Judge Barton had to cut short his morning ride in order to reach
the San Sebastian church at seven-thirty, but he admitted to himself
that he would have gone without his daily exercise rather than have
missed the wedding; and he was actually ten minutes early. He found
the edifice empty but pervaded with a general stir which hinted
at impending events. A dirty, bare-footed sacristan in marine
blue cotton drawers and a transparent shirt was opening windows
and lighting a few candles about the high altar. The early morning
sunlight streamed through the apertures, while the noise of street
traffic outside echoed hollowly through the dusty, empty silence
of the church. Sparrows flashed across the moted sunbeams and lost
themselves among the violet and orange shadows of the lantern. A
pobre shuffled in to mutter his devotions, and a widow and her two
daughters, who had been praying before one of the chapel altars,
lingered to discover the cause of the preparations.
Soon one or two men dropped in, strangers to the Judge, and friends,
as he instantly decided, of Collingwood. They stood about indecisively,
and stared up into the vaulted roof, and whispered to one another
in funereally regulated tones. Then came a group of five or six
women, whom the Judge recognized as fellow-nurses of Miss Ponsonby;
and almost immediately afterwards, without ceremonial or welcome
of the organ, the bride and groom appeared. Both were in white; he
in the military-cut blouse which is so popular in the Philippines,
she in a simple street dress of white muslin with a hat of white
embroidery. The marine sacristan went to summon the priest, while the
bridal pair waited quietly in the shadow of one of the Gothic pillars.
When the priest, a Spaniard of ascetic and noble countenance, had
arrived and was embarked upon the marriage ceremony, Judge Barton took
himself to task for the flutter of nervousness which, to his great
discomfiture, he found obtruding into his judicial reflections. He
had come to satisfy a very natural curiosity, and the affair had
taken his sympathies unaware. He had never before attended a wedding
in which the seriousness of matrimonial experiment appealed to him
so strongly. He never before had felt the solemn happiness which his
sympathy with that bride and groom awoke in him. He stole a glance at
the other witnesses; they were as preternaturally grave as he. There
was even a subdued air about Collingwood, full, however, of reserved
triumph. As for the bride, her pallor and fatigue were quite evident,
but she had an uplifted look which was most attractive. He caught
himself wondering if there would be any kissing the bride, and then
he decided it was time to rein in his imagination. "Emotions by
the quart!" he thought to himself. "Have I turned sentimental old
woman? Champagne wouldn't make me more maudlin."
He waited quite discreetly after the ceremony, till the young men
and the group of nurses had had their say, and it had been clearly
demonstrated that there would be no kissing. Then he went up and
offered Mrs. Collingwood his hand. There was a genuine friendliness
in his manner, a warmth and sincerity in his few words that touched
her. Her own reserve melted before them. He saw her eyes suffuse,
and a faint color glow in her cheek.
She was instantly aware, indeed, that she occupied a new plane in
his thoughts. She had gained upon him personally, and, as the wife
of a man engaged in developing one of the greatest resources of the
islands, and likely to become a factor of local commercial life, she
would receive consideration. She knew that he regarded her marriage as
a mesalliance, yet by making a mesalliance she had become a person to
be taken into account. Stranger situations than this happen frequently
in the world--in the governmental world--and Mrs. Collingwood did
not betray her intuitions.
"Well, Judge," said Martin jocosely, "the Bureau of Health did not
bear down on us after all."
"No; you are a Benedict, Collingwood, and 'whom the Lord hath
joined'--I don't know whether it is in your service or not. My Latin
is rusty."
"'Let no man, not even a Civil Commissioner, put asunder,'"
Collingwood finished for him. The Judge suspected that he felt some
relief in having the possibility of a change of mind on his bride's
part obviated, and the two men smiled at each other openly.
"I feel that my troubles are ended," said Collingwood.
His wife betrayed that she was still somewhat self-conscious. "It
remains for Judge Barton to be trite and to warn you that they have
just begun," she said, a little stiltedly.
