"Aunt Euphronasia, how dare you!" said Sally, sternly.
"Well, 'tis de trufe, ain't hit? Dar ain' nuttin er de po' wite trash in de look er him, is dar?"
"And what did she say then, Aunt Euphronasia?"
"Who? Miss Mitty? She sez 'huh' again jes' ez she done befo'. Miss Mitty ain't de kind dat's gwinter eat her words, honey. W'at she sez, she sez, en she's gwinter stick up ter hit. The hull time I 'uz dar, I ain' never yearn nuttin' but 'huh!' pass thoo her mouf."
"I knew she was proud, Ben, but I didn't know she was so cruel as to visit it on this precious angel," said Sally, on the point of tears; "and I believe Jessy is the same way. Nobody cares about him except his doting mother."
"What's become of his doting father?"
"Oh, his doting father is entirely too busy with his darling stocks."
"Sally," I asked seriously, "don't you understand that all this – everything I'm doing – is just for you and the boy?"
"Is it, Ben?" she responded, and the next minute, "Of course, I understand it. How could I help it?"
She was always reasonable – it was one of her greatest charms, and I knew that if I were to open my mind to her at the moment, she would enter into my troubles with all the insight of her resourceful sympathy. But I kept silence, restrained by some masculine instinct that prompted me to shut the business world outside the doors of home.
"Well, I must go downtown, dear; I don't see much of you these days, do I?"
"Not much, but I know you're here to stay and that's a good deal of comfort."
"I'm glad you've got the baby. He keeps you company."
She looked up at me with the puzzling expression, half humour, half resentment, I had seen frequently in her face of late. If she stopped to question whether I really imagined that a child of three months was all the companionship required by a woman of her years, she let no sign of it escape the smiling serenity of her lips. On her knees little Benjamin lay perfectly quiet while he stared straight up at the ceiling with his round blue eyes like the eyes of an animated doll.
"Yes, he is company," she answered gently; and stooping to kiss them both, I ran downstairs, hurried into my overcoat, and went out into the street.
As I closed the door behind me, I saw the General's buggy turning the corner, and a minute later he drew up under the young maples beside the pavement, and made room for me under the grey fur rug that covered his knees.
"I don't like the way things are behaving in Wall Street, Ben," he said. "Did that last smash cost you anything?"
"About two hundred thousand dollars, General, but I hadn't spoken of it."
"I hope the bank hasn't been loaning any more money to the Cumberland and Tidewater. I meant to ask you about that several days ago."
"The question comes up before the directors this afternoon. We'll probably refuse to advance any further loans, but they've already drawn on us pretty heavily, you understand, and we may have to go in deeper to save what we've got."
"Well, it looks pretty shaky, that's all I've got to say. If Jenkins doesn't butt in and reorganise it, it will probably go into the hands of a receiver before the year is up. Is it the bank or your private investments you've been worrying over?"
"My own affairs entirely. You see I'd dealt pretty largely through Cross and Hankins, and I don't know exactly what their failure will mean to me."
"A good many men in the country are asking themselves that question. A smash like that isn't over in a day or a night. But I'm afraid you've been spending too much money, Ben. Is your wife extravagant?"
"No, it's my own fault. I've never liked her to consider the value of money."
"It's a bad way to begin. Women have got it in their blood, and I remember my poor mother used to say she never felt that a dollar was worth anything until she spent it. If I were you, I'd pull up and go slowly, but it's mighty hard to do after you've once started at a gallop."
"I don't think I'll have any trouble, but I hate like the deuce to speak of it to Sally."
"That's your damned delicacy. It puts me in mind of my cousin, Jenny Tyler, who married that scamp who used to throw his boots at her. Once when she was a girl she stayed with us for a summer, and old Judge Lacy, one of the ugliest men of his day, fell over head and heels in love with her. She couldn't endure the sight of him, and yet, if you'll believe my word, though she was as modest as an angel, I actually found him kissing her one day in a summer-house. 'Bless my soul, Jenny!' I exclaimed, 'why didn't you tell that old baboon to stop hugging you and behave himself?' 'O Cousin George,' she replied, blushing the colour of a cherry, 'I didn't like to mention it.' Now, that's the kind of false modesty you've got, Ben."
"Well, you see, General," I responded when he had finished his sly chuckle, "I've always felt that money was the only thing that I had to offer."
