He had had no preparation for responsibility. He had lived—he smiled at the platitude—a sheltered life. Except in one or two isolated instances, such as his marriage, he had never been compelled to make a momentous decision. His youth, with its romantic dreaming, its fastidiousness which had made him shun such physical grossness as Grove's, had been ordered and directed. So had his more formal education. Even his four years in the army, except in unimportant details, had never taken him into the realm of plan and execution. He had simply been a cog in the military machine, obeying orders, reissuing those orders to men bound to obey him, as he was himself bound to obey others. Responsibility rested always in other hands. He had been aware of that and fairly content to have it so.
But that was at an end. Very soon now, a matter of hours, when the unconscious old man in a room down the hallway breathed out his tired life he, Rod Norquay, would become the fulcrum and lever which should move enormous weights. He would be faced by a necessity to take up a task which offered little hope of reward save a sense of duty performed. Other men's welfare, other men's money, other men's sins. He could draw back from this, or see it through. He could evade it or grapple it stoutly. But there it was, waiting for him to decide.
Grove had evaded, when he faced the incontrovertible result of his handiwork. Or had he? No one would ever know. He had gone in mid-afternoon from the Norquay Trust office to his home. He had telephoned a friend to join him in a duck hunt at a gun club on the Ladner flats, had arranged to pick up his friend. He had come out from the house to the garage, bearing a shotgun, a bag and a shooting coat, whistling as he came. He spoke to the chauffeur genially. While the man attended to some detail of his machine the shotgun cracked and Grove Norquay fell against the running-board. He was dead before the man could cry for help.
And whether it was sheer accident, or whether he had killed himself in a moment of despair at the muddle he had wrought, Rod could not say. Publicly it went as a sad accident. But he knew what his father thought. He knew, too, what rumors ran like sly foxes in the street, rumors which did not have their origin in mere conjecture, but which nevertheless would have brought Grove's financial castle tumbling about their ears if his father had not been prepared.
Rod would never forget the crowd of people in the street an hour before the Norquay Trust Company opened its doors. People well and ill-dressed, shopclerks, business men, middle-aged women, people whose motors were parked at the curb. They strove and pushed and jostled for advantage, eager to be first, until policemen came and herded them into line,—a line that extended a block and curved around a corner up a side street like the tail of an uneasy, muttering serpent.
All that forenoon and well past the luncheon hour they filed past the paying tellers, presented checks, passbooks, demanding their money, withdrawing accounts. As the cash boxes of the Norquay Trust emptied into pockets that departed hastily through the front door they were replenished by sheafs of Norquay estate currency withdrawn from other banks in hundred-thousand-dollar lots.
From behind bronze grillwork Rod watched this scene. He marked the nervous eagerness of these people over their money. They were frightened, watchful, uneasy, until they had it in their hands. The air was charged with hostile currents, with a tension that communicated itself to department managers, the ledgerkeepers, the tellers. One man made a five-hundred-dollar mistake,—and broke under the strain. He sat in his cage and wept, and a murmuring that was like a growl swept through the lofty, pillared room until he was led away and another man took up his work of handing out cash.
Once Rod's father came to sit by him for a minute. He looked out at the anxious faces, the people crowding forward, pressing eagerly up to the wickets. After a little he said to Rod in a low, tense whisper:
"The coward. The damned coward! He couldn't face the music."
About one-thirty the run tapered off. Every certificate of deposit, every demand was met promptly, courteously. Human nature asserted itself. An institution that could disgorge an enormous total and still exhibit great bales of currency and gold behind each teller couldn't be shaky. Who peddled the story that the Norquay Trust was broke, anyhow? Some damn fool. It was a false alarm. Fellow that started it ought to be shot—scaring people like that—making so much trouble. The Norquay estate's backing it. No chance of a concern like that being in the hole. What you think? Eh?