"Nonsense! What does it matter whether your troubles are beginning
or ending? The point is that you have your present, your romance. I
dare say you will have your troubles--most of us do; but to-day--"
The speaker paused expressively.
"That is an extremely sensible view," replied Mrs. Collingwood. "He
has not your happy gift of expression, but it is Mr. Collingwood's
also. He told me as much yesterday. I had been foolish enough to
anticipate the future."
"Is that what made you look so solemn?" the Judge inquired playfully.
She blushed a little and shook her head reprovingly, "It is no joking
matter. Try it yourself and see how you feel. Why, even Martin looked
serious."
"Frankly, I was scared to death," Collingwood admitted. His wife
laughed softly. The Judge shook hands again with the newly made
husband in an access of geniality.
He declined an invitation to the hotel breakfast which was all they
could offer in the line of wedding festivity, but he found time later
to appear aboard their boat.
"Mind," he said as he wished Mrs. Collingwood good-by, "you have not
seen the last of me. I am going to appear in your island paradise
sometime when you least expect me. When things get unendurable here,
I shall flee to you and solitude."
"How long do you think you would endure it?" she inquired.
How long will you?"
"Ah! I must. I'm pledged. I shall have no excuse for repining. I took
the step with my eyes open."
"Well, I fancy you do not regret leaving Manila." In the wholeness of
his suddenly acquired sympathy with her, the Judge quite forgot that
he had been one of the many persons contributing to the experience
which had failed to endear Manila to her.
"No; my experiences here have not been altogether happy, but perhaps I
was partially to blame." She hesitated and looked over at the shining
roofs, at the patches of green shrubbery relieving them, and, in the
background, at the mountains where Lawton died. The launch whistled for
its passengers before Judge Barton could reply, but he wrung her hand
with the intensity of a lifelong friendship. And such is the perversity
of the human soul that his heart ached as the launch darted up the
Pasig. She had waited upon him with infinite patience and gentleness
through nearly a month of illness. He had seen her daily. She had been
so situated that the faintest effort of real kindness or of chivalry
on his part could have won her everlasting gratitude, and probably,
if he had desired it, her affection. He certainly fulfilled the ideal
which her social traditions demanded of her husband more nearly than
Collingwood did, and the Judge knew how to make himself liked when he
wanted to. But he had not tried to be kind to Miss Ponsonby. He had
been patronizing, and at times almost impertinent and unmanly. He had
not a shadow of right to the grudging sense of having something that
should have been his snatched away from him. He had even a feeling
of impatience with her, a thought that she had cheated him, that she
had chosen to hide her real self from him, and to reveal it cruelly
at the moment when Fate put an insurmountable barrier between them. He
could not stifle the miserable regrets, the sense of baffled yearning,
that took possession of him. He did his best to shake off the memory
of the wedding and of her face as he had seen it at the altar, but
he could not do so. Mrs. Collingwood became an obsession. Before the
coastguard cutter had pulled its anchor, he was wondering how soon and
by what means he could invent an excuse for visiting her at her home.
The coastguard steamer on the Puerta Princesa run, on which the
Collingwoods had elected to go as far as Cuyo where their own launch
would pick them up, drove a clean white furrow, and, as Collingwood
had predicted, passed Corregidor at noon. She went out through the
Boca Chica with Corregidor on the left; and Mrs. Collingwood, who
was resting in her steamer chair, smiled languidly as he glanced
back at the island. "Corregidor over the stern," she murmured as
if repeating some well-worn quotation, and then went on, "Have your
experiences here led you into contact with a type of man who has but
one iterated and reiterated wish,--he is, by the way, usually a major
in the United States army,--which wish is 'to see Corregidor over the
stern'? I do not know how many times my tongue has burned to suggest
that the wisher take a coasting steamer and see it."
"Oh, the army's sore on the Philippines," remarked Collingwood.
