BLUFF.
The mines brought a rush of trade to St. Euphrase. The drowsy little
place, of late years, under the patronage of the railway, had been
growing into a sort of sequestered rustic suburb, or at least a rural
outlet for dust-stifled townspeople during the dog days, where such as
could buy a house might pick their own strawberries, or cut their
melon with the dew still on it, for breakfast. It was now breaking
into the "live-village" stage of growth, raising its own dust in most
respectable clouds, exhaling its own smoke--the villagers had burnt
only wood in their golden age, and their atmosphere had been
pure--with brawling navvies at the lane corners to disturb the night,
and the glare of illuminated saloons, now for the first time able to
outface the disapproval of M. le Curé, who hitherto had been able to
fend off such dangerous allurements from his simple flock.
As spring advanced things progressed with a rush, and everybody in the
district expected to make his fortune forthwith. The cautious
_habitants_, who would not risk their savings in a bank (remembering
how once upon a time a bank had broke, and a grandfather had lost some
dollars), but hid them away in crannies below the roof or underneath
the oven, took courage now, and bought shares. Were not the mines
there? visible to the naked eye. Did not Baptiste and Jean earn wages
there? paid regularly every Saturday night. The whistle of their steam
engine could be heard for miles around, and clouds of smoke drifted
across the country, dropping flakes of soot on the linen hung out to
dry. It was very real, this--definite and tangible. Had it not raised
even the price of hay, which now could be sold at home, for the mine
teams, at more than could be got for it in Montreal?
The rustics crowded into town to buy shares, and the price rose higher
and higher, till they became so valuable that no one would sell.
Still, however, shares were to be got, with exertion, and at a good
price, at the offices of the company, which were also those of the
Messrs. Herkimer, whose senior partner was president of the company.
The board of directors was so composed as to conciliate the local
interests of St. Euphrase--M. Podevin the hotelkeeper, Joseph Webb,
Esquire--Esquire meaning J.P.--Farmer Belmore, and Stinson, Ralph's
favourite clerk. These met periodically to accept five dollars apiece
for their attendance, sanction such proposals as their president might
make, and sign the minutes. None of them had an opinion upon the
matters to be considered, and even if they had had one, they would
have felt it to be indelicate to question the decisions of the city
magnate who was making their fortunes; but that mattered little; it
was pleasant to sit upon a board, and be paid for sitting, especially
when their decision upon the points on which they came to be consulted
was already framed, to save them the trouble of consideration, and
required only a mute assent. They found their consequence vastly
augmented among their neighbours, who all prayed them for advice and
private information; which, not having, they found it difficult to
give, and had to fall back on their habit, learned at the "board," of
looking as wise and saying as little as possible.
It was delightful, for the time being, thus to play at Lord Burleigh,
and be thought only the wiser the more they held their tongues; but
they little imagined the responsibility they were building up for
themselves, when issues of stock unregistered in the company's books,
funds not accounted for, and other irregularities had to be explained
to infuriated shareholders. The storm was yet in the future, for the
present the heavens were shining.
That year both Herkimer and Jordan removed their families to St.
Euphrase quite early in the spring, instead of waiting for the
summer heats. It was a demonstration of the importance they attached
to the mining operations, and their desire to be on the spot.
Directly, it was whispered among their acquaintance that fresh
discoveries were being made, and cultured persons, who combined
science with money-making, hastened to bespeak a summer residence in
the favoured village, whence they might scour the neighbourhood on
holidays, hammer in hand, rummaging for minerals, and picking up
information about the remarkable find already made at La Hache. Every
house, and even every shanty, to be let, was secured for the hot
months, and some impatient prospectors, unwilling to wait so long,
arrived at once, and established themselves with the Père Podevin,
whose house had never been so full before, and who, feeling that his
fortune was as good as made, began to prepare his family to adorn the
great position they were about to fill, withdrew his eldest daughter
from the kitchen, where she had been wont to assist, and sent her off
to the celebrated convent of St. Cecilia, at Quebec, that she might
learn to play the piano, and be turned into a lady.
