“Don’t be a fool,” Clement remonstrated, pity moving him more strongly now that he had once acted on it. He laid his hand on the other’s arm. “We’ll work together and make the best of it. I will, I swear, Bourdillon, and I’ll answer for my father. But if I leave you here and go home, things will be said and there’ll be trouble.”
“Trouble the devil!” Arthur retorted, and shook off his hand. “You have ruined the bank,” he continued, bitterly, but with less violence, “and ruined your father and ruined me. I hope you are content. You have been thorough, if it’s any satisfaction to you. And some day I shall know why you’ve done it. For your honesty and your clean hands, they don’t weigh a curse with me. You’re playing your own game, and if I come to know what it is, I’ll spoil it yet, d—n you!”
“I don’t mind how much you curse me, if you will come,” Clement answered, patiently. “It’s the only thing to be done, and when you think it over in cold blood, you’ll see that. Come, man, and put a bold face on it. It is the brave game and the only game. Face it out now.”
Arthur looked away, his handsome face sullen. He was striving with his passions, battling with the maddening sense of defeat. He saw, as plainly as Clement, that the latter’s advice was good, but to take it and to go with him, to bear for many hours the sense of his presence and the consciousness of his scorn, his gorge rose at the thought. Yet, what other course was open to him? What was he going to do? He had little money with him, and he saw but two alternatives: to blow out his brains, or to go, hat in hand, and seek employment at the brokers’ where he was known. He had no real thought of the former alternative—life ran strong in him and he was sanguine; and the latter meant the overthrow of all his plans, and a severance, final and complete, from Ovington’s. His lot thenceforth would, he suspected, be that of a man who had “crossed the fight,” done something dubious, put himself outside the pale.
Whereas if he went with Clement now, humiliation would indeed be his. But he would still be himself, and with his qualities he might live it down, and in the end lose nothing.
So at last, “Go on,” he said, sulkily. “Have it your own way. At any rate, I may spoil your game!” He shut his eyes to Clement’s generosity. If he gave a thought to it at all, he fancied that he had some purpose to serve, some axe of his own to grind.
They went out into the babel of the street, and, deafened by the cries of the hawkers, elbowed by panic-stricken men who fancied that if they were somewhere else they might save their hoards, shouldered by stout countrymen, adrift in the confusion like hulks in a strange sea, they made their way into Bishopsgate Street. Here they found the hackney-coach awaiting them, and drove by London Wall to the Bull and Mouth. A Birmingham coach was due to start at three, and after a gloomy wrangle they booked places by it, and, while the officer guarded the money, they sat down in the Coffee Room to a rare sirloin and a foaming tankard. They ate and drank in unfriendly silence, two empty chairs intervening; and more than once Arthur repented of his decision. But already the force of circumstances was driving them together, for the thoughts of each had travelled forward to Aldersbury—and to Ovington’s. What was happening there? What might not already have happened there? Hurried feet ran by on the pavement. Ominous words blew in at the windows. Scared men rushed in with pallid, sweating faces, ate standing and went out again. Other men sat listless, staring at the table before them, eating nothing, or here and there, apart in corners whispered curses over their meat.
CHAPTER XXXVI
The news of the failures which convulsed the City on that Black Monday did not reach Aldersbury until late on the Tuesday—the tidings came in with the mails. But hours before that, and even before the opening of the bank, things in the town had come to a climax. The women, always more practical than the men and less squeamish, had taken fright and been talking. In many a back parlor in Maerdol, and the Foregate, and on the Cop, wives had spoken their minds. They wouldn’t be scared out of asking for their own, by any banker that ever lived, they said. Not they! “Would you, Mrs. Gittins?” quoth one.
“Not I, ma’am, if I had it to ask for, as your goodman has. I’d not sleep another night before I had it tight and right.”