As she sat there the dull pain of a hopeless loneliness took possession of her. Here she was, at fifty, beginning for the first time to feel tired and in need of companionship, and she had no one—not even her own grandchildren. It was cruel, she told herself, to have suffered as she had suffered, with no reward but this—to end life alone after struggling for so long, always bent upon doing the right thing. Surely she had lived as God meant her to live, a Christian life filled with sacrifice to individuals and duty. Surely no one since Job had been so bitterly tried ... no husband ... no son ... alone.
And presently her blunt, strong fingers tore open the envelope, and she read the letter. It was brief, almost like a cablegram ... a few lines which told her what she already knew, that Philip, her little boy, was dead. The sight of the word “dead” and the name “Mary Downes” signed at the end, filled her with a sudden wave of bitterness that swept away all her sorrow. It was Mary who had stolen him from her like a thief. What could be more sinful than to steal from a mother a son for whom she had sacrificed her whole life? It was Mary who had destroyed him in the end, by filling his head with strange ideas, and leading him back to Africa. She was finished now with Mary. She would like to see Mary dead. And some day (perhaps it had happened already) Mary would receive the wandering letter and read, “I will even forgive Mary and try to treat her as if she were my own daughter.” Then perhaps for a moment she would feel remorse over what she had done.
The letter lay crumpled in her work-stained hand. She began suddenly to weep, falling forward and burying her head in her arms beneath the glow of the gas-dome, painted with wild-roses. She had suffered too long.... She kept seeing Philip as a little boy....
After midnight, when she had ceased to weep, she rose, and, turning out the light, went up the creaking stairs of the home she had made her own by the labor of her own hands ... the house (she thought bitterly) she had meant for Philip. She had done everything for his sake.
Alone in her own room, she thought, “I must not give in. I must go on. God will in the end reward me.” The old spirit began to claim her.
She put on mourning (a thing her conscience had not permitted her to do when Naomi died), and in the Town people said, “Poor Emma Downes! She has had almost too much to bear. It is a life like hers that makes you sometimes doubt God ... a good woman like that deserves a better reward.” She even had a letter from Moses Slade.
Only McTavish did not join in the pity. To him it seemed that the chain of her calamities was as inevitable as a Greek tragedy. It was not God, but Emma herself, who had created them. And he saw what the others did not, that Emma was by no means a broken woman.
And, after a time, she came even to create a certain glory out of Philip’s death, for she found that people believed he had gone back to Megambo to take up his old work, and so had gone back to certain death and martyrdom. She did not disillusion them: it could not, surely, be wrong to let them believe that her Philip was a martyr. Philip, who must now be with God, would understand. And, sitting in church, she knew that people about her thought of him as her martyred son. He had not lived to be Bishop of East Africa, but he had died a martyr....
There remained, however, one more blow. Two months after Philip’s death, she received a second letter, in a strange handwriting, this time from Australia. As she opened it, there fell out a photograph on a picture postcard. It was the photograph of seven people, all of them strangers save Jason, who sat in the middle of the front row beside a large, rather coarse and plain woman, whose hand rested on his shoulder. At the bottom was written: “Upper row: Jason, Henry, Hector. Lower row: Bernice, old Jason, self and Emma.”
It was “self and Emma” which startled her. Who was “self,” and who was “Emma”?