Thatnight he sat with Mary in the Victorian drawing-room, planning their future. It was the first time he had ever entered the house, and he found the quiet, feminine sense of order in the big room soothing and pleasant, just as Emma had found it melancholy and depressing. But he hadn’t come to her to be comforted and petted, as he had always done before: he was a different Philip, pathetic, and yet hard, kindly, yet cold in a way, and aloof. He did not speak of the stable, nor even of Naomi, and Mary, watching him, thought, “Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps after all he’s been sensible and put all that behind him,” and then, in the next moment, she saw him close his eyes suddenly. She knew what he was seeing ... that room in the boarding-house where Naomi had died. “They ought never to have let him go there,” she thought. “If any of them had any common sense, they wouldn’t have let him do it.” But she knew, too, that no one could have stopped him. He had gone because he saw it as his duty, a kind of penance: he was the sort who would never spare himself anything....
And, reaching over, she touched his hand, but there was no response. After a time, he said, “It’s all right, Mary. It’s just a headache. I’ve been having them lately.”
They couldn’t marry and stay there in the Town with every eye watching them, waiting for some bit of scandal: but Philip seemed obsessed with the idea that they must be married at once. At first she thought it might be because he wanted her so much, and thenshe saw that it was for some other reason, which she could not discover.
She asked him why they must hurry, and he said, “Don’t you want to be married? Don’t you care any longer?”
“Of course I do, Philip. You ought to know that.”
“Besides, I can’t bear staying here any longer.”
But even that, she felt, wasn’t the real reason. She did not press him, and together they planned what they were to do. The lease on Mary’s house was finished in a month, and she could go away with her sister-in-law, Rachel, and the two children, to Kentucky, where a sister of her mother’s lived. And then, quietly, Philip could send the twins there, and come himself. He would bring old Molly to help care for them.
“Rachel loves children,” said Mary, “and she’ll never be separated from mine. She’d like two more in the household.” (Only she wished they weren’t Naomi’s children ... they would always be reminding him of Naomi. It seemed impossible to be rid of Naomi. The shadow of her was always there, coming between them.)
After a long silence, she said suddenly, “Youdowant to marry me, don’t you, Philip?”
As he answered, it seemed to him that he came back from a great distance. “Marry you? Marry you? Why, of course I do. What have you been thinking of? What have I just been saying?”
“I don’t want it to be because you think you have to ... because of that night at the stable.”
“No ... no ... of course not. I want to marry you. I couldn’t think ofnotdoing it. Where did you get such an idea?”
“I don’t know ... only you’re so queer. It’s as if I didn’t make any difference any more ... as if you could do without me.”
For a moment he turned cross. “That’s nonsense! And you know it. I can’t help being like this ... I’ll be better later on.”
“I don’t know.”
But he did not try to convince her. He simply sat staring into the shadows of the old room and at last he said, “And then when everything is settled, I want to go back to Africa ... to Megambo.”
“You can’t do that, Philip ... you mustn’t. It would be like killing yourself. You can’t go back where there’s fever.” She wanted to cry out wildly, desperately, against the vague, dark force, which she felt closing in about her.
“That’s all nonsense,” he said. “Doctors don’t know everything. I shan’t get the fever. I’ve got to go back. I want to go back there to paint ... I’vegotto go back.”
“You hated the place. You told me so.”
“And you said once that I really liked it. You told me that some day I’d go back. Do you remember the day we were walking ... a few days after I came home? You were right. I’ve got to go back. I’m like that queer Englishwoman.”
“You won’t go ... leaving me alone.”
“It wouldn’t be for long ... a year, maybe.”
She did not answer him at once. “A year,” she thought. “A year! But that’s long enough. Too long. Anything could happen in a year. He might....” Looking at him as he lay back in theold horsehair sofa, he became unbearably precious to her. She seemed to see him for the first time—the thin, drawn, tormented face, the dark skin, the high cheekbones, the thin lips, even the tired eyelids. He didn’t know she was watching him. He wasn’t perhaps even thinking of her. He looked young, like a boy ... the way he had been long ago at twenty, when he was still hypnotized by Emma. She thought, “I can’t lose him now just when we’ve a chance of being happy. I can’t. I can’t. He’s mine ... my Philip.” He was free now of his mother, but he was still a captive.
She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. “Philip, my Philip,” she said. Opening his eyes, he looked at her for a moment lazily, and then smiled. It was the old shy smile she had seen on that solitary walk into the country. And then he said slowly what Naomi had once said—“I’m tired, Mary dear, that’s all....” She drew his head to her shoulder and began stroking it slowly. She thought, “It’s odd. My grandmother would turn in her grave if she knew. Or maybe she’d understand. He’s been mine always, since the beginning. I mean to keep him.”