She eyed him reflectively. "And you, who have been in it, seem to be
'sore' on the army."
"That's right," he exclaimed heartily, "Any man who has once served his
country as a high private and has gotten out is 'agin the Government'
for the rest of his life. I came over on the troop deck of a transport,
and I swore I'd go home on a liner or leave my bones here."
"Which seems likelier to be attained?" she asked, smiling idly.
"Which do you think yourself? You've linked your fortunes with
mine. Why?" he added fixing her with a sudden intensity of glance
insistent for reply.
His wife crimsoned and looked across the glinting sea.
"I thought you answered that question to your satisfaction last night,"
she murmured.
"No; I tried to answer it for you. It was you that needed
convincing. Here is a case of temperament," he went on, half jocose,
half serious. "So long as you hesitated and I had my side to urge,
any old reason would do for me. I would clutch at a straw and hold on
to it as if it were a cable. But now everything is settled and final,
I want to understand. I want you to make yourself clear to me."
"But, my dear Martin! The idea is out of the question. Why, for a
month you have professed to be able to make me clear to myself."
Martin ruffled his hair with a puzzled hand. "Did I?" he murmured. "Did
it strike you as cheeky?"
"No; I was heartily grateful. You helped me."
"In what way?"
"In the way of common sense," Charlotte said, as simply as if the
remark were an everyday one, and her husband's somewhat startled
acceptance of the reply sent her into a ripple of laughter, in which,
after an instant, he joined heartily.
Their merriment attracted the attention of the only other passengers,
two enlisted men going out to join a hospital corps at Puerta
Princesa. It also drew upon them a frown of disfavor from the captain.
The captain was an old-time skipper from a tramp freighter, with
the freighter's contempt for passengers. He was not married, and he
had little sympathy with the billings and cooings of newly married
couples. As often as his eyes fell on the orchids and ferns and
potted plants which were hanging from stanchions and cumbering his
decks (Mrs. Collingwood was taking them down for the adornment of
her new home) he cursed picturesquely. To his second officer he had
expressed a desire for a typhoon that would roll the deadlights out
of his boat, and blow the hyphenated "garden truck" into the Sulu
Sea. He had emphasized his distaste for bridal society by setting a
table for himself and his officers on the forward deck behind the
steering apparatus, thus leaving the tiny dining-room entirely to
the despised passengers.
Yet there had been little enough sentimentality exhibited to arouse
his displeasure. Mrs. Collingwood spent her day in the steamer chair
while her husband walked the deck with his cigar or sat chatting at
her side. The hospital men, covertly watching them as everybody does
a bridal pair, opined that they were a "queer proposition" but quite
agreed that they seemed happy.
To Collingwood, the change in Charlotte's mood was an intense
relief. The hesitations and self-questionings with which she had
puzzled him for a month previous had apparently been quieted by the
finality of the marriage ceremony. That she was nervously worn out by
the strain of the previous weeks and by the disagreeable circumstances
of her quarrel with the Government he realized; and with a delicacy for
which she was thoroughly grateful, he refrained from the rather ardent
demonstrations of his courtship, and treated her with matter-of-fact
kindness and good fellowship. She was his, and she seemed contented and
at peace. It was a glorious summer day, the sea was waveless, the boat
was clean and quiet, and might almost have been their private yacht,
so completely were they alone. A chance observer beholding a lazy young
woman in a deck chair and a quiet young fellow pacing to and fro near
her might have taken them for a young married couple of some weeks'
or months' standing. He would hardly have suspected a bridal couple.
