Ovington's Bank

by Stanley John Weyman

He took her hands and held them; and if he had taken her in his arms she would have forgiven him and clung to him. But he did not. He seemed even to hold her from him. “Forgive me, dear, for sending for you,” he said. “I thought to catch you going into church, but you were not there, and there was nothing for it but this. Jos, I have bad news.”

“Bad news?” she exclaimed. “What? Don’t keep me waiting, Clement! What bad news?”

“The worst for me,” he said. “For we must part. I have come to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” Oh, it was impossible! It was not, it could not be that! “What do you mean?” she cried, and her eyes pleaded with him to take it back. “Tell me! You cannot mean that we must part.”

“I do,” he said soberly. “Something has happened, dear—something that must divide us. Be brave, and I will tell you.”

“You must,” she said.

He told his story—rapidly, in clear short phrases which he had rehearsed many times as he covered the seven miles from Aldersbury on this dreary errand. He told her all, that which no one else must know, that which she must not reveal. They expected a run on the bank. They were sure, indeed, that a run must come, and though the issue was not yet quite certain, though his father still had hope, he had, himself, no hope. Within a week he would be a poor man, little better than a beggar, dependent on his own exertions; with no single claim, no possible pretensions to her hand, no ground on which he could appeal to her father. It must be at an end between them, and he preferred to let her know now rather than to wait until the blow had fallen. He thought himself bound in honor to release her while he still had some footing, some show of equality with her.

She smiled when she had heard him out. She smiled in his face. “But if I will not be released?” she said. And then, before he could answer her, she bade him tell her more. What was this run? What did it mean? She did not understand.

He told her in detail, and, while he told her, they stood, two pathetic figures in the mist and rain that dripped slowly and sadly from the eaves of the Dutch summerhouse. She stood, pressing her hands together, trying to comprehend. And he hid nothing: telling her even of the ten or twelve thousand that, did they possess it, would save them; telling her that which had decided him to bid her farewell—an item of news which had reached the bank on the previous evening, after Arthur had left for Garth. The great house of Poles, with a wide connection among country banks, had closed its doors; and not only that, but Williams’s, Ovington’s agents, had followed suit within six hours. The tidings had come by special messenger, but would be known in the town in the morning, and would certainly cause a panic and a run on both banks. That news had been the last straw, he said. It had pushed him to a decision. He had felt that he must give her back her word, and without the loss of a day must put it in her power to say that there was nothing between them.

Once and again, as he told his tale, she put in a question, or uttered a pitying exclamation. But for the most part she listened in silence, controlling herself, suppressing the agitation which shook her. When he had done, she put a question, but it was one so irrelevant, so unexpected, so far from the mark, that it acted on him like a douche of cold water. “What have you done to your coat?” she asked. “My coat?”