And yet she knew that he was in that very moment escaping her. She knew again the terrifying sensation of fighting some dark and shadowy thing which she could neither see nor feel nor touch.
“Philip,” she said softly. “Philip.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going with you to Africa.”
A little pause, and then—“You’d hate it there. You’d be miserable.”
She saw suddenly that he had wanted to go alone, to hide himself away. She was hurt and she thought, “I can’t let him do it. I’ve got to fight to save us both.”
Aloud she said, “I wouldn’t mind anything, Philip, but I’ve got to go with you. That’s all I care about.”
“There’s the children.”
“I’ve thought of that. I’ve thought of everything. We can leave them with Rachel and old Molly.” She would make the trip a lark, a holiday. She would care for him every moment, and even see that he took the proper drugs. She would fight the fever herself. Nothing could touch him if she were there to protect him. She could put her own body and soul between him and death.
“You’re sure you want to go, Mary?”
“Of course I’m sure. It’s the only thing I want ... never to be separated from you again. Nothing else makes any difference.”
But this time she did not ask him whether he really wanted her. He smiled at her again. “A poor, weak fool like me doesn’t deserve such a woman.”
She kissed him, thinking, “Yes, my dear, you’re poor and weak, and a bit of a fool, but it doesn’t make any difference. Maybe that’s only why I love you so much that it breaks my heart.”
For a moment, it seemed to her that he again belonged to her, body and soul, as he had belonged to her on that terrible, beautiful night in the stable. She knew now. She understood that strange, sad happiness that always seemed to envelop the wicked Lily Shane.
Whenhe told Emma the next day that he meant to marry Mary Conyngham, she turned suddenly white about the lips, and for once she was silent for a time before speaking. She must have seen that she had lost him forever, that she had lost even her grandchildren; but she had never yet surrendered weakly and she did not surrender now. She held her tongue, moved perhaps by the memory of Jason’s, “You never learn anything, Em. You’d better leave the boy alone, if you ever expect to see him again.”
She only said, “You might have waited a respectable time, so people wouldn’t talk. Why, Naomi’s hardly cold in her grave. You certainly don’t owe her much, but....”
“No one need know. We’re going away. We’ll keep it a secret if you like.”
She softened a little. “Why couldn’t you wait a little time?” (Mary might die or he might grow tired of her, if he would only wait.)
He looked at her steadily. “I’ve waited too long already, years too long.”
“And now that your Pa’s going back to Australia for a time, I’ll be alone ... I won’t have anybody. It’s hard when you’re beginning to be old to find your life hasn’t come to anything ... all the struggle gone for nothing.”
He saw that she was beginning to “work herself up” in the old fashion that she always used as a last resort. He knew the signs, and he didn’t care any longer. She couldn’t touch him that way. The trick had worn itself out, and he saw her with a strange, cruel clarity.One thing, however, did soften him ... “now that your Pa is going back to Australia for a time....” She didn’t know that she would never see Jason again.
“I’ll come sometimes to visit you,” he said. “You won’t lose me.”
“But it’s not the same, Philip. When a girl marries, she still belongs to her mother, but when a boy marries, he is lost forever.”
“But, Ma, I was married before.”
“But that didn’t count. Naomi didn’t make any difference. She was always a sort of poor thing.”
Theymade a part of the journey from the coast by the feeble half-finished railway that had only lately thrust its head like a serpent through the wilderness that had been untouched when Philip with Naomi and Swanson and Lady Millicent had made their way on foot to the coast. It was the end of the rainy season, before the coming of the burning heat, and Mary saw the country at its best, when it was still green and the earth still damp and pungent. The railroad came to an end abruptly, for no reason at all, in a clump of scrubby trees, and here they passed the second night in a shack shared by the East Indian guards. Long after nightfall, Mary heard the first roar of a lion—a strange, spasmodic, coughing sound, that came nearer and nearer until the frail wall of the shack trembled with the reverberation. Sitting up in bed, she fancied that she heard the beast circling the little shed. It came so near that she listened to the sound of its wheezing breath ... a queer, brutal sound, that created a sudden vision of slobbering, ruthless jaws.
In the morning, she found the footprints of the beast in the damp earth, great toed prints pressed deep by the weight of the tawny body. And again the terror seized her, this time a terror less of the beast than of the dark thing for which he seemed to stand as a symbol. She knew as she stood looking down at the tracks in the earth that what had happened just before dawn was not a nightmare, but reality. It was part of this life which she was entering. Every day would be like this. She said nothing to Philip. She succeeded in behaving as if the night had been the most usual thing in the world. For she was aware that she must not disturb the peace that seemed to settle over him, slowly, with each mile that brought them nearer to Megambo and the brassy lake. He appeared no longer to be tired and troubled; yet he was not the old, gentle, dependent Philip she had always known. It was still a new one she had never seen before—a Philip who seemed still and quiet, who seemed at times to be looking far beyond the world that lay all about them. Twice she had discovered him thus staring across the scrub-covered plains, as if he were enchanted by the sense of vast emptiness.
