“Do you mean,” he asked, “that your money is gone; that you are dying a bankrupt?”
The old man—for Frederick Unwin was twenty years older than his wife—grew so pale that his son became seriously alarmed.
“You are sick—fainting,” he cried; “let me call someone.” But a glance from his father’s commanding eye held him where he stood.
“No, no; it is from shame, Clarke, possibly from grief. You have been on the whole a good boy, and I have taken pride in you. To leave you with your hopes dashed, and the care of a mother on your hands, is a humiliation I never expected. I—I have lost all, Clarke, and am, besides, in debt. I have not five hundred dollars to give you, let alone five thousand. You will have to take up with some lesser position, some clerkship with a salary, reserving to yourself the right to curse a father who was so shortsighted as to invest his whole fortune in a mine that petered out before the machinery was paid for.”
Clarke, to whom the prospect thus opened meant the demolition of more than one dream, sat dazed for a moment in a state of despair, not noticing that his arm had struck the bell on the small table beside which he was sitting, making it ring out in one clear, low note.
“There is even a mortgage on this house,” the wretched father went on. “I thought the amount so raised might bridge me over my present difficulties, but it is gone like the rest, and now it only remains for me to be gone, too, for you to understand into what a position I have put you by my folly and ignorance.”
“Father I would not let any one else speak of you so in my hearing. You meant to better your position, and if you made mistakes, we—that is, my mother and myself, must try and retrieve them.”
“But your chances with Stevens and Wright? Your excellent plan for—” The son suppressed the sigh that rose to his lips and resolutely lifted his head.
“That dream is over,” he said. “I shall think no more of my own advancement, but only of supporting my mother by any humble means that offers.”
“You have not confidence enough in your schemes to borrow the money you want?”