For a long minute Philip stood looking down at the face of the woman who had supplanted his mother. It was the wreck of a face that had once been attractive, perhaps even beautiful with a wild, gypsy allure. While he looked, the dark eyelids fluttered and opened, and the carmined lips framed a single word, “John!”
The doctor straightened up and drew Jean away, shaking his head to signal that the end had come. The clergyman knelt beside the dying woman and began to speak in low tones. Bromley followed the doctor and Jean into the corridor, and at the door he looked back. He saw Philip hesitate, somber-eyed, but only for an instant. Then the son went to kneel, with bowed head, beside his father.
XXVII
“I saw what you saw as we were leaving the room—yes. But what did Philip do afterward?” Jean asked, looking up from her seat in the low wicker rocking-chair.
After taking Jean home on the night of the tragedy, Bromley had gone back to the tenement building to stand by as a loyal partner should, and for the three succeeding days his room in the West Denver cottage had remained unoccupied. Late the third evening he had returned to find Jean sitting up, sewing, with the two younger girls poring over their school books in the rear half of the double sitting-room.
“Phil did his full duty,” was his answer to the low-voiced question. “Took everything upon his own shoulders—funeral arrangements, and all that; acted just as if there had been no breach between his father and himself—a thing he wouldn’t have done six months ago, not if the heavens had fallen.”
“And you have been helping?”
“Naturally, I did what I could—which wasn’t much beyond backing Phil up and running errands. He seemed glad to have me to lean upon, so I stayed with him. It was the least I could do.”
“Of course. Where is his father now?”
“Vanished into thin air, right after the funeral; wouldn’t tell Phil where he was going; wouldn’t take any of Phil’s money; wouldn’t talk, except to say that he wouldn’t get in Philip’s way again—not if he had to take the other side of the world for his.”