An indignation-meeting was called; and so high ran popular feeling, that new directors were appointed for the bank. Mr. Lawrence would have fain declined, but the community insisted. In this time of general distrust, they came back to the loyal gentleman, who, whatever his pride might be, had never deceived one of them.
Alas! had he not enough perplexity of his own, that this new sorrow and shame should stare him in the face, bow him to the earth?
Not his own son, thank God! not any blood kin; and yet his daughter's husband, his fair Gertrude, of whom he had been so proud years ago! He went back suddenly to that old time, and seemed to see them all again as little children, a merry household; and his pale, delicate Fred, for whom his heart beat so anxiously. How they had welcomed his coming!—a son to hand down the name, a son to lean upon in his old age. Nay, those were the extremes of life: why should not men count on their sons through the burden and heat of middle life? Why wait until the evening for comfort?
Where was he now? Did he think of the one who had toiled that he might spend? for, now that he looked at it with awesome calmness, like a thing standing apart, it was one long, dreary pilgrimage of toil. To what end? Was gathering together riches the noblest use of a man made in God's image? Ah, how poor and paltry an aim!
Surely he had done something beside that! A pleasant home of culture and artistic beauty, a circle of refined people gathered about him, the evil and want and woe of the world shut carefully out by silken curtains and plate-glass. His daughters he had been proud of. No mésalliance, no common tastes, as he had sometimes fancied that he had detected in that pretty little Sylvie Barry. And his son?
There had been no positive evil in his life. A young man's follies perhaps, but few vices, if any, thank God! He would never be a libertine, a drunkard, a gambler, a thief. But was negative goodness all? These twenty-four years spent in shaping and culturing, but to what end? Could he call him back from his pleasure now, and have him take up this struggle grown too heavy to fight single-handed? and would he be manful, brave, clear-sighted, and unrepining? No. He felt the change would be too great. The soul so used to ease and luxury, fine linen and soft couches, delicate appetites, indolent habits, intellectual pursuits and graces, to be put in rough harness of business at once, would be cruel, nay, worse, like chaining humming-birds to a dray-wagon. And Irene, flitting like a butterfly through elegant salons, how would she be content with poverty and a cottage?
And was this all the work of his own hands? Had he laid up no treasure against the time of adversity, made no homes into which he might be received in his trial hour? For two years he had struggled manfully, earnestly; and all this time at his very gate there had been a traitor, turning aside the stream until there was nothing but a barren desert left.
The crown of his life was poverty and ruin! For himself he could give up luxuries, and come to plain fare; but what of the others? This last news had swept away all hope.
He sought Horace Eastman, and confronted him with his deceit and wrong: somehow he could not bring himself to call it by its true name, crime, and fasten it on the man there and then. There was a high-bred delicacy about David Lawrence, a little of the old knightly chivalry that in past times held a man back from striking a fallen foe. And then he was not quite sure. The dishonorable work lay between the two men, and he forbore to blame this one wrongly.
He need not have wasted his pity on this man, or have so nicely worded his charges. Horace Eastman stood there, surprised to be sure, for he had counted upon getting away before this turn in the wheel of fortune. For the last year, though he had been outwardly triumphant, and had carried business matters with a hopefully high hand, he had known what the end must be, and made ready for it with a kind of exultant elation at the sense of difficulties surmounted and deceptions carried on successfully. He really despised the man before him, that he had sufficient faith in human nature to be deceived. Starting from the principle that all men are rogues when opportunity offers, he felt no more guilty now, than if he had followed any other well-known law of nature. He stood before Mr. Lawrence bland and composed: there was no vulnerable point to strike, so he need put on no armor. Many a time he had reasoned the matter out to his own satisfaction, that the failure of Hope Mills was inevitable. What with losses, dull times, and extravagant living, it would surely come. That he owed his employer any thing in integrity and sharp fighting with adverse circumstances, would never enter the mind of such a man, so inwrapped in self.