The Merivale banks

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Mr. Lansing,” she began, when he said to her, “We will go to dinner as soon as Brown comes up to stay with your mother.”

“Mr. Lansing, I don’t know how you happened to come to meet us. But am so glad you did. I think I was nearly crazy with fright when I met you, and you have been so kind since, but I must tell you. Don’t these rooms cost a great deal of money?”

“Why, no; not so very much,” he answered, and she continued:

“This is the Northwestern, isn’t it? We expected to go to some cheap place, if I could find it. Maybe you don’t know how poor we are, and father is dead—failed, and couldn’t pay, do you know?”

Her face was crimson with shame as she talked, and when she was through she covered it with her hands and cried like a child.

Fred would like to have taken her hands from her face and kissed her tears away, so fast had his love grown for this little girl since he last saw her in Merivale. He could not forget her, and the bit of worn linen he had purloined was kept sacred for her sake, because it was all he had as a souvenir of her except the memory of her bright face and beautiful eyes, which had always brightened when he came and been downcast when he looked at her.

“If my cousin were not in the field before me, I believe I could win her,” he had often said to himself, wondering how it fared with the young people, and if the secret were still kept from the public.

He had heard from Herbert several times after leaving Merivale, and in his letters there was always a mention of Louie. It was Herbert, too, who had first written him news of the failure, saying very little of Mr. Grey’s delinquencies, and nothing of Louie, except that she was keeping up bravely. He had said that Mr. Blake was assignee, and Nancy Sharp preferred creditor, and Fred had laughed immoderately as he recalled the red-armed woman with her twenty hard silver dollars which had been the rounds so many times, and hoped she had received them intact. From Boston and Worcester papers he learned a good deal which Herbert had not told him, but it was from Mr. Blake that he received full particulars in response to a letter sent to the assignee. He knew of the sale of the piano and wheel and diamonds and horses, and Louie’s wish to sell the house, and it was at his instigation that Mr. Blake bought it in his own name, to blind the people, and then resold it to Fred, whose injunction was “Keep me out of sight at all hazards.”

“Perhaps I am rash,” he said to Miss Percy and his mother, “but I cannot begin to spend my income, and a few thousands may as well be sunk in Merivale as anywhere.”

When Mr. Grey died it was Mr. Blake who wrote the particulars to Fred, and in his letter no mention was made of Herbert, nor had there been in any of the correspondence. Evidently the engagement was still a secret, if, indeed, it were not broken. Fred thought the latter contingency possible, knowing Herbert’s nature and his fear of his father.