A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 14
It was Emma herself who saw him first. Returning flustered and upset from the call upon Mary Conyngham, she entered the slate-colored house closing the door stormily behind her. She would have passed the darkened parlor (where since Naomi's departure the shades were always kept drawn to protect the carpet), but, as she explained it afterward, she "felt" that there was some one in the room. Peering into the darkness, she heard a faint sound of snoring, and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she discerned the figure of a man lying on her best sofa, with his feet resting on the arm. He was sleeping with his mouth open a little way beneath a black mustache, waxed and curled with the care of a dandy.
As she stood there in the midst of the room, the figure in the shadows took form slowly, and suddenly she knew it . . . the dapper, small body, dressed so dudishly, the yellow waistcoat with its enormous gold watch-chain, and cluster of seals. She knew, with a sudden pang, even the small, well-shaped hand, uncalloused by any toil, that lay peacefully at rest on the Brussels carpet. For a second she thought, "I've gone suddenly crazy from all the trouble I've had. What I'm seeing can't be true."
It took a great deal of courage for her to move toward the sofa, for it meant moving in an instant, not simply across the Brussels carpet, but across the desert of twenty-six years. It meant giving up Moses Slade and all that resplendent future which had been taking form in her mind only a moment before. It was like waking the dead from the shadows of the tomblike parlor.
She did not lack courage, Emma; or perhaps it was not courage, but the headlong thrust of an immense vitality which now possessed her. She went over to the sofa and said, "Jason! Jason Downes!" He did not stir, and suddenly the strange thought came to her that he might be dead. The wicked idea threw her into an immense confusion, for she did not know whether she preferred the unstable companionship of the fascinating Jason to the bright future that would be hers as the wife of Moses. Then, all at once, she saw that the gaudy watch-chain was moving up and down slowly as he breathed, and she was smitten abruptly by memories twenty-six years old of morning after morning when she had wakened, full of energy, to find Jason lying beside her sleeping in the same profound, conscienceless slumber.
"Jason!" she said again. "Jason Downes!" And this time there was a curious tenderness in her voice that was almost a sob.
He did not stir, and she touched his shoulder. He moved slowly, and then, opening his eyes, sat up and put his feet on the floor. He awakened lazily, and for a moment he simply sat staring at her, looking as neat and dapper as if he had just finished an elaborate toilet. Again memory smote Emma. He had always been like this: he had always wakened in the mornings, looking fresh and neat, with every hair in place. It was that hair-oil he persisted in using. Now that he'd come home, she would have to get antimacassars to protect the furniture against Jason's oily head.
Suddenly he grinned and said, "Why! Hello! It's you, Em." It wasn't a sheepish grin, but a smile of cocky assurance, such as was frozen forever upon the face of the enlarged portrait.
"Jason . . . Jason! Oh, my God! Jason!" She collapsed suddenly and fell into the mahogany-veneer rocker. It was a strange Emma, less strange perhaps to Jason Downes than she would have been to the world outside, for suddenly she had become all soft and collapsed and feminine. All those twenty-six years had rolled away, leaving her helpless.
As if he had left the house only that morning, he sat on the arm of the chair and kissed her. He patted her hands and said, "You mustn't cry like that, Em. I can't bear to hear you. It breaks me all up."
"If you knew how long I'd waited!" she sobbed. "Why didn't you even write? Why didn't you tell me you were coming?"
He seemed a little proud of himself. "I wanted it to be a surprise."
He led her to the sofa and sat there, patting her hand and smiling, and comforting her while she wept and wept. "A surprise," she echoed. "A surprise . . . after twenty-six years. . . ." After a time she grew more calm, and suddenly she began to laugh. She kept saying at little intervals, "If you knew how I've waited!"
"I'm rich now, Emma," he said with the shadow of a swagger. "I've done well out there."
"Out where . . . Jason?"
"Out in Australia . . . where I went."
"You were in Australia?" He wasn't in China at all, then. The story was so old that she had come to believe it, and with a sudden shock of horror she saw that they would now have to face the ancient lie. He hadn't been in China, and he hadn't been killed by bandits. Here he was back again, and you couldn't keep a man like Jason shut up forever in the house. The Town would see him. She began once more to cry.
"There, there, Em!" he said, patting her hand again, almost amorously. "Don't take it so hard. You're glad I did come back, ain't you?"
"I don't know . . . I don't know. You don't deserve anything . . . even tears . . . after treating a wife the way you've treated me. Don't think I'm crying because I'm glad you're back. It's not that. I ought to turn you out. I'd do it, too, if I was an ordinary woman."
