A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 18
The morning came quickly in a cold gray haze, for the furnaces, starting to work one by one as the strike collapsed, had begun again to cover the Flats with a canopy of smoke. It was Mary who went first, going by the back drive, which led past the railway-station. And with her departure the whole world turned dark. While she had been there with him, he was happy with the sense of security that is born of companionship in adventure, but as her figure faded presently into the smoke and mist that veiled the deserted houses of the Flats, the enchantment of the night gave way to a cold, painful sense of actuality. The whole night had been, as some nights are in the course of lives that move passionately, unreal and charged with strange, intangible currents of fire and ice. During that brief hour or two when he had slept, years seemed to have passed. The figure of his father had become so remote that he no longer seemed cheap and revolting, but only shallow and pitiful. Even the memory of McTavish and the two men with the lantern standing over the dead woman in the snow was dim now and unreal.
It was only the sight of the trampled, dirty snow, the black spot where the fire had been and the pool of blood at the turn of the drive that made him know how near had been all these things which had happened during the night. And the park was no longer beautiful and haunted in the moonlight, but only a dreary expanse of land filled with dead trees and decaying arbors. The old doubts began slowly to torment him once more—the feeling of terror lest Naomi should ever discover what had happened, and the knowledge that he had betrayed her. There was, too, an odd new fear that he might become such a man as his father. It was born in that cold, gray light, of a sudden knowledge that deep inside him lay sleeping all the weaknesses, all the sensuality, of such a man. After what had happened in the night, he saw suddenly that he might come like his father to live in a shallow world that shut out all else. He was afraid suddenly, and ashamed, for he had been guilty of a sin which his father must have committed a hundred times.
Yet he had, too, an odd new sense of peace, a soothing, physical, animal sort of peace, that seemed to have had its beginnings months ago, in the moments of delirium when he had wanted to live only because he could not die without knowing such an experience as had come to him in the night. It was, he supposed, Nature herself who had demanded this of him. And now she had rewarded him with this sense of completeness. Nature, he thought, had meant his children to be Mary's children, too; and now that couldn't be . . . unless . . . unless Naomi died.
It was a wicked thought that kept stealing back upon him. It lay in hiding at the back of his mind, even in the last precious moments before Mary had left, when she stood beside the stove making the coffee. He had thought again and again, "If only Naomi died . . . we could be like this forever." Watching her, he had thought, despite all his will to the contrary, of what love had been with Naomi and what with Mary. And he had told himself that it wasn't fair to think such things, because he had never loved Naomi: at such moments he had almost hated her. Yet she had loved him, and was ashamed of her love, so that she made all their life together a sordid misery. And Mary, who had been without shame, had surrounded her love with a proud and reckless glory. Yet, in the end, it was Mary who hid, who stole away through the black houses of the Flats as if she had done a shameful thing, and it was Naomi who bore his children. For a moment he almost hated the two helpless little creatures he had come so lately to love, because a part of them was also a part of Naomi.
As he stood by the window, all wretched and tormented, he saw coming across the trampled snow the battered figure of Hennery. He was coming from the house, and his bent old figure seemed more feeble and ancient than it had ever been before. He entered the stable, and Philip heard him coming painfully up the stairs. At the sight of Philip, he started suddenly, and said, "You scared me, Mr. Downes . . . my nerves is all gone. I ain't the same since last night." He took off his hat and began fumbling in his pockets. "I got a letter for you . . . that strike feller left it for you . . . that . . . I doan' know his name, but the feller that made all the trouble."
He brought forth a piece of pale mauve paper that must have belonged to Lily Shane, but was soiled now from contact with Hennery's pocket.
"He was in the house all night," said Hennery, "a-hiding there, I guess, from the police, and he's gone now."
Then he was silent while Philip opened the note and read in the powerful, sprawling hand of Krylenko: He read it again and then he heard Hennery saying, "It was a turrible night, Mr. Downes . . . I guess it was one of those nights when all kinds of slimy things are out walkin'. They're up and gone too . . . both of them . . . the girls, Miss Lily and Miss Irene. And they ain't comin' back, so Miss Lily says. She went away, before it was light, on the New York flier. Oh, it was a turrible night, Mr. Downes . . . I've seen things happenin' here for forty years, but nothin' like last night . . . nothin' ever."
He began to moan and call on the Lord, and Philip remembered suddenly that the half-finished drawing of Lily Shane had disappeared. She had carried it off then, without a word. And slowly she again began to take possession of his imagination. For a moment he tried to picture her house in Paris where his drawing of her would be hung. She had gone away without giving him another thought.
Hennery was saying over and over again, "It was a turrible night . . . something must-a happened in the house too. The Devil sure was on the rampage."
He stood there, staring out of the window, suffering from a curious, sick feeling of having been deserted. "By what? By whom?" he asked himself. "Not by Lily Shane, surely, on whom I had no claims . . . whom I barely knew." Yet it was Lily Shane who had deserted him. It was as if she had closed a door behind her, shutting him back into the world of Elmer and his mother and Jason Downes. The thing he had glimpsed for a moment was only an illusion. . . .