Part 43

"Clement-Pell did, sir? When?"

"A year or two ago. I gave him an answer, Johnny; and I fancy he has not altogether liked me since. 'I could not think of placing even a shilling of Johnny Ludlow's where I did not know it to be safe,' I said to him. 'It will be safe with me,' says Pell, sharply. 'Possibly so, Mr Pell,' I answered; 'but you see there's only your word as guarantee, and that is not enough for an honest trustee.' That shut him up."

"Do you mean to say you have doubted Clement-Pell's stability, Brandon?" demanded the Squire, who was near enough to hear this.

"I don't know about doubting," was the answer. "I have thought it as likely to come to a smash as not. That the chances for it were rather better than half."

This sent the Squire on again. _He_ had no umbrella; and his straw hat glistened in the heat.

Church Dykely was in a commotion. Folk were rushing up to the little branch Bank black in the face, as if their collars throttled them; for the news was spreading like fire in dry turf. The Squire went bolting in through every obstruction, and seized upon the manager.

"Do you mean to tell me that it's true, Robertson?" he fiercely cried.--"That things have gone to smash?"

"I am afraid it is, sir," said Robertson, who looked more dead than alive. "I am unable to understand it. It has fallen upon me with as much surprise as it has on others."

"Now, don't you go and tell falsehoods, Robertson," roared the Squire, as if he meant to shake the man. "Surprise upon you, indeed! Why, have you not been here--at the head and tail of everything?"

"But I did not know how affairs were going. Indeed, sir, I tell you truth."

"Tell a jackass not to bray!" foamed the Squire. "Have you been short of funds here lately, or have you not? Come, answer me that."

"It is true. We have been short. But Mr. Clement-Pell excused it to me by saying that a temporary lock-up ran the Banks short, especially the small branch Banks. I declare, before Heaven, that I implicitly believed him," added Robertson, "and never suspected there could be any graver cause."

"Then you are either a fool or a knave."

"Not a knave, Squire Todhetley. A fool I suppose I have been."

"I want my two hundred pounds," returned the Squire. "And, Robertson, I mean to have it."

But Robertson had known nothing of the loan; was surprised to hear of it now. As to repayment, that was out of his power. He had not two hundred pence left in the place, let alone pounds.

"It is a case of swindle," said the Squire. "It's not one of ordinary debt."

"I can't help it," returned Robertson. "If it were to save Mr. Clement-Pell from hanging, I could not give a stiver of it. There's my own salary, sir, since Midsummer; that, I suppose, I shall lose: and I can't afford it, and I don't know what will become of me and my poor little children."

At this, the Squire's voice and anger dropped, and he shook hands with Robertson. But, as a rule, every one began by brow-beating the manager. The noise was deafening.

How had Pell got off? By which route: road or rail? By day or night? It was a regular hubbub of questions. Mr. Brandon sat on his cob all the while, patiently blinking his eyes at the people.

Palmerby of Rock Cottage came up; his old hands trembling, his face as white as the new paint on Duffham's windows. "It can't be true!" he was crying. "It can't be true!"

"Had you money in his hands, Palmerby?"

"Every shilling I possess in the world."

Mr. Brandon opened his lips to blow him up for foolishness: but something in the poor old face stopped him. Palmerby elbowed his way into the Bank. Duffham came out of his house, a gallipot of ointment in his hand.

"Well, this is a pretty go!"

The Squire took him by the buttonhole. "Where's the villainous swindler off to, Duffham?"

"I should like to know," answered the surgeon. "I'd be pretty soon on his trail and ask him to refund my money."

"But surely he has none of yours?"

"Pretty nigh half the savings of my years."

"Mercy be good to us!" cried the Pater. "He got two hundred pounds out of me last week. What's to become of us all?"

"It's not so much a question of what is to become of us--of you and me, Squire," said Duffham, philosophically, "as of those who had invested with him their all. We can bear the loss: you can afford it without much hurt; I must work a few years longer, Heaven permitting me, than I had thought to work. That's the worst of us. But what will those others do? What will be the worst for them?"

Mr. Brandon nodded approvingly from his saddle.

