Chapter IVWhat the buried archives are to the archæologist, the trunkful of old letters is to the novelist. But before those light-giving documents are brought forth, a little family history should be detailed as preface.In the year 1872 the Civil War had been more generally forgotten in the North than in the South. In the State of Massachusetts, however, a goodly circle of antislavery agitators still kept up the fight in favor of the black man. The Fourteenth Amendment had not then been made, nor those celebrated discussions which fixed its interpretation and application; but the reconstruction of the Southern States still left plenty of ground for bitter speech and feeling.Prominent among that circle and among the old Boston families of that day was the widow of a man who had literally given his life to the antislavery cause, for he had died during the War of overwork upon an antislavery journal. His widowbelonged to a family that for two hundred years or more had been prominent in state and national affairs. When her husband died and left her and a half-grown daughter almost penniless among a wealthy kindred, she found little or no difficulty in getting along; for their pride in the editorial victim was great, and she had been always a family favorite.But if the mother was everywhere sought, her daughter Charlotte found a less ready welcome. A tall, superb beauty, singularly cold at times and reserved, at others fiercely vehement, she was as utterly unlike the descendant of a staid New England family as can be imagined. It is regrettable that she found little favor in the family eyes; and in the year 1872 she came to an out and out rupture with all her kindred by eloping with Mountjoy Ponsonby, a Marylander, a Roman Catholic, and an irreconcilable son of slave-holding parents.Mrs. K—— took to her bed and died of chagrin. Four years later the unhappy girl followed her mother to the grave, leaving behind her a baby daughter six months old.Of that marriage so soon ended, the best and the worst that can be said is that it was unhappy. Thetwo undisciplined natures who had defied tradition, family sentiment, religious training, and political inheritance for the sake of each other, had not the patience to work out their common happiness when the infatuation which had drawn them together died, as all such sudden and violent emotions must.When Mrs. Ponsonby turned her back on life and on an impoverished Southern home where her New England thrift had struggled ceaselessly with the indolence and sluggish ways of a slave-holding household, it was after almost all possible recrimination had been exhausted over religion, politics, family inheritance, and ideals of life. Her husband, having buried her with due ceremony and observance in the Maryland family vaults, betook himself to travel, leaving the child to be cared for by a distant female relative. When little Charlotte was four, the relative died, and, as an ultimate act of defiance to his wife’s kindred, Ponsonby placed his daughter in a Roman Catholic convent.There the little girl remained till her fourteenth year. In that period, she saw her father some six or eight times. Their interviews were constrained affairs, for Mountjoy Ponsonby was nota man of domestic or affectionate nature, and the child of the wife with whom he had quarrelled bitterly made little appeal to him. He usually gave his daughter much good advice, found her exceedingly docile, but equally difficult, and was always embarrassed by an unspoken appeal in her nature which he dumbly resented. He looked forward with repugnance and dread to the days when she could be no longer stuffed away in a convent, and he rather hoped that she would feel herself religiously called upon to stay there.Like many other men, he had formed the habit of looking on himself as immortal, so that when he was instantly killed by being thrown from his horse, he had made no provision for his child’s future. On his own side of the family there was no near kindred; and the Boston relatives instantly put in a claim for the custody of little Charlotte.The man who was most actively interested in the little girl’s future was one Cornelius Spencer, a dry, hard-working, quiet man, capable of loving with singular intensity and equally capable of concealing his emotions. He had paid a quiet court to the beautiful Charlotte K——, and family gossip said that he took her elopement very seriously;but it was all conjecture, for he kept his own counsel. A year later, he married Martha Winston, her cousin, a lady who, furthermore said family gossip, had been in love with him for several years.The Spencer marriage turned out well; how nearly thatwellmay be translatedhappily, who can say? At least, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Spencer were a decorous couple, he given to amassing this world’s goods, she devoted to a thrifty oversight of their expenditures and to a calm enjoyment of their prosperity. Two daughters came to them, handsome children whose education from the first was up to the strictest standards of conservative Boston.There was much sage wagging of heads among the Boston kin when Cornelius Spencer came forward as the potential guardian of the orphan immured in the convent. But though they conjectured again, Mrs. Spencer kept her own counsel as her husband had kept his years before. Of course, said the kinship, it was a bitter pill to her. Charlotte K—— had always outshone her in brains, in wit, in beauty. She had been proud to marry the man whom Charlotte had refused; and to find that man, eighteen years later, still cherishingsentimental memories of her rival, determined to make himself a second father to that rival’s child,—ah, well, Martha was a remarkable woman to bear it all so quietly!It happened that, on the day the young girl appeared in charge of the nun who brought her North, a very observant lady was calling upon Mrs. Cornelius Spencer. The lady was the wife of an army officer, and had a taste for letter-writing, in fact, felt that letter-writing was her only gift. A few extracts from her epistle to her husband will throw some light upon Charlotte Ponsonby’s girlhood experiences.“—I have been visiting about for days among the K—— kin. They are as magnificently satisfied with themselves as ever, take themselves very seriously, are as proud of their money-making powers as of their blue blood; really it’s wonderful how they all make money, and talk, as they have always done, from a very much higher plane than they really live on.“Among others, Martha Spencer asked me to luncheon, and I went there this morning. Really, Cornelius must have madeoodlesof money. The mere household accessories were simple enough; but the books, the pictures, and the curios were a joy. I feasted my soul, and I wished for you, my dear, to enjoy it with me.“But I’ll talk of those things to you later. What Iwant to tell you about now is an incident that I am afraid may slip away from me, and I want to describe it while my impressions are fresh,“You remember I wrote you, in a previous letter, about the lawsuit and how old Dry-as-dust Cornelius has a real spark of romance in him after all, and of how he has disinterred his old love’s child from a convent where she was to have been buried alive. It was my happy fate to see the sequel this morning.“Martha and I were sitting together just before lunch, when the bell rang. ‘I think that must be the little relative whom we are expecting,’ said Martha, and a second later the butler ushered in a nun and a fourteen-year-old girl.“I wish you could have seen Martha’s greeting! It was exactly what she would have given a woman of the world, paying a morning call. She was concentrated extract of courtesy and breeding. The child, who was evidently nervous and expectant of a warmer welcome was instantly chilled by it. But she rose to it! She rose to it magnificently! She has rather fine eyes, her mother’s eyes as I remember them, and a self-possessed manner for a child of her age. I tried to gush over her a bit, but she would have none of me. Having been rebuffed by her hostess, she had no intention of allowing an undetermined factor to the situation to make amends to her.“The nun would not remain, and departed immediately after formally handing over her charge. She kissed Charlotte (the child is named for her mother), and I rather fancied that, in spite of her cold welcome, the child is notreluctant to enter on a more brilliant life than the conventical one. At any rate, she did not shed any tears.“Charlotte was sent upstairs with a maid to make her toilette for luncheon. ‘Your cousins regret not being here to welcome you,’ said Martha suavely, ‘but they went out to the country place of a friend for a day’s skating. They will see you at dinner.’“‘I am very glad they did not change their plans on my account,’ said my little nun that might have been.“Cornelius came home for luncheon and was stiffer than Martha. He was self-conscious, that was apparent. We had the most perfect luncheon imaginable, but though Martha prides herself on her heating arrangements and their temperatures never vary a degree, I felt as if the outside air had crept through the whole house.“I am sorry for that girl from the bottom of my heart. Martha hates the sight of her, and the girl knew it before she had been twenty minutes in the house. She will have food and dress and every material luxury dealt out to her as lavishly as it is to Martha’s own girls; but of good-will, kindness, human affection, not a drop. Instead, she will receive a courtesy measured by the most approved social standards. She will never be allowed to forget for one moment that it is given from a high sense of duty, and not from any sense of affection. I am not sure that Cornelius has done the child a kindness. She might have fared better in a boarding-school. At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy for Martha. I shouldn’t be at all nice about it, you know, if you raked up a dead and gone sweetheart’s child and established her among our brood.”Within a few weeks after the writing of this epistle, Mrs. Spencer expressed herself to an elderly relative perched in a very old colonial home among the hills of Vermont.“Charlotte’s little daughter is now with us. She is a very reserved child with beautiful manners—I suppose convent training does give that—and, her teachers think, has an exceptional mind. We have had private teachers for her this year because, though her elementary training is fair, she is greatly lacking in general information, though she has a curious accumulation of Roman Catholic religious lore.“She has a great deal of personality for a child of her age, which I have respected. I find myself constantly shrinking, however, from some undercurrent of feeling which she doesn’t express. She gets on very well with my two girls, but they don’t understand her any more than I do. Of course, she is treated exactly as they are—I really wouldn’t get one a hair ribbon without buying its match for Charlotte.“For a convent-reared girl, she is not so difficult to deal with as might be. I send her to church every Sunday in the brougham with the parlor maid, who happens to be of her faith; and I called on the parish priest and commended her to his fatherly mercies. He is a rather robust person, clearly of Irish peasant origin, and speaks with a very decided brogue. She is plainly growing a bit fastidious about him, and I am inclined to feel that she is none toodeeply enamored of her church. She has a curious gift of worldliness for a child brought up in a convent.”Eight years later Mrs. Spencer penned another brief note to this same elderly relative’s daughter.“I suppose it would be asking too much of you to run down to Smith and see Charlotte take her degree. I can’t go—Natalie’s engagement is just on—and somebody ought to appear from the family. She takes high honors, I understand. She wrote me a very pretty little note, saying it wasn’t to be expected of any of us to get up, but I can see she is hurt. Do go if you can.”Six weeks later in that same year, the military lady found herself at a very quiet and exclusive resort in the White Mountains, and once more delivered herself to her husband of many impressions.“You remember that incident I told you of some years ago of seeing Charlotte K’s daughter engulfed in the Spencer household. Well, they are all here for a brief stay, Martha engrossed in her two girls. Natalie’s engagement to young X—— of the Navy has been announced. Charlotte Ponsonby is really a magnificent creature—from a woman’s standpoint, that is. But the outcome of the affair is just what might have been expected. Somehow they have mortally wounded her, and to protect herselffrom them and their curiosity she has built a wall between herself and the whole world. I tried to cross it, and was most delicately and effectively rebuffed. She is the most solitary girl I have ever known, and yet she is not morbid. She moves among us in the most self-possessed,unaskingspirit that was ever held by a girl of twenty-two. She is remarkably well bred, quite at ease outwardly, and is altogether too clever to please men—who are dreadfully shy of her, though they speak of her admiringly. I would not have you think that her cleverness is of that cheap type which sharpens its wits on others, and prides itself on its brilliancy. She is not in the least talkative, but she gives you the feeling of one who is weighing, sifting, analyzing, judging; who is using her brain to its best purposes at all times.“The pathetic part of it all is that she is playing up to a rôle that somebody—I don’t know what idiot—assigned her. I find among all the kindred and all the family acquaintance the general opinion that Charlotte has no emotions, nothing but a brain; and the poor child is nothing but a bundle of emotions that she is desperately trying to conceal. I understand her perfectly. I never was so sorry for anyone in my life—anyone in our condition, that is. She has been tagged a girl of brains, and it has somehow been impressed upon her that, if she shows any feminine weakness, she will disgrace herself. So there she is, on her intellectual tiptoes, striving to conceal a very human disposition to come down on her heels, exiling herself from all that girlhood prizes.“Of course, you dear old goose, you are saying to yourself,‘Why don’t you put her wise, then?’ My dear, she has analyzed it all just as clearly as I have. She knows what is going on. She merely hasn’t the courage to break through the convention and, on the whole, I don’t wonder at it. It takes more courage to fight the accepted conception of oneself than it does to do any other sort of fighting in the world. Charlotte Ponsonby is a victim of the Spencer stupidity and of her own timidity and sensitiveness. There has grown up an impression that Charlotte doesn’t care for dancing; and night after night she goes off to her room, pretending a desire to read when her heart is in her toes, where a normal girl’s heart should be. If there is an expedition of any sort, Charlotte is always handed over to some elderly fossil because she is so intelligent and serious, and so entertaining to old gentlemen. If a man pays her the least attention, everybody notes it (and you know we pride ourselves an our breeding too); and so much interest, sympathy, and, yes, my dear,damnablecuriosity, is openly shown in the matter that the girl’s pride is outraged, and in sheer self-defence she snubs her admirer incontinently.