The influx of city men had scarcely become apparent--it was the middle
of May now--when a new phenomenon met the explorer's eye. A board
fence was of a sudden run up around the property of the mining
company, and watchers were stationed at intervals to see that no
inquisitive stranger should scale the barrier. Excitement among the
speculators grew intense. It was immediately inferred that silver, or
perhaps even gold, had been found, else why this jealousy? and the
crowds who came from town to scour the adjacent lands were so great
that the Père Podevin had to use his stable and poultry house as
sleeping quarters, and sold permission to two gentlemen to sleep on
the floor under his billiard table on the same terms as he had been
wont to charge for an entire chamber.
There was constant hurry in the offices in the Rue des Borgnes, by
gaslight as well as by day. The jaded clerks seemed always at work,
save when they crept home at night to sum up the endless figure
columns over again in their sleep, and hurry back to business next
morning. The president seemed as hardly driven as his servants. The
street--where hitherto he had been a prominent figure, notebook in
hand, making bargains, picking up information, and distributing it in
passing, because it could be done so much more quickly than on
'Change, where some contrive to make a little business go so far in
the way of talk and time-killing--the street knew him no more, and he
was beset by people all day long, in his office, on every imaginable
errand.
Hitherto he had been so cool, and so quick, and so strong--a very
steam engine for doing business--so confident and so clear, perceiving
all the bearings of a question at once--deciding on his course and
completing an agreement in a few incisive sentences, while another man
would still be figuring up with pencil and paper the preliminary
calculations. Now there were signs of fatigue in the robust figure, a
stoop of the shoulders, a flush about the temples. His temper, too--in
time past he had had no temper, or at least it had been impossible to
ruffle it, except where anger was made to serve a business end--his
temper had grown irritable, as the luckless clerks too frequently
found out, and he suffered from sensations of faintness which led to
his withdrawing momentarily into his dressing-room, where there now
stood a decanter of sherry, a thing which theretofore he would have
scorned to permit on his premises. His habit till then had been to
drink a couple of glasses of sherry at the club by way of luncheon,
but the idea of keeping a "pick-me-up" at his elbow, to be referred to
at uncertain intervals, had never occurred to him, because, till then,
he had found his own strength sufficient for the day's work.
That may have been because things had gone well always, and there is
no tonic in the pharmacop[oe]ia like a habit of succeeding; but now
there were so many things, mines of copper, plumbago, phosphate, a
railway, a suburb, and a bank, besides--besides everything else; for
Ralph's greed grew with his success, the more he secured the more he
still desired, and he could not see an opportunity go by without
wishing to have a fling at it. A few months before, when money was
flowing in for copper shares, there had seemed to be an opportunity in
railways on New York market, and Ralph went in. It fretted him to see
money lie idle when work could be found for it. He went in, but the
unforeseen had happened, as it always will some time, and h found he
could not come out again without loss, such as was not to be thought
of, and therefore he must go in deeper still.
His own railway, too, the St. Lawrence, Gattineau, and Hudson's Bay
had been suffering a check in the shape of a swamp it had to cross, in
which it went on burying itself as fast as it could be built above the
morass. A contractor had already failed. No other would undertake the
work. The company was compelled to do it itself, under pain of being
cut in two, with sections built to the south and north, and this gap
in the middle, which made both ends useless. Ralph was largely
interested in the road, which indeed he had both projected and
promoted, to connect his plumbago mines and his phosphate lands with
"the front," _i.e_., with civilization and a market.
The plumbago mines were at work, gangs of men digging into the ground
and dragging out riches which were barrelled up to await transport;
but, until that swamp could be bridged over, of no more present value
to the owners than so many tons of gravel. The workmen could not eat
it, and would not accept it in payment of their wages; and to haul it
to market over distances of corduroy road was to end by disposing of
it for something less than it had cost to bring it there.
The public were aware of the trouble, and the shares would not sell.
The bank, of course, could be brought to the rescue up to a certain
point, but that, he began to realize, was nearly reached. There were
signs of failing confidence at the board meetings, whisperings, and
averted glances betokening incipient opposition, though mistrustful as
yet of strength to declare itself, which in time past, when he could
defy it, he would easily have browbeaten into submission; but now he
dared not attempt to browbeat, the consequences of unsuccess would
have been too serious. He tried to conciliate and persuade, where he
had been wont to command, and when the master tries to conciliate the
pupil, it is a sign the whip has gone from him, and the subject
divines that he has a master no longer than he cares to accept one.
