The Merivale banks

by Mary Jane Holmes

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.