Still, the daylight had one good effect, it completed the reassurance
of Mr. Hollins. He could see his man now, and judging him to be good
for the money, he gave way to greed and proposed to run the horses on
to Dunstable. Clement thought that he might do worse and agreed, merely
halting for five minutes at the George at Brickhill, to administer a
quart of ale apiece to the nags, and to take one themselves. Then they
pressed on to Dunstable, which they reached at half-past eight.
Even so, Clement had still thirty miles to cover. But the postboy, a
sportsman with his heart in the game, had ridden in, waving his whip
and shouting for horses, and his good word spread like magic. Two
minutes let the yard know that here was a golden customer, an
out-and-outer, and almost before Clement could swallow a cup of
scalding coffee and pocket a hot roll he had wrung the farmer’s hand,
fee’d old Sam to his heart’s content, and was away again, on the
ten-mile downhill stage to St. Albans. They cantered most of the way,
the postboy’s whip in the air and the chaise running after the horses,
and did the distance triumphantly in forty-three minutes. Then on, with
the reputation of a good paymaster, to Barnet—Barnet, that seemed to be
almost as good as London.
Luck could not have stood by him better, and, now the sun shone, they
raced with taxed-carts, and flashed by sober clergymen jogging along on
their hacks. The midnight shifts to which he had been put, the
despairing struggle about Meriden and Dunchurch, were a dream. He was
in the fairway now, though the pace was not so good, and the hills,
with windmills atop, seemed to be set on the road at intervals on
purpose to delay him. Still he was near the end of his journey, and he
began to consider all the alternatives to success, all the various ways
in which he might yet fail. He might miss Bourdillon; he began to be
sure that he would miss him. Either he would be at the India Office
when Bourdillon was at the brokers’, or at brokers’ when he was at the
India Office; and, failing the India Office or the brokers’, he had no
clue to him. Or his quarry would have left town already, with the
treasure in his possession. Or they might pass one another in the
streets, or even on the road. He would be too late and he would fail,
after all his exertions! He began to feel sure of it.
Yes, he had certainly been a fool not to think at starting of the
hundred chances, the scores of accidents that might occur to prevent
their meeting. And every minute that he spent on the road made things
worse. He had had yonder windmill in sight this half-hour—and it seemed
no nearer. He fidgeted to and fro, lowered a window and raised it
again, scolded the postboy, flung himself back in the chaise.
At the Green Man at Barnet he got sulkily into his last chaise, and
they pounded down five miles of a gentle slope, then drove stoutly up
the easy ascent to Highgate. By this time the notion that Bourdillon
would pass him unseen had got such hold upon him—though it was the
unlikeliest thing in the world that Arthur could have got through his
business so early—that his eyes raked every chaise they met, and a
crowded coach by which they sped, as it crawled up the southern side of
the hill, filled him with the darkest apprehensions. Had he given a
moment’s thought to the state of the market, to the pressure of
business which it must cause, and to the crowd, greedy for transfers,
in which Arthur must take his turn, he would have seen that this fear
was groundless.
However, the true state of things was by and by brought home to his
mind. He had directed the postboy to take him direct to the brokers’ in
the City, and he had hardly exchanged the pleasant country roads of
Highbury and Islington, with their villas and cow-farms, for the noisy,
dirty thoroughfares of north London, before he was struck by the
evidences of excitement that met his eyes. Lads, shouting raucously,
ran about the busier streets, selling broadsheets, which were fought
for and bought up with greedy haste. A stream of walkers, with their
faces set one way, hastened along almost as fast as his post-chaise.
Busy groups stood at the street corners, debating and gesticulating. As
he advanced still farther, and crossed the boundary and began to thread
the narrow streets of the City—it wanted a half hour of noon—he found
himself hampered and almost stopped by the crowd which thronged the
roadway, and seemed in its preoccupation to be insensible to the
obstacles that barred its way and into which it cannoned at every
stride. And still, with each yard that he advanced, the press
increased. The signs of ferment became more evident. Distracted men,
hatless and red-hot with haste, regardless of everything but the errand
on which they were bent, sprang from offices, hurled themselves through
the press, leaped on their fellows’ backs, tore on their way; while
those whom they had maltreated did not even look round, but continued
their talk, unaware of the outrage. Some pushed through the press, so
deep in thought that they saw no one and might have walked a country
lane, while others, meeting as by appointment, seized one another,
shook one another, bawled in each other’s faces as if both had become
suddenly deaf. And now and again the whole tormented mass, seething in
the narrow lanes or narrower alleys, swayed this way or that under the
impulse of some unknown mysterious impulse, some warning, some call to
action.
Clement had never seen anything like it, and he viewed it with awe, his
ears deafened by the babel or pierced by the shrill cries of the
news-sellers who constantly bawled, “Panic! Great panic in the City!
Panic! List of banks closed!” He had heard as he changed at Barnet that
fourteen houses in the City had shut their doors, but he had not
appreciated the fact. Now he was to see with his own eyes shuttered
windows and barred doors with great printed bills affixed to them, and
huge crowds at gaze before them, groaning and hooting. Even the shops
bore singular and striking witness to the crisis, for in Cheapside
every other window exhibited a card stating that they would accept
bank-notes to any extent and for goods to any amount—a courageous
attempt to restore public confidence which deserved more success than
it won; while there, and on all sides, he heard men execrating the Bank
of England and loudly proclaiming—though this was not the fact—that it
had published a notice that it could no longer pay cash.
