Evelyn Byrd

by George Cary Eggleston

“Then I told him about the receivership and my purpose to have him appointed. I explained that in the mere matter of commissions it would give him a princely income, to say nothing of perquisites. I didn’t explain what ‘perquisites’ in such a case meant. That was because I had no moral character. He didn’t ask. That was because he thought he had a moral character and wished to spare it affront.

“It was easily arranged that the judge I owned should appoint as receiver the man I owned. But I didn’t own my man completely, as yet. He owed me more money, as a debt of honour, than he could pay at that time; but once in the receivership, he could quickly pay off all that, and then I shouldn’t own him at all. Indeed, he might have repudiated the I O U’s as illegal gambling debts; he might have refused to pay them at all. But I wasn’t afraid of that. Your brother fondly imagined that he was a man of honour, of high moral principle, and so I knew that in order to keep up that pretence with himself he would stand by his debts of honour. But I foresaw that he might presently discharge them all, out of the proceeds of the receivership, and send me adrift. I must get a stronger grip on him. So I told my judge to send for him and say certain things to him.

“‘You must setup a house,’ the judge told him, ‘in a fashionable quarter of the town, by way of maintaining your position. You see, it won’t do for me to put anybody in charge of those many millions who isn’t recognised as himself a man of independent wealth. You must have a good house and enlarge your establishment. The receivership will abundantly recoup you in the end, but from the beginning we must keep up appearances.’

“Your brother came to me in great distress of mind to tell me what the judge had required of him. He frankly told me he hadn’t the money necessary to make a first payment on the lease of a town house, to furnish it suitably, and to establish himself in it. I pretended to be worried over the matter, and I took twenty-four hours in which to think about it. Then I sent for your brother again and told him I saw a way out; that certain clients of mine had money to invest on bond and mortgage, and had placed it in my hands; that by a little stretching of my authority I could let him have the amount he needed, as a mortgage loan on his place in the country. I saw his face fall when I suggested this, as I had expected to see it fall. Presently he explained that in order to give a mortgage on his country place, which really stood in his wife’s name and had in fact come to her as a dowry, he must get her to execute the papers. That would be very awkward, he explained, as he had never thought it necessary to bother his womankind about his affairs. To ask his wife to execute a mortgage would necessitate a statement to her of his financial position, and a whole lot more of that sort, which I had expected. I told him I thought I could arrange the matter; that my clients had placed their affairs completely in my hands; that all they wanted was the prompt payment of interest and adequate security for their invested money; that the profits of the receivership would be ample to secure all this; and that any arrangement I might make would never be questioned by my clients. I told him that the mortgage security was after all only a matter of form in a case where the other security was so ample, and that the whole thing was in my hands. So I suggested that he should—as a mere matter of form—execute the mortgage, himself signing his wife’s name in her stead. I would take care of the document, not even recording it, and the loan could be paid off presently, with nobody the wiser. Your brother fell into the trap. He executed the mortgage, signing his wife’s name to it, and he was at once made receiver of the bank.

“From that hour, of course, he was my property. No negro slave in all the South was ever more completely owned, or more absolutely under the control of his master.

“I had only to reveal the facts at any moment in order to send him to jail. He had committed a felony—he, the highly respectable receiver of a savings bank, and a man regarded as a leader in social and even in religious movements of every kind. I held complete proofs of his felony in my own hands. He must do my bidding or go to State’s prison.

“My first order to him was to put me into the bank as counsel to the receiver, at a good salary, and also as expert accountant, at another good salary. The bank could afford all this and vastly more. Its assets were easily three times its liabilities—if properly handled, and I knew how to handle them. I meant no harm to your brother. On the contrary, I meant to make him rich and let him retire from the completed receivership with the commendation of the court for the masterly manner in which he had so handled the affairs of the institution as to make good every dollar of its deposits with interest, and to deliver it into the hands of its trustees again in a perfectly solvent condition. You see, the assets were ample for that, and to provide for my future besides. The only trouble before had been bad management and a deficient knowledge of the art of bookkeeping on the part of the respectable old galoots who had been in control of the bank. They might easily have straightened out everything without any court proceedings at all, if they had known how. Their violations of the law had been purely technical—such as occur in every bank every day—and these things can always be arranged on a good basis of assets, if the people in charge only know how.

“Now, when I began operations in the bank, your brother was inclined to object to some of the things I did. I had only to remind him of the mortgage papers in order to reduce him to subjection. He still thought he had a moral character, and so when I proposed to sell out the bank’s securities at ten or twenty or fifty per cent less than their value, and take a commission of five or ten or forty per cent for ourselves from the buyers, he raised grave moral objections. But he was in no position to insist upon them, and besides he was largely profiting by the transactions. Meanwhile, I was slowly getting the bank’s affairs into shape—very slowly, for there were the salaries of him and myself to be considered. Then came the revolt of the chief bookkeeper, and his complaint that we were robbing the bank. I tried hard to square him, but he wouldn’t square. That fellow really had a moral character, and, worse still, he couldn’t be scared. I showed him that as he had already permitted false entries in the bank’s books, he must himself be involved in any exposure that might be made. He answered that he knew that, and was prepared to explain matters in court and ‘take the consequences.’ Then your brother got scared half to death, and consulted you. If he had waited for forty-eight hours, I should have had that bookkeeper in jail, and your brother would have got credit for extreme vigilance. But when he sent for you, all was up. You came into the bank and practically took your brother’s place and function. But you neglected to provide yourself with legal authority to be in the bank at all. Another thing you didn’t reckon upon was my foresight. I had taken pains to win several of the clerks and bookkeepers to my side. I had ‘let them in,’ so that when you angrily dismissed me, I still had daily and hourly information of what was going on. You found out that the bank’s securities had been sold for less than they were worth, and you set to work to repair the wrong. You couldn’t cancel the sales that had been made, but you could and did pay your own money into the bank to make good what you regarded as the defalcations. That made it easy for me. I went to my judge—the one I owned—and laid before him the fact that you were handling the bank’s assets without a shadow of legal authority; that you had dismissed me—the receiver’s counsel and expert accountant—upon discovering that I knew of defalcations, and all the rest of it. You know that part of the story, for you suffered from it. To save your brother, you had sacrificed large sums of money. When that failed and you found that either he or you must go to prison for these defalcations, you decided to sacrifice your liberty and your reputation in order to save him and his wife and daughters. You refused to defend yourself. I thought your plan was to get a stay, give bail, and skip it. But you had the disadvantage of having a moral character, so you stood your hand and were sent to prison. Your brother, having no moral character, let you do this thing and pretended great grief over your dishonesty and perfidy. But he had learned the business by that time, and so he got away with the swag, and with the reputation of a man of truly Roman virtue who suffered acutely over the misbehaviour of his ‘black sheep’ brother. What a farce it all is anyhow—life, I mean—if one tries to take it seriously! Let me have a little brandy, please! I’m growing very faint.”