Ovington's Bank

by Stanley John Weyman

“A kind of trustee, then, ain’t he—for the shareholders.”

Sir Charles had not seen it in that light before. He looked at his adviser with growing respect. “Well, I take it he is—now you mention it, Griffin,” he said.

“Then”—this, it was plain, was the verdict, and the other listened with all his ears—“if he is honest, he’ll not have mixed the money with his own. He’ll not have put it to an ordinary account, but to a Trust account—so that it will remain the property of the Company, and not be liable to calls on him. That’s what he should have done, anyway. Whether he has done it or not is another matter. He’s pressed, hard pressed, I hear, and I don’t know that we can expect the last spit of honesty from such as him. It’s not what I’ve been brought up to expect. But,” with a return of his former bitterness, “we may be changing places with ’em even in that! God knows! And I do know something that gives me to believe that he may behave as he should.”

“You do?” Sir Charles exclaimed, his spirits rising. “You do think so?”

“Well, I do,” reluctantly. “I’ll speak as I know. But if I were you I should go to him now and tell him, as one man to another, that that’s what you expect; and if he hangs back, tell him plain that if that money’s not put aside he’ll have to answer to the law for it. Whether that will frighten him or not,” the Squire concluded, “I’m not lawyer enough to say. But you’ll learn his mind.”

“I’ll go in at once,” Sir Charles replied, thankfully.

“I’m going in myself. If you’ll take me in—you’ve four horses—it will save time, and my people shall fetch me out in an hour or so.”

Sir Charles assented with gratitude, thankful for his support; and Calamy was summoned. Two minutes later they got away from the door in a splutter of flying gravel and dead beech leaves. They clattered down the stony avenue, over the bridge, and into the high road.

Probably of all those—and they were many—who travelled that day with their faces set towards the bank, they were the last to start. If Tuesday had been the town’s day, this was certainly the country’s day. For one thing, there was a market; for another, the news of something amiss, of something that threatened the little hoard of each—the slowly-garnered deposit or the hardly-won note—had journeyed by this time far and wide. It had reached alike the remote flannel-mill lapped in the folds of the border-hills, and the secluded hamlet buried amid orchards, and traceable on the landscape only by the grey tower of its church. On foot and on horse-back, riding and tying, in gigs and ass-carts, in market vans and carriers’ carts, the countryside came in—all who had anything to lose, and many who had nothing at stake, but were moved by a vague alarm. Even before daybreak the roads had begun to echo the sound of their marching. They came by the East Bridge, laboring up the steep, winding Cop; by the West Bridge and under the gabled fronts of Maerdol, along the river bank, before the house of the old sea-dog whose name was a household word, and whose portrait hung behind the mayor’s chair, and so up the Foregate—from every quarter they came. Before ten the streets were teeming with country-folk, whose fears were not allayed by the news that all through the previous day the townsfolk had been drawing their money. Sullen tradesmen, victims of the general depression, eyed the march from their shop doors, and some, fearing trouble, put up half their shutters. More took a malicious amusement in telling the rustics that they were too late, and that the bank would not open.

The alarm was heightened by a chance word which had fallen from Frederick Welsh. The lawyer’s last thought had been to do harm, for his interest in common with all substantial men lay the other way. But that morning, before he had dressed, or so much as shaved, his office and even his dining-room had been invaded. Scared clients had overwhelmed him with questions—some that he could answer and more that he could not. He could tell them the law as to their securities, whether they were lodged for safety, or pawned for loans, or mortgaged on general account. But he could not tell them whether Ovington was solvent, or whether the bank would open, or whether Dean’s was affected; and it was for answers to these questions that they clamored. In the end, badgered out of all patience, he had delivered a curt lecture on banking.