THE JUDGE
Lunch had waited a long time at the White’s, where the ladies were in a
state of great anxiety, which deepened into alarm, as no attention was
paid to the message sent to the bank, asking how matters were
progressing. Mrs. White had heard of the run from Mrs. Lansing and Miss
Percy, without much emotion. It seemed absurd that such a thing could
happen to them.
“It can’t amount to much. The judge will soon stop it. There must be
money enough to meet every claim,” she said, and turned her attention to
the upheaval in her house, where workmen of different kinds were
constantly consulting her.
Lunch was ready promptly at twelve, but before that they had ‘phoned to
the bank twice in quick succession. The first time there was no
response. The second time the judge’s voice came back like a fog horn:
“Quit telephoning. Nobody can pay attention in this infernal racket.
There’s the very old boy to pay!”
Alarmed now and almost hysterical, Mrs. White sent a boy to the scene of
action, and as he did not at once return, she sent another, with
injunctions to come back immediately, which he did with the news that
the run was over and things quieting down, but there had been a great
row and the street was full of people. Then a third message was sent to
the judge to hurry, as lunch was waiting.
At the bank the judge had thought himself hungry, and during the drive
he had sat up straight and proud, holding his head high, not deigning to
look at anyone, but the moment he reached home he collapsed entirely,
and it was a very crushed and trembling man who crept up to his room,
and, lying down upon the couch, said to his wife with quivering lips and
a shaky voice:
“Cover me up, Susan. I’m cold, and don’t speak to me of victuals. My
stomach is all in a broil, and my head feels as if it was full of
bumble-bees. I’ve had an awful time! Yes, an awful time!”
He was almost crying, and held his wife’s hand tightly while in broken
sentences he tried to tell her what he had been through.
He seemed perfectly humiliated, and could not realize why he should have
been thus maltreated. He, Judge White, with a pedigree going back to
William the Conqueror, had been set on by dogs who had run on his bank!
His bank! The White Bank! The First National Bank, of whose stability he
had been so proud; and worse even than this, if anything could be worse,
he had heard himself called “Old Money Bags” and derided with groans and
caterwaulings from boys; and men, too, he believed, had joined in the
howls, he could still hear as he lay upon his couch with his hands to
his ears. He could see, too, with closed eyes the scowling faces which
had looked up at him when he stood upon the balcony, trying to bring
order out of confusion, and the threatening face which had looked in at
him from the window. It was dreadful, and the proud man writhed under
his load of mortification, made worse by the fact that his friends in
Worcester and Springfield, who were coming to the party, would hear of
it, and naturally have a little less faith in his solidity as a banker.
How he wished they were not coming; and that the party was in perdition;
and he consigned his wife there with it, when she tried to make him take
something to eat, saying he would not be able to appear in the evening
if he kept on in this way.
He didn’t much think he should appear in the evening, to be talked to
and sympathized with by people who, all the time, were wondering if his
bank were safe.
“Go away about your business,” he said at last, crossly, “and shut the
door to keep out that confounded clatter which makes me think of the
noise the mob made when they came tearing in—Nancy Sharp with the rest.
Think of that? Nancy Sharp! Didn’t I give her half a ton of coal that
winter she had the rheumatism, and hasn’t she cleaned the floor and
windows of the bank every month for the last year, and wasn’t she among
the first to stretch her great red, soapy arm for her ‘twenty silver
dollars?’ Must have silver, as if we had kept her dirty money intact,
and didn’t she say to the cashier, as she turned to go out, ‘I kinder
pity the poor old man after all,’ meaning me! Susan, me! and I not yet
sixty! I wonder I’m alive. Yes, I do. A run on my bank! If it had been
Grey’s nobody would have wondered, but mine—mine! The First National!
and _me_, pitied by Nancy Sharp and called a poor old man! _Me_! Susan,
_me_!”
The poor old man was wounded in more points than one. He had held
himself so high, and in his foolishness had taken the people’s deference
to him as real, and had believed himself as popular as he was rich, and
in a moment the cobweb film had been torn away, and he saw himself as he
really was in the estimation of the people. “And I am not as nice a man
as Grey,” he thought bitterly, as he reviewed the events of the morning,
and wondered again and again how it happened. “That was a plucky girl,”
he said to himself, thinking of Louie, “and I can’t say but what Grey
acted a friend’s part; but I believe there was something behind it. He
had some axe to grind, and what he did was perfectly safe so long as the
money did not come from him, but was just what we’d paid out.”