"You may feel that way, Ben, but I don't believe that Sally does. My honest opinion is that it means a lot more to you than it does to her. There never was a Bland yet that didn't look upon money as a vulgar thing. I've known Sally's grandfather to refuse to invite a man to his house when the only objection he had to him was that he was too rich to be a gentleman. If you think it's wealth or luxury or their old house that the Blands pride themselves on, you haven't learned a thing about 'em in spite of the fact that you've married into the family. What they're proud of is that they can do without any of these things; they've got something else – whatever it is – that they consider a long sight better. Miss Mitty Bland would still have it if she went in rags and did her own cooking, and it's this, not any material possessions, that makes her so terribly important. Look here, now, you take my advice and go home and tell Sally to stop spending money. How's that boy of yours? Is he wanting to become a bank president already?"
The old grey horse, rounding the corner at an amble, came suddenly to a stop as he recognised the half-grown negro urchin waiting upon the pavement. As if moved by a mechanical spring, the General's expression changed at once from its sly and jolly good nature to the look of capable activity which marked the successful man of affairs. The twinkle in his little bloodshot eyes narrowed to a point of steel, the loose lines of his mouth, which was the mouth of a generous libertine, grew instantly sober, and even his crimson neck, sprawling over his puffy, magenta-coloured tie, stiffened into an appearance of pompous dignity.
"Look sharp about the Cumberland and Tidewater, Ben," he remarked as he turned to limp painfully into the railroad office. Then the glass doors swung together behind him, and he forgot my existence, while I crossed the street in a rush and entered the Union Bank, which was a block farther down on the opposite side.
On the way home that afternoon, I told myself with determination that I would tell Sally frankly about the money I had lost; but when a little later she slipped her hand into my arm, and led me into the nursery to show me a trunk filled with baby's clothes that had come down from New York, my courage melted to air, and I could not bring myself to dispel the pretty excitement with which she laid each separate tiny garment upon the bed.
"Oh, of course, you don't enjoy them, Ben, as I do, but isn't that little embroidered cloak too lovely?"
"Lovely, dear, only I've had a bad day, and I'm tired."
"Poor boy, I know you are. Here, we'll put them away. But first there's something really dreadful I've got to tell you."
"Dreadful, Sally?"
"Yes, but it isn't about us. Do you know, I honestly believe that Jessy intends to marry Mr. Cottrel."
"What? That old rocking-horse? Why, he's a Methusalah, and knock-kneed into the bargain."
"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters to her except clothes. I've heard of women who sold themselves for clothes, and I believe she's one of them."
"Well, we're an eccentric family," I said wearily, "and she's the worst."
At any other time the news would probably have excited my indignation, but as I sat there, in the wicker rocking-chair, by the nursery fire, I was too exhausted to resent any manifestation of the family spirit. The last week had been a terrible strain, and there were months ahead which I knew would demand the exercise of every particle of energy that I possessed. In the afternoon there was to be a meeting of the directors of the bank, called to discuss the advancing of further loans to the Cumberland and Tidewater Railroad, and at eight o'clock I had promised to work for several hours with Bradley, my secretary. To go slowly now was impossible. My only hope was that by going fast enough I might manage to save what remained of the situation.
As the winter passed I went earlier to my office and came up later. Failure succeeded failure in Wall Street, and the whole country began presently to send back echoes of the prolonged crash. The Cumberland and Tidewater Railroad, to which we had refused a further loan, went into the hands of a receiver, and the Great South Midland and Atlantic immediately bought up the remnants at its own price. The General, who had been jubilant about the purchase, relapsed into melancholy a week later over the loss of "a good third" of his personal income.
"I'm an old fool or I'd have stopped dabbling in speculations and put away a nest-egg for my old age," he remarked, wiping his empurpled lids on his silk handkerchief. "No man over fifty ought to be trusted to gamble in stocks. Thank God, I'm the one to suffer, however, and not the road. If there's a more solid road in the country, Ben, than the South Midland, I've got to hear of it. It's big, but it's growing – swallowing up everything that comes in its way, like a regular boa constrictor. Think what it was when I came into it immediately after the war; and to-day it's one of the few roads that is steadily increasing its earnings in spite of this blamed panic."
"You worked regeneration, General, as I've often told you."
"Well, I'm too old to see what it's coming to. I hope a good man will step into my place after I'm gone. I'm sometimes sorry you didn't stick by me, Ben."
He spoke of the great road in a tone of regretful sentiment which I had never found in his allusions to his lost Matoaca. The romance of his life, after all, was not a woman, but a railroad, and his happiest memory was, I believe, not the Sunday upon which he had stood beside the rose-lined bonnet of his betrothed and sung lustily out of the same hymn-book, but the day when the stock of the Great South Midland and Atlantic had sold at 180 in the open market.
