NOT many days after this a crowd of persons stood in front of the old
bank, looking half stupefied at the shutters, and at a piece of paper
pasted on them announcing a suspension, only for a months or so, and
laying the blame on certain correspondents not specified.
So great was the confidence inspired by the old bank, that many said
it would come round, it must come round in a month: but other of Mr.
Hardie's unfortunate clients recognised in the above a mere formula to
let them down by degrees: they had seen many statements as hopeful end
in a dividend of sixpence in the pound.
Before the day closed, the scene at the bank door was heart-rending:
respectable persons, reduced to pauperism in that day, kept arriving
and telling their fellow-sufferers their little all was with Hardie, and
nothing before them but the workhouse or the almshouse: ruined mothers
came and held up their ruined children for the banker to see; and
the doors were hammered at, and the house as well as the bank was
beleaguered by a weeping, wailing, despairing crowd.
But like an idle wave beating on a rock, all this human misery dashed
itself in vain against the banker's brick walls and shutters, hard to
them as his very heart.
The next day they mobbed Alfred and hissed him at the back-door. Jane
was too ashamed and too frightened to stir out. Mr. Hardie sat calmly
putting the finishing strokes to his fabricated balance-sheet.
Some innocent and excited victims went to the mayor for redress; to the
aldermen, the magistrates--in vain.
Towards afternoon the banker's cool contempt for his benefactors, whose
lives he had darkened, received a temporary check. A heavy stone was
flung at the bank shutters: this ferocious blow made him start and the
place rattle: it was the signal for a shower; and presently tink, tink,
went the windows of the house, and in came the stones, starring the
mirrors, upsetting the chairs, denting the papered walls, chipping the
mantelpieces, shivering the bell glasses and statuettes, and strewing
the room with dirty pebbles, and painted fragments, and glittering ruin.
Hardie winced: this was the sort of appeal to touch him. But soon he
recovered his _sang froid._ “Thank you,” said he, “I'm much obliged to
you; now I'm in the right and you are in the wrong.” And he put himself
under protection of the police; and fee'd them so royally that they
were zealous on his behalf and rough and dictatorial even with those
who thronged the place only to moan and lament and hold up their ruined
children. “You _must_ move on, you Misery,” said the police. And
they were right: Misery gains nothing by stopping the way; nothing by
bemoaning itself.
But if the banker, naturally egotistical, and now entirely wrapped in
his own plans, and fears, and well-earned torments, was deaf to the
anguish of his clients, there were others in his house who felt it
keenly and deeply. Alfred and Jane were heart-broken: they sat hand in
hand in a little room, drawn closer by misfortune, and heard the groans
at their door; and the tears of pity ran down their own cheeks hot with
shame; and Alfred wrote on the fly-leaf of his “Ethics” a vow to pay
every shilling his father owed these poor people--before he died. It was
like him, and like his happy age, at which the just and the generous can
command, in imagination, the means to do kindred deeds.
Soon he found, to his horror, that he had seen but a small percentage of
the distress his father had caused; the greater griefs, as usual, stayed
at home. Behind the gadding woes lay a terrible number of silent, decent
ruined homes and broken hearts, and mixed sorrows so unmerited, so
complicated, so piteous, and so cruel, that he was ready to tear his
hair, to know them and not be able to relieve them instantly.
Of that mere sample I give a mere sample: divine the bulk then; and
revolve a page of human history often turned by the people, but too
little studied by statisticians and legislators.
Mr. Esgar, a respectable merchant, had heavy engagements, to meet which
his money lay at the old bank. Living at a distance, he did not hear the
news till near dinner-time, and he had promised to take his daughters
to a ball that night. He did so; left them there; went home, packed up
their clothes and valuables, and next day levanted with them to America,
taking all the money he could scrape together in London, and so he
passed his ruin on to others. Esgar was one of those who wear their
honesty long but loose: it was his first disloyal act in business.
