The Roystone Bank Case

Front matter

Sections: II — III — IV — V — VI

THE ROYSTONE BANK CASE

By Julian Hawthorne

II II

There were only the family and Stephen Bentinck at dinner at Mr. Allingham's that evening. It was a quiet and comfortable partie carrée, with old Philip Dorpe, the butler, waiting on them.

Stephen's head was high above the ears, full and deep; his features were marked, and his cheeks hollow, but with a healthy color in them. In body he was athletic and slender. He had a slow, grave smile, which was delightful to see; it brought a lovely, sparkling, gentle light into his eyes. He had kept pure the high ideals of conduct of his youth. He was of great diligence in his profession, learned and conscientious, and a natural thinker, which gave him the valuable quality, in medical practice, of originality and initiative. In general society he was retiring, reticent and shy; but with those he liked and trusted he was genial, playful and expressive. He was not an easy man to become familiar with; but it was not difficult for those who came in contact with him to perceive that he had a large, luminous, equitable mind, a feminine tenderness of nature, and, underneath, a sinewy masculine fiber, giving assurance that in emergencies he would never fail to show the true manhood of a man.

“There was another of those awful cases of a bank cashier taking the funds of the bank and running away, in the paper this evening,” observed Mrs. Allingham, in her plaintive voice. The good lady was perhaps morbidly religious, and very sensitive to moral lapses in members of the community; and this sensitiveness was kept alive by her habit of perusing the daily journals, and dwelling upon those features in them which recount the frailties of the race. “He is said to have been a church member, too,” she went on. “I'm sure there will come some terrible visitation upon mankind for all this wickedness. There seems to be no respect for the laws of God or man.”

“What do you say to that?—are we growing worse or better?” demanded Allingham, cheerfully, looking up at Bentinck with his inquisitorial smile.

“It seems to me, the worst thing is hypocrisy,” the young man said. “Such cases as Mrs. Allingham speaks of show that the man could not any longer bear to do evil while everybody believed he was doing good; he preferred to break out and be known for what he was. The community is like the body: when the disease appears on the surface, it is uglier to look at, but less deadly than internal lesions. There is more hope of curing them.”

“Oh, that's a sagacious doctrine,” laughed Allingham. “The worse we appear, the better we are! That ought to satisfy both sides. Quite diplomatic!”

“Don't mind him, Stephen,” said Olympia, with the confident optimism of girlhood. “Nobody hates deception so much as papa. He even likes to pretend he's bad when he's good.”

“Wealth is a new thing with us,” Stephen continued; “we don't understand it yet, and so we think it all the more desirable. It divides us into a few giants among a lot of pigmies. But when the novelty has worn off, nobody will care to be a giant, and then the temptation to try to become one, which causes more than half the crimes, will be gone. There are never many people strong enough to turn from anything that really tempts them; when there is constant temptation, there will be more yieldings than usual, but not on that account more intrinsic wickedness, do you think? We are passing through a phase of growth, which always weakens temporarily; but experience will cure it.”

“Well, it's no new philosophy that society stimulates crime in the individual,” rejoined Allingham. “The strong men must come out on top; what is the real top, is the question. As long as we think it's wealth, there'll be crime, because we don't know how to give wealth to everybody; besides, wealth makes people polite and pleasant to you, and we all like that. A time may come when people will be polite chiefly to beggars—as I believe is the way in India—but meanwhile, those who have or can get wealth are bound to keep or seize it, by fair means or foul. As for hypocrisy, in three cases out of five, a man is a hypocrite, not for his own sake, but for his wife and children's; they believe in him, and he can't find the nerve to undeceive them. What is wickedness, anyway? It's just a bad name for doing the best we can for ourselves; and that's instinct!”

“Then don't you think criminals ought to be punished, papa?” asked Olympia.

