The next morning at the matutinal swim the Judge affixed himself as
a satellite to Kingsnorth, and left the married pair to take their
morning recreation together. At breakfast, he talked business and
accepted with apparent eagerness an invitation to visit the fishing
grounds with the workers and the shell-purveyor. He went on that
day and on five other days, enduring a great many sights and smells
that he by no means enjoyed, but admitting to himself that anything
was better than battling with the continual temptation to bombard
Mrs. Collingwood with the declaration of his passion for her. He had
enough to do to watch his betraying eye and voice during those long
hours, from five o'clock till bedtime, during which the little colony
was perforce united; and at the end of each day's dragging torment,
he balanced a mental account in which he itemized on one side his
self-restraint, its pains and penances, and on the other Charlotte's
gradual revelation of all her hidden loveableness. At first, a shadow
of her old guard had hung about her, and she had been reserved; but
reassured by his frank geniality and his apparent desire to see as much
of Collingwood as possible, she gradually relaxed her watchfulness,
and admitted him to the place of a tried family friend.
One warm night, when the Maclaughlins, Kingsnorth, and the oyster-agent
had given themselves up to the delights of bridge, the other three
strolled along the beach till they came to an old banca lying bottom
up on the sand. There was no moon, but the stars burned steadily
overhead, their reflections rising and falling with each slow wave. A
ghostly thread of white fire outlined each breaker that toppled lazily
over, and the gentle succession of splashes was like a deep harmonic
accompaniment to the shrill chorus of insect life which burst from the
grove behind them. They sat and listened a long while, each under the
same charm, which was a different charm. It was Charlotte who first
broke the silence.
"In spite of the noise, isn't it still, isn't it lonely, isn't it
delightful?" she said. "It is like a sort of Truce of God thrown into
our lives of struggle and overstrain."
"I can never accustom myself to those sentiments from you,
Mrs. Collingwood," said the Judge. "To me you seem a woman so eminently
fitted to be a part of the great world, that I cannot understand your
getting along so well without it. It is like seeing a musician trying
to live without music, or an artist without pencils and brushes."
"Charlotte swam out into the big world and got a mouthful of salt
water, and it made her sick," Martin put it. He fancied the Judge's
words had reference to living in a city among hordes of fellow
beings. Of society as a fine art, Martin had no conception.
"That's quite true, Martin; but it isn't my only reason for liking
our present life. Your 'great world,' Judge Barton, means a continual
drain upon one's tact and patience, a continual smoothing over of
difficulties, of forcing oneself to adapt oneself to people with whom
one has no real sympathy. This life is a sort of moral drifting, with
the consciousness that the current moves in the right direction. The
other world is full of experiences. One passes from one perception
to another, one's being is wrung with the continual play of warring
emotions; but here one sits down quietly to digest and to let one's
soul feed on the food one has gathered in that plethora of emotions."
"I wonder if you know how aptly you illustrate your theory."
"Oh, yes, I have grown," she declared tranquilly. "It seems to me my
horizon has broadened infinitely while I have been here. When I was a
child living in a convent, we internes were given annually a week at
the seashore. Our unfailing recreation was to run about with a tin pail
and a spade, filling the pail with sea-shells, seaweed, and all the
other seashore treasures which children delight in. And when we went
home, I remember the joy I had in going through my pail. Things flopped
in so rapidly during the day that I hardly knew what was there. But
the ecstasy of the twilight hour when I sorted my treasures! My life
here has been something like that tin pail sorting-out. I have sat
down to review impressions, to throw away the valueless, to classify
and arrange the rest. It has been a priceless experience."
"Very good; but you don't want to keep it up forever," remarked
Collingwood.
"I fancy Mrs. Collingwood will begin constructing after she has
finished sorting."
"A philosophy! Remember you warned me against it. Besides I have my
doubts of a philosophy's ever being satisfactory to a woman. For myself
I have no hopes of ever being more than consistently inconsistent."
"Your demands are modest." This in rather an inscrutable voice from
the Judge.
"Do you really think so? Have you not learned that really modest
demands on life are like elegantly simple clothing, the most expensive
to be obtained? Get my husband to tell you his demands on life,
and you will hear something that really is modest."
"Out with it, Collingwood. I have never given you credit for modest
demands."