“Dishonesty made me dishonest,” was his excuse. _Valeat quantum._
John Shaw, a steady footman, had saved and saved, from twenty-one years
old to thirty-eight, for “Footman's Paradise,” a public-house. He was
now engaged to a comely barmaid, who sympathised with him therein, and
he had just concluded a bargain for the “Rose and Crown” in the suburbs.
Unluckily--for him--the money had not been paid over. The blow fell: he
lost his all; not his money only, but his wasted life. He could not be
twenty-one again; so he hanged himself within forty-eight hours, and was
buried by the parish, grumbling a little, pitying none.
James and Peter Gilpin, William Scott, and Joel Paton, were poor
fishermen and Anglo-Saxon heroes--that is, heroes with an eye to the
main chance; they risked their lives at sea to save a ship and get
salvage; failing there, they risked their lives all the same, like fine
fellows as they were, to save the crew. They succeeded, but ruined
their old boat. A subscription was raised, and prospered so, that
a boat-builder built them a new one on tick, price L. 85; and the
publicans said, “Drink, boys, drink; the subscription will cover all; it
is up to L. 120 already.” The subscription money was swallowed with the
rest, and the Anglo-Saxon heroes hauled to prison.
Doctor Phillips, aged seventy-four, warned by growing infirmities, had
sold a tidy practice, with house, furniture, and good-will, for a fair
price, and put it in the bank, awaiting some investment. The money
was gone now, and the poor old doctor, with a wife and daughter and a
crutch, was at once a pauper and an exile: for he had sold under the
usual condition, not to practise within so many miles of his successor.
He went to that successor, and begged permission to be his assistant at
a small, small salary. “I want a younger man,” was the reply. Then he
went round to his old patients, and begged a few half-guineas to get him
a horse and chaise and keep him over the first month in his new place.
They pitied him, but most of them were sufferers too by Hardie, and all
they gave him did but buy a donkey and cart; and with that he and his
went slowly and sadly to a village ten miles distant from the place
where all his life had been spent in comfort and good credit. The poor
old gentleman often looked back from his cart at the church spires of
Barkington.
“From seventeen till now, almost fourscore,
There lived he, but now lived there no more.
At seventeen many their fortunes seek;
But at fourscore it is too old a week.”
Arrived at his village, he had to sell his donkey and trust to his
crutch. And so Infirmity crept about begging leave to cure Disease--with
what success may be inferred from this: Miss Phillips, a lady-like girl
of eighteen, was taken up by Farmer Giles before Squire Langton for
stealing turnips out of a field: the farmer was hard, and his losses in
Hardie's Bank had made him bitter hard; so the poor girl's excuse, that
she could not let her father starve, had no effect on him: to jail she
should go.*
*I find, however, that Squire Langton resolutely refused to
commit Miss Phillips. The real reason, I suspect, was, that
he had a respect for the Gospel, and not much for the law,
except those invaluable clauses which restrain poaching. The
reason he gave was: “Turnips be hanged! If she hadn't eaten
them, the fly would.” However, he found means to muzzle
Giles, and sent the old doctor two couple of rabbits.
Took to the national vice, and went to the national dogs, Thomas Fisher,
a saving tinman, and a bachelor: so I expect no pity for him.
To the same goal, by the same road, dragging their families, went the
Rev. Henry Scudamore, a curate; Philip Hall, a linen-draper; Neil Pratt,
a shoemaker; Simon Harris, a greengrocer; and a few more; but the above
were all prudent, laborious men, who took a friendly glass, but seldom
exceeded, until Hardie's bankruptcy drove them to the devil of drink for
comfort.
Turned professional thief, Joseph Locke, working locksmith, who had just
saved money enough to buy a shop and good-will, and now lost it every
penny.
Turned atheist, and burnt the family Bible before his weeping wife
and terrified children and gaping servant-girl, Mr. Williams, a
Sunday-school teacher, known hitherto only as a mild, respectable man, a
teetotaler, and a good parent and husband. He did not take to drinking;
but he did to cursing, and forbade his own flesh and blood ever to enter
a church again. This man became an outcast, shunned by all.
