The Merivale banks E-Book

Mary Jane Holmes

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 382

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

The Merivale Banks

BY

MARY J. HOLMES

The Merivale Banks

CHAPTER I THE BANKS

CHAPTER II HERBERT AND LOUIE

CHAPTER III INVITATIONS FOR THE PARTY

CHAPTER IV THE MORNING OF THE PARTY

CHAPTER V THE RUN

CHAPTER VI LOUIE COMES TO THE RESCUE

CHAPTER VII THE JUDGE

CHAPTER VIII LOUIE AND FRED

CHAPTER IX THE PARTY

CHAPTER X ON THE GREY PIAZZA

CHAPTER XI KEEPING THE SECRET

CHAPTER XII MR. GREY

CHAPTER XIII THE CRASH

CHAPTER XIV LOUIE’S COURAGE

CHAPTER XV THE SESSION

CHAPTER XVI SEVERING THE TIE

CHAPTER XVII THE SHADOW OF DEATH

CHAPTER XVIII MR. GREY’S STORY

CHAPTER XIX THE END AND AFTER

CHAPTER XX. ON THE OTHER SIDE

CHAPTER XXI AT THE SAVOY

CHAPTER XXII IN PARIS

CHAPTER XXIII LOUIE AND MISS PERCY

CHAPTER XXIV AT HOME

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!”

CHAPTER II HERBERT AND LOUIE

Four years passed, and the Grey Bank had not come to the end of its rope. Many besides Widow Brown and old maid Smith, and washerwomen generally, deposited in it, and Mr. Grey seemed to be increasing in wealth and prosperity.

The new house had long been finished and occupied, and was a model of simple elegance, outside and in. The Greys had good taste, and whatever they touched fell into the right place, and harmonized with whatever was nearest to it. Louie’s artistic eye detected an incongruity at once, and as she directed the most of her surroundings, people said of the grounds and the house that they were like pictures in which the outline and coloring were perfect, while Louie was the fairest picture of all.

She was nearly seventeen, with a face of rare beauty, especially her eyes, which Herbert White thought the handsomest he had ever seen. She did not climb fences or trees with him now. She was getting too old for that, but she went rowing with him on the river, after the white lilies, and took long rambles in the woods, searching for the early spring flowers, and later on for ferns and the red sumach berries. Sometimes she drove with him in the fancy turn-out which his father had given him on his birthday. But this did not occur often, for such drives were highly disapproved by Judge White, who read his son many a lecture on his bad taste in admiring a girl in Louie’s low estate.

“Good thunder, father,” Herbert said to him one morning when the lecture had been longer than usual, “isn’t Louie Grey as good as I am, if her father hasn’t quite as much money as you? He is a banker and a gentleman, and folks like him, and put him in office. Why, he is President of the village now, and—and—I never told you—but that time Mr. Smith, our church warden, died and we had to have a new one, they offered it to Mr. Grey, who refused it, just as he refused being vestryman, saying he was not good enough. So they took you, because you had a lot of money, I know; I heard about it. They said you were proud and overbearing, but on the whole a good man, and if Mr. Grey wouldn’t take it, there was no one else, so they elected you. I wanted to tell you then, but you seemed so pleased I didn’t.”

The judge was very pale by the time Herbert finished this statement, and for a church warden very angry, too. He didn’t swear, but he wanted to, and did say some things not very complimentary to the church generally and Mr. Grey in particular. He was proud of being church warden, and that Tom Grey should have been mentioned in preference to himself was galling to his pride, and increased his dislike for the man and everything pertaining to him, while Herbert was again told in strong terms to let the Grey girl alone.

“Nobody knows what her father was before he came here, or how he lived either. No business till he opened a bank, I’ve heard it hinted—but I ain’t going to slander anybody; this I’ll say, though, I don’t believe Tom Grey’s record is the cleanest that ever was. Needn’t tell me that one-horse bank of his can pay for the big swath he is cutting. Stands to reason he has some other way of getting money, and always has had. Time will tell. Warden of the church! I’d laugh. He had sense enough to decline, and I’ll resign, too, by the Lord Harry! Took me because I had money and there was nobody else! Yes, sir! I’ll resign, and let ’em have Tom Grey if they want him.”

