CHAPTER VII.

TRUSTEE TO AN EMPTY CHEST.

'COME in,' said the banker mechanically, and his mother entered.

With a start Mr. Grey's mother cried out Henry!' then crossed the room hastily, and putting her hand on his arm, looked up into his face with alarm.

With an amused smile he glanced down at her, and said simply, 'Mother?' in a tone of badinage, as if he were paying her off in her own coin by replying to her by a single word.

"What was that you held in your hand and dropped into the bag as I came in ?' she asked, with reproachful earnestness, looking up fixedly into his eyes, as though she would pierce to his innermost thoughts.

He put his hand on her shoulder playfully, and carefully smoothed one of the black-silk strings of her black bonnet with his thumb and finger, returning her steady gaze with as steady an eye and a free smile. 'That, mother,' he answered, 'is the countersign for thieves.'

'The countersign for thieves ! What do you mean, Henry? You ought not to play with words to your mother.'

'Indeed, I am not playing with words. I am only describing the weapon and its use as briefly as

possible. I was looking at my revolver, for I was just about to set out on a journey. You see, if a thief comes up to a man armed with a revolver, and demands the man's purse, the man produces that revolver, and the thief says, "Pass on, friend." If a thief who has stolen money meets the man he stole it from or a policeman, and can pull out a revolver, then he can say to the man or the policeman, "Let me pass, or I will shoot you down;" or suppose the thief finds the odds are against him, he can put the barrel to his own temple, and pass the foe in spite of numbers. Now, mother, don't you think my explanation is very clever and very exhaustive ?'

He placed his two hands on the widow's shoulders, and pushed her back his full arms' length, dropped his head roguishly over his shoulder, and laughed a soft laugh, which seemed to invite her to enjoy his cleverness and be amused at the humour of the explanation.

Mrs. Grey did not smile. For a moment her face grew puckered and perplexed. In her eyes shone the light of a mental conflict between anger and tears. The conflict ended in a few moments. She threw herself into a chair and covered her face with her hands. She neither stormed nor wept.

He hastened to her with com

punctious solicitude He knelt on one knee by her side, and put his powerful arm around her emaciated shoulders, and with the hand of his other arm gently drew down her hands from her face.

'Mother! mother! mother!' he pleaded, in a tone of passionate tenderness. 'I did not mean to annoy or trouble you. I was only a little wilfully following out a fancy, a conceit. It was a foolish vanity that made me seem to play with your questions. You know, my own mother, I would not give you any pain I could help, for all the world. Forgive me, and let us drop the nonsense. Forgive me, and let us speak of something else.'

All the earnestness of this man's nature went into these words, and there was in them and the manner that attended them a fervid pathos which stirred the heart of the woman so deeply that it almost killed her to keep from crying out, and throwing her arms around her son, and weeping on his breast. But by a superhuman effort, an effort so painful and prodigious that no created being could make it but a mother for the salvation of a child, she held her passionate love within her own heart; for, according to her theory, so must all women do who wish to rule their children; and she wanted to rule, not for the love of power, but for the love of love and the preservation of her son.

She gave one quick glance at him out of those sharp eyes, and then throwing down the eyes on the ground said to him in a constrained voice,

'The St. George's Banking Company has failed. There is a run on the Daneford. You are unable to meet that run, and you were thinking of getting away from the run and the closing of the doors by She shuddered, raised

VOL. XXV.

her hand, and pointed to the black bag into which he had dropped the revolver.

'No! No! No, mother!' he cried imploringly. I pledge you my word-if you like I will prove to you that we are quite able to meet any run that may be upon us in consequence of this failure. If you like, I will call in Aldridge to corroborate my words.'

'Corroborate your word, Henry!' she cried scornfully. 'Do you think I could doubt my son's word and believe the word of any other man alive? Never while I live, I hope, shall you fall so pitifully low as to need another man's word to help your word to my belief.' She seemed to lay hold of the imputed question of her son's word as a point on which to rally her disordered feelings and overcome the tendency she felt to break down.

'Well, mother, rest assured this run threatens us with no danger whatever. On the contrary, as we are able to meet it without the least inconvenience, the position of the Bank ought to be very materially improved when all is quiet again.' He rose and left her as he spoke, and locked the two doors of the room, observing, 'We don't want any one to come in and interrupt

us now.'

By the time he returned to his seat she had recovered her composure. 'Then what do you mean by "setting out on a journey"? Those words helped me into the fear.'

As a reply to that question, he pushed the note he had just received from Mrs. Grant across the table to her, and said, 'Read that, and you will understand.'

She adjusted her tortoiseshell spectacles and read the note through deliberately. When she had finished she looked up quickly.

He was standing at the window looking out. His back was towards her, and she could not see his face.

L

"What has happened your voice?' she asked, in a tone of anxiety and surprise. He had spoken as though his windpipe was almost closed in a gripe.

Nothing; or at least something has got against my-breath. What am I wanted for at the Castle?' Still he spoke as if half suffocated. Still he kept his face to the window. Still his face was wrinkled and yellow and withered up.