“She lives and has always lived, as nearly as I can see, utterly without intimate companionship, confidence, or any of that wholesome dependence that belongs to girlhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in her isolation, which, much as I should like to, I dare not invade. There is a pride in life born of indigence as there is the pride of wealth. Charlotte Ponsonby is armored in the pride born of spiritual indigence. Her soul is hungering and thirsting for that thing for which all the world has decided shecares nothing. Mark my words, my dear, in the end, tragedy will come of it.”It was at the close of their stay in the mountains that Mrs. Spencer again unburdened herself to the Vermont relative.“What do you think Charlotte is now bent on? She wants to be a trained nurse. I have felt for a long time that she had something revolutionary in her mind. It doesn’t matter to me particularly, but Cornelius is grieved to the heart. However, we have no right to coerce her, and financial independence seems to be the one thing on which her mind is fixed.”Three years later she wrote again:“Charlotte has finished her training and is going to the Philippines. She came in from New York last week to break the news. I said little, and Cornelius said less. But we have talked it over, and have decided that she must judge for herself. I don’t feel satisfied with the results of our care for Charlotte, and I don’t know where the blame lies, but I do feel that she cherishes some bitterness of feeling in her heart, and that she is very unhappy.“Something in her nature wears clearer as she grows older, some ingrained romanticism which we did not suspect, and which repels me. However, it is too late to worry about now. She has taken her life into her own hands, and has decreed that it shall lie apart from ours; and I, for one, am thankful.”To these may be added a final word from Miss Ponsonby herself, written, on her wedding eve after her return from the Luneta.”My dear Aunt:“This is the last letter I shall write you for some time, for to-morrow I am going to be married, and shall leave Manila for a remote island where the opportunity for correspondence is small.“The man I am going to marry, whose name is Martin Collingwood, is engaged in pearl-fishing in the seas south of Manila. He is a man, I believe, with the money-making gift. However that is not the reason that I am marrying him. With me it is absolutely a matter of the heart. I am marrying him because, as nearly as I can see, he is the one human being who has ever loved me in this world, and because I cannot live life without love.“It is hardly necessary to say that I am sacrificing my ambitions in this matter. To a woman brought up as I have been, a dependent, a brilliant marriage would represent the most successful thing, the most nearly compensating thing, that life could offer. It has not come to me, however, and I am making the best I can of what has offered.“You may wonder why this frankness at the end of the silence which has always existed between us. It is because my only hope in the future is based on the fact that, at last, I have courage to declare myself. To guard my every thought and feeling from your curiosity and criticism, I have separated myself from all the world, and in the beginningunknowingly, but in the end with full knowledge, have walked down a path which has ended here. I will not hamper myself in my new life by even the memory of my old cowardice. You may call me weak, call me sentimental, foolish, romantic, call me all the things which for years you have been trying to discover in me, and for which you have sought in vain beneath the mask I wore—I am going to have my share of living.“This is not written in bitterness toward you. I am grateful for all the care and the money lavished upon me, and I realize fully the sacrifice that you made in receiving me into your home and in treating me, as you did, with perfect justice. It was magnificent. I am simply one of those miserable beings who have come into this world unwelcome, born to be a worry and a trial to someone, and I have taken the only means I knew to escape from it.“Tell Uncle Cornelius that I am not ungrateful to him. Some day I’ll write you again. For the present I want to put every memory of the past out of my life. If the day ever comes when I can go back to it without its influencing my life as it has always done, I’ll write again.“Yours gratefully,”Charlotte Ponsonby.”Chapter VJudge Barton had to cut short his morning ride in order to reach the San Sebastian church at seven-thirty, but he admitted to himself that he would have gone without his daily exercise rather than have missed the wedding; and he was actually ten minutes early. He found the edifice empty but pervaded with a general stir which hinted at impending events. A dirty, bare-footed sacristan in marine blue cotton drawers and a transparent shirt was opening windows and lighting a few candles about the high altar. The early morning sunlight streamed through the apertures, while the noise of street traffic outside echoed hollowly through the dusty, empty silence of the church. Sparrows flashed across the moted sunbeams and lost themselves among the violet and orange shadows of the lantern. Apobreshuffled in to mutter his devotions, and a widow and her two daughters, who had been praying before oneof the chapel altars, lingered to discover the cause of the preparations.Soon one or two men dropped in, strangers to the Judge, and friends, as he instantly decided, of Collingwood. They stood about indecisively, and stared up into the vaulted roof, and whispered to one another in funereally regulated tones. Then came a group of five or six women, whom the Judge recognized as fellow-nurses of Miss Ponsonby; and almost immediately afterwards, without ceremonial or welcome of the organ, the bride and groom appeared. Both were in white; he in the military-cut blouse which is so popular in the Philippines, she in a simple street dress of white muslin with a hat of white embroidery. The marine sacristan went to summon the priest, while the bridal pair waited quietly in the shadow of one of the Gothic pillars.When the priest, a Spaniard of ascetic and noble countenance, had arrived and was embarked upon the marriage ceremony, Judge Barton took himself to task for the flutter of nervousness which, to his great discomfiture, he found obtruding into his judicial reflections. He had come to satisfy avery natural curiosity, and the affair had taken his sympathies unaware. He had never before attended a wedding in which the seriousness of matrimonial experiment appealed to him so strongly. He never before had felt the solemn happiness which his sympathy with that bride and groom awoke in him. He stole a glance at the other witnesses; they were as preternaturally grave as he. There was even a subdued air about Collingwood, full, however, of reserved triumph. As for the bride, her pallor and fatigue were quite evident, but she had an uplifted look which was most attractive. He caught himself wondering if there would be any kissing the bride, and then he decided it was time to rein in his imagination. “Emotions by the quart!” he thought to himself. “Have I turned sentimental old woman? Champagne wouldn’t make me more maudlin.”He waited quite discreetly after the ceremony, till the young men and the group of nurses had had their say, and it had been clearly demonstrated that there would be no kissing. Then he went up and offered Mrs. Collingwood his hand. There was a genuine friendliness in his manner, a warmth andsincerity in his few words that touched her. Her own reserve melted before them. He saw her eyes suffuse, and a faint color glow in her cheek.She was instantly aware, indeed, that she occupied a new plane in his thoughts. She had gained upon him personally, and, as the wife of a man engaged in developing one of the greatest resources of the islands, and likely to become a factor of local commercial life, she would receive consideration. She knew that he regarded her marriage as amésalliance, yet by making amésallianceshe had become a person to be taken into account. Stranger situations than this happen frequently in the world—in the governmental world—and Mrs. Collingwood did not betray her intuitions.“Well, Judge,” said Martin jocosely, “the Bureau of Health did not bear down on us after all.”“No; you are a Benedict, Collingwood, and ‘whom the Lord hath joined’—I don’t know whether it is in your service or not. My Latin is rusty.”“‘Let no man, not even a Civil Commissioner, put asunder,’” Collingwood finished for him. The Judge suspected that he felt some relief inhaving the possibility of a change of mind on his bride’s part obviated, and the two men smiled at each other openly.“I feel that my troubles are ended,” said Collingwood.His wife betrayed that she was still somewhat self-conscious. “It remains for Judge Barton to be trite and to warn you that they have just begun,” she said, a little stiltedly.“Nonsense! What does it matter whether your troubles are beginning or ending? The point is that you have your present, your romance. I dare say you will have your troubles—most of us do; but to-day—” The speaker paused expressively.“That is an extremely sensible view,” replied Mrs. Collingwood. “He has not your happy gift of expression, but it is Mr. Collingwood’s also. He told me as much yesterday. I had been foolish enough to anticipate the future.”“Is that what made you look so solemn?” the Judge inquired playfully.She blushed a little and shook her head reprovingly, “It is no joking matter. Try it yourself and see how you feel. Why, even Martin looked serious.”“Frankly, I was scared to death,” Collingwood admitted. His wife laughed softly. The Judge shook hands again with the newly made husband in an access of geniality.He declined an invitation to the hotel breakfast which was all they could offer in the line of wedding festivity, but he found time later to appear aboard their boat.“Mind,” he said as he wished Mrs. Collingwood good-by, “you have not seen the last of me. I am going to appear in your island paradise sometime when you least expect me. When things get unendurable here, I shall flee to you and solitude.”“How long do you think you would endure it?” she inquired.How long will you?”“Ah! I must. I’m pledged. I shall have no excuse for repining. I took the step with my eyes open.”“Well, I fancy you do not regret leaving Manila.” In the wholeness of his suddenly acquired sympathy with her, the Judge quite forgot that he had been one of the many persons contributing to the experience which had failed to endear Manila to her.“No; my experiences here have not been altogether happy, but perhaps I was partially to blame.” She hesitated and looked over at the shining roofs, at the patches of green shrubbery relieving them, and, in the background, at the mountains where Lawton died. The launch whistled for its passengers before Judge Barton could reply, but he wrung her hand with the intensity of a lifelong friendship. And such is the perversity of the human soul that his heart ached as the launch darted up the Pasig. She had waited upon him with infinite patience and gentleness through nearly a month of illness. He had seen her daily. She had been so situated that the faintest effort of real kindness or of chivalry on his part could have won her everlasting gratitude, and probably, if he had desired it, her affection. He certainly fulfilled the ideal which her social traditions demanded of her husband more nearly than Collingwood did, and the Judge knew how to make himself liked when he wanted to. But he had not tried to be kind to Miss Ponsonby. He had been patronizing, and at times almost impertinent and unmanly. He had not a shadow of right to the grudging sense of having something that should have been his snatchedaway from him. He had even a feeling of impatience with her, a thought that she had cheated him, that she had chosen to hide her real self from him, and to reveal it cruelly at the moment when Fate put an insurmountable barrier between them. He could not stifle the miserable regrets, the sense of baffled yearning, that took possession of him. He did his best to shake off the memory of the wedding and of her face as he had seen it at the altar, but he could not do so. Mrs. Collingwood became an obsession. Before the coastguard cutter had pulled its anchor, he was wondering how soon and by what means he could invent an excuse for visiting her at her home.The coastguard steamer on the Puerta Princesa run, on which the Collingwoods had elected to go as far as Cuyo where their own launch would pick them up, drove a clean white furrow, and, as Collingwood had predicted, passed Corregidor at noon. She went out through the Boca Chica with Corregidor on the left; and Mrs. Collingwood, who was resting in her steamer chair, smiled languidly as he glanced back at the island. “Corregidor over the stern,” she murmured as if repeating some well-worn quotation, and then went on, “Have your experienceshere led you into contact with a type of man who has but one iterated and reiterated wish,—he is, by the way, usually a major in the United States army,—which wish is ‘to see Corregidor over the stern’? I do not know how many times my tongue has burned to suggest that the wisher take a coasting steamer and see it.”“Oh, the army’s sore on the Philippines,” remarked Collingwood.She eyed him reflectively. “And you, who have been in it, seem to be ‘sore’ on the army.”“That’s right,” he exclaimed heartily, “Any man who has once served his country as a high private and has gotten out is ‘agin the Government’ for the rest of his life. I came over on the troop deck of a transport, and I swore I’d go home on a liner or leave my bones here.”“Which seems likelier to be attained?” she asked, smiling idly.“Which do you think yourself? You’ve linked your fortunes with mine. Why?” he added fixing her with a sudden intensity of glance insistent for reply.His wife crimsoned and looked across the glinting sea.“I thought you answered that question to your satisfaction last night,” she murmured.“No; I tried to answer it for you. It was you that needed convincing. Here is a case of temperament,” he went on, half jocose, half serious. “So long as you hesitated and I had my side to urge, any old reason would do for me. I would clutch at a straw and hold on to it as if it were a cable. But now everything is settled and final, I want to understand. I want you to make yourself clear to me.”“But, my dear Martin! The idea is out of the question. Why, for a month you have professed to be able to make me clear to myself.”Martin ruffled his hair with a puzzled hand. “Did I?” he murmured. “Did it strike you as cheeky?”“No; I was heartily grateful. You helped me.”“In what way?”