The directors had made a gallant fight in order to continue the business, but their courage proved useless. The next morning after that night when Lord Darsham told Williams to show Mr. Forde the door, the manager had risen with the firm intention of handing in his resignation that forenoon, but on the way to St. Vedast Wharf he met Mr. Gibbons.
"Bad business that about Werner," said that gentleman.
"It's a bad business for me," answered Mr. Forde lugubriously; "I shall have to resign to-day, and what is to become of me and those poor creatures at home God alone knows."
"Nonsense!" retorted Mr. Gibbons; "why should you resign unless you have some consideration given you for doing so? Put a bold front on the matter, and say you did the best for the directors and the shareholders, and you are ready to answer any questions that may be put. They will give you a cool two hundred to walk out. That is what I should do if I were in your place."
And that was precisely what Mr. Forde did; the result being that he got not only two hundred but three hundred pounds given out of the directors' own pockets, if he would resign at once and follow his friend Kleinwort to South America.
And so that chapter in City history ended, with only this addendum, Mr. Forde never went to South America, though the directors said and believed he did.
With the three hundred pounds he travelled as far as Liverpool, where he set up in business with his correspondent Tom, and where people hear very little indeed about his wife and children, who live in an extremely small house situate at Everton.
Sic transit gloria mundi, the ex-manager might well exclaim, did he understand the meaning of that phrase, while pacing the pavement of those dreary streets to and from his humble habitation, when he contrasts the actual present with the once possible future himself had conceived.
Mr. Forde's departure from London caused another absentee; and as the opposition colour maker had by this time gone into liquidation, and would have cheerfully given his vote for Mortomley's immediate discharge had any one offered him five pounds, Mr. Swanland might certainly have helped the bankrupt to freedom had he chosen to do so. But Mr. Swanland did not choose to do so, and Mr. Douglas was afraid to tell Dolly this.
"It will come in time," she said calmly, "or if it never does, some other way will open for my husband."