Ovington's Bank Part 39

Josina was surprised and yet not surprised; or if surprised at all, it was at her own calmness. Her color ebbed, but she neither trembled nor faltered. She had not even to summon up the thought of Clement. The charge to which she had just listened clothed her with a dignity which the prospect, spread before her eyes and insensibly raising her mind to higher issues, helped to support. "I couldn't, sir," she said quietly. "I do not love him."

"Don't love him?" the Squire repeated--yet not half so angrily as she expected. "What's amiss with him?"'

"Nothing, sir. But I do not love him."

"Love? Bah! Love'll come! Maids ha' naught to do with love! When they're married love'll come fast enough, I'll warrant! The lad's straight and comely and a proper age--and what else do you want? What else do you want, eh? He's of your own blood, and if he's wild ideas 'tis better than wild oats, and he'll give them up. He's promised me that, or I'd never ha' said yes to him! Why, girl!" with sudden exasperation, "'twas only the other day you were peaking and puling for him! Peaking and puling like a sick sparrow, and I was saying, no!

And now--why, damme, what do you mean by it?"

"It was all a mistake, sir," she said with dignity. "I never did think of him, or wish for him. It was a mistake."

"A mistake! What do you mean?"

"You bade me think no more of him, and I obeyed. But--but I never had any thought of him."

That did irritate the old man; it seemed to him that she played with him. In a rage he struck his cane on the ground. "Damme!" he exclaimed. "That's womanlike all over! Give her what she wants and she doesn't want it. But, see here, I'll not have it, girl. I know your flimsies and you've got to have him! Do you hear?"

He was enraged by this queer twist in her, and he bl.u.s.tered. But his anger--and he felt it--lacked something of force. He did not know how to bring it to bear. And when she did not reply to him at once, "Do you forget that he saved my life?" he cried, dropping to a lower level. "D'you forget that, you ungrateful wench?"

"But he did not save mine, sir!" she answered, with astonishing spirit. "Yet it is mine that you ask me to give him. And indeed, indeed, sir, he does not love me."

"Then why should he want you?" he retorted. "But he'll soon make you sure of that, if you'll let him. And you've got to take him. You've got to take him. Let's ha' no more words about it. I've said the word."

"But I've not, sir," she replied, with that new and astonishing courage of hers. "And I cannot say it. I am grateful to him, I shall ever be grateful to him for saving you--and he is my cousin. But he does not love me, he has never made love to me. And am I, your daughter, to--to accept him, the moment it suits him to marry me?"

That touched the Squire's pride. It gave him to think. "Never made love to you?" he exclaimed. "What do you mean, girl?"

"Until he came to me in the garden on Tuesday he never--he never gave me reason to think that he would come. Am I," with a tremor of indignation in her voice, "of so little account, is that which you have just told me that I may some day bring to him so little, that I must put all in his hand the moment he chooses to lift it?"

The Squire was bothered by that, and "You are like all women!" he exclaimed. "I don't know where to ha' you. That's where it is. You twist and you turn, and you fib----"

"I am not fibbing, sir."

"And you've as many quirks as--as a hunted hare. There's no holding you! My father would ha' locked you up with bread and water till you did what you were told, and my mother'd ha' boxed your ears till she put some sense into you. But we're a d--d silly generation. We're too soft!"

She minded this little, as long as he did not put her to the supreme test; as long as he did not ask her if there was anyone else, any other lover. But his mind was now busy with Arthur. Was it true that the young spark was thinking more of Garth than of the girl? More of the heiress than of the sweetheart? More of lucre than of love? If so, d--n his impudence! He deserved what he had got! From which point it was but a step to thoughts of the bank. Ay, Arthur was certainly one who had his plans for getting on, and getting on in ways to which no Griffin had stooped before. Was this of a piece with them?

The doubt had a cooling effect upon him. While Josina trembled lest the fateful question should still be put, and clenched her little hands as she summoned up fort.i.tude to meet it--while she tried to still the fluttering of her heart, the old man relapsed into thought, muttered inarticulately, fell silent.

She would have given much to know the direction of his thoughts.

At last, "Well, you're so clever you must settle your own affairs," he grumbled. "I'm d--d if I understand either of you, girl or man. In my time if a wench said No, we took her and hugged her till she said Yes!

We didn't go to her father. But since the old king died there's no red blood in the country--it's all telling and no kissing. There, I've done with it. Maybe when he turns his back on you, you'll be wanting him fast enough."

"No, sir, never!" she answered, overwhelmed by a victory so complete.

"Anyway, don't come fretting to me if you do! Your aunt told me that you were pining for him, but I'm hanged if she knows more than I do--or happen you don't know your own mind. Now look out, and tell me if they've finished thatching that wagoner's cottage at the Bache?"

"Yes, sir. I can see the new straw from here," she said.

"Have they brought it down over the eaves?"

"I'm afraid I can't see that. It's too far."

"Mind me to ask Fewtrell. Now get me home. Where's your arm? I'll go down through the new planting."

