The evening meal passed off more easily than had seemed possible to
Mrs. Collingwood's disturbed imagination. Judge Barton managed to
appear perfectly at ease, and she played her own part better than she
had fancied that she could. Only one dread preyed upon her. There was
a readiness in Kingsnorth to devote himself to the entertainment of
the guests, and a tact on his part in holding the household together
which made her suspect that keen observer of a desire to aid her;
and such a desire could only lead to the inference that he had,
to some extent, grasped the situation. The thought was galling;
but its bitterness was, for the time, mitigated by her sense of need.
She slept little that night, but toward morning she fell into a doze
from which she was aroused by the sounds of breakfast preparations in
the next room. She jumped up hurriedly, only to behold the bathers
sporting in the sea, and the coastguard cutter lying a mile or so
off shore. Dressing as quickly as she could she hastened down to the
beach in time to meet the Commissioner as he came ashore.
The Commissioner's first rush of enthusiasm had had time to cool,
and he had thought much during his week's absence. Without in the
least abating his very high opinion of Mrs. Collingwood's personality
and attainments, he had had time to consider the possible attitude
of Mrs. Commissioner, and the difficulties attendant upon too close a
connection with the queer island menage. The result of his reflections
was a self-conscious restraint, and a very bungling masculine attempt
to recede from a position without betraying himself in the act.
Charlotte read his self-consciousness aright, ignored the existence
of a Mrs. Commissioner, saved his feelings for him, and bore him
no grudge. She had accepted her husband's associates kindly for
his sake; but she had never ceased to look upon them with the clear
vision of her upbringing. Socially Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins
were "impossible." It mattered little to her, because she had
turned her back forever upon society and all its works. She even
took satisfaction in playing her part gracefully. She enjoyed the
Commissioner's mystification, and the little access of deference in
his manner when he spoke to her.
She was saved the necessity of any direct speech with the Judge, till,
at the very last moment, he snatched a second while the others were
grouped around the Commissioner.
"I don't dare put out a hand," he said, "and I suppose you won't
believe me when I say that I am sorry, and that I didn't sleep last
night for execrating myself. I am sorry in the dullest, heart-sickest
way a man can be. I knew as well before I said those things as I
know now that it would not do me any good, and yet they had to come
out. Well, I've lost a friend. But do you suppose you can ever think
kindly of me again?"
She raised her eyes to him for one of those slow painful glances that
she sometimes gave, and she answered measuredly:
"I don't think unkindly of you on my own account. Somehow the thing
has no bearing on me. I have seen you in the proper light, and I do
not think you are worth thinking unkindly about. But for my husband's
sake I shall always feel a resentment. He gave you shelter under his
roof, and a seat at his table; and in turn you would have betrayed
him. On his account, I shall always feel anger, but for me you are
just--erased."
"You can say, at least, as bitter things as other women," the Judge
retorted with pale lips. She shrugged her shoulders lightly and
extended a very high hand.
"It has been such a pleasure to have you with us," she said quite
distinctly. Her eyes met his unflinchingly, but his own were bright
with moisture. He wrung her hand in spite of its high bent wrist.
"No, don't do that," he said. "Give me a good honest handshake. I'm
sorry. I shall be sorry for some time to come. Besides--" his
expressive pause said as plainly as words, "You have conducted yourself
admirably. The thing has done you no harm."
Collingwood saw the shrug, the look exchanged, and the handshake. He
perceived war in his wife's manner, and he wondered what it was
all about. But as the Commissioner was already seating himself in
the human chair to be carried out to the boat there was no time to
ask questions then. He was still more surprised when his wife came
up to him, and slipping a hand in his, stood watching the departing
dignitary. Charlotte had a horror of public demonstrations, and the act
was unlike her. He slipped an arm around her, glancing, as he did so,
somewhat sheepishly at his other guests; but the Judge was apparently
absorbed in the process of turning up the bottoms of an exceedingly
well made pair of trousers before embarking in turn; and, as he was
carried out, his anxiety to protect a pair of spotless shoes seemed
superior to every other consideration.
When the guests were once aboard their boat, the fishers made haste
to embark in their own; and Mrs. Collingwood, with a hasty wave of
her hand, turned immediately and went indoors.
