Judge Barton's servant, aided by Kingsnorth's boy and Martin's,
had put up the tents and had seen thoroughly to the comfort of the
visitors, so that there was nothing more to do than to bid the guests
good night and to warn them of the island habit of sea bathing every
morning. Jones had no bathing suit, but Kingsnorth said he would be
able to lend him one; while Judge Barton, showing his fine white
teeth in an appreciative smile, remarked that he never travelled
without one. "We shall see you in the morning, then," said Charlotte,
and she and Martin betook themselves to their own dwelling. Martin
sank lazily into his hammock on the veranda for a final cigar, while
Charlotte went to give some orders to her cook about breakfast. She
found that gentleman asleep on the kitchen table with his head on a
bread board. Rudely awakened and asked for explanations, he stated that
he had not gone to his quarters, because the Senora had sent him word
that she wished to speak with him; but finding the time pass slowly,
he had fallen asleep as she had found him. He asked her plaintively
why she had been so impatient with him for so small an offence,
and he held out the bread board to show that it had suffered no
harm. "Wash it with boiling water! Why not? but manana, manana! As
she could plainly see there was no boiling water at that time."
The situation being one in which racial intelligence beats itself
helplessly against racial unintelligence, Charlotte contented herself
with a note in her housekeeping tablets to remind her to superintend
the washing process the next morning, gave her orders, and returned
to her room. Martin was standing before her glass in his shirt and
trousers, a costume which always seemed to add to his stature.
"Now will you believe me?" he began teasingly. "What did I tell you
about the Judge?"
"I haven't a word to say, but I was surprised. What do you suppose
brought him down here?"
"I told you he wanted to see you."
"He said he wanted to see us, and we will treat him on that basis. That
means that you must do your share of the entertaining. I do not want
him on my hands all the time. He may just as well go with you each
day as stay around the house. Promise me, dear, that you will take
him on your shoulders."
There was an unmistakable earnestness about Charlotte's manner. She
was pulling hairpins out of her hair as she spoke, and she laid those
feminine accessories somewhat vigorously in a mother of pearl box,
which Martin, to honor his calling, had insisted on having made for
her. Her husband sank suddenly into a rocking chair and pulled her
down on his knee.
"You are the funniest woman I ever knew," he said reflectively, "the
first one I ever knew who wouldn't play on a man's jealousy. The truth
is I was just half inclined to be jealous, but you've disarmed me."
"I can't conceive myself, Martin, playing on your jealousy. The
whole idea is abhorrent to me. Jealousy implies distrust. Do you
think me capable of a flirtation with Judge Barton? Do you think I
should enjoy making you distrust me?"
Martin's face was a study. "You might not mean anything but a little
fun," he said apologetically. "Most women begin that way. And then
you might find that you liked him best. That happens. It happens
often. And the Judge is a big somebody, and I am a pearl-fisher."
His tone grew bitter as he pronounced the last words. It was almost
the first time that Charlotte had heard him refer to the worldly
distinctions that he affected to despise. But if he had expected his
self-disparagement to bring him a reward in a counter disparagement
of the Judge, he was disappointed. Charlotte sat on his knee, a very
earnest figure, her teeth nipping her lower lip, her brows frowning
with a very real perplexity. Her manner brought back to him his old
fear of her unexpectedness in thought and action. But even as he sat
wondering, she turned and smiled, and he drew a long breath of relief.
"We may as well have this out now," she said. "Perhaps I am making a
mistake in revealing myself to you frankly. I think men understand the
other sort of woman better, the one who plays upon their jealousy. I
believe they value her higher." She closed his protesting lips with
a gentle finger. "I am afraid that I do not belong wholly to the
twentieth century, Martin. They call it the age of individualism. But
I believe yet in those old tenets which were not individual opinions,
but the joint consensus of generations seeking a livable basis for
men and women. I believe in marriage and the family, and a lot of
old-fashioned things. I believe that what chastity is to a woman,
physical courage is to a man. I believe that women are born into
this world to bear children and that men are born to fight for woman
and child. The men of the present day seem to entertain a dream of
universal peace, so perhaps the women are excusable for entertaining
a dream of universal barrenness. However, that's irrelevant. We
can discuss that another time. But when I took you for my husband,
Martin, believing in all these old-fashioned ideas, I did it in the
consciousness that the choice was final, the determining factor of my
life. So long as you live, there is between me and every other man
in the world a barrier (I know not what it is) across which my mind
will never step, and across which no man will ever try to address
me twice. No, I won't be kissed--it is the first time I have ever
repelled a caress from you, but to me this moment is too serious for
caresses. You have the man's right to resent another man's possessive
thought of me; but you have no right to be jealous of me. I do not say
that I will always love you. There are offences which you could commit
against me which would turn my love to hatred. I do not pose as the
angelic, forgiving woman. I give fidelity. I demand it in return. If
you ever cease to love me, somehow, if it breaks my heart, I shall
cease to love you. I would not submit to personal brutality from you
or from any living being. But so long as you live there will be, in
a sentimental sense, but one man in the world for me. I want you to
know that, to understand it and feel it in every fibre of your being,
even though I know you hold me cheaper for so understanding it." Her
bosom heaved, her cheeks were fiery, and she would have sprung from
his knee only that he held her in a clasp that was iron. His own eyes
flashed a reply to hers.
