The mental suffering was, however, far from small. As she strained
her eyes through the blackness, Charlotte felt that the weight of
ages lay on their aching pupils. Fatigue, despair, and fear all tore
at her heart. There rose always before her the vision of Martin as
she had imagined him in the little coastguard steamer's cabin, and
the cold dread clenched her heart that the waves had sucked him down
and down to the bottomless sea, a lonely, dead thing in the awful
vastness of it. Once only she spoke to Mrs. Maclaughlin.
"Do you think it can be near morning?" she asked; and Mrs. Maclaughlin
negatived the idea sharply.
"It was about midnight when we cleared out," she said, "and time goes
slowly in fixes like this.
It went infinitely worse than slowly. When, at last, the blackness
became a gloom filled with shapes, and a pallor showed in the east,
the two women, their hair in disorder, their faces drawn and haggard,
had hardly courage to look about them. Broad daylight revealed a scene
of desolation, with the sea running furiously against the strewn beach,
and with the cocoanut grove a ragged waste, its snapped boles standing
upright and the long plumy tops dragging on the ground. Kingsnorth's
charred structure, their own homes sprawling drunkenly, and the distant
village in ruins, presented a picture, which, to minds less engrossed
with even more heartrending possibilities, would have meant despair.
With the first clear light, Mrs. Maclaughlin hunted up her basket of
food and some water bottles which she had deposited at the side of
the path, and each woman made a pretence of swallowing a few tinned
biscuit, and eased her parched throat with drink. Charlotte moistened
Kingsnorth's lips, but he seemed unable to swallow. After awhile,
however, he opened his eyes, and she perceived that he was conscious.
He did not try to speak, but looked at her curiously, evidently
wondering how he came to be lying on the ground with his head in her
lap. He stared at her, nonplussed by her appearance, then slowly let
his eyes travel about him. The wrecked houses, the general devastation
had, apparently, significance but no recollection in his mind. He
made a faint movement, but the pain stopped him, and then she saw
that he desired to speak but could not.
Charlotte bent over him. "You are hurt, Mr. Kingsnorth. I don't think
you can remember all that happened. After you went home, the storm
grew much worse, and finally Mrs. Maclaughlin and I perceived that our
houses were doomed. We went to your house and broke in a window. You
were asleep with a lamp burning on the table beside you; we had some
difficulty in awakening you; and when we succeeded, and you roused
yourself to come out, another blast of wind came. We had barely time
to spring back; but you went down with the house. It caught fire from
the lamp--but we got you out and dragged you here. I have done what I
could for your wounds." She stopped, a slight vibration in her voice,
and glanced desperately across the still foaming sea. If help did
not come to them, there was no hope for Kingsnorth.
The man himself knit his brows in a forceful attempt at
remembrance. Little by little, the lines of effort gave way to
lines of bitterness. His nostrils dilated, a slow painful flush
deepened the pallor of his face, and his lips tightened in a smile
of self-contempt. Her own eyes suffused with pity as she looked down
on him, for she knew that he had pieced it all out, and that the
self-consciousness of ultimate failure and debasement was overwhelming
him. To be a man and yet to have been found wanting at the supreme hour
to those with whose protection he had been charged was exceedingly
bitter to John Kingsnorth. He closed his eyes, unable to look at
her, but presently a tear forced its lonely way out, then another,
and still another.
At the sight, the last shadow of her old distaste and resentment
vanished from Charlotte's mind. She saw in him only the creature maimed
and suffering, dignified by the near approach to the supreme hour,
a man weighted with the sense of failure, and the knowledge that
his last chance had come and gone, and that it, too, had passed him
unprofiting. With sudden tenderness,--a feeling that seemed to reach
forth to the uttermost confines of desolation,--she gently wiped away
the tears, and then, bending, kissed him on the brow. He smiled at
her gratefully and spoke with painful effort.
"Ah that's good. I've been lonely, I've wanted a human hand in mine,
a woman's of my own class. I'm not all hard and bad."
