The banker and the bear

In quite another quarter of the city from the crowded thoroughfare where we first saw Dick, is another street, very different, but quite as interesting. It is narrow and dark; it does not celebrate the holiday time with gayly dressed shop windows; between the two black ranks of buildings that front on it, it is quite empty, save for alert policemen who patrol it, and the storm which has became ill natured as it whips angrily around corners. You may search as you will about this great city, but you will hardly find a spot more dismal, more chilling, more to be shunned on this jolly Christmas Eve. There is no doubt a dreariness of poverty, but the dreariness of wealth is worse; hidden, guarded, vaulted wealth, like that which lies behind these thick stone walls. For this street is the commercial heart of a great commercial city. And by day all about in the city and the country, in the great shops and office buildings and in the country store, men buy and sell, lend and borrow, without money, only with a faith in the wealth this cheerless street contains. Should it be destroyed, should the faith in it be shaken but for a day, unopened shutters would bear the bills of sheriffs’ sales, and cold ashes would lie under the boilers of great factories. At night the heart stops beating, the crowds go away, and that which has been sent throbbing through the arteries of trade comes back to lie safely in thick steel chambers, where barred doors bear cunning locks that never sleep, but tick watchfully till morning.

Upon this street, squeezed in uncomfortably by two of the modern towers of Babel which our civilization seems to have made necessary, stands a thick, squat building of an older architecture, which might look rather imposing, did not its sky-scraping neighbors dwarf it to a mere notch between them. And in front of this building, which is, as you may have guessed, the home of Bagsbury and Company’s Savings Bank, there drew up, at about eight o’clock on this Christmas Eve, a carriage. A footman clambered numbly from the box, opened the door, and helped old Mr. Bagsbury to extricate himself from his nest of rugs and furs; then he almost carried the old man across the wind-swept sidewalk and up the stairs, transferring him at the door to the care of Thomas Jones, the watchman.

“Call for me in about an hour, James. I shall have—Ah, that gale is bitter!—I shall have finished by that time.”

Thomas Jones led him to the little private office in the corner, lighted the gas, and then went out, closing the door behind him. Left alone, the old man dropped into a chair and sat there shivering for several minutes; his coat was still buttoned tightly round him, and his heavily gloved hands were crammed into the pockets. The fire of life was burning very low in old John Bagsbury, and he knew it; an instinct, which he did not even try to reason with, often took him, even on wild nights like this, to the badly lighted room that was his only real home.

Finally he rose and walked to his private safe, and, after fumbling with stiff fingers over the combination, opened it and took out a small iron box which he carried to the desk. Then, sitting down before it, he drew off his fur gloves and took out the neat piles of memoranda and the papers which it contained. There was nothing to be done to them, for his affairs had, for years, been perfectly ordered; but he read over the carefully listed securities as though he expected to find some mistake. The lists were long, for he was rich; not so immoderately rich, it is true, as he would have been, had there been a generous admixture of daring with his great shrewdness and caution, but still rich enough to count his fortune by the millions.

After a while, he laid the other papers back in the box, moved it a little to one side to make room, spread a large document out flat on the desk and bent over it, rubbing his cramped old hands together between his knees, and smiling faintly. Yes, there could be no doubt about it; it was sane, it was clear, it was inviolable; it would hold safe the thing he loved best, from rash hands that would recklessly destroy it.

In a small, snug room in young John Bagsbury’s house, by courtesy a library, though one modest case held all its books, John and Dick Haselridge were talking, or, rather, John was talking, while Dick listened. They were on opposite sides of the big desk that occupied the middle of the room, John in the easy-chair, and Dick in the swivel chair that stood before the desk, where she could make little pencil sketches on the blotter. They were alone, for Martha, John’s thirteen-year-old daughter, had gone to bed long ago, and Alice, who always grew sleepy very soon after John began talking shop, had followed her. It was by no means the first of the long talks John and Dick had had together, for he had not been slow to discover and delight in her swift comprehension and her honest appreciation of the turns and twists of his business. There was no affectation in her display of interest, for the active side of life, the exercise of judgment and skill, appealed to her very strongly.

But to-night the talk had taken another turn, and, somewhat to his own alarm, John found himself telling her about his gloomy boyhood, his disappointment in his father’s bank, and the ambition which had driven him out of it. His talk revealed to Dick more than he knew; for between the words she could read how the still unfulfilled ambition was not dead, but stronger than ever; how the successes of all those years meant nothing to him, except as they hastened the time when he should have the policy of Bagsbury and Company’s Savings Bank in his own hands.