The judge was very red in the face by the time he had finished this tirade, to which Herbert had listened impatiently. He had seen a plaid skirt and red waist down the street, and was anxious to get away; but his father was not yet through, and, after mopping his face and taking breath, he went on:

“The girl is all right in her place, but my son should look higher, and remember the kind of family he belongs to. Do you think your cousin, Fred Lansing, would go scampering round the country with Tom Grey’s girl? No, sir! There’s a young man who knows how to demean himself, and it would be well for you to imitate him. He is coming here, too. I’ve just got a letter from his mother, my sister and your aunt, Mrs. George Lansing. They will visit us this summer and bring that young lady who lives with them. There’s a chance for you. What is her name? Blanche—Blanche—?”

“Blanche Percy—old enough to be my grandmother,” Herbert answered contemptuously, as he turned on his heel and walked away, declaring he didn’t care for a hundred Blanche Percys and Fred Lansings. “I have had him dinged into my ears as a model to imitate ever since I can remember,” he said to himself as he went rapidly down the street in the direction of the plaid dress and red jacket.

And yet in his heart he had a great admiration for his cousin Fred, who was six years his senior, and every way his equal in money and position and pedigree, if indeed he was not his superior. His mother was a White, with all the prestige of the White lineage, while on the Lansing side was a long line of judges and governors and bishops, and two generals, both in the Confederate army. One of them was Fred’s father, who was a Virginian, and had been killed at Gettysburg. Judge White was very proud of his connection with the Lansings and very proud of his nephew Fred, who had been to college, and travelled round the world, and carried himself as if he had in his veins the blood of a hundred kings. He had not been often in Merivale, and it was two or three years since Herbert last saw him, in Washington, where his mother had lived for some time, and where her house was a resort for the best society in that cosmopolitan city. But he was coming now, and Herbert felt a thrill of pride as he thought of showing off his distinguished relatives to the plain people of Merivale.

“I wonder what he will think of Louie, and what she will think of him, and what father meant about Mr. Grey’s record,” he said to himself, as he turned a corner and met the girl face to face.

“Hallo,” he said, and she replied, “Hallo,” as if they were talking through a telephone; and then, unmindful of his father’s orders that he should let the Grey girl alone, Herbert continued: “Come on down to the river. I have a lot to tell you.”

It did not take them long to reach the river, and the boat which Herbert had named for Louie was soon floating out upon the water, with the two young people in it.

“Well, what is the lot you have to tell me?” Louie asked, removing her hat with one hand, and letting the other hang over the side of the boat in the river.

Once or twice Herbert had heard insinuations from his father and a few others with regard to Mr. Grey’s career before he came to Merivale, and of the possible way in which he was running his bank and having so much money to spend, and had always been very angry.

“I’ll ask Louie some time,” he had thought, but had never brought himself to do it until now, when his father’s hints were fresh in his mind. It was rather an awkward thing to do, and he hesitated a moment before he began:

“What did your father do before he came to Merivale?”

It was a strange question, and Louie looked her surprise as she replied, “Do you mean, how did he get his living?”

“Why, yes, I guess that is what I mean. Was he a banker, or merchant, or what?”

Louie’s brown eyes looked steadily at him, and her face flushed as she replied very frankly:

“I hardly know what he did; there were so many things, and he did not stay long in any. Got tired and tried another. He was in a bank for a while, and in a store and insurance office, and I don’t know what else; a rolling stone, mother used to call him, but he managed at times to make a lot of money, which he spent very freely, and then didn’t have much till he made some more. He is doing a great deal better now. Why do you ask me? Have you any particular reason?”

Louie’s eyes were very bright, and Herbert felt his own droop beneath them. He had not realized all his question might lead to, and was wondering how to answer her, when she again said to him:

“What is it? Tell me!”

“Oh, nothing much,” he began. “There are a heap of liars in the world—jealous pates—who hint that your father is—a—or was—a—”

Here he came to a dead stop, for Louie’s eyes were getting dangerous.

“Is—er—was—er—what? Speak out, or I’ll get up and go straight home.”

“I’d like to see you do it,” Herbert answered laughingly. “Don’t bounce about so. You’ll upset the boat, and I can’t swim.”

“I can,” she said, contemptuously; “and what is it? What do the liars say of father? That he is a thief, or murderer, or gambler, or what?”

“Why, no—or, yes—er—you’ve hit it partly,” Herbert stammered, but got no farther, for Louie sprang to her feet with a movement as if she were going to jump overboard, and did nearly upset the boat.