The words came with the utmost difficulty, and she gently pressed
her fingers on his lips to stop him. His hand sought hers weakly, and
held her fingers there. Then he turned his face to her like a chidden
child, and she spoke to him no more. Only occasionally she moistened
his fevered lips or wiped away the bloody froth that lay upon them
after a fit of coughing. His physical suffering was very great, great
enough, she hoped, to dull the consciousness of his dangerous state.
Mrs. Maclaughlin, as the day grew apace, busied herself in erecting a
low shelter over the dying man. She got some bamboo poles and stuck
them up, and laid on them a roof of banana leaves. She tried to get
a mattress out of one of the fallen houses, but was unable to do
so. She lighted a fire of leaves and old cocoanut husks, over which
she brewed a cup of strong coffee. Charlotte drank it gratefully
and afterwards ate one or two of the long fragrant bananas called
"boongoolan." Although she was greatly fatigued, the hot drink and
the food brought strength back to her, and new courage animated her.
Their servants and the village folk came in curious groups to inspect
the ruined houses; but--sinister omen--they did not approach the
whites, but eyed them curiously from a distance. Charlotte realized
that, helpless as he was, Kingsnorth was still a protection to them;
and he knew it too, for once, when the Japanese diver came too near,
he motioned feebly for the revolver strapped at Charlotte's waist. She
gave it to him, smiling faintly. The Jap, however, beat a retreat as
the revolver changed hands.
So the long morning wore away and the dying man still pillowed his
head in Charlotte's lap. Her mind, as she looked down upon him, was
a-surge with crowding thoughts. Pity was foremost. It was indeed
pitiful, this slow, painful ending, in desolation and loneliness,
of a life that should have closed in dignity and peace. As the face
grew whiter, and the pinched look of death stole upon his features,
the bitterness and the degeneracy seemed to yield to what had been
the once lofty spirit of manhood before the corroding acids of life
had preyed upon it. Step by step he had moved on the narrowing path
that ended in a cul de sac. He had declared that the fault was his,
and that if he had had the right stuff in him, he could not have made
the failure that he had made; but the poor fellow had not selected
the elements of his nature. They had been forged and linked upon him
by the wills and passions of others. Across the seas, the mother who
had contributed perhaps to the poorer elements of his character, and
who had chosen his father--that mother still lived an easy luxurious
life. Did she really think as little of him as he had declared she
did? Would no pangs of contrition for her selfishness strike deep at
the roots of her complacency, when she should learn that her son had
died an exile on the lonely island? The sisters who had played with
him, and the woman whose faithless hand had given the impetus to his
downward career--would no repentant pangs visit them when the news
should come that he had lived? There were other women, too, as he
had boasted; women who had loved him, in spite of his scorn. Where
were they? What were they doing as this final hour pressed upon John
Kingsnorth? Over in the Filipino village, the child who owed him life
sported with his playthings, ignorant of the father who would never
act a father's part to him; and on the sunny hillside mouldered the
remains of the broken-hearted girl who had been his wife. It was
such a waste, such a pitiable, useless, extravagant waste of human
desire, and of human happiness; a life that should have been filled
with decency and respect and honor, ending so meanly, so sordidly,
beneath the shelter of a mere leaf-roofed hutch. Her heart ached for
the sufferer, ached for his isolation, for the final hopeless ending
of what he had once hoped would be an honorable and happy career.
It was almost noon when Kingsnorth roused again and declared
weakly that he desired to make his will. In the pockets of the coat
which she had removed from him were a note book and pencil, and,
at his dictation, Charlotte scribbled down his wishes concerning
the child whom he at last stood ready to recognize. All his worldly
possessions were left to the orphan, and Collingwood was named as
guardian. Kingsnorth then signed the document, which both women
witnessed. At his request Charlotte once again pillowed his head in
her lap, and he kissed her hand feebly in gratitude.
Mrs. Maclaughlin after a last hopeless look at the sea, threw herself
down in the shade of the pandan bushes and went to sleep. Kingsnorth
watched her jealously and when he was certain that she was beyond
listening or seeing, asked Charlotte for his tobacco pouch. She
hunted it up in the pockets of his coat, and gave it into his weak,
trembling hands. He fumbled with it; and at last drew out the pearl,
wrapped in tissue paper, which he had shown her on the day they
discussed Martin's letter.
