A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 17
The room above the stable was in darkness, but as he came up out of the staircase he saw that there was a woman sitting by the window, silhouetted against the moonlight beyond. He thought, "It must be Lily Shane, but why is she here at this hour of the night?" And then a low, familiar voice came out of the darkness, "It's only me, Philip . . . Mary." She spoke as if he must have known she was there, waiting for him.
He struck a match quickly and lighted the kerosene lamp, at which she rose and came over to him. By the flickering, yellow light he saw that she had been crying.
"It's been horrible, Philip. I saw it all from the window while I was waiting for you."
"I know . . . we just found a dead woman in the snow."
He was possessed by a curious feeling of numbness, in which Mary seemed to share, as if the horror of what had taken place outside wiped out all the strangeness of their meeting thus. Death, it seemed, had brushed by them so closely that it had swept away all but those things which lay at the foundation of existence—the fact that they loved each other, that they were together now, and that nothing else was of any importance. They were, too, like people stunned by horror. They sat by the stove, Philip in silence, while Mary told him what she had seen. For a long time it did not even appear strange to him that she should be there in his room at two o'clock in the morning.
He heard her saying, "Who was the woman they killed?"
"I don't know. She looked Italian."
There was a long silence and at last it was Mary, the practical Mary, who spoke. "You must wonder why I came here, Philip . . . after . . . after not seeing you at all for all this time."
He looked at her slowly, as if half-asleep. "I don't know. I hadn't even thought of it, Mary . . . anything seems possible to-night, anything seems possible in this queer park." And then, stirring himself, he reached across the table and touched her hand. She did not draw it away, and the touch gave him the strangest sense of a fathomless intimacy which went back and back into their childhood, into the days when they had played together in the tree-house. She had belonged to him always, only he had been stupid never to have understood it. He could have spoken out once long ago. If only he, the real Philip, had been born a little sooner, they would both have been saved.
And then, suddenly, he knew why she had come, and he was frightened.
He said, "You heard about my father?"
She started a little, and said, "No."
"He came back to-night. It was awful, Mary. If he'd only stayed away! If he'd never have come back.
So he told her the whole story, even to his suspicion that his father was a liar, and had deserted him and his mother twenty-six years before. He told her of the long agony of the reunion, describing his father in detail. And at the end, he said, "You see why I wish he'd never come back. You do see, don't you, Mary . . . if he'd stayed away, I'd never have thought of him at all, or at least only as my mother thought of him. But he isn't like that at all. I don't see how she can take him back . . . how she can bear to have him about."
She wanted to cry out, "Don't you see, Philip? Don't you see the kind of woman she is? If you don't see, nothing can save you. She's worse than he is, because he's harmless." But she only said quietly, "Perhaps she's in love with him. If that's true, it explains anything."
"Maybe it's that. She must be in love with him."
Mary thought, "Oh, Philip! If you'd only forget all the things that don't matter and just live, you'd be so much happier!" She wanted him to be happy more than anything in the world. She would, she knew, do anything at all to make him happy.
Presently she said, "She came to see me this afternoon, Philip . . . your mother. That's why I'm here now. She said horrible things . . . that weren't true at all. She said . . . she said . . . that I'd been living with you all along, and she'd just found out about it. She said that I came here to meet you in the stable. She's hated me always . . . just because I've always been fond of you. She said I'd tried to steal you from her."
For a moment he simply sat very still, staring at her. She felt his hand grow cold and relax its grasp. At last he whispered, "She said that? She said such things to you?"
"Yes . . . I ran away from her in the end. It was the only thing I could do."
Then all at once he fell on his knees and laid his head in her lap. She heard him saying, "There's nothing I can say, Mary. I didn't think she'd do a thing like that . . . and now I know, I know what kind of a woman she is. Oh, I'm so tired, Mary . . . you don't know how tired I am!"
She began to stroke his dark hair, and the sudden thought came to her with horror that in her desire for vengeance upon Emma Downes, it was not Emma she had hurt, but Philip.
He said, "You don't know what it is, Mary,—for months now . . . for years even, I've been finding out bit by bit . . . to have something gone that you've always believed in, to have some one you loved destroyed bit by bit, in spite of anything you can do. I tried and tried, but it was no good. And now . . . I can't hold out any more. I can't do it . . . I hate her . . . but I can never let her know it. I can never hurt her . . . because she really loves me, and it's true what she says . . . that she did everything for me. She fed and clothed me herself with her own hands."
