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Contents

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Chapter I. Charlotte

Liguts had been out for an hour in High Hill Seminary. The principal had long since retired from the duties of the day. That excellent lady

shad, indeed, relinquished one care after another to her able assistant, until she herself did scarcely more than ask a blessing at meals, and conduct prayers. The annual circular, it is true, was composed by the pen of the principal. This document was a mingling of scenery, piety, cost and dimensions of buildings, ideals of womanhood, and delicately hinted social advantages, -all set forth in flowery English of the old school.

Among Miss Trowbridge’s toppling sentences, _ with their pretty adjectives and pronouns of doubtful antecedents, one, after all, made out a very comfortable and creditable education for a young girl up to the age of eighteen. Miss Trowbridge reserved for herself one more function.

Her assistant, Charlotte Coverdale, was wont to sit with outward composure and inward restiveness under the principal’s little addresses which often followed evening prayers. These were of the literary quality of the circular, and were an expansion of the same topics. Miss Trowbridge was an artless egotist, who based her exhortations upon her own example. This was not, however, especially to the disadvantage of the girls who looked up into her face. Few of them had yet the experience or the humor to judge | character. So Charlotte Coverdale reminded herself as she sat and watched the sweet, serious faces while Miss Trowbridge related anecdotes of her own instructive youth. The wit of the Literature Class did indeed whisper to her neighbor, “ ‘ Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’! ”

The old lady read and dozed her time away in the intervals of these labors, while Charlotte Coverdale gently usurped her duties, and gave the old school new efficiency and self-respect. Miss Coverdale and the principal differed at many points; as, for example, in the matter of the teacher’s life. Miss Trowbridge held the ascetic, conventual ideal. ‘A devoted teacher ” she had been this very evening describing to Charlotte. ‘“‘She has been with us over twenty years. She has no thought but of the Seminary ; her

WPT ial eo ae ent nah” OY ee Raye YS "s AT ar ere PM wT we age OS peg eS Gaets PACE eho Te aT LT Re uo hin a heart is wholly in her work. She is never so happy as when she is at her post. And I know of no one more faithful to the ideals of the Seminary,” continued Miss Trowbridge, in the sweet, ‘rotund voice in which she addressed her pupils. The word “ideals” so pronounced had often had its good effect upon a trustful girl of sixteen. It had a very bad effect upon Charlotte, who listened now.

“ More faithful, Miss Coverdale, to the ideals of the Seminary,” with the musical swell repeated. ‘In the simplicity of her attire, in the plainness of her surroundings, in the utter absence of self-seeking, Miss Bowdoin sets before our young gyurls the loftiest standard of plain living and high thinking, as Emerson has said,” added Miss Trowbridge, with complacent confidence in her misquotation as, often, in her serene mispronunciations.

- Charlotte sat miserable under this perversion of the truth, in which she saw her own best beliefs grotesque and distorted.

“ Which brings me to speak of a matter that you can help me to set right, I am sure,’’ Miss Trowbridge continued, in her soft official voice. “Miss Bowdoin herself has called my attention ‘to it. It is the matter of after-dinner coffee, - Miss Coverdale, — after-dinner coffee for the _ teachers on the Sabbath. It has been an innoot Foe lite Ka MAE eS, STR de nce a nee Mee ca ay ee, "oan : ‘ ots SL pate = PAE hee vation, as you are aware, and an innovation, I fear, not with the best results.” Charlotte looked a little startled.

“In the first place, you know that it is a matter of principle with me that the teachers ‘should share in all respects the life of the pupis.” |

Charlotte said gently, “That, Miss Trowbridge, is a point on which I cannot agree with you. For the pupil’s own sake I think the teacher’s life should be different at many points.”

“IT know your views,” said Miss Trowbridge, with perfect courtesy and toleration. ‘ But High Hill Seminary has established a principle which cannot well be set aside. We have had many innovations since you came among us, Miss Coverdale; of: that you are aware, no doubt.”

Charlotte Coverdale replied with the very smile by which she had carried through many of | the innovations.

“And I feel that we have another to deal with in this matter that has recently come up, — this affair of the coffee. Now after-dinner coffee is not a thing that we allow our gyurls to have; only coffee at breakfast, and not too strong, Miss Coverdale.”

Miss Trowbridge looked impressively at Char. lotte for her assent.

«6 Arid hy the teachers should desire it at dinner, and why coffee should be chosen to mark the Sabbath, I confess I fail to see. Can you enlighten me, Miss Coverdale ?”

Frivolous seriousness about trifles angered Charlotte. She answered lightly, but, it seems, to Miss Trowbridge’s satisfaction.

