Part 42

Sunday passed. We nodded to the Miss Clement-Pells at church (their bonnets making the pew look like a flower-garden); but did not see Mr. Clement-Pell or his wife. Monday passed; bringing a note from Tod, to say Lady Whitney and Bill would not let him leave yet. Tuesday morning came in. I happened to be seated under the hedge in the kitchen-garden, mending a fishing-rod, when a horse dashed up to the back gate. Looking through, I saw it was the butcher boy, Sam Rimmer. Molly, who was in one of her stinging tempers that morning, came out.

"We don't want nothing," said she tartly. "So you might have spared yourself the pains of coming."

"Don't want nothing!" returned the boy. "Why's that?"

"Why's that!" she retorted. "It's like your imperence to ask. Do families want joints every day; specially such weather as this? I a-going to cook fowls for dinner, and we've the cold round o' beef for the kitchen. Now you know why, Sam Rimmer."

Sam Rimmer sat looking at her as if in a quandary, gently rubbing his hair, which shone again in the sun.

"Well, it's a pity but you wanted some," said he, slowly. "We've gone and been and pervided a shop full o' meat to-day, and it'll be a dead loss on the master. The Clement-Pells don't want none, you see: and they took a'most as much as all the rest o' the gentlefolks put together. There's summat up there."

"Summat up where?" snapped Molly.

"At the Clement-Pells'. The talk is, that they've busted-up, and be all gone off in consekence."

"Why, what d'ye mean?" cried Molly. "Gone off where? Busted-up from what?"

But, before Perkins's boy could answer, the Pater, walking about the path in his straw hat and light thin summer coat, came on the scene. He had caught the words.

"What's that you are saying about the Clement-Pells, Sam Rimmer?"

Sam Rimmer touched his hair, and explained. Upon going to Parrifer Hall for orders, he had found it all sixes-and-sevens; some of the servants gone, the rest going. They told him their master had bursted-up, and was gone away since Sunday morning; and the family since Monday morning. And his master, Perkins, would have all the meat left on his hands that he had killed on purpose for the Clement-Pells.

You should have seen the Squire's amazed face. At first he did not know how to take the words, and stared at Sam Rimmer without speaking.

"All the Banks has went and busted-up too," said Sam. "They be a-saying, sir, as how there won't be nothing for nobody."

The Squire understood now. He turned tail and rushed into the house. And rushed against Mr. Brandon, who was coming in.

"Well, have you heard the news?" asked Mr. Brandon in his thinnest voice.

"I can't believe it; I don't believe it," raved the Squire. "Clement-Pell would never be such a swindler. He owes me two hundred pounds."

Mr. Brandon opened his little eyes. "Owes it _you_!"

"That day, last week, when he came driving in, in his smart cockle-shell carriage--when you were here, you know, Brandon. He got a cheque for two hundred pounds from me. A parcel of money that ought to have come over from the chief Bank had not arrived, he said, and the Church Dykely branch might be run close; would I let him have a cheque for two or three hundred pounds on the Bank at Alcester. I told him I did not believe I had anything like two hundred pounds lying at Alcester: but I drew a cheque out for that amount, and wrote a note telling the people there to cash it, and I would make it right."

"And Pell drove straight off to Alcester then and there, and cashed the cheque?" said Mr. Brandon in his cynical way.

"He did. He had told me I should receive the money on the following day. It did not come, or on the Friday either; and on Saturday I went to Alcester, thinking he might have paid it in there."

"Which of course he had not," returned old Brandon. "Well, you must have been foolish, to be so taken-in."

"Taken-in!" roared the Squire, in a passion. "Why, if he had asked me for two thousand pounds he might have had it--a man with the riches of Clement-Pell."

"Well, he wouldn't have got any from me. One who launched out as he did, and let his family launch out, I should never put much trust in. Any way, the riches are nowhere; and it is said Pell is nowhere too."

It was all true. As Sam Rimmer put it, Clement-Pell and his Banks had bursted-up.

XXIV.

GETTING AWAY.