Here was panic indeed! Here was an appalling state of things! And very
low his heart sank, as the chaise made a few yards, stopped, and
advanced again. What chance had Ovington’s, what hope of survival had
their little venture, when the very credit of the country tottered, and
here in the heart of London age-long institutions with vast deposits
and forty or fifty branches toppled down on all sides? When merchant
princes with tens of thousands in sound but unsaleable securities could
do nothing to save themselves, and men of world-wide fame, the giants
of finance, went humbly, hat in hand, to ask for time?
Stranded, or moving at a snail’s pace, he caught scraps of the talk
about him. Smith’s in Mansion House Street had closed its doors.
Everett and Walker’s had followed Pole’s into bankruptcy. Wentworth’s
at York had failed for two hundred thousand pounds. Telford’s at
Plymouth had been sacked by an angry mob. The strongest bank in Norwich
was going or gone. The Bank of England had paid out eight millions in
gold within the week—and had no more. They were paying in one-pound
notes now, a set found God knows where—in the cellars, it was said. The
tellers were so benumbed with terror that they could not separate them
or count them.
For the moment he forgot Arthur and Arthur’s business, and thought only
of his father and of their own plight. “We are gone!” he reflected, his
face almost as pale as the faces in the street. “We are ruined! There
is no hope. When this reaches Aldersbury we must close!” He could no
longer bear the inaction. He could not sit still. He paid off the
chaise—with difficulty, owing to the press—and pushed forward on foot.
But his mind still ran on Aldersbury, was still busy with the fate of
their own bank. He felt an immense pity for his father, and recognized
that until this moment, when panic in its most dreadful form stared him
in the face, he had not realized the catastrophe, or the sadness, or
the finality of it. They must close. They must begin the world again,
begin it at the bottom, in competition with a multitude of beggared
men, three-fourths of whom had never speculated, never touched a share,
never left the safe path of industrious commerce, but were now to pay
with all they possessed in the world, their daughters’ portions and
their sons’ fortunes, for the recklessness or the extravagance of
others.
For a space there was vouchsafed to him the wider vision, and he saw
the thing that was passing in its true light. He saw the wave of ruin
spread from these crowded streets ever farther and farther, from city
to town and town to country; and where it passed it wrecked homes, it
made widows, it swept away the dowries of children, it separated
lovers, it overwhelmed the happiness of thousands and tens of
thousands. He saw the honest trader, whose father’s good name was his
glory, broken in heart and fortune through the failure of others, his
health shattered, his house sold over his head, his pensioners and
dependants flung into the workhouse. He saw deluded parsons doomed to
spend the close of their lives in a hopeless wrestle with debt, their
sons taken from school, their daughters sent out into a cold and
unfeeling world. He saw squires, the little gods of their domain, men
once wealthy, doomed to drink themselves into forgetfulness of the
barred entail and the lost estate; the great house would be closed, the
agent would squeeze the tenants, and they in turn the laborers, until
the very village shop would feel the pinch. Thousands upon thousands
would lose their hoarded savings, and, too old to begin again, would
sink, they and their children and their children’s children, into the
under-world, there to be lost amid the dregs of the population.
And he and his? Why should they escape? How could they escape? It would
be much if they could feel, while they shared the common lot, that they
had deserved to escape, that they were not of those whose wild
speculations had brought this disaster on their kind.
He had by this time fought his way as far as the end of Cheapside, and
here, where the roar was loudest and the contending currents mingled
their striving masses, where the voices of the news-boys were
shrillest, and the timid stood daunted, while even strong men paused,
measuring the human whirlpool into which they must plunge, Clement’s
eye was caught by a side-scene which was passing in the street hard by
the Mansion House. Raised above the crowd on the steps of a large
building, a haggard man was making an announcement—but in dumb show,
for no word could be heard even by those who stood beside him, and his
meaning could be deduced only from his gestures of appeal. The lower
windows of the house were shuttered, and the upper exhibited many
broken panes; but behind these and the cornice of the roof gleamed here
and there a pale frightened face, peering down at the proceedings
below. From the crowd collected before the haggard man rose a
continuous roar of protest, a forest of menacing hands, shrill cries
and curses, and now and again a missile, which, falling absurdly
short—for in that press no man could swing his arm—still bore witness
to the malice that urged it. Nearer to Clement on the skirts of the
throng, where they could see little and were perpetually elbowed by
impatient passersby, loitered a few who at a first glance seemed to be
uninterested—so apathetic were their attitudes, so absent was their
gaze. But a second glance disclosed the truth. They were men whom the
tidings of ruin, sudden and unforeseen, had stunned. Spiritless and
despairing, seeing only the home they had forfeited and the dear ones
they had beggared, they stood in the street, blind and deaf to what was
passing about them, and only by the mute agony of their eyes betrayed
the truth.
The sight wrung Clement’s heart with pity, and he seized a news-lad by
the arm. “What is that place?” he shouted in his ear. In that babel no
man could make himself heard without shouting.
The man looked at him suspiciously. “Yar! Yer kidding!” he said. “Yer
know as well as me!”
Clement shook him in his impatience. “No, I don’t,” he shouted. “I’m a
stranger! What is it, man? A bank?”
“Where d’yer come from?” the lad retorted, as he twisted himself free.
“It’s Everitt’s, that’s what it is! They closed an hour ago! Might as
well ha’ never opened!”
He went off hurriedly, and Clement went too, plunging into the
maelstrom that divided him from Cornhill. But as he buffeted his way
through the throng, the faces of the ruined men went with him, coming
between him and the street, and with a sinking heart he fancied that he
read, written on them, the fate of Ovington’s.