“Sit down, Louie. Sit down. Don’t be so peppery, and I’ll tell you. Some folks do say that he gambled before he came here, and speculates now.”

“It’s false!” Louie exclaimed. “It’s false!” and she struck her hand in the river with such force that great splashes of water were thrown into the boat.

“Of course it’s a lie, I know that,” Herbert said, trying to quiet her. “I don’t know why I told you, only I wanted to contradict it.”

“You may. You can. He never gambled, and as to speculating, lots do that all the time in New York and Chicago and everywhere. You would do it if you could make money by it. But I don’t believe father does. I know he never gambled; that’s different,” Louie answered vehemently; then, suddenly, as if some wave of memory had swept over her, there came a hard look into her eyes, and drops of sweat stood around her lips, which were very white, as was the rest of her face.

Herbert thought she was going to cry, but she only said very low:

“Let’s go home.”

“No, no—not yet. It is so nice out here,” Herbert replied. “There is more I want to tell you.”

“If it is about father, I do not wish to hear it,” Louie said.

“It isn’t,” Herbert replied. “It is about my cousin, Fred Lansing. You have heard of him?”

Louie had heard of him, as a relation of whom Herbert was very proud, but in her excitement she cared to hear nothing more. She wanted to go home, she said; but Herbert pulled farther up the river toward a bed of white lilies, and kept talking to her of Fred and his Aunt Esther, who were coming, with a Miss Blanche Percy, to whom his Uncle Lansing had been guardian, and who lived with his aunt. This Miss Percy, he said, was born in Richmond, where his aunt lived before the war. She once had a twin brother, he had heard, who killed himself, or was killed, or something. They never talked about it. She was a great heiress, and his father would like him to marry her.

At this point Louie began to show a little interest, and looked up quickly, while he continued:

“But that’s absurd. She is as old as Fred, if not older. Boys don’t marry their grandmothers, do they?”

“I should think not,” Louie replied, and her head went up a little more squarely on her shoulders. “When are these fine folks coming?” she asked.

“Before long, I guess, and then there’ll be some grand times in town, you bet. I heard mother say once that if the Lansings ever came here she’d give a party which would astonish the natives. She’d have a brass band and a string band and a caterer and everything O. K., and have people from Worcester and Springfield, and only the very first in town.”

“Then I shall not be invited,” Louie said, with a snap in her voice corresponding to the snap in her eyes.

“Why not?” Herbert asked in surprise.

“Because you would not invite the daughter of a gambler to meet your fine friends, and that is what you said my father was,” Louie answered.

“I said nothing of the sort,” Herbert responded hotly. “I told of some hints I wanted to contradict. I am sorry I told you, and I know it isn’t true.”

To this Louie made no reply, but there came into her eyes a second time the same hard look which had been there once before as she talked of her father. Ordinarily she would have been greatly interested in the party, of which there were never many in Merivale, but she was too anxious to get home and confront her father with what she had heard, to care much for Fred Lansing, or Blanche Percy, or the party to which she probably would not be bidden.

Herbert was now rowing back to the boathouse, and almost before the landing was reached Louie sprang on shore, and, without a word, sped away like a deer in the direction of her home.

Her mother was out, but she found her father in the little room he called his den, where he spent a good deal of his leisure time smoking and reading, and looking over papers and letters, of which he had a great many.

Louie never hesitated when a thing was to be done, and, rushing in upon him, she startled him with the question:

“Father, are you a gambler?”

If she had knocked him down, Mr. Grey could not have been more surprised.

“A gambler!” he repeated, the pen with which he was writing dropping from his hands and his face white as a corpse. “What do you mean? Who has said this of me?”

“It does not matter. I have heard that it was hinted. I said it was a lie, and it is. You are not a gambler. If I thought you were and that the money you give us so freely was obtained that way, I’d—I’d—burn my dresses! I’d smash the furniture! I believe I’d set fire to the house!”

She looked like a little fury, with her flashing eyes and flushed, eager face, and Mr. Grey drew his chair back from her as if afraid she might do him bodily harm.

Two or three times he tried to speak, but the words he wanted to say were difficult to utter and his lips twitched nervously.

“Say, father,” she continued, “are you a gambler?”

He was glad she put the question that way, and answered her clearly and distinctly:

“No, daughter, I am not.”

“I knew it, and I’m so glad,” and Louie’s arms were around his neck, and she was smothering him with kisses, each of which seemed to burn the spot it touched, as he tried to disengage himself from her, and asked her to tell him what she had heard.