“In the way of common sense,” Charlotte said, as simply as if the remark were an everyday one, and her husband’s somewhat startled acceptance of the reply sent her into a ripple of laughter, in which, after an instant, he joined heartily.Their merriment attracted the attention of theonly other passengers, two enlisted men going out to join a hospital corps at Puerta Princesa. It also drew upon them a frown of disfavor from the captain.The captain was an old-time skipper from a tramp freighter, with the freighter’s contempt for passengers. He was not married, and he had little sympathy with the billings and cooings of newly married couples. As often as his eyes fell on the orchids and ferns and potted plants which were hanging from stanchions and cumbering his decks (Mrs. Collingwood was taking them down for the adornment of her new home) he cursed picturesquely. To his second officer he had expressed a desire for a typhoon that would roll the deadlights out of his boat, and blow the hyphenated “garden truck” into the Sulu Sea. He had emphasized his distaste for bridal society by setting a table for himself and his officers on the forward deck behind the steering apparatus, thus leaving the tiny dining-room entirely to the despised passengers.Yet there had been little enough sentimentality exhibited to arouse his displeasure. Mrs. Collingwood spent her day in the steamer chair while herhusband walked the deck with his cigar or sat chatting at her side. The hospital men, covertly watching them as everybody does a bridal pair, opined that they were a “queer proposition” but quite agreed that they seemed happy.To Collingwood, the change in Charlotte’s mood was an intense relief. The hesitations and self-questionings with which she had puzzled him for a month previous had apparently been quieted by the finality of the marriage ceremony. That she was nervously worn out by the strain of the previous weeks and by the disagreeable circumstances of her quarrel with the Government he realized; and with a delicacy for which she was thoroughly grateful, he refrained from the rather ardent demonstrations of his courtship, and treated her with matter-of-fact kindness and good fellowship. She was his, and she seemed contented and at peace. It was a glorious summer day, the sea was waveless, the boat was clean and quiet, and might almost have been their private yacht, so completely were they alone. A chance observer beholding a lazy young woman in a deck chair and a quiet young fellow pacing to and fro near her might have taken them for a young married couple of some weeks’ ormonths’ standing. He would hardly have suspected a bridal couple.Yet the young man’s mind, as they steamed past the beautiful wooded heights of Mindoro, and looked up and up at the giant forests or out over the gleaming water, was a tumult of joy and triumph and wonder—the wonder being by no means in the smallest proportion. His wife was not a beautiful woman, but his lover’s eyes endowed her with every beauty as she lay scanning the tree-clad mountains. That fine quality of breeding in her which Collingwood was unable to define, but which pleased him inordinately, was never more apparent. Moreover, he had found her in times past a rather difficult person to deal with, and behold! in the Scriptural “twinkling of an eye,” her thorniness had vanished and a docility as agreeable as it was unexpected had given him fresh cause for self-gratulation.Still, as he had confessed, his temperament inclined him to retroactive investigation. So long as she proved obdurate and was not yet won, Collingwood could not analyze. But with the struggle past he had time to take up the contradictions of her attitude, and he found little to justify his bold statementthat he could read her better than she could read herself. If, as he had somewhat daringly reminded her, she was happy in his arms, it was a happiness, as he could not but realize, of less ecstatic measure than that of many of the predecessors who, with or without the sanction of an engagement, had yielded to their pressure. She was a novice at love-making, as a man less experienced than her husband would easily have guessed; and she was reticent, not only in the voluntary expression of that fact, but in response to his tentative overtures to her to confess it. Collingwood was no less puzzled by the fact than by the philosophy of life which desired its concealment. He had known many young women in his life who were not novices at love-making, but who ardently desired to be thought so.An ironical sense of his wife’s power to baffle him tempered more than one of the affectionate glances he cast upon her as he strolled back and forth beside her chair. The consciousness of her mental superiority, of her obedience to perceptions and convictions which were only half formulated in his own mind, was literally seeping through Collingwood’s brain. He was inordinately proud ofher. Her excellence was a proof of his own good taste. He felt that she was a credit to him. He did not associate her intelligence and her grace with a class distinction. On the contrary, it was one of his sources of joy that he would take her out of the masses and make her of the classes, only Martin did not use those terms. In his simple philosophy, people with money were important, and people without it were not. Miss Ponsonby had been poor. She had earned her own living. Ergo, she was nobody. But he, Martin Collingwood, would make her somebody, and when he had done so, she would fill the position to his entire satisfaction. He did not ask himself if he would come up to her expectations. He did not understand that a woman can ask for more in a husband than for a lover, a master, and a provider of the world’s goods. In spite of his public-school education, Martin Collingwood’s philosophy of life was a very primitive one, based upon a sense of sex superiority. He could realize that a woman can be a man’s inferior; but he supposed that the mere fact of his sex makes any man the equal of the proudest woman who lives.So Collingwood continued to walk the deck in afool’s paradise, and his wife lounged away her day, if not in his blissful state of ignorance, a happy and contented woman, nevertheless. There was a soundness in that primitive philosophy of her husband’s which she was proving. If Collingwood did not have all the requisites of a woman’s ideal of her husband, he had at least three-fourths of them; and Mrs. Collingwood was enough of a philosopher (little as she liked being told so) not to cavil at the missing quarter when they were hurrying away from the conditions that made that quarter vital.The coastguard steamer skirted the coast of Mindoro and then turned her nose westward. The next day, she crept up under the pinnacled heights of Peñon de Coron in a jade-green sea, and entered the channel between Coron and Bushuanga. There the water was like purple glass, save where a rush of porpoises parted it in swift pursuit of the flying-fish. Fairy islets dotted its dazzling surface while the land masses on either hand were clothed in amethystine haze.The boat lay half a day off the curving beach of Culion, and the travellers stared up at the nipa houses of the leper colony, clinging to the hillsides,and at the gray old church and the fort on the left, speaking of the day when Moroparaoswere no strangers to the peaceful locality. On the third night, it anchored in Halsey Harbor, “which is,” said Collingwood, “the last place on earth except the one we are going to live in.”To this somewhat discouraging remark, Mrs. Collingwood, who was leaning over the rail, staring into darkness and the massed bulk of land near, made no reply. Immediately after the dropping of the anchor, the captain, accompanied by his third officer and the two hospital corps men, had gone ashore to call upon the single American family which was holding Halsey Harbor. He did not invite the Collingwoods to go, glad apparently to be out of their sight for a time. They laughed at their power to arouse his distaste, and agreed that they were the gainers by his dislike. The fiery cigar tip of the officer on watch was the only reminder that the boat was not wholly in their hands.Collingwood, throwing away his cigar, slipped an arm around his wife, who never objected to petting.“It’s wonderful,” she said dreamily; “I never knew before that tree toads made silence. I thought they made noise.”The night was one of those cloudy ones which occur so frequently in the tropics, when the vapors hang low at dusk, to dissipate later. The boat seemed to be at anchor in a bay shut in by low hills, for, at one point, a rift in the clouds showed the pallor of the sky and a single star, below which the solid blackness loomed in relief, and against which a clump of bamboo teased the eye with its phantom outline. A faint chorus of insects and tree toads and the insistent cry of anikulizard suggested that the boat must be fairly close to the shore, but, as Mrs. Collingwood had said, the sounds only emphasized the stillness. Low down in the gloom—so low as to suggest a valley between the hills—a light burned steadily with a sweet and human significance in the tremendous vagueness about them.There was almost trepidation in Collingwood’s inquiry if she found it lonesome.“Not in the least. Or rather, I find it tremendously lonely, and enjoy it. Are you worrying about me when it is too late? Do not do so. I shall find plenty to occupy me on the island.”“For a woman who held back as persistently as you did, you have experienced a wonderful change of heart.”“Did you think I was afraid of loneliness?”“Lord! I didn’t know what you were afraid of, but I could see you were afraid of something. I had to take it into consideration. It was one of a lot of things working against me which I had to combat.”There came a long, long pause. Eight bells sounded. The second engineer came out on the lower deck and cursed some of the Filipino crew who had stretched themselves for a night’s rest in such a manner as to block the passage-way.“Well,” insisted Collingwood, “am I a good guesser or not?”“About the island? No, dear. My imagination took hold of that at once. The thought of living on a practically uninhabited island stirred up all the romance there is in me.”“What was it, then? Come, we’re married. Out with it!”“You told me yourself in so many words that I was coquetting with myself.”“I never said anything like that,” declared Mr.Collingwood with a vivacity inspired by a premonition of the resentment she might feel. But Charlotte only laughed.“Those were your exact words,” she insisted. “They were quite true.”“That was not all,” he persisted. “It was more serious than that. I felt something mighty heavy in the atmosphere at times.”Mrs. Collingwood reflected a few minutes. “Don’t you think,” she said then, “that any woman of mature age—of my age—would hesitate to marry a man of whose family and antecedents she knew as little as I did of yours?”“No: I don’t see what my family had to do with it. In the first place I haven’t any near relatives living now, as I told you; and if I had, you wouldn’t have married them. You have married me. As for my antecedents (I suppose you mean my conduct), I told you myself that I had been no saint. I’m just a good average citizen. I’ve known better men than I am, and I have known worse. I have not been married before; that’s the main thing, after all; and no woman ever had cause for a breach-of-promise suit against me. I had ——” (he named a man locally prominent) “writeto you and tell you that he came from the same town with me, and he knew my record was what I had told you. Besides, I didn’t give a thought to your family, and you have talked less about them than I have talked of mine.”“That is true. Do you think me secretive? There is nothing to be secretive about. But my life with my relatives was too painful to talk about, even to you.”“I saw that. I guessed it must have been hard to anybody so loving and tender as you.”“Martin, when did you form the impression that I am loving and tender?”“Well, ain’t you?”“I think so; but most people have not thought so, you know. What made you decide differently?”“Oh, that first night in the hospital after they had fixed me up in the operating room, and the chloroform wore off, and my fever came up. God! I can feel it all now! And just when I thought that I could not stand things any longer, and must yell, you came along with an ice bag and gave me a piece to suck.” His wife smiled in the darkness at his homely phraseology. “Itseemed to me I had never heard a woman’s voice in my life as soft as yours was when you said, ‘You are in great pain, I know.’”“But that was what I should have done for anybody, Martin.”“I knew it. That’s why I felt that you were gentle and loving. I would have liked to put my arms around you and cry. I wanted to be babied. It is strange, isn’t it, how physical suffering can unman a fellow?”Charlotte turned her eyes on him for an instant. He could just see their gleam by the reflection of a ray streaming out on the water from a light on the lower deck, and they were infinitely tender yet mirthful. “You understand yourself thoroughly,” she said. “You were a brave baby and a good baby but you were a baby, Martin, a great six-foot baby.”“Well, if it made you fall in love with me—“Ah! but I didn’t then. You bullied me into being in love with you. You wouldn’t give me a chance to make myself heard.”“What about that time I kissed you?” said Martin, referring to that episode for the first time since his very formal and abject letter of apology hadmet an equally formal but cold forgiveness from her.To his consternation, she drew away from him in sudden displeasure. “Perhaps we had better not speak of it.”“Why shouldn’t we speak of it? Is it a crime for a man to kiss a woman he loves? Did it contaminate you?”“I had given you no right, no encouragement.”“I’d have done it if I had known I was to be kicked out of the hospital, broken ribs and all. Besides, how is a man to know whether he has any rights till he exercises them?”Martin put the question seriously in all good faith. It was his primitive philosophy again, the simple way in which he tested women in his sphere of life. She was at a loss how to reply, and somewhat sore put to hide her inexperience in affairs of the sort. She had been brought up to believe that milkmaids kiss their young men over the gate, but that, in refined society, men offer no caresses to girls whom they respect, unless a troth has first been plighted. Had she chummed more with girls and young women, she might have learned thateven in the best of society, young people pay little heed to the strong statements of their elders, and that, wise heads to the contrary, young blood will have its toll. But Charlotte had had no chums and had never exchanged gossip over late bedroom fires. Her views on the propriety of kissing were entirely theoretical. But that kiss was a sore remembrance with her. It marked the beginning of the end. It was an opening door which gave her an instant’s glance into the kingdom of love; and from its bestowal, she had known that she was confronted with a mighty temptation to open it further and to go boldly into the fair land. How hard she had fought with the inclination, she could never tell Martin Collingwood; but she had fought, and she had lost.She glanced up at him penitently after his last speech, and marked the cessation of her involuntary resentment by slipping back into his arm. He was emboldened to make a query which had been on his tongue a dozen times, but which, up to that hour, not even the proprietary sense of the husband had enabled him to regard as discreet.