It seemed to Mrs. Collingwood that the next three days embodied the
quintessence of all that had ever fallen to her lot of discomfort
and misery. To lie physically helpless, a burden and a care to
the one person who, at that time, was most out of love with her,
was humiliation of the most cankering variety. Added to it was the
sense of loss, the consciousness of ruin and disaster, and a feeling
of shame that bowed her to the earth. Her husband's bitter words had
sunk deep into her soul. She saw herself as a creature degraded and
partaking of the instincts of the most depraved class. Her marriage
began to assume the complexion of an adventure. Was there an element of
the adventuress in her? she asked herself tremulously. In reply came
a wild rush of denial, an agony of revolt. As she envisaged herself
she could not but justify her own actions. The feminine weakness, and
dread of life's bread-and-butter struggle, alone justified them. And
she had loved Martin tenderly; she had been a good wife, loyal to
his interests, guarding his dignity as her own, literally pouring
her affection and her gratitude for all his tenderness toward her
into his carelessly outstretched palm. No mother ever more sedulously
stood between her child and the evil of the world than she had sought
to save Martin Collingwood the pain of knowing what he had come to
know. His ingratitude, though she would not use that word even to
herself, cut her to the depths of her heart.
But it was plain that their romance was ended; "the thing had gone to
smash," in Collingwood's forceful language. Time and time again she
went over that night on the Luneta before their marriage, and Martin's
words, and her own miserable doubts and fears. The worst had happened,
as she had feared it might, but Collingwood was not living up to his
philosophy. He was angry at her, held himself a man cheated, put all
the blame on her, wanted in a dumb, fruitless way to quarrel with her.
On the evening of her second day in bed, they attempted to thresh out
their difficulties, but it was soon evident that they had reached a
hopeless impasse. Charlotte ended what was a miserable controversy.
"What is your quarrel with me about, Martin?" she said. "Simply that
I am I, that I have lived through certain experiences, that I have
certain criterions of taste and judgment that you have not. I have
not obtruded them on you. I haven't made myself obnoxious by them. I
deny that I have ever deceived you, and I have tried honestly to
think and feel as you do. I haven't been playing a part. I have been
thoroughly happy. But you can't any more make me put your values
on life and people, than you can, because somebody wishes you to,
convince yourself that there is no America; that all your past life
has been a dream; that all you have known and felt and seen has been
mere imagination, a fancy on your part. I'll have no quarrel with you,
no reproaches. I married you of my own free will, and married you for
love. As for my philosophy of life or my views on worldly matters,
what actual part need they play in our life? If I am content to put
them out of sight, why cannot you do so?"
"I'll be damned if I'll live with any woman on earth on your terms,"
Collingwood reiterated.
She looked him steadily in the eyes. "Then the thing is finally
settled, and we can spare ourselves the pain of useless discussion. For
in the thing we are quarrelling with--not my actions, but my philosophy
of life--I shall not change. Nor can I fancy any woman with a spark
of modesty or decency in her, entreating a man to live with her. If
you will allow me to remain here during your stay in Manila, I'll go
before you get back."
"How do you think you are going to live?"
She gave a little reckless shrug. "I supported myself before we were
married. I suppose I can do so again. I'll make no demands on your
pocket book. I didn't marry you to be supported. I married you to
be loved by you, to feel that I gave in your life and home an order
and an assistance--yes, and a joy--to equalize what I cost you in
money. When there is no longer exchange, I refuse to accept."
"Big talk," said Martin. She did not reply, but turned away
wearily. The servant knocked at the door a minute after to say that
dinner was ready, and he went to his meal. After that, it seemed that
they had subsided into a tacit acceptance of their future as she had
outlined it.
Collingwood was quite as unhappy as his wife was. All his masculine
pride was chafing, but his masculine heart was aching. He wanted to be
set gloriously in the right, to ascend the pedestal from which he had
been ignominiously tumbled by a few incautious words overheard. He
wanted, though he hardly phrased it to himself, apologies for his
wife's daring to understand a thing that he had not understood. He
had literally eaten of the tree of knowledge and was enraged with
what lay patent to his seared vision.