“If you can catch 'em—by all means,” said her father, laughing; “but the punishment will always be not for their crime, but for letting themselves be found out. For getting found out shows a weakness in them somewhere; and weakness is unforgivable. We're like a pack of wolves; as soon as one of us is wounded, the others tear him to pieces.”

“You are very radical!” said Stephen, encountering the other's eyes, and gradually smiling.

“Oh, it's terrible!” lamented Mrs. Allingham. “I really think, James, you ought not to jest in that way in the presence of young people. You confuse their ideas of right and wrong.”

Olympia arose and kissed her father, and stood beside him, looking down on him with radiant confidence, her arm around his neck. “Papa never confuses me,” she said. “He's the best and dearest man in the world—he and Stephen, I mean!”

“You see the way hypocrites are made!” said Allingham, laughing at Stephen.

Dorpe came in and said: “If you please, Mr. Allingham, there's a—a gentleman in the anteroom; says he called by appointment, sir. Shall I show him into the drawing-room?”

The dinner was over; they had been at nuts and raisins for sometime. Allingham stood up, and put his daughter's arm from his shoulder. He drew his napkin across his bearded lips, and threw it down with a frown. But in the same moment his brow was clear again.

“That's all right,” he said. “Take him into the study. I'm coming.”

“These business people ought to see you in your office, and not come after you here,” Olympia declared. “You belong to us, here; we don't go bursting into your office, and disturbing you there.”

“Oh, this man is a special case,” replied her father, taking her hand and patting it. “It wouldn't do to have him seen around the bank. He's a great financial genius; if our credit were to go down, he's the man to restore it. But if it were known that he and I were plotting together, the depositors would be tumbling over one another to-morrow to draw out their balances; and I shouldn't be able to afford you a trousseau.”

“I don't like such a man,” said Olympia. “Send him away, papa—or let me come into the study with you and hear what he has to say.”

She was half in earnest, and held him by the sleeve.

He seemed to hesitate a moment, and gave her an intent look Then he drew his arm away.

“No—it's too late!” he said, briskly and laughingly. “He has me in his toils, and I must sign my name in his book! Go and play with Stephen. I can't risk slipping up on that trousseau of yours, you know! Go in and play. I'll be back presently.”

Light and alert as usual, he passed from them down the wide hall. Just before he disappeared, he turned and saw them standing in the light of the chandelier; Stephen had given his arm to Mrs. Allingham, and Olympia was close to his other side, and she waved her hand and kissed her fingers to him. He returned a quick, bright nod, and was gone into the shadows.

“I know it's somebody come to beg money of him, and papa doesn't want it known, and that's why he wouldn't let him come to the bank,” said Olympia. “Papa does more good that nobody knows of than any other man in town—except you, beloved.” And she laid her cheek for a moment on her lover's shoulder.

The visitor, standing invisible in the unlighted study, saw this picture of the young man between the old woman and the girl, and the girl's gesture of love. It shone out on him, and vanished, like a glimpse of heaven. But it had found its way into a dark and stern heart. Its image remained there after the active, erect figure of his host had intervened in the doorway, and the door had closed behind him as he came in. Then the host pressed an electric button, and the room was flooded with light.

The Rubicons of life often seem to be crossed swiftly and easily; but it is only because the last step of the crossing is the first one that we take note of. There have been many previous ones, and, at each one, the chance to draw back. Allingham's soul had been, longer than he himself perhaps imagined, preparing for the culmination which had now arrived. The dark influences that guide us to evil, disguise, as long as possible, the increasing perils of the path; and when, finally, the disguises are thrown off, they have acquired other means to hold us. We may believe we are freest at the moment when we are first irrevocably slaves.

The electric light softly flooded the room; but in the same instant, the last rays of an inner light were withdrawn, and the spirit upon which they had rested stood in darkness.

III III

Allingham and his visitor now stood face to face, and scrutinized each other with interest.