"You had no cause to say that last," he said hotly.
"No cause, when ten minutes ago, you assured me of my unlikeness to
other women! Look into your heart of hearts and ask yourself if I am
a dearer possession now that you know that, come good or ill, with
you or apart from you, in love or in anger, I hold myself yours and
no other man's. And I do so not out of any false loyalty to you, for
there are conditions which might cancel your right to ask loyalty. No:
it is loyalty to myself. And this much I know of the whole male sex;
that while you are infinitely content to know that there are women
who can entertain such ideals and hold to them at any sacrifice,
you hold the individual woman cheaper for the knowledge."
She stared at him accusingly, and at first, half confounded, half
amused with her unusual intensity, he tried to stare back; but in
the end, his eyes fell and a dull shame burned in his cheek. For
he knew that what she said was true, and that in the very moment
of her assurances, he felt the loss of something to guard, felt
that easy-going surety which a man of his experiences with women
knows only too well how to diagnose. However, another emotion of a
very great pride in her capacity and in her frankness and a sense
of guilt made him very abject. He held her when she tried again to
slip from his arms; and when, to his consternation, she put her head
down on his shoulder and her body was shaken with noiseless sobs,
he was as comforting as she could have desired him to be, and she
felt a repentant tear mingle with her own.
She allowed herself no luxury of grief, and after a few convulsive
efforts got control of herself. But she lay with her head on his
shoulder for a long time, and when she spoke it was with a mournful
dignity.
"We have had our tragic moment," she said, "and I with my wretched love
of staring facts in the face have unearthed a family skeleton. Let's
put it back in the cupboard, Martin. Yours was a bogey skeleton,
and I was so anxious to show it up for a fraud, that I dragged
out the genuine one. That's singularly in keeping with my lifelong
habit. Don't look so long-faced, Martin. Are you angry?" She put her
face caressingly against his.
"Angry! Why should I be angry? I wish you didn't analyze things so
minutely, Lottie."
"I wish I didn't too, Martin, but I can't help it. That's my punishment
for being I. Oh, how I wish I were not I!" She looked at him with
eyes unfathomably tired and sad, eyes of that gentle appeal that went
straight to the depths of his masculine heart.
"All the same, I love you as you," he said. "I can't measure how
much more or less for being sure of you--but I'm mighty glad to be
sure of you--and I can't take my own insides to pieces as you can,
but all the same I love you, love you, Lottie."
But as he smoked a last cigar,--for he said that their talk had
driven sleep from him--Mr. Collingwood uttered but one phrase as he
monotonously paced back and forth across his veranda. Sometimes he
uttered it with irritation, sometimes he mouthed it slowly as if its
terse brevity were the outlet of profound conviction. Sometimes he
even smiled tenderly over it, as a memory of his wife's earnestness
brushed across his vision. But however he said it, he repeated it
again and again; and it was, "Well, I'll be damned!" For the lady he
had married had again said and done the unexpected thing.
Charlotte was still less inclined to sleep than her lord, though she
went through the semblance of courting slumber. She was infinitely
annoyed with herself for her own outburst, and was seeking what seemed
a reasonable cause for so much emotion, but could not find one. She
heartily wished Judge Barton had seen fit to wait for an invitation
before he invaded Maylubi; and, though she declined to admit that she
looked upon his coming as an omen, she was inclined to feel that he had
been altogether too mixed in her romance. He had been an unsympathetic
and amused onlooker at her courtship; he had been with them on that
last crucial evening before their marriage;--she wondered how much
his mere presence had influenced her in her subsequent speech with
Martin;--he had been present at the wedding; and now his coming was
contemporaneous with their nearest approach to a quarrel. As for what
she had eased her mind of to Martin, she knew that she was right, but
she added, self-accusingly, that her knowing it was all wrong. Quite
mournfully she arraigned herself, and she assented whole-heartedly
in what she knew must be Martin's secret verdict--that women have no
business with ideas of a philosophy on sex matters: that they should
be limited to instincts and to principles. Long after Martin had
ceased to pass upon his own condemnation, and was sleeping like an
exaggerated infant, she lay wide-eyed, fearing she knew not what,
but conscious of change impending. She had had eight months of a
happiness more nearly perfect than she had ever dreamed could be hers,
and it was not in the nature of things temporal as she knew them that
such happiness could be of long duration.