The consciousness of what had been going on in Kingsnorth's mind,
in Judge Barton's, in the Commissioner's, burnt like acid on a
wound. He saw, with astonishing clearness, Judge Barton's viewpoint,
and he marvelled no more at that gentleman's temerity. His beggar
maid a princess! his throne a mesalliance!--the thought burned. His
tortured self-love yawned like an abyss which no heaping of prostrate
offenders could ever fill; and against his wife's quiet dignity his
thwarted will raged sullenly.
Yet it is doubtful if he ever really regarded their separation
as probable. Tacitly he accepted her statement that she was going
away. In reality he hardly thought of such a possibility. Alone with
his thoughts, all his will and his imagination bent itself to her
conquest. It was that hour of her final humiliation and confession
to which he looked forward. How long was she going to keep it up?
During her few days' illness, however, he showed her some courtesies
for which she returned a dignified, but not an affectionate,
gratitude. Indeed, she had been up and about the house two or three
days before her husband perceived that the door of her heart and mind,
which she had so shyly opened to him, had closed, and that he stood
outside of it, a part of that concourse which Charlotte Ponsonby
had always feared and distrusted. She had trusted him most of all the
world, and he had turned upon her and hurt her more cruelly than anyone
else had ever done. Without reproach or lamentation or any sign of
self-pity, she retired behind those invincible ramparts to which Martin
had been blind in hospital days, but to which he was now so much alive.
It would have been exceedingly difficult for him to tell in what the
change consisted. Her courtesy was finely measured, it is true, but
it was not an armed truce between belligerents. It was the refuge
of dignity, of one who feels his position false, but would save
appearances by outward grace, at least. She who had been his wife,
his dearest possession, became only a graceful hostess in his home--a
lady who stood ready to lend a deferential ear to his suggestions,
or carry out, to the best of her ability, his every wish, expressed or
unexpressed. She ignored his gloom, saw to all his needs, spoke to him
always kindly, though without humility or contrition; but for herself
she asked not one fraction of his time or his attention. The occasions
for little courtesies which he had been accustomed to offer her were
skilfully avoided; but were never rudely made conspicuous by their
avoidance. Her quiet pride was infinitely more than a match for his
aggressive self-love; her supreme naturalness, the most impregnable
armor she could have worn.
Kingsnorth beheld the transformation in her, was first astonished,
then interested, then moved to profound pity and contrition. With tact
equal to her own, he set himself to meet the situation, seconded
all her efforts to make their awkward meals natural and easy,
silenced Mrs. Mac's gaping curiosity, and managed, in doing it all,
to keep himself well in the background. With Collingwood he had
one conversation on the launch, but the sum and substance was that
gentleman's reiteration of the terms on which he would live.
"Damnation!" was Kingsnorth's irritable response, "you are simply
making an ass of yourself, Collingwood. I can't call you a brute,
because I've been too much of one myself. I live in glass houses--I
can't throw stones. You've married a jewel among women, and you're
going to make your ruffled dignity make smash of two lives that ought
to be happy. Moreover, you are not in earnest. This is all bluffing
and bad temper to bring Mrs. Collingwood to her knees, and to make
her put herself in the wrong when you know there isn't any wrong or
right about things. Now I'll give you a piece of advice, old man. You
are trying that game on the wrong woman: see that you don't carry it
too far, and turn her affection into dislike. I've learned one thing,
learned it tragically well in this life; and that is that one has
just one chance really in this world with one person. Now don't lose
your chance with your wife."
To this Martin vouchsafed a grunt. Hardly conscious of it, he had
set his will to bring Charlotte to his terms. He could not listen to
anything that crossed that strong desire.
The days went by slowly where they had once gone so fast, and
neither husband nor wife referred again to that tacit agreement of
separation. Yet Martin knew from the bundle of letters which he was to
carry up to Manila that Charlotte was making plans for business life
again; and once, when he came into the sitting-room unexpectedly,
he found her frowning over her bank book. He knew the balance it
contained, for, on their wedding journey, they had laughed at her
little savings; and he knew she could not long maintain herself upon
it. He smiled grimly at her flushed discomfiture when he found her
pondering ways and means, and somewhat brutally said to himself that
she would find that she had little rope to run upon.
Yet at the last moment it was he who wavered, he who rang down the
curtain on their make-believe. She had looked after his garments
and had packed his trunk with wifely solicitude; had prepared for his
launch trip, foods for which she knew his predilection, and had, at the
moment of farewell, saved the situation by putting out a friendly hand.