The room in which this interview took place possessed individuality. It was the private retreat of its owner, and, more than any other part of the house, reflected his traits. Both the intellectual and the emotional qualities of the man were intimated in it. It was a spacious room; the walls, to the height of a man, were lined with books in handsome cases; above them glowed pictures, uttering beauty, sublimity, or passion; in one corner, a bronze group by Rodin portrayed a girl led downward by a satyr. Beneath a stained-glass window was a deep divan, with silk cushions, and low-seated easy-chairs stood by glistening tables, with magazines and portfolios. Upon the carved mantelpiece stood tall Venetian glasses; and all those things spoke of culture, slightly tinged with the voluptuous.

But, peeping forth here and there, like untoward visages through interstices of fair foliage, were indications of another tenor. Squatting in a compartment of one of the bookcases, between books of religious and social philosophy, was an exquisitely-wrought but horrible Japanese wood-carving of a man committing hara-kiri. Under the allegorical form of the sacred Dove, in the stained-glass window, hung a stuffed South American bat, with outspread dusky wings and hideous face. Some of the most handsomely bound books bore the names of the grossest French and Italian writers. A small alcove was fitted up as a chemical laboratory, but it was noticeable that most of the drugs and solutions were poisons. On a wall of this alcove hung a drawing, badly executed, but wonderfully expressive, of a peculiarly revolting Voodoo rite. The catalogue need not be extended. Such features might be regarded simply as the excursions of a mind resolved to become philosophically conversant with all parts of nature and human nature: but, the more they were examined, the more did they seem to imply a voluntary perversity, a pregnant outlawry, a vicious curiosity, a flattered rebellion of the dark against the bright. The first impression was of an unwelcome discordance; the final one was of the deliberate profanation of good, and mockery of truth. And, doubtless, though a man may dwell long in the mere imagination and histrionics of the unlawful, a time will arrive when the facile dream stiffens into unchangeable reality, and the beguiling slave changes abruptly into the master.

Allingham's bidden guest was a sturdy man of middle height, with a powerful head and face and dark auburn, short-curling hair. He was well but unobtrusively clad in dark garments; his hands were small but very muscular; in one he carried his black derby hat, the other rested on the gold head of an ebony cane. His bearing was studiedly undemonstrative, and his countenance expressionless; but his half-closed gray eyes gathered all details and significances in a glance.

“You're Mr. Dexter Gunn, are you?” said Allingham, after a pause. “And you're the top of your profession?”

“I call myself by that name, Mr. Allingham,” replied the visitor; “and I suppose I have my points, as you have yours.” His voice was smooth and unmodulated, though with evident force behind it.

Allingham made another short pause, as if to give the personality of his interlocutor time to stamp itself upon his senses.

“Well, you look the part—I guess you'll do,” he then said. “The door of this room is locked; no one cam hear anything said here. Sit down, Mr. Gunn; we were bound to meet some time; I preferred it should be at my invitation. What will you drink?—wine?—spirits?”

“Nothing, till we've done our business. A cigar I wouldn't mind.”

The banker opened a cupboard in the writing-table, and put a box of cigars within his guest's reach. He then took one himself, and lighted it. He half sat on the edge of the table, and smoked a whiff or two; then he laid down the cigar in the ash-receiver. He had become conscious of a strange, tumultuous life welling up in him. It forced him to vibrate in unison with itself; it shook his heart and his lungs, so that his breathing was disturbed. He was grotesquely reminded of how water bubbles in a vacuum; so he, the pressure of orthodox and moral atmospheres being removed, was aware of a spiritual effervescence or exhilaration, not to be entirely concealed. He paced slowly up and down the room, forcing himself to measure his paces, and subdue the impulse to throw out his limbs violently, and to shout aloud. He tried to steady himself by glancing at the familiar contents of the room; but the aspect of all things seemed changed, disordered, and even unreal. He glanced at his own figure in a looking-glass, and was surprised to behold the decorous, succinct evening dress, and the neatly-trimmed beard and accustomed countenance; he did not know what he expected to see; but he felt that this image and himself were ridiculously dissimilar. Outrageous conceptions rioted in his mind, and words of abandoned license stuttered for utterance on the tip of his tongue. Why not utter them? He had summoned a congenial companion; let the foul flood rush forth! But he feared to do this; he had not gaged the limits of this new spirit that had entered into him; it might rend and destroy him. He must keep control of the rudder, no matter whither he steered. He found himself again standing in front of Dexter Gunn, who sat immobile, smoking his cigar. It seemed to him that years had elapsed since he last spoke to the man. He put forth all his strength, and crushed down the symptoms of insurrection within himself. But when he spoke, his voice sounded in his ears like that of a stranger.

