The sedative effect of more than twenty years had dimmed the fascination of Mr. Downes to a point where it was possible for her to believe that he was, after all, only a scamp who had trifled with her affections and one whom she had never really loved at all—or at least only enough to make the presence of a son respectable in the eyes of the Lord. If he had “lived,” she told herself, he would have gone his waggish, improvident way, leaving her and her son somewhat at the mercy of the dyspeptic Elmer; as things stood, she was successful and well off. Her once passionate and rather shameful desire to have him back seemed very remote now; she no longer wanted him to return; her only fear was that he might rise from the grave in which she had placed him with such thoroughness. For years the thought had raised an uneasy feeling in her bosom; but when years passed without a word from him she decided that he must really be dead. There were still moments, however, when she came close to betraying herself by saying, “When Mr. Downes went away”—which could, of course, pass for meaning anything at all.
Each night she thanked God that her son—their son, she was forced to admit—would never know that his father was a scamp. He was a half-orphan to whom she had been both mother and father, and her training (she thanked God again) had left its mark. Her son was a fine young man with no bad habits, smoking, drinking or otherwise, who, married to Naomi Potts (known throughout the churchgoing world as “the youngest missionary of God”), was himself spreading the light among the heathen of that newly discovered land between Victoria-Nyanza and the Indian Ocean. He and Naomi and a third missionary were the first in the field. “In blackest Africa” was the way she expressed it. “My son,” she would say proudly, “who is head of a mission in blackest Africa.”
No, she reflected frequently, it was impossible to think of Philip, so handsome, so clean, so pure, so virtuous, so molded by her own hand, as the son of Jason Downes. She had succeeded in everything save changing his appearance: he had the same rather feline good looks which had ruined his father by inducing women to fling themselves at his head. (It was a thing she could never understand—how any woman could fling herself at the head of a man, even a man as handsome as Jason had been.)
2
The sight of the letter, so carelessly tossed aside by Essie, filled her with a sense of disappointment: if she had only received it at the proper time, she could have read it to the ladies of the Augusta Simpson Branch. Only an hour before she had “craved the indulgence” of the ladies while she read “one of my son’s interesting letters about the work they are doing in blackest Africa.” The letter still crackled in her reticule, filling her with an immense pride, for was not the career of Philip, and Philip himself, simply another evidence of her sterling character? If Essie hadn’t been a slut she would have had two letters to read.
She drew her solid body up to the table and, clamping on her pince-nez (which for a moment exasperated her by becoming entangled in the white badge of her temperance) she tore open the battered letter and holding it at arm’s length because of her far-sightedness, began to read.
At first glance she was disturbed by the brevity of it and by the fact that there was no enclosure from Naomi. Usually Philip wrote pages.
“Dear Ma:
“I write this in great haste to tell you that by the time this reaches you we will be on our way home.
“I don’t know whether the news has reached you, but there has been an uprising among the tribes to the north of Megambo. They attacked the mission and we narrowly escaped with our lives. I was wounded, but not badly. Naomi is all right. There was a strange Englishwoman who got caught with us. She wasn’t a missionary but middle-aged and the sister of a British general. She was seeing the country and doing some shooting.