Then she turned to Herbert, who helped her in and held her hand a moment with a warm pressure which she felt during all the rapid drive home—past stores and shops, and houses, from which curious faces were looking, as if Mr. Grey were some new species of the genus homo which they had never seen before.
Louie had half hoped Herbert would go with her, and for a moment he had thought to do so. But his father had just come up, puffing and blowing with heat and impatience, and glad that the thing was over and Grey going quietly home.
“This must seem kinder nateral to you, seein’ ’tain’t long sence you was in the same boat,” Nancy Sharp said, as she elbowed her way up to him.
The Judge glared at her, but made no reply. He had never forgotten the poor old man whom she pitied, and had raised her rent a dollar a month in consequence of the part she had played in the run. He knew her twenty silver dollars were in Grey’s bank, and did not feel particularly sorry for her. She had lost it, of course, and after he passed her something impelled him to turn and say, “How much are you out?”
“Not a red cent,” she answered. “I’m a preferred creditor, I be. Mr. Grey done the square thing by me, same as he did by you, and here in his trouble you stalk away without a word to these folks thet they’d better go home. I’ve been advisin’ ’em, but they won’t hear me.”
For a moment the judge hesitated. He did not want them standing around in front of his bank. It reminded him too much of a day he would like to forget, and he finally said, “What are you waiting for? You can’t get your money to-day, if you ever do. You’d better go home. There’s no good standing here, gaping at the bank!”
Most of them took his advice, and went home with heavy hearts as they thought of their hard earnings gone through the recklessness of a man they had trusted implicitly, and who was lying in his own house, white and still as the dead, speaking to no one and only answering in monosyllables when spoken to.
He had not seen his wife. The physicians did not think it best, as she was growing quiet when he came, and the sight of him would set her off again with hysterics, which, complicated with heart trouble, might prove serious.
Louie had a double task, caring for her father and mother, and she faced it bravely. She saw Mr. Blake when he came in the afternoon and heard from him how little there was left of the wreck, and asked for a list of the depositors, especially the smaller ones—the working women and men to whom their loss meant more than to Godfrey Sheldon. She called the four servants together—the coachman and cook and laundress and housemaid—and said to them:
“We can pay you up to Saturday night. After that we can’t afford it, and you must go.”