If it was easy to talk to Dick, it was delightful to watch her as she listened. She had pushed aside the reading lamp, and with her hands was shading her eyes from its light; but still he could see the quick frown which would draw down her brows when the meaning of one of his technicalities baffled her, and her nod of comprehension when she understood. There was no need for explanation now: he was telling her of his first meeting with Sponley, and how the desire, aroused by the speculator’s suggestion that he leave his father’s bank, had grown until it was irresistible, and, finally, how he had told his father of his determination to go to work for Dawson.

At the mention of Sponley’s name Dick had dropped her eyes, and the pencil resumed its play over the blotter; her dislike for the man was so strong that she was afraid of showing it to his friend. But when John told her of his parting from his father, she looked up again.

“That must have been a terrible disappointment to—grandfather,” she said slowly.

“I never heard you call him that before.”

“I don’t believe I ever did; I know I never have thought of him that way. And I never was truly sorry for him till just now.”

“Sorry for him!” John exclaimed.

Dick nodded. “Perhaps because it’s Christmas Eve,” she said.

“Do you suppose,” she asked a moment later, “that he’ll come over to-morrow? He always comes on Christmas, doesn’t he?”

“Nearly always,” he answered. “He generally comes two or three times a year. But he’s getting pretty old now.”

“What an utterly lonely life he’s led all these years,” said Dick. “Think of it! I wonder—”

The sharp jangle of the telephone bell cut her short. John sprang up to answer it.

“Yes. Who is this?—Thomas Jones? Oh, yes—at the bank—What do you say?—Are you sure? Have you a doctor there?—Yes, I’ll be over directly.”

He turned to Dick, who had risen and was standing close beside him.

“I’ve got to go out for a while,” he said. “There’s—a man—sick over at the bank.”

“Who is it?” she asked. “Is it grandfather?”

John answered her, “He’s over at our bank—his bank. The watchman telephoned. He thinks he’s dead, but it may be only a faint. I’m going down there right away.”

As he spoke, he turned back to the telephone; his hand was on the bell crank when Dick said:—

“I’m going, too. You telephone for a carriage, and I’ll be ready as soon as it comes.”

“You! You mustn’t go. There’ll be nothing you can do.”

“I want to—very much,” she answered. “Please take me.”

With a nod of assent he rang the bell, and she hurried from the room.

Their drive to the bank was a silent one, and though they went rapidly, it seemed a long time to Dick before they stopped in front of the dismal building in the narrow street. When they alighted, John led the way into the bank, picking his way about in the dimness with the confidence of perfect familiarity; he knew that nothing had been changed in all the years.

At the door of the private office John paused an instant, uncovered, and looked about on the well-known appointments of the little room before he dropped his gaze on the stark figure lying upon the worn old sofa. Then he walked across to it, and Dick followed him into the office. The two stood a minute looking down in silence on the figure of the old man; then John turned and spoke to Thomas Jones, who had arisen from his chair in the corner when they came in.

“You were right,” said John. “He is dead. Hasn’t the doctor come?”

“No, sir. I sent Mr. Bagsbury’s carriage after him as directly as I found out what had happened, before I telephoned to you. He should be here by now.”

“Did he die here, on the sofa, I mean?” John asked.

“In his chair, sir. I heard a noise, and when I came in I found that he had fallen over on the desk; his head and arms were resting on those papers. I thought it might be just a faint, and carried him over here.”

At the mention of the desk, John turned to it. There were two minutes of silence after Thomas Jones had finished speaking, and then they heard in the street the rumble of the carriage.

“It’s the doctor,” said John. “Go and bring him up here.”

The man went out, and still John’s eyes rested on the disordered papers upon the desk. Dick, standing at his left, but a pace behind him, had also turned her eyes from the dead figure of the old banker; she was intently watching the son’s face. Once she started to speak, but hesitated; then, seeing a slight motion of John’s body, a motion that seemed preparatory to a step toward the desk, she took a swift decision.

“They’re his private papers, aren’t they?” she said. “Hadn’t we better put them away? They shouldn’t lie here.”

“Yes,” said John, decisively. “Will you do it?”

He stood watching her without volunteering to help while she laid the papers back in the iron box.

“It has a spring lock,” he said, when she had finished. “You have only to shut it.”

When he heard the lock click, he walked to the safe and pulled open the heavy door. Dick carried the box to the safe and put it in, and John shut the door, shot the bolts, and spun the combination knob around vigorously.