She never shattered his moods by so much as a word, yet she was frightened, for at such times he seemed to withdraw far beyond her into a strange mystical world of his own where she had no part. Once she awakened in the night to find him sitting by the side of the fire, awake, looking up at the dome of cobalt sky powdered with stars. She lay there for a long time watching him. He turned toward her, and she closed her eyes quickly, pretending to be asleep. The old terror seized her that he was escaping her in an unearthly fashion that left her powerless.
On the fourth day, at the crest of a low hill covered with thorn-trees, Philip halted the little train of bearers, and said to her, “That ought to be the lake and Megambo.” He pointed into the distance where the plain seemed to break up into a group of low hills covered with trees, and then far beyond to turn intothe dark line of a real forest. At an immense distance, out of the heat, the mountains appeared like a mirage. She stared for a long time, and presently she saw that what at first she had believed to be only sky was in reality a vast lake. As she looked, it seemed in a way to come alive, to be striking the reflection of the sky from a surface made of metal. It was a dark, empty country, wild and faintly sinister in its stillness.
Itwas Swanson who saw them coming and went out to meet them on the edge of the forest. He had heard the news from a black runner on his way up the lake to join a party of German engineers who were bound inland. He was so changed that Philip looked at him for a moment with the air of a stranger. He was much thinner and had lost most of his hair. As if to compensate the loss, he had grown an immense sandy beard, which gave him the air of a comic monk. But the slow, china-blue eyes were the same, and the way of talking slowly, as if he were always afraid that his tongue would run faster than his dull brain.
Philip said, “This is my wife,” and the shadow of Naomi suddenly fell on the three of them. “You got my letter?”
Poor Swanson had turned crimson, and stood awkwardly, holding his battered straw hat in his sausage-like hands. “No,” he stammered. “No—what letter?”
For a moment there was a terrible silence. They both saw that he had expected Naomi. He had thought all the while that the woman he saw from afar off with the train of bearers that wound along the river wasNaomi ... coming back. And it was true. Shehadcome back. She had returned in the strangest way to take possession of them all. She was there in the stupid, puzzled eyes of Swanson, in the confusion of Mary, in the tragic silence of Philip.
It was Philip who spoke suddenly. “Naomi is dead!” And Mary thought bitterly, “She isn’t dead! She isn’t dead! This place belongs to her. This strange man wishes that I were Naomi.”
“We’ve missed you,” said Swanson dully.
“I’ll tell you about it ... later, when we’re settled. Let’s be moving on now.”
“I’m glad you’ve come back. I got no letter from you; I only knew from the Germans who came through a week ago.” Swanson had suddenly the air of a child who has forgotten the poem that he was to recite before a whole audience of people. He was aware, in his dull way, that he had blundered.
Philip said quickly, “I’m not coming back to work ... at least not as a missionary. That’s all finished.”
“We never get any news out here,” said Swanson humbly. “I didn’t know.”
“Are you alone?”
“No ... there’s a new man. Murchison ... he’s a preacher. He’s doing Naomi’s work.”
(Naomi! Naomi! Naomi!)
“Let’s go on now,” said Philip. He shouted at the bearers an order to march, and as they walked, Philip said, “We passed a train of bearers in the distance yesterday ... over beyond the Rocks of Kami. Who was it?”
For a moment Swanson was silent. He scratched his head. “Oh, that ... that ... it must have been that queer Englishwoman’s train ... going back alone.”
They were entering the borders of the real forest, where the moist earth was covered by a tangle of vines and a pattern of light and dark. Philip asked, “Why ... alone?”
“She died three days ago ... of the fever. Murchison would have sent her away if she hadn’t been sick. She abused missionaries. She said we were spoiling her country.”
“Yes ... she thought it belonged to her.”
The shadows grew thicker and thicker all about them. They walked in silence, save for the occasional chatter of a monkey.
“It was the third time she’d been back,” said Swanson.
“She must have been quite old.”
“About sixty, maybe. She told Murchison to stop praying over her. ‘Stop slobbering over me,’ is what she said.”
“Yes ... shewouldsay that. Where did you bury her?”
“Down the lake ... by the lagoon.”
By the lagoon ... the spot where Philip had come upon the black women carrying water from the lake. It was a beautiful spot, a quiet place to rest.
“She asked to be buried there. She liked the place.”
They walked in silence until suddenly through the trees and the tangle of vines the glittering lake became visible, and a moment later the clearing on the low hill where Philip had once fought back the ravenous jungle. There was no trace of the old mission that had been burned; there were two new huts, larger thanthe old, built by the patient Swanson of mud and of stones dragged up from the river-bed in dry season.
