Part 35 (1/2)
”You have had it washed!”
Lucy (unpacking her things in her bedroom). ”Who is Mr. Hardie, dear?”
”What! don't you know? Mr. Hardie is the great banker.”
”Only a banker? I should have taken him for something far more distinguished. His manner is good. There is a suavity without feebleness or smallness.”
Mrs. Bazalgette's eye flashed, but she answered with apparent nonchalance: ”I am glad you like him; you will take him off my hands now and then. He must not be neglected; Bazalgette would murder us.
_Apropos,_ remind me to ask him to tell you Mr. Hardie's story, and how he comes to be looked up to like a prince in this part of the world, though he is only a banker, with only ten thousand a year.”
”You make me quite curious, aunt. Cannot you tell me?”
”Me? Oh, dear, no! Paper currency, foreign loans, government securities, gold mines, ten per cents, Mr. Peel, and why _one_ breaks and _another_ doesn't! all that is quite beyond me.
Bazalgette is your man. I had no idea your mousseline-delame would have washed so well. Why, it looks just out of the shop; it--” Come away, reader, for Heaven's sake!
CHAPTER XI.
THE man whom Mr. Bazalgette introduced so smoothly and off-hand to Lucy Fountain exercised a terrible influence over her life, as you will see by and by. This alone would make it proper to lay his antecedents before the reader. But he has independent claims to this notice, for he is a princ.i.p.al figure in my work. The history of this remarkable man's fortune is a study. The progress of his mind is another, and its past as well as its future are the very corner-stone of that capacious story which I am now building brick by brick, after my fas.h.i.+on where the theme is large. I invite my reader, therefore, to resist the natural repugnance which delicate minds feel to the ring of the precious metals, and for the sake of the coming story to accompany me into AN OLD BANK.
The Hardies were goldsmiths in the seventeenth century; and when that business split, and the deposit and bill-of-exchange business went one way, and the plate and jewels another, they became bankers from father to son. A peculiarity attended them; they never broke, nor even cracked. Jew James Hardie conducted for many years a smooth, unostentatious and lucrative business. It professed to be a bank of deposit only, and not of discount. This was not strictly true. There never was a bank in creation that did not discount under the rose, when the paper represented commercial effects, and the indorsers were customers and favorites. But Mr. Hardie's main business was in deposits bearing no interest. It was of that nature known as ”the legitimate banking business,” a t.i.tle not, I think, invented by the customers, since it is a system dest.i.tute of that reciprocity which is the soul of all just and legitimate commercial relations.
You shall lend me your money gratis, and I will lend it out at interest: such is legitimate banking--in the opinion of bankers.
This system, whose decay we have seen, and whose death my young readers are like to see, flourished under old Hardie, green--as the public in whose pockets its roots were buried.
Country gentlemen and n.o.blemen, and tradesmen well-to-do, left floating balances varying from seven, five, three thousand pounds, down to a hundred or two, in his hands. His art consisted in keeping his countenance, receiving them with the air of a person conferring a favor, and investing the bulk of them in government securities, which in that day returned four and five per cent. As he did not pay one s.h.i.+lling for the use of the capital, he pocketed the whole interest. A small part of the aggregate balance was not invested, but remained in the bank coffers as a reserve to meet any accidental drain. It was a point of honor with the squires and rectors, who shared their incomes with him in a grateful spirit, never to draw their balances down too low; and more than once in this banker's career a gentleman has actually borrowed money for a month or two of the bank at four per cent, rather than exhaust his deposit, or, in other words, paid his debtor interest for the temporary use of his own everlasting property.
Such capitalists are not to be found in our day; they may reappear at the Millennium.
The banker had three clerks; one a youth and very subordinate, the other two steady old men, at good salaries, who knew the affairs of the bank, but did not chatter them out of doors, because they were allowed to talk about them to their employer; and this was a vent. The tongue must have a regular vent or random explosions--choose! Besides the above compliment paid to years of probity and experience, the ancient _regime_ bound these men to the interest and person of their chief by other simple customs now no more.
