“To-morrow morning, before twelve, let us say. I shall want you to sign a mortgage—a necessary evil; and if you bring me an exact amount of your indebtedness to the Bank of New Guinea, I will give you a cheque for it.”
“A cheque for it!” How magnificent was the sound. Mr. Stamford had drawn some tolerably large cheques in his time, which had been duly honoured, but of late years the cheque-drawing method had fallen much into abeyance.
Nevertheless, he felt like Aladdin, suddenly gifted with the wonderful lamp. The sense of security and the guarantee of funds, for even their moderate and necessary expenses, appeared to open to him vistas of wealth and power verging on Oriental luxury.
He lost no time; indeed he just managed to gain his bank before its enormous embossed outer door was closed, when he marched into the manager’s room with so radiant a countenance that the experienced centurion of finance saw plainly what had happened.
“Don’t trouble yourself to speak,” he said. “It’s all written on your forehead. We bankers can decipher hieroglyphs invisible to other men. ‘Want my account made up—securities ready to be delivered—release—cheque for amount in full.’ Who is the reckless entrepreneur?”
“The Austral Agency Company,” he replied, feeling rather cooled down by this very accurate mind-reading; “but you seem to know so much, you ought to know that too.”
“My dear fellow, I congratulate you!” Mr. Merton said, getting up and shaking him warmly by the hand. “I beg your pardon; but really, any child could see that you had been successful; and I began to think that it must have been one of Barrington Hope’s long shots. A very fine fellow, young but talented; in finance operates boldly. I don’t say he’s wrong, mind you, but rather bold. Everything will be ready for you to-morrow morning. Look in just before ten—by the private door.”
Mr. Stamford did look in. How many times had he walked to those same bank doors with an aching heart, in which the dull throb of conscious care was rarely stilled! Many times had he quitted that building with a sense of temporary relief; many times with a more acutely heightened sense of misery, and a conviction that Fate had done her worst. But never, perhaps, before had he passed those fateful portals with so marked a sense of independence and freedom as on the present occasion.
He had cast away the burden of care, at any rate for two years—two whole years! It was an eternity in his present state of overwrought feeling. He felt like a man who in old days had been bound on the rack—had counted the dread contrivances for tearing muscles and straining sinews—who had endured the first preliminary wrench, and then, at a word, was suddenly loosed.
Such was now his joyous relief from inward agony, from the internal throbs which rend the heart and strain to bursting the wondrous tissue which connects soul and sense. The man who had decreed all this was to him a king—nay, as a god. And in his prayer that night, after he had entreated humbly for the welfare of wife and children in his absence, and for his own safe return to their love and tenderness, Barrington Hope came after those beloved names, included in a petition for mercy at the hands of the All-wise.