She drew a long breath of relief as she entered her little
sitting-room. There was a sort of clearing in the atmosphere, a sense
of wholesomeness and content in having their lives to themselves. She
passed lovingly from one piece of furniture to another, giving a touch
here, making some slight change there. Her housekeeping cares became a
renewed pleasure. All day she busied herself about house and mending,
laying aside wholly the books and magazines which, for several hours
each day, had been her wonted entertainment. When Martin came home
at five o'clock, she met him, a radiant creature, eyes smiling, face
beaming content, her laugh spontaneous as a child's. He was inclined
to be lonely, and said as much at dinner. Mrs. Maclaughlin agreed with
him, but Maclaughlin and Kingsnorth went over to Charlotte's side,
and insisted that things were cosier with their own little family.
After dinner, husband and wife sat on their veranda steps while
Martin smoked a pipe or two. He was very thoughtful, she silently
content. Suddenly he broke out:
"Charlotte, did you and the Judge quarrel?"
Charlotte started perceptibly and answered after a decided pause:
"What makes you think we did?"
"I saw your handshake."
He felt rather than saw another little shrug. It was a reckless
gesture. Charlotte wanted very much to quarrel with her little gods
just then. She kept silence, however, and he was forced to go on
insistently.
"Did he try to make love to you?"
There was a miserable humor in her reply. "Not in your acceptance of
the term, Martin."
"Well, what is my acceptance of the term? I should like to know what
you mean by that."
"He did not put his arm around my waist or try to kiss me."
"Then what were you scrapping with him for?" said Martin with such
instant relief that Charlotte laughed helplessly, though the tears were
rolling down her cheeks. Martin studied her intently through the gloom.
"There's something behind all this," he remarked sententiously. "I
never before knew you to dodge a question, or to be in such a
mood. Now, see here, I've got some rights in this matter and I want
to know about it."
His tone brought her up sharp in her half-hysterical mirth. She
replied quickly.
"You will not like it, Martin."
"I'll have to decide that."
"Well, if nothing but the truth will do, he proposed to me that I
should get rid of you and marry him."
Collingwood threw down his cigar with an oath, and jumped, in the
sudden rush of his anger, quite clear of the steps. He made several
short, quick turns back and forth before he finally sat down again
at his wife's side.
"I suppose he had some reason for thinking you might entertain such
a proposition," he said bitterly.
Charlotte's pride sprang to arms. "He may have had one," she replied
laconically. "It was not in any glance or words I had given him. I
haven't been flirting with him. My conscience is clear."
"But men don't make propositions of that sort without a reason,
Charlotte."
Again she said nothing. The answer was burning on her lips. "You are
the reason. The associates you have given me here are the reasons." But
she maintained silence. Collingwood was angered by what he thought
her obstinacy.
"Well, what was the reason?" he demanded.
"He thought I might be ambitious."
It was an honest answer and as generous as it was frank. But
Collingwood was in no mood to measure generosity.
"And you let him get away without giving me a chance to kick him into
the Sulu Sea," he reproached her.
"I did. The greatest fear I had was that he would not get away without
your doing it. Suppose you had kicked him--as you are quite capable
of doing--and he had kicked back. One or the other would have been
hurt. Suppose it had been you, do you think I should have enjoyed
seeing you suffer? Or suppose you had hurt him, do you think it would
have been a satisfaction to me to know that you had fought for me,
and had to be punished for it? Do I want my husband in jail or maimed
for rebuking an insolence that I could handle myself? I defended
your dignity and mine, and Judge Barton has been a thousand times
more rebuked by my tongue than he would have been by your fists."
With this speech and with the memory of her shrug and handshake,
Martin's kindling jealousy had to be temporarily extinguished. He
returned with a more conciliating manner to the charge.
"I should like to know what you said to him."
But Charlotte could suffer no more. "Don't ask me, don't ask me,"
she implored. She rose and walked away. The action was the result of
lifelong habit. She had never allowed herself to indulge in emotion
before others, and she had exercised almost the will of a red Indian to
refrain from giving way to an overwhelming burst of tears; but when,
after she had regained some control of herself, her thoughts returned
to Collingwood, a sense of bitter disappointment in him mingled with
her self-pity.