Three elderly sisters, the Misses Lunley, well born and bred, lived
together on their funds, which, small singly, united made a decent
competence. Two of them had refused marriage in early life for fear the
third should fall into less tender hands than theirs. For Miss Blanche
Lunley was a cripple: disorder of the spine had robbed her, in youth's
very bloom, of the power not only to dance, as you girls do, but to walk
or even stand upright, leaving her two active little hands, and a heart
as nearly angelic as we are likely to see here on earth.
She lay all day long on a little iron bedstead at the window of their
back-parlour, that looked on a sunny little lawn, working eagerly for
the poor; teaching the poor, young and old, to read, chiefly those of
her own sex; hearing the sorrows of the poor, composing the quarrels of
the poor, relieving their genuine necessities with a little money and
much ingenuity and labour.
Some poor woman, in a moment of inspiration, called Miss Blanche “The
sunshine of the poor.” The word was instantly caught up in the parish,
and had now this many years gently displaced “Lunley,” and settled on
her here below, and its echo gone before her up to Heaven.
The poor “sunshine of the poor” was happy: life was sweet to her. To
know whether this is so, it is useless to inquire of the backbone or the
limbs: look at the face! She lay at her window in the kindred sunshine,
and in a world of sturdy, able, agile cursers, grumblers, and yawners,
her face, pale its ashes, wore the eternal sunshine of a happy, holy
smile.
But there came one to her bedside and told her the bank was broken, and
all the money gone she and her sisters had lent Mr. Hardie.
The saint clasped her hands and said, “Oh, my poor people! What will
become of them?” And the tears ran down her pale and now sorrowful
cheeks.
At this time she did not know the full extent of their losses. But they
had given Mr. Hardie a power of attorney to draw out all their consols.
That remorseless man had abused the discretion this gave him, and
beggared them--they were his personal friends, too--to swell his secret
hoard.
When “the sunshine of the poor” heard this, and knew that she was now
the poorest of the poor, she clasped her hands and cried, “Oh, my poor
sisters! my poor sisters!” and she could work no more for sighing.
The next morning found “the sunshine of the poor” extinct in her little
bed: ay, died of grief with no grain of egotism in it; gone straight to
heaven without one angry word against Richard Hardie or any other.
Old Betty had a horror of the workhouse. To save her old age from it she
had deposited her wages in the bank for the last twenty years, and also
a little legacy from Mr. Hardie's father. She now went about the house
of her master and debtor, declaring she was sure he would not rob _her,_
and, if he did, she would never go into the poorhouse. “I'll go out on
the common and die there. Nobody will miss _me._”
The next instance led to consequences upon consequences: and that is my
excuse for telling it the reader somewhat more fully than Alfred heard
it.
Mrs. Maxley one night found something rough at her feet in bed. “What on
earth is this?” said she.
“Never you mind,” said Maxley: “say it's my breeches; what then?”
“Why, what on earth does the man put his breeches to bed for?”
“That is my business,” roared Maxley, and whispered drily, “'tain't for
you to wear 'em, howsever.”
This little spar led to his telling her he had drawn out all their
money, but, when she asked the reason, he snubbed her again indirectly,
recommending her to sleep.
The fact is, the small-clothes were full of bank-notes; and Maxley
always followed them into bed now, for fear of robbers.
The bank broke on a Tuesday: Maxley dug on impassive; and when curious
people came about him to ask whether he was a loser, he used
to inquire very gravely, and dwelling on every syllable,
“Do--you--see--anything--green--in this ere eye.”
Friday was club day; the clubsmen met at the “Greyhound” and talked over
their losses. Maxley sat smoking complacently; and when his turn came to
groan, he said drily: “I draad all mine a week afore. (Exclamations.) I
had a hinkling: my boy Jack he wrote to me from Canada as how Hardie's
was rotten out there; now these here bankers they be like an oak tree;
they do go at the limbs first and then at the heart.”