“Charlotte, am I really the first man you ever cared about?”“Absolutely the first to whom I ever gave a sentimental thought.”The delighted recipient of this compliment did not, in the joy of hearing it, examine it too closely. When he did begin to speak, his wife was pleased to note that he was less inclined to investigate the cause of the phenomenon than to speculate upon its uncommonness.“I don’t know what you were about,” he said. “It’s mighty good luck for me, but—not in an uncomplimentary sense—you must have been an awful goose.”“That’s it exactly. I was an awful goose; and, being so, I had an inspiration to keep out of love.”“Why so?”“Because I was afraid of being in love. Can you understand that? Because love was altogether associated in my mind with pain—the pain of losing, and the pain of loving and of not being loved, and of being generally misunderstood.”“And all that because you were raised an orphan. I don’t think you had a fair show, old girl.”“I know I had not,” said Mrs. Collingwood decisively. She added, “But I had rather not talk about it. It makes me morbid.”“Were your folks well to do?”“They were people of considerable wealth. I do not think they ever grudged me anything I cost them. But I was in a false position in their house, and I was conscious of it. The knowledge put me at a disadvantage with all the world. It made me feel myself different from everybody else. I was self-conscious, afraid of being an object of pity. It was like failing to possess some essential article of dress that everybody else has, and trying to cover up one’s nakedness.”“That’s it. I couldn’t put it into words, but that is exactly how you acted with Barton. You seemed to shrink away from him and to be ready to fight him if he spoke pleasantly to you.”“Oh, dear! was it so bad as that?” Charlotte’s heart sank. Her way of expressing facts differed considerably from his, and the balance of vividness and realism was in his favor.“It was, just like that. But you were not that way to me. Why not?”Her woman’s wit, already quickened by her increased experience with men, showed her how to be truthful, and, in so being, how to deceive him most. “Ah! you were different,” she murmured.But after he had led her, in response to her request, back to her chair, and was pacing to and fro beside her in quiet happiness, her heart reproached her. She had not shrunk from him because she knew that he was blind, because, to carry out her simile, he could perceive nothing lacking in her raiment. But those keen eyes of Judge Barton’s had questioned her, had perceived every rag and tatter!The captain returned and called Martin to deliver to him a message from the Inhabitant of Halsey Harbor. Charlotte was left alone to her musings.She was very happy. The old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind” was proving its appositeness in her case. No one was about her who could read her, who could perceive the absence of any necessary raiment, who would be conscious that there was anything odd in her being Martin Collingwood’s wife. She had, in one decisive action, destroyed all that was holding her spirit in leash. A woman yet young, whose emotions had been stifled for a lifetime, in whom the warmth of love had been overlaid by the calculating egoism of a nature wounded to the quick, she had emancipated herself at thefortuitous moment, alive to the rapture of passion, of freedom from all the restraints that had curbed her existence. She had thrown the admonitions and the self-restraint of a life-time aside for a romance. She had (but fortunately for a time she was able to put the fact out of mind) quite justified a conventional assumption that a woman’s nature is full of primitive evil, and that you must pitch your maxims pretty strong if you would have them believed at all, and that then, ten to one, she will demolish all your precautions at a bound if an object in trousers holds out his arms. She had profited by her husband’s view. “Come what may,” she said, “I will have my romance and pay the price afterwards.”So far, the price seemed a remote contingency. With every revolution of the steamer’s screw, Manila and her distant relatives whose pride she had outraged became the mere phantoms of memory, growing paler every hour. Nothing was left but the delightful sense of being an absolute necessity to Martin—she who had been a superfluity all her life!As for Collingwood himself, his kindness, hisshrewdness, his strength were gaining constantly in her esteem. He had proved himself innately delicate and refined. Of what possible importance were a fewdeficienciesin speech, a too vivid phraseology, the lack of the little courtesies which mark a man of the world? But (and here some of her elation diminished) if they mattered so little, why had she to convince herself so eagerly? If two negatives make an affirmative, too passionate a denial sometimes constitutes an assertion. Whenever she arrived at this stage of reflection, another cloud dimmed her horizon. Was not her whole attitude a practical deception of the man himself? Would Martin Collingwood have accepted her surrender so joyfully, could he have read that it was weighted with the condition of living with him on an uninhabited island? Would not all his self-esteem repudiate such a proposition? She had not lied when she said that she loved him, but would he content himself with a definition of love which excluded all natural pride of choice, and put a compromise value upon himself? As often as she found herself confronted with these thoughts, Charlotte took refuge in a bit of casuistry. If she saw Martin with clear eyes and underrated the proportionalvalue of his attainments, did he even see her clearly at all? Did she wrong him more in reserving an opinion of his social worth than he wronged her in not perceiving that she had any social worth? The fact that every person has a real personal value and an accredited worldly value, and that most effort is directed to making these two values coincide, or appear to do so, put a convenient weapon in her hand. Since, in only a few cases, the two values are really identical, happy marriages must be the result of a marvellous luck or of a wonderful power of self-deception. Was she to be taxed for not deceiving herself? Was her intelligence to be punished when his ignorance was rewarded? As often as she thought about it, it seemed that his incapacity to value certain qualities of her own justified her in a few mental reservations.Nevertheless she was afflicted with a sense of penitence in spite of her sophistry, and when, after a long conversation with the captain, her husband came back to her and bent over her, she put up her arms and drew his face down to hers, giving him the first voluntary caress which she had bestowed upon him since the hour of her surrender upon the Luneta.“Have you thought me a selfish, ungrateful wretch?” she asked him.“Never! But I have worried a little. There’s no getting around it—you are daffy about some things, Charlotte.”“Daffy is such a beautiful word. It’s so civil. I’ll adopt it. You are not daffy about anything but me, are you, Martin?”“Kingsnorth says I’m daffy about anything that I really like.”“Tell me about Mr. Kingsnorth—all about him. Analyze him for me.”“I can’t do that sort of thing. Besides, I want you to form your own impressions. You will see him in thirty-six hours.”“So soon as that.” She drew a long breath, and fell silent.“The captain says he is going out at dawn. We ought to make Cuyo by five to-morrow afternoon, and if Mac’s there with the launch, as he surely will be, we’ll get our freight transhipped and make the run over to-morrow night. That will bring us home by dawn the day after to-morrow. Home,” he repeated softly. “I’ve dreamed many dreamsin my life and some of them have come true, but I don’t think anything stranger could have happened to me than taking my wife home to an uninhabited island in the Pacific.”“Nothing stranger could have happened to you than finding yourself married at all. Isn’t that it?”“It’s a fact,” he admitted slowly. “I was not planning to marry for many a year. I don’t know that I thought seriously about doing it at all. In fact, I was so afraid that I might be injudicious and get married—or get myself married—” he smiled in the darkness—“that I swore off even on flirtations some time before I came out here. But when you came along with the ice-bag and your nice voice, and I got a good look at you next day, all that went up in the air. I knew then and there that I wanted to get married as quick as I could. I’d been in love before a half dozen times, but I knew every time that it wasn’t a love I wanted to marry on. It don’t matter how much a man loves a woman, he don’t love her in the right way unless she does him credit. I felt that way about you. You were the kind of woman I could be proud of all my life. ‘That’s the girl for me,’ I said, andsure enough—” his pause expressed the idea that the outcome had been foreordained.His desire to compliment her was so unmistakable, his admiration was so sincere, that Charlotte was able to stifle quickly the first instinct to rebuke his unconscious patronage. His egoism, after all, was of an inoffensive variety. He was not boasting himself as a connoisseur, but was testifying to the completeness with which she satisfied his ideal. The wife lay silent for a long time, studying his face, which was just dimly visible in the glow of his cigar. When she spoke, it was as she rose from her chair.“I hope I’ll always be able to live up to your conception of me,” she said. “I mean to try.”“Nonsense,” replied the man of common sense. “You just suit me perfectly as you are. Why, you’d spoil it all if you even thought of trying. What is there to try? You areyou. I wouldn’t have the biggest fault or the smallest virtue in you altered by the ten-millionth of an inch.”When Charlotte had shut the door of her stateroom and had snapped on the light, she sank for an instant on the locker, with a face in which pride, shame, and contrition were tumultuously mingled.For why had she spent twenty-eight years acquiring tastes and criterions which, at that moment, made her seem incredibly mean and ungenerous?
Chapter IVWhat the buried archives are to the archæologist, the trunkful of old letters is to the novelist. But before those light-giving documents are brought forth, a little family history should be detailed as preface.In the year 1872 the Civil War had been more generally forgotten in the North than in the South. In the State of Massachusetts, however, a goodly circle of antislavery agitators still kept up the fight in favor of the black man. The Fourteenth Amendment had not then been made, nor those celebrated discussions which fixed its interpretation and application; but the reconstruction of the Southern States still left plenty of ground for bitter speech and feeling.Prominent among that circle and among the old Boston families of that day was the widow of a man who had literally given his life to the antislavery cause, for he had died during the War of overwork upon an antislavery journal. His widowbelonged to a family that for two hundred years or more had been prominent in state and national affairs. When her husband died and left her and a half-grown daughter almost penniless among a wealthy kindred, she found little or no difficulty in getting along; for their pride in the editorial victim was great, and she had been always a family favorite.But if the mother was everywhere sought, her daughter Charlotte found a less ready welcome. A tall, superb beauty, singularly cold at times and reserved, at others fiercely vehement, she was as utterly unlike the descendant of a staid New England family as can be imagined. It is regrettable that she found little favor in the family eyes; and in the year 1872 she came to an out and out rupture with all her kindred by eloping with Mountjoy Ponsonby, a Marylander, a Roman Catholic, and an irreconcilable son of slave-holding parents.Mrs. K—— took to her bed and died of chagrin. Four years later the unhappy girl followed her mother to the grave, leaving behind her a baby daughter six months old.Of that marriage so soon ended, the best and the worst that can be said is that it was unhappy. Thetwo undisciplined natures who had defied tradition, family sentiment, religious training, and political inheritance for the sake of each other, had not the patience to work out their common happiness when the infatuation which had drawn them together died, as all such sudden and violent emotions must.When Mrs. Ponsonby turned her back on life and on an impoverished Southern home where her New England thrift had struggled ceaselessly with the indolence and sluggish ways of a slave-holding household, it was after almost all possible recrimination had been exhausted over religion, politics, family inheritance, and ideals of life. Her husband, having buried her with due ceremony and observance in the Maryland family vaults, betook himself to travel, leaving the child to be cared for by a distant female relative. When little Charlotte was four, the relative died, and, as an ultimate act of defiance to his wife’s kindred, Ponsonby placed his daughter in a Roman Catholic convent.There the little girl remained till her fourteenth year. In that period, she saw her father some six or eight times. Their interviews were constrained affairs, for Mountjoy Ponsonby was nota man of domestic or affectionate nature, and the child of the wife with whom he had quarrelled bitterly made little appeal to him. He usually gave his daughter much good advice, found her exceedingly docile, but equally difficult, and was always embarrassed by an unspoken appeal in her nature which he dumbly resented. He looked forward with repugnance and dread to the days when she could be no longer stuffed away in a convent, and he rather hoped that she would feel herself religiously called upon to stay there.Like many other men, he had formed the habit of looking on himself as immortal, so that when he was instantly killed by being thrown from his horse, he had made no provision for his child’s future. On his own side of the family there was no near kindred; and the Boston relatives instantly put in a claim for the custody of little Charlotte.The man who was most actively interested in the little girl’s future was one Cornelius Spencer, a dry, hard-working, quiet man, capable of loving with singular intensity and equally capable of concealing his emotions. He had paid a quiet court to the beautiful Charlotte K——, and family gossip said that he took her elopement very seriously;but it was all conjecture, for he kept his own counsel. A year later, he married Martha Winston, her cousin, a lady who, furthermore said family gossip, had been in love with him for several years.The Spencer marriage turned out well; how nearly thatwellmay be translatedhappily, who can say? At least, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Spencer were a decorous couple, he given to amassing this world’s goods, she devoted to a thrifty oversight of their expenditures and to a calm enjoyment of their prosperity. Two daughters came to them, handsome children whose education from the first was up to the strictest standards of conservative Boston.There was much sage wagging of heads among the Boston kin when Cornelius Spencer came forward as the potential guardian of the orphan immured in the convent. But though they conjectured again, Mrs. Spencer kept her own counsel as her husband had kept his years before. Of course, said the kinship, it was a bitter pill to her. Charlotte K—— had always outshone her in brains, in wit, in beauty. She had been proud to marry the man whom Charlotte had refused; and to find that man, eighteen years later, still cherishingsentimental memories of her rival, determined to make himself a second father to that rival’s child,—ah, well, Martha was a remarkable woman to bear it all so quietly!It happened that, on the day the young girl appeared in charge of the nun who brought her North, a very observant lady was calling upon Mrs. Cornelius Spencer. The lady was the wife of an army officer, and had a taste for letter-writing, in fact, felt that letter-writing was her only gift. A few extracts from her epistle to her husband will throw some light upon Charlotte Ponsonby’s girlhood experiences.