Collingwood puffed out two rings of smoke, and removed his cigar. He
was sitting at his wife's feet as she sat on the banca, and he leaned
his head back luxuriously against her knee.
"Above five millions as near as I can make it is my figure. I might do
with more if I could get it, but I don't see where I can do with less."
"And you call that modest!" said Judge Barton ironically to Charlotte.
"I call any demand on life modest which can be expressed in dollars
and cents. But Martin's only modest demand is for the five millions. He
has others not so modest."
"Name one," challenged Collingwood, sitting up in some surprise.
"I shall do nothing of the kind. Find them out for yourself."
"And how about me?" There was a tone almost of abject anxiety in
Judge Barton's voice.
"Ah, you! You know that you draw sight drafts on the universe daily."
"Which are seldom honored," the Judge remarked somewhat bitterly.
"This is all getting blamed mysterious to me," interrupted
Collingwood. "I wish you two would talk down to my level."
"Talk up to it, you mean," replied Charlotte good-naturedly. "For you
cannot believe for an instant that the irresponsible demands of two
persons asking for the impossible are to be put on a higher level than
a practical demand like yours that can be expressed in figures, even if
it runs into seven. You ask nothing of life, Martin, that isn't in it;
while those drafts of Judge Barton, as well as my own, are drawn on
an ideal universe. The Judge and I are not content with things as they
are. We do not own up often, but this seems a propitious moment. Deep
in his heart each of us is echoing that old refrain of Omar's.
"Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!"
"That's pretty. Say that again," said Martin; and she repeated it. At
its end he said wistfully, "I thought you and I had our hearts'
desires." And Judge Barton broke into his short, ironical laugh.
"Don't tell me my husband can't make pretty speeches," said Charlotte.
"He clings to his commercial instincts," said the Judge, "for he
asked as much as he gave."
"Humph!" grunted Martin. "I am beginning to be proud of myself. I
didn't know I gave or asked. I thought I referred to things that are
understood. You are my heart's desire. All the rest is just working,
and being glad when I succeed, and angry when I fail. It's taking
hard knocks and gritting my teeth over them, and saying to myself
that I'll blast what I want out of this universe yet. That's just
living. But I don't want the world made over. It suits me all right,
and I thought it suited you."
Judge Barton's gaze was fixed on the vague moving mass of waters
before them, but Charlotte fancied she could detect a tense interest
in her answer.
"It does not suit me altogether," she replied slowly, "but if Judge
Barton will forgive an exchange of conjugal compliments, I'll admit
that it has come very near suiting me, since I married you. My little
burst of this evening is an echo of a former self. It's the sort of
thing I have said so much in my life, that it ripples off my tongue
through force of habit whenever anyone strikes a harmonious note. And
now I am going in. I am tired and sleepy, and I know that you both
want to talk business."
The Judge rose as she did. Martin remained on the upturned banca. "I'll
follow you before long," he said, and before she was out of earshot
she heard him say, "What do you think the administration is likely
to do?" The rest trailed off in an indistinct murmur; but she smiled,
knowing that Philippine policy was uppermost.
The next morning Judge Barton found his self-denying spirit in the
minority, and a very insistent small voice demanding a reward for
five days of self-immolation. Secure in the knowledge of his past
will-power, and confident that the next day would see him off the
island, he asked himself why there was any need of sacrificing himself
to the heat and smells of another day on the launch. He pleaded a
headache, ate little to bear evidence to his sincerity, and after
breakfast retired to his tent with the honest intention of keeping
it till noon at least for very consistency's sake. Through its open
sides, he could view Mrs. Collingwood at her daily routine.
She came out upon the broad veranda, made a minute examination of
the flower-pots, pulled a few dead fronds from a great air-fern which
hung in one of the windows, and cut a nosegay from the hedge of golden
cannas. Afterwards he saw her through the open casement, sitting at
her desk, and apparently making entries in an account book. At nine
o'clock, six or eight children between the ages of seven and fourteen
arrived and squatted down on the veranda. Charlotte came out with
an armful of books, which she distributed; and with the help of one
of the larger boys, she also brought out an easel on which was a
rude blackboard.
At this point the Judge's resolution weakened. He donned a coat and
ambled over to the veranda. To his hostess's somewhat suspicious,
"Better so soon?" he returned an honest confession.
