Ovington's Bank

by Stanley John Weyman

It was check and mate, the loss of his last piece, the close of the game—and he knew it. With all in his favor he had made one false move, then another and a graver one, and this was the end.

He could not face it out. There was no more to be said, nothing more to be done, only shame and humiliation if he stayed. He flung a word of passionate incoherent abuse at her, and before she could reply he turned his back on her and strode away. Sorrowfully Jos watched him as he hurried along the path, cutting at the hedge with his stick, cursing his luck, cursing the trickery of others, cursing at last, perhaps, his own folly. She watched him until the ghostly hedges and the misty distances veiled him from sight.

Ten minutes later he burst in upon his mother at the Cottage and demanded twenty pounds. “Give it me, and let me go!” he cried. “Do you hear? I must have it! If you don’t give it me, I shall cut my throat!”

Scared by his manner, his haggard eyes, his look of misery, the poor woman did not even protest. She went upstairs and fetched the sum he asked for. He took it, kissed her with lips still damp with rain, and bidding her send his clothes as he should direct—he would write to her—he hurried out.

CHAPTER XLII

“I wun’t do it! I wun’t do it!” the Squire muttered stubbornly. “Mud and blood’ll never mix. Shape the chip as you will, ’tis part of the block! Girls’ whimsies are women’s aches, and they that’s older must judge for them. She’d only repent of it when ’twas too late, and I’ve paid my debt and there’s an end of it.”

From the hour of that scene at Ovington’s he had begun to recover. From that moment he began to wear a stiff upper lip and to give his orders in hard, sharp tones, as he had been wont to give them in days when he could see; as if, in truth, his irruption into the life of the town and his action at the bank had re-established him in his own eyes. Those about him were quick to see the change—he had taken, said they, a new lease of life. “Maybe, ’tis just a flicker,” Calamy observed cautiously; but even he had to admit that the flame burned higher for a time, and privately he advised the new man who filled Thomas’s place “to hop it when the master spoke,” or he’d hop it to some purpose.

The result was that there was a general quickening up in the old house. The master’s hand was felt, and things moved to a livelier time. To some extent pride had to do with this, for the rumor of the Squire’s doings in Aldersbury had flown far and wide and made him the talk of the county. He had saved the bank. He had averted ruin from hundreds. He had saved the country-side. He had paid in thirty, forty, fifty thousand pounds. Naturally his people were proud of him.

And doubtless the bold part he had played had given the old man a fillip; others had stood by, while he, blind as he was, had asserted himself, and acted, and rescued his neighbors from a great misfortune. But the stiffness he showed was not due to this only. It was assumed to protect himself. “I wun’t do it! I wun’t do it! It’s not i’ reason,” he told himself over and over again; and in his own mind he fought a perpetual battle. On the one side contended the opinions of a lifetime and the prejudices of a caste, the beliefs in which he had been brought up, and a pride of birth that had come down from an earlier day; on the other, the girl’s tremulous gratitude, her silence, the touch of her hand on his sleeve, the sound of her voice, the unceasing appeal of her presence.

Ay, and there were times when he was so hard put to it that he groaned aloud. No man was more of a law to himself, but at these times he fell back on the views of others. What would Woosenham say of it? How would he hold up his hands? And Chirbury—whose peerage he respected, since it was as old as his own family, if he thought little of the man? And Uvedale and Cludde? Ay, and Acherley, who, rotten fellow as he was, was still Acherley of Acherley? They had held the fort so stoutly in Aldshire, they had repelled the moneyed upstarts so proudly, they had turned so cold a shoulder on Manchester and Birmingham! They had found in their Peninsular hero, and in that little country churchyard where the maker of an empire lay resting after life’s fever, so complete a justification for their own claims to leadership and to power! And no one had been more steadfast, more dogged, more hide-bound in their pride and exclusiveness than he.