She told him all at last, and although it was not much, it was the first breath of suspicion which had reached him in his prosperous career, and it struck him harder than Louie ever dreamed.

“Don’t tell your mother,” he said. “It is not necessary to trouble her.”

“Of course not,” Louie answered, “but what are you going to do? Won’t you arrest ’em? Sue ’em for slander, or something?”

Mr. Grey laughed and answered: “Sue whom? That boy, or his father, from whom, I think, the whole story started, because he is jealous of my success? No, Louie, that is not my nature, and it is the wiser plan to pay no attention to a story which will die of itself if it is given nothing to feed upon. I am not a gambler. Perhaps I speculate a little now and then in a safe, legitimate way, but that is very common. And now go.”

He was quite himself again, and, with a load lifted from her mind, Louie went out to meet her mother, who had just come in.

She did not see Herbert again, to speak with him, that day or the next, although he passed the house two or three times very slowly, and she knew he was hoping to get a sight of her. The next day a new wheel came to her, and, anxious to show it and try it, she started out for a spin, going past the White house, at which she looked almost as anxiously as Herbert had looked for her the day before, and with better success, for she had scarcely turned from that street into the Boulevard when she heard the whir of a wheel behind her, and Herbert came scorching to her side, nearly running her down in his headlong haste.

“I say, Louie,” he began, “where have you kept yourself? It’s an age since I saw you. I hope you are not mad at what I told you. I wish my tongue had been cut out before I did it; and isn’t your wheel a dandy? Don’t ride so fast. I want to see it. Are you mad?”

“No,” Louie answered curtly, stopping short. “I told father what you said, and it isn’t true, and if you ever hint it again, I’ll have you arrested, and your father, too. I know he is at the bottom of it, because he is jealous of father, and I’ll never speak to you again if you don’t contradict it every time you hear it. My father a gambler! Not much!”

She had said what she had to say, and was ready to forgive and be forgiven, and to talk of her wheel, which, she said, had cost seventy-five or a hundred dollars, she didn’t know which.

“It was not bought with gambling money, either,” she continued with a toss of her head. “Father gave a check on his bank.”

Herbert thought of some things he had heard with regard to the management of the bank, but wisely forebore any comment. He was too glad to have Louie back on any terms, and the two were soon bowling far out into the country, Louie keeping a little in advance, but near enough to Herbert to hear what he was telling her of the Lansings, who, he said, were coming the next day on the two o’clock train from New York. The party was a sure thing, for his father and mother had settled it that morning at breakfast. They decided, too, that no one in Merivale should be invited except those to whom his mother was indebted and those who called upon Mrs. Lansing and Miss Percy. “So you be sure and call with your mother,” he added.

Louie laughed, and said she shouldn’t trouble herself to call upon such old people, nor would they expect it, but she would tell her mother. Then she made a long, rapid sweep, and turned towards home, followed by Herbert, who with all his scorching could scarcely keep up with her, for she seemed to fly, and her wheel was proving worthy of its name, “The Flyer,” stamped upon it in silver letters, with the date of its gift to her.

“I don’t suppose I shall see you while your grand folks are here,” she said as she dismounted at her gate.

“Oh, but you must see Fred,” Herbert replied, and the last thing she heard from him as he went down the road was something about Fred, the best fellow in the world.

The next day, when Louie heard the New York train, she took a book, and seating herself upon the piazza, waited for the White carriage. She had seen it go by with Herbert in it, and in the course of half an hour it came back, with Herbert and a young man on the front seat, and two ladies behind them, presumably Mrs. Lansing and Blanche Percy. The former was short and fat and sat very erect, looking curiously about her through a gold-handled lorgnette.

“Dumpy and Frumpy and Proud,” was Louie’s mental verdict of her; then she scanned the lady beside her, who was tall and slender and fair, and dressed in mourning, with a look of care or fatigue, or both, on her face, which was very pale and very sweet: “Rather pretty, with an air about her,” Louie thought, and turned next to the young man, Fred Lansing, who was sitting on the side of the open carriage nearest to her.

As he was looking another way, she could not see his face until, from something Herbert said to him, he turned quickly and she saw a pale, refined face, with perfectly regular features and a pair of large, dark eyes, which met hers, while his hat was lifted for a moment, as she bowed to Herbert, who had removed his cap and was waving it towards her.

