He laughed, but in no more audible tone of exultation than had been his an hour before, when he had emptied the bag of sovereigns into the till and had lifted, with a great show of fatigue, the dummy bag from the counter to the drawer. He felt that he could not afford to give himself away in the presence of the mob. He knew that the clutch for gold makes a mob of the most cultivated people.
“How good of you! how wise of you!” he said to Agnes in a low tone when the crowd had drifted away from them and the office was rapidly emptying. “But the cheque—how did you get the cheque?”
“You did not see whose signature was attached to it?” said Agnes.
“I only saw that it was a London & County cheque.”
“It was signed by Sir Percival Hope.”
“I do not quite understand how you could have a cheque signed by Sir Percival Hope.”
“He gave it to me; he trusted me as I have trusted you. He would have done so without security if I had accepted it on such terms. I declined to do so, however. I placed in his hands security that would satisfy any bank—even so scrupulous a bank as Westwoods'. I handed over to him all my shares in the Water Company.”
“They are worth twenty-five thousand pounds at least. Great heavens! Agnes, you never sold them for fifteen thousand pounds?”
“Oh no; I did not sell them. I only deposited them as security with Sir Percival. You see I had not long to make up my mind what to do. Only an hour and a half ago I heard of this idiotic run upon the bank. Oh no; neither Sir Percival nor I had much margin for deliberation. He told me that unless I lodged gold with you it would be no use. He laughed at the idea of my fancying that a cheque would be as useful to you as gold. But you see”—
“Yes, I see; I see. And I believed that it required a man to understand men, and that only a clever man understood what was meant by a panic among men and women. I was a fool. For the past two hours I have been trying to stem the flood of that panic—the avalanche of that panic; I have been smiling in the faces of those fools; they were fools, but not great enough fools to fail to see through my acting. I have been pretending that dummy money bags were almost too heavy for me to lift. That trick only got rid of half-a-dozen men, and not one woman. I came out from my room munching a biscuit, to make them believe that I regarded the situation as an everyday one, not worth a second thought. I bluffed—abusing the cashier for the time he took to count out the money, promising to pay the full amount of all the cheques without taking time to calculate if they were correct to the penny. It was all a game of bluff to make the people believe that the bank had enough gold to pay them all in full. But I failed to deceive more than a few, though I played my part well. I know that I played it well; I like boasting of it. But I failed. And then you enter. Ah, my dear, I am proud of you; you are the truest woman that lives. You deserve a better fate than that which has been yours.”