“T thought you would agree with me. Moreover, | have observed that coffee has — appears to have an effect. It appears to conduce to what I may call—bhilarity. I heard laughter from the teachers’ room last Sunday. Miss Bowdoin and I observed that the teachers lingered for some time after the pupils left the dining-room.” Miss Trowbridge paused.

_ “There was some very good talk at our table, Miss Trowbridge.”

“ No doubt, and yet you must agree with me that from every point of view this is not in the spirit of the Seminary, not in the spirit in which it was founded. Now if it were tea, it might be somewhat different.”

“Tea is quite as exhilarating, do you not think so, Miss Trowbr ridge ?”’

“But then, you know, Miss Coverdale, tea does not smell so far!”

Miss Trowbridge dropped her voice secretively, and Charlotte marveled at her morality. “Therefore, in future, shall we not agree to

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substitute tea,—‘the cup that cheers but not inebriates,’ Miss Coverdale?” Miss Trowbridge paused as usual, for her quotation to take effect. :

Charlotte made her escape politely, and retired to her room in wrath. Even then she was half aware that her anger was out of proportion, and that she, too, was frivolous, in taking Miss Trowbridge so seriously. Once outside of High Hill Seminary, Charlotte would have found her a diverting character, whose existence could be readily pardoned in consideration of the entertainment she afforded. It was in fact a bad state of nerves, the fatigue of ten years’ teaching, that caused Charlotte to view Miss Trowbridge’s influence upon the Seminary as so disastrous.

The truth was, that the principal of High Hill ©

Seminary did no great harm; while Charlotte’s own influence, always underrated by herself, was the positive working force of the institution. Nor was Miss Trowbridge’s repression of the teachers so unfortunate as might be supposed. Two or three of Miss Bowdoin’s type survived Charlotte Coverdale’s reforms, but the nineteenth century was now far advanced, and the ascetic ideal was fading out. Charlotte had assembled a number of healthy, enthusiastic young women, of sound education, and she had made it her highest effort to secure to them a well-rounded ee ee ae eee Se Boe” NE Be oe ae : ~ - ores 4

. personal life, as the basis of their professional career. This had been her “ original work ” as a teacher. She had not distinguished herself in the field of scholarship; her thought and research had gone to the study of the teacher’s life. Charlotte knew as yet nothing of a movement on foot among the trustees of the Seminary, who proposed to bestow a graceful pension upon Miss Trowbridge and to vest the power of principal in Miss Coverdale. Kind words were spoken of her by these excellent gentlemen ; all about her was love and appreciation, but so late and so weary was this night that her faith in herself was gone. Her conversation with Miss Trowbridge was all that remained of the day. She could extract no amusement from it. She felt cramped, thwarted, and heart-sick. Her ambition for the teacher’s life seemed to have no fulfillment in her own. She clearly did not practice what she preached. How watchfully she guarded a newly arrived young teacher, lest the Seminary walls should close about her, — and here she sat herself, immured. She could guard other teachers from Miss Trowbridge’s petty tyranny, but she could not protect herself. Charlotte felt every relation of her life imperfect and unnatural. Her parents had died in her childhood; she had no brothers and sisters. As for her teacher’s life, she thought of a vivacious friend of hers. Rebecca had said, “I should like to see you in the real world, out of this artificial life, for good andall! Of all hypo- © crites teachers are the worst. How I used to hate that amiability and enthusiasm that I had to put on and take off every day. You shake your head. That shows how far gone in hypocrisy you are, if you can even keep it up with me. But you are romantic about teaching. Oh, yes, you are as romantic as ever. How you have kept your complexion and your imagination is more than I can understand. Think, it’s ten years since we were in college together. You have even been romantic about your education. I am not. ITowe my education a grudge. If it were not for that, 1 might have been a comfortable woman, without the torment of all these problems. -I’ma child o’ the time —a mistake o’ the time, I often think; there are so many women of that sort now; mistakes that have to be made, I suppose, before we get to the right thing.” Charlotte took up a letter from Rebecca, which the evening mail had brought. Her friend was in San Francisco, and, as the letter revealed, in San Francisco she was to spend her life. She had abandoned teaching for journalism, and had now abandoned journalism for marriage. Charlotte sat brooding over the letter. Unselfish woman though she was, it was

¢ —— vie ot a a cee 9a % her own life that came uppermost as she read her friend’s confidences. She took from her desk a faded daguerreotype case, bearing the date of her mother’s marriage. It contained two pictures. Charlotte studied her young mother’s face, the full, sensitive lips, the tender, expectant eyes. A speaking likeness, they had ealled it ; and many a time had Charlotte, when the living had failed her, found response in the face of her mother. The daughter was an older woman now than the young Mary Coverdale, and she gazed at the picture with a comprehend- - ing, almost maternal tenderness. An old grief uttered its moan again. Charlotte could remember of her mother only a bending face with love in it, —not a feature, not a word remained to her. Perversely enough, she had a distinct recollection of the little gold pin at her mother’s throat. It was touched with gilt in the daguerreotype, and was the freshest part: of the picture also. It was this little twist of gold that, by some freak of the heart, brought the tears to her eyes now.

