Ovington's Bank

by Stanley John Weyman

The matter was no surprise to him. He knew his man, and neither the demand nor the threat was unexpected. But he knew, too, that Acherley was shrewd, and that the demand and the threat were ominous signs. More forcibly than anything that had yet occurred, they brought before him the desperate nature of the crisis, and the likelihood that, before a week went by, the worst would happen. He would be compelled to put up the shutters. The bank would stop. And with the bank would go all that he had won by a life of continuous labor: the position that he had built up, the status that he had gained, the reputation that he had achieved, the fortune which he had won and which had so much exceeded his early hopes. The things with which he had surrounded himself, they too, tokens of his success, the outward and handsome signs of his rise in life, many of them landmarks, milestones on the path of triumph—they too would go. He looked sadly on them. He saw them, he too, under the hammer: saw the mocking, heedless crowd handling them, dividing them, jeering at his short-lived splendor, gibing at his folly in surrounding himself with them.

Ay, and one here and there would have cause to say more bitter things. For some—not many, he hoped, but some—would be losers with him. Some homes would be broken up, some old men beggared: and all would be laid at his door. His name would be a byword. There would be little said of the sufferers’ imprudence or folly or rashness: he would be the scapegoat for all, he and the bank he had founded. Ovington’s Bank! They would tell the story of it through years to come—would smile at its rise, deride its fall, make of it a town tale, the tale of a man’s arrogance, and of the speedy Nemesis which had punished it!

He was a proud man, and the thought of these things, the visions that they called up, tortured him. At times, he had borne himself a little too highly, had presumed on his success, had said a word too much. Well, all that would be repaid now with interest, ay, with compound interest.

The room was growing dark, as dark as his thoughts. The fire glowed, a mere handful of red embers, in the grate. Now and again men went by the windows, talking—talking, it might be, of him: anxious, suspicious, greedy, ready at a word to ruin themselves and him, to cut their own throats in their selfish panic. They had only to use common sense, to control themselves, and no man would lose a penny. But they would have no common sense. They would rush in and destroy all, their own and his. For no bank called upon to pay in a day all that it owed could do so, any more than an insurance office could at any moment pay all its lives. But they would not blame themselves. They would blame him—and his!

He groaned as he thought of his children. Clement, indeed, might and must fend for himself. And he would—he had proved it of late days by his courage and cheerfulness, and the father’s heart warmed to him. But Betty? Gay, fearless, laughing Betty, the light of his home, the joy of his life! Who, born when fortune had already begun to smile on him, had never known poverty or care or mean shifts! For whom he had been ambitious, whom he had thought to see well married—married into the county, it might be! Poor Betty! There would be an end of that now. Past his prime and discredited, he could not hope to make more than a pittance, happy if he could earn some two or three pounds a week in some such situation as Rodd’s. And she must sink with him and accept such a home as he could support, in place of this spacious old town-house, with its oaken wainscots and its wide, shallow stairs, and its cheerful garden at the back.

His love suffered equally with his pride.

He was thinking so deeply that he did not hear the door open, or a light foot cross the room. He did not suspect that he was observed until a pair of warm young arms slid round his neck, and Betty’s curls brushed his check. “In the dumps, father?” she said. “And in the dark—and alone? Poor father! Is it as bad as that? But you have not given up hope? We are not ruined yet?”

“God forbid!” he said, hardly able, on finding her so close to him, to control his voice. “But we may be, Betty.”

“And what then?” She clasped him more closely to her. “Might not worse things happen to us? Might you not die and I be left alone? Or might I not die, and you lose me? Or Clement? You are pleased with Clement, father, aren’t you? He may not be as clever as—as some people. But you know he’s there when you want him. Suppose you lost us?”

“True, child. But you don’t know what poverty is—after wealth, Betty—how narrowing, how irksome, how it galls at every point! You don’t know what it is to live on two or three pounds a week, in two or three rooms!”