She told him.
“Oh, him!” he exclaimed. “He’s dead against my policy. He’ll make a mess.”
“They say he’s doing that,” she remarked.
He asked her a series of questions which she tried to answer frankly, and he came to know that the trouble between the two towns, which, after the Orange funeral and his own disaster had subsided, was up again; that the railways were in difficulties; that there had been several failures in the town; that one of the banks—the Regent-had closed its doors; that Felix Marchand, having recovered from the injury he had received from Gabriel Druse on the day of the Orange funeral, had gone East for a month and had returned; that the old trouble was reviving in the mills, and that Marchand had linked himself with the enemies of the group controlling the railways hitherto directed by himself.
For a moment after she had answered his questions, there was strong emotion in his face, and then it cleared.
He reached out a hand towards her. How eagerly she clasped it! It was cold, and hers was so warm and firm and kind.
“True friend o’ mine!” he said with feeling. “How wonderful it is that somehow it all doesn’t seem to matter so much. I wonder why? I wonder—Tell me about yourself, about your life,” he added abruptly, as though it had been a question he had long wished to ask. In the tone was a quiet certainty suggesting that she would not hesitate to answer.
“We have both had big breaks in our lives,” he went on. “I know that. I’ve lost everything, in a way, by the break in my life, and I’ve an idea that you gained everything when the break in yours came. I didn’t believe the story Jethro Fawe told me, but still I knew there was some truth in it; something that he twisted to suit himself. I started life feeling I could conquer the world like another Alexander or Napoleon. I don’t know that it was all conceit. It was the wish to do, to see how far this thing on my shoulders”—he touched his head—“and this great physical machine”—he touched his breast with a thin hand—“would carry me. I don’t believe the main idea was vicious. It was wanting to work a human brain to its last volt of capacity, and to see what it could do. I suppose I became selfish as I forged on. I didn’t mean to be, but concentration upon the things I had to do prevented me from being the thing I ought to be. I wanted, as they say, to get there. I had a lot of irons in the fire—too many—but they weren’t put there deliberately. One thing led to another, and one thing, as it were, hung upon another, until they all got to be part of the scheme. Once they got there, I had to carry them all on, I couldn’t drop any of them; they got to be my life. It didn’t matter that it all grew bigger and bigger, and the risks got greater and greater. I thought I could weather it through, and so I could have done, if it hadn’t been for a mistake and an accident; but the mistake was mine. That’s where the thing nips—the mistake was mine. I took too big a risk. You see, I’d got so used to being lucky, it seemed as if I couldn’t go wrong. Everything had come my way. Ever since I began in that Montreal railway office, after leaving college, I hadn’t a single setback. I pulled things off. I made money, and I plumped it all into my railways and the Regent Bank; and as you said a minute ago, the Regent Bank has closed down. That cuts me clean out of the game. What was the matter with the bank? The manager?”
His voice was almost monotonous in its quietness. It was as though he told the story of something which had passed beyond chance or change. As it unfolded to her understanding, she had seated herself near to his bed. The door of the room was open, and in view outside on the landing sat Madame Bulteel reading. She was not, however, near enough to hear the conversation.
Ingolby’s voice was low, but it sounded as loud as a waterfall in the ears of the girl, who, in a few weeks, had travelled great distances on the road called Experience, that other name for life.