“You've done time, of course, Mr. Gunn,” he said, grinning between his teeth. “You know the inside of 'Copper John's'? Probably think you know what solitary confinement with hard labor means? Well, you don't know anything about it; but I know it. I was sentenced fifty years ago, and this is the first hour of liberty I've had ever since! What's more, if all comes out right, it'll probably be the last. It's you let down the bars, and after you've gone, they'll put themselves up again.”

“You're a bit nervous, Mr. Allingham; it'll wear off,” said Gunn, in his low monotone. “Maybe, if we talked business, it would quiet you down.”

The banker forced himself into a chair. The paroxysm was abating a little.

“Of course, I did all my thinking before sending for you,” he remarked, after a while. “There'll be no explanations, or sentiment, or rot of any sort. I suppose you've guessed what I want of you?”

Gunn made a movement with his thick eyebrows, but remained silent.

“We can speak out, you know,” rejoined the other, with a sneering inflection. “Understand, you're in no danger here; and neither am I. Go straight from me to the captain of the precinct, if you like, and tell him all I shall tell you; I shall deny it, and it will be the word of Dexter Gunn, expert bank-burglar, against bank-president James Thorpe Allingham's, the most respected citizen of Pennborough. On the other hand, we can be of use to each other. There's the situation, in two words.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Allingham?”

The banker hated the formal address; he would have liked his companion to call him “Jim,” and slap him on the shoulder; yet he was a man with whom no one had ever ventured to take a liberty. But he was tuned to other music now.

“I want you to rob the Roystone Bank!” he said, letting his voice out harshly.

“Steady!” said Gunn, coldly. “We don't shout in our profession. You'll find etiquette everywhere, Mr. Allingham. I follow my business; but I try to be respectable, in my way. I do what's necessary—no more and no less. I know a little about banks and bankers; you and I are after the same thing, only on different lines. But once in a while you get caught foul, and then you … May I put a question?”

“Go ahead!”

“You're insolvent, of course; speculated with the funds, and they're gone; mortgaged your house and furniture; owe three or four times what you can pay. Blinds will be up in another week. All right. Then why don't you skip, in place of calling in me?”

Allingham laughed. “Oh, I've a wife and daughter; and I expect to be a father-in-law next Fall. Besides, I don't care to be beat; I mean to carry on here.”

Gunn meditated a moment. “The young lady and gentleman I saw through the door just now?”

The fire reddened through Allingham's eyes. “They're not what we're here to discuss,” he said, angrily.

“I'll be the judge of that,” returned the other, impassively. “If you care for the girl, or for anybody else, it's an element of risk. If she should suspect anything, and come at you wheedling, maybe you'd give the thing away.”

Allingham reflected, and controlled his temper; but a satanic expression twisted across his face. “A risk?” he chuckled. “Well, take it or leave it! If I didn't care for her, you wouldn't be having the biggest chance of your career. Do you think I look so soft?”

“That isn't the trouble with your kind, Mr. Allingham,” replied Gunn. “I've seen some of your sort before. When you go crooked, the danger is of your going too far—until you get used to it. Is this your first job?”

An irrational fury flamed up in the banker; his muscles grew tense, as if for a spring. But he realized his own irrationality, and finally replied, quietly but sardonically: “Oh, Mr. Gunn, you flatter me! No, I'm a virgin.”