Mary, watching Philip, knew what he was seeing. Naomi ... Naomi. The place belonged to her in a strange, inexplicable fashion. She saw suddenly that Naomi perhaps belonged in a place like this with a stupid man like Swanson ... a man who was all faith, too stupid even to have doubts.
On a platform before one of the huts a strange figure sat before a table reading aloud in the native tongue some long harangue which was repeated after him by ten or a dozen black girls who sat swaying monotonously to the rhythm of their own voices. The sound was droning and monotonous, like the sound of a hive of bees.
“That’s Murchison,” said Swanson. The figure was dressed in a black suit like an undertaker, with a high white celluloid collar gaping about a reedlike neck, which it no longer fitted. On his head was a stiff straw hat, yellowed with age. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles that in the heat had slipped well down upon a long nose.
“He’s dressed up to greet you,” said Swanson.
The black girls, all save one or two, had ceased their buzzing and were staring now with pokes and giggles at the newly arrived procession. The Reverend Mr. Murchison halted the two dutiful girls who were going mechanically on with their lesson, and stepped down from his throne. He was an ugly little man with a sour expression.
He shook hands and to Mary he said, “I suppose you’ll want to take back your girls. I’ve been teachingthem while you were away. We’ve made a good deal of progress, I guess....”
There was a silence and Mary said:
“But I’m not Naomi ... Naomi is dead.”
The Reverend Mr. Murchison passed lightly over his error. “Like true children of God,” he said, “let us kneel here in the dust and humbly thank Him for having brought you safely through a perilous journey.”
The little man flopped duly to his knees, followed by Swanson. Mary waited, watching Philip, and then she saw him kneel along with the others. He didn’t protest. He knelt and bowed his head. She knew suddenly why he was doing this—because it would have pleased Naomi. Then she knelt, too, with the old fear in her heart. She was afraid, because he was praying.... He kept slipping further and further....
“O Just and Almighty God,” said the dry, flat voice of the withered Mr. Murchison, “we thank Thee for having brought these poor humble travelers safely through their perilous journey....” Swanson knelt dumbly, his head bowed. It was the gnatlike Mr. Murchison who ruled the mission. But it was the meek Swanson who was the servant of God. Mary saw all at once the vast and immeasurable difference.
Philipmade no effort to paint. The box containing his things lay forgotten in a dark corner of the hut, and for three days he went out to spend hours wandering alone along the shores of the tepid lake. Mary only waited, fighting a queer unnatural jealousy of theghost that walked with him. And on the fourth night she was awakened by his voice saying, “Mary, I feel ill. I’m afraid I’ve caught the fever again.” It was a voice peaceful and full of apology.
By noon the fever had taken possession of his thin body, and by evening he lay still and unconscious. For three days and three nights Mary sat beside him, while Swanson fumbled with his medicines, and kept saying in his kind, clumsy way, “He’ll be all right now. You mustn’t fret. Why, he’s strong as an ox. I’ve seen him like this before.” She sat by the bed, bathing Philip’s thin face, touching his head gently with her hand. In her weariness she deceived herself, thinking at times, “He’s cooler now. It will pass,” but in the end she always knew the bitter truth—that the fever hadn’t passed. It was always there, burning, burning, burning the little life that remained.
Sometimes in his delirium he talked of Lady Millicent and Swanson, but nearly always of Naomi. She was always there, as if she, too, stayed by the side of the crude bed ... watching.
In the middle of the fourth night, when Swanson had come in to look at him, Philip stirred slowly, and opened his eyes. For a moment he looked about him with a bewildered look in the burning blue eyes, and then he reached out weakly, and took her hand. “Mary,” he said, “my Mary ... always mine since the beginning.”
He asked her to get a pencil and a block of paper out of his box, and then he said, “I want you to write something for me. I’ll tell you what it is....” When she returned, he lay silent for a time, and thenhe said, “It’s this, Mary. Listen.... Write.... I think it ought to go like this.... ‘Whatever happens, after my death, I mean that my children, Philip and Naomi ... whom I had by my first wife, Naomi Potts, are never to be left in the care of my mother, Emma Downes.’”He hesitated for a moment, and then weakly murmured, “‘The same is my wish with regard to any child who may be born after my death ... of my second wife, Mary Conyngham.’”Again he paused. “‘This is my express wish.’”He beckoned with his eyes to Swanson. “Raise me up,” he said. “Here, Mary, give me the pencil and the paper.” She held the drawing-block for him while the thin, brown hand wrote painfully the words “Philip Downes.”
The pencil dropped to the floor. “Now, Swanson ... you must sign it as witness....” Swanson laid him back gently and then wrote his own name and went quietly out.
