The influx of city men had scarcely become apparent--it was the middle of May now--when a new phenomenon met the explorer's eye. A board fence was of a sudden run up around the property of the mining company, and watchers were stationed at intervals to see that no inquisitive stranger should scale the barrier. Excitement among the speculators grew intense. It was immediately inferred that silver, or perhaps even gold, had been found, else why this jealousy? and the crowds who came from town to scour the adjacent lands were so great that the Père Podevin had to use his stable and poultry house as sleeping quarters, and sold permission to two gentlemen to sleep on the floor under his billiard table on the same terms as he had been wont to charge for an entire chamber.
There was constant hurry in the offices in the Rue des Borgnes, by gaslight as well as by day. The jaded clerks seemed always at work, save when they crept home at night to sum up the endless figure columns over again in their sleep, and hurry back to business next morning. The president seemed as hardly driven as his servants. The street--where hitherto he had been a prominent figure, notebook in hand, making bargains, picking up information, and distributing it in passing, because it could be done so much more quickly than on 'Change, where some contrive to make a little business go so far in the way of talk and time-killing--the street knew him no more, and he was beset by people all day long, in his office, on every imaginable errand.
Hitherto he had been so cool, and so quick, and so strong--a very steam engine for doing business--so confident and so clear, perceiving all the bearings of a question at once--deciding on his course and completing an agreement in a few incisive sentences, while another man would still be figuring up with pencil and paper the preliminary calculations. Now there were signs of fatigue in the robust figure, a stoop of the shoulders, a flush about the temples. His temper, too--in time past he had had no temper, or at least it had been impossible to ruffle it, except where anger was made to serve a business end--his temper had grown irritable, as the luckless clerks too frequently found out, and he suffered from sensations of faintness which led to his withdrawing momentarily into his dressing-room, where there now stood a decanter of sherry, a thing which theretofore he would have scorned to permit on his premises. His habit till then had been to drink a couple of glasses of sherry at the club by way of luncheon, but the idea of keeping a "pick-me-up" at his elbow, to be referred to at uncertain intervals, had never occurred to him, because, till then, he had found his own strength sufficient for the day's work.
That may have been because things had gone well always, and there is no tonic in the pharmacopœia like a habit of succeeding; but now there were so many things, mines of copper, plumbago, phosphate, a railway, a suburb, and a bank, besides--besides everything else; for Ralph's greed grew with his success, the more he secured the more he still desired, and he could not see an opportunity go by without wishing to have a fling at it. A few months before, when money was flowing in for copper shares, there had seemed to be an opportunity in railways on New York market, and Ralph went in. It fretted him to see money lie idle when work could be found for it. He went in, but the unforeseen had happened, as it always will some time, and h found he could not come out again without loss, such as was not to be thought of, and therefore he must go in deeper still.
His own railway, too, the St. Lawrence, Gattineau, and Hudson's Bay had been suffering a check in the shape of a swamp it had to cross, in which it went on burying itself as fast as it could be built above the morass. A contractor had already failed. No other would undertake the work. The company was compelled to do it itself, under pain of being cut in two, with sections built to the south and north, and this gap in the middle, which made both ends useless. Ralph was largely interested in the road, which indeed he had both projected and promoted, to connect his plumbago mines and his phosphate lands with "the front," i.e., with civilization and a market.
The plumbago mines were at work, gangs of men digging into the ground and dragging out riches which were barrelled up to await transport; but, until that swamp could be bridged over, of no more present value to the owners than so many tons of gravel. The workmen could not eat it, and would not accept it in payment of their wages; and to haul it to market over distances of corduroy road was to end by disposing of it for something less than it had cost to bring it there.
The public were aware of the trouble, and the shares would not sell. The bank, of course, could be brought to the rescue up to a certain point, but that, he began to realize, was nearly reached. There were signs of failing confidence at the board meetings, whisperings, and averted glances betokening incipient opposition, though mistrustful as yet of strength to declare itself, which in time past, when he could defy it, he would easily have browbeaten into submission; but now he dared not attempt to browbeat, the consequences of unsuccess would have been too serious. He tried to conciliate and persuade, where he had been wont to command, and when the master tries to conciliate the pupil, it is a sign the whip has gone from him, and the subject divines that he has a master no longer than he cares to accept one.
Again, the success of St. Hypolite Suburb was hanging fire. The suburb had been a tract of waste ground some years before, when Ralph picked it up on easy terms, as being unfit for agriculture and useless for anything else, and his scheme was to build on it a new and improved quarter of the town. He had sunk great sums in draining, levelling, and filling up. He had laid out a park, with a fountain, overlooked by semi-detached villas, and approached by residence streets of a superior kind. A few houses had become tenanted the year before, and a great sale of houses in June of the current year had been written up in a series of ingenious paragraphs in the local newspapers; when, on the arrival of warm weather, a visitation of ague and typhoid fever fell upon the pioneer settlers in the district, and frightened the public out of all the interest which it had cost so much money and pains to instil into its mind. The sale came off as advertised, but the half-dozen dwellings first offered--"replete with every modern improvement and convenience"--fetching barely enough to pay the advances of the Proletarian Loan and Mortgage Company, the rest were withdrawn for the present.
In a house of cards, though one card may be in doubtful equilibrium, if those other cards it leans against are moderately steady, it may stand. Nay, it may even contribute a measure of support to its supporters; but if all are shakey at the same time, it is a task of infinite dexterity to balance the several weaknesses each upon each. Even then the balance is but temporary; a flutter in the surrounding air will disturb the equipoise, and, when that befalls, the structure holding together only by weaknesses which balance each other will tumble to the ground a heap of ruin. And this was the fate Ralph saw impending. He was in so many ventures, and up to his full strength in each. If only one of them had weakened he could have propped it with the others in such wise as he had done before, but when everything grew shakey at the same time, it seemed as if the pillars of the universe itself were giving way; and worse, he felt the giving way within himself, a nodding to that frightful fall which was approaching, a yielding such as he had never known before. Hitherto each difficulty had called out latent strength to overcome it, but now there seemed a torpor in himself which would not be thrown off. His mind would, not, as hitherto, answer to his call with new expedients to circumvent each new check; he felt benumbed, and sought to that decanter--in his dressing-room for the strength, ingenuity, and courage he had theretofore found within himself.
It was a morning in the beginning of July--Ralph had remained in town overnight, not so much for the sake of doing anything as merely to be beside his business. In time past, when his affairs flourished, he had rather prided himself on the determination with which he could dismiss "shop" from his mind at five minutes past four, when he walked out of his office, and his promptitude in resuming it, exactly where he had left off, at a quarter before ten next morning. But now, when it would have been a relief to his jaded mind to lay cares by for a time, they clung to him all the while, disturbing sleep, even, with confused and harassing visions. To be away from business aggravated his anxiety--filled him with doubts as to what might occur in his absence, and he found his mind easier in the office than anywhere else. Even so the mother of a sick child will sit by the bed for hours, though the child be in sleep the most undisturbed, and she can do nothing more. There is assurance in being present, if she were away she would imagine things were happening, and be miserable.