“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.