“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?”