Again Mary wanted to cry out, "She doesn't love you. She doesn't love any one but herself!" and again she kept silent.
"And now it's true . . . what she said . . . you've stolen me away from her, Mary. She's made it so. I'm through now . . . I can't go on trying any more."
Still stroking his head, she thought, "He's like a little boy. He's never grown up at all." And she said, "I was so angry, Philip, that I came here. I didn't care what happened; I only thought, 'If she thinks that's the truth, it might as well be, because she'll tell about it as the truth.' I didn't care any longer for anything but myself and you."
His head stirred, and he looked up at her, seizing her hands. "Is that true, Mary?" He kissed her hand suddenly.
"It's true . . . or why else should I be here, at this hour?" He was hopeless, she thought: he didn't live for a moment in reality.
He hadn't even thought it queer of her to be sitting there in his room long after midnight with his head on her knees. And suddenly she thought again, "If I'm his mistress, I can save him from her altogether. Nothing else can break it off forever."
He was kissing her hands, and the kisses seemed to burn her. He was saying, "Mary, I've loved you always, always . . . since the first time I saw you, but I only knew it when it was too late."
"It isn't too late, Philip. It isn't too late."
He was silent for a time, but she knew what he was thinking. He wasn't strong enough to take life into his own hands and bend it to his own will, or perhaps it wasn't a lack of strength, but only a colossal confusion that kept him caught and lost in an immense and hopeless tangle. Until to-night she hadn't herself been strong enough to act, but now a kind of intoxicating recklessness had seized her—the sober, sensible Mary Conyngham. She meant to-night to take him and comfort him, to make them both, for a little time, happy. To-morrow didn't matter. It would have been better if there were no to-morrow, if they could never wake at all.
It was Philip who spoke first. After a long silence, he said in a whisper, "I can't do it, Mary . . . I can't. It isn't only myself that matters. It's you and Naomi too. It isn't her fault any more than mine."
For a moment she wished wickedly that he had been a little more like John Conyngham, and then almost at once she saw that it was his decency, the very agony of his struggle, that made her love him so profoundly. And she was afraid that he would think her wicked and brazen and fleshly. It was a thing she couldn't explain to him.
There were no words rich enough, strong enough, to make him understand what it was that had brought her here. She had thought it all out, sitting for hours there by the window, in the light of the rising moon. She had felt life rushing past her. She was growing old with the passing of each second. She had seen a man killed, and afterwards Philip had himself come upon the body of a dead woman lying in the snow. Nothing mattered, save that they come together. What happened to her was of no consequence. Some terrible force, stronger than either of them, had meant them for each other since the beginning, and to resist it, to fight against it unnaturally as Philip was doing, seemed to her all at once a black and wicked sin.
He freed himself suddenly and stood up. "I can't do it, Mary. I'll go away. . . . You can spend the night here and leave in the morning. No one in the Town will know you haven't spent the night at Shane's Castle."
"Where will you go?"
"I'll go to the tents. I'll be all right."
She suddenly put her hand over her eyes, and, in a low voice, asked, "And . . . what's to come after, Philip?"
"I don't know . . . I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing."
"We can't go on . . . I can't . . ."
"No . . . I'd rather be dead."
Suddenly, with a sob, she fell forward on the table, burying her face in her hands. "You belong to your mother still, Philip . . . you can't shake off the hard, wicked things she's taught you. Oh, God! If she'd only died . . . we'd have been married to each other!"
She began to cry softly, and, at the sound, he stopped the mechanical business of buttoning his coat, and then, almost as if he were speaking to himself, he said, "Damn them all! We've a right to our happiness. They can't take it from us. They can't . . ."
He raised her face from the table and kissed it again and again with a kind of wild, rude passion that astonished her, until she lost herself completely in its power. Suddenly he ceased, and, looking at her, said, "It doesn't matter if to-morrow never comes. I love you, Mary . . . I love you. That's all that matters."
They were happy then, for in love and in death all things are wiped out. There, in the midst of the dead and frozen park, she set him free for a little time.