“And nothing staged either! Railroads!” scornfully. “D’you think there’s any need o’ railroads when a man can do that? Or that any railroad that’s ever made will beat that? Sixteen hours, by George, a hundred and fifty-one miles in the night-time!”
Sir Charles, who had been an astonished spectator of the scene, gave a qualified assent, and by that time Ovington was ready with his note. The Squire pouched it with care, but cut short his thanks. “I’ve told you why I do it,” he said gruffly. “And now I’m tired and I’ll be getting home. Give me your arm, Woosenham. But as we pass I’ve a word to say to that little joker in the bank.”
He had his word, and a strange scene it was. The two great men stood within the counter, the old man bending his hawk-like face and sightless eyes on the quailing group beyond it, while the clerks looked on, half in awe and half in amusement. “Fools!” said the Squire in his harshest tone. “Fools, all of ye! Cutting your own throats and tearing the bottom out of your own money-bags! That’s what ye be doing! And you, Tom Jenkins, and you, Owen, that should know better, first among ’em! You haven’t the sense to see a yard before you, but elbow one another into the ditch like a pair of blind horses! You deserve to be ruined, every man of you, and it’s no fault o’ yourn that you’re not! Business men? You call yourselves business men, and run on a bank as if all the money was kept in a box under the counter ready to pay you! Go home! Go home!” poking at them with his stick. “And thank God the banker has more sense than you, and a sight more money than your tuppenny ha’penny accounts run to! Damme, if I were master here, if one single one o’ you should cross my door again! But there, take me out, Woosenham; take me out! Pack o’ fools! Pack o’ dumb fools, they are!”
The two marched out with that, but the Squire’s words ran up and down the town like wild-fire. What he had said and how he had said it, and the figure little Tom Jenkins of the Hollies had cut, was known as far as the Castle Foregate before the old man had well set his foot on the step of his carriage. The crowd standing about Sir Charles’s four bays in the Market Place and respectfully gazing on the postillions’ yellow jackets had it within two minutes. Within four it was known at the Gullet that the old Squire was supporting the bank, and had given Welsh Owen such a talking-to as never was. Within ten, the news was being bandied up and down the long yard at the Lion, where they stabled a hundred horses, and was known even to the charwomen who, on their knees, were scrubbing the floors of the Assembly Rooms that looked down on the yard. Dean’s, at which a persistent and provoking run had been prosecuted since morning, got it among the first; and Mr. Dean, testy and snappish enough before, became for the rest of the day a terror and a thunder-cloud to the junior clerks. Nay, the news soon passed beyond Aldersbury, for the three o’clock up-coach swept it away and dropped it with various parcels and hampers at every stage between the Falcon at Heygate and Wolverhampton. Not a turn-pike man but heard it and spread it, and at the Cock at Wellington they gave it to the down-coach, which carried it back to Aldersbury.
Owen, it was known, had drawn his money. But Jenkins had thought better of it. He had gone out of the bank with his cheque in his hand, and had torn it up coram public in the roadway; and from that moment the run, its force already exhausted, had ceased. Half an hour later he would have been held a fool who looked twice at an Ovington note, or distrusted a bank into which, rumor had it, gold had been carried by the sackful. Had not the Bank of England sent down a special messenger bearing unstinted credit? And had not the old Squire of Garth, the closest, stingiest, shrewdest man in the county, paid in thirty, forty, fifty thousand pounds and declared that he would sell every acre before the bank should fail? Before night a dozen men were considering ruefully the thing that they had done or pondering how they might, with the least loss of dignity, undo it. Before morning twice as many wives had told their husbands what they thought of them, and reminded them that they had always said how it would be—only they were never listened to!
At the Gullet in the Shut off the Market Place, where the tap never ceased running that evening, and half of the trade of the town pressed in to eat liver and bacon, there was no longer any talk of Boulogne. All the talk ran the other way. The drawers of the day were the butts of the evening, and were bantered and teased unmercifully. Their friends would not be in their shoes for a trifle—not they! They had cooked their goose with a vengeance—no more golden eggs for them! And very noticeable was it that whenever the banker’s name came up, voices dropped and heads came together. His luck, his power, his resources were discussed with awe and in whispers. There were not a few thoughtful faces at the board, and here and there were appetites that failed, though the suppers served in the dingy low-ceiled room at the Gullet, dark even at noon-day, were famous for their savoriness.
Very different was the scene inside the bank. At the counter, indeed, discipline failed the moment the door fell to behind the last customer. The clerks sprang to their feet, cheered, danced a dance of triumph, struck a hundred attitudes of scorn and defiance. They cracked silly jokes, and flung paper darts at the public side; they repaid by every kind of monkey trick the alarms and exertions from which they had suffered during three days. They roared, “Oh, dear, what can the matter be!” in tones of derision that reached the street. They challenged the public to come on—to come on and be hanged! They ceased to make a noise only when breath failed them.
But in the parlor, whither Clement, followed after a moment’s hesitation by Rodd, had hastened to join and to congratulate his father, there was nothing of this. The danger had been too pressing, the margin of safety too narrow to admit of loud rejoicing. The three met like ship-wrecked mariners drawn more closely together by the ordeal through which they had passed, like men still shaken by the buffeting of the waves. They were quiet, as men amazed to find themselves alive. The banker, in particular, sat sunk in his chair, overcome as much by the scene through which he had passed as by a relief too deep for words. For he knew that it was by no art of his own, and through no resources of his own that he survived, and his usual self-confidence, and with it his aplomb, had deserted him. In a room vibrating with emotion they gazed at one another in thankful silence, and it was only after a long interval that the older man let his thoughts appear. Then “Thank God!” he said unsteadily, “and you, Clement! God bless you! If we owe this to any one we owe it to you, my boy! If you had not been beside me, God knows what I might not have done!”
“Pooh, pooh, sir,” Clement said; yet he did but disguise deep feeling under a mask of lightness. “You don’t do yourself justice. And for the matter of that, if we have to thank any one it is Rodd, here.” He clapped the cashier on the shoulder with an intimacy that brought a spark to Rodd’s eyes. “He’s not only stuck to it like a man, but if he had not paid in his four hundred and fifty——”