Ovington's Bank

by Stanley John Weyman

“Mind me to ask Fewtrell. Now get me home. Where’s your arm? I’ll go down through the new planting.”

“But it’s not so safe, sir,” she remonstrated. “There’s the stone stile, and——”

“When I canna get over the stone stile I’ll not come up the hill. I want to see the planting. D’you take me that way and tell me if the rabbits ha’ got in. March, girl!”

She obeyed him, but in fear and trembling, for there was not only the awkward stile to climb, but the track ran over outcrops of rocks on which even a careful walker might slip. However, he crossed the stile with ease, aided less by her arm than by his own memory of its shape, and of every stone that neighbored it; and it was only over the treacherous surface of the rock that he showed himself really dependent on her care. Memory could not help him here, and here it was, as he leant on her shoulder, that she felt, her breast swelling with pity, the real, the blood tie between them. Her heart went out to him, and her eyes were dim with tears when at length they stood again on the high road, and viewed, on a level with themselves but divided from them by the trough of green meadows in which the brook ran, the gables and twisted chimneys, the buttressed walls, that gave to Garth its air of a fortress.

The girl gazed at it, the old man’s hand still on her shoulder. It was her home: she knew no other, she had never been fifty miles from it. It stood for peace, safety, protection. She loved it—never more than now, and never as much as now. And never as much as now had she loved her father; never before had she understood him so well. The last hour had wrought a change, dimly suspected by both, in their relations. They stood on a level—more on a level, at any rate; with no gulf between them but the natural interval of years, a green valley as it were, which the eyes of understanding and the light foot of love could cross at will.

CHAPTER XXVI

A week and a day went by after the banker’s return and there was no run upon the bank. But afar off, in London and Manchester and Liverpool, and even in Birmingham, there were shocks and upheavals, failures and talk of failures, fear in high places, ruin in low. For there was no doubt about the crisis now. The wheels of trade, which had for some time been running sluggishly, stopped. It was impossible to sell goods, for the prudent and foreseeing had already flung their products upon the market, and glutted it, and later, others had come in and, forced to find money, had sold down and down, procuring cash at any sacrifice. Now it was impossible to sell at all. Men with the shelves of their warehouses loaded with goods, men whose names in ordinary times were good for thousands, could not find money to meet their trade bills, to pay their wages, to discharge their household accounts.

And it was still less possible to sell shares, for shares, even sound shares, had on a sudden become waste paper. The bubble companies, created during the frenzy of the past two years, were bursting on every side, and the public, unable to discriminate, no longer put faith in anything. Rudely awakened, they opened their eyes to reality. They saw that they had dreamed, and been helped to dream. They discovered that skates and warming pans were in no great request in the tropics, and could not be exported thither at a profit of five hundred per cent. They saw that churns and milkmaids, freighted to lands where the cattle ran wild on the pampas and oil was preferred to butter, were no certain basis on which to build a fortune. Their visions of South American argosies melted into thin air. The silver from La Plata which they had pictured as entering the mouth of the Thames, or at worst as within sight from the Lizard, was discovered to be reposing in the darkness of unopened seams. The pearling ships were yet to build, the divers to teach, and, for the diamonds of the Brazils which this man or that man had seen lying in skin packages at the door of the Bank of England, they now twinkled in a cold and distant heaven, as unapproachable as the Seven Stars of Orion. The canals existed on paper, the railways were in the air, the harbors could not be found even on the map.

The shares of companies which had passed from hand to hand at fourfold and tenfold their face value fell with appalling rapidity. They fell and fell until they were in many cases worth no more than the paper on which they were printed. And the bursting of these shams, which had never owned the smallest chance of success, brought about the fall of ventures better founded. The good suffered with the bad. Presently no man would buy a share, no man would look at a share, no bank advance on its security. Men saw their fortunes melt day by day as snow melts under an April sun. They saw themselves stripped, within a few weeks or even days, of wealth, of a competence, in too many cases of their all.

And the ruin was widespread. It reached many a man who had never gambled or speculated. Business runs on the wheels of credit, and those wheels are connected by a million unseen cogs. Let one wheel stop and it is impossible to say where the stoppage will cease, or how many will be affected by it. So it was now. The honest tradesman and the manufacturer, striving to leave a competence to a family nurtured in comfort, were involved in one common ruin with the spendthrift and the speculator. The credit of all was suspect; from all alike the sources of accommodation were cut off. Each in his turn involved his neighbor, and brought him down.