“I’ll take you home,” said McTavish, standing off and looking at him. “You know a fellow like you oughtn’t to be working in the Mills. Why, man, you’re thin as a fence-rail. I’ve been watching you when you went past—getting thinner and thinner every day. And you’re beginning to look like an old man. A fellow of your age ought to be getting drunk and giving the girls a time. I wish to God I was twenty-six again.”
He finished with a great booming laugh, which was meant to be reassuring, but which Philip, even through the haze of illness, knew was meant to hide his alarm. He gave Philip another drink, and asked suddenly, “What’s the matter with you, anyway? There’s something wrong. Why, any fool can see that.” Philip didn’t answer him, and he added, “You don’t mean to go back to Africa. That’s it, ain’t it? I guessed that long ago, in spite of everything your Ma had to say. Well, if you was to go back like this, it’d be the end of you, and I propose telling your Ma so. I knew her well enough when she was a girl, though we don’t hold much with one another now.”
Philip suddenly felt too ill to speak to any one, to explain anything. McTavish had lifted him up and was carrying him toward the door, “Why you don’t weigh no more than a woman—and a little woman at that.”
He felt himself being lifted into McTavish’s buggy. The fat man kept one arm about him, and with the other drove the horses, which on occasions pulled his hearse. At length, after what seemed to Philip hours, they drew up before the slate-colored house.
It was Emma herself who opened the door. McTavish, the debaucher of young men, she saw, had got Philip drunk, and was delivering him to her like a corpse.
“What does this mean?” she asked.
Philip managed to say feebly, “I haven’t been drinking.”
McTavish, still carrying him, forced his way past her into the hall. “Where do you want to put him? You’ve got a pretty sick boy here, and the sooner you know it the better.”
They carried him upstairs and laid him on his and Naomi’s bed. Naomi was in the room, and Mabelle was with her, and as they entered, she got up with a wild flutter of alarm, while McTavish explained. Philip asked for water, which Naomi went to fetch, and McTavish led Emma with him into the hall.
Downstairs, they faced each other—two middle-aged people, born to be enemies by every facet of their characters; yet, oddly enough, McTavish had once been a suitor for Emma’s hand in those far-off days when Emma had chosen such a hopeless mate as Jason Downes. “Sometimes, drawing deep out of his own experience, the philosophic McTavish had wondered how on earth he had ever fallen in love with Emma, or how she had come to be in turn the abject slave of such an amiable scamp as Downes. It made no sense, that thing which got hold of you, brain and body, in such a tyrannical fashion. (He was thinking all this again, as he stood facing the ruffled Emma beneath the cold glow of the green Moorish light.)