[Illustration:
“He has four thousand more we can have.”
Frontispiece—Page 77.
]
The Merivale Banks
BY
MARY J. HOLMES
[Illustration: [Logo]]
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1900, 1903.
BY MRS. MARY J. HOLMES.
[_All rights reserved._]
_The Merivale Banks._ _Issued September, 1903._
[Illustration: [Logo]]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Banks 5
II. Herbert and Louie 16
III. Invitations for the Party 34
IV. The Morning of the Party 42
V. The Run 50
VI. Louie Comes to the Rescue 71
VII. The Judge 83
VIII. Louie and Fred 91
IX. The Party 104
X. On the Grey Piazza 121
XI. Keeping the Secret 132
XII. Mr. Grey 155
XIII. The Crash 177
XIV. Louie’s Courage 199
XV. The Session 215
XVI. Severing the Tie 223
XVII. The Shadow of Death 233
XVIII. Mr. Grey’s Story 248
XIX. The End and After 256
XX. On the Other Side 269
XXI. At the Savoy 281
XXII. In Paris 290
XXIII. Louie and Miss Percy 299
XXIV. At Home 309
The Merivale Banks
CHAPTER I
THE BANKS
There were two of them: the First National, familiarly known as the
White Bank, and a private bank, known as the Grey Bank, and they stood
side by side in the same imposing block, with marble front and massive
doors of oak, and broad granite steps. High up in the cornice was an
inscription telling that the building had been erected in 1875 by Robert
White, Esq. He would like to have had Judge Robert White, instead of
Robert White, Esq., so proud was he of the title held for a year only,
and for which he was indebted to the resignation of an intimate friend
and the influence of money. But his wife dissuaded him from it, but
could not keep off the “Esq.” He was both a judge and a ‘squire, he
said, having held the office of Justice of the Peace for two terms, and
being called ‘squire before he became a judge, and one of the titles
should go down to posterity.
He was a weak man, and a proud man; weak in judgment and common sense,
and very proud of his birth as son of a General and grandson of a
Governor, with a line of ancestry dating back nearly to the flood. He
was proud, too, of his money, and his house, the finest in Merivale, and
his handsome grounds, and of his marble block, the third floor of which
was occupied by a Masonic lodge, the second by law offices and
club-rooms, and the first by the two banks. Of one of them—the
National—he was president, and that fact added to his high opinion of
himself as the first man in Merivale.
“Yes, my boy—the first man in Merivale, and don’t you forget it, or that
you are my son—the grandson of a General and the great grandson of a
Governor, with all sorts of high blood behind them,” he said to his only
son and heir, Herbert. “Pick the best there is in society or none,” was
his injunction, and by the best he meant those with the most money,
without reference to character or morals.
In some respects Herbert was a son worthy of his father, and when a lad,
had built a wall of reserve between himself and the boys whom he thought
second-class in the Merivale High School.
With the girls, however, it was different, and when Louie Grey’s bright
brown eyes looked fearlessly at him, and when Louie called him a
blockhead because he failed to work out a simple problem in algebra upon
the blackboard, and then, to make amends, whispered to him the answer to
a question in history over which he was hopelessly floundering, he
forgot the White blood of which his father had taught him to be so
proud—forgot his pedigree, and went over the wall to meet the young girl
with the brown eyes and hair, who had no pedigree, so far as he knew,
and who certainly had no money.
The Greys were new-comers in Merivale, and no one knew anything about
them, except that they had come from Denver and seemed to be very poor.
But both Mr. Grey and his wife were so affable and had about them an air
of so much good breeding and refinement that it won them friends at
once, and a place in the best society of the town—always excepting, of
course, Judge White, who held aloof from strangers until he knew the
length of their purse, or their pedigree, both of which he considered
indispensable if he were to take them up. The Greys had neither, he was
sure, for they rented one of his cheap cottages in what was known as
White Row; and Louie, when questioned by Herbert as to her pedigree,
said at first that she didn’t think they had one; or if they had, they
didn’t call it by that name; and when he explained to her what he meant,
citing his grandfather and great-grandfather as examples of his meaning,
she answered at once:
“Oh, yes, I have, or did have, a grandfather and great-grandfather, like
you—captains of ships, which sailed from Nantucket out upon the seas,
and were called either smugglers or pirates, I don’t know which. I’ll
ask father.”
She did ask him, and, with his fondness for humor and jokes, Mr. Grey
replied, “Tell him both, by all means, and that you have quite as
blooded a pedigree as he can boast.”
