“No,” answers the other, “nothing has happened, the good ship is safe, sir, as yet. But she has narrowly escaped a great danger, Pendennis,” cries F. B., gripping my arm with great energy, “there was a traitor in her crew—she has weathered the storm nobly—who would have sent her on the rocks, sir, who would have scuttled her at midnight.”
“Pray drop your nautical metaphors, and tell me what you mean,” cries F. B.’s companion, and Bayham continued his narration.
“Were you in the least conversant with City affairs,” he said, “or did you deign to visit the spot where merchants mostly congregate, you would have heard the story, which was over the whole City yesterday, and spread dismay from Threadneedle Street to Leadenhall. The story is, that the firm of Hobson Brothers and Newcome, yesterday refused acceptance of thirty thousand pounds’ worth of bills of the Bundelcund Banking Company of India.
“The news came like a thunderclap upon the London Board of Directors, who had received no notice of the intentions of Hobson Brothers, and caused a dreadful panic amongst the shareholders of the concern. The board-room was besieged by colonels and captains, widows and orphans; within an hour after protest of bills were taken up, and you will see, in the City article of the Globe this very evening, an announcement that henceforward the house of Baines and Jolly, of Job Court, will meet engagements of the Bundelcund Banking Company of India, being provided with ample funds to do honour to every possible liability of that Company. But the shares fell, sir, in consequence of the panic. I hope they will rally. I trust and believe they will rally. For our good Colonel’s sake and that of his friends, for the sake of the innocent children sporting by the Serpentine yonder.
“I had my suspicions when they gave that testimonial,” said F. B. “In my experience of life, sir, I always feel rather shy about testimonials, and when a party gets one, somehow look out to hear of his smashing the next month. Absit omen! I will say again. I like not the going down of yonder little yacht.”
The Globe sure enough contained a paragraph that evening announcing the occurrence which Mr. Bayham had described, and the temporary panic which it had occasioned, and containing an advertisement stating that Messrs. Baines and Jolly would henceforth act as agents of the Indian Company. Legal proceedings were presently threatened by the solicitors of the Company against the banking firm which had caused so much mischief. Mr. Hobson Newcome was absent abroad when the circumstance took place, and it was known that the protest of the bills was solely attributable to his nephew and partner. But after the break between the two firms, there was a rupture between Hobson’s family and Colonel Newcome. The exasperated Colonel vowed that his brother and his nephew were traitors alike, and would have no further dealings with one or the other. Even poor innocent Sam Newcome, coming up to London from Oxford, where he had been plucked, and offering a hand to Clive, was frowned away by our Colonel, who spoke in terms of great displeasure to his son for taking the least notice of the young traitor.
Our Colonel was changed, changed in his heart, changed in his whole demeanour towards the world, and above all towards his son, for whom he had made so many kind sacrifices in his old days. We have said how, ever since Clive’s marriage, a tacit strife had been growing up between father and son. The boy’s evident unhappiness was like a reproach to his father. His very silence angered the old man. His want of confidence daily chafed and annoyed him. At the head of a large fortune, which he rightly persisted in spending, he felt angry with himself because he could not enjoy it, angry with his son, who should have helped him in the administration of his new estate, and who was but a listless, useless member of the little confederacy, a living protest against all the schemes of the good man’s past life. The catastrophe in the City again brought father and son together somewhat, and the vindictiveness of both was roused by Barnes’s treason. Time was when the Colonel himself would have viewed his kinsman more charitably, but fate and circumstance had angered that originally friendly and gentle disposition; hate and suspicion had mastered him, and if it cannot be said that his new life had changed him, at least it had brought out faults for which there had hitherto been no occasion, and qualities latent before. Do we know ourselves, or what good or evil circumstance may bring from us? Did Cain know, as he and his younger brother played round their mother’s knee, that the little hand which caressed Abel should one day grow larger, and seize a brand to slay him? Thrice fortunate he, to whom circumstance is made easy: whom fate visits with gentle trial, and kindly Heaven keeps out of temptation.
In the stage which the family feud now reached, and which the biographer of the Newcomes is bound to describe, there is one gentle moralist who gives her sentence decidedly against Clive’s father; whilst on the other hand a rough philosopher and friend of mine, whose opinions used to have some weight with me, stoutly declares that they were right. “War and justice are good things,” says George Warrington, rattling his clenched fist on the table. “I maintain them, and the common sense of the world maintains them, against the preaching of all the Honeymans that ever puled from the pulpit. I have not the least objection in life to a rogue being hung. When a scoundrel is whipped I am pleased, and say, serve him right. If any gentleman will horsewhip Sir Barnes Newcome, Baronet, I shall not be shocked, but, on the contrary, go home and order an extra mutton-chop for dinner.”
“Ah! revenge is wrong, Pen,” pleads the other counsellor.
“Let alone that the wisest and best of all Judges has condemned it. It blackens the hearts of men. It distorts their views of right. It sets them to devise evil. It causes them to think unjustly of others. It is not the noblest return for injury, not even the bravest way of meeting it. The greatest courage is to bear persecution, not to answer when you are reviled, and when wrong has been done you to forgive. I am sorry for what you call the Colonel’s triumph and his enemy’s humiliation. Let Barnes be as odious as you will, he ought never to have humiliated Ethel’s brother; but he is weak. Other gentlemen as well are weak, Mr. Pen, although you are so much cleverer than women. I have no patience with the Colonel, and I beg you to tell him, whether he asks you or not that he has lost my good graces, and that I for one will not huzzah at what his friends and flatterers call his triumphs, and that I don’t think in this instance he has acted like the dear Colonel, and the good Colonel, and the good Christian that I once thought him.”