"I'll tell you what, my boy," he remarked with a quiver of his lower lip, which hung still farther away from his bloodless gum, "a woman may go back on you, and the better the woman the more likely she is to do it, – but a road won't, – no, not if it is a good road."
"Well, I'm not getting much return out of the West Virginia and Wyanoke just now," I replied. "It's no fun being a little road at the mercy of a big one when the big one is a boa constrictor. Even if you get a fair division of the rates, you don't get your cars when you want them."
"The moral of that," returned the General, with a chuckle, "is, to quote from my poor old mammy again, 'Don't hatch until you're ready to hatch whole.'"
We parted with a laugh, and I dismissed the affairs of the little railroad as I entered my office at the bank, where my private wire immediately ticked off the news of a state of panic in the money market. That was in February, and it was not until the end of March that the ice on which I was walking cracked under my feet and I went through.
CHAPTER XXIV
IN WHICH I GO DOWN
I had just risen from breakfast on the last day of March when I was called to the telephone by Cummins, the cashier of the bank.
"Things are going pretty queer down here. Looks as if a run were beginning. Some old fool started it after reading about that failure of the Darlington Trust Company in New York. Wish you'd hurry."
"Call up the directors, and look here! – pay out all deposits slowly until I get there."
The telephone rang off, and picking up my hat, I went down the front steps to the carriage, which had been ordered by Sally for an early appointment. As I stepped in, she appeared in her hat and coat and joined me.
"Drive to the bank, Micah," I said, "I want to get there like lightning."
"Can you wait till I speak to mammy? She is bringing the baby."
For the first time since our marriage my nerves got the better of me, and I answered her sharply.
"No, I can't wait – not a minute, not a second. Drive on, Micah."
In obedience to my commands, Micah touched the horses, and as we sped down Franklin Street, Sally looked at me with an expression which reminded me of the faint wonder under the fixed smile about Miss Mitty's mouth.
"What's the matter, Ben? Are you working too hard?" she enquired.
"I'm tired and I'm anxious. Do you realise that we are living in the midst of a panic?"
"Are we?" she asked quietly, and arranged the fur rug over her knees.
"Do you mean to tell me you hadn't heard it?" I demanded, in pure amazement that the thing which had possessed me to madness for three months should have escaped the consciousness of the wife with whom I lived.
"How was I to hear of it? You never told me, and I seldom read the papers now since the baby came. Of course I knew something was wrong. You were looking so badly and so much older."
To me it had needed no telling, because it had become suddenly the most obvious fact in the world in which I moved. Only a fool would gaze up at the sky during a storm burst and remark to a bystander, "It thunders." Yet even now I saw that what she realised was not the gravity of the financial crisis, but its injurious effect upon my health and my appearance.
"You've been on too great a strain," she remarked sympathetically; "when it's all over you must come away and we'll go to Florida in the General's car."
To Florida! and at that instant I was struggling in the grip of failure – the failure of the successful financier, which is of all failures the hardest. Not a few retrenchments, not the economy of a luxury here and there, but ultimate poverty was the thing that I faced while I sat beside her on the soft cushions under the rich fur rug. One by one the familiar houses whirled by me. I saw the doors open and shut, the people come out of them, the sunshine fall through the budding trees on the sidewalk; and the houses and the moving people and the budding trees, all seemed to me detached and unreal, as if they stood apart somewhere in a world of quiet, while I was sucked in by the whirlpool. Though I lifted my voice and called aloud to them, I felt that the people I passed would still go quietly in and out of the opening doors in the placid spring sunshine.
"There's Bonny Page," said Sally, waving her hand; "she's to marry Ned Marshall next month, you know, and they are going to Europe. Did you notice that baby in the carriage – the one with blue bows and the Irish lace afghan? – it is Bessy Munford's, – the handsomest in town, they say, after little Benjamin."
The sight of the baby carriage, with its useless blue fripperies, trundled on the pavement under the budding trees, had aroused in me a sudden ridiculous anger, as though it represented the sinful extravagance of an entire nation. That silly carriage with its blue ribbons and its lace coverlet! And over the whole country factory after factory was shutting down, and thousands of hungry mothers and children were sitting on door-steps in this same sunshine. My nerves were bad. It had been months since I had a good night's sleep, and I knew that in the condition of my temper a trifle might be magnified out of all due proportion to its relative significance.