"Coming home last night from Duck Lane--by the way, there's another infant at John Mitchel's, because he had not enough before--the blacksmith accosted me, saying Clement-Pell was reported to be in a mess and to have run off. The thing sounded so preposterous that I thought at first Dobbs must have been drinking; and told him that I happened to know Clement-Pell was only off to a relative's death-bed. For on Sunday morning, you see----"

A crush and rush stopped Duffham's narrative, and nearly knocked us all down. Ball the milkman had come bumping amongst us in a frantic state, his milk-cans swinging from his shoulders against my legs.

"I say, Ball, take care of my trousers. Milk stains, you know."

"Master Ludlow, sir, I be a'most mad, I think. Folks is saying as Mr. Clement-Pell and his banks have busted-up."

"Well? You have not lost anything, I suppose?"

"Not lost!" panted poor Ball. "I've lost all I've got. 'Twere a hundred pound, Mr. Johnny, scraped together hard enou', as goodness knows. Mr. Clement-Pell were a-talking to me one day, and he says, says he, Ah, says he, it's difficult to get much interest now; money's plentiful. I give eight per cent., says he; most persons gets but three. Would ye take mine, sir, says I; my hundred pound? If you like, he says. And I took it to him, gentlemen, thinking what luck I was in, and how safe it were. My hundred pound!"--letting the cans down with a clatter. "My hundred pound that I'd toiled so hard for! Gentlefolk, wherever be all the money a-gone?"

Well, it was a painful scene. One we were glad to get out of. The Squire, outrageously angry at the way he had been done out of his money, insisted on going to Parrifer Hall. Mr. Brandon rode his cob; Duffham stepped into his surgery to get his hat.

One might have fancied a sale was going on. The doors were open: boxes belonging to some of the servants were lying by the side-entrance, ready to be carted away; people (creditors and curiosity-mongers) stood about. Sam Rimmer's master, the butcher, came out of the house as we went in, swearing. Perkins had not been paid for a twelvemonth, and said it would be his ruin. Miss Phebus was in the hall, and seemed to have been having it out with him. She was a light-haired, bony lady of thirty-five, or so, and had made a rare good gipsy that day in the tent. Her eyes were peculiar: green in some lights, yellow in others: a frightfully hard look they had in them this morning.

"Oh, Mr. Todhetley, I am so glad to see you!" she said. "It is a cruel turn that the Clement-Pells have served me, leaving me here without warning, to bear the brunt of all this! Have you come in the interests of the family?"

"I've come after my own interests, ma'am," returned the Pater. "To find out, if I can, where Clement-Pell has gone to: and to see if I can get back any of the money I have been done out of."

"Why, it seems every one must be a creditor!" she exclaimed in surprise, on hearing this.

"I know I am one," was his answer.

"To serve _me_ such a trick,--to behave to me with this duplicity: it is infamous," went on Miss Phebus, after she had related to us the chief events of the Sunday, as connected with the story of the dying uncle and the telegram. "If I get the chance, I will have the law against them, Mr. Todhetley."

"It is what a few more of us mean to do, ma'am," he answered.

"They owe me forty pounds. Yes, Mr. Duffham, it is forty pounds: and I cannot afford to lose it. Mrs. Pell has put me off from time to time: and I supposed it to be all right; I suspected nothing. They have not treated me well lately, either. Leaving me here to take care of the house while they were enjoying themselves up in Kensington! I had a great mind to give warning then. The German governess got offended while they were in town, and left. Some friend of Fabian Pell's was rude to her."

A little man looked into the room just then; noting down the furniture with his eye. "None of these here articles must be moved, you understand, mum," he said to Miss Phebus.

"Don't talk to me," she answered wrathfully. "I am going out of the house as soon as I can put my things together." And the man went away.