Yet the young man's mind, as they steamed past the beautiful wooded
heights of Mindoro, and looked up and up at the giant forests or
out over the gleaming water, was a tumult of joy and triumph and
wonder--the wonder being by no means in the smallest proportion. His
wife was not a beautiful woman, but his lover's eyes endowed her with
every beauty as she lay scanning the tree-clad mountains. That fine
quality of breeding in her which Collingwood was unable to define,
but which pleased him inordinately, was never more apparent. Moreover,
he had found her in times past a rather difficult person to deal with,
and behold! in the Scriptural "twinkling of an eye," her thorniness
had vanished and a docility as agreeable as it was unexpected had
given him fresh cause for self-gratulation.
Still, as he had confessed, his temperament inclined him to retroactive
investigation. So long as she proved obdurate and was not yet won,
Collingwood could not analyze. But with the struggle past he had time
to take up the contradictions of her attitude, and he found little to
justify his bold statement that he could read her better than she could
read herself. If, as he had somewhat daringly reminded her, she was
happy in his arms, it was a happiness, as he could not but realize,
of less ecstatic measure than that of many of the predecessors who,
with or without the sanction of an engagement, had yielded to their
pressure. She was a novice at love-making, as a man less experienced
than her husband would easily have guessed; and she was reticent,
not only in the voluntary expression of that fact, but in response
to his tentative overtures to her to confess it. Collingwood was no
less puzzled by the fact than by the philosophy of life which desired
its concealment. He had known many young women in his life who were
not novices at love-making, but who ardently desired to be thought so.
An ironical sense of his wife's power to baffle him tempered more
than one of the affectionate glances he cast upon her as he strolled
back and forth beside her chair. The consciousness of her mental
superiority, of her obedience to perceptions and convictions which were
only half formulated in his own mind, was literally seeping through
Collingwood's brain. He was inordinately proud of her. Her excellence
was a proof of his own good taste. He felt that she was a credit to
him. He did not associate her intelligence and her grace with a class
distinction. On the contrary, it was one of his sources of joy that
he would take her out of the masses and make her of the classes, only
Martin did not use those terms. In his simple philosophy, people with
money were important, and people without it were not. Miss Ponsonby had
been poor. She had earned her own living. Ergo, she was nobody. But he,
Martin Collingwood, would make her somebody, and when he had done so,
she would fill the position to his entire satisfaction. He did not ask
himself if he would come up to her expectations. He did not understand
that a woman can ask for more in a husband than for a lover, a master,
and a provider of the world's goods. In spite of his public-school
education, Martin Collingwood's philosophy of life was a very primitive
one, based upon a sense of sex superiority. He could realize that a
woman can be a man's inferior; but he supposed that the mere fact of
his sex makes any man the equal of the proudest woman who lives.
So Collingwood continued to walk the deck in a fool's paradise, and his
wife lounged away her day, if not in his blissful state of ignorance,
a happy and contented woman, nevertheless. There was a soundness in
that primitive philosophy of her husband's which she was proving. If
Collingwood did not have all the requisites of a woman's ideal of her
husband, he had at least three-fourths of them; and Mrs. Collingwood
was enough of a philosopher (little as she liked being told so) not
to cavil at the missing quarter when they were hurrying away from
the conditions that made that quarter vital.
The coastguard steamer skirted the coast of Mindoro and then turned
her nose westward. The next day, she crept up under the pinnacled
heights of Penon de Coron in a jade-green sea, and entered the channel
between Coron and Bushuanga. There the water was like purple glass,
save where a rush of porpoises parted it in swift pursuit of the
flying-fish. Fairy islets dotted its dazzling surface while the land
masses on either hand were clothed in amethystine haze.
The boat lay half a day off the curving beach of Culion, and the
travellers stared up at the nipa houses of the leper colony, clinging
to the hillsides, and at the gray old church and the fort on the
left, speaking of the day when Moro paraos were no strangers to the
peaceful locality. On the third night, it anchored in Halsey Harbor,
"which is," said Collingwood, "the last place on earth except the
one we are going to live in."