She saw then that she still had to manage everything, including Jason. She saw that he was as useless as he had always been. She would have to "take hold." The feminine softness melted away, and, sitting up, she blew her nose and said, "It's like this, Jason. When you went away, I said you'd gone to China on business. And when you didn't come back, I said I hadn't had any letters from you and something must be wrong. You see I pretended I heard from you regularly because . . . I wanted to protect you and because I was ashamed. I didn't want people to think you'd deserted me after everybody had warned me against you. And so Elmer. . . ."
"And how's he?" said Jason. "Cold boiled mutton, I call 'im."
"Wait till I finish my story, Jason. Try to keep your mind on what I'm saying. And so Elmer set the Government to investigating. . . ."
"They were looking for me? The United States Government itself?" There was in his voice and manner a sudden note of gratification at his importance.
"Yes . . . they hunted all over China."
Jason was grinning now. "It's lucky they was looking in China, because I was in Australia all the time."
"And they said you must have been killed by bandits . . . so I put on black and set out to support myself and Philip."
"Why didn't old pious Elmer help you out? I wouldn't have gone away, except that I knew 'e was rich enough to look out for you."
"Elmer's tight, and besides I didn't want him to be pitying me and saying, "I told you so' every time I asked him for a cent."
"And Philip? You haven't told me about him yet."
"We'll come to him. We've got to settle this other thing first. You see, Jason, we've got to do something about that lie I told . . . it wasn't really a lie because I told it for your sake and Philip's—to protect you both."
"Yes, it is kind-a awkward." He sat for a moment, trying to bring his volatile mind into profitable operation. At last he said, "You oughtn't to have told that lie, Em."
"I told you why I told it. God will understand me if no one else will."
"Now, Em, don't begin on that line. . . . It was always the line I couldn't stand. . . . You ain't no bleedin' martyr."
She looked at him with a sudden suspicion. "Jason, where did you pick up this queer talk . . . all the queer words you've been using?"
"Australia, I guess . . . living out among the cockneys out there." He rose suddenly. "Em, I can't sit any more in this dark. I can't think in a tomb." He went over and drew up the window-shades. As the fading winter light filled the room, he looked around him. "Why, it ain't changed at all! Just the same . . . wedding parlor suite and everything." His glance fell on the wall above the fireplace. "And you still got my picture, Em. That was good of you."
She showed signs of sobbing again. "It's all I had. . . ."
He was looking at the picture with a hypnotic fascination. "It's funny, I ain't changed much. You'd never think that picture was taken twenty-six years ago." He took out a pocket mirror and began comparing his features with those in the enlarged photograph. What he said was true enough. Time had left no marks on the smooth, good-looking face, nor even on a mind that was like a shining, darting minnow. He was as slim and dapper as ever. The hair was much thinner, but it was still dark, and with the aid of grease and shrewd manipulation you couldn't tell that he was really bald. Emma, watching him, had an awful suspicion that it was dyed as well; and the elegant mustaches too. She would be certain to discover, now that he had come back to share the same room and bed. She had a sudden, awful fear that she must look much older than he.
"I'm a little bald," he said ruefully, "but nothing very much."
"Jason," she said sternly. "Jason . . . we've got to settle this thing . . . now . . . before we do anything else. Did any one see you?"
"No, I don't think so." He replaced the pocket mirror with a mild, comic air of alarm at the old note of authority in her voice.
"You must think of something . . . you're better at such things than I am." He had, she remembered, the proper kind of an imagination. She knew from experience how it had worked long ago when he had given her excuses for his behavior.
He looked at her with an absurd air of helplessness. "What can we say? I suppose you could say I lost my memory . . . that I got hit on the head." Suddenly a great light burst upon the empty face. "I did get a fall on the steamer going out. I fell down a stairway and for three days I didn't know a thing. A fall like that might easily make you lose your memory. . . . A thing like that might happen." As if the possibilities of such a tale had suddenly dawned upon him, his face became illumined with that look which must come at times into the faces of great creative artists. He said, "Yes, I might have lost my memory, not knowing who I was, or where I came from, and then, after twenty-six years, I got another fall . . . how? . . . well out of the mow on my ranch in Australia, and when I came to, I remembered everything—that I had a wife in America. It's true—it might happen. I've read of such things."
Listening to him, Emma felt the story seemed too preposterous, and yet she knew that only heroic measures could save the situation. The bolder the tale, the better. It was, as he said, a story that might be true. Such things had happened. She could trust him, too, to make the tale a convincing one: the only danger lay in the possibility of his doing it too well. It occurred to her in the midst of her desperate planning that it was strange what wild, incredible things had happened in her life . . . a life devoted always to hard work and Christian living.