Again, the success of St. Hypolite Suburb was hanging fire. The suburb
had been a tract of waste ground some years before, when Ralph picked
it up on easy terms, as being unfit for agriculture and useless for
anything else, and his scheme was to build on it a new and improved
quarter of the town. He had sunk great sums in draining, levelling,
and filling up. He had laid out a park, with a fountain, overlooked by
semi-detached villas, and approached by residence streets of a
superior kind. A few houses had become tenanted the year before, and a
great sale of houses in June of the current year had been written up
in a series of ingenious paragraphs in the local newspapers; when, on
the arrival of warm weather, a visitation of ague and typhoid fever
fell upon the pioneer settlers in the district, and frightened the
public out of all the interest which it had cost so much money and
pains to instil into its mind. The sale came off as advertised, but
the half-dozen dwellings first offered--"replete with every modern
improvement and convenience"--fetching barely enough to pay the
advances of the Proletarian Loan and Mortgage Company, the rest were
withdrawn for the present.
In a house of cards, though one card may be in doubtful equilibrium,
if those other cards it leans against are moderately steady, it may
stand. Nay, it may even contribute a measure of support to its
supporters; but if all are shakey at the same time, it is a task of
infinite dexterity to balance the several weaknesses each upon each.
Even then the balance is but temporary; a flutter in the surrounding
air will disturb the equipoise, and, when that befalls, the structure
holding together only by weaknesses which balance each other will
tumble to the ground a heap of ruin. And this was the fate Ralph saw
impending. He was in so many ventures, and up to his full strength in
each. If only one of them had weakened he could have propped it with
the others in such wise as he had done before, but when everything
grew shakey at the same time, it seemed as if the pillars of the
universe itself were giving way; and worse, he felt the giving way
within himself, a nodding to that frightful fall which was
approaching, a yielding such as he had never known before. Hitherto
each difficulty had called out latent strength to overcome it, but now
there seemed a torpor in himself which would not be thrown off. His
mind would, not, as hitherto, answer to his call with new expedients
to circumvent each new check; he felt benumbed, and sought to that
decanter--in his dressing-room for the strength, ingenuity, and
courage he had theretofore found within himself.
It was a morning in the beginning of July--Ralph had remained in town
overnight, not so much for the sake of doing anything as merely to be
beside his business. In time past, when his affairs flourished, he had
rather prided himself on the determination with which he could dismiss
"shop" from his mind at five minutes past four, when he walked out of
his office, and his promptitude in resuming it, exactly where he had
left off, at a quarter before ten next morning. But now, when it
would have been a relief to his jaded mind to lay cares by for a time,
they clung to him all the while, disturbing sleep, even, with confused
and harassing visions. To be away from business aggravated his
anxiety--filled him with doubts as to what might occur in his absence,
and he found his mind easier in the office than anywhere else. Even so
the mother of a sick child will sit by the bed for hours, though the
child be in sleep the most undisturbed, and she can do nothing more.
There is assurance in being present, if she were away she would
imagine things were happening, and be miserable.
After the hot night in town, with its unrefreshing sleep, and the
untasted breakfast which followed, Ralph sat in his office listless
and limp, with nothing to brace him but that hateful sherry in the
dressing-room. It was ten o'clock. The train from St. Euphrase must
have arrived, but his son had not yet appeared, when Jordan hurried
in, closing the door behind him, and fastening it.
"You were not on the train this morning, Herkimer. Were you trying to
give a man the slip?--and unload before any one else knew?"
"Unload? Slip? I remained in town last night. What do you mean? Is
anything wrong?"
"Podevin tells me he heard some of the men, who were drinking in his
bar, talking. They were telling each other that our lode was no true
vein, that every bit of metal would be out in three months' time, and
they would all be thrown idle. They were the only people in the place
at the time; Podevin took them in hand, and made them promise to hold
their tongues; but it's all coming out, can only be a question of a
day or two. He came to me in a d--l of a funk--says he will be ruined,
as everything he has is in it. To tell you the truth, I shall be hard
hit myself--have never sold a share, and I have been buying. I do
think you might have given me a hint."