As his grotesque figure shut out from the doorway the blue of the African night, she knelt beside him, and, pressing the dry, hot hands against her cheek, she cried out, “But you’re not going to die, Philip.... You’re not going to die! I won’t let you!” She would hold him by her own will. Anything was possible in this strange, terrifying world by the lake.
“No ... Mary ... I’m not going to die. I only wanted to make certain.”
The room grew still, and all at once she found herself praying. Her lips did not move, but she was praying. She was ashamed to have Philip hear her, and she was ashamed, too, before God that she shouldturn to Him only when she had desperate need. But none of these things made any difference. In her terror and anguish she prayed. God would hear her. He would know and understand if he were a good God.
Then suddenly she felt his hand relax ever so little, gently, and she said softly, “Philip! Philip!”
After a long silence, he said, “Yes ... Mary,” and pressed her hand feebly. “I’m here.”
“Philip ... I think there is to be a child.... You must live on his account.”
“I’m glad, Mary ... I mean to live. I mean to live.”
She fell to praying again, and again she felt the thin hand relax. This time it slipped slowly from her cheek.
“Philip! Philip!”
He did not answer, and again she called, “Philip! Philip!”
His eyes were closed, but he still breathed. She began to pray once more, pressing her body close to his. She never knew how long she knelt there, but presently she knew that the thin, brown hands were no longer hot. The fever had gone out of them, and she thought suddenly, “The thing has passed, and he is safe.” But the coolness turned slowly to a strange dead chill. She raised her head and looked at him. He seemed asleep, but he was so still. She touched his face, and the head fell a little to one side. The mouth opened. And then she knew....
Without a sound, she slipped to the dusty earth beside the cot. She tasted the earth with her lips, but she did not even raise her head.
When she came out of the hut to find Swanson, it was still dark, although a faint rim of light had begun to show above the surface of the lake. Near the opening in the barricade, the night fire had burned to a glowing pile of embers. For a long time she stood there beneath the stars, listening to the mysterious sounds of the African night, on the very spot where Philip had once stood, half-naked, listening to the sound of the drums, lost in a strange, savage delight at the discovery of being alive and young and a man. And at last there came to her the feeling that she was not alone, but surrounded by the creatures who filled all the night with their sense of life. She was not alone, for Naomi was there, too. This strange world belonged to Naomi. She herself was only an intruder.
A sound of birds churring in the darkness roused her, and she went off to find Swanson. He was asleep in his hut and he wakened slowly, clumsily. For once, understanding without being told, he rose and followed her.
As the gray turned to rose above the lake, and the sounds of the waking forest grew more distinct, she knelt by the side of the cot while Swanson prayed, and slowly she came to understand that in his simplicity he was a good man, akin in his selfless simplicity, to the wild things in the gloomy forest that surrounded them. She understood, too, that Philip had meant to die thus, that he had come here to the spot where death was certain. But she saw, too, that he had really died long ago, on the night that had followed their happiness in the room above the stable. She didn’t hate Naomi: she had never hated her.
The morning light began to filter in through the doorway, and the spaces below the thatching. She stirred and took up the drawing-block on which Philip had written his name. No, it was not Naomi that she hated....
Two days later they buried him beneath the acacia not far from the fresh grave of the battered old Lady Millicent, on the spot where once, for the first time, he had known a blinding intimation of what life might be. He had known it again afterward—once as he stood in the moonlight listening to the drums, and again, on the day the wicked Lily Shane came to the stable; and then at last on the night he returned to find Mary waiting in the darkness.
It was the simple Swanson who read the service, because Mary wished it; for the Reverend Mr. Murchison made her think of Christians like Emma Downes and her brother, Elmer Niman.... It was the Reverend Mr. Murchison who would be the first Bishop of East Africa.
WhenEmma returned home one night from the restaurant to find a letter from Madagascar addressed in a strange handwriting, she knew what had happened. For a long time, she sat at the dining-room table, staring at the letter, for the sight of it threw her into one of those rare moods when for a moment she gave herself over to reflection and so came unbearably near to seeing herself. She had known all along that it wascertain to happen, yet the knowledge had not prepared her in any way. It seemed as hard to bear as if he had been killed suddenly by some terrible accident in the Mills.
He had not told her he was returning to Megambo until he had gone, when it was too late for her to act; and now she knew that he had died without ever seeing the letter she had sent, as it were, into space, to follow him in time to turn him back. He had died, she saw, without even knowing at all she had written, begging him not to be so hard, to think of her as his mother who was willing to sacrifice everything for his happiness. She would (she had written) forgive Mary, and try her best to behave toward her as if Mary were her own daughter. What more could she have done? To forgive Mary who had stolen him from her?