Jason's glittering mind had been working rapidly. He was saying, "You see, there's the scar and everything." He bent down, exposing the bald spot that was the only sign of his decay. "You see, there it is—the scar."
She looked at him scornfully, for the crisis of her emotion had passed now, and she was beginning to feel herself once more. "Now, Jason," she said, "I haven't forgotten where that scar came from. You've always had it. You got it in Hennessey's saloon."
For a second the dash went out of him. "Now, Em, you're not going to begin on that, the minute I get home." And then quickly his imagination set to work again, and with an air of brightness, as if the solution he had thought of vindicated him completely, he said, "Besides I wasn't bald in those days and nobody ever saw the scar. And the funny thing is that it was on that exact spot that I fell on the boat. It enlarged the scar." He looked at her in the way he had always done when he meant to turn her mind into more amiable channels. "Now, isn't that queer? It enlarged the scar."
It was clear that she meant not to be diverted from the business at hand. "I suppose that's as good a story as any. We've got to have a story of some kind. But you must stick to it, Jason, and don't make it too good. That's what you always do . . . make it too good." (Hadn't she, years ago, trapped him time after time in a lie, because he could not resist a too elaborate pattern of embroidery?)
She said, "But there's one thing I've got to do right away, and that is send word to Naomi to tell Philip."
"Who's Naomi?"
"She's Philip's wife."
"He's married?"
"He's been married for five years."
He made a clucking sound. "We're getting on, Em."
"And there's more than that. You're a grandfather."
The smooth face wrinkled into a rueful expression. "It's hard to think of myself as a grandfather. How old is the child, or the children?"
"They're twins."
He chuckled. "He did a good job, Philip."
"Now, Jason. . . ."
"All right, but how old are they?"
"Four months . . . nearly five."
"I must say that Philip took 'is time about it. Married five years. . . . Well, we didn't waste any time, did we, Em."
"Jason!"
She hated him when he was vulgar. She decided not to go into the reasons why Philip and Naomi had been married four years without children, because it was a thing which Jason wouldn't understand—sacrificing the chance of children to devote yourself to God. There was nothing spiritual about Jason. It was one of his countless faults.
"But who did 'e marry, Em? You haven't told me."
"Her name was Naomi Potts. You wouldn't know who she was. Her people were missionaries, and she was a missionary too."
"Oh, my God!"
"I won't have you blaspheming."
"And what's Philip like?"
"He was a missionary too. . . . He was three years in Africa . . . until his health broke."
"Oh, my God!" He grew suddenly thoughtful, moved perhaps by the suspicion that she had succeeded in doing to his son what she had failed to do to him.
She was at the door now. "I won't listen to you talking like that any longer." She turned in the doorway. "Don't go out till I come back. You mustn't be seen till we've worked this thing out. I've got to send word to them all."
When she had gone, he picked up his hat, took a cigar from his vest pocket and lighted it. In the hallway, he shouted at her, "Are we still using the same room, Em? I'll just move in my things and wash up a bit."
In the sitting-room Emma sat down and wrote three notes—one to Naomi, one to Mabelle, and the third to Moses Slade. With a trembling hand she wrote to him, "God has sent Jason, my husband, back to me. He came to-day. It is His will that we are not to marry. Your heartbroken Emma."
She summoned the slattern Essie, and, giving her instructions of a violence calculated to impress Essie's feeble mind, she bade her deliver the three notes, Mr. Slade's first of all. But once outside the sight of Emma, the hired girl had her own ideas of the order in which she meant to deliver them, and so the note to Moses Slade arrived last. But it made no difference, as the Honorable Mr. Slide, bearing a copy of the Labor Journal, was at the same moment on his way to Emma's to break off the engagement, for he had discovered the author of the libelous drawings. The latest one was signed boldly with the name, "Philip Downes." He never arrived at Emma's house, for on his way he heard in Smollett's Cigar Store that Jason Downes had returned, and so he saved himself the trouble of an unpleasant interview. For Essie, in the moment after the returned prodigal had made known to her his identity, had put on a cast-off hat of Emma's and set out at once to spread the exciting news through the Town.
When she returned at last from delivering the three notes, Emma was "getting Jason settled" in the bedroom he had left twenty-six years before. Essie, tempted, fell, and, listening outside the door, heard him recounting to his wife a wonderful story of having lost his memory for a quarter of a century. But one thing tormented the brain of the slattern Essie. She could not understand how Emma seemed to know the whole story and to put in a word now and then correcting him.
At the sound of Emma's footsteps approaching the door, Essie turned and, fleeing, hid in the hall closet, from which she risked her whole future by opening the door a little way to have a look at the fascinating Mr. Downes. Her heart thumped wildly under her cotton blouse at the proximity of so romantic a figure.