"It was just one of my boyhood headaches," he admitted, "the kind
that used to keep me in bed till nine o'clock, when school had taken
up. Did you never have that sort of headache, Mrs. Collingwood?"
"Never. I was a conscientious child, though I am willing to admit
that it was doubtless a great mistake to be so. Rufino, begin." And
Rufino began chantingly:
"E see a cuf. A ball is in de cuf. Srow de ball to me." He paused
triumphantly.
"I see a cup," corrected Charlotte. "Say it after me--cup, cup"
and she pronounced the final consonant so distinctly that Rufino
proceeded without difficulty:--
"I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa. Srow de ball to me." There was
no little difficulty in inducing Rufino to say throw, and he did not
succeed until Mrs. Collingwood made him take his tongue in his two
fingers and pull it through his teeth, preliminary to attacking the
word. His mates took exuberant joy in this feat, and the next boy,
Wenceslao de los Angeles, started out glibly: "I see a cuppa. A
ball is in de cuppa," and then dropped his book, gave his tongue a
convulsive jerk and spluttered, "Srow de cuppa to me."
The Judge gurgled as helplessly as the children did, blushed, tried to
save the situation, and looked exceedingly severe. Mrs. Collingwood, a
little flushed, threw him a protesting glance, smiled, bit her lip and
went on with the reading lesson. When every aspirant had had a chance
to see the cup and to pull his tongue, she proceeded to "develop"
the lesson. The Judge was bored. It was one of the miseries of his
strange infatuation for her that merely being with her or able to
watch her afforded him no satisfaction. He wanted to monopolize her,
to keep her attention constantly centred in himself. If this feeling
was Nature, working in its own blind way to accomplish what the man's
intellect told him could not be done, the Judge ruefully reflected
that Nature can sometimes keep a man very miserable, and that she
wastes a great deal of human effort. For whether her thoughts were
with him or away from him, he was secretly conscious of what she had
told her husband, that there was for her, in one sense, but one man in
the world. Her old suspicion of him was lulled, and she stood ready
for fair honest friendship; but there never had been, in one glance
of her eye, in her occasional merry laugh, or in her frank converse,
the faintest evidence of that sex consciousness which is in no wise to
be confounded with social self-consciousness, but which, as an element
in woman's entity, is the only possible excuse for the banalities
which men are usually eager to exchange with them by the hour.
The Judge was wearily awaiting the close of the reading lesson when
he received another disappointment in the sight of numerous physically
incommoded individuals who strolled up by detachments, and squatted at
the foot of the veranda steps. There was a consumptive in a talebon,
or hammock, in which the sick are carried about. There was a small
boy with a boil on his kneecap. He had plastered it with lime,
a disinfectant for almost all skin troubles in the Philippines;
and he alternately felt it gingerly, and glanced apprehensively, if
fascinatedly, in the direction of the "medequilla." There were ulcers,
and yellow jaundiced folk suffering with a seasonal fever. The Judge
decided that fully one-fifth of the island's population was represented
in the assemblage, and he gave a shrug of commiseration as he reflected
how they must have suffered unaided before the coming of Charlotte.
He was watching her somewhat closely as she struggled with the limited
understanding of one of her protegees, when she glanced down the
beach, and he saw a great tide of crimson rush to her cool, clear
skin. Naturally his eyes followed hers, but he saw approaching only
a rather young and comely girl carrying a young child in her arms. He
had barely time to perceive this when Mrs. Collingwood turned to him.
"I am going to dismiss my class and take these poor people next, and
I can't let you assist at that. I am dreadfully self-conscious about
it with any on-lookers. There isn't any evading the fact that it is
really daring on my part to attempt to play physician, and nurse,
too; but something has to be done for them. But I really couldn't
bear an audience."
"I'm off," said the Judge with a laugh. He did not, however, turn
toward his tent, which would have taken him away from the approaching
girl, but swung briskly down the sand in the direction from which
she was advancing.
She greeted him with the customary civility of Filipinos, and he
vouchsafed her a nod. He dared not stop and speak to her, but he
made directly for the native village, a mile away, where he asked
the headman who she was. When he had extracted the full details of
the story, he turned and strolled slowly back. But he did not rejoin
Mrs. Collingwood. He went, instead, to his tent, where he sat gazing
meditatively across the sea while he turned over and over the facts
that he had heard.