Opposite was the face of Charlotte’s father, a face that added. years would have made distinguished and commanding. The loss to the _ world, and the loss to her! she reflected. It could only be put away among the mysteries of fate. When an excellent old woman had one time tried to explain, on behalf of Providence, the death of Charlotte’s parents, the girl had turned upon her solemnly and sharply. As she grew to mature thought, her utmost exercise of faith was the patience to wait for knowledge. She was on the whole a happy woman, yet there were times when she went into retreat with her old sorrows. She did not avoid or regret these seasons of bereavement. They kept her related to her father and mother, she said, when ae becca remonstrated.

As Charlotte held in her hand the double daguerreotype, she looked at her mirror. She gazed searchingly into her own eyes, and found there the light of her mother’s. She glanced at her father’s face, and then looked again into her own. Her dark hair rolled back from a _ brow of singular power and beauty. The soft eyes of Mary Coverdale had a moment ago — looked from her daughter’s; now Charlotte met in her own face the look of her dead father. A little above the common height she stood, the lines of her figure gracious and noble. Yet, if she looked fascinated into her mirror, it was not her beauty that held her. The mystery of — earthly immortality laid its spell upon her. “They are not dead; they live in me; I will live out their life for them.” So her thoughts ran, till they brought her back to the very point artery Arras tht te from which she had set out: the yearning for a wider life. She often questioned her own lot anxiously. She was good and she was happy in the eyes of every one; but there was an artificial serenity about her very goodness and happiness. She doubted their quality; she wondered if she had met the natural trials and temptations. She breathed the adulation of two hundred schoolgirls, sweet and stifling incense. She dreaded its effect upon her character.

“TIT need a complete change of relations. I need to look up and not down.” So she had said to Rebecca, and Rebecca had agreed, with enthusiasm.

“How often we have been over it all!” Charlotte had sighed in conclusion. “TI love my girls, and I love my work, and by it I must — live. It is as well that necessity settles it for me.”

Charlotte Coverdale laid down the portraits of her father and mother, and took up a newspaper. It was in the direct line of her thought that she turned to the editorial pages of the “ Citizen,” which took her into the mid-stream of American life. She had established an intimacy with these columns, and was usually in cordial sympathy with them. One vigorous pen she learned to recognize in criticisms from time to time of the progress of American civilization. With all its radicalism, she knew no other paper so jealously conservative of the world’s experience. This liberal conservatism answered to her own character, and the fresh New York paper, traveling its two hundred miles daily to reach her, supplied to her cloistered life contact with the world and the stimulus of men’s minds.

To-night Charlotte had not read far when, in another corner of the paper, she caught sight of her mother’s family name,—an uncommon name, — standing out in firm, black type among the death notices. She read, ‘“ Petrie. Died in © New York, May 17, James Petrie, for forty years a resident of London.”

James Petrie was her mother’s cousin, whom she herself had never known or even seen. She thought a moment of the lonely end of the old man, then continued her reading.

Chapter II. The Last Days Of James Petrie

Ir was the lovely afternoon of the seventeenth of May. In the yard of the hospital the soft breeze stirred in the trees, and the sunlight filtered through the leaves and lay shifting and flickering on the grass. It was one of the gentle, young days by which a new summer is brought in, and which make it easy to apply to the ancient earth every metaphor of youth and hope. Outside the hospital gates, there rolled gay carriages, with occupants in fresh, spring toilettes, smiling to one another in congratulation upon the matchless beauty of a New York May day. The walks upon the avenue were gay as the stream of carriages. Beauty and fashion on foot makes a phenomenon striking to the eye of a foreigner, who, nevertheless, feels in it the charm of an American city. Under the high garden wall of the hospital, the tide was at its highest,—a tide as constant and punctual as the ebb and flow of the ocean. Men might come and men might go, but the afternoon crowd upon the avenue went on, immortal. The gray walls and the people passing had the sense of mutual permanence that made them altogether thoughtless of each other. The life outside seldom penetrated to the life beyond the vine-covered gateway ; to the life within, it was but the undertone of the receding world. To the sick and dying the murmur of the street was only a symbol and abstraction. To Richard Waring, also, as he hurried to the hospital on his grave errand, the crowd on the street lost | reality, and became mere confusion to eye and ear; save for one moment, when, about to turn into the quiet side street, he encountered Grace Hathaway and her companion. The girl’s eye lighted with pleasure as she bowed to him, and a half dozen pretty looks went in and out upon her face before it settled again.

me

Waring lifted his hat, but his face lost none of its grave preoccupation.

