name would be a byword. There would be little said of
the sufferers’ imprudence or folly or rashness: he would be the
scapegoat for all, he and the bank he had founded. Ovington’s Bank!
They would tell the story of it through years to come—would smile at
its rise, deride its fall, make of it a town tale, the tale of a man’s
arrogance, and of the speedy Nemesis which had punished it!
He was a proud man, and the thought of these things, the visions that
they called up, tortured him. At times, he had borne himself a little
too highly, had presumed on his success, had said a word too much.
Well, all that would be repaid now with interest, ay, with compound
interest.
The room was growing dark, as dark as his thoughts. The fire glowed, a
mere handful of red embers, in the grate. Now and again men went by the
windows, talking—talking, it might be, of him: anxious, suspicious,
greedy, ready at a word to ruin themselves and him, to cut their own
throats in their selfish panic. They had only to use common sense, to
control themselves, and no man would lose a penny. But they would have
no common sense. They would rush in and destroy all, their own and his.
For no bank called upon to pay in a day all that it owed could do so,
any more than an insurance office could at any moment pay all its
lives. But they would not blame themselves. They would blame him—and
his!
He groaned as he thought of his children. Clement, indeed, might and
must fend for himself. And he would—he had proved it of late days by
his courage and cheerfulness, and the father’s heart warmed to him. But
Betty? Gay, fearless, laughing Betty, the light of his home, the joy of
his life! Who, born when fortune had already begun to smile on him, had
never known poverty or care or mean shifts! For whom he had been
ambitious, whom he had thought to see well married—married into the
county, it might be! Poor Betty! There would be an end of that now.
Past his prime and discredited, he could not hope to make more than a
pittance, happy if he could earn some two or three pounds a week in
some such situation as Rodd’s. And she must sink with him and accept
such a home as he could support, in place of this spacious old
town-house, with its oaken wainscots and its wide, shallow stairs, and
its cheerful garden at the back.
His love suffered equally with his pride.
He was thinking so deeply that he did not hear the door open, or a
light foot cross the room. He did not suspect that he was observed
until a pair of warm young arms slid round his neck, and Betty’s curls
brushed his check. “In the dumps, father?” she said. “And in the
dark—and alone? Poor father! Is it as bad as that? But you have not
given up hope? We are not ruined yet?”
“God forbid!” he said, hardly able, on finding her so close to him, to
control his voice. “But we may be, Betty.”
“And what then?” She clasped him more closely to her. “Might not worse
things happen to us? Might you not die and I be left alone? Or might I
not die, and you lose me? Or Clement? You are pleased with Clement,
father, aren’t you? He may not be as clever as—as some people. But you
know he’s there when you want him. Suppose you lost us?”
“True, child. But you don’t know what poverty is—after wealth,
Betty—how narrowing, how irksome, how it galls at every point! You
don’t know what it is to live on two or three pounds a week, in two or
three rooms!”
“They will bring us the closer together,” said Betty.
“And to be looked down upon by those who have been your equals, and
shunned by those who have been your friends!”
“Nice friends! We shall do better without them!”
“And things will be said of me, things it will be hard to listen to!”
“They won’t say them to me,” said Betty. “Or look out for my nails,
ma’am! Besides, they won’t be true, and who cares, father! Lizzie
Clough said yesterday I’d a cast in one eye, but does it worry me? Not
a scrap. And we’ll shut the door on our two or three rooms and let
them—go hang! As long as we are together we can face anything,
father—we can live on two pounds or two shillings or two pence. And
consider! You might never have known what Clement was, how lively, how
brave, how”—with a funny little laugh—“like me,” hugging him to her,
“if this had not happened—that’s not going to happen after all.”
He sighed. He dealt with figures, she with fancy. “I hope not,” he
said. “At any rate I’ve two good children, and if it does come to the
worst——”
“We’ll lock ourselves in and our false friends out!” she said; and for
a moment after that she was silent. Then, “Tell me, father, why did Mr.
Rodd take that money—when you need all that you can get together, and
he knows it? For he’s taking the plate to Birmingham to pledge, isn’t
he? So he must know it.”
“He is, if——”
“If it comes to the worst? I know. Then why did he take his money, when
he knew how things stood?”
“Why did he take his own when we offered it?” the banker replied. “Why
shouldn’t he, child? It was his own, and business is business. He would
have been very foolish if he had not taken it. He’s not a man who can
afford to lose it.”
“Oh!” said Betty. And for some minutes she said no more. Then she
roused herself, poked the fire, and rang for the lamp.