She had compromised with life with a vengeance! He felt that she had
gone far when he beheld the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth. But to live
openly in daily converse with such a man, to sit at the table with
him, and to minister to the needs of his illegitimate child--that
was carrying tolerance or charity to a length unprecedented. He
made no allowance for the fact that she found herself confronted
with a situation in which to take action was to risk her domestic
happiness. What he scorned in her was the fact that she could be happy
under such circumstances. He knew very well that women put up with
worse in the very circles which he was struggling so desperately
to attain; but he knew also the veil of decent concealment which
those circles know so well how to assume. He had to admit, also,
that she had proved more of a philosopher than he had given her
credit for being, and she had dared to reprove him for his gibe,
and he had apologized with God knows what of contrition! The hunter
instinct that is so strong in all men rose up in him; and suddenly he
realized why he had so remorselessly wounded her and tormented her in
those early days of their acquaintance. It was that deep in his mind
had lain the desire for her, which still held, but which then he had
been unwilling to gratify by marriage; and proportionally as he had
felt that she was out of his reach and that he dared not insult her
by one sign of sentimentality unbacked by the desire of marriage, he
had hated her with the smouldering hatred of balked affection. Well,
he loved her still, and he was willing to marry her. If she could get
rid of Collingwood, he was willing to marry her. He hardly doubted that
she would do it. He felt pretty sure of the motives which had made her
marry the young ruffian, who had, he admitted, improved considerably
under her hands. She was a feminine creature in spite of her brains,
unable to face life without love, and she had been grateful to the
man who offered it to her, and had given her the shelter of his
roof. But that any woman of Charlotte Collingwood's breeding would
deliberately prefer Martin Collingwood to a man of her own class,
Judge Alexander Barton declined to believe. Nor was he altogether
wrong. She might not have taken Collingwood in the beginning, had the
Judge been his honest rival at that time. But having taken him, she
had no intention of questioning her bargain. The Judge read her very
correctly up to that point of secret loyalty and gratitude, which to
a man of his ambitions was outside the possibilities of human nature.
Why should she not, he asked himself, get rid of Collingwood without
scandal and marry him. She was a woman to be proud of. He had seen
her at her husband's table and knew that she graced it. There must
be somewhere in the United States an influential kindred who might
not care to make too much of her as a nurse, but who would be glad
to welcome the wife of an eminent jurist; and with proper family
backing, the Judge saw many things. Why not a commissionership, yes,
a governorship? And then (for everybody knows that a Governor of the
Philippines has a great chance to keep in the public eye) why not
something better by-and-by? The Judge's visions grew more rosy than
it is safe to chronicle here.
Strange it was that his week of intimate association had not shown him
the utter futility and madness of thinking to approach Mrs. Collingwood
with the audacious plan he had in mind. Partly, his own passion blinded
his judgment; partly, he had so long been accustomed to the society of
women to whom social preferment is the end of life that he had lost
sight of the stronger and nobler elements of character that can live
in the feminine breast. To be just to the society in which the Judge
moved, there was a very fair sprinkling of noble women within it,
but his restless ambition drove him into intimacy with those who could
understand him and sympathize without the necessity of explanations.
The result of his musings was that he went to luncheon in a dangerous
mood. It had full opportunity to show itself, for Mrs. Maclaughlin did
not appear. She sent word that she had been engaged in the poultry yard
all morning, had bathed late, and would prefer taking her luncheon
in her wrapper at home. As the Judge had caught a glimpse of her
drying her rather wiry gray tresses in the sunshine of a window,
he was able to corroborate her statement; and Charlotte laughed as
she gave orders for the preparation of the tray.
"You can be trusted to see all things that you are not wanted to see,"
she added.
Then the Judge went point-blank and very indiscreetly at the matter
in his mind. "Was that why you sent me away this morning?" he inquired.
For an instant her face flamed, and then the color left it white, with
an angry gleam in her eyes. She played with her teaspoon a minute,
and then she asked him a civil question about his impressions of her
school. It was his turn to flush. The rebuke was the more scathing
for its silence. His temper rose, and even in that instant he found
time to wonder why he should have such an infatuation for a woman
who had such power to enrage him.