“ Papa’s friend, Mr. Waring,” Grace explained. “He is on the ‘Citizen’; he is one of the editors.”

“Ts he always as solemn as that?” her companion inquired.

“He is fascinating,” Grace confided, in a lower tone.

“He is very good-looking,” said the young lady of seventeen, judicially ; “though I prefer dark men, myself.” Richard Waring was

THE LAST DAYS OF JAMES PETRIE. 15 of the pure Saxon type, as modified by two centuries in America.

The apparition of the pretty Grace was a “trivial fond record,” quickly effaced by Waring. He entered the hospital and made his way to a private room, with perfect right and famillarity.

“ Give us a little more light, can’t you, Mrs. Jenkins ?”

The nurse raised the shade. The window looked out into a great tree, with the breeze from the bay rustling its leaves. Birds were twittering in its boughs. Back of these gentle sounds hung the great curtain of dull noise, — the life of the city. The room was airy and comfortable, fitted up with all the ingenuities of modern nursing. Perfect scientific care was evident in every detail. The admirable nurse in attendance was a quiet, efficient woman, who spoke seldom and then to the point, and obeyed orders with machine-like precision. The cool, safe accuracy of this sick-room represented all the love and tenderness that money could buy. One thing only modern nursing has failed to supply: the wealth of James Petrie could not at this final hour give him home and kindred ; dear, familiar walls and loved faces. Here was no love, no grief; clean, bare walls, a competent nurse, and the odor of disinfectants.

So thought Waring, with love and grief, however, in his own face as he came near the bedside of his old friend. |

“He ain’t going to know you, sir, to-night,” said the nurse.

A shrunken old man lay on the bed. His face was pinched and narrow ; his thin hair was tossed upon the pillow. A touching hand lay outside the sheet, — that a man’s right hand should come to this! It lay like a sleeping child’s, half open, as if to receive something. The slow heavy breathing was all of life that had not departed.

Waring stood long with bent head, in solemn thought. The change in his old friend was no shock to him; he had stood by his bedside day by day through a long illness.

“Tt ’s a whim of mine, Dick,” the old man had said when he landed three months before ; “it’s a fancy of mine to come home to die. I wanted to die an American, and lay my bones in American soil. It was Ja patrie, a pure sen- .

timent, a pure abstraction, that brought me home. Iam an utter stranger. Kith and kin I have none, — a distant cousin or two, perhaps, though our race has about died out. Pity! It ended in some incomparable old maids, — New England cousins of mine, — all dead. There was one of the other branch that married, I pico ae Ame the

THE LAST DAYS OF JAMES PETRIE. 17 believe, into a good family, the Coverdales, but if there are any of the next generation, they never heard my name. I am a stranger, but, thank God, I’m not a man without a country.”

Suddenly, in a different tone, he said, “I came home, too, because I wanted a last look at you, my boy.” After the shrewd pause with which the old banker was wont to preface an important remark, he continued. “I wanted to look you over, my lad,’’ he said, with a searching eye. “Thirty — thirty-five — or thereabouts, isn’t it? Well, I wanted to see if ten years had made you or marred you. I wanted to see if you were the same lad I used to have such a fondness for. I rather think you are,” said the old gentleman, with a smile that Richard liked to remember. ‘I believe it’s safe to trust you,’ with another smile, which months after Waring recalled, as he studied his own situation. ‘Your father was one of the best men in our house. I owed it to him to look after his little boy,—all the more, that your mother married again so soon. Your mother lives in Florence still, | think you said. She has stayed too long in that land of the lotus-eaters. There’s no place that will expatriate you more surely than Florence. I am glad you belong in New York. If it can’t be London or Paris, then New York. And a native American has no business with London or Paris ; he misses the great opportunity if he misses his share in American progress. How do things over here look to you, now you are a man grown, Richard ?”’

