It was at the end of a month, when Charlotte looked forward with
increasing dread to her husband's return and to her own departure,
that the lorcha Dos Hermanos, their tried friend, left cargo and
letters at the island. Collingwood wrote that he should delay his
return another month. He sent down their commissaries, and Maclaughlin
was to come up to Romblon harbor to meet the first June run of the
Puerta Princesa steamer. Most of these details were contained in a
letter to Maclaughlin. His letter to his wife, a very bulky epistle,
dwelt upon their own difficulties. It was the first letter he had
written to her, and Charlotte's face, as she read it, was a study.
"My dearest Girl:
"You are that, after all. I've been thinking over our affairs,
and I am willing to admit that I was hasty. But I don't think
that you treated me altogether fair. What I do see is that we
haven't got any time to jaw over what is done and gone. You have
been talking about leaving me and all that, but that is just
talk. I don't suppose you ever really meant it, and I never
took it seriously. We'll kiss and be friends when I get back,
and you'll see that everything will come out all right.
"I've been having a pretty fine time up here. About the first
person I met was Barton. I had intended to kick him on sight,
but I was still feeling pretty sore toward you, so I didn't. He
took me up to his clubs and entered my name, and the next night
took me to call on that Mrs. Badgerly. Lord! Lord! that woman is
inquisitive! She dug at me like a lawyer at a witness. I never gave
anything away: swore you wouldn't come along because you hated
the sea trip so, and vowed I had come up on a sugar lorcha. Then
this Mrs. Badgerly (she's a corker; I like her style), told me
she wanted to take me to see old General ----'s wife, because the
old lady knew you at home. She was a mighty nice old lady--real
motherly,--and she told me a lot of things that you never told me,
and made a good many things clear that I've never understood. Then
I was invited out to the General's to a big dinner, where there
were two or three other people who used to know you; and if I
hadn't been so fond of you, it would have made me all-fired mad
the way they rammed it into me that I had married into a fine
family, and a fine woman, and all that sort of thing. I didn't
need their verdict on you.
"There was another old lady there who used to know you [here Martin
named the mother of a very important civil officer], and both the
old ladies took me to their hearts and purred over me. I bluffed
the thing right through, invited everybody to Maylubi, and promised
to bring you up some time this year. Barton was at the dinner too,
and he piled it on thick about our island, made it quite romantic.
"Well, the long and the short of the matter is that you call
me. I'll admit that the crowd here is a little swifter than any
I have ever known, and maybe you have some right to your private
opinions that I didn't see before. And, as you said, you keep
them to yourself, so I don't see why I should let them bother
me. I'll stay another month or so, and by that time we will both
have a chance to get over our grudges. You needn't think I'll let
you go back to nursing; and as for me, I am willing to live with
you on the old terms, and mighty anxious to get back to them.
"I have put six dots here to represent six kisses (......). I'll
give you sixty when I get home.
"Your affectionate husband,
"Martin Collingwood."
"P. S. I am going to take both old ladies for a drive to-night. How
am I getting on for a beau?"
When she had twice read this epistle, Mrs. Martin Collingwood was
startled by the realization of a great mental change in herself. For
six weeks she had schooled herself to feel that she must leave her
husband purely out of decent pride and self-respect. She had believed
that she was actuated by the desire to remove an obnoxious presence
from one who had ceased to take pleasure in it; and she had said to
herself a hundred times that her affection for her husband had never
wavered, but that to thrust it upon him was indecent.
But as she laid down the letter after a second perusal, she was aghast
to realize that she did not want to live again with Martin Collingwood:
that she recoiled passionately from his easy sense of possession;
that his taking her so completely for granted was an affront that
she could not pardon. She became conscious of a slow process that
had been going on in her mind during the dreary weeks, the death of
the feeling that had cast a glamour over Martin Collingwood and his
inability to understand her standards and traditions. He had lived
with her for a year, and had been unable to comprehend that she was
of different substance from Mrs. Maclaughlin or Mrs. Badgerly. He
had been grossly offensive at the bare suggestion that she might be
superior to one of them, but when she was ticketed with the other's
approval,--she drew an indignant breath,--he stood ready to exhibit
her to the world, and to call its attention to the superfine partner
whom he had drawn in the matrimonial lottery.