"If I had only suspected!" she resumed to us, her angry tone full of pain; "and I think I might have done so, had I exercised my wits. My room is next to Mrs. Pell's; but it's not much larger than a closet, and has no fireplace in it: she only gave it me because it was not good enough for any one else. Saturday night was very hot--as you must remember--and I could not sleep. The window was open, but the room felt like an oven. After tossing about for I don't know how long, I got up and opened the door, thinking it might admit a breath of air. At that moment I heard sounds below--the quiet shutting of a door, and advancing footsteps. Wondering who could be up so late, I peeped out and saw Mrs. Pell. She came up softly, a candle in her hand, and her face quite curious and altered--aged and pale and haggard. She must be afraid of the ghosts, I thought to myself, as she turned off into her chamber--for we had been telling ghost-stories that night up to bed-time. After that, I did not get to sleep; not, as it seemed, for hours; and all the time I heard drawers being opened and shut in her bed and dressing-room. She must even then have been preparing for flight."

"And the dying uncle was invented for the occasion, I presume," remarked Mr. Duffham.

"All I know is, I never heard of an uncle before," she tartly answered. "I asked Mrs. Clement-Pell on Sunday night where the uncle lived, and how long a journey they had to go: she answered shortly that he was at his country house, and bade me not tease her. Mr. Duffham, can my own boxes be stopped?"

"I should think no one would attempt to do it," he answered. "But I'd get them out as soon as I could, were I you, Miss Phebus."

"What a wreck it will be!" she exclaimed.

"You have used the right word, ma'am," put in Mr. Brandon, who had left his horse outside. "And not only here. Wrecks they will be; and many of them."

We stood looking at one another ruefully. The Pater had come to hunt up his two hundred pounds; but there did not seem much chance of his doing it. "Look here," said he suddenly to the governess, "where was that telegram sent from?"

"We have not been able to discover. It was only seen by Mrs. Pell. After she had read it aloud, she crushed it up in her hand, as if in frightful distress, and called out about the poor dear old uncle. She took care it should not be seen: we may be very sure of that."

"But who sent the telegram?"

"I don't know," said Miss Phebus viciously. "Her husband, no doubt. Neither was the luggage that they took with them labelled: we have remembered the fact since."

"I think we might track them by that luggage," observed the Pater. "Five big boxes."

"If you do track them by it I'll eat the luggage wholesale," cried wise old Brandon. "Clement-Pell's not a fool, or his wife either. They'll go off just in the opposite direction that they appeared to go--and their boxes in another. As to Pell, he was probably unknown at the distant station the groom drove him to."

There was no end to be served in staying longer at the house, and we quitted it, leaving poor Miss Phebus to her temper. I had never much liked her; but I could not help feeling for her that unlucky morning.

"What's to be done now?" gloomily cried the Squire, while old Brandon was mounting. "It's like being in a wood that you can't get out of. If Clement-Pell had played an honest part with me: if he had come and said, 'Mr. Todhetley, I am in sore need of a little help,' and told me a bit about things: I don't say that I would have refused him the money. But to dupe me out of it in the specious way he did was nothing short of swindling; and I will bring him to book for it if I can."

That day was only the beginning of sorrow. There have been such cases since: perhaps worse; where a sort of wholesale ruin has fallen upon a neighbourhood: but none, to me, have equalled that. It was the first calamity of the kind in my experience; and in all things, whether of joy or sorrow, our earliest impressions are the most vivid. It is the first step that costs, the French tell us: and that is true of all things.

* * * * *

The ruin turned out to be wider even than was feared; the distress greater. Some had only lost part of their superfluous cash. It was mortifying; but it did not further affect their prosperity, or take from them the means of livelihood; no luxuries need be given up, or any servants dispensed with. Others had invested so much that it would throw them back years, perhaps cripple them for life. Pitiable enough, that, but not the worst. It was as nothing to those who had lost their all.

People made it their business to find out more about Mr. and Mrs. Clement-Pell than had been known before. Both were of quite obscure origin, it turned out, and he had _not_ been a lawyer in London, but only a lawyer's clerk. So much the more credit to him for getting on to be something better. If he had only had the sense to let well alone! But she?--well, all I mean to say here, is this: the farmers she had turned up her nose at were far, far better born and bred, even the smallest of them, than she was. Let that go: other women have been just as foolishly upstart as Mrs. Clement-Pell. One fact came out that I think _riled_ the public worse than any other: that his Christian name was Clement and his surname Pell. He had united the two when growing into a great man, and put a "J." before the Clement, which had no right there. Mr. Brandon had known it all along--at least he chanced to know that in early life his name was simply Clement Pell. The Squire, when he heard of this, went into a storm of reproach at old Brandon, because he had not told it.

