“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.”