You have heard of the avalanches that fall without warning and crush luckless dwellers in the Swiss mountains; and of mälströms that suddenly swallow up vessels sailing jauntily along on a calm sea; and of railway trains, filled with happy passengers, that one minute are running smoothly and safely along, and the next are nowhere: but nothing of this sort ever created the consternation that attended the bursting-up of the Clement-Pells.

It was Saturday night.--For we have to trace back a day or two.--Seated in the same room where I had seen him when I went back for Helen Whitney's bag, was Clement-Pell. That the man had come to his last gasp, he knew better than any one else in the world could have told him. How he had braved it out, and fought against the stream, and still kept off the explosion since the night but one before--Thursday--when Mr. Johnson had intruded himself into the grounds and then stealthily watched him from the trees, and he knew all was over, it might have puzzled him to tell. How he had fought against all for months, ay, and years, turned him sick only to recall. It had been a fierce, continuous, secret battle; and it had nearly worn him out, and turned his face and his hair grey before their time.

On the day following this fête-night, Friday, Clement-Pell took the train and was at his chief Bank early. He held his interview with Mr. Johnson; he saw other people; and his manner was free and open as usual. On this next day, Saturday, he had been denied to nearly all callers at the Bank: he was too busy to be interrupted, he told his clerks: and his son James boldly made appointments with them in his name for the Monday. After dark on Saturday evening, by the last train, he reached home, Parrifer Hall. And there he was, in that room of his; the door and shutters bolted and barred upon him, alternately pacing it in what looked like tribulation, and bending over account-books by the light of two wax candles.

Leaning his forehead on his hand, he sat there, and thought it out. He strove to look the situation fully in the face; what it was, and what it would be. Ruin, and worse than ruin. Clement-Pell had possessed good principles once: so to say, he possessed them still. But he had allowed circumstances to get the better of him and of them. He had come from his distant home (supposed to have been London) as the manager of an insignificant and humble little Bank: that was years ago. It was only a venture: but a certain slice of luck, that need not be recorded here, favoured him, and he got on beyond his best expectations. He might have made an excellent living, nay, a good fortune, and kept his family as gentlepeople, had he been prudent. But the luck, coming suddenly, turned his head, you see. Since then, I, Johnny Ludlow, who am no longer the inexperienced boy of that past time, have known it turn the heads of others. He launched out into ventures, his family launched into expense. The ventures paid; the undue expense did not pay. When matters came to be summed up by a raging public, it was said that it was this expense which had swamped the Pells. That alone, I suppose, it could not have been: but it must have gone some way towards it.

It lay on his mind heavily that Saturday night. Looking back, he got wondering how much more, in round figures, his family had cost him than they ought to have cost. There had been his wife's different expenses. Her houses, and her staff of servants, her carriages and horses, her dresses and jewels, and all the rest that it would take too long to tell of; and the costly bringing-up of his daughters; and the frightful outlay of his two younger sons. Fabian and Gusty Pell ought to have had ten thousand a year apiece, to have justified it. James had his expenses too, but in a quieter way. Clement-Pell ran his nervous fingers through his damp hair, as he thought of this, and in his bitter mind told himself that his family had ruined him. Unlimited spending--show--the shooting up above their station! He gave a curse to it now. He had not checked it when he might have done so; and it (or they) got the upper hand, and then he could not. Nothing is so difficult as to put down such expenses as these when they have become a habit.

And so the years had soon come that he found need for supplies. Unlimited as his millions were supposed to be by a confiding public, Clement-Pell in secret wanted money more than most people. His operations were gigantic, but then they required gigantic resources to keep them going. Money was necessary--or the smash must have come two or three years earlier. But sufficient money was not then conveniently attainable by Clement-Pell: and so--he created some. He believed when all his returns from these gigantic operations should flow in, that he could redeem the act; could replace the money, and no one ever be the wiser. But (it is the old story; one that has been enacted before and since), he found somehow that he could not replace it. Like Tod and that gambling affair when we were in London, in trying to redeem himself, he only got further into the mire. Tod, in playing on to cover his losses, doubled them; Clement-Pell's fresh ventures in the stream of speculation only sent him into deeper water. Of late, Clement-Pell had been walking as on a red-hot ploughshare. It burnt and scorched him everlastingly, and he could not get out of it. But the end had come. The thunder-cloud so long hovering in the air was on the very point of bursting, and he was not able to meet it. He must get away: he could not face it.