The club was wroth. “What, you went and made yourself safe and never
gave any of us a chance? Was that neighbourly? was that--clubbable?”
To a hailstorm of similar reproaches, Maxley made but one reply,
“'Twarn't _my_ business to take care o' _you._” He added, however, a
little sulkily, “I was laad for slander once: scalded dog fears lue-warm
water.”
“Oh,” said one, “I don't believe him. He puts a good face on it but his
nine hundred is gone along with ourn.”
“'Taiu't gone far, then.” With this he put his hand in his pocket, and,
after some delay, pulled out a nice new crisp note and held it up. “What
is that? I ask the company.”
“Looks like a ten-pun note, James.”
“Welt the bulk 'grees with the sample; I knows where to find eightscore
and nine to match this here.”
The note was handed round: and on inspection each countenance in turn
wore a malicious smile; till at last Maxley, surrounded by grinning
faces, felt uneasy.
“What be 'e all grinning at like a litter o' Chessy cats? Warn't ye ugly
enough without showing of your rotten teeth?”
“Haw! Haw!”
“Better say 'tain't money at all, but only a wench's curl paper:” and
he got up and snatched it fiercely out of the last inspector's hand. “Ye
can't run your rigs on me,” said he. “What an if I can't read words,
I can figures; and I spelt the ten out on every one of them, afore I'd
take it.”
A loud and general laugh greeted this boast.
Then Maxley snatched up his hat in great wrath and some anxiety, and
went out followed by a peal.
In five minutes he was at home; and tossed the note into his wife's lap.
She was knitting by a farthing dip. “Dame,” said he, controlling all
appearance of anxiety, “what d'ye call that?”
She took up the note and held it close to the candle.
“Why, Jem, it is a ten-pound note, one of Hardie's--_as was._”
“Then what were those fools laughing at?” And he told her all that had
happened.
Mrs. Maxley dropped her knitting and stood up trembling. “Why, you told
me you had got our money all safe out!”
“Well, and so I have, ye foolish woman; and he drew the whole packet out
of his pocket and flung them fiercely on the table. Mrs. Maxley ran her
finger and eye over them, and uttered a scream of anger and despair.
“These! these be all Hardie's notes,” she cried; “and what vally be
Hardie's notes when Hardie's be broke?”
Maxley staggered as if he had been shot.
The woman's eyes flashed fury at him. “This is your work, ye born idiot:
'mind your own business,' says you: you _must_ despise your wedded wife,
that has more brains in her finger than you have in all your great long
useless carease: you _must_ have your secrets: one day poison, another
day beggary: you have ruined me, you have murdered me: get out of my
sight! for if I find a knife I'll put it in you, I will.” And in her
ungovernable passion, she actually ran to the dresser for a knife: at
which Maxley caught up a chair and lifted it furiously, above his head
to fling at her.
Luckily the man had more self-command than the woman; he dashed the
chair furiously on the floor, and ran out of the house.
He wandered about half stupid, and presently his feet took him
mechanically round to his garden. He pottered about among his plants,
looking at them, inspecting them closely, and scarce seeing them.
However, he covered up one or two, and muttered, “I think there will be
a frost to-night: I think there will be a frost” Then his legs seemed to
give way. He sat down and thought of his wedding-day: he began to talk
to himself out loud, as some people do in trouble. “Bless her comely
face,” said he, “and to think I had my arm lifted to strike her, after
wearing her so low, and finding her good stuff upon the whole. Well,
thank my stars I didn't We must make the best on't: money's gone; but
here's the garden and our hands still; and 'tain't as if we were single
to gnaw our hearts alone: wedded life cuts grief a two. Let's make it up
and begin again. Sixty come Martinmas, and Susan forty-eight: and I be
a'most weary of turning moulds.”
He went round to his front door.
There was a crowd round it; a buzzing crowd with all their faces turned
towards his door.
He came at their backs, and asked peevishly what was to do now. Some of
the women shrieked at his voice. The crowd turned about; and a score of
faces peered at him: some filled with curiosity, some with pity.
