The Merivale banks

by Mary Jane Holmes

Mrs. White nodded, and the judge went on: “And now he has money for a bank! Gambled for it, maybe, when he was gone. He is just the quiet, sly sort of a fellow to do that thing.”

“Mr. Grey never gambled, I know he didn’t,” Herbert spoke up. “He’s a gentleman, if he is poor, and he has been through college. Louie told me so, and you have only been to common schools!”

Herbert was quite eloquent in his defense of Mr. Grey, but his father frowned him down by saying, “You seem to be posted in Mr. Grey’s affairs—too much so—and I want you to keep away from there—carrying home that girl’s books and umbrella! Remember who you are.”

Herbert’s answer was to leave the room and slam the door behind him, while his father continued: “That boy is too thick with the Grey girl, and if her father gets into a bank, it will be worse yet. I think I’ll not let him have it.”

“But,” his wife rejoined, “if you do not rent to him some one else will, and your rooms will stay vacant. Don’t be foolish. It isn’t likely he can run more than a year.”

“No, nor half that, before he bursts up. Who is going to deposit with him, when there is the First National? Nobody; but I’ll have the lease drawn for a year, and he’ll have to pay whether or no, half down anyway! Said he had had some experience in a bank, and liked it. Well, let him try. I’ll give him six months before he closes up.”

As a result of this conversation, the rooms next to the National Bank were leased for a year to Mr. Grey, who also hired and moved into a more fashionable part of the town than White’s Row, where he had at first lived. There was some speculation as to where he got the money so suddenly for so great an expenditure when he was not in any business. But on this point he was non-committal, as he was on most subjects. He never talked much, but his pleasant, genial manners had made him popular, and people were glad to see him prosper, and glad to have a second bank in town. They needed it, they said, for Bob White was getting so bigheaded and overbearing, that it was well to take him down a bit, and they hoped Tom Grey would succeed.

He had no fear of it himself, and entered heart and soul into the fitting up of the new bank, and never asked patronage from any one. He knew he should get it, and he did. Slowly at first, as people were a little timid, and those who had money in the National did not care to draw it out and place it elsewhere. As time went on, however, and there was no sign of the blow-up Judge White had predicted, confidence increased. There were more deposits and larger, and by the end of the year the Grey Bank was doing a good business—small, of course, compared with the White Bank, but good, and constantly increasing.

“Can’t go on long. Mark my words. Can’t go on,” Judge White would say, shaking his head warningly to some customer who, he knew, was taking a part of his funds from his bank to place it with his rival. “There goes Widow Brown now with five dollars, I dare say, and old maid Smith with ten, maybe. What is that to what we have? A drop in the bucket. You’ll see, you will, where he’ll land with his washerwomen’s and servant girls’ deposits.”

This was Judge White’s opinion of the Grey Bank, and when the first lease expired, he would have liked some good reason for refusing to renew it. But there was none. The rent was paid as regularly as it had been in the little tenement in White’s Row. There was no other applicant for the premises, and he contented himself with raising the rent a hundred dollars, to which Mr. Grey made no demur. He was satisfied and happy, and an ideal banker, greeting every one with a pleasant smile and word, and making loans in small amounts where the risk was so great that the White Bank would never have taken it. To all human appearance he was on the top wave of prosperity and enjoyed it to the full.