“—I have been visiting about for days among the K—— kin. They are as magnificently satisfied with themselves as ever, take themselves very seriously, are as proud of their money-making powers as of their blue blood; really it’s wonderful how they all make money, and talk, as they have always done, from a very much higher plane than they really live on.“Among others, Martha Spencer asked me to luncheon, and I went there this morning. Really, Cornelius must have madeoodlesof money. The mere household accessories were simple enough; but the books, the pictures, and the curios were a joy. I feasted my soul, and I wished for you, my dear, to enjoy it with me.“But I’ll talk of those things to you later. What Iwant to tell you about now is an incident that I am afraid may slip away from me, and I want to describe it while my impressions are fresh,“You remember I wrote you, in a previous letter, about the lawsuit and how old Dry-as-dust Cornelius has a real spark of romance in him after all, and of how he has disinterred his old love’s child from a convent where she was to have been buried alive. It was my happy fate to see the sequel this morning.“Martha and I were sitting together just before lunch, when the bell rang. ‘I think that must be the little relative whom we are expecting,’ said Martha, and a second later the butler ushered in a nun and a fourteen-year-old girl.“I wish you could have seen Martha’s greeting! It was exactly what she would have given a woman of the world, paying a morning call. She was concentrated extract of courtesy and breeding. The child, who was evidently nervous and expectant of a warmer welcome was instantly chilled by it. But she rose to it! She rose to it magnificently! She has rather fine eyes, her mother’s eyes as I remember them, and a self-possessed manner for a child of her age. I tried to gush over her a bit, but she would have none of me. Having been rebuffed by her hostess, she had no intention of allowing an undetermined factor to the situation to make amends to her.“The nun would not remain, and departed immediately after formally handing over her charge. She kissed Charlotte (the child is named for her mother), and I rather fancied that, in spite of her cold welcome, the child is notreluctant to enter on a more brilliant life than the conventical one. At any rate, she did not shed any tears.“Charlotte was sent upstairs with a maid to make her toilette for luncheon. ‘Your cousins regret not being here to welcome you,’ said Martha suavely, ‘but they went out to the country place of a friend for a day’s skating. They will see you at dinner.’“‘I am very glad they did not change their plans on my account,’ said my little nun that might have been.“Cornelius came home for luncheon and was stiffer than Martha. He was self-conscious, that was apparent. We had the most perfect luncheon imaginable, but though Martha prides herself on her heating arrangements and their temperatures never vary a degree, I felt as if the outside air had crept through the whole house.“I am sorry for that girl from the bottom of my heart. Martha hates the sight of her, and the girl knew it before she had been twenty minutes in the house. She will have food and dress and every material luxury dealt out to her as lavishly as it is to Martha’s own girls; but of good-will, kindness, human affection, not a drop. Instead, she will receive a courtesy measured by the most approved social standards. She will never be allowed to forget for one moment that it is given from a high sense of duty, and not from any sense of affection. I am not sure that Cornelius has done the child a kindness. She might have fared better in a boarding-school. At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy for Martha. I shouldn’t be at all nice about it, you know, if you raked up a dead and gone sweetheart’s child and established her among our brood.”Within a few weeks after the writing of this epistle, Mrs. Spencer expressed herself to an elderly relative perched in a very old colonial home among the hills of Vermont.“Charlotte’s little daughter is now with us. She is a very reserved child with beautiful manners—I suppose convent training does give that—and, her teachers think, has an exceptional mind. We have had private teachers for her this year because, though her elementary training is fair, she is greatly lacking in general information, though she has a curious accumulation of Roman Catholic religious lore.“She has a great deal of personality for a child of her age, which I have respected. I find myself constantly shrinking, however, from some undercurrent of feeling which she doesn’t express. She gets on very well with my two girls, but they don’t understand her any more than I do. Of course, she is treated exactly as they are—I really wouldn’t get one a hair ribbon without buying its match for Charlotte.“For a convent-reared girl, she is not so difficult to deal with as might be. I send her to church every Sunday in the brougham with the parlor maid, who happens to be of her faith; and I called on the parish priest and commended her to his fatherly mercies. He is a rather robust person, clearly of Irish peasant origin, and speaks with a very decided brogue. She is plainly growing a bit fastidious about him, and I am inclined to feel that she is none toodeeply enamored of her church. She has a curious gift of worldliness for a child brought up in a convent.”Eight years later Mrs. Spencer penned another brief note to this same elderly relative’s daughter.“I suppose it would be asking too much of you to run down to Smith and see Charlotte take her degree. I can’t go—Natalie’s engagement is just on—and somebody ought to appear from the family. She takes high honors, I understand. She wrote me a very pretty little note, saying it wasn’t to be expected of any of us to get up, but I can see she is hurt. Do go if you can.”Six weeks later in that same year, the military lady found herself at a very quiet and exclusive resort in the White Mountains, and once more delivered herself to her husband of many impressions.“You remember that incident I told you of some years ago of seeing Charlotte K’s daughter engulfed in the Spencer household. Well, they are all here for a brief stay, Martha engrossed in her two girls. Natalie’s engagement to young X—— of the Navy has been announced. Charlotte Ponsonby is really a magnificent creature—from a woman’s standpoint, that is. But the outcome of the affair is just what might have been expected. Somehow they have mortally wounded her, and to protect herselffrom them and their curiosity she has built a wall between herself and the whole world. I tried to cross it, and was most delicately and effectively rebuffed. She is the most solitary girl I have ever known, and yet she is not morbid. She moves among us in the most self-possessed,unaskingspirit that was ever held by a girl of twenty-two. She is remarkably well bred, quite at ease outwardly, and is altogether too clever to please men—who are dreadfully shy of her, though they speak of her admiringly. I would not have you think that her cleverness is of that cheap type which sharpens its wits on others, and prides itself on its brilliancy. She is not in the least talkative, but she gives you the feeling of one who is weighing, sifting, analyzing, judging; who is using her brain to its best purposes at all times.“The pathetic part of it all is that she is playing up to a rôle that somebody—I don’t know what idiot—assigned her. I find among all the kindred and all the family acquaintance the general opinion that Charlotte has no emotions, nothing but a brain; and the poor child is nothing but a bundle of emotions that she is desperately trying to conceal. I understand her perfectly. I never was so sorry for anyone in my life—anyone in our condition, that is. She has been tagged a girl of brains, and it has somehow been impressed upon her that, if she shows any feminine weakness, she will disgrace herself. So there she is, on her intellectual tiptoes, striving to conceal a very human disposition to come down on her heels, exiling herself from all that girlhood prizes.“Of course, you dear old goose, you are saying to yourself,‘Why don’t you put her wise, then?’ My dear, she has analyzed it all just as clearly as I have. She knows what is going on. She merely hasn’t the courage to break through the convention and, on the whole, I don’t wonder at it. It takes more courage to fight the accepted conception of oneself than it does to do any other sort of fighting in the world. Charlotte Ponsonby is a victim of the Spencer stupidity and of her own timidity and sensitiveness. There has grown up an impression that Charlotte doesn’t care for dancing; and night after night she goes off to her room, pretending a desire to read when her heart is in her toes, where a normal girl’s heart should be. If there is an expedition of any sort, Charlotte is always handed over to some elderly fossil because she is so intelligent and serious, and so entertaining to old gentlemen. If a man pays her the least attention, everybody notes it (and you know we pride ourselves an our breeding too); and so much interest, sympathy, and, yes, my dear,damnablecuriosity, is openly shown in the matter that the girl’s pride is outraged, and in sheer self-defence she snubs her admirer incontinently.“She lives and has always lived, as nearly as I can see, utterly without intimate companionship, confidence, or any of that wholesome dependence that belongs to girlhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in her isolation, which, much as I should like to, I dare not invade. There is a pride in life born of indigence as there is the pride of wealth. Charlotte Ponsonby is armored in the pride born of spiritual indigence. Her soul is hungering and thirsting for that thing for which all the world has decided shecares nothing. Mark my words, my dear, in the end, tragedy will come of it.”It was at the close of their stay in the mountains that Mrs. Spencer again unburdened herself to the Vermont relative.“What do you think Charlotte is now bent on? She wants to be a trained nurse. I have felt for a long time that she had something revolutionary in her mind. It doesn’t matter to me particularly, but Cornelius is grieved to the heart. However, we have no right to coerce her, and financial independence seems to be the one thing on which her mind is fixed.”Three years later she wrote again:“Charlotte has finished her training and is going to the Philippines. She came in from New York last week to break the news. I said little, and Cornelius said less. But we have talked it over, and have decided that she must judge for herself. I don’t feel satisfied with the results of our care for Charlotte, and I don’t know where the blame lies, but I do feel that she cherishes some bitterness of feeling in her heart, and that she is very unhappy.“Something in her nature wears clearer as she grows older, some ingrained romanticism which we did not suspect, and which repels me. However, it is too late to worry about now. She has taken her life into her own hands, and has decreed that it shall lie apart from ours; and I, for one, am thankful.”To these may be added a final word from Miss Ponsonby herself, written, on her wedding eve after her return from the Luneta.”My dear Aunt:“This is the last letter I shall write you for some time, for to-morrow I am going to be married, and shall leave Manila for a remote island where the opportunity for correspondence is small.“The man I am going to marry, whose name is Martin Collingwood, is engaged in pearl-fishing in the seas south of Manila. He is a man, I believe, with the money-making gift. However that is not the reason that I am marrying him. With me it is absolutely a matter of the heart. I am marrying him because, as nearly as I can see, he is the one human being who has ever loved me in this world, and because I cannot live life without love.“It is hardly necessary to say that I am sacrificing my ambitions in this matter. To a woman brought up as I have been, a dependent, a brilliant marriage would represent the most successful thing, the most nearly compensating thing, that life could offer. It has not come to me, however, and I am making the best I can of what has offered.“You may wonder why this frankness at the end of the silence which has always existed between us. It is because my only hope in the future is based on the fact that, at last, I have courage to declare myself. To guard my every thought and feeling from your curiosity and criticism, I have separated myself from all the world, and in the beginningunknowingly, but in the end with full knowledge, have walked down a path which has ended here. I will not hamper myself in my new life by even the memory of my old cowardice. You may call me weak, call me sentimental, foolish, romantic, call me all the things which for years you have been trying to discover in me, and for which you have sought in vain beneath the mask I wore—I am going to have my share of living.“This is not written in bitterness toward you. I am grateful for all the care and the money lavished upon me, and I realize fully the sacrifice that you made in receiving me into your home and in treating me, as you did, with perfect justice. It was magnificent. I am simply one of those miserable beings who have come into this world unwelcome, born to be a worry and a trial to someone, and I have taken the only means I knew to escape from it.“Tell Uncle Cornelius that I am not ungrateful to him. Some day I’ll write you again. For the present I want to put every memory of the past out of my life. If the day ever comes when I can go back to it without its influencing my life as it has always done, I’ll write again.“Yours gratefully,”Charlotte Ponsonby.”