“Lord help us!” said the poor man, “is there any more trouble a foot
to-day? Stand aside, please, and let me know.”
“No! no!” cried a woman, “don't let him.”
“Not let me go into my own house, young woman?” said Maxley with
dignity: “be these your manners?”
“Oh, James: I meant you no ill. Poor man!”
“Poor soul!” said another.
“Stand aloof!” said a strange man. “Who has as good a right to be there
as he have?”
A lane was made directly, and Maxley rushed down between two rows of
peering faces, with his knees knocking together, and burst into his own
house. A scream from the women inside as he entered, and a deep groan
from the strong man bereaved of his mate, told the tragedy. Poor Susan
Maxley was gone.
She had died of breast-pang within a minute of his leaving her; and the
last words of two faithful spouses were words of anger.
All these things, and many more less tragic, but very deplorable, came
to Alfred Hardie's knowledge, and galled and afflicted him deeply. And
several of these revelations heaped discredit high upon Richard Hardie,
till the young man, born with a keen sense of justice, and bred amongst
honourable minds, began to shudder at his own father.
Herein he was alone; Jane, with the affectionate blindness of her sex,
could throw her arms round her father's neck, and pity him for his
losses--by his own dishonesty--and pity him most when some victim of
his unprincipled conduct died or despaired. “Poor papa will feel this so
deeply,” was her only comment on such occasions.
Alfred was not sorry she could take this view, and left her unmolested
to confound black with white, and wrong with right, at affection's
dictates; but his own trained understanding was not to be duped
in matters of plain morality. And so, unable to cure the wrongs he
deplored, unable to put his conscience into his pocket like Richard
Hardie, or into his heart like Jane, he wandered alone, or sat brooding
and dejected: and the attentive reader, if I am so fortunate as to
possess one, will not be surprised to learn that he was troubled, too,
with dark mysterious surmises he half dreaded, yet felt it his duty to
fathom. These and Mrs. Dodd's loss by the bank combined to keep him
out of Albion Villa. He often called to ask after Captain Dodd, but was
ashamed to enter the house.
Now Richard Hardie's anxiety to know whether David was to die or live
had not declined, but rather increased. If the latter, he was now
resolved to fly to the United States with his booty, and cheat his
alienated son along with the rest: he had come by degrees down to this.
It was on Alfred he had counted to keep him informed of David's state;
but, on his putting a smooth inquiry, the young man's face flushed with
shame, or anger, or something, and he gave a very short, sharp, and
obscure reply. In reality, he did not know much, nor did Sarah, his
informant; for of late the servants had never been allowed to enter
David's room.
Mr. Hardie, after this rebuff, never asked Alfred again; but having
heard Sampson's name mentioned as Dodd's medical attendant, wrote and
asked him to come and dine next time he should visit Barkington.
“You will find me a fallen man,” said he; “to-morrow we resign our house
and premises and furniture to the assignees, and go to live at a little
furnished cottage not very far from your friends the Dodds. It is called
'Musgrove Cottage.' There, where we have so little to offer besides a
welcome, none but true friends will come near us; indeed, there are very
few I should venture to ask for such a proof of fidelity to your broken
friend,
“R. H.”
The good-hearted Sampson sent a cordial reply, and came to dinner at
Musgrove Cottage.
Now all Hardie wanted of him in reality was to know about David; so when
Jane had retired and the decanter circulated, he began to pump him
by his vanity. “I understand,” said he, “you have wrought one of your
surprising cures in this neighbourhood. Albion Villa!”
Sampson shook his head sorrowfully: Mr. Hardie's eyes sparkled. Alfred
watched him keenly and bitterly.
“How can I work a great cure after these ass-ass-ins Short and Osmond?