'I met Dr. Hardy as I came in. He had just driven straight back from the Castle. There has been a consultation of doctors to-day, and they say there is no hope of Sir Alexander getting better. He has not yet made his will, and they all agreed you were the only person likely to have any influence with him. They could get him to do nothing about it.'

Grey's face cleared as if by magic. He turned around suddenly, threw up both his hands, and burst into a loud and continuous shout of laughter.

His mother started to her feet, and looked at him aghast. 'Henry!' she cried, in great alarm; 'Henry, what is the matter ?'

'Nothing, mother, nothing,' he said between his laughter; ‘I thought it was something serious.'

She regarded him in a stupor of amazement for a few seconds. 'You thought it was something serious,' she whispered, as if she questioned her hearing.

'Yes, something very serious.' 'But it is very serious. He is in danger of death, and has not yet made his will. Surely that, Henry, is no subject for laughter.'

apologetically as he said, 'You must really forgive me, mother. The fact is, that for the past quarter of an hour I have been on such a stretch in the interview between us that to hear of anything else but my own affairs relieved me, and I could not help laughing. I did not, indeed, laugh at the thought of poor Sir Alexander being ill; I pity him with all my heart. But what you said touched some spring of my mind, and I could no more have forborne to laugh than to breathe for an hour. Well, I think I had better start for the Island at once. You now feel all right about the Bank? You feel quite comfortable about it, mother, don't you?'

'Yes, but do not be so odd, Henry, you frighten me to death with your strange ways of late.'

'I have a good deal of anxiety, and perhaps am too abrupt. More of my abruptness: I can't wait another moment. Good-bye, mother.'

And in a few seconds he was gone.

When she found herself alone, she sat down to recover and to think. Every day,' she thought, 'he becomes less like his old self, and more of a riddle.'

Her eyes caught something on the table.

'When I came in he told me he was examining that dreadful thing because he was going on a journey, and now he's gone off and left it behind him in the bag on that table. Can it be that he is losing his reason?'

When Mr. Grey found himself outside the bank-door he hailed the nearest fly, jumped in, and cried cheerily to the driver,

Island Ferry, and I lay you a half-crown to a whip-lash you don't do it under half an hour. Take the time and drive on.'

With a chuckle of grave satis

faction, the banker threw himself back in the fly, and as they drove rapidly through the town he waved his hand or doffed his hat at every twenty yards. There was cordiality in every look that greeted him, and many who saw him go by turned and gazed with admiration and envy after the fine rich jovial banker.

No wonder he looked pleased. An hour ago, less than an hour ago, he had, upon reading that note, almost come to the conclusion that Sir Alexander Midharst had discovered he, Grey, had 'borrowed' every penny of the immense sum confided to his charge by the baronet. Such a discovery would have been to him simply and literally fatal.

Early in this year, when he disclosed the secret of the Bank to his mother, he and it were bankrupt, and all the depositors' money was gone. Pressure after pressure had come upon him after that, and all such demands had been met by 'borrowing' the baronet's savings without the baronet's consent.

Three months ago he was a bankrupt, now he was a bankrupt and a thief. He had no more right to take those consols out of the Midharst chest than to put his hand into any customer's pocket and take out his purse. He had glided into the thing gradually, beginning by borrowing twenty thousand pounds, which he caused to be lodged to his own credit at his London agents' in the name of Barrington, Ware, & Duncan, an imaginary firm of Boston merchants, who remitted the money through their London agent on account of supposititious dealings in hides on the western coast of the United States.

The twenty thousand had only stopped the gap for a few days. Then heavier and heavier bills came to maturity, and before there

was any general uneasiness in the commercial world, one hundred thousand pounds of the baronet's savings had been 'borrowed.'

Then came ugly rumours of heavy banking establishments; and although the Daneford Bank was always spoken of with the highest esteem in the district, the city, and in such quarters of London as it was known, the accommodation market had got very much straitened, and the Daneford Bank's London agents not only hinted that they did not care to make any addition to their advances, but sounded Grey as to the possibility of their being able to get a little advance from him. Could he let them have fifty thousand for six weeks on Argentines they did not want to sell?

Here was a chance of showing the stability of his own concern and helping a friendly firm which might be of incalculable use to him at another time. Now that he had dipped into the Midharst chest,. why not go deeper? He could make something out of this transaction; and it was for the good of Sir Alexander as well as his own that he should try to pull back all the money he could, and keep the name of the Bank at the very highest level. He lent the money.

Then came other pressures because of these old speculations, a quarter of million at least; and last, more uneasy rumours in the financial world, and the possibility of a run on the Bank. At all risks the Daneford Bank must stand; for on its stability depended not only the life of Henry Walter Grey, but all chance of winning back any portion of the baronet's money.

When the moment of this decision arrived Grey put down his last stake; converted the last hundred thousand of Sir Alexander's half a million into cash, and bought the revolver. As he put the matter