Get away for good, as he hoped, never to be tracked by friends or foes. What his future life was to be he did not attempt to consider: he only knew that he would give all he ever had been worth to be able to live on, no matter how quietly, with his fellow-men around him. The little moderate home that he and his wife had once looked to as the haven of their desires, would have been a harbour of safety and pride to him now.

Say what you will, men do not like to be shown up as black sheep in the eyes of their fellows; especially if they have hitherto stood out as conspicuously white leaders of the flock. The contrast is so great, the fall so startling. The public gives them all sorts of hard names; as it did in the case of Clement-Pell. A desperately hardened man he must be, said the world, with a brazen conscience; unprincipled as--well, yes, as Satan. But we may be very sure of one thing--that upon none does the disgrace tell so keenly, the ruin so heavily, the sense of shame so cruelly, as on these men themselves. Put it, if you will, that they make a purse and carry it off to set up a new home in some foreign land--they carry their sense of humiliation with them also; and their sun of happiness in this life has set. Men have tried this before now, and died of it.

That was the _best_ that lay prospectively before Clement-Pell: what the worst might be, he did not dare dwell upon. Certain ugly possibilities danced before his mental vision, like so many whirling ballet girls. "If I can only get away!" he muttered; "if I can only get away!"

He tried to confine his whole attention to the ledgers before him, and he put on his spectacles again. Mental trouble and mental work will dim the sight as well as whiten the hair and line the face, and Clement-Pell could not see as he had seen a year before. He altered figures; he introduced entries; he tore out whole leaves, and made a bonfire of them in the grate--carefully removing from the grate first of all its paper ornament. One book he burnt wholesale, even to the covers; and the covers made a frightful smell and daunted him.

Money was wanted here, there, everywhere. Snatching a piece of paper he idly dotted down the large sums occurring to him at the moment; and quite laughed as he glanced at the total. These were only business liabilities. At his elbow lay a pile of bills: domestic and family debts. House rent, taxes, horses, carriages, servants' wages, bills for food, bills for attire: all running back a long while; for no one had pressed Clement-Pell. The outlay for the fête might well have been profuse, since none of it was ever paid for. Beside the bills lay letters from Fabian and Gusty--wanting money as usual. To all these he scarcely gave a thought; they were as nothing. Even though he were made bankrupt upon them, they were still as nothing: for they would not brand his brow with the word felon. And he knew that there were other claims, of which no record appeared here, that might not be so easily wiped out.

Just for a moment, he lost himself in a happy reverie of what might have been had he himself been wise and prudent. It was Gusty's pressing letter that induced the reflection. He saw himself a prosperous man of moderate expenses and moderate desires, living at his ease in his own proper station, instead of apeing the great world above him. His daughters reared to be good and thoughtful women, his sons to be steady and diligent whatever their calling, whether business or profession. And what were they? "Curse the money and the pride that deluded me and my wife to blindness!" broke with a groan from the lips of Clement-Pell.

A sharp knocking at the door made him start. He looked about to see if there were anything to throw over his tell-tale table, and had a great mind to take off his coat and fling it there. Catching up the ornamental paper of the grate to replace it if he could, the knocking came again, and with it his wife's voice, asking what that smell of burning was. He let her in, and bolted the door again.

