One day he spent in a sort of pleasing lethargy, like a strong swimmer who, long and sore buffeted by the waves, has reached the shore at last.
The next day his cashier, a sharp-visaged, bald-headed old man called Young Skinner, invited his attention rather significantly to the high amount of certain balances compared with the cash at his (Skinner's) disposal.
“Indeed!” said Hardie quietly; “that must be regulated.” He added graciously, as if conferring a great favour, “I'll look into the books myself, Skinner.”
He did more: he sat up all night over the books; and his heart died with him. Bankruptcy seemed coming towards him, slow perhaps, but sure. And meantime to live with the sword hanging over him by a hair!
Soon matters approached a crisis; several large drafts were drawn, which would have cleaned the bank out, but that the yearly rents of a wealthy nobleman had for some days past been flowing in. This nobleman had gone to explore Syria and Assyria. He was a great traveller, who contrived to live up to his income at home, but had never been able to spend a quarter of it abroad, for want of enemies and masters—better known as friends and servants—to help him. So Hardie was safe for some months, unless there should be an extraordinary run on him, and that was not likely this year; the panic had subsided, and, nota bene, his credit had never stood higher. The reason was, he had been double-faced; had always spoken against railways: and his wise words were public, whereas his fatal acts had been done in the dark.
But now came a change, a bitter revulsion, over this tossed mind: hope and patience failed at last, and his virtue, being a thing of habit and traditions rather than of the soul, wore out; nay more, this man, who had sacrificed so nobly to commercial integrity, was filled with hate of his idol and contempt of himself. “Idiot!” said he, “to throw away a fortune fighting for honour—a greater bubble than that which has ruined me—instead of breaking like a man, with a hidden purse, and starting fair again, as sensible traders do.”
No honest man in the country that year repented of his vices so sincerely as Richard Hardie loathed his virtue. And he did not confine his penitence to sentiment: he began to spend his days at the bank poring over the books, and to lay out his arithmetical genius in a subtle process, that should enable him by degrees to withdraw a few thousands from human eyes for his future use, despite the feeble safeguards of the existing law. In other words, Richard Hardie, like thousands before him, was fabricating and maturing a false balance-sheet.
One man in his time plays many animals. Hardie at this period turned mole. He burrowed darkling into oes alienum. There is often one of these sleek miners in a bank: it is a section of human zoology the journals have lately enlarged on, and drawn the painstaking creature grubbing and mining away to brief opulence—and briefer penal servitude than one could wish. I rely on my reader having read these really able sketches of my contemporaries, and spare him minute details, that possess scarcely a new feature, except one: in that bank was not only a mole, but a mole-catcher; and, contrary to custom, the mole was the master, the mole-catcher the servant. The latter had no hostile views; far from it: he was rather attached to his master. But his attention was roused by the youngest clerk, a boy of sixteen, being so often sent for into the bank parlour, to copy into the books some arithmetical result, without its process. Attention soon became suspicion; and suspicion found many little things to feed on, till it grew to certainty. But the outer world was none the wiser: the mole-catcher was no chatterbox; he was a solitary man—no wife nor mistress about him; and he revered the mole, and liked him better than anything in the world—except money.
Thus the great banker stood, a colossus of wealth and stability to the eye, though ready to crumble at a touch; and indeed self-doomed, for bankruptcy was now his game.
This was a miserable man, far more miserable than his son, whose happiness he had thwarted: his face was furrowed and his hair thinned by a secret struggle; and of all the things that gnawed him, like the fox, beneath his Spartan robe, none was more bitter than to have borrowed five thousand pounds of his children and sunk it.