CHAPTER VII.
A Return To 1856—Nicholas Hill, Iron Merchant—His Death, his Daughter and his Friend—How Dr. Pomeroy became a Guardian, and how he discharged that Duty—A Ruin and an Awakening—The market value of Dunderhaven stock in 1858.
Seven years before 1863, and consequently in 1856, died Nicholas Hill, a merchant of Philadelphia, whose place of business on Market Street above Third had been the seat of a respectable though not remarkably extensive trade, for nearly a quarter of a century. His trade had been in iron and hardware, but the material of his stock by no means entered into his own composition, for he was a man somewhat noted for his quiet and retiring manners and a pliancy of spirit making him at times the victim of the unscrupulously plausible. His private fortune met with sundry serious drawbacks on account of this weakness, though a generally prosperous business enabled him to keep intact the few thousands which he had already won, and gradually if slowly to add to the accumulation. He had remained a widower since the death of his wife ten years before his own demise; and his pleasant though quiet little house on Locust Street, had only contained one member of his family besides himself, for years before his death—his only daughter and only child, Eleanor.
The warmest and longest-continued friendships are very often formed by persons diametrically opposed in character and disposition; and the rule seemed to hold good in the instance under notice. A friendship formed several years before between the merchant and Dr. Philip Pomeroy, when the latter was a practising physician resident in the city proper, had never died out or become weakened, at least in the heart of the confiding and quiet dealer in iron, and there was no reason to believe that the sentiment had been more transient in the breast of the physician. Mr. Hill had been suffering under the incipient threats of consumption, for years, and the doctor had been his medical attendant, as before the death of his wife he had filled the same confidential relation towards that lady and the other members of his household. Neither personally nor by marriage had the merchant any near relatives in the city or its vicinity; and his retiring disposition was such that while he made many friends in the ordinary acceptation of the word, he had few who stood in that peculiar relation which the French, supplying a noun which has scarcely yet crept into our own language, designate as les intimes.
It was not strange, then, that when Nicholas Hill was suddenly seized with hemorrhage of the lungs and brought home in an almost dying condition from his store, one afternoon in November, 1856, Dr. Pomeroy, who was hurriedly summoned to his aid, was summoned quite as much in the capacity of friend as in that of medical attendant. The story of life or death was soon told. The merchant had believed, from the moment of attack, that his day of probation was over; and, apart from his natural anxiety for the welfare of his only child, there was little tie to bind the sufferer to earth. His wife—his wife that day as much as she had been at any period of their wedded life,—had long been awaiting him, as he believed, in a better world; and there is something in the facility with which those quiet, good people, who seem never to have enjoyed existence with the fiery zest which tingles in finger and lip of the sons of pleasure and sorrow, give up their hold upon being and pass away into the infinite unknown which lies beyond the dark valley,—something that may well make it a matter of question whether theirs is not after all the golden secret of human happiness, for which all ages have been studying and delving.
The doctor came, with that rapidity which was usual with him, and with every mark of intense interest on his face and in his general demeanor. He found the invalid sinking rapidly, and his attendants, the weeping Eleanor, then a handsome, promising but defectively-educated girl of near eighteen, and two or three of the ladies of the near neighborhood who had gathered in to tender their services when it was known that the merchant had been brought home in a dying condition. A few words from the sufferer, uttered in a low tone almost in the ear of the stooping physician, and then all the others were sent out of the room except his daughter, whose pleading gesture, asking to be allowed to remain within the room was not disregarded, but who was motioned by the doctor to take her place at the window, beyond supposed hearing of the words that were to pass between the two friends.
"Tell me the exact truth," said the low voice of Nicholas Hill, when these dispositions had been made. "I am prepared to hear any judgment which your lips may speak. There is no hope for me?—I am dying?"
Either the doctor could not speak, or he would not. He merely bowed his head in a manner that the questioner well understood.
"So I thought, from the first," said the dying man. "The life blood does not flow away in that manner for nothing. And I do not know that I regret the end, for I have lived almost as long as I could make myself useful, and I think I am as nearly prepared to die as poor, fallen humanity can hope to be."
"I hope and believe that you are indeed prepared to die, my dear, good friend," answered the doctor, with feeling in his tone, and the feeble hand of the sufferer meanwhile within his. "I cannot hold out a false hope to you—you cannot live. How gladly science and friendship would both join hands in doing something to keep you in the world, you know; but how much we shall all miss you and grieve for you, you do not know."