A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 28
That night 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 fnever 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 then she 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, "You do want 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 of not doing 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've got to 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 the old 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.