The Merivale banks

by Mary Jane Holmes

For weeks a chilly fog had hung over the great city, but it cleared at last, and the wintry sun shone bright and warm upon the grave in Kensal Green where Mrs. Grey was buried, while Miss Percy and Fred Lansing stood on either side of Louie, whose face was white as that of the corpse the coffin covered from her sight.

“I know you are trying to comfort me,” she said, as they were driving back to the hotel, “and by and by I shall thank you, but I can’t talk now, I am so sorry, and so tired and so sick.”

They knew she was sick, and the physician and nurse who had attended her mother were retained for her during the weeks which followed, when she hovered between life and death, battling with exhaustion and brain fever in its worst form, and cared for with all the sympathy of a sister by Miss Percy, and all the devotion of a lover by Fred Lansing, who watched by her constantly, with a terrible fear in his heart that the treasure he coveted might be snatched from him just as its possession seemed possible. Mrs. Lansing, too, who seldom evinced much interest in anyone outside her family, was interested in this young girl, who she felt intuitively would some day be her daughter-in-law, and she sat by the bedside many an hour when she would otherwise have been resting in her own room.

A cablegram announcing Mrs. Grey’s death and Louie’s illness had gone to Merivale, where Herbert was spending his Christmas vacation. Prayers were said for the sick in the little stone church, where the judge’s amen was louder, if possible, than it had been when Mr. Grey died; while the book Herbert held was wet with tears for the girl who was to have been his wife, and for whom his heart was aching with a dull, heavy pain. He knew she could never be his. If she lived Fred Lansing would claim her, and “he ought to have her,” he said to himself; and that day he wrote to Fred, telling him of the broken engagement and saying:

“I am human, and sometimes feel that I would rather know she was dead than the wife of another than myself. But that is selfish and mean, and I give her to you, knowing how worthy you are of her, and how happy she will be with you.”

Other letters came from Merivale, and among them one from Nancy Sharp, wonderful in composition and spelling. She had heard, she said, that the Grey house was to be closed for the winter, so far as a genteel family was concerned, but that some honest, respectable person, or persons were wanted to live in the rear, and take charge of it until the owner claimed it; and as she was both respectable and honest, she had applied for the situation and got it, and was, as she expressed it, “happy as a clam,” with stationary tubs and plenty of room for her clothes to dry in the back yard. She did not suppose the Almighty cared for the prayers of an old scrub like her, but she prayed, just the same, three times a day—on her knees, too—that Louie might get well, and she felt it in her bones that she would, and come back some day to the old home which she would find in apple-pie order.

“I don’t use the drawin’, nor sittin’, nor dinin’, nor best sleepin’ rooms, of course,” she wrote. “I keep ’em swep’ and dusted and aired, and live in the kitchen and but’ry, and bedroom off, and am happy as the day is long, for it’s quite a hist from White’s Row to this grand house.”

This letter, with others directed to Louie, from Merivale, Fred put away, waiting for the time when she would understand their contents, if that time ever came. She was very ill, and every day seemed going lower down into the shadow of death. From the first she was delirious and talked of the failure, and the hours passed with her father in the bank listening to the angry roar of the crowd outside; of the wild, rainy night when she faced the Session alone, while Herbert sat on the dry-goods box in the hall. Once she spoke of a young man with a bullet in his brain and his half-open eyes staring at her as they did at her father, but only Fred heard her, and he did not understand. From her ravings he learned more of what she had passed through than Mr. Blake had told them, and his great, kind heart yearned with sympathy and pity for the young girl who seemed so crushed and broken and ashamed. She dwelt a great deal upon that, as if she in some way were to blame for what had happened. “We didn’t suspect the truth or we would have lived differently,” she said, “but I shall pay it all.” Sometimes it seemed to dawn upon her that she might never be able to pay the debts; then she would wring her hands and cry piteously, “Who will do it, if I can’t?”

Once, when alone with her, and her plaintive cry, “Who will do it?” was repeated again and again, Fred bent so close to her that her hot, feverish breath stirred his hair, and said, “Louie! Louie!”

He had always called her Miss Grey, and now, at the sound of her old familiar name, she opened her eyes, bright with delirium, and asked, “Who is calling me Louie, as they used to do so long ago?”