The horses stopped at the bank, and Sally leaned out to bow smilingly to one of the directors, who was coming along the sidewalk.
"I never saw so many people about here, Ben," she remarked; "it looks exactly as if it were a theatre. Ah, there's the General now going into his office. He hobbles so badly, doesn't he? When do you think you'll be home?"
"I don't know," I returned shortly, "perhaps at midnight – perhaps next week."
My tone brought a flush to her cheek, and she looked at me with the faint wonder that I had seen first on the face of Miss Mitty when I went in to breakfast with her on that autumn morning. It was the look of race, of the Bland breeding, of the tradition that questioned, not violently, but gently, "Can this be possible?"
She drove on without replying to me, and as I entered my office, the faces of Miss Mitty and of Sally were confused into one by my disordered mind.
The run had already started – a depositor, who had withdrawn ten thousand dollars after reading of the failure of the Darlington Trust Company, had been paid off first, and following him the line had come, crawling like black ants on the pavement. As I entered the doors, it seemed to me that the face of each man or woman in the throng stood out, separate and distinct, as though an electric search-light had passed over it; and I saw one and all, frightened, satisfied, or merely ludicrous, with a vividness of perception which failed me when I remembered the features of my own wife.
"We can pay them off slowly till three o'clock," said Bingley, the vice-president, whom I found, with five or six of the directors, already in my office. "I've got only one paying teller's window open. The trouble, of course, began with the small accounts, of which we carry such a blamed lot. Mark my words, it is the little depositor that endangers a bank."
He looked nervous, and swallowed hastily while he talked, as if he had just rushed in from breakfast, with his last mouthful still unchewed. As I entered and faced the men sitting in different attitudes, but all wearing the same strained and helpless expression, a feeling of irritation swept over me, and I paused in the middle of the floor, with my hat and a folded newspaper in my hand.
"A quarter of a million in hard cash would tide us over, I believe," pursued Bingley, swallowing faster; "but the question is how in thunder are we to lay hands on it by nine o'clock to-morrow morning?"
I drew out my watch, and with the simple, mechanical action, I was conscious of an immediate quickening of the blood, a clearing of the brain. A certain readiness for decision, a power of dealing with an emergency, of handling a crisis, a response of pulse and brain to the call for action, stood me service now as in every difficult instant of my career. They were picked business men and shrewd financiers before me, yet I was aware that I dominated them, all and each, by some quality of force, of aggressiveness, of inflated self-confidence. The secret of my success, I had once said to the General, was that I began to get cool when I saw other people getting scared.
"It is now a quarter of ten, gentlemen," I said, "and I pledge my word of honour that I will have a quarter of a million dollars in bank by ten o'clock to-morrow."
"For God's sake, Ben, where is it coming from?" demanded Judge Kenton, an old Confederate, with the solemn face I had sometimes watched him assume in church during the singing of the hymns. As I looked at him the humour of his expression struck me, and I broke into a laugh.
"I beg your pardon," I returned the next minute, "but I'll get it – somewhere – if it's in the city."
One of the men – I forget which, though I remember quite clearly that he wore a red necktie – got up from the table and slapped me on the shoulder.
"Go ahead, Ben, and get it," he said. "We take your word."
On the pavement the crowd had thickened, and when it caught sight of me, a confused murmur rose, and I was surrounded by half-hysterical women. The trouble, as Bingley had said, had begun with the small depositors; and in the line that pressed now like black ants to the doors, there were many evidently who had entrusted their nest-eggs to us for safe-keeping. I was not gentle by nature, and the sight of a woman's tears always aroused in me, not the angel, but the brute. For five years I had been married to a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, and yet, as I stood there, held at bay, in the midst of those sobbing women, the veneer of refinement peeled off from me, and the raw strength of the common man showed on the surface, and triumphed again as it had triumphed over the frightened directors in my office.
"What are you whining about?" I said with a laugh, "your money is all there. Go in and get it."
An old woman in a plaid shawl, with her mouth twisted sideways by a recent stroke of paralysis, barred my way with an outstretched hand, in which she held the foot of a grey yarn stocking.
"I'd laid it up for my old age, Mister," she mumbled, through her toothless gums, "an' they told me it was safer in the bank, so I put it there. But I reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back – I reckon I'd feel easier."
"Then go after it," I replied harshly, pushing her out of my way. "If you don't get it before I come back, I'll give it to you with my own hands."
