In the month that elapsed between her conversation with Kingsnorth and
the time set by Collingwood for his return, Charlotte had time for an
exhausting and (as it seemed to her) fruitless self-inquisition. She
was alternately the prey of a hopeless apathy and of a consuming
impatience, but in either mood there ran a strong undercurrent of
rebellion against all the formative influences of her life. At times
the future yawned before her like a bottomless gulf, into the darkness
and loneliness of which she must inevitably sink helpless. Out of
love as she was with her husband, the prospect of going back to her
forlorn, loveless state was one she could not contemplate. To get up
day after day, knowing that there was, in all this world, no human
being who took more than a casual interest in her; to go to bed at
night, knowing that, if ruin and disaster overtook the world, no human
thought would turn to her, no voice cry to hers out of the darkness,
no warm human hand reach for hers, seemed to her a fate infinitely
worse than death. Yet she had lived just that life for twenty-eight
years before she married Martin Collingwood to escape from it; and,
though she had been most unhappy in it, she certainly had not regarded
it as a tragedy. She remembered once having seen a young soldier come
forth from the court-room after he had received a life sentence for
shooting his corporal. The boy had lifted his hat with his manacled
hands and had raised a white face to the touch of the cool morning
wind. Something in the gesture had expressed his sense of helplessness
in the grasp of that terrible thing we call the law. He was looking
down the long vista of years at a living death ten thousand times
worse than death, at a life from which every human ambition, every
hope, every natural spring had been erased. His brother had followed
behind him, a short distance of twenty or thirty feet, already the
emblem of a separation that was to become complete. The brother was
weeping as strong men do when their hearts are wrung; but, as she
had looked at them, one so quiet, the other convulsed with grief,
she had recognized that, to the second man, life held comfort and
healing still. In the long years to come, new interests would take the
place of the old tie; a wife and babes would fill that life; healthy
toil allied to honorable ambition would make the years seem to fly;
and the memory of a convict brother would drop out of life, only to
be recalled tenderly at those seasons when a universal festival brings
back the old days and makes the rotting thread of memory seem new and
strong once more. But what of the other? Nothing new would come to
him, nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to
live upon but memories that would be very, very bitter. There would
be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil, and the awful knowledge
that long before he ceased to live he had ceased to be even to those
who had been his nearest and dearest.
Well, she had lived it once. She could live it again. As with the
soldier there would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil. But
the heart cries loudly for more than these things in life, until
that heart is chastened into meekness. Would she ever be meek, she
wondered sadly. If she could have accepted her fate with submission
and sadness only, she would have felt herself indeed treated with
mercy by the unseen fates. But there was no element of submission
in her mood. As often as she contemplated the future, and said to
herself that these things must be, had to be, so often the wild will
rose within her to say that they must not be. She lay often for hours
at a time face downward on her bed, not a muscle moving, not a sound
escaping her tense lips; but her passivity was the physical expression
of an impotence that left her prostrate before the overwhelming fates.
Often there recurred to her mind a conversation which had taken place
between her and a fellow nurse, a young, joyous, magnetic creature for
whom she had formed a friendship more nearly approximating intimacy
than any other that had come into her life. It was in the last days
of her engagement, and she had spoken of a fear of what unhappiness
love might bring into her life. The other had looked at her with
amazement. "Love!" she said. "I can imagine it bringing a lot of joy,
but why unhappiness?"
"Why unhappiness?" Charlotte asked in vain for the reason; but the fact
stood stronger than any "why's," that there had been, in all her life,
some fundamental outrage of human sentiment. It had existed in that
strange paternal attitude of her father's; it had lived on in that
perfunctory kindness of the nuns who had found her an antipathetic
and incomprehensible child; and it had grown and intensified in
the curious, prying interest developed in those who had governed
her later years. That any such a condition could exist by a series
of fortuitous events was out of the question. There had to be cause
running through it all. Yet search her heart and mind as she would,
she found there no wells of bitterness or evil thought or envy or
malice to justify relations so peculiar as had finally established
themselves between her and human society.