Richard, appealed to thus formally, had given his views with some care. His older friend had looked at him with watchful measurement. He had listened with the catlike attention with which an old college professor listens to a boy reciting under examination, and, like the college _ professor, Mr. Petrie had turned, as it were, to

a mental record and entered a mark against Richard Waring’s name. |

“T am inclined to think you are wrong, sir.” James Petrie’s sir was his extreme of severity, as Richard in his teens had known. “I am inclined to think you are also quite wrong about yourself. You will live to change your mind. You say you have made no success of life, that there is no place in this country for men hike you. It’s unmanly, sir. Sit down, my boy, — sit —down. Look at me. I expect no promises, mind. But I say to you now that it 1s my earnest desire for you that — well, whatever turn your life may take, you will remain an American on American ground. Hark, now ! Don’t sell your birthright. You understand that that is my wish. What do you say to it?”

FW oh ee ties

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THE LAST DAYS OF JAMES PETRIE. 19

Waring said nothing beyond an expression of respect for his old friend. He felt like a manly schoolboy, whose dignity has been wounded. He was not to be coerced into promises, especially with the bribe of a fortune. To his old friend eying him, he looked simply sulky. The good man was hurt and angry.

“| want my money spent in America, in plain terms. What do you say to that, sir?”

Waring was stung by the threat implied. He forced himself to answer gently and carefully. In substance, he refused to make any promises as to his future. He pained himself and his old friend, and neither touched the subject again. This had been the one incident to mar the tenderness of their intercourse for three months. Richard afterwards reproached himself for not indulging more gently what was plainly the controlling idea of James Petrie’s last days.

“Draw your moral from me,” the old man would say. “A plain duty forty years ago directed me to take my father’s place in our London banking-house. Twenty years later I might have come home. But it was too late. I loved my London by that time. You see me now without home or kindred, —a man with five hundred acquaintances, and two, perhaps three friends. I have been neither American nor Englishman. I have counted for nothing. I

FE ve A Aa mE TRENT BEE ray SARS ed iy pee ee eS oo Nan hake MR TGV Af have no ties. I have strengthened no bonds. I am no loss.”

“That you cannot say, sir,’ Waring answered.

*¢ You will see when I come to die.”

And now he had come to die. Waring sat down by the bedside, and took the feeble hand in his. He looked to see some transfusion of his own vigor into the life ebbing back to eter- ~ nity. But no sign of his presence was given. The separation had taken place already, the parting of which they had spoken with the solemnity and courage of manly men. ‘The last months had brought them together again into the old intimacy. James Petrie had talked much of his own life and of the conclusions that he now drew from it. It seemed his desire to leave to Waring a legacy of experience, that Waring might repeat his successes and avoid his mistakes.

“« Ah, that’s a thing you must do some day, Dick,” and his fading eye would kindle. Or it was, “ Richard, I charge you, don’t make the mistake I did.” One day he spoke with energy. “ Dick, why are n’t you looking about you for a wife? It’s high time, my lad. Look at me. You would n’t be like me, not when the last years come,— not when the last days come. Lose no time; within a year, now!”

THE LAST DAYS OF JAMES PETRIE. 21

The strength of his old friend’s affection was evident to Richard not so much through lavish expression, as by this entering into the younger man’s life and by the transferring of his own interests one by one into the keeping of Waring. It became plain to Richard that he was to inherit a fortune. It was a familiar, happy consciousness which strengthened the tie between the two men, one of whom was making over his life to the other. Yet no word passed between them. Waring supposed that even the final transfer of his property would be to this sanest of business men a transaction accurate and without jeopardy of sentiment. Undoubtedly his affairs were pigeonholed by his lawyers, . and this reserve on his own part was the only sentiment that entered into the matter.

As Richard sat now by the bedside and felt the weak hand in his, he was shaken with filial sorrow. His face grew paler and the lines about his mouth were drawn tense and grim.

Stich feeling must give way to the relief of thought. Waring pondered. This experience, for the time so personal, so isolated, became universal, — became Death. The theme widened, then narrowed again: James Petrie’s death,

Death, Richard Waring’s death. So does all

' great experience expand and contract. Waring recalled distinctly a day in his thirtieth year aa daa ci ian bei Lk it a tal ita ics cs EN ee eon ty, when the one thing certain in his future was revealed to him. The day of the knowledge of

* Death was a milestone that marked his entrance on the second stage of life. The thrilling conviction had many times returned to him, yet never to mar the present. It was necessary to the mature conception of life, vital to the true relation and perspective.

Waring tenderly turned in his hand the helpless fingers. That expressive right hand had been so living a part of the man, animated as his face, dramatic as his inflection! Its grasp had been vital with friendship; the facile pen it held had ‘written the sound business letter, or had replied to my lady’s invitation with gallant grace. This little, wan old man had been the dinner-guest whose contribution could be absolutely relied upon; whose repartees would bear to be passed around next day.

Waring looked at his watch and saw that two hours had passed.