The Romance of a Plain Man Part 41

"Dreadful, Sally?"

"Yes, but it isn't about us. Do you know, I honestly believe that Jessy intends to marry Mr. Cottrel."

"What? That old rocking-horse? Why, he's a Methusalah, and knock-kneed into the bargain."

"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters to her except clothes. I've heard of women who sold themselves for clothes, and I believe she's one of them."

"Well, we're an eccentric family," I said wearily, "and she's the worst."

At any other time the news would probably have excited my indignation, but as I sat there, in the wicker rocking-chair, by the nursery fire, I was too exhausted to resent any manifestation of the family spirit. The last week had been a terrible strain, and there were months ahead which I knew would demand the exercise of every particle of energy that I possessed. In the afternoon there was to be a meeting of the directors of the bank, called to discuss the advancing of further loans to the c.u.mberland and Tidewater Railroad, and at eight o'clock I had promised to work for several hours with Bradley, my secretary. To go slowly now was impossible. My only hope was that by going fast enough I might manage to save what remained of the situation.

As the winter pa.s.sed I went earlier to my office and came up later.

Failure succeeded failure in Wall Street, and the whole country began presently to send back echoes of the prolonged crash. The c.u.mberland and Tidewater Railroad, to which we had refused a further loan, went into the hands of a receiver, and the Great South Midland and Atlantic immediately bought up the remnants at its own price. The General, who had been jubilant about the purchase, relapsed into melancholy a week later over the loss of "a good third" of his personal income.

"I'm an old fool or I'd have stopped dabbling in speculations and put away a nest-egg for my old age," he remarked, wiping his empurpled lids on his silk handkerchief. "No man over fifty ought to be trusted to gamble in stocks. Thank G.o.d, I'm the one to suffer, however, and not the road. If there's a more solid road in the country, Ben, than the South Midland, I've got to hear of it. It's big, but it's growing--swallowing up everything that comes in its way, like a regular boa constrictor.

Think what it was when I came into it immediately after the war; and to-day it's one of the few roads that is steadily increasing its earnings in spite of this blamed panic."

"You worked regeneration, General, as I've often told you."

"Well, I'm too old to see what it's coming to. I hope a good man will step into my place after I'm gone. I'm sometimes sorry you didn't stick by me, Ben."

He spoke of the great road in a tone of regretful sentiment which I had never found in his allusions to his lost Matoaca. The romance of his life, after all, was not a woman, but a railroad, and his happiest memory was, I believe, not the Sunday upon which he had stood beside the rose-lined bonnet of his betrothed and sung l.u.s.tily out of the same hymn-book, but the day when the stock of the Great South Midland and Atlantic had sold at 180 in the open market.

"I'll tell you what, my boy," he remarked with a quiver of his lower lip, which hung still farther away from his bloodless gum, "a woman may go back on you, and the better the woman the more likely she is to do it,--but a road won't,--no, not if it is a good road."

"Well, I'm not getting much return out of the West Virginia and Wyanoke just now," I replied. "It's no fun being a little road at the mercy of a big one when the big one is a boa constrictor. Even if you get a fair division of the rates, you don't get your cars when you want them."

"The moral of that," returned the General, with a chuckle, "is, to quote from my poor old mammy again, 'Don't hatch until you're ready to hatch whole.'"

We parted with a laugh, and I dismissed the affairs of the little railroad as I entered my office at the bank, where my private wire immediately ticked off the news of a state of panic in the money market.

That was in February, and it was not until the end of March that the ice on which I was walking cracked under my feet and I went through.

CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH I GO DOWN

I had just risen from breakfast on the last day of March when I was called to the telephone by c.u.mmins, the cashier of the bank.

"Things are going pretty queer down here. Looks as if a run were beginning. Some old fool started it after reading about that failure of the Darlington Trust Company in New York. Wish you'd hurry."

"Call up the directors, and look here!--pay out all deposits slowly until I get there."

The telephone rang off, and picking up my hat, I went down the front steps to the carriage, which had been ordered by Sally for an early appointment. As I stepped in, she appeared in her hat and coat and joined me.

"Drive to the bank, Micah," I said, "I want to get there like lightning."

"Can you wait till I speak to mammy? She is bringing the baby."

For the first time since our marriage my nerves got the better of me, and I answered her sharply.

"No, I can't wait--not a minute, not a second. Drive on, Micah."

In obedience to my commands, Micah touched the horses, and as we sped down Franklin Street, Sally looked at me with an expression which reminded me of the faint wonder under the fixed smile about Miss Mitty's mouth.