"Nay, why should I have sought to do the man an injury?" remonstrated Mr. Brandon. "It was no business of mine, that I should interfere. We must live and let live, Squire, if we care to go through the world peaceably."

The days went on, swelling the list of creditors who came forward to declare themselves. The wonder was, that so many had been taken in. But you see, people had not made it their business to proclaim that their money lay with Clement-Pell. Gentlefolk who lived on their fortunes; professional men of all classes, including the clergy; commercial men of high and low degree; small tradespeople; widows with slender incomes, and spinsters with less. If Clement-Pell had taken the money of these people, not intentionally to swindle them, as the Squire put it in regard to his own, but only knowing there was a chance that it would not be safe, he must have been a hard and cruel man. I think the cries of the defrauded of that unhappy time must have gone direct to heaven.

He was not spared. Could hard words injure an absentee, Clement-Pell must have come in for all sorts of harm. His ears burned, I should fancy--if there's any truth in the saying that ears burn when distant friends give pepper. The queerest fact was, that no money seemed to be left. Of the millions that Clement-Pell had been worth, or had had to play with, nothing remained. It was inconceivable. What had become of the stores? The hoards of gold; the chests, popularly supposed to be filled with it; the bank-notes; the floating capital--where was it all? No one could tell. People gazed at each other with dismayed faces as they asked it. Bit by bit, the awful embarrassment in which he had been plunged for years came to light. The fictitious capital he had created had consumed itself: and the good money of the public had gone with it. Of course he had made himself secure and carried off loads, said the maddened creditors. But they might have been mistaken there.

For a week or two confusion reigned. Accountants set to work in a fog; official assignees strove to come to the bottom of the muddy waters. There existed some of what people called securities; but they were so hemmed in by claims that the only result would be that there would not be anything for any one. Clement-Pell had done well to escape, or the unhappy victims had certainly tarred and feathered him. All that time he was being searched for, and not a clue could be obtained to him. Stranger perhaps to say, there was no clue to his wife and daughters either. The five boxes had disappeared. It was ascertained that certain boxes, answering to the description, had been sent to London on the Monday from a populous station by a quick train, and were claimed at the London terminus by a gentleman who did _not_ bear any resemblance to Clement-Pell. I'm sure the excitement of the affair was something before unknown to the Squire, as he raged up hill and down dale in the August weather, and it must have been as good as a course of Turkish baths to him.

Ah me! it is all very well to write of it in a light strain at this distance of time; but God alone knows how many hearts were broken by it.

One of the worst cases was poor Jacob Palmerby's. He had saved money that brought him in about a hundred a year in his old age. Clement-Pell got hold of the money, doubled the interest, and Palmerby thought that a golden era had set in. For several years now he had enjoyed it. His wife was dead; his only son, who had been a sizar at Cambridge, was a curate in London. With the bursting up of Clement-Pell, Jacob Palmerby's means failed: he had literally not a sixpence left in the world. The blow seemed to have struck him stupid. He mostly sat in silence, his head down; his clothes neglected.

"Come, Palmerby, you must cheer up, you know," said the Squire to him one evening that we looked in at Rock Cottage, and found Mr. Brandon there.

"Me cheer up," he returned, lifting his face for a moment--and in the last fortnight it had grown ten years older. "What am I to cheer up for? There's nothing left. _I_ can go into the workhouse--but there's poor Michael."

"Michael?"

"My son, the parson. The capital that ought to have been his after me, and brought him in his hundred a year, as it did me before I drew it from the funds, is gone. Gone. It is of him I think. He has been a good son always. I hope he won't take to cursing me."

"Parsons don't curse, you know, and Michael will be a good son still," said Mr. Brandon, shrilly. "Don't you fret, Palmerby. Fretting does no good."

"It 'ud wear out a donkey--as I tell him," put in the old woman-servant, Nanny, who had brought in his supper of bread-and-milk.

He did not lift his head; just swayed it once from side to side by way of general response.

