"O Rosa, she is your own flesh and blood! and, as her father said, a
mere baby yet! You said, too, that she refused to assign any cause
to him for her singular conduct."
"She might better have made open outcry than have left upon his mind
the impression that I had banished her cruelly and unnecessarily.
But I despair of giving you an idea of how provoking she can be. She
is a Chilton, through and through, in feature, manner, and
disposition--one of those 'goody' children, you know! a class of
animals that are simply intolerable to me. She is too precocious and
unbaby-like to be in the least interesting. You should have seen my
little Violet to understand what a constant disappointment Florence
is. She was myself in miniature, and moreover the most witching,
prankish, peppery elf that was ever made. The best trait in
Florence's character was her love for her baby-sister. She gave up
everything to her while she was alive, and they told me that she
would not eat, and scarcely slept, for days after her death. Her
father will have it that she is singularly sensitive, and has
marvellous depths of feeling; but if this be so, it is queer I never
found it out. Nobody could help adoring Violet--my aweet, lost,
beautiful angel!"
The hysterical sobs were pumping up the tears now in hot torrents,
and these Mrs. Sutton was fain to assuage by loving arts she would
not--but for the danger of allowing them to flow--have been in the
temper to employ, so full was her heart of yearning pity for the
hardly-used babe, and displeasure at the mother's weak selfishness.
It was easier to forgive and forget Rosa's sins; to lessen, in the
retrospect, her worst faults into foibles, than it would have been
to overlook the more venal failings of one less mercurial, and whose
personal fascinations did not equal hers.
Ere the close of another day, Mrs. Sutton had excused her unnatural
insensibility to her child's virtues and affection, by representing
to herself how fearfully disease had warped judgment and perception;
had cast over the enormities she could not palliate the pall of
solemn remembrance of the truth that death's dark door was already
as surely shut between mother and daughter, as if the grave held the
former. A week of chill March rains and wind was disastrous to the
patient, who had seemed to draw her main supplies of strength from
the sunshine admitted freely to her room, with the spring air,
redolent with the delicious odors of the freshly-turned earth, the
budding trees, and early blossoms from the garden heneath her
windows. She shrank and shivered under the ungenial sky, while the
drizzling mist soaked life and animation out of the fragile body.
Occasional fits of delirium, increased difficulty of breathing, and
a steady decline of the slender remains of vital force, warned her
attendants that their care would not be required much longer. She
was still obstinate in her disbelief of the grave nature of her
malady. The most distant reference to her decease would arouse her
to angry refutation of the hinted doubt of her recovery, and excited
her to offer proof of her declaration that she was less ill than
others supposed; she would summon up a poor counterfeit of energy
and mirth, more ghastly than her previous lassitude; deny that she
suffered from any cause, save the unfailing nervous depression
consequent upon the unfavorable weather.