Well, he would be disappointed. He had yet to learn that she was no
readier to accept his terms than he had been to accept hers. She had
had her romance, and she would pay the price!
Her social knowledge told her, also, that the Spencer family had
taken steps to make its power felt across the Pacific, and that in
spite of her marriage and her bitter letter, they were behind her,
holding fast to the old tenet that blood is thicker than water. She
knew that from both the ladies who had impressed Martin as motherly old
dears she would have received at any time both courtesy and kindness;
but they would not have taken especial notice of Martin Collingwood
or have troubled themselves to introduce him without some sort of
urgent appeal from the Boston family.
The thought warmed her sad heart a little, for we are all grateful
for good-will, and the world looked a lonely place to Charlotte at
that time. She was very thoughtful, however, and she was inclined
to regret that old family friends had arrived so inopportunely in
Manila. It would make her lot harder, entail humiliating explanations
exceedingly difficult to make and--crowning agony--it would mean that
the disastrous outcome of her marriage would be immediately known and
discussed by the very persons whose knowledge of her affairs she most
desired to restrict.
She was sitting on her veranda, the letter upon her lap, her brows
frowning, her lips pain-drawn, when Kingsnorth approached from his
own cottage. He too had had a letter from Collingwood, and after
a bath and a change of garments, had come over to discuss it with
Mrs. Collingwood.
He advanced with the hesitating and apologetic air which he had
worn with her ever since that unfortunate evening on the beach. She
roused herself to a cold courtesy, gave him a cup of tea, and then
sat listlessly awaiting what she knew he had come to say.
"I have a letter from Martin," Kingsnorth began awkwardly, at length,
"which I thought you might want to see. He says in it that he did not
mention some of the business details to you and that I am to show it
to you."
She took it, glanced through it, flushed slightly, but handed it
back without comment. It was a characteristically brief but condensed
epistle, dealing wholly with business save in the last paragraph.
"Better show this to my wife. I wrote her, but had something
more interesting to talk about than these matters. You were
quite right. I have been a damn fool, but I am all right now,
and she and I are going to be happy ever after."
As Charlotte returned the epistle, Kingsnorth fixed her with a curious
eye, half interested, half apologetic. Then, as she said nothing,
he stammered.
"I hope it will be as Martin says, Mrs. Collingwood, and that no
lasting ill will come out of my stupidity and insistence."
A slight flush tinged Mrs. Collingwood's cheek. "Martin wrote what he
meant to be a kindly letter, and I am grateful for it. But it really
doesn't affect the matter in the least. I am going away. You will
have to know it sooner or later."
"You can't forgive him?"
"I can't forgive myself. I have no hard feeling against him. But he
showed me myself." Her face burned.
"Dear Mrs. Collingwood, don't feel that way. Martin did not mean what
he said."
She lifted her heavy eyes. "Wasn't it true?"
"No, it wasn't; or, at least, the coloring he gave it wasn't true. It
wouldn't be true unless--" he paused and broke off confused.
"Unless what?"
"You know." He looked at her steadily.
"I don't know."
"Unless you leave him. That's what they do; that's what I did when I
got tired. But if you stay by what you promised, no human being can
think of you with less than respect. It isn't the game, it's the way
you play the game that counts." His voice trembled with emotion.
Charlotte sat very still, her cheeks burning. It seemed
incomprehensible that she should be sitting there, listening to John
Kingsnorth's views on ethics. Where had she failed? What gradual
disintegration had taken place in her, that she should be willing,
nay, eager, to listen to moral advice from a man whose very presence
had once seemed polluting?
At the same time, she realized that his words had value. Is it, she
asked herself, the cut and dried opinion of those who walk safely
along a beaten path in company with myriads of their fellow beings,
which really counts in this world? or is it the knowledge that comes
of bitterness and experience? It is so easy to formulate high-sounding
phrases; but what do these phrases amount to when one is confronted
with life? In the past three years, what downward steps had she taken
upon that pathway--she whose whole ideal had been to keep herself
untainted from the common world and to walk serenely and gracefully
along those heights where all the training of childhood and the
instincts of heredity had made her believe that her path lay? When
had she missed it? And then, like a flash, she saw in retrospect her
conduct for years past; saw herself stopping here, twisting there,
trying, at every instant, to evade the fate and the suffering allotted
to her in life. Suddenly she realized how much she and John Kingsnorth
had in common, for each was a coward. Neither had strength to take
sorrow to his heart, and to bear it uncomplainingly. She was doing
what he had done, failing as he had failed.