The solution of the question came to her suddenly, when, on a
particularly dreary day, she had been trying to discipline herself and
to keep her thoughts from running on her own troubles. She had spent
two hours trying to read the story, written by a great modern author,
of three precocious school-boys. She had been a great admirer of the
author, and, up to that time, had found fascination in his pages;
but the three boys were little to her taste. As she mused sadly,
a flash of insight came, and another; and, little by little, she saw
clearly what had so long puzzled her.
The precocious child is abnormal, and inspires in his fellow men that
blind instinct to worry and torment which runs all through the animal
world. She had been a precocious child, made uncanny by perceptions
of the hidden currents and causes of life at a time when she should
have been gurgling over its toys. As she recalled her sensitiveness
to impressions, her powers of reading what was passing in others'
minds, and the singular growth of self-concealment and self-control
that had grown out of them, it seemed to her that her keen brain
had been her lifelong curse. Little by little, she went back to
her convent days and tried to put herself in the place of the good
sisters who had taught her. How distressing it must have been to them
to feel the dumb interrogation that was always so strong under outward
obedience! If she could have been unconscious of her father's mental
state and could have made a happy child's claim upon his affections,
would he not in time have come to love her? If, when she was a lonely
orphan, living on her cousin's sufferance, she had been able to
reveal to her relatives the suffering that she really underwent in
the strange ostracism which she had built up for herself, would not
pity have conquered their selfishness? She drew a long, pained sigh,
as she thought of what a difference might have been made in her life
by a little less brain and a little more moral courage.
She was lying in her steamer chair on the veranda of her house at
the time; and by her side, on a taboret, stood a glass of water. She
picked it up and smiled over it. It was full of microbes (dead, of
course, for Americans drink no unboiled water in the Philippines),
and she knew it, and cared little, for she could not see them. But had
she possessed an eye with the magnifying power of a strong microscope,
she could not have tasted the water for the sight of the dead organisms
would have made it unpalatable. She began to wonder what would be the
effect on society, if there were let loose upon it a body of persons
with microscopic eyes. They would shrink and exclaim and turn faint
at dishes that the epicure delights in. How they would upset dinners
and spoil little suppers and picnic luncheons! How eagerly would
their society be avoided, and how soon their name become anathema!
But though physically the microscopic eye does not yet exist,
the mental and spiritual microscopic eye does exist, and it has
about the same distressing effect upon its human brethren who do not
possess it as the other sort might have. She had had the microscopic
eye--nothing could blind her to facts--and her starts and shrinkings
had made her antipathetic to most of the persons with whom she had
come in contact. It had remained for Martin, the indomitably ignorant,
to be blind to her mental attitude, to assume her a normal woman of
the world in which he found her. What of gratitude did she not owe him?
The thought pricked her to her feet, set her to restless pacings of
the floor. Whatever of gratitude she owed him, she was preparing
ingratitude in the course she was still bent upon pursuing. Never
had she appreciated the stubborn inheritance of her own will
till she measured herself against it in this struggle. Whatever
the conscience and the intelligence might say, her will said "No"
as often as she contemplated forgiving Martin and going back to her
life with him. The feeling which had been warm in her heart for him
so long was dead--killed by his own brutal words, buried in her own
shame and self-reproach. She saw with unutterable sadness, that there
was no hope of its resuscitation. But did that break the tie that she
had of her own volition forged? Could not that same will of hers which
resisted so bitterly be schooled to duty and to right? For against
a year's tenderness and kindness, where was the justice of weighing
the utterances of a single hour of pain and disappointment? The one
ought not to balance the other. She had no right to think so for
an instant. Alas, though, one did balance the other, outweighed it
many times!
