AND now, during the calm and quiet summer months that followed, my life
took its tone from the harmony of Nature, and rested itself for a while
in one great calm. Taking its rest like Nature, the better to prepare
itself against the advent of stress and storm.
Hardly a day passed during this halcyon time that I did not see Marion.
Sometimes it would be at the Rectory, sometimes at the Manor House;
oftener still in some cottage where there was sickness or trouble which
she could comfort and relieve. To ourselves, at any rate, life in those
days was full of interest; it may be, for that very reason, void of
interest to those who only watched its progress from without.
One day the rooks re-appeared in the trees of the Manor House farm. I
suppose it was one of the periodical visits which they are accustomed to
pay, off and on, before they close their summer establishment finally to
take up their abode in some mysterious winter residence. In my boyish
days it seemed to me the height of unwisdom to abandon your city of
habitation just when the winter gales were due. But perhaps a rook lives
his real life elsewhere, and only comes down to rusticate in the country
as a volunteer or militiaman goes into camp, _i.e._ for duty’s sake,
which, in the case of the rook, means the fatigue duty of rearing and
raising a family. Somewhere (in the pages of the ‘Encyclopaedia
Britannica’ for example) and some day I will look up their winter
address. In this neighbourhood it is probably among the cliffs of
Portland or on the rock-bound promontory of St. Aldhelm’s Head that a
letter would find them. Anyhow, they were with us again to-day.
“Do you think they talk to one another, Peggy?” I said, as they were
making a great to-do in the trees adjoining our garden.
“I can’t say, sir, I’m sure; but if they do, it’s pretty much, I allow,
on the same subject. Seems like a warning of some kind to my ears.”
“Perhaps it may be, Peggy, and, so far as I can read it, couched in very
classical language. It sounds to me exactly like the Latin word ‘cave,’
which your favourite Reggie must often have told you means ‘take care.’
We pronounce the word now-a-days ‘caue,’ which, in the clipt
pronunciation of an excited rook, might easily have degenerated into
‘caw.’ If so, they are very lavish of their presentiments at the present
moment.”
“And no wonder,” was Peggy’s reply, “for there’s trouble enough and to
spare in the village to-day. And will be through all the country round
for the matter of that. You know, I suppose, sir, that the bank has
failed? There were whispers of it in the street last evening, and to-day
the postman tells me that the shutters are up.”
I glanced at the letters on the table before me—at an aggressive-looking
blue one in particular, which might possibly contain a bill—a letter of
the kind that one ordinarily leaves unopened till the last. In it was a
short circular, confirming the fact of the failure in the plain
unsympathetic language with which a disaster that spells ruin to hundreds
is officially announced.
There are many ways in which a bank may fail, though the result in all of
them is pretty much the same in the end. Sometimes it dies of inanition,
by a slow decay of life and credit, and this is the form of suicide that
novelists and journalists prefer. For it offers a fine field for
sensational writing—the whispers in the air, the mysteries and doubts;
then the ‘run,’ with all its train of interesting incidents, the
reinforcements of gold that are hurried down post haste from London, the
noise and tumult of desperate claimants, with the cashier’s final
announcement that his resources are exhausted.
Sometimes, on the other hand, the suicide is sudden, without preliminary
word or warning—‘foudroyant,’ as the French would call it. And this is
how our bank elected to fall. To the last it drew in money and paid it
out, and then on a grey November morning the shutters were up, for the
bank had died in the night. But for us in Fleetwater there was not even
the poor satisfaction of watching its last hours or gazing upon the
closed shutters. For the bank had died elsewhere, at the county town
some miles away, and the news had only filtered to us at second hand (as
Peggy told me) through the postman.
Most people, I suppose, were stunned at first by the novelty of the
disaster. I can remember that for some definite period, how long I never
knew, I studied the circular before me dreamily, with a strange feeling
that it would be bad for some other people, but never realising what it
meant for me. “What will Peggy do?” I asked myself. “She had all her
savings, I know, invested in it. And what again of Richard Smiley, who
only two days ago placed in it all that the Old Inn has earned for him in
twenty years?”
Worse still, I thought, for Andrew Strong and his widowed mother, before
whom I saw nothing but the refuge of the Union, for they were old and
feeble now, and had been living, I knew, for years on the slender
pittance they drew in driblets from the bank. And so by degrees, and
through many vague wanderings of thought, by realising all that it meant
for others, I came at last to realise all that it meant for me.
At this point in my meditations I did what it would have been wiser for
me to do a few months earlier, when I should have been in time to act
upon the Squire’s advice. I bethought me of turning up the original
prospectus of the bank where it had lain forgotten among a number of old
papers, mostly unimportant, that had come into my possession at the time
of my father’s death. The information that I gained from it was
startling. It was to the effect that the company had been registered in
shares of £50 each, only half of which had been as yet called up. So I
had no need to go to London to win the knowledge that I was a ruined man.
This time I did not lose myself in vain misgivings. I had become, I
suppose, already somewhat callous to surprise. But I set myself the task
of looking the future in the face by thinking and working out my plans on
the basis of this new discovery. And I took the business in hand with
something of that strange unquestioning instinct which leads the fatalist
to work out his destiny in a crisis that has come upon him suddenly, and
over which he has lost the control.
Whereby I saw that, under the best possible conditions, I had no right to
continue my claim to Marion’s hand. Even now there were rumours afloat
in the village that the failure was a bad one, and that the bank would
only pay a small dividend. And, though I could not satisfy myself on
this point till I had been to London to consult my agents, as I intended
to do on the following day, it was already perfectly clear that the
company would have to call up all its capital, and that, dividend or no
dividend, the result to me would be the loss of most of my small fortune.
And this meant, first of all, the loss of Marion. How could I ask her
father to consent to our marriage, even if his opinion on a contingency
which was now realised had been less plainly given at the time of our
engagement?
No; neither he nor I could have consented to it. And so the failure
meant to me the loss of all that, for the time at any rate, made life
worth living. Other work I could get, of course; possibly other friends.
But a love like Marion’s never again. And, for the time, I could bring
myself to think of nothing save the loss of her. I was young, it is
true, but not weak, I think, in character; and I could never picture
myself in the future as loving another with such love as I had given her.
Yet she and I must surely part. The clearest and most decisive judgment
dictated it. And I must be the one to go.
Even if I had been content to remain among my present surroundings, every
smallest detail of which reminded me of her, yet for her sake my
continuance in Fleetwater was impossible. If I stayed, it would mean for
her nothing less than banishment from her father and her home.
I had asked the Rector to tell her of my discovery and of the changes
that must follow from it. Not yet could I see her personally. Only I
asked her to meet me a few hours later for a walk in the adjoining
forest. Perhaps that few hours’ interval might tell me in what words to
greet her.
With the Rector my arrangements were quickly made. Once put in
possession of the facts he saw, clearly as I had done, that I had decided
on the only course that was open to me under the circumstances of the
case. “No honourable man could have done otherwise,” he said, and, as he
grasped my hand at parting, the same kindly look came into his eye that
had welcomed me on the first day we met in the Rectory study. Only time
and our warm friendship had strengthened it into the look with which a
father greets his well-beloved son.