Chapter IV
What the buried archives are to the archæologist, the trunkful of old letters is to the novelist. But before those light-giving documents are brought forth, a little family history should be detailed as preface.In the year 1872 the Civil War had been more generally forgotten in the North than in the South. In the State of Massachusetts, however, a goodly circle of antislavery agitators still kept up the fight in favor of the black man. The Fourteenth Amendment had not then been made, nor those celebrated discussions which fixed its interpretation and application; but the reconstruction of the Southern States still left plenty of ground for bitter speech and feeling.Prominent among that circle and among the old Boston families of that day was the widow of a man who had literally given his life to the antislavery cause, for he had died during the War of overwork upon an antislavery journal. His widowbelonged to a family that for two hundred years or more had been prominent in state and national affairs. When her husband died and left her and a half-grown daughter almost penniless among a wealthy kindred, she found little or no difficulty in getting along; for their pride in the editorial victim was great, and she had been always a family favorite.But if the mother was everywhere sought, her daughter Charlotte found a less ready welcome. A tall, superb beauty, singularly cold at times and reserved, at others fiercely vehement, she was as utterly unlike the descendant of a staid New England family as can be imagined. It is regrettable that she found little favor in the family eyes; and in the year 1872 she came to an out and out rupture with all her kindred by eloping with Mountjoy Ponsonby, a Marylander, a Roman Catholic, and an irreconcilable son of slave-holding parents.Mrs. K—— took to her bed and died of chagrin. Four years later the unhappy girl followed her mother to the grave, leaving behind her a baby daughter six months old.Of that marriage so soon ended, the best and the worst that can be said is that it was unhappy. Thetwo undisciplined natures who had defied tradition, family sentiment, religious training, and political inheritance for the sake of each other, had not the patience to work out their common happiness when the infatuation which had drawn them together died, as all such sudden and violent emotions must.When Mrs. Ponsonby turned her back on life and on an impoverished Southern home where her New England thrift had struggled ceaselessly with the indolence and sluggish ways of a slave-holding household, it was after almost all possible recrimination had been exhausted over religion, politics, family inheritance, and ideals of life. Her husband, having buried her with due ceremony and observance in the Maryland family vaults, betook himself to travel, leaving the child to be cared for by a distant female relative. When little Charlotte was four, the relative died, and, as an ultimate act of defiance to his wife’s kindred, Ponsonby placed his daughter in a Roman Catholic convent.There the little girl remained till her fourteenth year. In that period, she saw her father some six or eight times. Their interviews were constrained affairs, for Mountjoy Ponsonby was nota man of domestic or affectionate nature, and the child of the wife with whom he had quarrelled bitterly made little appeal to him. He usually gave his daughter much good advice, found her exceedingly docile, but equally difficult, and was always embarrassed by an unspoken appeal in her nature which he dumbly resented. He looked forward with repugnance and dread to the days when she could be no longer stuffed away in a convent, and he rather hoped that she would feel herself religiously called upon to stay there.Like many other men, he had formed the habit of looking on himself as immortal, so that when he was instantly killed by being thrown from his horse, he had made no provision for his child’s future. On his own side of the family there was no near kindred; and the Boston relatives instantly put in a claim for the custody of little Charlotte.The man who was most actively interested in the little girl’s future was one Cornelius Spencer, a dry, hard-working, quiet man, capable of loving with singular intensity and equally capable of concealing his emotions. He had paid a quiet court to the beautiful Charlotte K——, and family gossip said that he took her elopement very seriously;but it was all conjecture, for he kept his own counsel. A year later, he married Martha Winston, her cousin, a lady who, furthermore said family gossip, had been in love with him for several years.The Spencer marriage turned out well; how nearly thatwellmay be translatedhappily, who can say? At least, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Spencer were a decorous couple, he given to amassing this world’s goods, she devoted to a thrifty oversight of their expenditures and to a calm enjoyment of their prosperity. Two daughters came to them, handsome children whose education from the first was up to the strictest standards of conservative Boston.There was much sage wagging of heads among the Boston kin when Cornelius Spencer came forward as the potential guardian of the orphan immured in the convent. But though they conjectured again, Mrs. Spencer kept her own counsel as her husband had kept his years before. Of course, said the kinship, it was a bitter pill to her. Charlotte K—— had always outshone her in brains, in wit, in beauty. She had been proud to marry the man whom Charlotte had refused; and to find that man, eighteen years later, still cherishingsentimental memories of her rival, determined to make himself a second father to that rival’s child,—ah, well, Martha was a remarkable woman to bear it all so quietly!It happened that, on the day the young girl appeared in charge of the nun who brought her North, a very observant lady was calling upon Mrs. Cornelius Spencer. The lady was the wife of an army officer, and had a taste for letter-writing, in fact, felt that letter-writing was her only gift. A few extracts from her epistle to her husband will throw some light upon Charlotte Ponsonby’s girlhood experiences.“—I have been visiting about for days among the K—— kin. They are as magnificently satisfied with themselves as ever, take themselves very seriously, are as proud of their money-making powers as of their blue blood; really it’s wonderful how they all make money, and talk, as they have always done, from a very much higher plane than they really live on.“Among others, Martha Spencer asked me to luncheon, and I went there this morning. Really, Cornelius must have madeoodlesof money. The mere household accessories were simple enough; but the books, the pictures, and the curios were a joy. I feasted my soul, and I wished for you, my dear, to enjoy it with me.“But I’ll talk of those things to you later. What Iwant to tell you about now is an incident that I am afraid may slip away from me, and I want to describe it while my impressions are fresh,“You remember I wrote you, in a previous letter, about the lawsuit and how old Dry-as-dust Cornelius has a real spark of romance in him after all, and of how he has disinterred his old love’s child from a convent where she was to have been buried alive. It was my happy fate to see the sequel this morning.“Martha and I were sitting together just before lunch, when the bell rang. ‘I think that must be the little relative whom we are expecting,’ said Martha, and a second later the butler ushered in a nun and a fourteen-year-old girl.“I wish you could have seen Martha’s greeting! It was exactly what she would have given a woman of the world, paying a morning call. She was concentrated extract of courtesy and breeding. The child, who was evidently nervous and expectant of a warmer welcome was instantly chilled by it. But she rose to it! She rose to it magnificently! She has rather fine eyes, her mother’s eyes as I remember them, and a self-possessed manner for a child of her age. I tried to gush over her a bit, but she would have none of me. Having been rebuffed by her hostess, she had no intention of allowing an undetermined factor to the situation to make amends to her.“The nun would not remain, and departed immediately after formally handing over her charge. She kissed Charlotte (the child is named for her mother), and I rather fancied that, in spite of her cold welcome, the child is notreluctant to enter on a more brilliant life than the conventical one. At any rate, she did not shed any tears.“Charlotte was sent upstairs with a maid to make her toilette for luncheon. ‘Your cousins regret not being here to welcome you,’ said Martha suavely, ‘but they went out to the country place of a friend for a day’s skating. They will see you at dinner.’“‘I am very glad they did not change their plans on my account,’ said my little nun that might have been.“Cornelius came home for luncheon and was stiffer than Martha. He was self-conscious, that was apparent. We had the most perfect luncheon imaginable, but though Martha prides herself on her heating arrangements and their temperatures never vary a degree, I felt as if the outside air had crept through the whole house.“I am sorry for that girl from the bottom of my heart. Martha hates the sight of her, and the girl knew it before she had been twenty minutes in the house. She will have food and dress and every material luxury dealt out to her as lavishly as it is to Martha’s own girls; but of good-will, kindness, human affection, not a drop. Instead, she will receive a courtesy measured by the most approved social standards. She will never be allowed to forget for one moment that it is given from a high sense of duty, and not from any sense of affection. I am not sure that Cornelius has done the child a kindness. She might have fared better in a boarding-school. At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy for Martha. I shouldn’t be at all nice about it, you know, if you raked up a dead and gone sweetheart’s child and established her among our brood.”Within a few weeks after the writing of this epistle, Mrs. Spencer expressed herself to an elderly relative perched in a very old colonial home among the hills of Vermont.“Charlotte’s little daughter is now with us. She is a very reserved child with beautiful manners—I suppose convent training does give that—and, her teachers think, has an exceptional mind. We have had private teachers for her this year because, though her elementary training is fair, she is greatly lacking in general information, though she has a curious accumulation of Roman Catholic religious lore.“She has a great deal of personality for a child of her age, which I have respected. I find myself constantly shrinking, however, from some undercurrent of feeling which she doesn’t express. She gets on very well with my two girls, but they don’t understand her any more than I do. Of course, she is treated exactly as they are—I really wouldn’t get one a hair ribbon without buying its match for Charlotte.“For a convent-reared girl, she is not so difficult to deal with as might be. I send her to church every Sunday in the brougham with the parlor maid, who happens to be of her faith; and I called on the parish priest and commended her to his fatherly mercies. He is a rather robust person, clearly of Irish peasant origin, and speaks with a very decided brogue. She is plainly growing a bit fastidious about him, and I am inclined to feel that she is none toodeeply enamored of her church. She has a curious gift of worldliness for a child brought up in a convent.”Eight years later Mrs. Spencer penned another brief note to this same elderly relative’s daughter.“I suppose it would be asking too much of you to run down to Smith and see Charlotte take her degree. I can’t go—Natalie’s engagement is just on—and somebody ought to appear from the family. She takes high honors, I understand. She wrote me a very pretty little note, saying it wasn’t to be expected of any of us to get up, but I can see she is hurt. Do go if you can.”Six weeks later in that same year, the military lady found herself at a very quiet and exclusive resort in the White Mountains, and once more delivered herself to her husband of many impressions.“You remember that incident I told you of some years ago of seeing Charlotte K’s daughter engulfed in the Spencer household. Well, they are all here for a brief stay, Martha engrossed in her two girls. Natalie’s engagement to young X—— of the Navy has been announced. Charlotte Ponsonby is really a magnificent creature—from a woman’s standpoint, that is. But the outcome of the affair is just what might have been expected. Somehow they have mortally wounded her, and to protect herselffrom them and their curiosity she has built a wall between herself and the whole world. I tried to cross it, and was most delicately and effectively rebuffed. She is the most solitary girl I have ever known, and yet she is not morbid. She moves among us in the most self-possessed,unaskingspirit that was ever held by a girl of twenty-two. She is remarkably well bred, quite at ease outwardly, and is altogether too clever to please men—who are dreadfully shy of her, though they speak of her admiringly. I would not have you think that her cleverness is of that cheap type which sharpens its wits on others, and prides itself on its brilliancy. She is not in the least talkative, but she gives you the feeling of one who is weighing, sifting, analyzing, judging; who is using her brain to its best purposes at all times.“The pathetic part of it all is that she is playing up to a rôle that somebody—I don’t know what idiot—assigned her. I find among all the kindred and all the family acquaintance the general opinion that Charlotte has no emotions, nothing but a brain; and the poor child is nothing but a bundle of emotions that she is desperately trying to conceal. I understand her perfectly. I never was so sorry for anyone in my life—anyone in our condition, that is. She has been tagged a girl of brains, and it has somehow been impressed upon her that, if she shows any feminine weakness, she will disgrace herself. So there she is, on her intellectual tiptoes, striving to conceal a very human disposition to come down on her heels, exiling herself from all that girlhood prizes.“Of course, you dear old goose, you are saying to yourself,‘Why don’t you put her wise, then?’ My dear, she has analyzed it all just as clearly as I have. She knows what is going on. She merely hasn’t the courage to break through the convention and, on the whole, I don’t wonder at it. It takes more courage to fight the accepted conception of oneself than it does to do any other sort of fighting in the world. Charlotte Ponsonby is a victim of the Spencer stupidity and of her own timidity and sensitiveness. There has grown up an impression that Charlotte doesn’t care for dancing; and night after night she goes off to her room, pretending a desire to read when her heart is in her toes, where a normal girl’s heart should be. If there is an expedition of any sort, Charlotte is always handed over to some elderly fossil because she is so intelligent and serious, and so entertaining to old gentlemen. If a man pays her the least attention, everybody notes it (and you know we pride ourselves an our breeding too); and so much interest, sympathy, and, yes, my dear,damnablecuriosity, is openly shown in the matter that the girl’s pride is outraged, and in sheer self-defence she snubs her admirer incontinently.“She lives and has always lived, as nearly as I can see, utterly without intimate companionship, confidence, or any of that wholesome dependence that belongs to girlhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in her isolation, which, much as I should like to, I dare not invade. There is a pride in life born of indigence as there is the pride of wealth. Charlotte Ponsonby is armored in the pride born of spiritual indigence. Her soul is hungering and thirsting for that thing for which all the world has decided shecares nothing. Mark my words, my dear, in the end, tragedy will come of it.”It was at the close of their stay in the mountains that Mrs. Spencer again unburdened herself to the Vermont relative.“What do you think Charlotte is now bent on? She wants to be a trained nurse. I have felt for a long time that she had something revolutionary in her mind. It doesn’t matter to me particularly, but Cornelius is grieved to the heart. However, we have no right to coerce her, and financial independence seems to be the one thing on which her mind is fixed.”Three years later she wrote again:“Charlotte has finished her training and is going to the Philippines. She came in from New York last week to break the news. I said little, and Cornelius said less. But we have talked it over, and have decided that she must judge for herself. I don’t feel satisfied with the results of our care for Charlotte, and I don’t know where the blame lies, but I do feel that she cherishes some bitterness of feeling in her heart, and that she is very unhappy.“Something in her nature wears clearer as she grows older, some ingrained romanticism which we did not suspect, and which repels me. However, it is too late to worry about now. She has taken her life into her own hands, and has decreed that it shall lie apart from ours; and I, for one, am thankful.”To these may be added a final word from Miss Ponsonby herself, written, on her wedding eve after her return from the Luneta.”My dear Aunt:“This is the last letter I shall write you for some time, for to-morrow I am going to be married, and shall leave Manila for a remote island where the opportunity for correspondence is small.“The man I am going to marry, whose name is Martin Collingwood, is engaged in pearl-fishing in the seas south of Manila. He is a man, I believe, with the money-making gift. However that is not the reason that I am marrying him. With me it is absolutely a matter of the heart. I am marrying him because, as nearly as I can see, he is the one human being who has ever loved me in this world, and because I cannot live life without love.“It is hardly necessary to say that I am sacrificing my ambitions in this matter. To a woman brought up as I have been, a dependent, a brilliant marriage would represent the most successful thing, the most nearly compensating thing, that life could offer. It has not come to me, however, and I am making the best I can of what has offered.“You may wonder why this frankness at the end of the silence which has always existed between us. It is because my only hope in the future is based on the fact that, at last, I have courage to declare myself. To guard my every thought and feeling from your curiosity and criticism, I have separated myself from all the world, and in the beginningunknowingly, but in the end with full knowledge, have walked down a path which has ended here. I will not hamper myself in my new life by even the memory of my old cowardice. You may call me weak, call me sentimental, foolish, romantic, call me all the things which for years you have been trying to discover in me, and for which you have sought in vain beneath the mask I wore—I am going to have my share of living.“This is not written in bitterness toward you. I am grateful for all the care and the money lavished upon me, and I realize fully the sacrifice that you made in receiving me into your home and in treating me, as you did, with perfect justice. It was magnificent. I am simply one of those miserable beings who have come into this world unwelcome, born to be a worry and a trial to someone, and I have taken the only means I knew to escape from it.“Tell Uncle Cornelius that I am not ungrateful to him. Some day I’ll write you again. For the present I want to put every memory of the past out of my life. If the day ever comes when I can go back to it without its influencing my life as it has always done, I’ll write again.“Yours gratefully,”Charlotte Ponsonby.”