Gunn meditated again. “I don't like the looks of it over well. What is there in it for me?”

“There's a hundred and sixty-five thousand in the safe to-day,” answered Allingham, now finding himself speaking more naturally. “If you can get to it, that's your wages. You must chisel it open, or blow it open, of course; there must be no doubt about the robbery. Then you'll get credit for having taken a couple of millions, and the bank for having lost that amount. I shall call a directors' meeting, and they will vote to make good. How does all that commend itself to your judgment?”

“Does anybody except you and me know of the scheme?” Gunn inquired. “Your Mr. Calverly, for instance?”

“Calverly? You've studied us up a little, I see! But you evidently don't know Calverly. No, if I could have talked to any one else, I wouldn't be talking to you. My rope was a long one, but I've come to the end of it, and I don't mean to hang myself with it. I'd heard of that New York adventure of yours, a year or two ago; and—well, here we are!”

“That's all right. But I could tell you of a banking man, as it might be yourself, being caught like you are, gets a young clerk of his to grab a few hundreds, and skip over to Canada. The bank gives out he got into them to the tune of as many hundred thousand, the directors pony up, and the clerk is taken care of. That's one way. But if your Mr. Calverly isn't that kind of a sport, it wouldn't work.”

“And it counts for nothing, from your point of view, that the plan involves the ruining of a clerk; whereas mine only gives a crook another opportunity to be crooked?” added Allingham, sarcastically.

“Why, as for that, Mr. Allingham,” said Gunn, some overt insolence creeping for the first time into his tone, as he folded his hands before him, and held his cigar between his teeth, “if you measure the bank-presidents and the bank-burglars up against each other, I don't know but what you'd find, of the two sorts of crooks, that the bank-presidents were as bad as the burglars, and a good bit meaner and more cowardly. We do our jobs, under the noses of the cops, and we keep ourselves to ourselves, or we get jugged, as may be; you live in your houses and do the society fling, while all the time you're picking the pockets, not only of the rich folks that come to your parties, but of the poor tradesmen whom you're too refined to allow among your acquaintances. And if the cops, or the judges, get wind of you, you know how to fix them; you don't take the chances we do. I'll tell you another thing, Mr. Allingham—and you may as well sit tight and hear me, for I'm your master at any game you can put up in this room to-night, and I don't have the chance every night to chat sociably like this with a gentleman of your standing and intelligence—as I was saying, there's your daughter, a nice-looking young lady, and good, I make no doubt, and going to get married to a nice young doctor, and both of 'em thinking the world of you. Now, I'm called a bad man, and I don't say otherwise, and if you corner me when I'm cracking a crib, and there's no other way out, I'd kill you all in the day's work, and think no more of it. But I saw you to-night, coming from that girl to me, and she kissing her hand after you; and when we're through with our business, you'll go back to her and kiss her good night; and all the while, you're a thief and a crook, with no more right to her good thoughts—barring that you're her father—than I have. You've lived on velvet all your life; been to college, most likely, and had the pick of the best right along from the start. I'm a crook, and have lived with crooks, and if I've education enough to talk straight, I can thank myself for it. But if a young lady like your daughter was to look and act and feel toward me as she does to you, I should feel queer—I wouldn't want to stand for it. I'll tell what you don't know, and maybe won't believe, but it's truth just the same, we crooks put a limit—we draw the line; it may be low down, but it's there. But a gentleman that goes crooked, like you, Mr. Allingham, draws no line at all; he's rotten clear through, lock, stock and barrel. And between you and me, sociably, here by ourselves, that's what I take you to be. So,” added Gunn, taking his cigar from between his teeth, and knocking off the ash into the receiver, “when you talk about the shame of corrupting a poor innocent clerk, and preferring to hire a professional like me, I say to myself, 'This is from the gentleman who feels nothing queer in setting up his rottenness on a pedestal for a good young girl and her intended to worship and fondle and take into their hearts, and giving it out to the folks he's robbing that he's the innocent victim of the robbery.” And that's why I don't take your rebuke so hard as I might otherwise, Mr. Allingham. I shall take on this job, for, as you say, that amount don't often come my way so easy; but if things were to go wrong with you after this, and you came into the profession as a regular, my sort wouldn't want to work with you; you'd have to go down among the pickpockets, if they'd have you. Well, I believe that lets me out.”