The letter dropped from her shaking fingers, and she raised her eyes
to his with a look so hopeless, shamed, and grief-stricken, that he
shrank back and winced as if he had seen a gaping wound.
"I can't," she said. "Something has snapped. I have changed. I
can't be Martin Collingwood's wife again. If the weight of my own
self-contempt could crush me, I should be dead. Oh, why did they
destroy my faith? There would have been the religious life at least."
"You must not talk that way," Kingsnorth said. "Your path is as plain
as a pikestaff. You married Martin Collingwood,--why, only you and
your Maker know,--but you did marry him, and you have got to stay
with him. He needs you."
"Oh, you men!" she cried scornfully. "And if he did not need me--if
only I needed him--it would be equally my duty to leave him. However
you arrange the scale of duties, they are always to suit your own
interests."
"I am thinking of this from yours," Kingsnorth said firmly. "I tell
you, and I know, that the one thing the human soul can't stand is
to live on compromising with its own self-contempt. A woman of your
brains can't take the liberties with her conscience that her frivolous
sisters do. You can't stand the self-contempt. You'll disintegrate
under it. Convince yourself that you are a martyr if you can, and
hug your martyrdom. They got something out of it when it was boiling
oil, and melted lead, and crucifixion, and all the rest of those
horrors. Be a martyr if you must, but do not try living under the
weight of your own self-contempt. Of all failures that is the weakest,
saddest, most loathsome. Dear lady, I've carried mine with me like an
atmosphere. People have felt it; you did. I've seen you shrink from
me as if I were a leper. And you were right. I am loathsome to myself."
He stopped, wiped his brow, and settled back into his chair with a
heavy sigh. Charlotte sat on, her trembling fingers tightly clasped,
her eyes fixed on the sea. She turned at last and shook her head.
"I can't. I can't take up that thread of life. I don't know how I got
myself here--it is all a nightmare--but I must go away and work--by
myself again."
Kingsnorth leaned forward, his hands loosely clasped between his knees.
"Will you listen to the story of my life, Mrs. Collingwood?" he said
with more of sharpness in his tone than was characteristic of him.
Charlotte had little curiosity in anyone else's affairs; but she
would have listened to anything at that moment to slip away from the
discussion of her own. She nodded listlessly, and Kingsnorth began
speaking in a very judicial tone.
"I was what is called in England well born, though my people were not
rich. My father came of a very old and once distinguished family,
but was the owner of an impoverished estate. My mother was equally
well born, and possessed a small income of her own. You probably know
that, in England, the eldest son is the family; nobody else really
counts. In our family there were two girls, then my elder brother,
the 'heir,' then myself, and another girl. I cannot remember the time
when the rest of us were not all being pinched to keep things going
for the heir. Tom was, on the whole, a pretty good fellow, but that
sort of rearing would spoil the best nature that was ever born. He
got into the way of thinking that the rest of us ought to sacrifice
everything we had or could hope to have to his position. He was also
a devilish good-looking fellow, easy-going and selfish, as was natural.
"My two elder sisters were promptly married off, on the whole pretty
well. The difficulty came with Tom. He had to marry money, and he had
not enough in himself or the place to make money come begging for him.
"Tom was in an expensive regiment. My dream of life was also the
army, but the paternal pocketbook couldn't stand it, so I was put
in a bank instead. I promptly fell head-over-ears in love with the
banker's daughter.
"Her family was what we called 'new people'; but there was plenty
of money, and if Elena wanted me, why she must have me. Therefore no
objections were made to the engagement. I was in the seventh heaven
of happiness. I do not deny that I was glad she had plenty of money;
but I should have married her just the same if she had not had a cent.
"Elena paid a visit to my home in the early days of our betrothal,
and--well, she threw me over deliberately for my elder brother. Looking
back now, I can see some excuse for her. I was unimportant in my
family, of course, and Tom was its centre. He looked handsome in
his uniform, and he was the heir. The place had age and dignity,
and she knew its value.