How far Mrs. Clement-Pell had been acquainted with his position, never came out to the world. That she must have known something of it was thought to be certain; and perhaps the additional launching out lately--the sojourn at Kensington, the fête, and all the rest of it--had only been entered upon to disarm suspicion. Shut up together in that room, they no doubt planned together the getting-away. That Mrs. Clement-Pell fought against their leaving home and grandeur, to become fugitives, flying in secret like so many scapegoats, would be only natural: we should all so fight; but he must have shown her that there was no help for it. When she quitted the room again, she looked like one over whom twenty years had passed--as Miss Phebus told us later. And the whole of that night, Mrs. Clement-Pell never went to bed; but was in her room gathering things together barefooted, lest she should be heard. Jewels--dresses--valuables! It must have been an awful night; deciding which of her possessions she should take, and which leave for ever.

At six in the morning, Sunday, Mr. Clement-Pell's bell rang, and the groom was summoned. He was bade get the small open carriage ready to drive his master to the railway station to catch an early train. Being Sunday, early trains were not common. Mr. Clement-Pell had received news the previous night, as was intimated, of an uncle's illness. At that early hour, and Sunday besides, Clement-Pell must have thought he was safe from meeting people: but, as it happened (things do happen unexpectedly in this world), in bowling out from his own gates, he nearly bowled over Duffham. The Doctor, coming home from a distant patient, to whom he had been called in the night, was jogging along on his useful old horse.

"Well!" said he to the banker. "You _are_ off early."

"Drive on, don't stop," whispered Clement-Pell to the groom. "I had news last night of the dangerous illness of my poor old uncle, and am going to see him," he called out to Duffham as they passed. "We shall have it piping hot again to-day, Doctor!"

The groom told of this encounter afterwards--as did Duffham too, for that matter. And neither of them had any more suspicion that Clement-Pell was playing a part than a baby could have had. In the course of the morning the groom drove in again, having safely conveyed his master to a distant station. The family went to church as usual, chaperoned by Miss Phebus. Mrs. Clement-Pell stayed at home, saying she had a headache: and no doubt quietly completed her preparations.

About six o'clock at night a telegram was delivered. The uncle was dying: Mrs. Clement-Pell must come as soon as possible, to be in time to see him: as to bringing the children she must do as she pleased about that. In Mrs. Pell's agitation and dismay she read the telegram aloud to the governess and the servant who brought it to her. Then was confusion! Mrs. Pell seemed to have lost her head. Take the children?--Of course she should take them;--and, oh, when was the earliest time they could start?

The earliest time by rail was the following morning. And part of the night was again passed in preparation--openly, this time. Mrs. Clement-Pell said they should probably stay away some days, perhaps a week or two, and must take things accordingly. The boxes were all brought into her room, that she might superintend; the poor old uncle was so very particular as to dress, she said, and she trusted he might yet recover. On the Monday morning, she and her daughters departed in the large carriage, at the same early hour that her husband had gone, and for the same remote station. After all, not so much luggage went; only a box a-piece. In stepping into her carriage, she told the servants that it would be an excellent opportunity to clean the paint of the sitting-rooms and of the first-floor while she was away: the previous week she had remarked to them that it wanted doing.

The day went on; the household no doubt enjoying their freedom and letting the paint alone. No suspicion was aroused amongst them until late in the afternoon, when a curious rumour was brought over of some confusion at the chief Bank--that it had stopped and its master had flown. At first the governess and servants laughed at this: but confirmation soon came thick and three-fold. Clement-Pell had burst-up.

And why the expression "bursting-up" should have been universally applied to the calamity by all people, high and low, I know no more than you; but it was so. Perhaps in men's minds there existed some assimilation between a bubble, that shines brightly for its brief existence before bursting, like the worthless froth it is, and the brilliant but foundationless career of Mr. Clement-Pell.

The calamity at first was too great to be believed in. It drove people mad only to fancy it might be true: and one or two, alas! subsequently went mad in reality. For the bursting-up of Mr. Clement-Pell's huge undertakings caused the bursting-up of many private ones, and of households with them. Means of living went: homes were desolated.

It would be easier to tell you of those who had not trusted money in the hands of Clement-Pell, than of those who had. Some had given him their all. Led away by the fascinating prospect of large interest, they forgot future safety in the dazzling but delusive light of immediate good. I should like it to be distinctly understood that I, Johnny Ludlow, am writing of a matter which took place years ago; and not of any recent event, or events, that may have since occurred to shake public equanimity in our own local world.