When lunch was over, Fred Lansing came in to see the judge, and
succeeded in soothing him somewhat, telling him that his bank was not
the first on which there had been a run, nor the first to be helped
through in the way he had been; and that the fact it had stood the run
would insure it greater prestige in the future. Then he spoke of Louie,
and said: “I am sorry she is not to be here to-night. I think she ought
to come. Everybody will want to see her.”
“Wasn’t invited,” the judge said quickly, his old feeling against the
Greys beginning to return upon him, now that Richard was somewhat
himself again.
“Oh, yes she was. I saw the invitation myself,” Fred answered. “They
have sent their regrets. Miss Grey told me so.”
“Knew they wasn’t wanted, and showed their good sense in declining,” the
judge answered gruffly, while Fred looked at him in surprise.
“Not wanted! What is the matter with the Greys?” he asked, and the judge
replied, “Prejudice, I suppose; all prejudice, most likely; but I don’t
like the man, and never have.”
“Do you know anything against him?” Fred asked.
“Not a blessed thing, for sure. It’s all a surmise that there is
something behind that smooth tongue and manner of his which takes the
crowd. Nobody knows what he was before he came here, so poor that he
lived in one of my tenements in White’s Row—cheapest place in town,
where Nancy Sharp lives. Think of it!” and the judge looked at Fred as
if White’s Row, and the tenement house and Nancy Sharp would settle the
matter.
But Fred did not seem at all disconcerted. He was seeing all the time
the face which had rested on his arm and the light in the beautiful eyes
when they first opened and looked up at him.
“Nobody knows where the fellow got his money, so sudden, to start a bank
with,” the judge went on. “Poor as Job’s turkey when he came here;
clerked a little while in a grocery, I believe. Susan didn’t call on
’em. Then he went west, and after being away a spell came back rich
enough to open a bank and build a fine house with a five hundred dollar
piano and things to match, they say. I’ve never been inside, nor Susan
either. Somehow or other a breath of something did get here about him,
and I shall always believe him a gambler, though he did do the fair
thing to-day, that’s a fact.”
The word gambler had a bad sound to Fred, for it recalled the dead face
of one of his dearest friends, who, after a night’s debauch in some
gambling den in the West, had taken his own life. But Mr. Grey was not
proven to be a gambler because Judge White surmised it, and certainly
Louie was not one, and, he said:
“The young lady is not to blame for what her father may be, and I wish
very much for her to be here to-night, and so does my mother and Blanche
and Herbert.”
At the mention of his son’s name the judge frowned gloomily.
“That’s it,” he said. “Herbert is daft on that girl. That is the
trouble, and if she came this evening he wouldn’t see another blessed
woman here.”
“I don’t think him so far gone as that,” Fred answered, laughingly.
“I’ll take her off his hands part of the time; and I wish Aunt Susan
would send a note asking her to reconsider her regret. I’ll take the
note myself, if there is no one else at leisure to do it.”
Fred was getting quite in earnest, with the result that his uncle
finally said:
“Don’t bother Susan. Her hands are full now and she don’t know what
she’s about or whether she is on her head or her feet. I’ll write a line
or two, myself.”
Going to his desk, he sat down and wrote.
“MISS GREY: We want you to come to-night, even if you have regretted. I
hope you will not disappoint us.
“Yours,
“JUDGE WHITE.”
“That’ll fetch her,” he said, passing the note to Fred, with a feeling
that he had only to express his wish, for her to comply at once. “Isn’t
it right?” he asked, as he saw Fred looking at the note doubtfully.
“Why, yes—so far as it goes,” Fred answered; “but ought you not to have
included Mr. and Mrs. Grey?”
“Oh, thunderation, maybe so! Give it back,” the judge replied, taking
the note and adding as a P. S.: “Bring your father and mother, of
course.”
“I don’t know what Susan will say when the three walk in. She didn’t
s’pose they were invited. She don’t fancy ’em any more than I do,” he
said; but Fred didn’t hear him.
He was half way down the stairs with the note, which seemed to him
almost an insult, it was so crisp and short. But if any one could smooth
it over, he could, and he meant to do it. He did not care a picayune
whether Mr. and Mrs. Grey accepted or not. He wanted Louie, and he meant
to have her, and he wouldn’t tell Herbert where he was going, for fear
he would insist upon going himself. “I’ll tell him afterwards that I was
doing him a favor and giving him a surprise,” he thought, as he walked
rapidly in the direction of Mr. Grey’s house.