To this somewhat discouraging remark, Mrs. Collingwood, who was leaning
over the rail, staring into darkness and the massed bulk of land
near, made no reply. Immediately after the dropping of the anchor,
the captain, accompanied by his third officer and the two hospital
corps men, had gone ashore to call upon the single American family
which was holding Halsey Harbor. He did not invite the Collingwoods to
go, glad apparently to be out of their sight for a time. They laughed
at their power to arouse his distaste, and agreed that they were the
gainers by his dislike. The fiery cigar tip of the officer on watch
was the only reminder that the boat was not wholly in their hands.
Collingwood, throwing away his cigar, slipped an arm around his wife,
who never objected to petting.
"It's wonderful," she said dreamily; "I never knew before that tree
toads made silence. I thought they made noise."
The night was one of those cloudy ones which occur so frequently in
the tropics, when the vapors hang low at dusk, to dissipate later. The
boat seemed to be at anchor in a bay shut in by low hills, for, at
one point, a rift in the clouds showed the pallor of the sky and
a single star, below which the solid blackness loomed in relief,
and against which a clump of bamboo teased the eye with its phantom
outline. A faint chorus of insects and tree toads and the insistent cry
of an iku lizard suggested that the boat must be fairly close to the
shore, but, as Mrs. Collingwood had said, the sounds only emphasized
the stillness. Low down in the gloom--so low as to suggest a valley
between the hills--a light burned steadily with a sweet and human
significance in the tremendous vagueness about them.
There was almost trepidation in Collingwood's inquiry if she found
it lonesome.
"Not in the least. Or rather, I find it tremendously lonely, and
enjoy it. Are you worrying about me when it is too late? Do not do
so. I shall find plenty to occupy me on the island."
"For a woman who held back as persistently as you did, you have
experienced a wonderful change of heart."
"Did you think I was afraid of loneliness?"
"Lord! I didn't know what you were afraid of, but I could see you
were afraid of something. I had to take it into consideration. It
was one of a lot of things working against me which I had to combat."
There came a long, long pause. Eight bells sounded. The second engineer
came out on the lower deck and cursed some of the Filipino crew who
had stretched themselves for a night's rest in such a manner as to
block the passage-way.
"Well," insisted Collingwood, "am I a good guesser or not?"
"About the island? No, dear. My imagination took hold of that at
once. The thought of living on a practically uninhabited island
stirred up all the romance there is in me."
"What was it, then? Come, we're married. Out with it!"
"You told me yourself in so many words that I was coquetting with
myself."
"I never said anything like that," declared Mr. Collingwood with
a vivacity inspired by a premonition of the resentment she might
feel. But Charlotte only laughed.
"Those were your exact words," she insisted. "They were quite true."
"That was not all," he persisted. "It was more serious than that. I
felt something mighty heavy in the atmosphere at times."
Mrs. Collingwood reflected a few minutes. "Don't you think," she
said then, "that any woman of mature age--of my age--would hesitate
to marry a man of whose family and antecedents she knew as little as
I did of yours?"
"No: I don't see what my family had to do with it. In the first
place I haven't any near relatives living now, as I told you; and if
I had, you wouldn't have married them. You have married me. As for
my antecedents (I suppose you mean my conduct), I told you myself
that I had been no saint. I'm just a good average citizen. I've
known better men than I am, and I have known worse. I have not
been married before; that's the main thing, after all; and no woman
ever had cause for a breach-of-promise suit against me. I had ----"
(he named a man locally prominent) "write to you and tell you that
he came from the same town with me, and he knew my record was what
I had told you. Besides, I didn't give a thought to your family,
and you have talked less about them than I have talked of mine."
"That is true. Do you think me secretive? There is nothing to be
secretive about. But my life with my relatives was too painful to
talk about, even to you."
"I saw that. I guessed it must have been hard to anybody so loving
and tender as you."
"Martin, when did you form the impression that I am loving and tender?"
"Well, ain't you?"
"I think so; but most people have not thought so, you know. What made
you decide differently?"