"It's the way he goes on all day, masters," whispered Nanny when we went out. "His heart's a-breaking--and I wish it was that knave of a Pell's instead. All these purty flowers to be left," pointing to the clusters of roses and geraniums and honeysuckles within the gate, "and the chairs and tables to be sold, and the very beds to be took from under us!"

"Nay, nay, Nanny, it may turn out better than that," spoke the Squire.

"Why, how can it turn out better, sirs?" she asked. "Pell didn't pay the dividends this two times past: and the master, believing as all his excuses was gospel, never thought of pressing for it. If we be in debt to the landlord and others, is it our fault? But the sticks and stones must be sold to pay, and the place be given up. There be the work'us for me; I know that, and it don't much matter; but it'll be a crying shame if the poor master have to move into it."

So it would be. And there were others in a similar plight to his; nothing else but the workhouse before them.

"He won't never live to go--that's one consolation," was Nanny's last comment as she held the gate open. "Good evening to ye, sirs; good evening, Master Johnny."

What with talking to Dobbs the blacksmith, and staying with Duffham to drink what he called a dish of tea, it was almost dark when I set out home; the Squire and Mr. Brandon having gone off without me. I was vaulting over the stile the near way across the fields, expecting to catch it for staying, when a man shot into my path from behind the hedge.

"Johnny Ludlow."

Well, I did feel surprised. It was Gusty Pell!

"Halloa!" said I. "I thought you were in Scotland."

"I was there," he answered. And then, while we looked at one another, he began to tell me the reason of his coming away. Why it is that all kinds of people seem to put confidence in me and trust me with matters they'd never speak of to others, I have never found out. Had it been Tod, for instance, Gusty Pell would never have shown himself out of the hedge to talk to him.

Gusty, shooting the grouse on the moors, had found his purse emptied of its last coin. He wrote to his father for more money: wrote and wrote; but none arrived: neither money nor letter. Being particularly in want of supplies, he borrowed a sovereign or two from his friends, and came off direct to see the reason why. Arrived within a few miles of home he heard very ugly rumours; stories that startled him. So he waited and came on by night, thinking it more prudent not to show himself.

"Tell me all about it, Johnny Ludlow, for the love of goodness!" he cried, his voice a little hoarse with agitation, his hand grasping my arm like a vice. "I have been taking a look at the place outside"--pointing up the road towards Parrifer Hall--"but it seems to be empty."

It was empty, except for a man who had charge of the things until the sale could take place. Softening the narrative a little, and not calling everything by the name the public called it, I gave the facts to Gusty.

He drew a deep breath at the end, like a hundred sighs in one. Then I asked him how it was he had not heard these things--had not been written to.

"I don't know," he said. "I have been moving about Scotland: perhaps a letter of theirs may have miscarried; and I suppose my later letters did not reach them. The last letter I had was from Constance, giving me an account of some grand fête here that had taken place the previous day."

"Yes. I was at it with Todhetley and the Whitneys. The--the crisis came three or four days after that."

"Johnny, where's my father?" he asked, after a pause, his voice sunk to a whisper.

"It is not known where he is."

"Is it true that he is being--looked for?"

"I am afraid it is."

"And, if they find him--what then? Why don't you speak?" he added impatiently.

"I don't know what. Some people say it will only be a bad case of bankruptcy."

"Any way, it is a complete smash."

"Yes, it's that."

"Will it, do you think, be ruin, Johnny? Ruin utter and unmitigated?"

"It is that already--to many persons round about."

"But I mean to my own people," said he, impatiently.

"Well, I should fear it would be."

Gusty took off his hat to wipe his brow. He looked white in the starlight.

"What will become of me? I must fly too," he muttered, as if to the stars. "And what of Fabian?--he cannot remain in his regiment. Johnny Ludlow, this blow is like death to me."

And it struck me that of the two calamities, Gusty Pell, non-religious though he was, would rather have met death. I felt dreadfully sorry for him.

"Where's James?" he suddenly asked. "Is he gone too?"

"James disappeared on the Sunday, it is said. It would hardly have been safe for him to remain: the popular feeling is very bitter."