“They’re all right now,” he said. Then he walked to the chair in the corner, though the big office chair that stood before the desk was nearer, and sat down, just as Thomas came in with the doctor.

The day after the funeral John went to the office of his father’s attorney to hear the reading of the will. Judge Hayes—he had been a judge once—was a stout little man with a bald, round head; he had no eyebrows worth mentioning nor lashes, and altogether his red wrinkled face was laughably like that of a baby. His shell-rimmed eye-glasses, by looking ridiculously out of place, only made this effect the more striking.

He ushered John into his private office, closed the door, motioned John to a seat, sat down heavily in his own broad chair, and began rummaging fussily through his littered desk to find the will. It may seem strange that a lawyer whom old John Bagsbury would trust should be so careless about an important document like a last will and testament, that finding it in his desk should be a matter of difficulty; but it is certain that Judge Hayes had looked in every pigeonhole in his desk, and had opened every drawer and shut it again with a bang, before his hand alighted upon the paper which at this moment meant more than anything else to the man who sat waiting. All the while the Judge had been hailing down a shower of small remarks upon all conceivable subjects, and John had answered all of them in a voice that gave no hint of impatience.

At last he unfolded the will, swung round in his chair to get a better light on it, tilted back at a seemingly perilous angle, cleared his throat, and said:—

“This storm makes it rather hard to see. I wonder how many more days it will last?”

“I guess it’s about worked itself out,” said John. “It can’t last forever.”

Judge Hayes began reading in that rapid drone which lawyers affect, but he knew the will almost by heart, and he found time to cast many swift glances at John Bagsbury.

John sat low in his chair, his chin on his breast, his legs crossed, his thumbs hooked into his trousers pockets. His eyes were half closed, the lower lids being drawn to meet the drooping upper ones; his gaze seemed fixed on one of the casters of the lawyer’s chair; his brows bore the slight frown of a man who listens intently. And that was all; though the lawyer’s glance grew more expectant and alert as he proceeded, there was no change in the lines of John Bagsbury’s face or figure to betray anger or disappointment or annoyance—not even a movement of his suspended foot.

Not until Judge Hayes had read the will to the last signature and tossed it back into his desk, did John speak.

“If I have caught the gist of it,” he said, “my father has left me nearly all of his fortune—”

“The greater part of it,” corrected the lawyer.

“Which amounts to something less than three million dollars—”

“Somewhat less, yes; considerably less.”

“But that it is all trusteed,” John went on quite evenly, “so that I can’t touch a cent of it, except part of the income.”

“Not without the express consent of the trustees,” said Judge Hayes.

“The same conditions,” said John, with a faint smile, “which would apply to my touching your money. As I understand it, these three trustees are allowed the widest discretion; they may do with my property just what they think best—”

The lawyer nodded.

“Even to the extent of turning it over to me unconditionally.”

Here the lawyer smiled. “Even to that extent,” he said.

“They vote my bank stock just as though they owned it,” said John.

“Precisely.”

“Suppose they disagree?”

“Then it can’t be voted at all.”

“Well,” said John, rising, “I guess I understand. How soon shall we be able to get the will proved?”

“If everything goes smoothly,” said the Judge, “that is, if there is no contest and no irregularity of any sort, we should be able to prove it in a week or two.”

“There will be no contest, I imagine,” said John. “Good day.”

As the door closed behind John, Judge Hayes swung back to his desk, put his elbows on it, and his chin on his hands, and for the next ten minutes he meditated upon the attainments and the prospects of the man who had just left him. For the past half hour he had tried all that long experience and a fertile mind could suggest to tear off what he felt to be John’s mask of indifference. He knew what a blow that will must be, and he wanted to see how the real man, the man inside the shell, was taking it. He felt sure that the composure was a veneer, and he had done his best to rasp through it. “Well,” he concluded, as he reluctantly turned to something else, “the coating is laid on confounded thick.”

As for John, he was walking swiftly up the street with the unmistakable air of a man who is about to attempt something, and intends to succeed in it. And yet, to all appearances, the situation was hopeless. His father had held a majority of the stock in the bank; the rest was in the hands of investors who had been attracted by the eminent respectability and conservatism of the policy the old man had established, and it was not likely they would look with favor on anything in the way of a change. And the three trustees whom old Mr. Bagsbury had selected were men after his own heart, crusty, obstinate, timorous. They controlled John’s stock—a majority of all the stock of the bank—as absolutely as if they were the joint owners of it.