Look, see! the man had been wounded in the hid, and lost blood: thin
stabbed in the shoulder, and lost more blood.”--Both the Hardies uttered
an ejaculation of unfeigned surprise.--“So, instid of recruiting the
buddy thus exhausted of the great liquid material of all repair, the
profissional ass-ass-in came and exhausted him worse: stabbed him while
he slept; stabbed him unconscious, stabbed him in a vein: and stole
more blood from him. Wasn't that enough? No! the routine of
profissional ass-ass-ination had but begun; nixt they stabbed him with
cupping-needles, and so stole more of his life-blood. And they were goen
from their stabs to their bites, goen to leech his temples, and so hand
him over to the sixton.”
“But you came in and saved him,” cried Alfred.
“I saved his life,” said Sampson sorrowfully; “but life is not the only
good thing a man may be robbed of by those who steal his life-blood, and
so impoverish and water the contints of the vessels of the brain.”
“Doctor Sampson,” said Alfred, “what do you mean by these mysterious
words? You alarm me.”
“What, don't you know? Haven't they told you?”
“No, I have not had the courage to enter the house since the bank----”
he stopped in confusion.
“Ay, I understand,” said Sampson: “however, it can't be hidden now:--
“He is a maniac.”
Sampson made this awful announcement soberly and sorrowfully.
Alfred groaned aloud, and even his father experienced a momentary
remorse; but so steady had been the progress of Corruption, that he felt
almost unmixed joy the next instant; and his keen-witted son surprised
the latter sentiment in his face, and shuddered with disgust.
Sampson went on to say that he believed the poor man had gone
flourishing a razor; and Mrs. Dodd had said, “Yes, kill me, David: kill
the mother of your children,” and never moved: which feminine, or in
other words irrational, behaviour had somehow disarmed him. But it would
not happen again: his sister had come; a sensible, resolute woman. She
had signed the order, and Osmond and he the certificates, and he was
gone to a private asylum. “Talking of that,” said Sampson, rising
suddenly, “I must go and give them a word of comfort; for they are just
breaking their hearts at parting with him, poor things. I'll be back in
an hour.”
On his departure, Jane returned and made the tea in the dining-room:
they lived like that now.
Mr. Hardie took it from his favourite's lithe white hand, and smiled
on her: he should not have to go to a foreign land after all: who would
believe a madman if he should rave about his thousands? He sipped
his tea luxuriously, and presently delivered himself thus, with bland
self-satisfaction:--
“My dear Alfred, some time ago you wished to marry a young lady without
fortune. You thought that I had a large one; and you expected me to
supply all deficiencies. You did not overrate my parental feeling, but
you did my means. I would have done this for you, and with pleasure,
but for my own coming misfortunes. As it was, I said 'No,' and when you
demanded, somewhat peremptorily, my reasons, I said 'Trust me.' Well,
you see I was right: such a marriage would have been your utter ruin.
However, I conclude, after what Dr. Sampson has told us, you have
resigned it on other grounds. Jane, my dear, Captain Dodd, I am sorry to
say, is afflicted. He has gone mad.”
“Gone mad?! Oh, how shocking! What will become of his poor children?”
She thought of Edward first.
“We have just heard it from Sampson. And I presume, Alfred, you are not
so far gone as to insist on propagating insanity by a marriage with his
daughter.”
At this conclusion, which struck her obliquely, though aimed at Alfred,
Jane sighed gently, and her dream of earthly happiness seemed to melt
away.
But Alfred ground his teeth, and replied with great bitterness and
emotion: “I think, sir, you are the last man who ought to congratulate
yourself on the affliction that has fallen on that unhappy family I
aspire to enter, all the more that now they have calamities for me to
share----”
“More fool you,” put in Mr. Hardie calmly.
“--For I much fear you are one of the causes of that calamity.”
Mr. Hardie assumed a puzzled air. “I don't see how that can be: do you,
Jenny? Sampson told us the causes: a wound on the head, a wound in the
arm, bleeding, cupping, &c.”
“There may be other causes Dr. Sampson has not been told of--yet”
“Possibly. I really don't know what you allude to.”
The son fixed his eyes on the father, and leaned across the table to
him, till their faces nearly met.
“The fourteen thousand pounds, sir.”