The rector shook his head sadly.
“I am afraid you must bring yourself to face facts,” he replied, as they clasped hands. “Good-bye. We need not look upon each other as enemies on account of this, need we?” he added, laying an affectionate, detaining hand on the other’s shoulder. “Good-bye for the present—and, God bless you!”
Chapter Twenty.
Darker Still.
“Things are never so bad but that they might be worse,” is a clap-trap disguised beneath the gold leaf of philosophy. When a man’s leg has to come off—without chloroform—it doesn’t make the impending “bad quarter of an hour” a bit less redoubtable to impress upon him the indisputable fact that he might have had to lose an arm as well.
When Roland awoke the next morning—he had engaged a room in the principal inn at Wandsborough—it seemed as if the outlook before him was about as black as it could be. He had made an enormous sacrifice for love, and all in vain; the fruition of that love was denied him. Wrapped in gloomy reflections, he hardly noticed a letter lying beside his bed. It had come the previous evening, but he had chucked it aside as not worth bothering about. Now he took it up and carelessly tore it open. Suddenly an alarming change came over his features, an awful, rigid, grey look, as if he had been suddenly turned to stone. This is what he read:
“My Dear Dorrien—
“I am rather afraid that I shall be the first to make known some confoundedly bad news. In a word the Tynnestop Bank has ‘gone,’ and the smash is complete. Now the question is, have you got rid of those shares of yours or not—you know we were talking about it when you were up here? If not, I’m deuced sorry for you, for I fear there’s no chance—the smash is too thorough, and it’s supposed they won’t pay sixpence in the pound. Bang they went! without a symptom of warning, and everyone’s asking how on earth it was managed so quietly. If you think it’ll be any good, run up here and talk things over.
“Believe me, old fellow,—
“Yours, etc, etc,
“John Venn.”
“P.S.—I’m bitten myself to a small amount—trusteeship—damned fool’s trade. But it’s you shareholders who’ll be most heavily shot, I’m afraid. I send a couple of papers with an account of the crash—in case you haven’t seen it.”
Again and again he read through the letter, which had been addressed to the rector’s care, till Venn’s large, business-like calligraphy seemed burnt into his brain; then he tore open the newspapers. The affair was plain enough. The Bank was an unlimited concern, and every farthing he had in the world except his last half-yearly dividend was invested in its shares, and now it had fallen with a crash. Roland Dorrien was a ruined man.