"But it's not so safe, sir," she remonstrated. "There's the stone stile, and----"

"When I canna get over the stone stile I'll not come up the hill. I want to see the planting. D'you take me that way and tell me if the rabbits ha' got in. March, girl!"

She obeyed him, but in fear and trembling, for there was not only the awkward stile to climb, but the track ran over outcrops of rocks on which even a careful walker might slip. However, he crossed the stile with ease, aided less by her arm than by his own memory of its shape, and of every stone that neighbored it; and it was only over the treacherous surface of the rock that he showed himself really dependent on her care. Memory could not help him here, and here it was, as he leant on her shoulder, that she felt, her breast swelling with pity, the real, the blood tie between them. Her heart went out to him, and her eyes were dim with tears when at length they stood again on the high road, and viewed, on a level with themselves but divided from them by the trough of green meadows in which the brook ran, the gables and twisted chimneys, the b.u.t.tressed walls, that gave to Garth its air of a fortress.

The girl gazed at it, the old man's hand still on her shoulder. It was her home: she knew no other, she had never been fifty miles from it.

It stood for peace, safety, protection. She loved it--never more than now, and never as much as now. And never as much as now had she loved her father; never before had she understood him so well. The last hour had wrought a change, dimly suspected by both, in their relations.

They stood on a level--more on a level, at any rate; with no gulf between them but the natural interval of years, a green valley as it were, which the eyes of understanding and the light foot of love could cross at will.

CHAPTER XXVI

A week and a day went by after the banker's return and there was no run upon the bank. But afar off, in London and Manchester and Liverpool, and even in Birmingham, there were shocks and upheavals, failures and talk of failures, fear in high places, ruin in low. For there was no doubt about the crisis now. The wheels of trade, which had for some time been running sluggishly, stopped. It was impossible to sell goods, for the prudent and foreseeing had already flung their products upon the market, and glutted it, and later, others had come in and, forced to find money, had sold down and down, procuring cash at any sacrifice. Now it was impossible to sell at all. Men with the shelves of their warehouses loaded with goods, men whose names in ordinary times were good for thousands, could not find money to meet their trade bills, to pay their wages, to discharge their household accounts.

And it was still less possible to sell shares, for shares, even sound shares, had on a sudden become waste paper. The bubble companies, created during the frenzy of the past two years, were bursting on every side, and the public, unable to discriminate, no longer put faith in anything. Rudely awakened, they opened their eyes to reality.

They saw that they had dreamed, and been helped to dream. They discovered that skates and warming pans were in no great request in the tropics, and could not be exported thither at a profit of five hundred per cent. They saw that churns and milkmaids, freighted to lands where the cattle ran wild on the pampas and oil was preferred to b.u.t.ter, were no certain basis on which to build a fortune. Their visions of South American argosies melted into thin air. The silver from La Plata which they had pictured as entering the mouth of the Thames, or at worst as within sight from the Lizard, was discovered to be reposing in the darkness of unopened seams. The pearling ships were yet to build, the divers to teach, and, for the diamonds of the Brazils which this man or that man had seen lying in skin packages at the door of the Bank of England, they now twinkled in a cold and distant heaven, as unapproachable as the Seven Stars of Orion. The ca.n.a.ls existed on paper, the railways were in the air, the harbors could not be found even on the map.

The shares of companies which had pa.s.sed from hand to hand at fourfold and tenfold their face value fell with appalling rapidity. They fell and fell until they were in many cases worth no more than the paper on which they were printed. And the bursting of these shams, which had never owned the smallest chance of success, brought about the fall of ventures better founded. The good suffered with the bad. Presently no man would buy a share, no man would look at a share, no bank advance on its security. Men saw their fortunes melt day by day as snow melts under an April sun. They saw themselves stripped, within a few weeks or even days, of wealth, of a competence, in too many cases of their all.

And the ruin was widespread. It reached many a man who had never gambled or speculated. Business runs on the wheels of credit, and those wheels are connected by a million unseen cogs. Let one wheel stop and it is impossible to say where the stoppage will cease, or how many will be affected by it. So it was now. The honest tradesman and the manufacturer, striving to leave a competence to a family nurtured in comfort, were involved in one common ruin with the spendthrift and the speculator. The credit of all was suspect; from all alike the sources of accommodation were cut off. Each in his turn involved his neighbor, and brought him down.

There was a great panic. The centres of commerce and trade were convulsed. The kings of finance feared for themselves and closed their pockets. The Bank of England would help no one. Men who had never sought aid before, men who had held their heads high, waited, vain pet.i.tioners, at its doors.

Fortunately for Ovington's, Aldersbury lay at some distance from the centres of disturbance, and for a time, though the storm grumbled and crackled on the horizon, the town remained calm. But it was such a calm as holds the tropic seas in a breathless grip, before the typhoon, breaking from the black canopy overhead, whirls the doomed bark away, as a leaf is swept before our temperate blasts. Throughout those six days, though little happened, anything, it was felt, might happen. The arrival of every coach was a thing to listen for, the opening of every mail-bag a terror, the presentation of every bill a pang, the payment of every note a thing at which to wince; while the sense of danger, borne like some infection on the air, spread mysteriously from town to village, and village to hamlet, to penetrate at last wherever one man depended on another for profit or for subsistence. And that was everywhere.

