CHAPTER XXXVIII.
MOURNING FOR PHIL.
It was very bitter and deep, and all the more so because the blow had fallen so suddenly, without a note of warning. At the Knoll there was a small and select dinner party the evening the letter came. Some friends from Boston were visiting in the house, and Mrs. Rossiter had invited a few of the villagers to meet them, and in her evening dress of claret velvet, with diamonds in her ears and at her throat, she looked as lovely and almost as young as in her early girlhood when she won the heart of the grave and silent Paul Rossiter. Dinner had been over some little time, and she was standing with her guests in the drawing-room when the fatal letter was brought to her. She saw it was from Madras, and that the handwriting was a stranger’s; and though it was directed to her husband, who immediately after dinner had wandered off to his conservatories, where he spent most of his time, she opened it unhesitatingly, feeling sure that it contained tidings of her son, and feeling, too, with that subtle intuition which so often precedes dreadful news, that the tidings were not good. But she was not prepared to hear that Phil was dead; and when she read that he would never return to her again, she gave one long, agonizing shriek, and dropped upon the floor in a faint so nearly resembling death that for a little while they feared she was really dead. Fortunately the family physician was among the guests, and so relief was immediate, or she might never have returned to consciousness, so terrible was the shock to her nervous system. For hours she passed from one fainting fit into another, and when these were over lay in a kind of semi-stupor, moaning at intervals:
“Oh, my boy! my Phil, my darling—dead—gone from me forever—my boy, my boy!”
If Mrs. Rossiter had a weakness it was her love for her son. Phil had been her idol, and if her husband and both her daughters had lain dead at her feet and Phil had been spared to her, she would not have felt so badly as she did now when she still had husband and daughters, but Phil was not. Nothing availed to soothe or quiet her, and the house which had heretofore been so bright and cheerful, and full of gayety, became a house of sorrow and gloom. The servants trod softly through the silent halls, and spoke only in whispers to each other, while Ethel and Grace, with traces of bitter weeping upon their fair, sweet faces, sat from morning till night with folded hands looking hopelessly at each other as if paralyzed by the awful calamity which had fallen upon them. They were of no use to their mother, who lay in her darkened room, refusing to see any one except her husband, whom she kept constantly with her, and who gave no sign of what he thought or felt. Quiet, patient all enduring, he sat by his wife’s bedside and listened to her moans, and did what she bade him do; left her when she said so; returned to her when she sent for him, and if he felt pain or grief himself uttered no word, and never mentioned Philip’s name.
Of Mr. Rossiter we have said comparatively nothing, as he has but little to do with the story, except as the father of Phil. He was a very peculiar man—silent, unsocial, undemonstrative, and, save for his love and admiration for his wife, apparently indifferent to everything except his four conservatories, and what they contained. Had he been poor and obliged to earn his own living he would unquestionably have been a gardener, so fond was he of flowers and plants of every kind. He had walked miles through the tangled glades of Florida, hunting for some new specimens of ferns or pitcher-plants, and his greenhouses were full of exotics from every clime. Here, and in the room adjoining, where he kept his catalogues and books of pressed leaves and flowers, he spent most of his time, and if beguiled away from his favorites for a few moments he was always in a hurry to return to them. It was in one of his conservatories that the news of his son’s death reached him. After dinner was over he had asked his gentlemen guests to go with him and see a new kind of fern, gathered the previous autumn in some of the neighboring swamps, and he was talking most eloquently of its nature and habits when his wife’s shriek reached him, and the next moment a servant rushed in, exclaiming:
“Oh sir, come quick, Mrs. Rossiter has fainted, and Mr. Philip is drowned.”
“Drowned! My son drowned! Did you say Philip was dead? It will go hard with his poor mother,” he said very calmly, as he put the pot of ferns carefully back in its place.
But the hands which held the pot trembled, and the palms were wet with great drops of sweat, as he went slowly to the room where his wife lay in a swoon. He was a small man, and weak, too, it would seem, but it was he who lifted the fainting woman up and bore her to her chamber and loosened her dress, and took the diamonds from her throat and ears, and the flowers from her hair, as quickly and skillfully as her daughters could have done. There was a good deal of Phil in his nature, and he showed it in his womanly and quiet manner at the sick bed.
“Poor Mary, I am so sorry for you,” he said, and pressed his lips to the forehead of his wife, who clung to him as a child in pain clings to its mother.