"Oh, that first night in the hospital after they had fixed me up
in the operating room, and the chloroform wore off, and my fever
came up. God! I can feel it all now! And just when I thought that
I could not stand things any longer, and must yell, you came along
with an ice bag and gave me a piece to suck." His wife smiled in
the darkness at his homely phraseology. "It seemed to me I had never
heard a woman's voice in my life as soft as yours was when you said,
'You are in great pain, I know.'"
"But that was what I should have done for anybody, Martin."
"I knew it. That's why I felt that you were gentle and loving. I would
have liked to put my arms around you and cry. I wanted to be babied. It
is strange, isn't it, how physical suffering can unman a fellow?"
Charlotte turned her eyes on him for an instant. He could just see
their gleam by the reflection of a ray streaming out on the water
from a light on the lower deck, and they were infinitely tender yet
mirthful. "You understand yourself thoroughly," she said. "You were
a brave baby and a good baby but you were a baby, Martin, a great
six-foot baby."
"Well, if it made you fall in love with me--
"Ah! but I didn't then. You bullied me into being in love with you. You
wouldn't give me a chance to make myself heard."
"What about that time I kissed you?" said Martin, referring to that
episode for the first time since his very formal and abject letter
of apology had met an equally formal but cold forgiveness from her.
To his consternation, she drew away from him in sudden
displeasure. "Perhaps we had better not speak of it."
"Why shouldn't we speak of it? Is it a crime for a man to kiss a
woman he loves? Did it contaminate you?"
"I had given you no right, no encouragement."
"I'd have done it if I had known I was to be kicked out of the
hospital, broken ribs and all. Besides, how is a man to know whether
he has any rights till he exercises them?"
Martin put the question seriously in all good faith. It was his
primitive philosophy again, the simple way in which he tested women
in his sphere of life. She was at a loss how to reply, and somewhat
sore put to hide her inexperience in affairs of the sort. She had been
brought up to believe that milkmaids kiss their young men over the
gate, but that, in refined society, men offer no caresses to girls whom
they respect, unless a troth has first been plighted. Had she chummed
more with girls and young women, she might have learned that even
in the best of society, young people pay little heed to the strong
statements of their elders, and that, wise heads to the contrary,
young blood will have its toll. But Charlotte had had no chums and
had never exchanged gossip over late bedroom fires. Her views on the
propriety of kissing were entirely theoretical. But that kiss was a
sore remembrance with her. It marked the beginning of the end. It was
an opening door which gave her an instant's glance into the kingdom
of love; and from its bestowal, she had known that she was confronted
with a mighty temptation to open it further and to go boldly into the
fair land. How hard she had fought with the inclination, she could
never tell Martin Collingwood; but she had fought, and she had lost.
She glanced up at him penitently after his last speech, and marked
the cessation of her involuntary resentment by slipping back into his
arm. He was emboldened to make a query which had been on his tongue
a dozen times, but which, up to that hour, not even the proprietary
sense of the husband had enabled him to regard as discreet.
"Charlotte, am I really the first man you ever cared about?"
"Absolutely the first to whom I ever gave a sentimental thought."
The delighted recipient of this compliment did not, in the joy of
hearing it, examine it too closely. When he did begin to speak, his
wife was pleased to note that he was less inclined to investigate
the cause of the phenomenon than to speculate upon its uncommonness.
"I don't know what you were about," he said. "It's mighty good luck
for me, but--not in an uncomplimentary sense--you must have been an
awful goose."
"That's it exactly. I was an awful goose; and, being so, I had an
inspiration to keep out of love."
"Why so?"
"Because I was afraid of being in love. Can you understand
that? Because love was altogether associated in my mind with pain--the
pain of losing, and the pain of loving and of not being loved, and
of being generally misunderstood."
"And all that because you were raised an orphan. I don't think you
had a fair show, old girl."
"I know I had not," said Mrs. Collingwood decisively. She added,
"But I had rather not talk about it. It makes me morbid."