What the buried archives are to the archæologist, the trunkful of old letters is to the novelist. But before those light-giving documents are brought forth, a little family history should be detailed as preface.
In the year 1872 the Civil War had been more generally forgotten in the North than in the South. In the State of Massachusetts, however, a goodly circle of antislavery agitators still kept up the fight in favor of the black man. The Fourteenth Amendment had not then been made, nor those celebrated discussions which fixed its interpretation and application; but the reconstruction of the Southern States still left plenty of ground for bitter speech and feeling.
Prominent among that circle and among the old Boston families of that day was the widow of a man who had literally given his life to the antislavery cause, for he had died during the War of overwork upon an antislavery journal. His widowbelonged to a family that for two hundred years or more had been prominent in state and national affairs. When her husband died and left her and a half-grown daughter almost penniless among a wealthy kindred, she found little or no difficulty in getting along; for their pride in the editorial victim was great, and she had been always a family favorite.
But if the mother was everywhere sought, her daughter Charlotte found a less ready welcome. A tall, superb beauty, singularly cold at times and reserved, at others fiercely vehement, she was as utterly unlike the descendant of a staid New England family as can be imagined. It is regrettable that she found little favor in the family eyes; and in the year 1872 she came to an out and out rupture with all her kindred by eloping with Mountjoy Ponsonby, a Marylander, a Roman Catholic, and an irreconcilable son of slave-holding parents.
Mrs. K—— took to her bed and died of chagrin. Four years later the unhappy girl followed her mother to the grave, leaving behind her a baby daughter six months old.
Of that marriage so soon ended, the best and the worst that can be said is that it was unhappy. Thetwo undisciplined natures who had defied tradition, family sentiment, religious training, and political inheritance for the sake of each other, had not the patience to work out their common happiness when the infatuation which had drawn them together died, as all such sudden and violent emotions must.
When Mrs. Ponsonby turned her back on life and on an impoverished Southern home where her New England thrift had struggled ceaselessly with the indolence and sluggish ways of a slave-holding household, it was after almost all possible recrimination had been exhausted over religion, politics, family inheritance, and ideals of life. Her husband, having buried her with due ceremony and observance in the Maryland family vaults, betook himself to travel, leaving the child to be cared for by a distant female relative. When little Charlotte was four, the relative died, and, as an ultimate act of defiance to his wife’s kindred, Ponsonby placed his daughter in a Roman Catholic convent.
There the little girl remained till her fourteenth year. In that period, she saw her father some six or eight times. Their interviews were constrained affairs, for Mountjoy Ponsonby was nota man of domestic or affectionate nature, and the child of the wife with whom he had quarrelled bitterly made little appeal to him. He usually gave his daughter much good advice, found her exceedingly docile, but equally difficult, and was always embarrassed by an unspoken appeal in her nature which he dumbly resented. He looked forward with repugnance and dread to the days when she could be no longer stuffed away in a convent, and he rather hoped that she would feel herself religiously called upon to stay there.
Like many other men, he had formed the habit of looking on himself as immortal, so that when he was instantly killed by being thrown from his horse, he had made no provision for his child’s future. On his own side of the family there was no near kindred; and the Boston relatives instantly put in a claim for the custody of little Charlotte.
The man who was most actively interested in the little girl’s future was one Cornelius Spencer, a dry, hard-working, quiet man, capable of loving with singular intensity and equally capable of concealing his emotions. He had paid a quiet court to the beautiful Charlotte K——, and family gossip said that he took her elopement very seriously;but it was all conjecture, for he kept his own counsel. A year later, he married Martha Winston, her cousin, a lady who, furthermore said family gossip, had been in love with him for several years.
The Spencer marriage turned out well; how nearly thatwellmay be translatedhappily, who can say? At least, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Spencer were a decorous couple, he given to amassing this world’s goods, she devoted to a thrifty oversight of their expenditures and to a calm enjoyment of their prosperity. Two daughters came to them, handsome children whose education from the first was up to the strictest standards of conservative Boston.
There was much sage wagging of heads among the Boston kin when Cornelius Spencer came forward as the potential guardian of the orphan immured in the convent. But though they conjectured again, Mrs. Spencer kept her own counsel as her husband had kept his years before. Of course, said the kinship, it was a bitter pill to her. Charlotte K—— had always outshone her in brains, in wit, in beauty. She had been proud to marry the man whom Charlotte had refused; and to find that man, eighteen years later, still cherishingsentimental memories of her rival, determined to make himself a second father to that rival’s child,—ah, well, Martha was a remarkable woman to bear it all so quietly!
It happened that, on the day the young girl appeared in charge of the nun who brought her North, a very observant lady was calling upon Mrs. Cornelius Spencer. The lady was the wife of an army officer, and had a taste for letter-writing, in fact, felt that letter-writing was her only gift. A few extracts from her epistle to her husband will throw some light upon Charlotte Ponsonby’s girlhood experiences.
“—I have been visiting about for days among the K—— kin. They are as magnificently satisfied with themselves as ever, take themselves very seriously, are as proud of their money-making powers as of their blue blood; really it’s wonderful how they all make money, and talk, as they have always done, from a very much higher plane than they really live on.“Among others, Martha Spencer asked me to luncheon, and I went there this morning. Really, Cornelius must have madeoodlesof money. The mere household accessories were simple enough; but the books, the pictures, and the curios were a joy. I feasted my soul, and I wished for you, my dear, to enjoy it with me.“But I’ll talk of those things to you later. What Iwant to tell you about now is an incident that I am afraid may slip away from me, and I want to describe it while my impressions are fresh,“You remember I wrote you, in a previous letter, about the lawsuit and how old Dry-as-dust Cornelius has a real spark of romance in him after all, and of how he has disinterred his old love’s child from a convent where she was to have been buried alive. It was my happy fate to see the sequel this morning.“Martha and I were sitting together just before lunch, when the bell rang. ‘I think that must be the little relative whom we are expecting,’ said Martha, and a second later the butler ushered in a nun and a fourteen-year-old girl.“I wish you could have seen Martha’s greeting! It was exactly what she would have given a woman of the world, paying a morning call. She was concentrated extract of courtesy and breeding. The child, who was evidently nervous and expectant of a warmer welcome was instantly chilled by it. But she rose to it! She rose to it magnificently! She has rather fine eyes, her mother’s eyes as I remember them, and a self-possessed manner for a child of her age. I tried to gush over her a bit, but she would have none of me. Having been rebuffed by her hostess, she had no intention of allowing an undetermined factor to the situation to make amends to her.“The nun would not remain, and departed immediately after formally handing over her charge. She kissed Charlotte (the child is named for her mother), and I rather fancied that, in spite of her cold welcome, the child is notreluctant to enter on a more brilliant life than the conventical one. At any rate, she did not shed any tears.“Charlotte was sent upstairs with a maid to make her toilette for luncheon. ‘Your cousins regret not being here to welcome you,’ said Martha suavely, ‘but they went out to the country place of a friend for a day’s skating. They will see you at dinner.’“‘I am very glad they did not change their plans on my account,’ said my little nun that might have been.“Cornelius came home for luncheon and was stiffer than Martha. He was self-conscious, that was apparent. We had the most perfect luncheon imaginable, but though Martha prides herself on her heating arrangements and their temperatures never vary a degree, I felt as if the outside air had crept through the whole house.“I am sorry for that girl from the bottom of my heart. Martha hates the sight of her, and the girl knew it before she had been twenty minutes in the house. She will have food and dress and every material luxury dealt out to her as lavishly as it is to Martha’s own girls; but of good-will, kindness, human affection, not a drop. Instead, she will receive a courtesy measured by the most approved social standards. She will never be allowed to forget for one moment that it is given from a high sense of duty, and not from any sense of affection. I am not sure that Cornelius has done the child a kindness. She might have fared better in a boarding-school. At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy for Martha. I shouldn’t be at all nice about it, you know, if you raked up a dead and gone sweetheart’s child and established her among our brood.”
“—I have been visiting about for days among the K—— kin. They are as magnificently satisfied with themselves as ever, take themselves very seriously, are as proud of their money-making powers as of their blue blood; really it’s wonderful how they all make money, and talk, as they have always done, from a very much higher plane than they really live on.
“Among others, Martha Spencer asked me to luncheon, and I went there this morning. Really, Cornelius must have madeoodlesof money. The mere household accessories were simple enough; but the books, the pictures, and the curios were a joy. I feasted my soul, and I wished for you, my dear, to enjoy it with me.
“But I’ll talk of those things to you later. What Iwant to tell you about now is an incident that I am afraid may slip away from me, and I want to describe it while my impressions are fresh,
“You remember I wrote you, in a previous letter, about the lawsuit and how old Dry-as-dust Cornelius has a real spark of romance in him after all, and of how he has disinterred his old love’s child from a convent where she was to have been buried alive. It was my happy fate to see the sequel this morning.
“Martha and I were sitting together just before lunch, when the bell rang. ‘I think that must be the little relative whom we are expecting,’ said Martha, and a second later the butler ushered in a nun and a fourteen-year-old girl.
“I wish you could have seen Martha’s greeting! It was exactly what she would have given a woman of the world, paying a morning call. She was concentrated extract of courtesy and breeding. The child, who was evidently nervous and expectant of a warmer welcome was instantly chilled by it. But she rose to it! She rose to it magnificently! She has rather fine eyes, her mother’s eyes as I remember them, and a self-possessed manner for a child of her age. I tried to gush over her a bit, but she would have none of me. Having been rebuffed by her hostess, she had no intention of allowing an undetermined factor to the situation to make amends to her.
“The nun would not remain, and departed immediately after formally handing over her charge. She kissed Charlotte (the child is named for her mother), and I rather fancied that, in spite of her cold welcome, the child is notreluctant to enter on a more brilliant life than the conventical one. At any rate, she did not shed any tears.
“Charlotte was sent upstairs with a maid to make her toilette for luncheon. ‘Your cousins regret not being here to welcome you,’ said Martha suavely, ‘but they went out to the country place of a friend for a day’s skating. They will see you at dinner.’
“‘I am very glad they did not change their plans on my account,’ said my little nun that might have been.
“Cornelius came home for luncheon and was stiffer than Martha. He was self-conscious, that was apparent. We had the most perfect luncheon imaginable, but though Martha prides herself on her heating arrangements and their temperatures never vary a degree, I felt as if the outside air had crept through the whole house.