For a minute my presence subdued the crowd; but the panic terror had gripped it, and while I crossed the street the hysterical murmurs were in my ears. A desire to turn and throttle the sound as I might a howling wild beast took possession of me. It was true, I suppose, as Dr. Theophilus had once told me, that the quality I lacked was tenderness.
The General fortunately was alone in his private office, and when I went in he glanced up enquiringly from a railroad report he was reading.
"It's you, Ben, is it?" he remarked, and went back to his paper.
"General," I said bluntly, and stopped short in the centre of the room, "I want a quarter of a million dollars in cash by nine o'clock to-morrow morning."
For a moment he sat speechless, blinking at me with his swollen eyelids, while his lower lip protruded angrily, like the lip of a crying child. Then the old war-horse in him responded gallantly to the scent of battle.
"Damn you, Ben, do you know cash is as tight as wax?" he enquired. "You ain't dozing in the midst of a panic?"
"There's trouble at the bank," I replied. "A run has started, but so far it is almost entirely among the small depositors. We can manage to pay off till three o'clock, and if we open to-morrow with a quarter of a million, we shall probably keep on our feet, unless the excitement spreads."
"When do you want it?"
"By nine o'clock to-morrow morning; and I want it, General," I added, "on my personal credit."
He rose from his chair and stood swaying unsteadily on his gouty foot.
"I'll give you every penny that I've got, Ben," he answered, "but it ain't that much."
"You have access to the cash of both the Tilden Bank and the Bonfield Trust Company. If there's a dollar in the city you can get it."
A hint of his sly humour appeared for an instant in his eyes. "It wasn't any longer ago than breakfast that I remarked I didn't believe there was a blamed dollar in the whole country," he returned. Then his swaying stopped and he became invested suddenly with the dignity of the greatest financier in the state.
"Hand me my stick, Ben, and I'll go and see what I can do about it," he said.
I gave him his stick and my arm, and with my assistance he limped to the offices of the Bonfield Trust Company on the next block. When I returned to the bank the directors were talking excitedly, but at my entrance a hush fell, and they sat looking at me with a row of vacant, expectant faces that waited apparently to be filled with expression.
"By ten o'clock to-morrow morning," I said, "a quarter of a million in cash will be brought in through the door in bags."
"I told you he'd do it," exclaimed Bingley, as he grasped my hand, "and I hope to God it will stay 'em off."
"You need a drink, Ben," observed Judge Kenton, "and so do I. Let's go and get it. A soft-boiled egg was all I had for breakfast, and I've gone faint."
I remember that I went to a restaurant with him, that a few old women sitting on the curbing spoke to us as we passed, that we ate oysters, and returned in half an hour to another meeting, that we discussed ways and means until eight o'clock and decided nothing. I know also that when we came out again several of the old women were still crouching there, and that when they came whining up to me, I turned on them with an oath and ordered them to be off. As clearly as if it were yesterday, I can see still the long, solemn face of the Judge as he glanced up at me, and I see written upon it something of the faint wonder that I had grown to regard as the peculiar look of the Blands.
I had telephoned Sally not to wait, and when I reached home I found that she had dismissed the servants and was preparing a little supper for me herself. While she served me, I sat perfectly silent, too exhausted to talk or to think, trying in vain to remember the more important events of the day. Only once did Sally speak, and that was to beg me to eat the slice of cold turkey she had laid on my plate.
"I'm not hungry, I got something with Judge Kenton down town," I returned as I pushed back my chair and rose from the table; "what I need is sleep, sleep, sleep. If I don't get to bed, I'll drop to sleep on the hearth-rug."
"Then go, dear," she answered, and not until I reached the landing above did I realise that through it all she had not put a single question to me. With the realisation I knew that I ought to have told her what in her heart she must have felt it to be her right to know; but a nervous shrinking, which seemed to be a result of my complete physical exhaustion, held me back when I started to retrace my steps.
She might cry, and the sight of tears would unman me. There's time enough, I thought. Why not to-morrow instead? Yet in my heart I knew it would be no easier to do it to-morrow than it was to-day. By some strange freak of the imagination those unshed tears of hers seemed already dropping upon my nerves. "There's time enough, she'll be obliged to hear it in the end," something within me repeated with a kind of dulness. And with the words, while my head touched the pillow, I started suddenly wide awake as though from the flash of a lantern that was turned inward. Trivial impressions of the afternoon stood out as if illuminated against the outer darkness, and there hovered before me the face of the old woman, in the plaid shawl, with her twisted mouth, and the foot of her grey yarn stocking held out in her palsied hand. "I reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back," said a voice somewhere in my brain.