Ovington's Bank

by Stanley John Weyman

Poor Clement! There are situations in which it is hard to play the hero, and he found himself in one of them. He had vowed that there should be no more meetings and no more love-making until he had faced and conquered his dragon. But meanwhile the dragon lay sick and blind at the bottom of its den, guarded by its very weakness from attack, while every hour and every day that saw nothing done seemed to remove Clement farther from his mistress, seemed to set a greater distance between them, seemed to blacken his face in her eyes.

Yet what could he do? How could he wrest himself from the inaction—it must seem to her the ignoble inaction—which pressed upon him? She watched—he pictured her watching from her tower, or more precisely from the terraced garden at Garth, for the deliverance which did not come, for the knight whose trumpet never sounded! She watched, while he, weak and shiftless, hung back in uncertainty, the inefficient he had ever been!

Ay, that he had ever been! It was that which hurt him. It was the sense of that which wasted his spirits as sorely as the impatience, the fever, of thwarted love. The spell of vigor which had for a few days lifted him out of himself, and given him the force to meet and to impress his fellows, had not only failed to win any real advantage, but failing, it had left him less self-reliant than before. For he saw now where he had failed. He saw that with the winning-card in his hand he had allowed himself to be defeated by Arthur, and to be jockeyed out of all the fruits of his labor, simply because he had lacked the moral courage, the hardness of fibre, the stiffness to stand by his own!

And he feared that it would ever be so. Arthur had got the better of him, and the knowledge depressed him to the ground. He was not a man. He was a weakling, a dreamer, good for neither one thing nor another! As useless outside the bank as at his desk, below and not above the daily tasks that he secretly despised.

Yet what could he do? What was it in his power to do? He asked himself that question a hundred times. He could not force himself on the Squire, ill and confined to his bed as he was—and be sure, Arthur did not make the best of his uncle’s condition. He could only wait, though to wait was intolerable. He could only wait, while poor Josina first doubted, then despaired! Wait while first hope, and then faith, and in the end love died in her breast! Wait, till she thought herself abandoned!

Of course in his impatience and his humility Clement exaggerated both the delay and its results. The days seemed weeks to him, the weeks months. He fancied it a year since he had seen Josina. He did not consider that she was no stranger to his difficulties, nor reflect that though his silence might try her, and his absence cause her unhappiness, she might still approve both the one and the other. As a fact, the lesson which he had taught her at their last meeting had been driven home by the remorse that had tortured her on that dreadful night; and lonely hours in the sick room, much watching, and many a thought of what might have been, had strengthened the impression.

But Clement did not know this. He pictured the girl as losing all faith in him, and as the weeks ran on, the time came when he could bear the delay no longer, when he felt that he must either do something, or write himself down a coward. So one day, after hearing in the town that the Squire was able to leave his room, he wrote to Josina. He told her that he should call on the morrow and see her father.

And on the morrow he rode over, blind for once to the changes of nature, of landscape and cloudscape that surrounded him. But he never reached the house, for at the little bridge at the foot of the drive Josina met him, and eager as he had been to see his sweetheart and to hear her voice, he was checked by the change in her. It was a change which went deeper than mere physical alteration, though that, too, was there. The girl was paler, finer, more spiritual. Trouble and anxiety had laid their mark on her. He had left her girl, he found her woman. A new look, a look of purpose, of decision, gave another cast to her features.

She was the first to speak, and her words bore out the change in her. “You must come no farther, Clement,” she said. And then as their hands met and their eyes, the color flamed in her cheeks, her head drooped flowerlike, she was for an instant the old Josina, the girl he had wooed by the brook, who had many a time fallen on his breast. But for a moment only. Then, “You cannot see him yet,” she announced. “Not yet, for a long time, Clem. I met you here that I might stop you, and that there might be no misunderstanding—and no more secrets.”

And this she had certainly secured, for the place which she had chosen for their meeting was overlooked, though at a distance, by the doorway of the house, and by all the walks about it.