“But it will break her heart, Philip,” she was saying. “She worships you.... It will break her heart.”
Through a giddy haze he managed to say, “No ... I’m so tired.... Let’s not talk any more.” He felt the nightmare stealing back again, and presently he was for some strange reason back at Megambo, sitting under the acacia-tree, and through the hot air came the sound of voices singing, in a minor key:
“Go down to the water, little monkey,
To the life of lives, the beginning of all things.”
He thought wildly, “I’ve got to get free. I must run.... I must run.”
Emma, holding his hand, felt the fever slipping back. She heard him saying, “Go down to the water, little monkey,” which clearly made no sense, and suddenly she sprang up and called Miss Bull, the nurse.
“It’s odd,” said Miss Bull, white and frightened, “when he was so much better. Did anything happen to upset him?”
“No,” said Emma. “Nothing. We barely talked at all.”
The nurse sent Essie for the doctor, reproaching herself all the while for having allowed Emma to stay so long a time by the bed. But it was almost impossible to refuse when a woman like Mrs. Downes said, “Surely seeing his mother won’t upset him. Why, Miss Bull, we’ve always been wonderful companions—my boy and I. He never had a father, you see. I was both mother and father to him.” Miss Bull knew what a gallant fight she’d made, for every one in the Town knew it. A widow, left alone, to bring up her boy. You couldn’t be cruel enough to stop her from seeing her own son.
When the doctor came and left again, shaking his head, Emma was frightened, but her fright disappeared once more as the fever receded again toward morning, and when at last she fell asleep, she was thinking, “He doesn’t belong to her, after all. He’s never belonged to her. He’s still my Philip.” There was in the knowledge a sense of passionate triumph and joy, which wiped out all else—her doubts about Moses Slade, her worry over Philip’s future, even the sudden, cold terror that gripped her as she felt the fever stealing back into his thin, transparent hand. He didn’t belong to Naomi. Why, he almost hated her. He was still her boy.... And she had defeated Naomi.
In the darkness the tears dampened the pillow. God had not, after all, forsaken her.