Like their father, Ethel and Grace were very quiet in their grief, which was not the less acute for that. A thought of Phil was always in their hearts, though they never spoke of him voluntarily, and always changed the conversation as soon as possible when his name was mentioned. But oh, how they missed him everywhere: missed his quick, springing step upon the walk as he came in, bright, and fresh, and gay, from doing nothing—his cheery whistle, or snatches of song, or his playful badinage, and all the thousand little acts by which a good, kind brother can make himself beloved. If they could have seen him dead—if his body could have been brought home and buried in quiet Merrivale, under the shadows of the pines, where they could have kept his grave bright with flowers and watered it with their tears—it would have been some solace for their pain. But alas! he had no grave, no resting-place, save those deep, dark Eastern waters, and who could tell what horrid monster of the deep might have torn and mangled his manly form ere it reached the bottom of the sea! It was too horrible to think of; and the faces of his mother and sisters grew whiter and thinner each day, for each day they missed more and more the young man who had been the sunlight of their home.
Poor Grandma Ferguson, too, was completely prostrated at first with the suddenness of the blow, and could only sit and cry like a little child for the boy whom she had loved so dearly, and who had always been kind and affectionate to her.
“No matter if I ain’t nothin’ but a homespun, uneddicated critter; he never acted an atom ashamed of me, and when he had some high young city bucks visitin’ him he allus brought ’em to see me and get some of my strawberry short-cake or mince pies,” she said to a neighbor who was trying to comfort her. “He never sassed me but once, and then he was a boy, and didn’t know no better, and he was sorry, too,” she said; and she went on to relate the circumstances of his coming to her the night before he went away to school, and asking her forgiveness for the rude words he had said to her, when she kissed him and called him her baby.
He was her only grandson, and her heart was very sore and full of pain; and, laying aside her brown silk dress, which she had thought to wear at Anna’s wedding, she clothed herself in deepest black, and thought and talked of nothing but her boy, her Phil, “drownded in the Ingies.”
As for Anna, she cried herself into a sick headache the first day, and declined to see the major, when he called. But she received him the next day, and was a good deal comforted by the beautiful necklace and pendant of onyx and pearls he brought to her with a view to assuage her grief, which was not very lasting. She liked Phil well enough, and his sudden death was a great shock to her, but she liked the major better, or, rather, she liked the costly presents he made her, and the position he would give her when she became his wife, as she expected to do in a few weeks. The grand wedding, however, which she was intending to have, must now be given up; and this, perhaps, added a little to her sorrow and regret for Phil’s untimely end.
Outside of his family, too, there was deep mourning for the young man who had been so popular with every one, and of whom it was said that he had not a single enemy. But nowhere was there a heart so full of pain and remorse as at Hetherton Place where Queenie shut herself in her room and refused to see any one except Margery and Pierre.
She had read with a fresh burst of anguish Phil’s letter written her from Madras—a letter full of tenderness and love, showing how he kept her still in his heart as the dearest, sweetest memory of his life, and at the close containing a few words of passionate entreaty that she would overcome her scruples, and bid him come back to her by and by.
“Not now,” he wrote, “not while I am the shiftless, aimless block you were right to despise, but after I have shown that there is something in me besides a love of indolence and feminine occupations, will you reconsider, Queenie, and see if you cannot love me?”
“Yes, Phil, oh, Phil!” Queenie cried, as she finished reading this letter, which she covered with her kisses, and then kept under her pillow where she could find it readily when the fancy took her to read it.
Everything Phil had given her or helped to make, was brought to her chamber where she could see it, for she refused to go down stairs, but stayed constantly in her own room, sometimes pacing restlessly to and fro, but often lying down with her face to the wall and her eyes open day and night, for she could neither sleep nor cry, and her head seemed bursting with its pressure of blood and pain.