As she sat there the dull pain of a hopeless loneliness took possession of her. Here she was, at fifty, beginning for the first time to feel tired and in need of companionship, and she had no one—not even her own grandchildren. It was cruel, she told herself, to have suffered as she had suffered, with no reward but this—to end life alone after struggling for so long, always bent upon doing the right thing. Surely she had lived as God meant her to live, a Christian life filled with sacrifice to individuals and duty. Surely no one since Job had been so bitterly tried ... no husband ... no son ... alone.
And presently her blunt, strong fingers tore open the envelope, and she read the letter. It was brief, almost like a cablegram ... a few lines which told her what she already knew, that Philip, her little boy,was dead. The sight of the word “dead” and the name “Mary Downes” signed at the end, filled her with a sudden wave of bitterness that swept away all her sorrow. It was Mary who had stolen him from her like a thief. What could be more sinful than to steal from a mother a son for whom she had sacrificed her whole life? It was Mary who had destroyed him in the end, by filling his head with strange ideas, and leading him back to Africa. She was finished now with Mary. She would like to see Mary dead. And some day (perhaps it had happened already) Mary would receive the wandering letter and read, “I will even forgive Mary and try to treat her as if she were my own daughter.” Then perhaps for a moment she would feel remorse over what she had done.
The letter lay crumpled in her work-stained hand. She began suddenly to weep, falling forward and burying her head in her arms beneath the glow of the gas-dome, painted with wild-roses. She had suffered too long.... She kept seeing Philip as a little boy....
After midnight, when she had ceased to weep, she rose, and, turning out the light, went up the creaking stairs of the home she had made her own by the labor of her own hands ... the house (she thought bitterly) she had meant for Philip. She had done everything for his sake.
Alone in her own room, she thought, “I must not give in. I must go on. God will in the end reward me.” The old spirit began to claim her.
She put on mourning (a thing her conscience had not permitted her to do when Naomi died), and in the Town people said, “Poor Emma Downes! She hashad almost too much to bear. It is a life like hers that makes you sometimes doubt God ... a good woman like that deserves a better reward.” She even had a letter from Moses Slade.
Only McTavish did not join in the pity. To him it seemed that the chain of her calamities was as inevitable as a Greek tragedy. It was not God, but Emma herself, who had created them. And he saw what the others did not, that Emma was by no means a broken woman.
And, after a time, she came even to create a certain glory out of Philip’s death, for she found that people believed he had gone back to Megambo to take up his old work, and so had gone back to certain death and martyrdom. She did not disillusion them: it could not, surely, be wrong to let them believe that her Philip was a martyr. Philip, who must now be with God, would understand. And, sitting in church, she knew that people about her thought of him as her martyred son. He had not lived to be Bishop of East Africa, but he had died a martyr....
There remained, however, one more blow. Two months after Philip’s death, she received a second letter, in a strange handwriting, this time from Australia. As she opened it, there fell out a photograph on a picture postcard. It was the photograph of seven people, all of them strangers save Jason, who sat in the middle of the front row beside a large, rather coarse and plain woman, whose hand rested on his shoulder. At the bottom was written: “Upper row: Jason, Henry, Hector. Lower row: Bernice, old Jason, self and Emma.”
It was “self and Emma” which startled her. Who was “self,” and who was “Emma”?
She read:
“Dear Madam:“I am writing because I knew you would be interested in the details of Jason’s death....”
“Dear Madam:
“I am writing because I knew you would be interested in the details of Jason’s death....”
(Jason’s death! Jason dead!)
“He died a month ago on board ship coming home....”
“He died a month ago on board ship coming home....”
(Coming home! What did it mean—coming home? This house was Jason’s home!)
