CHAPTER VIII.—Continued.

Clutha Leader, Volume IV, Issue 217, 6 September 1878, Page 7

CHAPTER Vlll.— Continued.

Soon matters approached a crisis ; several large drafts were drawn, which would have cleaned Hardies bank out, but that the yearly rents of a wealthy nobleman had for some days past been flowing in. This nobleman had gone to explore Syria and Assyria. He was a great traveller, who contrived to live up to his income at home, but had never been able to spend a quarter ol it abroad for want of enemies and masters — better known as friends and servants — to help him. So Hardie was safe for some months, unless there should be an extraordinary run on him, and that was not likely this year; the panic had subsided, and, nota bene, his credit had never stood higher. The reason was, he had been double-faced ; had always spoken against railways : and his wise words were public, whereas his fatal acts had been done in the dark.

But now came a change, a bitter revulsion, over this tossed mind ; hope and patience failed at last, and his virtue, being* a thing 1 of habit and traditions, rather than of the soul, wore out; nay more, this man, who had sacrificed so nobly to commercial integrity, filled with hate of his idol and contempt of himself. ' Idiot !' said he, 'to throw away a fortune fighting" for honour, — a greater bubble than that which has ruined me — instead of breaking like a man, with a hidden purse, and starting fair again as sensible traders do.'

No honest man in tbe country that year repented of his vices so sincerely as Richard Hardie loathed his virtue. And he did not confine his penitence to sentiment ; he began to spend his days at the bank poring over the books, and to lay out his arithmetical genius in a subtle process, that should enable him by degrees to withdraw a few thousands from human eyes for his future use, despite the feeble safeguards of the existing law. In other words Richard Hardie, like thousands before him, was fabricating and maturing a false balance sheet.

One man in his time plays many animals. Hardie at this period turned mole. He burrowed darkling into ses alienum. There is often one of these sleek miners in a Bank : it is a section of human zoology the journals have lately enlarged on, and drawn the painstaking creature grubbing and mining away to brief opulence ; and briefer penal servitude than one could wish. I rely on my reader having read these really able sketches of my contemporaries, and spare him minute details, that possess scarcely a new feature, except one ' in that Bank was not only a mole, but a mole-catcher; nnd contrary to custom, the mole was the master, the mole-catcher the servant. The latter had no hostile views — far from it : he was rather attached to his master : but liis attention was roused by the youngest clerk, a boy of sixteen, being so often sent tor into the bank parlour, to copy into the books some arithmetical result, without its process. Attention, soon became suspicion, and suspicion found many little things to feed on till it grew to certainty. But the outer world was none the wiser ; the mole-catcher wns no chatterbox ; he was a solitary man ; no wife nor mistress about him ;'and he revered the mole, and liked him better than anything in the world—- -except money. Thus the great Banker stood, a colossus of wealth and stability to the eye, though ready to crumble at a touch ; and indeed self-doomed, for bankruptcy was now his game. This was a miserable man ; far more miserable than his son whose happiness he had thwarted: his face was furrowed and his hair thinned by secret struggle : and of all the things that gnawed him, like the fox, beneath his Spartan robe, none was more bitter than to have borrowed five thousand pounds of his children and sunk it. His wife's father, a keen man of business, who saw there was little affection on fhis side, had settled his daughter's money on her for life, and, in case of her death, on the children upon coming of age. The marriage of Alfred or J ane would be sure to expose him ; settlements would be proposed ; lawyers engaged to peer into the trust, &c. No ; they must remain single for the present or else marry wealth.

So, when his son announced an attachment to a young lady living in a suburban villa, it was a terrible blow, though he took it with outward calm, as usual. But if, instead of prating about beauty, virtue, and breeding, Alfred had told him hard cash in five figures could be settled by the bride's family on the young couple, he would have welcomed the wedding with great external indifference, but a secret gush of joy ; for then he could throw himself on Alfred's generosity, and be released from the one corroding debt ; perhaps allowed to go on drawing the interest* of the remainder.

Thus, in reality, all the interests, with which this story deals, converged towards one pomt — the fourteen thousand pounds.