"My dear sir, I am a heavier holder than you and Podevin both put
together. The price has been going up so steadily I did not care to
sell; it might have injured the property for the rest of you; and this
is the first I have heard of a threatening collapse. We must sell at
once, that is all."
"Too late, I fear, though I am now on my way to my broker. You will be
selling, too? Wish I had known enough to hold my tongue till after I
had unloaded," he added with a nervous pretence of hilarity. "Well!
I'm off."
"Don't be a fool, Jordan. Of course I don't blame you for wishing to
save yourself, I do the same; but perhaps it is just as well you came
in and told me first. I mean those shares to go higher yet before I
sell. I have all along known there was a possibility of what you tell
me coming to pass, though I had hoped to get shut of the thing before
it took place, and I would have preferred to slip out quietly. There
will be a row, now, perhaps; but what of that? If it must be, we can
weather it, so long as we save our money. It was to provide against
such a contingency that I had that fence built round the operations,
to keep prying fools on the outside; and you know how well that has
answered. I see by the _Journal_ they have been finding indications of
silver; if we inclose another hundred acres it will be taken to
indicate gold and diamonds. But no, that would be too slow, and some
one would blab in the meantime. I must telegraph the superintendent to
work over-time, and contrive that the men do not go into the village.
I shall telegraph to the directors, too, and hold a board meeting. It
is handy having men so easily within call, and yet so innocent of
business. You had better be present as solicitor, and convince
yourself that we are not stealing a march. _And then_----"
"You wish me, then, not to offer my stock to-day?" said Jordan
dubiously. The saw tells us there is honour among thieves, and
perhaps there sometimes is, but there is seldom confidence among the
over-sharp.
"As to that," cried Ralph scornfully, "you can please yourself. Go to
your brokers, by all means, if you think well. Or, if you would like
to save brokerage, you can just speak to Stinson as you go out. Tell
him what you want to sell, and I shall buy at yesterday's quotation;"
and he lay back in his chair with a cheerful smile, and twiddled his
gold chain exactly like the prosperous millionaire his neighbours
thought him.
Jordan looked and hesitated, and bit his nails, and then his brow
cleared, and he drew a long sigh of supreme relief. "Well!" he said,
smiling effusively, "you know more about it than I do. I'll trust your
advice, and hold on till to-morrow."
"I gave you no advice whatever, sir. Please to remember that;" and he
sat up in his chair with a suggestion of dignified offence on his
features which made Jordan feel contrite and ashamed, and thoroughly
satisfied that he had better not disturb his shares for the next
twenty-four hours at any rate. "You can tell Stinson about your shares
if you have a mind to; but whatever you do, I must beg that you will
not only not circulate, but that you will put down any foolish report
such as that you have just mentioned."
"You may depend on me for that, old fellow," cried Jordan, nodding
adieu, and walking out with a sense of disburdenment from the cares he
had been carrying, which made his middle-aged gait positively elastic.
Ralph rose, and watched through a convenient chink his retreating
figure off the premises, and then he drew a breath, and stretched
himself with a sardonic twitch of the eyebrows. "There's nothing like
bluff after all! Yet where should I have been if he had concluded to
take my offer? A fine rumpus those white-livered directors next door
would have raised over the cheque. However, _that's_ weathered. Now
for the mines," and he sat down and wrote his telegrams. He felt
better and stronger than he had done for weeks. There was something to
do now, action, work, combat with circumstances. He was a man once
more with a fund of strength within, which needed only to be drawn on
to come forth. The sherry decanter diffused its topaz radiance in vain
all that day, for never once came Ralph within sight of the seductive
lustre. He had something to do and think of, and in doing he found the
best tonic for his system. It is waiting and looking forward to
uncertain evil, distant as yet, and impossible to be struggled with,
which racks the nerves to pieces with its strain, and drives the
victim to artificial supports, which they from whose coarser
construction a nervous system seems to have been omitted, and who
cannot comprehend such needs, brand as intemperance and dissipation.