But an ironical providence has ordained that excessive caution shall often overreach itself, and the old man’s attempt to make safer what was already safe, gave John his opportunity. Had there been but one trustee, John’s case would indeed have been hopeless; but old Mr. Bagsbury, finding it impossible to trust any one man utterly, had trusted three.

In a flash of intuition John had seen his chance and had asked Judge Hayes the question, whose significance the lawyer had failed to grasp, even as he answered it. As John walked along the street he smiled over a proverb which was running in his head. Doubtless it was a wild injustice to think of three blameless old men as rogues, but in their falling out lay John’s hope of coming into his own. For if the trustees should disagree as to the way his stock should be voted at the annual meeting, it could not be voted at all; and if John and his friends could get control of more than half the stock now in the hands of outsiders, he could put himself where he knew he belonged, at the head of Bagsbury and Company’s Savings Bank.

One “if” is enough to bring most men anxiety and sleepless nights; two “if’s,” both of them slender ones, may well drive a brave man to despair. But there was no thought of failure in John’s mind; he meant to win.

John was one of the best bankers in the city, which is another way of saying that he knew men as well as he knew markets. Not men in a general, philosophical sort of way—Men, with a big letter; he had no interest in “types.” But he knew Smith and Jones and Robinson right down to the ground. He knew the customers of Dawson’s bank and of other banks too—men who came to him to persuade him to lend them money; he knew their tricks and their tempers as well as their balances. And in all the years of waiting he had not been ignorant of the way things were going with Bagsbury and Company. He knew his father’s customers, his friends,—such as they were,—and he knew the three old trustees, Meredith, Cartwright, and Moffat.

He knew that you couldn’t talk to Cartwright ten minutes without having Meredith quoted at you, or to Meredith without hearing some new instance of Cartwright’s phenomenally accurate judgment; that each thought the other only the merest hair’s breadth his inferior, and that they could be relied on to agree and continue to agree indefinitely.

And Moffat?—John smiled when he thought of him. The one thing in the world which Moffat couldn’t tolerate was obstinacy; and as nearly everybody Moffat knew was disgustingly wrong-headed, old Mr. Moffat found it difficult to get on smoothly with people. Moffat could not explain why men should be so cock-sure and so perversely deaf to reason, but certainly he found them so. It was most unfortunate, because though by intention one of the most peaceable of men, he was constantly being driven by righteous indignation into quarrels.

When John left Judge Hayes, he headed straight for Mr. Moffat’s office. The old gentleman welcomed him cordially, for he had always held Mr. Bagsbury in the highest esteem, and was prepared, if he should find in John his father’s common sense, to think well of him, too.

John talked freely about the will, and confessed his disappointment that his father had not thought him capable of administering the fortune himself. He added, however, that his wish was the same as his father’s, that the estate should be kept safe, and that he had no doubt it would be in the hands of the three trustees his father had chosen. They chatted on for some time, John feeling his way cautiously about among the old man’s opinions, dropping a word now and then about Cartwright or Meredith, until finally he drew this remark from Mr. Moffat:—

“I have only the barest acquaintance with my fellow-trustees. Do you know them well?”

“I’ve known them for a good many years,” John answered, “though I can’t say that I know them well. They’re thoroughly honorable, and they have some ability, too. You’ll find they have a disagreeable habit of backing each other up, though. In that respect, they’re like a well-trained pair of setter dogs. If one points, the other will too, and he’ll stick to it whether he sees anything or not. But I’ve no doubt you’ll be able to get along with them well enough.”

With that he shifted the subject abruptly on another tack, and a few minutes later took his leave. He was well satisfied with the afternoon’s work, for he felt confident that the Bagsbury holdings would not be voted at the next stockholders’ meeting. It was a little seed he had sown, but it had fallen into good ground.

He went straight home after that and found Dick curled up in the big chair in the library, reading. She glanced up at him, and as he spoke to her there was a vibrant quality in his voice that made her close her book and ask him what had happened.

“I’m just going to telephone to Sponley,” he said. “Listen, and you’ll hear part of it. That’ll save telling it twice.”

Over the telephone he told Sponley all about the terms of the will, adding that his only chance now lay in getting control of the outside stock. He asked Sponley to come to the house that night after dinner to talk things over.

Then he rang off, and sitting down on the desk he told Dick what he had not told Sponley, all about his interview with Moffat. And though Dick nodded her pretty head appreciatively, and seemed thoroughly to grasp the situation, yet when he finished her face still wore a puzzled frown.

John was too busy making his plans to think much of it, but he wondered vaguely what she had failed to understand.