Her marriage had been all wrong. But had she been less conscious of
the fact on the day she married him than on the day when she vainly
struggled to convince herself that she ought to go on living with
him? Marriage can not be for love alone any more than it can be for
selfish material interest alone. In its appeal to human emotion
and in its relation to the family it may be, as the church calls
it, a sacrament; but marriage as a lifelong partnership must have
its material side. Love must enter in; but no healthy marriage can
exist, unless there be equally the consciousness of a good bargain,
of a legitimate exchange of values, added to the affection which
sanctifies it. Well, Collingwood had played fairly. It was she who
had entered into the alliance, knowing its weakness, knowing herself.
But did she know herself? What more that was disappointing and
agonizing was she to learn of herself? What was even then struggling in
her breast? Was there some secret hope holding itself in concealment
behind her oft repeated thought that life was ended for her? Did
some hidden ambition prompt her to take the step that she believed
came from self-respect? She had learned only too well her capacity
for self-deception. She had advanced step by step along the path by
which she had come to the church door with Martin Collingwood, denying
every motive which, in the end, had proved itself the stronger. Was
it possible that she was turning blindly, as women naturally turn,
to a second man to lift her from the wreck to which she had brought
her life with the first? Again she faced that truth which she had
long before discovered, that too passionate a denial constitutes an
assertion; and while every atom of her intelligence bade her distrust
her own sophistry, every throb of a strong emotional nature bade her
turn from the conclusions of her reason.
In these hours of agonizing inquisition when her soul seemed literally
torn in two, she contemplated with added despair, the loss of her early
religious faith. It did not come back to her in the least. No impulse
for prayer seized her. The conviction that the world is made up of
blind forces, and that there is no help outside of ourselves was very
strong in her. She might pray and pray, but when she arose from her
knees, the elements of struggle would be there still, tearing at her,
filling her soul with pain. Prayer would not bring sleep to her aching
eyeballs in the night, it would not silence the cry in her heart,
it would not keep the thronging thoughts from her weary brain. Time
alone could do that. Give her time--she smiled bitterly--and change
of circumstances, and she might put the experiences of the last three
years behind her, put even the man who had ruled her life and thought
for a year (and a happy year) behind her.
Of course she wrestled with the temptations which must present
themselves to the intelligent mind which has had the ways of the
world set before it. Intelligence said that nothing mattered except
the material. She could be good or bad, noble or contemptible, so
long as she played her game well and kept on good terms with that
thing we call the world. Little the world cares what we do or what
we are, said intelligence; the question with it is how much power
do we own in this vale of tears. Intelligence told her that with
the backing of her family and the successful use of her own powers,
and with Judge Barton's political influence, they two might make a
very comfortable place for themselves in this material universe. She
felt dangerously sure of the Judge. The knowledge had come to her (how
she knew not) that all she needed to insure her an absolute dominion
over the man's soul was a little less moral fastidiousness, a little
more worldliness. Indeed, a strange confidence in her own powers of
attraction was working itself out of all the miserable situation. She
realized how completely she had under-estimated her own charm. Less
conscience, less good taste, more charity (which is a much misused term
in these days, signifying lack of all social and moral tradition),
in fact, a general elimination of the best qualities of her nature
would constitute a humanizing process which would work decidedly to
her material advantage. But she was not willing to submit herself to
the process. She wanted her own way, and she wanted to remain her ideal
self. More and more clearly she saw the unreasonableness of her demand.
So the days slipped by one by one, and she marked them off on her
calendar. In the end, the time for the launch to go up to Romblon
arrived without her having taken any decisive steps toward the act
which she still declared to herself she was bent upon. She excused
herself on the ground of Martin's letter, saying to herself that
she owed him a personal interview and explanation for her refusal
to accept his offer of reconciliation. But in truth, she was pulling
away again from the uncomfortable. She could contemplate the action,
but until circumstances more disagreeable than those she was enduring
forced her into activity, she would not take a decisive step.