"For you," he said weakly; but at her flush, and sudden impulsive
gesture of protest, he went on more strongly; "I want you to have
it. It means something--a beginning--something between you and
want. You're right: you must not sacrifice yourself. You deserve
something of life. But take--take with the strong hand."
"But Mr. Kingsnorth," she replied, "I have not told you, but I am not
going away from Martin. I shall stay by him; he needs me, I think. At
any rate, there is some happiness in that thought."
He frowned slightly, and then smiled. "All the more need. A woman
ought not to be so utterly in a man's power. We're merciless
wretches--selfish." The effort of speech seemed to be too great.
Seeing that to refuse him would cloud his dying hours, Charlotte ceased
to argue and let him press the bauble into her palm. It lay there,
the visible token of Kingsnorth's final allegiance to the ideals of
the class which he had once renounced. It was, as he had declared,
a something to stand between her and want, a bridge perhaps in some
hour of need, that thing which might furnish her with temporary
support and independence if she chose to set Martin Collingwood and
her marriage vows aside.
But she did not intend to do so. As the slow hours dragged by,
that resolution shaped itself more and more definitely in her mind,
and with it there fell away her old self-consciousness about the
world's opinion of her actions. Through what throes this sense of
moral independence had come to her, she knew; through what it might
yet have to pass before it could obtain a perfect development, she
had some intuition; but in her ultimate victory over the weaker and
poorer elements of her nature she had perfect confidence.
As she sat on in the blinding heat, her life passed in retrospect
before her, and something half bitterness, half elation sprang up
in her soul as she gazed upon it. Too clearly she perceived that its
noblest features had been those which had most obstructed the happiness
she yearned for. Her ideals, those maxims which parent, teachers,
and guardians alike had dinned in her ears as the guide-marks of
life if she would be a lovely and loveable woman, had only served
to isolate her from human kind; and so far as love and tenderness
had come into her life at all they were owing to a quality which
all her training had taught her to regard as, at best, a weakness,
and at worst, a shame. A flush of humiliation stained her cheek as
she realized that her husband had not loved her for her intelligence,
for her truth, for her candor, for her fair judgment, for her human
charity, or for that final tenderness of soul and spirit which she
felt welling like some crystal stream in her bosom. No, it was for
her capacity for passion which his ruder instincts had assumed must
underlie the polished surface of her mind. Judge Barton, too, had
loved her, had striven to rouse in her an answering feeling to his own;
but though he had been able from the first to put a proper value upon
her breeding and intelligence, she could not blind herself to the fact
that these attributes were mere accessories to what really attracted
him--the development, in herself, of amorous possibilities which
only marriage could have brought about. She knew incontrovertibly,
that if, by a magician's stroke, she could be changed back into the
girl she was when Alexander Barton first met her, his interest in her
would fall flat in an instant. That girl had been neither priggish
nor puritanical, only intelligent, full of ideals, and emotionally
immature, dedicated to that vision of womankind which man himself
has consciously created, but from which unconsciously he turns away,
chilled and rebuked by its very perfection.
As she looked back, she wondered at herself and at her own temerity
in having dared to break with the teachings of a life-time; in having
set at defiance all that tremendous pressure which custom, social
usage, family pride, and selfishness bring to bear upon a girl and her
marriage. It had taken a certain amount of moral courage to do what
she had done; it had taken still more to bear what she had borne. But
if out of endurance there came knowledge,--not empty maxims and high
sounding phrases, but real knowledge of her own strength and of her
own weaknesses, and some true guiding sense of her own relationship
to the thing we call life,--she grudged it as little as the mother
grudges the birth-pains which give her her child.