“He died from a fall down some steps. I guess he had been taking a drop too much. You know how Jason was. And he hit his head where he had fallen once before. You remember the scar he had. Well, that’s where he hit himself. He didn’t ever become conscious again, and died two days later.“I know you will be wondering about the postcard. Well, it is me and Jason and our five children. No, Jason was no bigamist. We was never married. He came to my father’s ranch looking for work twenty-four years ago. The eldest, Jason, is twenty-two come Michaelmas. He wasn’t much good as a worker, but he was good company and the ranch was a lonely place, so Pa kept him on. He told such good stories. And the following spring—I was eighteen then, but developed like a woman of twenty-five, he seduced me. I guess I wanted to be seduced. You know what away Jason had with women. My only complaint against him as a husband was that it was hard to keep him in order. Well, when Pa found out that I was in the family way, he was hoppin’ mad, and I didn’t care, because I was off my nut about Jason. Pa said he had to marry me, and Jason said he couldn’t, because he already had a wife. So then when Pa had cooled down a bit, he said we was all to go to Sydney, and pretend we was married there, and if Jason ever deserted me he’d go after him with a gun and shoot him. The way it was about here then, it didn’t make much difference if you was married or not. It was kind of wild. So we pretended we was married because Pa was a believer and a Primitive Methodist.“Well, at the time Pa died, we had four children, and he left everything to me, I being his only child, and heir. Emma was born after he died. Maybe you’ll think it was funny about her name. It was Jason who wanted to call her Emma. He said he’d like to because it made him think of old times. I said it was all the same to me, though I wanted to call her Opal.“Jason must have told you that he was rich and owned a lot of land. He was always a liar. Well, it ain’t true. He didn’t own a square foot of land, and he never made a ha’penny in all the time he was my husband. I even gave him the money to go back to America to see you. He wanted to go so bad I couldn’t say no to him. I guess he was curious about that son of his in America, and maybe he wanted to see you, too. I just wanted you to know this, so you wouldn’t think there was any money coming to you or your son.“I always speak of him as my husband. He may have been married to you, but he was really mine. Hewas happy out here and I need never to reproach myself for anything I did while he was alive. He always belonged to me and as I’ve often told him, before he passed away, that counts for more than all the banns and marriage certificates in the world. That’s why I didn’t mind his paying you a brief visit. I KNEW he’d come back to me.“Well, I can’t think of any more that ought to be said. He often spoke of you kindly. The worst he ever said was, ‘Em had an unfortunate temperament.’ I think that was how he put it. He was embalmed on ship, and at his funeral looked very natural. He was a remarkable young-looking man for his age. Well, I will stop now.“Yours respectively,“Dora Downes.“(Mrs. Jason Downes.)“Postscriptum. The picture is good of all except me and Emma. I never did photograph well. It was a thing Jason always said—that photographs never did me justice.”
“He died from a fall down some steps. I guess he had been taking a drop too much. You know how Jason was. And he hit his head where he had fallen once before. You remember the scar he had. Well, that’s where he hit himself. He didn’t ever become conscious again, and died two days later.
“I know you will be wondering about the postcard. Well, it is me and Jason and our five children. No, Jason was no bigamist. We was never married. He came to my father’s ranch looking for work twenty-four years ago. The eldest, Jason, is twenty-two come Michaelmas. He wasn’t much good as a worker, but he was good company and the ranch was a lonely place, so Pa kept him on. He told such good stories. And the following spring—I was eighteen then, but developed like a woman of twenty-five, he seduced me. I guess I wanted to be seduced. You know what away Jason had with women. My only complaint against him as a husband was that it was hard to keep him in order. Well, when Pa found out that I was in the family way, he was hoppin’ mad, and I didn’t care, because I was off my nut about Jason. Pa said he had to marry me, and Jason said he couldn’t, because he already had a wife. So then when Pa had cooled down a bit, he said we was all to go to Sydney, and pretend we was married there, and if Jason ever deserted me he’d go after him with a gun and shoot him. The way it was about here then, it didn’t make much difference if you was married or not. It was kind of wild. So we pretended we was married because Pa was a believer and a Primitive Methodist.
“Well, at the time Pa died, we had four children, and he left everything to me, I being his only child, and heir. Emma was born after he died. Maybe you’ll think it was funny about her name. It was Jason who wanted to call her Emma. He said he’d like to because it made him think of old times. I said it was all the same to me, though I wanted to call her Opal.
“Jason must have told you that he was rich and owned a lot of land. He was always a liar. Well, it ain’t true. He didn’t own a square foot of land, and he never made a ha’penny in all the time he was my husband. I even gave him the money to go back to America to see you. He wanted to go so bad I couldn’t say no to him. I guess he was curious about that son of his in America, and maybe he wanted to see you, too. I just wanted you to know this, so you wouldn’t think there was any money coming to you or your son.
“I always speak of him as my husband. He may have been married to you, but he was really mine. Hewas happy out here and I need never to reproach myself for anything I did while he was alive. He always belonged to me and as I’ve often told him, before he passed away, that counts for more than all the banns and marriage certificates in the world. That’s why I didn’t mind his paying you a brief visit. I KNEW he’d come back to me.
“Well, I can’t think of any more that ought to be said. He often spoke of you kindly. The worst he ever said was, ‘Em had an unfortunate temperament.’ I think that was how he put it. He was embalmed on ship, and at his funeral looked very natural. He was a remarkable young-looking man for his age. Well, I will stop now.
“Yours respectively,
“Dora Downes.“(Mrs. Jason Downes.)
“Postscriptum. The picture is good of all except me and Emma. I never did photograph well. It was a thing Jason always said—that photographs never did me justice.”