How much of this Herbert believed, it were difficult to tell. Smugglers
and pirates had an ugly sound, and for a time he kept aloof from the
girl whose ancestry was so questionable; then her sunny face and saucy
eyes prevailed over prejudice, and they became inseparable. She was no
end of fun, he said, and followed fearlessly where he led her. She was
not afraid of snakes, nor bugs, nor beetles, nor worms, for he had tried
them all upon her, and she had neither screeched nor flinched, but paid
him in his own coin, and made him more afraid of her than she was of
him. She could climb a fence or a tree as fast as he could, and faster,
too, as he knew by experience; for once, when he started up an elm in
which there was a robin’s nest, with four blue eggs in it, she went
after him like a little cat, and, seizing him by the coat collar, nearly
threw him to the ground and made him give up the nest, to which the
father and mother robins, who had been uttering cries of distress,
returned in peace, finding their eggs unmolested.
“I’ll never speak to you again,” she said to him when she had him safe
on the ground, with her hand still holding to his collar, while he made
frantic efforts to get away from her.
She didn’t speak to him for two days; but when, on the third, she found
an orange in her desk, with a few words scrawled on a piece of paper,
“Haven’t you been mean long enough, and ain’t you never going to give
in?” she gave in, and allowed him to walk home with her after school,
past his own handsome house, with its grounds sloping down to the river,
and on to the narrow back street where she lived in one of his father’s
tenement houses. It was not a very attractive house, and Herbert always
shuddered when he saw it and thought that Louie lived there. There were
six cottages in a row, all of the same size and architecture, except one
at the north end, where the only shade tree on the street was growing.
This was a little larger and had in front a double bay window, which
gave it an air of superiority over its humbler neighbors. When Mr. Grey
came to Merivale houses were scarce and rents high. In White Row, Bay
Cottage, as it was called on account of its window, chanced to be
vacant, and after searching in vain for a house in a more desirable
neighborhood, Mr. Grey took it and became one of the White Row tenants.
“My tenants,” Judge White was wont to say, with a strong emphasis on the
_my_, as if they belonged to him, body and soul, while to the tenants,
when he came in contact with them, he had an air as if they were as far
beneath him in the social scale as it was possible for them to be. “A
wretched lot,” he said, “who never seem to think it as incumbent upon
them to pay their rent as their grocer’s bill; act as if I or’to give it
to ’em. In fact, old Nancy Sharp once told me I or’to, because I was
rich and she poor.”
To this, however, Mr. Grey was an exception. His rent was always ready,
and he paid it with a manner which made his landlord feel that if there
were any superiority, it was not on his side.
On the afternoon when Herbert accompanied Louie home, carrying her books
and her umbrella, for the day had been showery, he found his father in
the cottage, receiving his money for the quarter’s rent, and looking
puzzled and disconcerted.
“I’ll think about it, and let you know; but I warn you now that I don’t
believe it will work. It takes experience and a pile of money. No, sir;
I don’t believe it will work,” he said, as he placed his rent in a
pocketbook bulging with bills, for this was the day when he went the
rounds among his tenants himself, instead of sending an agent.
What wouldn’t work, he didn’t explain to Herbert, whom he took away with
him, questioning him closely as to the frequency of his visits to the
Greys, and telling him to remember who he was and what his ancestry.
At dinner that night he was more communicative, and said to his wife,
“What do you suppose Tom Grey wants to do?”
Mrs. White could not guess, and her husband continued: “In the first
place, he has given notice that he will quit my tenement for a larger
house at the end of the next quarter; and I don’t like it. No, sir! I
don’t like it. I never fancied the fellow. Puts on the fine gentleman
too much for a chap as poor as I suppose he is. But he’s a good
tenant—one of the very best; pays up to the hour, and never asks for
repairs, papering nor nothing; while the rest of ’em in White Row hound
me, spring and fall, for paper or paint, but mostly paper, which I
believe they tear off as fast as it is put on. Old Nancy Sharp had the
impudence to ask me for screens to keep the flies out! Lord Harry!
they’ll want gas or electric lights next! But what beats me is Tom
Grey’s setting up so high. Says he has lately come into possession of
quite a little money. He has been West for some weeks, and has just got
home, and is going to take a better house, and wants to rent the vacant
rooms next to the Bank; and for what, do you suppose? You’d never
guess.”
Mrs. White didn’t try, and he went on: “For a bank! A private bank! To
be known as Grey’s Bank! Think of it—a one-horse bank, side by side with
mine! It’s a piece of impertinence, and I would have refused outright,
if the place had not been vacant so long, and I hadn’t had such pesky
work with the last man, who went off leaving me in the lurch to the tune
of three hundred dollars.”
