“You mean that my father has failed! Then that accounts, oh, that accounts for it all!”
“You don’t say that you did not know it? What did you mean and what are you talking about? Your father hasn’t—” Fortunately the question that Lucy asked did not reach Brooke’s ears, for, pushing the instrument from her across the desk, she neither cried nor raved nor wrung her hands, but sitting forward in her father’s chair, very much the attitude he took when deep in thought, scarcely stirred for the quarter-hour. The visible signs of the years she lacked of being the age she really was came swiftly, and laid their hands upon hers, not empty hands nor yet filled with the trifles the years sometimes hold. Presently Courage entered her heart, and then its sponsors, Hope and Constancy.
Soon a muffled closing of the door at the lower end of the hall, and the approaching tiptoe tread of two people of uneven weights, brought her to her feet and into the crisis again. It was Lucy, who, with every vestige of flippancy gone, threw her arms around her friend’s neck and burst into tears, while Brooke held out her hand to Mr. Dean, meanwhile, looking him straight in the eyes, saying: “Thank you for coming. Do not trouble to conceal anything, only tell me the truth, and do it quickly,” not realising that in such cases truth-telling is not the simple thing that it is reckoned.
There was a single day of incredulity and suspense, and then the fact of Adam Lawton’s financial downfall was made public through the papers, together with the names of those who had been swept from their feet in his company. As to his physical collapse, it was merely stated that he was ill at his department in the St. Hilaire, denied himself to all visitors, and would hold no communication even with his lawyer or business associates.
Few people sink alone in a financial maelstrom, and Lawton was not one of these; so that the cries and muttered imprecations of those who, unlike her father, were conscious and battling for life in trying to find and cling to bits of the wreckage reached Brooke and rang in her ears, partially deafening her to her own thoughts.
It was not until noon of the second day that she had succeeded in getting her mother to leave her post and see Mr. Dean in the library. At first Brooke had hoped to keep the knowledge of the real cause of her father’s illness from her mother, for a few days at least, but it was of no use; every one in the great hotel was aware of the facts, even though it made no difference in the attitude of the employees, for with a certain class of people, and a fairly intelligent one at that, failures are often interpreted merely as an odd trick in the game of finance now played. One of the important morning papers even went so far as to print a thinly veiled hint that Adam Lawton’s seclusion and supposed illness was a very subtle excuse for gaining time or allowing him to forget much that it would be extremely inconvenient to be called upon to remember at this juncture.