The Merivale banks

by Mary Jane Holmes

Herbert said he had heard something of the kind, but did not think it was true.

“It is true,” Louie cried, in a tremor of distress, “and you must stop it!”

“I stop it! How?” Herbert asked, and Louie replied:

“Go to the meeting, and plead for him. Tell them how sorry and broken he is. Tell them it will all be paid in time, if I live. I can do it, and I will. Tell them everything we have will be sold, if they will only leave father alone. You will do this for me?”

She was looking at him now, with the tears running down her cheeks, and her lips quivering with the pain it gave her to ask this of her lover, whose hesitancy she saw before he spoke. If she had asked him to walk through a fire he could have done it more readily than to attend the meeting of angry citizens and plead for Mr. Grey. It would be too marked, and life would be intolerable with his father when he heard it, as he was sure to.

This he tried to explain, and Louie understood him, and knew she must stand alone. There was no one to help her, and in her eyes, dry now, and very bright, there was a look, which Herbert would never forget, and in coming years he would give much if he could recall the words which had brought it there.

“Father will be wanting me, and I must go to him,” she said, when he tried to detain her while he explained, further why it would be of no use for him to do her bidding. “I shall only be one against many, and I am sorry to say some of the creditors have lost their good sense with their money, and they would only laugh at me if I told them you would pay the debts. How can you do it?”

“I know,” was Louie’s reply, as she drew away from him.

He did not try to caress her. She would not have permitted it had he tried. In her mind there was fast forming the idea that he was a weak reed to lean upon—that her idol was falling from its pedestal, and there was a constraint in her voice and manner as she bade him good-by and went to her father, who was growing delirious and talking of stocks, and prison, and a dead face with a bullet in the brain. This she did not understand, unless it referred to his thought to kill himself. The prison she understood, and tried to soothe and quiet him by saying he would never go there—that she would save him from it. How she could do it she scarcely knew. There seemed to be but one way. She must face that night session alone, and beg them to spare her father. It was a terrible ordeal, and she shrank from it with inexpressible dread, for she must do it, and her resolution was kept up by the news Nancy Sharp brought her at intervals during the day of the arrangements making for the session and the intensity of feeling among the people as the sense of their losses grew upon them.

“Don’t tell me any more, or I shall go crazy, and I need all my wits about me,” Louie cried at last when Nancy came late in the afternoon with more harassing details of what was being done in town.