He had not followed her! He had shown her no sympathy in her momentary
outburst of unhappiness. She was conscious of never having deserved
better of his loyalty and sympathy, and she had never received
less! She finally took up a book and endeavored to read, but her
heart was sick with wounded love and pride. She found old feelings
that she had believed scourged out of her being rising in tumultuous
violence. There was the feeling of outraged pride and sensibility,
the swelling sense of injustice, and a blind twisting and turning to
see a way out of the situation. Suddenly that which the Judge had
proposed leaped back into her mind. The ear which had been deaf to
him when he appealed to her ambitions became sensitively alive to
a whisper when that whisper promised succor from distaste. She was
frightened at her own attitude and took herself severely to task. She
said to herself that she was morbid, that Martin had every right to
be displeased with her, for she had denied him frankness; but even
as she ranged these weights in her mind's eye the scale tipped lower
and lower with the weight of his displeasure.
Live under the bane of his anger she could not. The tentative
overtures, the timid looks or glances, the humility with which
less spirited women propitiate an injured deity were foreign to
her nature; but equally she was not calloused, as many women are,
to conjugal frowns.
All the self-confidence which she had gained in months of happiness
was jolted out of her at Martin's first angry word. Another woman
might have turned his wrath away with a laugh, might have nestled
her hand into his with a whisper and a kind look; but it was not
in Charlotte Collingwood to offer a caress to an angry husband. It
would have been to her an act beyond the pale of decency. Her heart
harbored no revenge. Every moment as she sat listening for his step,
she justified his resentment, she told herself over and over that
she had no tact and no consideration, and that Martin was an abused
husband; but to have risen and sought him when he was plainly averse
to her society would have seemed to her the acme of unwomanliness.
Meanwhile Mr. Collingwood was pacing the sands. His temper was
seething. He did not understand the situation, and the more he
realized his inability to understand it, the higher rose his desire
to hold somebody accountable. There was no doubting the sincerity of
Charlotte's words, "I have not been flirting with him," but Martin
Collingwood thought there had to be a reason for such a radical step
on the part of so conservative a man as the Judge. Then there was the
fact that the Judge had departed without that closer acquaintance with
Martin Collingwood's footwear. To a man of Collingwood's temperament,
being balked of the physical pleasures of revenge was worse even
than the sting of the affront. Why had not Charlotte told him? She
had clearly not meant to tell him. She had meant to let him go on
shaking that viper by the hand when they met. But why? Ah, that why!
It was long after midnight when he entered his home. His wife was
asleep or pretended to be so; and when he awoke late, after a troubled
sleep, he found her dressed and gone. From the adjoining room, the
clinking of cups and saucers told him that breakfast was going on.
Collingwood dressed quickly and went in to breakfast wearing an
unpleasant face. After one quick glance, Charlotte gave him a smiling
good morning, to which he vouchsafed a surly reply.
Kingsnorth remarked: "I thought I should have to go to work without
you, old man. Mrs. Collingwood would not have you waked. She made us
talk in whispers and eat in parenthesis, as it were."
"All tom-foolishness," said Martin. "I am no six-weeks-old baby. You
let me oversleep like this again," he added, addressing the muchacho,
"and I'll beat you with a dog whip."
Then electrically everybody knew that something was wrong in the
Collingwood household. Mrs. Maclaughlin stole a frightened look at
Charlotte whose face flamed, Maclaughlin stared first at Collingwood
and then at his wife, and finally turned his wondering eyes on
Kingsnorth, who met his gaze with an eye about as intelligent as that
of an oculist's advertisement. A moment later Charlotte addressed some
trifling remark to Kingsnorth who answered with a suspicious readiness,
and they fell into conversation unshared by the rest of the table.
Collingwood continued to gloom after the Maclaughlins and
Kingsnorth, who had nearly finished when he appeared, had excused
themselves. Charlotte sat on profoundly uncomfortable. She had no words
in which to address his frowning majesty, but she was heartsick. She
rose at last, saying, "If you will excuse me, Martin, I will leave
you to finish alone, I forgot about those launch supplies;" and she
made her errand in the kitchen detain her until she saw the launch
puffing lazily across the blue, sparkling water.
She went back to her room and lay down half nauseated with the misery
surging within her. Nothing in her experience had prepared her to meet
the emergency she was confronting. She came of a family to whom the
scene which had taken place in her breakfast-room could be possible
only as a definite, final act of estrangement. She was as utterly
ignorant of those persons who alternately frown and smile and betray
joy or sorrow unthinkingly to the world as Martin was ignorant of
the jealous guarding of appearances which pertained to her world. It
never once occurred to her that Martin could publicly affront her at
breakfast and forget all about it before dinner.