"I do hope you will have a pleasant trip," she said,--and what it cost
her to speak so easily and naturally, only she could have told,--"and
thank you for giving me the weeks here to get ready. I'll go over to
Cuyo when the launch goes up for you on your return trip, and will
leave a letter for you there. There are some things I can't say to
you, but I should like to write them. They will, perhaps, leave a
better feeling between us."
To these words Martin found, at the time, no answer. He wrung her hand,
muttered something, and hastened away. Yet when his belongings had
all been deposited in the boat, and the men were waiting to "chair"
him out, he turned on his heel, and strode back to the cottage.
He took her by surprise, for she had not stayed to watch him. Her
impulse had been to scream, to weep, to give some vent to the pain
that wrenched soul and body; and in the determination to keep hold
upon herself she had gone straight to the back of the house, and was
wrestling there with a refractory lock on a cupboard. She turned
at his step a face drawn, white, and frozen into lines of pain,
and looked at him with eyes that asked and yet were proudly defiant.
He went straight up to her and took her in his arms; and though she
relaxed and her head lay passive on his shoulder, there thrilled
through them both the sense of conflict, of individuality set against
individuality. Their embrace did not lessen the strain, and after an
instant, something of his own fierce grasp relaxed, and they stood,
the dumb victims of emotions that were stronger than their wills,
stronger than their aching desires to be at peace with each other.
She turned at length and looked at him with eyes of misery. "Oh,
go!" she said. "It's a hundred times worse than I ever thought anything
could be. Think kindly of me as I do of you. We can't help ourselves. I
knew this hour. I felt it when we were happiest. It had to be."
"What I want you to do," Martin said honestly, "is to take into
consideration my care for you and my protection. I can take care of
you--can do it well. That ought to count for something."
"O my poor boy, has it not always counted? I've leaned on you and
your love, Martin. I've told you so a thousand times."
"Yes, but you set against them a lot of trifles."
"But I don't set the trifles against them. I have never weighed one
against the other--never for an instant."
"But you know that you could." Poor Martin here uttered helplessly
what was, after all, at the bottom of his spleen.
"Ah," she sighed. "Don't judge me by what I know; judge me by what
I've done and thought."
"You've got to change," he muttered. "I can't. I'm right. You're
wrong."
"The things you have in mind can't be changed by will power, dear. They
are the results of education, association, environment. New environment
may change them gradually. What you ask I cannot give. 'I've done
all I can do, come as far to meet you as I can.' I'm not stubborn,
Martin. I would do anything in my power to meet your wishes. You are
quarrelling not with what I do, but with what I am."
The answer was a grunt of impatience as Martin flung away again. He
raged helplessly against the truth of her words.
When, at last, the launch was hull down on the sky line, Charlotte
went to bed, and shutting out Mrs. Maclaughlin's insistent curiosity,
permitted herself the luxury of nearly a week's retirement. Though
at times she wept, for the most part she tried to shut out the past,
and to concentrate her thoughts on the future. Collingwood's idea that
her dread of business life would outweigh her sense of humiliation
and her wounded self-love was entirely wrong. She shrank, it is true,
from the world; but the thought that there was an alternative never
suggested itself to her. Collingwood had said that he would not live
with her, or what had seemed to her the equivalent of that. She took
him at his word. The fact that legally he was her husband counted no
more in her summing up of the situation than if he had been a chance
stranger encountered in the street. Live for an hour more than was
absolutely necessary under the same roof with a man who entertained
such feelings for her? She turned sick at the thought.
When at last she emerged from her retirement she was the woman of
hospital days, the super-sensitive orphan, feeling herself unwelcome
to all the world, everybody's hand against her, her hand against
everybody; but she took them, as Kingsnorth phrased it to himself,
in the hollow of her own hand. In the presence of her reserve, even
Mrs. Maclaughlin's frank speech grew guarded. Kingsnorth merely looked
at her in a kind of mute apology. Again and again she caught his glance
with its furtive appeal; but each time her own eyes met it, not with
studied blankness, but with a naturalness that was almost histrionic.
Maclaughlin had returned with the launch before her seclusion was at
an end, and after a family discussion of what was patent to their eyes,
he went vigorously on her side. She was "gentle folks," he maintained,
a deal sight too good for Martin Collingwood; and Collingwood was
behaving like a fool. Mrs. Maclaughlin's democratic partiality,
naturally roused in Martin's favor, was somewhat rudely snubbed.