THE man whom Mr. Bazalgette introduced so smoothly and off-hand to
Lucy Fountain exercised a terrible influence over her life, as you
will see by and by. This alone would make it proper to lay his
antecedents before the reader. But he has independent claims to this
notice, for he is a principal figure in my work. The history of this
remarkable man's fortune is a study. The progress of his mind is
another, and its past as well as its future are the very corner-stone
of that capacious story which I am now building brick by brick, after
my fashion where the theme is large. I invite my reader, therefore, to
resist the natural repugnance which delicate minds feel to the ring of
the precious metals, and for the sake of the coming story to accompany
me into AN OLD BANK.
The Hardies were goldsmiths in the seventeenth century; and when that
business split, and the deposit and bill-of-exchange business went one
way, and the plate and jewels another, they became bankers from father
to son. A peculiarity attended them; they never broke, nor even
cracked. Jew James Hardie conducted for many years a smooth,
unostentatious and lucrative business. It professed to be a bank of
deposit only, and not of discount. This was not strictly true. There
never was a bank in creation that did not discount under the rose,
when the paper represented commercial effects, and the indorsers were
customers and favorites. But Mr. Hardie's main business was in
deposits bearing no interest. It was of that nature known as “the
legitimate banking business,” a title not, I think, invented by the
customers, since it is a system destitute of that reciprocity which is
the soul of all just and legitimate commercial relations.
You shall lend me your money gratis, and I will lend it out at
interest: such is legitimate banking--in the opinion of bankers.
This system, whose decay we have seen, and whose death my young
readers are like to see, flourished under old Hardie, green--as the
public in whose pockets its roots were buried.
Country gentlemen and noblemen, and tradesmen well-to-do, left
floating balances varying from seven, five, three thousand pounds,
down to a hundred or two, in his hands. His art consisted in keeping
his countenance, receiving them with the air of a person conferring a
favor, and investing the bulk of them in government securities, which
in that day returned four and five per cent. As he did not pay one
shilling for the use of the capital, he pocketed the whole interest. A
small part of the aggregate balance was not invested, but remained in
the bank coffers as a reserve to meet any accidental drain. It was a
point of honor with the squires and rectors, who shared their incomes
with him in a grateful spirit, never to draw their balances down too
low; and more than once in this banker's career a gentleman has
actually borrowed money for a month or two of the bank at four per
cent, rather than exhaust his deposit, or, in other words, paid his
debtor interest for the temporary use of his own everlasting property.
Such capitalists are not to be found in our day; they may reappear at
the Millennium.
The banker had three clerks; one a youth and very subordinate, the
other two steady old men, at good salaries, who knew the affairs of
the bank, but did not chatter them out of doors, because they were
allowed to talk about them to their employer; and this was a vent. The
tongue must have a regular vent or random explosions--choose! Besides
the above compliment paid to years of probity and experience, the
ancient _regime_ bound these men to the interest and person of
their chief by other simple customs now no more.
At each of the four great festivals of the Church they dined with Mr.
and Mrs. Hardie, and were feasted and cordially addressed as equals,
though they could not be got to reply in quite the same tone. They
were never scorned, but a peculiar warmth of esteem and friendship was
shown them on these occasions. One reason was, the old-fangled banker
himself aspired to no higher character than that of a man of business,
and were not these clerks men of business good and true? his staff,
not his menials?
And since I sneered just now at a vital simplicity, let me hasten to
own that here, at least, it was wise, as well as just and worthy.
Where men are forever handling heaps of money, it is prudent to
fortify them doubly against temptation--with self-respect, and a
sufficient salary.
It is one thing not to be led into temptation (accident on which half
the virtue in the world depends), another to live in it and overcome
it; and in a bank it is not the conscience only that is tempted, but
the senses. Piles of glittering gold, amiable as Hesperian fruit;
heaps of silver paper, that seem to whisper as they rustle, “Think how
great we are, yet see how little; we are fifteen thousand pounds, yet
we can go into your pocket; whip us up, and westward ho! If you have
not the courage for that, at all events wet your finger; a dozen of us
will stick to it. That pen in your hand has but to scratch that book
there, and who will know? Besides, you can always put us back, you
know.”
Hundreds and thousands of men take a share in the country's public
morality, legislate, build churches, and live and die respectable, who
would be jail-birds sooner or later if their sole income was the pay
of a banker's clerk, and their eyes, and hands, and souls rubbed daily
against hundred-pound notes as his do. I tell you it is a temptation
of forty-devil power.
Not without reason, then, did this ancient banker bestow some respect
and friendship on those who, tempted daily, brought their hands pure,
Christmas after Christmas, to their master's table. Not without reason
did Mrs. Hardie pet them like princes at the great festivals, and
always send them home in the carriage as persons their entertainers
delighted to honor. Herein I suspect she looked also, woman-like, to
their security; for they were always expected to be solemnly, not
improperly, intoxicated by the end of supper; no wise fuddled, but
muddled; for the graceful superstition of the day suspected severe
sobriety at solemnities as churlish and ungracious.
The bank itself was small and grave, and a trifle dingy, and bustle
there was none in it; but if the stream of business looked sluggish
and narrow, it was deep and quietly incessant, and tended all one
way--to enrich the proprietor without a farthing risked.
Old Hardie had sat there forty years with other people's money
overflowing into his lap as it rolled deep and steady through that
little counting-house, when there occurred, or rather recurred, a
certain phenomenon, which comes, with some little change of features,
in a certain cycle of commercial changes as regularly as the month of
March in the year, or the neap-tides, or the harvest moon, but,
strange to say, at each visit takes the country by surprise.