At each of the four great festivals of the Church they dined with Mr.
and Mrs. Hardie, and were feasted and cordially addressed as equals, though they could not be got to reply in quite the same tone. They were never scorned, but a peculiar warmth of esteem and friends.h.i.+p was shown them on these occasions. One reason was, the old-fangled banker himself aspired to no higher character than that of a man of business, and were not these clerks men of business good and true? his staff, not his menials?
And since I sneered just now at a vital simplicity, let me hasten to own that here, at least, it was wise, as well as just and worthy.
Where men are forever handling heaps of money, it is prudent to fortify them doubly against temptation--with self-respect, and a sufficient salary.
It is one thing not to be led into temptation (accident on which half the virtue in the world depends), another to live in it and overcome it; and in a bank it is not the conscience only that is tempted, but the senses. Piles of glittering gold, amiable as Hesperian fruit; heaps of silver paper, that seem to whisper as they rustle, ”Think how great we are, yet see how little; we are fifteen thousand pounds, yet we can go into your pocket; whip us up, and westward ho! If you have not the courage for that, at all events wet your finger; a dozen of us will stick to it. That pen in your hand has but to scratch that book there, and who will know? Besides, you can always put us back, you know.”
Hundreds and thousands of men take a share in the country's public morality, legislate, build churches, and live and die respectable, who would be jail-birds sooner or later if their sole income was the pay of a banker's clerk, and their eyes, and hands, and souls rubbed daily against hundred-pound notes as his do. I tell you it is a temptation of forty-devil power.
Not without reason, then, did this ancient banker bestow some respect and friends.h.i.+p on those who, tempted daily, brought their hands pure, Christmas after Christmas, to their master's table. Not without reason did Mrs. Hardie pet them like princes at the great festivals, and always send them home in the carriage as persons their entertainers delighted to honor. Herein I suspect she looked also, woman-like, to their security; for they were always expected to be solemnly, not improperly, intoxicated by the end of supper; no wise fuddled, but muddled; for the graceful superst.i.tion of the day suspected severe sobriety at solemnities as churlish and ungracious.
The bank itself was small and grave, and a trifle dingy, and bustle there was none in it; but if the stream of business looked sluggish and narrow, it was deep and quietly incessant, and tended all one way--to enrich the proprietor without a farthing risked.
Old Hardie had sat there forty years with other people's money overflowing into his lap as it rolled deep and steady through that little counting-house, when there occurred, or rather recurred, a certain phenomenon, which comes, with some little change of features, in a certain cycle of commercial changes as regularly as the month of March in the year, or the neap-tides, or the harvest moon, but, strange to say, at each visit takes the country by surprise.
CHAPTER XII.
THE nation had pa.s.sed through the years of exhaustion and depression that follow a long war; its health had returned, and its elastic vigor was already reviving, when two remarkable harvests in succession, and an increased trade with the American continent, raised it to prosperity. One sign of vigor, the roll of capital, was wanting; speculation was fast asleep. The government of the day seems to have observed this with regret. A writer of authority on the subject says that, to stir stagnant enterprise, they directed ”the Bank of England to issue about four millions in advances to the state and in enlarged discounts.” I give you the man's words; they doubtless carry a signification to you, though they are jargon in a fog to me. Some months later the government took a step upon very different motives, which incidentally had a powerful effect in loosening capital and setting it in agitation. They reduced to four per cent the Navy Five per Cents, a favorite national investment, which represented a capital of two hundred millions. Now, when men have got used to five per cent from a certain quarter, they cannot be content with four, particularly the small holders; so this reduction of the Navy Five per Cents unsettled several thousand capitalists, and disposed them to search for an investment. A flattering one offered itself in the nick of time. Considerable attention had been drawn of late to the mineral wealth of South America, and one or two mining companies existed, but languished in the hands of professed speculators. The public now broke like a sudden flood into these hitherto sluggish channels of enterprise, and up went the shares to a high premium.