"I give Tom the credit of being ashamed and of feeling some remorse;
but my father and mother planned--actually aided and abetted my
betrayal. They wanted the money for the heir.
"I made a row, naturally, but it was fruitless. Elena wept and declared
that she would have her own way. Tom looked ashamed, but his bringing
up had made him constitutionally selfish; and the parents on both
sides joined to suppress me.
"The end was that I cleared out, blind with rage and pain, cursing
Elena and my kin; and in the next three years in London I went to
what is commonly known as the dogs.
"My self-pity is justifiable in my eyes to-day; but I made a fatal
mistake. If I had had the right stuff in me, Elena couldn't have
driven me to the dogs. I might have hugged my griefs and have grown
embittered; but my worst mistake was the desire to 'drown sorrow'
with drink, with cards, with all the undesirable vices of men. If I
had hugged sorrow and warmed it to my heart, I might have suffered
more, but I should not have crumbled up morally like a gold ring
in quicksilver.
"England has always a frontier war or two on her hands, and I got into
one. A private, a 'gentleman ranker' has a magnificent opportunity
to sink in the English army. Afterwards I drifted over here, and got
into pearl-fishing. I liked the life and its adventures (we had to
fight a bit in the early days), and then when the Americans came,
I fell in with Collingwood. We fancied each other on sight. Then we
picked up Mac, and I lighted accidentally on this oyster bed, and we
settled here.
"Throughout all these years I have kept up a desultory correspondence
with my married sisters; but I have drifted out of their lives, and
I realize that I represent to them only a possible legacy. It is my
business to make some money, and one day to die and leave it to them;
and meanwhile a few gifts from the Orient are not unacceptable.
"Well, to shorten this tale, I settled here and married my wife. You
need not look so startled. She was my wife legally; bell, book,
and candle were all there. I lived openly with her in my house till
the morning when you landed on Maylubi. Then, after I had seen and
talked with you, I went home and ordered her out. She loved me, and
she obeyed me. Five months later she died." He stopped and wiped a
cold perspiration from his brow.
"But how could you have kept it from me?" cried Charlotte. "Why did
not Martin or Mrs. Maclaughlin tell me?"
"Mrs. Mac had her orders from Mac. She never disobeys him. Martin
was simply a good friend."
"But he brought me here." She stopped, crimsoning with indignation.
"Precisely. He brought you here to associate with me, a respectable
married man, as he considered me. He has never understood my
conduct. He doesn't understand why I preferred you to believe me a
profligate instead of a decent married man. He has never understood
why I should be willing to have my child pass for illegitimate. But
you understand, Mrs. Collingwood."
"Yes, I understand." Then with sudden passion she cried, "But it was
not my fault. I was trained to it."
"As I was. But, if I had had one spark of manhood in me, I should
have stood by the woman I had married, and should have taken my
child to my heart in the face of the world. But I did not have the
courage. I writhed and twisted to get out of facing the consequences
of my own actions; and since then the weight of my own self-contempt
has grown steadily heavier. Don't talk to me of reform," he added
savagely as she started to speak. "There isn't any reform for such as
I. I tell you the consciousness of my own moral cowardice is with me
day and night. It never leaves me. And it's the ungodly unfairness
of it all that kills me by inches. I see other men about me, living
lives not so very different from mine: Collingwood himself has been
no saint. But because I've wanted better things, because I drank my
cup, knowing that it was poor drink, it has not slaked my thirst,
and it has parched the last drop of sweetness out of my life.
"Don't you go another foot along this trail; you began it when you
married Collingwood. If you double and twist on your tracks again,
you are lost. Hug pain, hug misery, martyr yourself, if you will,
but don't try to indulge your own selfish will, and to square things
by saying that you despise yourself. God in Heaven! Do you know what
it is to despise yourself? You don't now; but you will some day." He
wiped the perspiration that stood in great drops on his brow.
Charlotte, who had turned very white, sat nerveless and trembling like
a leaf. All her pride was in arms that John Kingsnorth, degraded scion
of a decent family, should be giving advice to her; and then she saw,
with sudden horror, what a tremendous distance she had drifted with
the current before John Kingsnorth's words could be true.