"Were your folks well to do?"
"They were people of considerable wealth. I do not think they ever
grudged me anything I cost them. But I was in a false position in
their house, and I was conscious of it. The knowledge put me at a
disadvantage with all the world. It made me feel myself different
from everybody else. I was self-conscious, afraid of being an object
of pity. It was like failing to possess some essential article of
dress that everybody else has, and trying to cover up one's nakedness."
"That's it. I couldn't put it into words, but that is exactly how
you acted with Barton. You seemed to shrink away from him and to be
ready to fight him if he spoke pleasantly to you."
"Oh, dear! was it so bad as that?" Charlotte's heart sank. Her way
of expressing facts differed considerably from his, and the balance
of vividness and realism was in his favor.
"It was, just like that. But you were not that way to me. Why not?"
Her woman's wit, already quickened by her increased experience with
men, showed her how to be truthful, and, in so being, how to deceive
him most. "Ah! you were different," she murmured. But after he had led
her, in response to her request, back to her chair, and was pacing to
and fro beside her in quiet happiness, her heart reproached her. She
had not shrunk from him because she knew that he was blind, because,
to carry out her simile, he could perceive nothing lacking in her
raiment. But those keen eyes of Judge Barton's had questioned her,
had perceived every rag and tatter!
The captain returned and called Martin to deliver to him a message
from the Inhabitant of Halsey Harbor. Charlotte was left alone to
her musings.
She was very happy. The old saying, "Out of sight, out of mind"
was proving its appositeness in her case. No one was about her who
could read her, who could perceive the absence of any necessary
raiment, who would be conscious that there was anything odd in her
being Martin Collingwood's wife. She had, in one decisive action,
destroyed all that was holding her spirit in leash. A woman yet young,
whose emotions had been stifled for a lifetime, in whom the warmth of
love had been overlaid by the calculating egoism of a nature wounded
to the quick, she had emancipated herself at the fortuitous moment,
alive to the rapture of passion, of freedom from all the restraints
that had curbed her existence. She had thrown the admonitions and
the self-restraint of a life-time aside for a romance. She had (but
fortunately for a time she was able to put the fact out of mind) quite
justified a conventional assumption that a woman's nature is full of
primitive evil, and that you must pitch your maxims pretty strong if
you would have them believed at all, and that then, ten to one, she
will demolish all your precautions at a bound if an object in trousers
holds out his arms. She had profited by her husband's view. "Come what
may," she said, "I will have my romance and pay the price afterwards."
So far, the price seemed a remote contingency. With every revolution of
the steamer's screw, Manila and her distant relatives whose pride she
had outraged became the mere phantoms of memory, growing paler every
hour. Nothing was left but the delightful sense of being an absolute
necessity to Martin--she who had been a superfluity all her life!
As for Collingwood himself, his kindness, his shrewdness, his
strength were gaining constantly in her esteem. He had proved himself
innately delicate and refined. Of what possible importance were a
few deficiencies in speech, a too vivid phraseology, the lack of the
little courtesies which mark a man of the world? But (and here some
of her elation diminished) if they mattered so little, why had she
to convince herself so eagerly? If two negatives make an affirmative,
too passionate a denial sometimes constitutes an assertion. Whenever
she arrived at this stage of reflection, another cloud dimmed her
horizon. Was not her whole attitude a practical deception of the
man himself? Would Martin Collingwood have accepted her surrender so
joyfully, could he have read that it was weighted with the condition of
living with him on an uninhabited island? Would not all his self-esteem
repudiate such a proposition? She had not lied when she said that she
loved him, but would he content himself with a definition of love which
excluded all natural pride of choice, and put a compromise value upon
himself? As often as she found herself confronted with these thoughts,
Charlotte took refuge in a bit of casuistry. If she saw Martin with
clear eyes and underrated the proportional value of his attainments,
did he even see her clearly at all? Did she wrong him more in reserving
an opinion of his social worth than he wronged her in not perceiving
that she had any social worth? The fact that every person has a real
personal value and an accredited worldly value, and that most effort
is directed to making these two values coincide, or appear to do so,
put a convenient weapon in her hand. Since, in only a few cases, the
two values are really identical, happy marriages must be the result
of a marvellous luck or of a wonderful power of self-deception. Was
she to be taxed for not deceiving herself? Was her intelligence to
be punished when his ignorance was rewarded? As often as she thought
about it, it seemed that his incapacity to value certain qualities
of her own justified her in a few mental reservations.
