Squire Culpepper, was laid up with an attack of his old enemy the gout. Thereby his temper was by no means improved. But to the ordinary pains which attend podagra was superadded another source of irritation and alarm. The shares of the Alcazar Silver Mining Company, in which promising speculation the Squire had invested the whole of his savings, had of late been going down slowly but steadily in the market. It was altogether unaccountable. They had no sooner reached the high-water point of value than they began to fall. But the difficulty had been to know when the high-water mark was reached. The Squire had bought at a low figure--at a remarkably low figure--and when, subsequently, the shares had risen so tremendously in value, he had often been tempted to sell out and realize. But the temptation to keep holding on, in the hope of being able to realize still larger profits, had hitherto proved the stronger of the two.
At first he had looked upon the decline as being merely one of those ordinary market fluctuations such as even the best securities are liable to at times. But at length he took alarm and wrote to his friend Mr. Bird, the secretary of the company, and the man who had persuaded him to invest so heavily in Alcazar securities.
To the Squire\'s letter Mr. Bird replied as under:
"My Dear Mr. Culpepper,--Your note of yesterday did not surprise me in the least. I quite expected to hear from you some days ago respecting the fall in Alcazars. Several other shareholders have either written to me or seen me on the same subject. The truth is that the partisans of a rival company (a company, be it said, whose shares have never yet risen to par, and are never likely to do so) have been doing their best to injure us by spreading abroad a report that a sudden irruption of water had put a stop to all our workings for an indefinite length of time. The whole affair is an infamous canard, having no other object than to discredit us in the opinion of the public. Unfortunately it is next to impossible to bring such things home to any particular individual, but I have every reason to believe that one or two who are most deeply implicated in this scandalous affair have been buying heavily for the rise which is sure to take place in a few days from the present time; and I strongly advise you, my dear sir, to follow their example. You cannot possibly do better. So satisfied am I on that point, that within the last few days I have invested every spare shilling of my own in Alcazars.
"In conclusion, I may just state that according to advices from our South American managers up to the latest date, received by me per last night\'s mail, the mine was never in so flourishing a condition as at the present moment.
"It is with the utmost confidence that I look forward to the declaration of a dividend and a bonus equivalent in the gross to seventy-five per cent. per annum, at the close of the current half-year.
"I remain, my dear Mr. Culpepper,
"Very truly yours,
"Theodore Bird."
This letter allayed the Squire\'s fears and kept him quiet for several days. Strange to say, however, the Alcazars still kept steadily declining, and at length the old man became seriously alarmed. He wrote again to Mr. Bird, but this time there came no answer. For five days he waited in such a state of mental agony, as he had never known before. He would have gone up to London himself, in order to see Mr. Bird, but by this time the gout had laid hold of him so severely that it was quite impossible for him to venture out of the house. What to do he knew not. No one, not even his daughter, knew how, or in what speculation, he had invested his money, and yet it was evident that he must now take some one into his confidence in the matter, or else be prepared to let the Alcazars go up or down at their own sweet will, and accept the result, whatever it might be, when he should be sufficiently recovered to attend to business himself. But in the face of matters, as they now stood, that was more than he could afford to do---it was more than he dare do. Where, then, was the person on whose honour, discretion, and good business knowledge he could safely rely to assist him in the dilemma in which he now found himself? He had employed five or six brokers at different times during the last eighteen months to buy stock for him, but he had no particular knowledge of, or confidence in, any of them. In Mr. Bird himself he had always placed the most implicit confidence, but that confidence had been severely shaken of late. Bird had originally been a protégé of his own, and had been placed by him as a junior clerk in Mr. Cope\'s bank. There he had remained for years, gradually working his way up, and always very grateful to the Squire for the interest that he had taken in his welfare. Then came an advantageous removal to London, after which the Squire lost sight of him for several years. When he next turned up it was as secretary to the Alcazar Mining Company, and as promoter of several other speculative schemes, with a fine house in the Regent\'s Park, a capital cellar of wines, and a pair of steppers in his brougham that a duchess might have been proud of. The Squire went to dine with him. Mr. Bird did not fail delicately to insinuate that to Mr. Culpepper\'s generous kindness in giving him such an excellent start in life he attributed all his after success, and that the blessings by which he was now surrounded owed their origin to the Squire alone. Before the day was over, Mr. Culpepper had agreed to invest a very considerable sum in Alcazar stock.
Squire Culpepper\'s income, considering his position and influence, was anything but a large one. It amounted in all to very little more than three thousand a year. The estate itself was strictly entailed, all but one corner of it, which had been bought by the present Squire and added to it. It was in this corner that he had proposed to build his new mansion. But unless the Alcazar shares should rise very much again in public favour, there would be no funds forthcoming wherewith to build a new mansion, or even to repair the old one.
Out of this income of three thousand a year the Squire had always contrived to save something; and thus, little by little, he had gradually accumulated some fifteen thousand pounds. This was to be Jane\'s dowry when she should marry. It was the hope of being able to turn this fifteen thousand into sixty or seventy thousand that had been his first inducement to speculate; and had he sold out when the Alcazars were at the flood tide of their success, not only would this hope have been realized, but what to many had seemed an idle boast, that before long he would have built for him a new and a more magnificent Pincote, would have become a substantial reality.
These golden prospects, however, these magnificent castles in the air, had of late been losing their brightness and were fast resolving themselves into the misty cloud-land from which they had sprung. Very loath, indeed, was the Squire to let them go. Buoyed up by Mr. Bird\'s letter, he had deferred from day to day the painful act of selling out, still clinging with desperate tenacity to his cloudy battlements, and trying with all his might to believe that the frown which fortune had of late put on had been merely assumed to frighten him for a little while, and that behind it her golden smile was still lurking, and ready at any time to shine on him again.
But, by-and-by, there came a day when the Alcazars, still bent on going down, reached at one fell plunge a lower deep than they had ever dropped to before. Next morning they were quoted in the lists at ten shillings per share less than they had been on the day when Squire Culpepper, allured by their fatal beauty, ventured on his first investment.
The London papers reached Pincote about luncheon time; and on this particular day the Squire, with his leg; swathed in flannel, was just discussing a basin of chicken broth when the post came in. With eager fingers that trembled with excitement he tore off the wrapper, turned to the City article, and there read the fatal news. The blow was so stunning that for a little while he could scarcely realize it. He pushed away his basin of broth untasted. His head drooped into his hands, and bitter tears sprang to his eyes. For the first time since his wife\'s death the old man cried.
With his newspapers had come several letters, but they all lay untouched beside him for more than an hour. By-and-by he roused himself sufficiently from his abstraction to turn them listlessly over, and then to take them up one after another and stare at their superscriptions with glazed, incurious eyes. There was only one, and it was the last one that he took up, which roused his dull senses to any sign of recognition. "This must be from Fanny," he said. "I\'d swear to her writing anywhere. All the way from Ems, too. Still as fond of those nauseous German waters as ever she was. No wonder she\'s never well." Then his thoughts reverted to his loss, and with a sigh he dropped the letter on the table.
Two or three minutes later............