The Merivale banks

by Mary Jane Holmes

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.