Judge Barton meanwhile had retired to his tent, but had him drawn
thence by a late-rising moon and his own cogitations. As he paced
slowly up and down the silvery beach, his thoughts rushed one after
another in confusing circles. First of all he anathematized himself
for daring to put to the test that lulled security of his own feelings
for Mrs. Collingwood. He had left her on her wedding day, himself a
prey to a charm that had struck him, as it were, between the eyes,
struck him with that force which emotion can attain only when it
is suddenly aroused for one who has played an unheeded part in the
subject's life up to the moment of its birth. It had been months since
he deemed that his sudden obsession for Mrs. Collingwood was dead,
killed by very weariness of itself, and by continual thwarting. For a
week or ten days after his parting with her, he had gone about with
her face constantly before him, with her voice in his ears. He had
started at the sight of a figure in the distance, resembling hers. His
appetite had failed him, zest in all things had departed from him. The
congratulations of his confreres on a brilliant decision had, it seemed
to him, been mockery. He wanted her approval, nobody else's. The
women of his acquaintance bored him to irritation. "I am in love,"
he admitted to himself, "in love with a married woman whom I probably
might have married myself had I so desired. I saw her every day for six
weeks, and far from entertaining any sentimental thoughts about her,
I deliberately set myself to tease and annoy her. I lost all sight
of her for six weeks, and in that time never gave her a thought; but
when I found her with her lover at her side and saw her vow herself
to him, for reasons only known to the imp of perversity I discovered
that she was my long lost affinity. My God! was ever man before such
an imbecile? How can a man conceive such an affection for a woman who
has given him one tremulous smile on her wedding day? What does this
thing feed on? Am I coming to my dotage?"
In such strain did the Judge berate himself through ten or twelve
weary days, and then the obsession left him as suddenly as it had
come. Interest and ambition returned, he found his women friends
as entertaining as ever, and though he thought often and kindly of
Mrs. Collingwood, his meditations were tinged with a strain of that
violet usually allotted to the dead. Past experience had taught
him that sentimental fancies about women, once chilled, are hard
to resuscitate, and he felt quite certain that Mrs. Collingwood's
ghost would trouble his musings no more. He fell into the habit of
thinking about the experience humorously, he spoke of it to himself as
"my tragedy," and once he nearly allowed a clever woman to worm the
story out of him. The accidental intrusion of a third person was all
that saved him from an access of garrulity; but having been saved,
he was able to contemplate with retrospective horror his nearness to
the brink and to avoid all subsequent promenadings on that path.
When by mere chance, he found himself invited to accompany the
Commissioner and the oyster-shell agent on their voyage of discovery,
he accepted the invitation with delight, regarding himself as a man
protected by inoculation. He owned up, however, to a frank curiosity
about the Collingwoods, and to a strong desire to see them together
in their home; but he had as little expectation of a revival of his
fancy for Mrs. Collingwood as he had of beholding so great a change
in the lady herself.
But it had revived! It was there in full force, bringing with it the
primitive man's sense that desire is right. From the moment he had
again beheld Charlotte's high-bred face with her soul shining through
the gray eyes, and had been again conscious of her fastidiousness and
of her intelligence,--in short, of all the overpowering emanations of
a unique personality,--his old passion to dominate her, to hold her
fascinated by his own powerful magnetism, burned like a fever within
him. It burned the more that in the lapsed months some new element
of charm had come to her, as if the enlarging of human experience had
fused and melted into softer lines those sturdy elements of character
which had repelled quite as often as they had attracted him. She was
not to be flirted with--that he knew only too well, and he had to put
on eyes and voice a guard that cost him dear; but he could not resist
following her when she went to supervise her dinner preparations,
he could not resist the grudging sense he had of every word addressed
to another than himself.
He cursed his folly in submitting himself to temptation. By his own
act he had put himself in this place and had burned his bridges
behind him. He had let himself in for a week of the society of a
woman, to associate with whom, on the terms on which he must meet
her, was sheer tantalization. She would not flirt with him, nor was
she of the ingenuously simple sort which can be flirted with without
knowing the fact. The Judge smiled ruefully as he tried to imagine
Charlotte Collingwood dominated by any emotion which she could not
analyze. Plainly, he had one course before him--to see as little as
possible of Mrs. Collingwood except in her husband's presence, and to
guard his eyes and tongue if by chance he should find himself alone
with her. He was rather proud of his virtuous resolutions, but he
dreaded the slow-going days--seven of them before the steamer would
return and he could put time and distance between him and Charlotte
Collingwood. The Judge had great faith in Time as a mender of all
things.