For they were true! She had married Martin Collingwood, blaming herself
for the weakness that made human affection and the freedom from the
responsibility of self-support loom larger than all the traditions of
birth and breeding. She had wanted her romance as every other woman
in the world does; and romance, as it comes to most women, had been
denied her. She might have gone out and found one, as many a woman
does, and might, in time, have taken her flirtations lightly. But
she had been too timid and too proud to flirt. The doubt came to her
that it would have been better to play lightly at romance than to
purchase it at the sacrifice of the second essential factor that makes
a true marriage. Then came another throb of terror. She saw herself
bent wilfully again on her own way, doubling, twisting, as Kingsnorth
phrased it, trying to escape her conscience by saying that she despised
herself: but the fact stared her in the face that she was turning
on all the principles that had justified romance. She had married
Collingwood against her reason, justifying herself for being swayed by
human feeling by reiterating the finality of the action. For better,
for worse, she had said--but now that it was for worse, its finality
had somehow disappeared. Where was her mind--her will--her conscience?
She sat for a long time in bitter silence, but roused herself as
Kingsnorth, who had been furtively watching her, drew out his tobacco
pouch and extracted from its depths a little ball of tissue paper. He
unfolded it, and there appeared to her startled eyes a single pearl
of unusual size and luster.
"What a beauty!" she cried, bending forward to look at it.
"Yes, it's beautiful enough," said Kingsnorth. "I've carried it about
with me for three years. Even Collingwood has never seen it."
"I wish you had not--" she stopped, flushing.
"I didn't show it to you to tempt you. It's my moral slough. There
are times when I've felt that its hell luster was my soul, and that
I had nothing but the blackened shell in my body. It stood for the
dearest emotions a man can have--for love and vengeance."
"You are horrible," she cried, shrinking from him.
"I am better than I used to be," replied Kingsnorth. "I found this
bauble three years ago, before Martin and I went into business. I
never intended to sell it. Do you know what I wanted it for? To
buy her back, and to blacken the face of the man who stole her from
me. Yes, shrink! God help me, I love that woman still with a love
gone awry. Other women, yes, and better women, though they had not
her grace and training, have loved me; but, in my heart of hearts, I
have held them all cheap. It was she, the woman who jilted me before
all the world, that I wanted. It was he, whose heart I wanted to
wring. Poor cheap human nature! Twelve years I've roughed it in shacks
and junks, a flannel shirt to my back, and pork and beans or rice and
fish in my stomach; while he has sat beneath the oaks we played under
in our childhood, and has slept in the panelled rooms of our home,
and has held the woman he stole from me in his arms! Talk of family
affection! There isn't such a thing. What am I to the mother who bore
me? A derelict son, adrift in the South Seas, who is not to come home
without some money. What am I to the sisters who played with me and
fought with me over our nursery tea? A scape-grace brother, who, it
is hoped, will keep out of the way, but who ought to make some money
and leave it to their children. Money! I've toiled like a negro slave
for money, but not for them--not for them! It was for her. I wanted
to go back rich. She sold herself once; why not again? The pearl was
not enough in itself to tempt. It was the bauble, the outward sign."
"You hoped--that?" She could not help glancing at his seamed,
degenerate countenance.
"Never after you came. The look in your eyes told me what I had
become. Since then I have lived--with myself." He smiled a wretched,
drawn smile.
She pointed gingerly to the bauble. "Why don't you get rid of
it? sell it?"
"Sell my soul? Did I not tell you my soul is steeped in it? No,
bury it with me. Somehow I know I'll not last long. Take this word
from me. If you know anything of me when death comes, see that this
does not go to the women who betrayed me and pitied me not. Women are
selfish creatures. They sun themselves on their own cat premises. They
have no pity for the poor devils on the outside."
"Is it women alone? or isn't it men as well, who are pitiless? Or
isn't it just life? Yet it isn't pitiless to all. There are those
who dance through it on rose-strewn paths." She stopped, the sense
of the great differences in individual lives overwhelming her.
Kingsnorth rose. "Well, that hasn't been my life or yours. I have
seen that you suffer. But suffer! Don't change that look on your
face. Better poignant suffering than moral decay. I tell you, you
are facing it." He rose abruptly and walked away, leaving her like
a figure carved in ivory, looking out on the waste of waters, that
seemed the emblem of waste in her own life.