"Why do you stand it?" he asked.
Charlotte was dumbfounded. She had her hospital patient on her hands
again, when she had imagined, for nearly a week, that she had found a
friend. Mechanically she pushed a dish of candied fruits (they were at
dessert) toward him. "These are quite fine," she said quietly. "You
had better try them and then have your cigar. Meanwhile I must ask
you to excuse me. My cook awaits dinner directions."
She was rising, but he reached a hand across and seized hers as it
rested on the table edge.
"Do you think you can put this scene off?" he demanded. "You have
got to listen. You had no business to marry Collingwood in the first
place. It is time the thing came to an end."
Mrs. Collingwood very quietly pulled her hand out of his grasp.
"So," she said. She had the air of one who finds herself incarcerated
with a madman. Judge Barton leaned far across the table, his eyes
gleaming, his rather large, powerful face flushed, all the brute
strength of the man dominating the urbane jurist who said clever
things in a rich, well-modulated voice.
"You had no business to marry him in the first place," he said. "But
that's done. Still you can change it."
"Yes," replied Mrs. Collingwood, a very level intonation of contempt
in her tone. It irritated the Judge, and his vehemence rose higher.
"Anything can be changed in these days," he went on. "I want you to
divorce Collingwood and to marry me."
"Well, I shan't," said Mrs. Collingwood. She did not offer to rise,
however. Her heart was swelling with anger, humiliation, and a dull
disappointment in the man in front of her. But some unaccountable
instinct held her listening to the end. She did want to hear what he
would say, she knew it would wound her, but she had a very strong
curiosity as to how far he would go; and a retrospect of all her
past association with him flashed through her mind. A faint smile
curved her lips as she remembered the weeks when he had been free,
had he so chosen, to make love to her. But he had not wanted to make
love to her, till, in the making, he violated all the laws of right
and loyalty. She sat very white and rigid, and the Judge felt in her
once again the woman who had challenged his old self-complacency.
"I suppose it was natural," he went on. "You were alone. You had to
have your romance. But what will it be to ours?--to ours? I'll be a
lover to rival the lovers of history--a husband--and we'll do some
of the things we want to do in this world. We have ambitions, both of
us. Dear--" his voice dropped like a violin note on the octave--"take
the same courage you had in hand to make this mistake, and remedy
it. You defied public opinion in marrying Collingwood. Defy it once
again to get rid of him. The world will understand you better. Yes,
by Jove! it will sympathize more."
"I shall not test it," said Mrs. Collingwood. This time she rose
definitely. "I thank God you are going away to-morrow. The very air
will be freer and cleaner after you have gone."
He stood looking after her, red-eyed, enraged, yet longing with
all the fierce strength of his nature to seize her in his arms and
conquer her as Martin Collingwood had once conquered her. When he
heard the snap of her closing door, he fell into a sort of stupor,
still sitting at the table, his head resting on his clasped hands.
The vehement forceful fury of his mood fell away from him, and
he sat staring haggardly at the white cloth. The act was final,
and having committed it, he had full opportunity to question its
discretion. Strange tragedy of temperament, forcing eye and voice to
utterance which no human power can revoke, though life itself would
be reckoned a fair price for revocation! Sitting there alone with
his thoughts, Alexander Barton was conscious of a shame that would
stay with him for life, of a futile hopeless anger and despair with
himself, of an ache that would take the taste out of life for many
a month and year to come.
Meanwhile, Charlotte had passed into her room, where she stood very
quietly looking out of the window. Her heart lay heavy within her,
and a dull, gripping pain tugged at her throat. She had a sense of
having been morally bruised and beaten. For she saw with painful
distinctness, that it was not only brute feeling which had carried
away Judge Barton's self-control; but that deeper, subtler was his
measurement of the compromise she had made with life. It was not
Charlotte Collingwood's personality, it was what she had done that
opened the way to his advances.
After a time she lay down, and she remained so for the rest of the
afternoon, with her face buried in her pillow. How was she to face
Martin with the wretched story? How was she to dissemble her own
misery? She was a fair actress to the world, taking refuge in a
kind of stoic dignity. But how was she to hide her embarrassment
and misery from the man who could measure her moods as a barometer
measures pressure?