Had she taken her courage in her hand with one splendid outburst of
defiance, much of sorrow and of humiliation might have been spared
her; but, on the whole, she was glad that she had not done so. That
sort of courage is seldom moral; it is, at bottom, emotionalism. She
had gone timidly inch by inch trying to fortify each step by her
intelligence. The way had led through devious windings: it had been a
trial of endurance for others as well as for herself; but in the end
it was she who had come out benefited. Poor Martin (her eyes lighted
tenderly) had trodden it side by side with her; but experience had
brought him no enlightenment.
No: the real value of all those weeks of pain and humiliation had
been for herself. They had been a preparation for the revelation
that had come upon her of the false ideals which modern society
gives women. It was incomprehensible that a woman of brains could
have clung tenaciously to the ideal which she had cherished for
twenty-eight years; and yet, all her training, all the influences
which surround a "well-brought-up girl" had contributed to it. What
she had asked for herself was a splendid nullity. She had expected to
draw her skirts daintily about her, and to pick her way through the
drawing-room of life, receiving all, giving nothing, too well-bred and
too intellectual to be tempted by its passions; and she had actually
supposed this egoistic solitude was moral elevation! She had thought
that trampling upon human love, setting aside the desire for home
and husband and children unless in their possession she gratified her
vanity and ambition, was self-respect! Well, she had not been alone
in her delusion. She knew that seventy per cent of her fellow women
would condemn her for having married Martin Collingwood, and that
more than that number would despise her for overlooking the crude
insults of his letter and of his speech by the pandan bushes. Her
face flamed as she recalled them. As long as she should live they
would be a thorn in her flesh, a scourge, an agony to be relived.
Yet no flagellant ever bent more meekly under his own blows than
Charlotte did as she resigned herself to bearing that cross. His
words had been but the irrepressible utterance of his own wounded
vanity; his letter but the masterful outcropping of the man's blind
egoism. His illusions versus her illusions!--after all, what more
had divided them than that? But greater than any illusion was life
itself, the mingling of distracting hopes, fears, emotions, out of
which only one thing is permanent and real, the consciousness of duty
and right, as they are forever separated from material advantages;
the expression of the human soul, which must move on struggling,
fainting, vanquished or triumphant, asking perhaps for sympathy here
or understanding there, but in the end recording its failures or its
victories, companionless and voiceless.
Often and often, during her weeks of torment, a phrase had crept into
her musings which she had repeated with God knows what of bitterness:
"The years that the locust hath eaten." In the clarity of her new-found
light, it was those other years which the locusts had eaten--those
long, empty, undeveloping years in which she had patterned herself
on a social ideal; but which had brought her nothing of strength or
of character.
She went slowly over the year of her life on the island. What had
her association with the Maclaughlins cost her? A possible intimacy
with a commissioner's wife. What had it brought her? Much that
was healthy in her viewpoint of life. That homely common sense of
Mrs. Maclaughlin, her outspoken dependence upon the man of her choice,
her frank admission of her sense of duty and obedience to him, had
a wholesome significance in these days, when women have thrown off
all the old maxims of subjection without finding any new self-imposed
obligations. What had her year's association with Kingsnorth, educated
reprobate, well-bred degenerate, cost her? An insulting proposition
from a worldly man; but what a wealth of human sympathy and charity
and compassion had it not injected into her moral and intellectual
exclusiveness! She felt the richening of her whole nature that had
come from putting aside her pride, from walking hand in hand with an
outcast upon the highway.
As for Judge Barton's little drama, it had not hurt her in the
least. Socially, it is true, it might be a stain. Even the semblance
of an "affair" with the respected dignitary might cause gossip. But
on her own soul that interview had left not one spot. It had soiled
nothing in her but her pride. She realized that it is not dodging
the temptations of life that makes character, but meeting them and
resisting them. She made up her mind that if fate should ever throw her
again into the society of Judge Barton, she would forgive him frankly;
nor would she seek to overwhelm him with her offended dignity, nor
press upon him the consciousness of his own sins. The man had had
his moment of temptation and had fallen. He had wronged no one but
himself. Far be it from her to decree his punishment.