"What's the matter, Ben? Are you working too hard?" she enquired.

"I'm tired and I'm anxious. Do you realise that we are living in the midst of a panic?"

"Are we?" she asked quietly, and arranged the fur rug over her knees.

"Do you mean to tell me you hadn't heard it?" I demanded, in pure amazement that the thing which had possessed me to madness for three months should have escaped the consciousness of the wife with whom I lived.

"How was I to hear of it? You never told me, and I seldom read the papers now since the baby came. Of course I knew something was wrong.

You were looking so badly and so much older."

To me it had needed no telling, because it had become suddenly the most obvious fact in the world in which I moved. Only a fool would gaze up at the sky during a storm burst and remark to a bystander, "It thunders."

Yet even now I saw that what she realised was not the gravity of the financial crisis, but its injurious effect upon my health and my appearance.

"You've been on too great a strain," she remarked sympathetically; "when it's all over you must come away and we'll go to Florida in the General's car."

To Florida! and at that instant I was struggling in the grip of failure--the failure of the successful financier, which is of all failures the hardest. Not a few retrenchments, not the economy of a luxury here and there, but ultimate poverty was the thing that I faced while I sat beside her on the soft cushions under the rich fur rug. One by one the familiar houses whirled by me. I saw the doors open and shut, the people come out of them, the sunshine fall through the budding trees on the sidewalk; and the houses and the moving people and the budding trees, all seemed to me detached and unreal, as if they stood apart somewhere in a world of quiet, while I was sucked in by the whirlpool.

Though I lifted my voice and called aloud to them, I felt that the people I pa.s.sed would still go quietly in and out of the opening doors in the placid spring sunshine.

"There's Bonny Page," said Sally, waving her hand; "she's to marry Ned Marshall next month, you know, and they are going to Europe. Did you notice that baby in the carriage--the one with blue bows and the Irish lace afghan?--it is Bessy Munford's,--the handsomest in town, they say, after little Benjamin."

The sight of the baby carriage, with its useless blue fripperies, trundled on the pavement under the budding trees, had aroused in me a sudden ridiculous anger, as though it represented the sinful extravagance of an entire nation. That silly carriage with its blue ribbons and its lace coverlet! And over the whole country factory after factory was shutting down, and thousands of hungry mothers and children were sitting on door-steps in this same sunshine. My nerves were bad. It had been months since I had a good night's sleep, and I knew that in the condition of my temper a trifle might be magnified out of all due proportion to its relative significance.

The horses stopped at the bank, and Sally leaned out to bow smilingly to one of the directors, who was coming along the sidewalk.

"I never saw so many people about here, Ben," she remarked; "it looks exactly as if it were a theatre. Ah, there's the General now going into his office. He hobbles so badly, doesn't he? When do you think you'll be home?"

"I don't know," I returned shortly, "perhaps at midnight--perhaps next week."

My tone brought a flush to her cheek, and she looked at me with the faint wonder that I had seen first on the face of Miss Mitty when I went in to breakfast with her on that autumn morning. It was the look of race, of the Bland breeding, of the tradition that questioned, not violently, but gently, "Can this be possible?"

She drove on without replying to me, and as I entered my office, the faces of Miss Mitty and of Sally were confused into one by my disordered mind.

The run had already started--a depositor, who had withdrawn ten thousand dollars after reading of the failure of the Darlington Trust Company, had been paid off first, and following him the line had come, crawling like black ants on the pavement. As I entered the doors, it seemed to me that the face of each man or woman in the throng stood out, separate and distinct, as though an electric search-light had pa.s.sed over it; and I saw one and all, frightened, satisfied, or merely ludicrous, with a vividness of perception which failed me when I remembered the features of my own wife.

"We can pay them off slowly till three o'clock," said Bingley, the vice-president, whom I found, with five or six of the directors, already in my office. "I've got only one paying teller's window open. The trouble, of course, began with the small accounts, of which we carry such a blamed lot. Mark my words, it is the little depositor that endangers a bank."

He looked nervous, and swallowed hastily while he talked, as if he had just rushed in from breakfast, with his last mouthful still unchewed. As I entered and faced the men sitting in different att.i.tudes, but all wearing the same strained and helpless expression, a feeling of irritation swept over me, and I paused in the middle of the floor, with my hat and a folded newspaper in my hand.

"A quarter of a million in hard cash would tide us over, I believe,"

pursued Bingley, swallowing faster; "but the question is how in thunder are we to lay hands on it by nine o'clock to-morrow morning?"