When she had finished reading, Emma took up the postcard and looked again at the three strapping sons and the two robust daughters, but her chief interest lay in the figure of Dora Downes (Mrs. Jason Downes!) She was a healthy, rather plain woman, with an enormous shelflike bosom on which her fat double chin appeared to rest. Beside her, Jason appeared, small and dapper and insignificant, like a male spider beside the female who devours her mate after he has filled Nature’s demands.
“She must have been plain always,” thought Emma. “She’s really a repulsive woman.”
Then she rose and, going into the kitchen, lifted an iron plate from the stove, and thrust into the coals the letter and the picture postcard, sending them the way of that other letter left by Jason twenty-seven years earlier.
One thing in the letter she could not forget—“I knew he’d come back to me.”
It was a little more than a year later that Moses Slade and Emma Downes were married quietly in Washington, but not so quietly that Sunday newspapers did not have pictures of the bride and bridegroom taken outside the church. They had come together again, through the strangest circumstances, for Moses, still unmarried, had found himself suddenly involved with Mamie Rhodes, who Emma had once said “did something to men.” He was, in fact, so involved that blackmail or the ruin of a career seemed the only way out ... the only way save marriage with some woman so prominent and so respectable as to suffocate any doubts regarding his breach of morality. “And what woman,” he had asked himself, “fitted such a rôle as well as Emma Downes, who was now a widow ... arealwidow whose troublesome son was dead.” He saw with his politician’s eye all the protection she could give him as a prominent figure, known for her moral strictness and respectability, pitied for the trials she had borne with such Christian fortitude. Such a woman, people (voters) would say, could not marry him if the stories about Mamie Rhodes were true.
So he had gone to Emma and, confessing everything, thrown himself upon her mercy. For five days she kepthim in doubt, and terror, lest she refuse, and in the end she accepted, but only at a price ... that it should remain, as she expressed it, “a marriage in name only.”
In the end, she subdued even Moses Slade. It was in reality Emma who sat in his seat in the House of Representatives. It was Emma who cast his votes. She became, in a small way, a national figure, concerned always with moralities and reforms. She came into a full flowering as chairman or member of a dozen committees and movements against whisky and cigarettes, and for Sunday closing. She made speaking tours, when she was received by palpitating ladies who labored in vain to sap the robust vitality of their country. There were times when her progress became a marvel of triumph. She was known as a splendid speaker.
But the apotheosis of her glory was reached in the war, when she offered her services as a speaker to right and to left—to aid recruiting, or Y.M.C.A. funds, to attack Bolshevism and denounce the barbarous Huns. She had a marvelous speech which began on a quavering note: “I had a son of my own once, but he gave his life as a martyr in Africa, fighting the good fight for God and home and Christian faith, even as all our boys are fighting to-day against a whole race, a whole nation bent upon spreading murder and destruction across the face of God’s bright earth. (Cheers.) If my son were alive to-day, he would be over there, on the rim of the world (cheers), etc., etc.”
It was in making this speech that she wore herself out. The end came on a wet, chill night in KansasCity, when, speaking on behalf of the Y.M.C.A., she was taken with a chill. Moses Slade came from Washington to be at her bedside, and so was there at the end to tell her that “she’d given her life as much as any soldier who fell in Flanders Field.”
She was buried in the Town, alone, for the grave of her husband was in Australia, and that of her son beside a tepid lake in East Africa. The funeral service, in the enthusiasm of the war, became a sort of public festival, done to the titanic accompaniment of the Mills, which pounded now as they had never done before, to heap up piles of shells in the dead, abandoned park of Shane’s Castle. It was an end which she would have liked. The new preacher, more sanctimonious but less moving than the Reverend Castor, made a high-flown and flowery funeral oration. He did it skilfully, though it was a difficult thing to speak of her trials and still not raise the ghosts of Naomi and the Reverend Castor. But the ghosts were there: they troubled the minds of every member of the congregation.
In conclusion, he said in a voice rich with enthusiasm, “She never lost her faith through trials more numerous than are the lot of most. She gave her son to God and her own life to this great cause which is so near to the heart of us all. She was brave and courageous, and generous and tolerant, but she fought always for the right like a good soldier. She never had any doubts. She was, in brief, all that is meant when our hearts lead us to say of some one, ‘She was a good woman....’”
It was in the following year that the Town bought the Castle from Lily Shane who had never returned toit since the night of the riot. The Town demolished the place and even dug away the hill itself to make a site for the new railway station. When the wreckers attacked the stable they found a room whose walls were covered with pencil sketches. By the window stood a half-finished painting black with soot and dust. On the table there was a coffee-pot, several soiled plates, and a fragment of something which turned out to be bread. Nearby beneath a layer of soot lay a woman’s handkerchief of fine linen marked with the initials M.C.; one of the workmen took it home to his wife. The other things—the sketches and the painting—were thrown into a heap and burned on the very spot where eight years before there had been another fire in the snow.
THE END