Her thoughts turned then to Martin. The situation had its pathos
for him as well as for her, though perhaps he might never know it;
for there had come into the reality of her feeling for him the very
elements which his own egoism had most feared and hated. She had,
in the beginning loved him for loving's sake, caring nothing, so
far as she was concerned, for his faults and his weaknesses, only
too willing to ascribe to him the worth that he set upon himself;
afraid of the world, it is true, and hiding from its condemnation,
but secretly quarrelling with what she knew would be its contrary
judgment. She had married him because she needed him, because she
leaned weakly upon him. Now, when the experiences to which he had
subjected her had taught her to stand alone and to judge independently,
she was taking him back because he needed her.
He had declared that he would live with no woman on terms of pity or
of sufferance; but her heart was full of pity for him as it had never
been before; and for the first time the consciousness of her own real
superiority to Martin entered into her feeling for him. Up to that
hour, she had exalted him always at her own expense. There had been no
way of evading the weight of what she had felt to be the world's scorn
but determinedly to make Martin Collingwood into something which he
was not; in the moment of putting aside that world's verdict, he and
she swung as naturally into their normal relationships as a compass
needle swings back to its rest.
Henceforward she would see Collingwood as he was: the democrat whose
democracy is but the ladder of ambition, the raw, self-made man
reaching out an eager clutch for those finer things of life which
he knows only by their ticketed values. But that fact no longer
weighted him with a quality which needed apology or forgiveness;
she saw in it growth, the only enduring, magnificent thing in this
universal scheme. In all nature what is there but growth and decay,
what but the steady effort to arrive at perfection, and the ensuing
death out of which come new life and effort? Blind man, with Nature's
unvarying lesson spread before him, seeks to defy in his own being
the law which can never be successfully defied; would seize and
hold unchanged that moment of perfect development which precedes
decadence; would make use of artificial distinctions, would endeavor
to strengthen class differences; would invent caste systems, and sell
his very soul to gratify his vain hope of retaining in himself or in
his immediate descendants what he feels as the highest expression
of his own development. He has never done it, he can never do it;
but as instinctively as the flower reaches up to the sunlight, so
must he ever struggle for the prolongation of his best matured product.
The question of Collingwood's social status became in an instant
trivial. She saw in him the new growth, vigorous, wholesome, needing
but the right soil and nourishment to develop into a forest monarch;
and she had in her the power to aid that growth, and she had been
minded to turn her back upon him because he had not found out what
meed of consideration was due her, because he had sapped unconsciously
of her strength without asking himself why and whence it came!
The thought broke upon her like a splendor, that there might be more
joy in helping Martin Collingwood to his perfected state than there
would be in just loving him or in being loved by him. Many times she
had repeated, as women are fond of doing, that threadbare quotation,
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
'Tis woman's whole existence!
and she had accepted the common feminine view that the couplet is a
testimonial to man's coarser nature, and a subtle tribute to feminine
"soul" and superiority. She saw in it suddenly the whole story of
feminine weakness and selfishness. She honored Martin Collingwood
that love had not been his whole existence. There in her lap,
his head swathed in bloody bandages, was gasping out his life a
man who, however manly he might have been in other respects, had
been essentially feminine in his disposition to make love his whole
existence; and who had felt that the thwarting of the one natural
desire for the woman of his choice was sufficient to dull all the
normal manly instincts of ambition and accomplishment.
She glanced about her at the evidences of ruin, and she bowed her head
in gratitude that it had been her lot to come to this primitive land,
to know humiliation and sorrow and loneliness, and to free herself
in its solitudes from the false ideals of her training. She looked
down the long vista of years and saw herself always at Martin's side,
helping, working with him, bearing with his weaknesses, struggling
with her own; but the end of it all was life and character for
them both, something bigger than mere loving or being loved. If
she uttered a sigh or two for what was irrevocably gone, it was
not wholly in regret. It was no dream life she was going back to,
no Summer in Arcady (that was past), but plain, prosaic marriage,
with disappointments and misunderstandings and misconceptions to be
outlived and to make the best of; nor was there anything but health
in the thought that Martin might find just as much to overlook as she
might. Children would come to them, and she saw herself bearing them,
rearing them, guiding into intelligent and ethical expression the
forceful inheritance which would be theirs from him, finding in them
the realization of her own will and soul expression, rejoicing in his
pride in them. He would work and she would bear,--strange anomaly of
fate that carried back to its primitive beginnings the product of so
much effort and vanity and ambition!