It had been the original intention that Kingsnorth should take
the launch over for Collingwood, but, as the time slipped
by, and the typhoon season was at hand this idea was deemed
impracticable. Maclaughlin was a licensed engineer, while Kingsnorth
was not, and the launch was not in the best of repair.
Maclaughlin left at daybreak on an exceedingly hot morning, when
the sea rolled lazily in long, metallic swells shining as if the
brilliant surface were oiled. All that day the heat was like a vapor,
but in mid-afternoon the clouds rolled up, showers fell at intervals,
and cool gusts of wind made the cocoanut trees writhe and their stiff
leaves to rattle. Once or twice Charlotte looked at the barometer,
which fell steadily.
At dinner their common anxiety made the three more companionable than
anyone had hoped to be. "We are going to have a baguio, that's flat,"
said Kingsnorth, "but it has been kind in holding off. Mac's safe
in Romblon harbor by this time, and that is landlocked, and shut in
by mountains. If Collingwood is there, they'll wait anyway to come
out. Mac's got sense enough not to leave port on a falling barometer,
though Collingwood might take the chances."
"I hope Martin isn't out on the ocean to-night," said Charlotte. "It
makes me ill to think of it." She shivered and glanced into the
darkness where the oily surf fell over in ghostly green fire, and
the wash rolled back pricked with millions of vanishing light points.
"Spooky, isn't it?" remarked Kingsnorth. He set down his coffee-cup
(they were just finishing dinner), and as his hostess rose, held
back the rattling shell curtain for her, then went to inspect the
barometer. He whistled.
"What is it?" inquired Mrs. Mac.
"Oh, just so-so." Something in his tone betrayed an effort to retrieve
the impression made by his bit of carelessness. Mrs. Maclaughlin went
over to the instrument.
"It's nearly 750," she said in a dismayed tone. [1] "I've never known
it to go that low without warning since I've lived on the island. I
wish Mac and Martin were here."
Charlotte said nothing, but in her heart she echoed the other's words.
"Can't be helped," replied Kingsnorth, curtly. "I hope that you will
not feel it presumptuous in me to suggest that Mrs. Maclaughlin stay
with you to-night, Mrs. Collingwood. I'll come over also if there is
anything very bad."
Both women were grateful for the suggestion. Each had been secretly
longing to broach the matter, and had felt ashamed to do so.
"I'll go over with you while you lock up your place," said Kingsnorth
to Mrs. Maclaughlin. They disappeared almost instantly in the profound
blackness of the night. Charlotte marvelled at it. The gloom was like
a solid substance save where the phosphorescence showed a glimpse
of foaming suds, and a few lights gleaming from the distant village
seemed golden by contrast with the green and blue fires.
The servants all begged leave to absent themselves for the night. Each
had discovered an ailing relative in the village to whom his presence
was an absolute necessity.
"Let 'em go," said Kingsnorth. "They are in a dead fright. They know
we'll probably have Tophet before the night is over, and they want
to get into their flock." Even as he spoke, a little moan of wind
came off the sea, and a pattering shower drenched the earth.
"Curtain rung up," said Kingsnorth. He had been standing tentatively,
hat in hand, after escorting back Mrs. Maclaughlin and some, as it
seemed to Charlotte, preposterously large bundles. Charlotte motioned
him to a chair. "We may as well watch the first act," she smiled,
humoring his metaphor.
"Just as well," he answered, "because I fancy we'll be on the second."
"Do you mean that there may be any actual danger?" Charlotte asked,
startled.
"Danger? no! At the worst we might have to spend a night under the
pandan bushes. But one of these big storms is a trying thing while
it lasts."
"Trying isn't the word," Mrs. Maclaughlin precipitated this
dictum into the conversation with her usual vigor. "It's just
nerve-wracking. Lord! Lord! what fools we women are! Here are two of
us out here likely to be swallowed up by a tidal wave or Heaven only
knows what, just because we were so tarnation ready to take up with
a man. I've traipsed around this world at Andrew Maclaughlin's heels
twenty-two years, and the good Lord only knows what he hasn't asked
me to go through with; and now he's left me unprotected in the face
of the biggest storm we're likely to have." She fairly choked with
fear and anger.