Disbelief in the misfortune was natural. Clement-Pell had stood on a lofty pedestal, unapproachable by common individuals. We put greater trust in him--in his unbounded wealth, his good faith, his stability--than we could have put in any other man on the face of the globe. We should almost as soon have expected the skies to fall as Clement-Pell. The interests of so many were involved and the ruin would be so universal, that the terrified natives could only take refuge in disbelief: and Squire Todhetley was amongst them.

* * * * *

The news was brought to Dyke Manor on the Tuesday morning, as you have heard, by the butcher boy, Sam Rimmer; and was confirmed by Mr. Brandon. When the first momentary shock had been digested by the Squire, he arrived at the conclusion that it must be false. But that Sam had trotted off, he might have heard the length of the Pater's tongue. Sam being gone, he turned his indignation on Mr. Brandon.

"One would have thought you had sense to know better, Brandon," said he, raging about the breakfast-room with the skirts of his light morning coat held out behind him. "Giving ear to a cock-and-bull story that _can't_ be true! Take care Pell does not get to hear it. He'd sue you for defamation."

"He'd be welcome," nodded old Brandon, in his thin voice, as he stood, whip in hand, against the window.

"The grand fête of last Thursday," gasped Mrs. Todhetley--who had been puzzling her brains over Sam Rimmer's master's book, the writing in which could never be deciphered. "Surely the Clement-Pells would not have given that fête had things been going wrong with them."

"And poured iced champagne, unlimited, down folk's throats; and strutted about in point-lace and diamonds," added old Brandon. "Madam, I'd believe it all the more for that."

As he spoke, the remembrance of the scene I had witnessed in the grounds, and Clement-Pell's curious fear later when I told him of the same man watching him, flashed over me, bringing a conviction that the report was true.

"I heard it at the chief Bank yesterday," began Mr. Brandon. "Having some business to transact in the town, I went over by train in the afternoon, and chanced to meet Wilcox in High Street. He is a red-faced man in general----"

"Oh, I know Wilcox," impatiently interrupted the Squire. "Face as red as the sun in a fog. What has that to do with it?"

"Well, it was as pale yesterday as the moon on a frosty night," went on old Brandon. "I asked if he had an attack of bile--being subject to it myself--and he said No, it was an attack of fright. And then he told me there was a report in town that something was wrong with Pell's affairs, and that he had run away. Wilcox will lose every penny of his savings."

"All talk; all talk," said the Pater in his obstinacy.

"And for a man to come to Wilcox's age, which must be five-and-fifty, it is no light blow to lose a life's savings," calmly went on old Brandon. "I went to the Bank, and found it besieged by an excited and angry crowd fighting to get in, the door locked, and the porter vainly trying to put up the shutters. That was enough to show me what the matter was, and I left Wilcox to it."

The Squire stared in perplexity, rubbing up his scanty hair the wrong way while his senses came to him.

"It is all true," said Mr. Brandon, nodding to him. "Church Dykely is in an uproar this morning already."

"I'll go and see for myself," said the Squire, stripping off his nankeen coat in haste so great that he tore one sleeve nearly out. "I'll go and see; this is _not_ credible. Clement-Pell would never have swindled me out of two hundred pounds only a day or two before he knew he was going all to smash."

"The most likely time for him to do it," persisted Mr. Brandon. "People, as a rule, only do these things when they are desperate."

But the Squire did not stay to listen. Settling himself into his other coat, he went driving on across the fields as though he were walking for a wager. Mr Brandon mounted his cob, and put up his umbrella against the sun.

"Never embark any money with these beguiling people that promise you undue interest, Johnny Ludlow," said Mr. Brandon, as I kept by his side, and opened the gates for him. "Where would you have been now, young man--or, worse, where should I have been--had I, the trustee of your property, consented to risk it with Pell? He asked me to do it."