The sunshine beat pitilessly on the leaf shelter; the fatigue of the
long vigil told upon her; her crowding thoughts wearied her. She held
herself upright with difficulty, and her eyelids drooped. Sitting
unsupported, she slept.
Her own body falling forward roused her after the briefest of naps. Her
quick movement to regain her balance jarred Kingsnorth, and he opened
his eyes. His face was half turned to the sea, whereas her back was
set squarely against it; and he instantly perceived the long trail
of a steamer's smudge borne ahead of the vessel which was still hull
down. He pointed feebly to call her attention to it.
"Good old Martin," he murmured weakly. "I knew--he--would come. He's
not--like-- me. He--doesn't fail."
Charlotte stared, her eyes aglow, her face aflame with hope. She lifted
her hand to her throat, choked by what was throbbing there. There were
hope and succor fast enough; but also what message of despair might
not that vessel bring? What if she, like Kingsnorth, had delayed too
long, and the Unseen Powers had decreed there should be no more chances
for her? Then as she glanced down, she met Kingsnorth's intent eyes,
puzzled, their keen intelligence slightly dimmed, but full of some
question that he dared not ask. A sudden impulse moved her.
"I want to tell you before it is too late," she said with difficulty,
"just how I feel. I glory in Martin Collingwood; I am glad I am
his wife. I have had the indecency to be ashamed of myself for
the most human and womanly thing I ever did in my life. Well, I'm
emancipated." She stopped, drew a long breath, and broke into a little,
low, nervous laugh. "There seems to be growing up a conviction among
women that the only door of emancipation is the divorce court, and that
the only way to assert their personality is in insurrection. I don't
want that door. I had the effrontery to marry Martin Collingwood to
be adored--as if either he or I or anybody else has the right to make
that the end of life. That is the cry of the effete, of the thing which
must soon fall into decay. But Heaven helping me, I'm going to make
myself into a woman, and I'm going to be the right influence in his
life. It's not going to be easy or free from heartache, but we'll do
it." A sudden recollection overcame her. Her bravery dropped from her,
the light vanished from her eye. "If it isn't too late," she whispered,
"if it isn't too late."
"No, no," Kingsnorth said, though some torment, physical or
mental, twisted his lips into uncouth shapes as he dragged out the
words. "He'll come. Almighty God wouldn't keep a man--from this." With
which words, of a poetic consistency with the weakness which had
been his undoing, the voice of John Kingsnorth fell into eternal
silence. For half an hour longer, perhaps, his eyes remained open,
staring curiously, wistfully, sometimes at her face, sometimes at the
deepening vapor line upon the sky. The steamer came full into view,
a coastguard boat, undoubtedly heading for the island. The day's heat
diminished; the shadows lengthened; the sea ran more and more gently;
and the light of late afternoon deepened to etherealized amber. Its
magic seemed to bring peace and resignation to the dying man. Once
again with a pathetic sigh he turned his face to hers and tried to
nestle closer to her as a penitent child clings to the mother who
has conquered him. She bent and kissed him again, this time upon the
lips. Shortly after, she perceived that he was unconscious.
Still the labored breathing went on and on a long time,--time enough
for their servants to gather, a meek and hospitable group some little
distance away, watching the vessel which would restore the whites to
their old status on the island; time enough for the steamer to drop her
anchor and to put out a boat; but at last, in a long shuddering sigh,
it ceased. John Kingsnorth, disreputable offspring of a proud family,
had gone to his reckoning. In time they would go to theirs.
For a few minutes, Charlotte made no attempt to move. Then she gently
laid him down, and without disturbing Mrs. Maclaughlin still in the
deep sleep of exhaustion, dragged herself painfully to her feet. The
movement dislodged the pearl, which had slipped unnoticed into her
lap. She picked it up and stood looking upon it meditatively. Its
luster had no sinister significance in spite of those rather revolting
confessions of Kingsnorth's about his musings over it. It was just
a beautiful bauble, one of those shining gauds for which women break
their hearts or with which they seek to break other women's. It had
no worth apart from human vanity. Back of all its commercial value,
lay a human weakness.