Mrs. Maclaughlin's untrammelled speech was at all times an affront
to Kingsnorth. The intimation that he was a poor substitute for
Maclaughlin as a protector stung him. When he spoke, his voice
had a quality of suave ugliness that grated like a rasped saw on
Charlotte's nerves.
"You're panicky," he said. "Why don't you pattern on Mrs. Collingwood
and me? We're ready for anything; are we not, dear lady?"
A heavy gust of wind and another downpour silenced them all for a
few seconds.
"This," said Kingsnorth to Charlotte, as the gust subsided, "is just
preliminary to the theme; it's the scale playing in the key with which
the virtuoso dazzles his audience before he rolls up his cuffs, runs
both hands through his hair, and gets into the first movement. Ah,
here's the theme."
"What's a virtuoso?" snapped Mrs. Maclaughlin.
"A virtuoso is a gentleman who can play the piano or some other
instrument exceedingly well," Kingsnorth replied, with the same
dangerous suavity.
"I hate the nasty long-haired things." It was quite evident that
Mrs. Mac's nerves had gone to splinters. Charlotte threw herself into
the breach.
"Well, don't hate this storm," she said, "even if Mr. Kingsnorth did
compare it to a sonata. It's beautiful. It's grand." Another howl
and downpour, and this time the framework of the house shivered under
its impact.
"Merely the andante," said Kingsnorth, shrugging his shoulders.
"You make my blood run cold," cried Mrs. Maclaughlin.
It was too dark to see him, but Charlotte knew that his lips were
apart and his teeth grinning in an evil smile.
"But why, Mrs. Maclaughlin?" said Charlotte suddenly. "If danger is
coming, it will come. No human power can stop it. The future is as
unreadable as the very sky. But why borrow trouble for what we are
powerless to resist? And if there is beauty and majesty in all this
conflict of the elements, surely it is better to see that, than to sit
dreading the unknown. Mr. Kingsnorth's comparisons are not unjust. It
is like a great piece of music, divided into movements. Whatever it
may come to later, it is glorious now."
"Spoken like a brave woman," Kingsnorth cried. "Let loose the dogs of
war and make Rome howl! Well, we don't care; do we, Mrs. Collingwood?"
"Not much," Charlotte assented, though somewhat coldly. Her manner
brought him to a sudden check.
"I forgot," he stammered. "Excuse me."
"Forgot what?" This point blank query about a remark not addressed
to herself emanated from Mrs. Maclaughlin.
"Dear Mrs. Mac," Kingsnorth said, and Charlotte winced at his tone,
"you do not realize how quickly you deteriorate once out of reach of
Mac's disciplining eye. Mac would never have permitted you to ask that
question. I often wonder if, had it been my good fortune to marry,
I should have been able to exert the strong guiding influence over
my wife that Mac evidently holds over you."
"Oh, you have," replied Mrs. Mac, while Charlotte sat in helpless
embarrassment at the scene. "Well, let me tell you that you wouldn't
have. You might have broken her heart, the Lord knows, as you'd
probably have broken your children's spirits, if you'd 'a' had 'em;
but no woman would ever be proud to be ruled by you as I'm proud to be
ruled by Mac. I'm disciplined. You hit the nail on the head there. And
maybe I fall back when Mac isn't around. But I love that old man of
mine. I've followed him over deserts and oceans. I may have let my
mind go once in a while; but no woman on God's green earth would have
married you and lived with you twenty-two years, and still have loved
you as I love Mac. I've been rebellious sometimes with the Almighty,
and it hasn't always seemed as if the powers above knew what they
were about. But the good Lord did a wise thing when He kept women
and children out of your hands, John Kingsnorth." She arose with a
snort of wrath and passed into the house. "Where's my Bible?" they
heard her saying to herself. "I brought it."