“I believe he is a gentleman, but proud, of course. I wonder if Herbert will tell him what people say of my father,” she thought, and grew hot and dizzy as she recalled the insult.

“The Lansings are here,” she said to her father when he came home to lunch.

“The Lansings? Who are they?” he answered abstractedly.

“Why, the grand relations of Judge White,” Louie replied; “his sister, Mrs. Lansing, and her son Fred. They live in Washington now, but they did live in Richmond before the war, and there’s a Miss Blanche Percy with them, a great heiress and Mr. Lansing’s ward before he died. She had a brother who was killed, or something, and I guess that is why her face is so sad. I saw her just a minute as she went by,” Louie added, too intent upon her strawberries and cream to notice the change in her father as she talked, from one of indifference to absorbing interest.

The Lansings made no impression upon him, but when Blanche Percy was mentioned, he became all attention, and had Louie been observing him, she would have seen a pallor about his lips as he listened.

“Blanche Percy—from where?” he asked, and Louie replied, “From Washington now—from Richmond formerly, where I told you the Lansings lived. They are Southerners, and big swells, Herbert says.”

To this her father made no comment, but asked, “What was it about the brother? What did you say his name was?”

“I didn’t say. I don’t know—Percy, most likely,” Louie replied. “Herbert told me she had a twin brother who killed himself, or was killed—the latter probably; those Southerners are so hot-headed.”

As Mr. Grey made no reply, Louie branched off upon the big party the Whites were to have in honor of their guests, and to which no one was to be invited from the town except those to whom Mrs. White was indebted, and those who called upon Mrs. Lansing and Miss Percy.

“You’ll call, mother, won’t you? I want you and father to attend the party, and tell me about it,” she said.

There was a sudden movement as of dissent from Mr. Grey, but before he could speak his wife replied:

“I don’t think I shall trouble myself. I was here five years before Mrs. White called upon me, and then she came when I am certain she knew I was out. When I returned it, she was engaged, and she has never been near me since. I shall not call on her or the Lansings.”

“Of course not,” Mr. Grey rejoined, with an asperity of manner unusual with him.

He did not seem himself at all. He had a headache, he said, and, declining the strawberries Louie urged upon him, left the table and went to his room, where his wife found him lying upon the couch, either asleep or pretending to be, for he neither spoke nor moved when she entered the room. He was subject to headaches, and they had increased in frequency within the last few years. This one seemed harder than usual, and it was not till the next day that he went to the bank, before which the White carriage was standing, with two ladies in it, Mrs. Lansing and Blanche Percy, while Judge White was just coming down the steps to join them.

Mr. Grey would rather have passed them unnoticed, but he never forgot to be a gentleman, and in response to the judge’s rather gruff “good morning, Grey,” he answered pleasantly and lifted his hat politely to the two ladies.

“Who is that splendid-looking man?” Blanche asked as the judge entered the carriage.

“That? Oh, that’s Tom Grey, the one-horse banker who has set up business right under my nose; but he can’t run long, you’ll see,” the judge replied, as they drove away, while the one-horse banker looked after them till they were out of sight, with thoughts from which Louie would have shrunk aghast if she could have known them.

CHAPTER III INVITATIONS FOR THE PARTY

Merivale was one of those quiet New England towns where, compared with larger places, the people seemed more asleep than awake, there was so little to interest or excite them outside the routine of daily life. There were no very poor people, for work of some sort was plenty, and there were no very rich people, except Judge White, whose walk, as he put down his heavy gold-headed cane, indicated money and the self-importance he felt on account of it. There were four churches—Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist and Roman Catholic—two banks, a weekly paper, a high school, a book club, a struggling literary society, three dry goods stores, six groceries, and ten saloons, which the W. C. T. U.’s were vainly trying to suppress. Once in two weeks the Presbyterians and Methodists had a sewing society, which few attended, as it closed at five and every one went home to supper. Once a month the Episcopalians had a meeting of the Guild, with supper and a large attendance, especially at supper time, when the young people came in, glad of any break in their rather monotonous lives. For a time Mrs. White was president of the Guild, but when at an annual meeting Mrs. Grey was made vice-president she resigned, giving as a reason that it made her nervous to read the prayers with which the meetings were opened. Mrs. Grey was elected to fill her place, and made a most popular president. Under her jurisdiction, with Louie as coadjutor, entertainments of various kinds were instituted, and the little town put on quite an air of hilarity compared with what it had worn.