She did not care for it. She said to herself that she would keep it
long enough to learn the news that the boat brought her. If Martin
was alive, well she knew how quickly he would repudiate the gift, how
his man's pride would revolt at her having financial independence of
him. She could not but realize how utterly his own self-respect must
hang on his power to work for her, to give her the things he wanted for
her. Nor did she wish to repeat to him what Kingsnorth had told her. It
was a confession he would not willingly have made to Collingwood;
it was the woman in him crying out to the woman. But if Martin was
no more, then she would accept the gift, thankful for the help it
would give her, knowing well that Martin would not have grudged it.
Stiffly she made her way to the beach and shading her eyes, peered at
the approaching boat. The dazzle of the sunset was in them and the
boat was well out; but someone was standing, waving frantic arms at
her. Her heart gave one great throb as she realized that no one but
Martin would so energetically have welcomed the sight of her; and
then as it came nearer and she saw him plainly, the throbs settled
into steady, confident beating. Her chance had come, and would find
her ready to profit.
The sea was molten metal shot with undertones of steely blue and opal;
huge banks of cloud were massed on the distant horizon, the hidden
sun pouring down great shafts of light; cocoanut trees were yellow
green in the radiance; the worn, mouse-colored nipa roofs were turned
to gold. All nature was afire with beauty and promise. Yet there in
the dismantled homes lay a man's work to his hand; and in the general
devastation was written the story of wreck and of failure, the threat
of toil to restore. There, too, in the full light stood a woman ready
to help and to bear unflinchingly her share of the burden. Her dress
was disordered; her hair, that had grayed slightly in the suffering
of past weeks, had something of wildness in its untidiness. Her face
was white, and would never again be youthful; but in spite of fatigue
she stood erect, magnificent, a splendor of purpose in her eyes,
a woman entered into her heritage, tried, self-confident, sure of
herself. Though he would never know it, though he was destined to
go on to the end in his fool's paradise of indomitable ignorance,
Martin Collingwood, most masculine of masculine types, who had vowed
that no woman should ever rule him or patronize him, accepted, in that
hour, the terms he had repudiated, and thrust his neck rapturously,
for all time, beneath the yoke of petticoat government.
Collingwood and Maclaughlin were both on their feet, the one
feasting his eyes on the woman he loved, the other searching with
dread premonition of evil for the form dear to him. Neither at that
moment gave a thought to the destruction that had overtaken what
they had built, or to the tedious steps to be retraced, the effort
of accomplishment to be re-done. That was for later; that was life in
their sturdy acceptation of it. But just before the boat grounded they
saw Charlotte lift one hand with an easy graceful movement and toss
some gleaming object into the sea. They even heard the tiny splash
it made, and saw the ripples. Neither gave it a second thought;
it might have been a pebble picked from the beach, or some equally
valueless trifle. Little did Martin dream that it was the last fagot
she possessed laid upon the altar of his self-esteem.
As the boat's keel grated on the sands, however, both men sprang out
and splashed their way to her. She stood smiling clearly, steadfastly,
into her husband's eyes; and as he gathered her with a sob into his
arms, Maclaughlin, obedient to her slight gesture, tore past them to
the low-roofed shelter whither she motioned him. Collingwood, raising
his eyes as he lifted his lips from his wife's, saw the man's abrupt
halt and recoil; then beheld him uncover at the sight of the sleeping
woman and their dead comrade.
THE END
NOTE
[1] Barometric pressure in Philippines is measured in millimeters. In
typhoons where fifth signal is flown, about 742 is lowest pressure
recorded. In great storm of 1908, 739.8 was lowest. Generally the
falling of the barometer is gradual for several days during the
continuance of the storm. When it falls suddenly, as here indicated,
before a storm, it means that a storm of short duration but of terrific
violence is coming.