For a second or two, Charlotte remained like Kingsnorth, half
paralyzed by the outburst. Then a helpless, pitying embarrassment
settled upon her. It was all so terribly true, it was such a baring
of naked underfeelings. Would it ever be possible, she wondered,
to resume the island life after such an indecent exposure of what
simmered deep in Mrs. Maclaughlin's heart? Then, as the silence grew,
she cast about vainly for some change of subject. As if divining her
thoughts, Kingsnorth rose.
"Already the tempest has broken," he said. "It's been brewing three
years. I can't complain; and I know you think she told the truth."
A sudden impulse stirred Charlotte. "No, no," she said. "You must
not think that. I believe that, if you had married the right woman
(that's the stock phrase, isn't it?) you would have been a tender
husband, and if you had had children, a kind father. I don't know what
perversity of fate kept those influences out of your life, but all that
is wayward in you and bitter seems to have been caused by their lack."
She uttered the words with real warmth, and for an instant wondered
that he made no reply. Then, as the pause grew more marked, she heard
him breathing heavily, and it flashed into her mind that the man was
on the point of an utter breakdown. Her few sincere words had gone
straight through the armor that Mrs. Maclaughlin's blows had apparently
failed to affect. An absolute horror of such a possibility seized upon
her. They had had, she felt, an indecent exhibition of naked human
emotions. If more were to follow, what intimate revelations might not
take place? Yet the impossibility of uttering some banality was clear
to her mind. Anything short of the sincerity and earnestness demanded
by the situation would be insulting. So she remained as if transfixed,
in a kind of shivering expectation of what might be coming.
Kingsnorth, however, pulled himself together after a convulsive
movement or two of his chest. He stood for an instant without a word,
and then walked away to his own quarters, whence Charlotte soon heard
his voice shouting angrily for his servant.
Mrs. Maclaughlin, somewhat appeased by finding the Bible which she
had brought along for her usual nightly chapter, came out on the
piazza as the strident tones of Kingsnorth penetrated the sitting-room.
"Taking it out on his boy," she remarked. "Well, I've been aching to
tell the truth to John Kingsnorth for two years, and now I've done it."
"Do you feel any better for it?"
"Yes--no. I'm always sorry when I blurt out. He's right: Mac holds me
in." Her voice broke. "Oh, my Lord! My Lord! I wish I knew where he
was this minute. You're a strange woman, Charlotte Collingwood. You
sit here and watch them waves roll in and hear the wind blowing,
and you don't seem to give one thought to the man that you've lived
here with side by side for a year. Ain't you got no love for him?"
Charlotte put up a hand. "I can't discuss that with you,
Mrs. Maclaughlin. Surely I have made it plain before this."
"You've made a lot plain," replied Mrs. Maclaughlin. There was endless
reservation in her tone. It heaped such mountains of unuttered reproach
that Charlotte quite bowed under it.
"The rain is coming in strong," said Mrs. Maclaughlin, when she had
extracted sufficient healing from her companion's discomfort. "You'll
get drenched out here. I'm going to read my Bible. You had better
come in."
But Charlotte motioned her away. "I'm not religiously inclined
to-night," she replied.
"Charlotte Collingwood, do you defy your Maker?"
"I'm rebellious to-night, Mrs. Maclaughlin. There are His waves and
His winds, but still I'm rebellious. I'm not apologetic to-night,
not even in the face of a baguio."
"I'll speak for you," said Mrs. Maclaughlin earnestly. She went
inside, closed the doors and shell windows to keep out the storm,
and Charlotte heard her keeping her word. Mrs. Maclaughlin's prayers
were simple but fervent. They seemed to consist chiefly of a few
reiterated sentences. "O Lord, protect and save my old husband. You
know I love him, Lord; but it isn't all selfishness. O God, give me
back my Mac." At times she asked that the Divine Power might soften
the hardened heart of Mrs. Collingwood.