Nevertheless she was afflicted with a sense of penitence in spite of
her sophistry, and when, after a long conversation with the captain,
her husband came back to her and bent over her, she put up her arms
and drew his face down to hers, giving him the first voluntary caress
which she had bestowed upon him since the hour of her surrender upon
the Luneta.
"Have you thought me a selfish, ungrateful wretch?" she asked him.
"Never! But I have worried a little. There's no getting around it--you
are daffy about some things, Charlotte."
"Daffy is such a beautiful word. It's so civil. I'll adopt it. You
are not daffy about anything but me, are you, Martin?"
"Kingsnorth says I'm daffy about anything that I really like."
"Tell me about Mr. Kingsnorth--all about him. Analyze him for me."
"I can't do that sort of thing. Besides, I want you to form your own
impressions. You will see him in thirty-six hours."
"So soon as that." She drew a long breath, and fell silent.
"The captain says he is going out at dawn. We ought to make Cuyo by
five to-morrow afternoon, and if Mac's there with the launch, as he
surely will be, we'll get our freight transhipped and make the run
over to-morrow night. That will bring us home by dawn the day after
to-morrow. Home," he repeated softly. "I've dreamed many dreams in
my life and some of them have come true, but I don't think anything
stranger could have happened to me than taking my wife home to an
uninhabited island in the Pacific."
"Nothing stranger could have happened to you than finding yourself
married at all. Isn't that it?"
"It's a fact," he admitted slowly. "I was not planning to marry for
many a year. I don't know that I thought seriously about doing it
at all. In fact, I was so afraid that I might be injudicious and get
married--or get myself married--" he smiled in the darkness--"that I
swore off even on flirtations some time before I came out here. But
when you came along with the ice-bag and your nice voice, and I got
a good look at you next day, all that went up in the air. I knew then
and there that I wanted to get married as quick as I could. I'd been in
love before a half dozen times, but I knew every time that it wasn't
a love I wanted to marry on. It don't matter how much a man loves a
woman, he don't love her in the right way unless she does him credit. I
felt that way about you. You were the kind of woman I could be proud
of all my life. 'That's the girl for me,' I said, and sure enough--"
his pause expressed the idea that the outcome had been foreordained.
His desire to compliment her was so unmistakable, his admiration was so
sincere, that Charlotte was able to stifle quickly the first instinct
to rebuke his unconscious patronage. His egoism, after all, was of an
inoffensive variety. He was not boasting himself as a connoisseur,
but was testifying to the completeness with which she satisfied his
ideal. The wife lay silent for a long time, studying his face, which
was just dimly visible in the glow of his cigar. When she spoke,
it was as she rose from her chair.
"I hope I'll always be able to live up to your conception of me,"
she said. "I mean to try."
"Nonsense," replied the man of common sense. "You just suit me
perfectly as you are. Why, you'd spoil it all if you even thought of
trying. What is there to try? You are you. I wouldn't have the biggest
fault or the smallest virtue in you altered by the ten-millionth of
an inch."
When Charlotte had shut the door of her stateroom and had snapped on
the light, she sank for an instant on the locker, with a face in which
pride, shame, and contrition were tumultuously mingled. For why had
she spent twenty-eight years acquiring tastes and criterions which,
at that moment, made her seem incredibly mean and ungenerous?