Yet that is precisely what he did. The day's work restored his
natural sunny self. He dismissed the Judge from his mind with the
mental reservation of kicking him on sight; and when he came home
that night, he strode up the steps, caught his wife in his arms, and
kissed her as naturally as if they had not, that very morning, omitted
that lover's benediction for the first time since their marriage.
He made no apology for his late spleen. Truth is, he hardly thought
of it as affecting her. She clung to him as he kissed her, and he saw
that she was pale and her eyes heavily lidded; but he asked her no
questions. She had had, in truth, a hard day. As soon as the glowering
man body was safely out of the way, Mrs. Maclaughlin came over, bent
on extracting information. In her life and in the lives of most of
her friends, connubial difficulties meant neighborhood confidences
and lamentations. Charlotte parried her hints and, to a point-blank
question, returned a look so rebuking that Mrs. Maclaughlin went home
in high dudgeon. For the rest of the day, Charlotte struggled against
the tears that would have betrayed her--struggled till her eyeballs
ached and her weary head seemed drawn back upon her shoulders.
At dinner Kingsnorth stole one furtive glance, said to
himself "Thoroughbred, by Jove," and bent himself to seconding
Mrs. Collingwood's conversational efforts. After dinner they all
played bridge till eleven o'clock.
So the whole incident was passed over without speech between husband
and wife. But with it went the completeness, the golden, unreal
joy of their honeymoon. Though they walked and talked together,
and played at being lovers again, a sense of distrust hung over
their relations. Collingwood secretly nursed his why; his wife still
asked herself proudly if she had deserved public humiliation at his
hands. Led by an evil genius he could not have selected a more adroit
way to offend her and to arouse her critical faculties against him
than that he had chosen. Private reproaches she could have endured
with more fortitude than she could endure public sulking.
Nevertheless, she made a Spartan effort to clear him at her own
expense, and a no less loyal attempt to conceal from him that a wound
still rankled in her breast. But it did rankle, and, in the next
six weeks, it seemed to her that she and Martin grew steadily apart;
that in spite of every effort to stay the widening process, it went
on slowly and relentlessly, and that it was leading them gradually
but inevitably to that moment which she had so greatly dreaded before
her marriage.
It was the custom at the island for the three men to take turns in
going to Manila for commissaries, and to dispose of their pearls and
shells. Collingwood had been engaged in this work the year before,
when he met with the accident which landed him in the hospital;
the Maclaughlins had been up since Charlotte's marriage, and the
next trip was Kingsnorth's. But as the time drew near, he astounded
them all by the announcement that he did not want to go, and that
he wished Collingwood to take his place. When pressed for a reason
for his apparent insanity, he declared that if a man had to live in
purgatory or a worse place, he had better stay there all the time,
and not seek spots that would emphasize its drawbacks when he returned
to it. He insisted that Collingwood enjoyed Manila while to him it
was the extreme of boredom, and that Martin ought to take his wife
away for a change, that her spirits were drooping.
"Nonsense," said Charlotte. "I am absolutely contented. I don't
feel droopy."
But Collingwood had taken alarm. He stared at her. "But you are a
bit pale," he said. "I wonder why I had not noticed it. Besides, I
should like to be in Manila again with you. Let's accept. Kingsnorth
proposed it himself. He can't complain if we take him at his word."
At this point, Mrs. Maclaughlin put in a bomb. "Why can't I go too,
then?" she said.
"We need a housekeeper," cried Kingsnorth, while Maclaughlin remarked
hastily, "Don't talk of it."
"Fiddlesticks," Martin said. "You can get along by yourself a
while. It's just the thing. Charlotte will have somebody for company
while I am at business."
By this time, Charlotte was ready with a smile and an echo of
his remark. Kingsnorth grew morose while Mrs. Maclaughlin began
to enumerate the things which actually demanded her presence in
Manila. Maclaughlin gave her one or two frowns; but she had taken the
bit in her teeth; and it was soon decided that she was to have her way.
Charlotte's heart sank and her anticipation of pleasure subsided into
dread. Mrs. Maclaughlin was, at all times, a trial to her. She had
little sympathy with the self-complacent temperament which is not
subject to atmospheric influences; and Mrs. Maclaughlin's society
seemed to her several degrees less desirable in Manila than it did
in Maylubi. She made no objection, however, and even succeeded in
forcing herself to a half-hearted share in Martin's enthusiasm.