During the few minutes while Gunn was speaking, Allingham passed up and down a gamut of emotions. A burglar was taking an authoritative tone with him, was criticizing him in an insulting and degrading manner, and was actually reading him a sort of moral lecture. The banker's sense of humor bade him laugh in mockery; his masculine instinct challenged him to resent the attack physically; but in both directions he found himself met by an unfamiliar and alarming impotence. Hitherto in his career he had been the master or leader of his associates; but now, having abandoned his own ground for another's, he had found a master in him. The late exhilaration of defying old boundaries had unmasked itself as the fatal inherent weakness of the criminal, increased by that criminal's desire to retain his social prestige. The romance of evil had quickly been replaced by its debasing ugliness. His shield of society was lost, his sword of character blunted, and without these he discovered that his personal equation was helpless. He could do nothing. He dared not even—now that it had gone so far—discontinue the negotiation. Possibly, however, he might find a way to revenge himself secretly or indirectly; and it was with this undefined hope that he went on. His brains at least were left him, and the resource of the defeated—dissimulation.

“You have the best of the argument, Mr. Gunn,” he said, pleasantly. “I'm in a hole, and I'm willing to sacrifice anything to get out—except one thing—my social standing, and I regard that mainly for the sake of persons dear to me. No doubt, your position in the matter is more decent than mine; anyhow, you're the man to help me through, and I think the price for your services ought to satisfy you.”

Gunn assented with a movement of the lips. “What about the details?” he added.

“I'll give you keys to the doors of the building, and I'll see that the night-watchman is out of the way. You must look after the policeman on the beat yourself; he's an Irishman. The safe you must tackle for yourself; the worse you wreck it the better. As for the time, to-morrow night would suit me.”

Gunn took his hat and stood up. “One hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars, you said?”

“There may be a few drafts or deposits to-morrow; but that is about what you'll find there.”

Gunn looked him in the eyes for a moment. The banker divined the significance of that look, and it roused a helpless fury in him. But he smiled.

“I'll have to take your word for it,” said Gunn, at length, and he turned to go.

“You must drink a glass of wine with me now,” said Allingham, bringing a bottle out of the cupboard. He filled two glasses, and lifted his. Gunn did the same; the glasses touched. They drank, and again looked at each other.

“That's good stuff,” Gunn remarked, as he set down his glass. “If all goes right, I shall go South after this; you won't hear of me in the profession again. I've had enough. That girl of yours will be the better for this job—but don't let her know!”

“Good luck to you!” said Allingham. He stood twisting his pointed beard, and smiling; he was ready to shake hands, should Gunn offer it. But the latter again turned, and put his hand on the handle of the door. Allingham accompanied him into the hall.

“Papa!” called Olympia's voice, from the drawing-room, “won't your friend come in and have a cup of tea with us?”

“Will you come? Why not?” said Allingham, laying a hand on the other's arm.

Gunn shook the hand off, with a low, surly laugh. That laugh humiliated and enraged Allingham more than anything else that had passed between them that evening. He thought it meant, “And you pretend to care for her!”

As Gunn descended the steps to the street, an unobtrusive, round-shouldered figure passed him, and glanced into his face with a pair of deep-set, steady gray eyes. It was Calverly, who often thus patrolled the sidewalk at night before the house where lived the girl he loved. Gunn gave him no attention, and walked off in the opposite direction. But many years' training at the cashier's window had given Calverly the faculty of quickly stamping a face on his memory, and, though without suspicions, he never forgot that grim countenance.