Here the judge stopped to take breath, while his wife asked, “Where did
he get the money to start a bank with?”
“The Lord only knows,” her husband replied. “Was poor as Job’s turkey
when he came here. Why, didn’t his wife do some sewing for you?”
Mrs. White nodded, and the judge went on: “And now he has money for a
bank! Gambled for it, maybe, when he was gone. He is just the quiet, sly
sort of a fellow to do that thing.”
“Mr. Grey never gambled, I know he didn’t,” Herbert spoke up. “He’s a
gentleman, if he is poor, and he has been through college. Louie told me
so, and you have only been to common schools!”
Herbert was quite eloquent in his defense of Mr. Grey, but his father
frowned him down by saying, “You seem to be posted in Mr. Grey’s
affairs—too much so—and I want you to keep away from there—carrying home
that girl’s books and umbrella! Remember who you are.”
Herbert’s answer was to leave the room and slam the door behind him,
while his father continued: “That boy is too thick with the Grey girl,
and if her father gets into a bank, it will be worse yet. I think I’ll
not let him have it.”
“But,” his wife rejoined, “if you do not rent to him some one else will,
and your rooms will stay vacant. Don’t be foolish. It isn’t likely he
can run more than a year.”
“No, nor half that, before he bursts up. Who is going to deposit with
him, when there is the First National? Nobody; but I’ll have the lease
drawn for a year, and he’ll have to pay whether or no, half down anyway!
Said he had had some experience in a bank, and liked it. Well, let him
try. I’ll give him six months before he closes up.”
As a result of this conversation, the rooms next to the National Bank
were leased for a year to Mr. Grey, who also hired and moved into a more
fashionable part of the town than White’s Row, where he had at first
lived. There was some speculation as to where he got the money so
suddenly for so great an expenditure when he was not in any business.
But on this point he was non-committal, as he was on most subjects. He
never talked much, but his pleasant, genial manners had made him
popular, and people were glad to see him prosper, and glad to have a
second bank in town. They needed it, they said, for Bob White was
getting so bigheaded and overbearing, that it was well to take him down
a bit, and they hoped Tom Grey would succeed.
He had no fear of it himself, and entered heart and soul into the
fitting up of the new bank, and never asked patronage from any one. He
knew he should get it, and he did. Slowly at first, as people were a
little timid, and those who had money in the National did not care to
draw it out and place it elsewhere. As time went on, however, and there
was no sign of the blow-up Judge White had predicted, confidence
increased. There were more deposits and larger, and by the end of the
year the Grey Bank was doing a good business—small, of course, compared
with the White Bank, but good, and constantly increasing.
“Can’t go on long. Mark my words. Can’t go on,” Judge White would say,
shaking his head warningly to some customer who, he knew, was taking a
part of his funds from his bank to place it with his rival. “There goes
Widow Brown now with five dollars, I dare say, and old maid Smith with
ten, maybe. What is that to what we have? A drop in the bucket. You’ll
see, you will, where he’ll land with his washerwomen’s and servant
girls’ deposits.”
This was Judge White’s opinion of the Grey Bank, and when the first
lease expired, he would have liked some good reason for refusing to
renew it. But there was none. The rent was paid as regularly as it had
been in the little tenement in White’s Row. There was no other applicant
for the premises, and he contented himself with raising the rent a
hundred dollars, to which Mr. Grey made no demur. He was satisfied and
happy, and an ideal banker, greeting every one with a pleasant smile and
word, and making loans in small amounts where the risk was so great that
the White Bank would never have taken it. To all human appearance he was
on the top wave of prosperity and enjoyed it to the full.
He was building a new house now, on a lot a little out of the town, and
on the same street with Judge White. It was to be first-class in every
respect, and people watched it as it progressed, and were glad for Tom
Grey. He was a good fellow every way, and a good citizen, giving freely
of his means and working for the public good, and they rejoiced in his
good fortune, and made him one of the Village Board and School Board,
and would have made him a vestryman if he had not declined that office,
saying he was not worthy of it. That Judge White should be a little
jealous of him was natural, but he was too proud to own it, and only
shook his head ominously whenever he was mentioned.
“Let him run,” he would say to himself. “Yes, let him run. He will soon
reach the end of his rope, if my surmises are correct. Then we’ll hear
howling from those washerwomen who are putting their weeks’ earnings in
his bank. Yes, let him run!”