A storm impended, and no man knew where it would break, or on whom it would fall. Each looked in his neighbor's face and, seeing his fear reflected, wondered, and perhaps suspected. If so-and-so failed, would not such-an-one be in trouble? And if such-an-one "went," what of Blank--with whom he himself had business?

The feeling which prevailed did not in the main go beyond uneasiness and suspicion. But, in quarters where the facts were known and the peril was clearly discerned, these days of waiting were days--nay, every day was a week--of the most poignant anxiety. In banks, where those behind the scenes knew that not only their own stability and their own fortunes were at stake, but that if they failed there would be lamentation in a score of villages and loss in a hundred homes, endurance was strained to the breaking point. To show a cheerful face to customers, to chat over the counter with an easy air, to smile on a visitor who might be bringing in the bowstring, to listen unmoved to the murmur in the street that might presage bad news--these things made demands on nerve and patience which could not be met without distress. And every hour that pa.s.sed, every post that came in, added to the strain.

Under this burden Ovington's bearing was beyond praise. The work of his life--and he was over-old to begin it again--was in danger, and doubtless he thought of his daughter and his son. But he never faltered. He had, it is true, to support him the sense, of responsibility, which steels the heart of the born leader, even as it turns to water that of the pretender; he knew, and doubtless he was strengthened by the knowledge, that all depended on him, on his calmness, his judgment, his resources; that all looked to him for guidance and encouragement, watched his face, and marked his demeanor.

But even so, he was the admiration of those in the secret. Not even Napoleon, supping amid his marshals, and turning over to sleep beside the watch-fire on the night before a battle, was more wonderful. His son swore fealty to him a dozen times a day. Rodd, who had received his money in silence, and now stood to lose no more than his place, followed him with worshipping eyes and, perhaps, an easier mind. The clerks, who perforce had gained some inkling of the position, were relieved by his calmness, and spread abroad the confidence that they drew from him. Even Arthur, who bore the trial less well, admired his leader, suspected at times that he had some secret hope or some undisclosed resources, and more than once suffered himself to be plucked from depression by his example.

The truth was that while financial ability was common to both, their training had been different. The elder man had been always successful, but he had been forced to strive and struggle; he had climbed but slowly at the start, and there had been more than one epoch in his career when he had stood face to face with defeat. He had won through, but he had never shut his eyes to the possibility of failure, or to the fact that in a business, which in those days witnessed every twenty years a disastrous upheaval, no man could count on, though with prudence he might antic.i.p.ate, a lasting success. He had accepted his profession with its drawbacks as well as its advantages. He had not closed his eyes to its risks. He had viewed it whole.

Arthur, on the other hand, plunging into it with avidity at a time when all smiled and the sky was cloudless, had supposed that if he were once admitted to the bank his fortune was made, and his future secured. He knew indeed, and if challenged he would have owned, that banking was a precarious enterprise; that banks had broken. He knew that many had closed their doors in '16, still more on one black day in '93. He was aware that in the last forty years scores of bankers had failed, that some had taken their own lives, that one at least had suffered the last penalty of the law. But he had taken these things to be exceptions--things which might, indeed, recur, but not within his experience--just as in our day, though railway accidents are not uncommon, no man for that reason refrains from travelling.

At any rate the thought of failure had not entered into Arthur's mind, and mainly for this reason he, who in fair weather had been most confident and whose ability had shone most brightly, now cut an indifferent figure. It was not that his talent or his judgment failed; in these he still threw Clement and Rodd into the shade. But the risk, suddenly disclosed, was too much for him. It depressed him. He grew crabbed and soured, his temper flashing out on small provocation. He sneered at Rodd, he snubbed the clerks. When it was necessary to refuse a request for credit--and the necessity arose a dozen times a day--his manner lacked the suavity that makes the best of a bad thing.

In very truth they were trying times. Men who had bought shares through Ovington's, and might have sold them at a profit but had not, could not understand why the bank would not now advance money on the security of the shares, would not even pay calls on them, and had only advice, and that unpalatable, at their service. They came to the parlor and argued, pleaded, threatened, stormed. They would close their accounts, they would remove them to Dean's, they would publish the treatment that they had received! Again, there were those who had bought railway shares, which were now at a considerable discount and looked like falling farther; the bank had issued them--they looked to the bank to take them off their hands. More trying still were the applications of those who, suddenly pressed for money, came, pallid and wiping their foreheads with bandanna handkerchiefs, to plead desperately for a small overdraft, for twenty, forty, seventy pounds--just enough to pay the weekly wage-bill, or to meet their household outgoings, or to settle with some pressing creditor. For all creditors were now pressing. No man gave time, no man trusted another, and for those in the bank the question was, How long would they trust Ovington's? For every man who left the doors of the bank after a futile visit, every man who went away with his request declined, became a potential enemy, whose complaint or chance word might breed suspicion.