Ovington's Bank

by Stanley John Weyman

“Good lord!” someone exclaimed.

Only Rodd was unmoved. “Get a pay slip,” he said to the senior clerk, who had been pretty well employed filling in cheques for the illiterate and examining notes. “Now, gentlemen, fair play. Let his pass through. Oh, it’s Mr. Walker, is it? How much, Mr. Walker?”

“Two seven six, ten,” said Mr. Walker, laying a heavy canvas bag on the counter. Rodd untied the neck of the bag and upset the contents, notes and gold, before him. He counted the money with professional deftness, whilst the clerk filled in the slip. “How’s your brother?” he asked.

“Pretty tidy.”

“And how are things in Wolverhampton?”

“So, so! But not so bad as they were.”

“Thank you. You’re the only sensible man I’ve seen to-day, and we shall not forget it. Now, gentlemen, next please.”

Mr. Walker was closely inspected as he pushed his way out, and one or two were tempted to say a word of warning to him, but thought better of it, and held their peace. About two in the afternoon a Mr. Hope of Bretton again broke the chain of withdrawals. He paid in two hundred. Him a man did pluck by the sleeve, muttering “Have a care, man! Have a care what you’re doing!” But Mr. Hope, a bluff tradesman-looking person only answered, “Thank ye, but I am up to snuff. If you ask me I think you’re a silly set of fools.”

News of him and of what he had said, and indeed of much more than he had said, ran quickly through the crowd that wondered and waited all day before the bank; that snapped up every rumor, and devoured the wildest inventions. The bank would close at one! It would close at three—the speaker had it on the best authority! It would close when so and so had been paid! Ovington, the rascal, had fled. He was in the bank, white as a sheet. He had attempted suicide. There was a warrant out for him. The crowd moved hither and thither, like the colors in a kaleidoscope. On its outer edges there was horseplay. Children chased one another up and down the Butter Cross steps, fell over the old women who knitted, were cuffed by the men, driven out by the Beadle—only to return again.

But under the trivialities there was tense excitement. Now and again a man who had been slow to take the alarm forced his way, pale and agitated, through the crowd, to vanish within the doors; or a countryman, whom the news had only just reached in his boosey-close or his rickyard—as they call a stackyard in Aldshire—rode up the hill, hot with haste and cursing those who blocked his road, flung his reins to the nearest bystander, and plunged into the bank as into water. And on the fringe, hiding themselves in doorways, or in the dark mouths of alleys, were men who stood biting their nails, heedless or unconscious of what passed about them; or who came staggering up from the Gullet with stammering tongues and eyes bloodshot with drink—men who a year before had been well-to-do, sober citizens, fathers of families. All one to them now whether Ovington’s stood or fell! They had lost their all, and to show for it and for all that they had ever been worth had but a few pieces of printed paper, certificates, or what not, which they took out and read in corners, as if something of hope might still, at the thousandth time of reading be derived from them, or which they brandished aloft in the tavern with boasts of what they would have gained if trickery had not robbed them. So, though the crowd had its humors and was swept at times by gusts of laughter, the spectre of ruin stood, gaunt and bleak, in the background, and many a heart quailed before grim visions of bailiffs and forced sales and the workhouse—the workhouse, that in Aldersbury, where they were nothing if not genteel, they called the House of Industry.