 as had been supposed; whether there might not be a
temporary difficulty in realising it; whether there might not even be a
temporary suspension (say a month or so), on the part of the wonderful Bank. As
the whispers became louder, which they did from that time every minute, they
became more threatening. He had sprung from nothing, by no natural growth or
process that any one could account for; he had been, after all, a low, ignorant
fellow; he had been a down-looking man, and no one had ever been able to catch
his eye; he had been taken up by all sorts of people, in quite an unaccountable
manner; he had never had any money of his own, his ventures had been utterly
reckless, and his expenditure had been most enormous. In steady progression, as
the day declined, the talk rose in sound and purpose. He had left a letter at
the Baths addressed to his physician, and his physician had got the letter, and
the letter would be produced at the Inquest on the morrow, and it would fall
like a thunderbolt upon the multitude he had deluded. Numbers of men in every
profession and trade would be blighted by his insolvency; old people who had
been in easy circumstances all their lives would have no place of repentance for
their trust in him but the workhouse; legions of women and children would have
their whole future desolated by the hand of this mighty scoundrel. Every
partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen to have been a sharer in the
plunder of innumerable homes; every servile worshipper of riches who had helped
to set him on his pedestal, would have done better to worship the Devil
point-blank. So, the talk, lashed louder and higher by confirmation on
confirmation, and by edition after edition of the evening papers, swelled into
such a roar when night came, as might have brought one to believe that a
solitary watcher on the gallery above the Dome of St. Paul's would have
perceived the night air to be laden with a heavy muttering of the name of
Merdle, coupled with every form of execration.
    For, by that time it was known that the late Mr. Merdle's complaint had
been, simply, Forgery and Robbery. He, the uncouth object of such wide-spread
adulation, the sitter at great men's feasts, the roc's egg of great ladies'
assemblies, the subduer of exclusiveness, the leveller of pride, the patron of
patrons, the bargain-driver with a Minister for Lordships of the Circumlocution
Office, the