“I am sorry for that girl from the bottom of my heart. Martha hates the sight of her, and the girl knew it before she had been twenty minutes in the house. She will have food and dress and every material luxury dealt out to her as lavishly as it is to Martha’s own girls; but of good-will, kindness, human affection, not a drop. Instead, she will receive a courtesy measured by the most approved social standards. She will never be allowed to forget for one moment that it is given from a high sense of duty, and not from any sense of affection. I am not sure that Cornelius has done the child a kindness. She might have fared better in a boarding-school. At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy for Martha. I shouldn’t be at all nice about it, you know, if you raked up a dead and gone sweetheart’s child and established her among our brood.”
Within a few weeks after the writing of this epistle, Mrs. Spencer expressed herself to an elderly relative perched in a very old colonial home among the hills of Vermont.
“Charlotte’s little daughter is now with us. She is a very reserved child with beautiful manners—I suppose convent training does give that—and, her teachers think, has an exceptional mind. We have had private teachers for her this year because, though her elementary training is fair, she is greatly lacking in general information, though she has a curious accumulation of Roman Catholic religious lore.“She has a great deal of personality for a child of her age, which I have respected. I find myself constantly shrinking, however, from some undercurrent of feeling which she doesn’t express. She gets on very well with my two girls, but they don’t understand her any more than I do. Of course, she is treated exactly as they are—I really wouldn’t get one a hair ribbon without buying its match for Charlotte.“For a convent-reared girl, she is not so difficult to deal with as might be. I send her to church every Sunday in the brougham with the parlor maid, who happens to be of her faith; and I called on the parish priest and commended her to his fatherly mercies. He is a rather robust person, clearly of Irish peasant origin, and speaks with a very decided brogue. She is plainly growing a bit fastidious about him, and I am inclined to feel that she is none toodeeply enamored of her church. She has a curious gift of worldliness for a child brought up in a convent.”
“Charlotte’s little daughter is now with us. She is a very reserved child with beautiful manners—I suppose convent training does give that—and, her teachers think, has an exceptional mind. We have had private teachers for her this year because, though her elementary training is fair, she is greatly lacking in general information, though she has a curious accumulation of Roman Catholic religious lore.
“She has a great deal of personality for a child of her age, which I have respected. I find myself constantly shrinking, however, from some undercurrent of feeling which she doesn’t express. She gets on very well with my two girls, but they don’t understand her any more than I do. Of course, she is treated exactly as they are—I really wouldn’t get one a hair ribbon without buying its match for Charlotte.
“For a convent-reared girl, she is not so difficult to deal with as might be. I send her to church every Sunday in the brougham with the parlor maid, who happens to be of her faith; and I called on the parish priest and commended her to his fatherly mercies. He is a rather robust person, clearly of Irish peasant origin, and speaks with a very decided brogue. She is plainly growing a bit fastidious about him, and I am inclined to feel that she is none toodeeply enamored of her church. She has a curious gift of worldliness for a child brought up in a convent.”
Eight years later Mrs. Spencer penned another brief note to this same elderly relative’s daughter.
“I suppose it would be asking too much of you to run down to Smith and see Charlotte take her degree. I can’t go—Natalie’s engagement is just on—and somebody ought to appear from the family. She takes high honors, I understand. She wrote me a very pretty little note, saying it wasn’t to be expected of any of us to get up, but I can see she is hurt. Do go if you can.”
“I suppose it would be asking too much of you to run down to Smith and see Charlotte take her degree. I can’t go—Natalie’s engagement is just on—and somebody ought to appear from the family. She takes high honors, I understand. She wrote me a very pretty little note, saying it wasn’t to be expected of any of us to get up, but I can see she is hurt. Do go if you can.”
Six weeks later in that same year, the military lady found herself at a very quiet and exclusive resort in the White Mountains, and once more delivered herself to her husband of many impressions.
“You remember that incident I told you of some years ago of seeing Charlotte K’s daughter engulfed in the Spencer household. Well, they are all here for a brief stay, Martha engrossed in her two girls. Natalie’s engagement to young X—— of the Navy has been announced. Charlotte Ponsonby is really a magnificent creature—from a woman’s standpoint, that is. But the outcome of the affair is just what might have been expected. Somehow they have mortally wounded her, and to protect herselffrom them and their curiosity she has built a wall between herself and the whole world. I tried to cross it, and was most delicately and effectively rebuffed. She is the most solitary girl I have ever known, and yet she is not morbid. She moves among us in the most self-possessed,unaskingspirit that was ever held by a girl of twenty-two. She is remarkably well bred, quite at ease outwardly, and is altogether too clever to please men—who are dreadfully shy of her, though they speak of her admiringly. I would not have you think that her cleverness is of that cheap type which sharpens its wits on others, and prides itself on its brilliancy. She is not in the least talkative, but she gives you the feeling of one who is weighing, sifting, analyzing, judging; who is using her brain to its best purposes at all times.“The pathetic part of it all is that she is playing up to a rôle that somebody—I don’t know what idiot—assigned her. I find among all the kindred and all the family acquaintance the general opinion that Charlotte has no emotions, nothing but a brain; and the poor child is nothing but a bundle of emotions that she is desperately trying to conceal. I understand her perfectly. I never was so sorry for anyone in my life—anyone in our condition, that is. She has been tagged a girl of brains, and it has somehow been impressed upon her that, if she shows any feminine weakness, she will disgrace herself. So there she is, on her intellectual tiptoes, striving to conceal a very human disposition to come down on her heels, exiling herself from all that girlhood prizes.“Of course, you dear old goose, you are saying to yourself,‘Why don’t you put her wise, then?’ My dear, she has analyzed it all just as clearly as I have. She knows what is going on. She merely hasn’t the courage to break through the convention and, on the whole, I don’t wonder at it. It takes more courage to fight the accepted conception of oneself than it does to do any other sort of fighting in the world. Charlotte Ponsonby is a victim of the Spencer stupidity and of her own timidity and sensitiveness. There has grown up an impression that Charlotte doesn’t care for dancing; and night after night she goes off to her room, pretending a desire to read when her heart is in her toes, where a normal girl’s heart should be. If there is an expedition of any sort, Charlotte is always handed over to some elderly fossil because she is so intelligent and serious, and so entertaining to old gentlemen. If a man pays her the least attention, everybody notes it (and you know we pride ourselves an our breeding too); and so much interest, sympathy, and, yes, my dear,damnablecuriosity, is openly shown in the matter that the girl’s pride is outraged, and in sheer self-defence she snubs her admirer incontinently.“She lives and has always lived, as nearly as I can see, utterly without intimate companionship, confidence, or any of that wholesome dependence that belongs to girlhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in her isolation, which, much as I should like to, I dare not invade. There is a pride in life born of indigence as there is the pride of wealth. Charlotte Ponsonby is armored in the pride born of spiritual indigence. Her soul is hungering and thirsting for that thing for which all the world has decided shecares nothing. Mark my words, my dear, in the end, tragedy will come of it.”
“You remember that incident I told you of some years ago of seeing Charlotte K’s daughter engulfed in the Spencer household. Well, they are all here for a brief stay, Martha engrossed in her two girls. Natalie’s engagement to young X—— of the Navy has been announced. Charlotte Ponsonby is really a magnificent creature—from a woman’s standpoint, that is. But the outcome of the affair is just what might have been expected. Somehow they have mortally wounded her, and to protect herselffrom them and their curiosity she has built a wall between herself and the whole world. I tried to cross it, and was most delicately and effectively rebuffed. She is the most solitary girl I have ever known, and yet she is not morbid. She moves among us in the most self-possessed,unaskingspirit that was ever held by a girl of twenty-two. She is remarkably well bred, quite at ease outwardly, and is altogether too clever to please men—who are dreadfully shy of her, though they speak of her admiringly. I would not have you think that her cleverness is of that cheap type which sharpens its wits on others, and prides itself on its brilliancy. She is not in the least talkative, but she gives you the feeling of one who is weighing, sifting, analyzing, judging; who is using her brain to its best purposes at all times.
“The pathetic part of it all is that she is playing up to a rôle that somebody—I don’t know what idiot—assigned her. I find among all the kindred and all the family acquaintance the general opinion that Charlotte has no emotions, nothing but a brain; and the poor child is nothing but a bundle of emotions that she is desperately trying to conceal. I understand her perfectly. I never was so sorry for anyone in my life—anyone in our condition, that is. She has been tagged a girl of brains, and it has somehow been impressed upon her that, if she shows any feminine weakness, she will disgrace herself. So there she is, on her intellectual tiptoes, striving to conceal a very human disposition to come down on her heels, exiling herself from all that girlhood prizes.
“Of course, you dear old goose, you are saying to yourself,‘Why don’t you put her wise, then?’ My dear, she has analyzed it all just as clearly as I have. She knows what is going on. She merely hasn’t the courage to break through the convention and, on the whole, I don’t wonder at it. It takes more courage to fight the accepted conception of oneself than it does to do any other sort of fighting in the world. Charlotte Ponsonby is a victim of the Spencer stupidity and of her own timidity and sensitiveness. There has grown up an impression that Charlotte doesn’t care for dancing; and night after night she goes off to her room, pretending a desire to read when her heart is in her toes, where a normal girl’s heart should be. If there is an expedition of any sort, Charlotte is always handed over to some elderly fossil because she is so intelligent and serious, and so entertaining to old gentlemen. If a man pays her the least attention, everybody notes it (and you know we pride ourselves an our breeding too); and so much interest, sympathy, and, yes, my dear,damnablecuriosity, is openly shown in the matter that the girl’s pride is outraged, and in sheer self-defence she snubs her admirer incontinently.
“She lives and has always lived, as nearly as I can see, utterly without intimate companionship, confidence, or any of that wholesome dependence that belongs to girlhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in her isolation, which, much as I should like to, I dare not invade. There is a pride in life born of indigence as there is the pride of wealth. Charlotte Ponsonby is armored in the pride born of spiritual indigence. Her soul is hungering and thirsting for that thing for which all the world has decided shecares nothing. Mark my words, my dear, in the end, tragedy will come of it.”
It was at the close of their stay in the mountains that Mrs. Spencer again unburdened herself to the Vermont relative.
“What do you think Charlotte is now bent on? She wants to be a trained nurse. I have felt for a long time that she had something revolutionary in her mind. It doesn’t matter to me particularly, but Cornelius is grieved to the heart. However, we have no right to coerce her, and financial independence seems to be the one thing on which her mind is fixed.”
“What do you think Charlotte is now bent on? She wants to be a trained nurse. I have felt for a long time that she had something revolutionary in her mind. It doesn’t matter to me particularly, but Cornelius is grieved to the heart. However, we have no right to coerce her, and financial independence seems to be the one thing on which her mind is fixed.”
Three years later she wrote again:
“Charlotte has finished her training and is going to the Philippines. She came in from New York last week to break the news. I said little, and Cornelius said less. But we have talked it over, and have decided that she must judge for herself. I don’t feel satisfied with the results of our care for Charlotte, and I don’t know where the blame lies, but I do feel that she cherishes some bitterness of feeling in her heart, and that she is very unhappy.“Something in her nature wears clearer as she grows older, some ingrained romanticism which we did not suspect, and which repels me. However, it is too late to worry about now. She has taken her life into her own hands, and has decreed that it shall lie apart from ours; and I, for one, am thankful.”
“Charlotte has finished her training and is going to the Philippines. She came in from New York last week to break the news. I said little, and Cornelius said less. But we have talked it over, and have decided that she must judge for herself. I don’t feel satisfied with the results of our care for Charlotte, and I don’t know where the blame lies, but I do feel that she cherishes some bitterness of feeling in her heart, and that she is very unhappy.
“Something in her nature wears clearer as she grows older, some ingrained romanticism which we did not suspect, and which repels me. However, it is too late to worry about now. She has taken her life into her own hands, and has decreed that it shall lie apart from ours; and I, for one, am thankful.”
To these may be added a final word from Miss Ponsonby herself, written, on her wedding eve after her return from the Luneta.
”My dear Aunt:“This is the last letter I shall write you for some time, for to-morrow I am going to be married, and shall leave Manila for a remote island where the opportunity for correspondence is small.“The man I am going to marry, whose name is Martin Collingwood, is engaged in pearl-fishing in the seas south of Manila. He is a man, I believe, with the money-making gift. However that is not the reason that I am marrying him. With me it is absolutely a matter of the heart. I am marrying him because, as nearly as I can see, he is the one human being who has ever loved me in this world, and because I cannot live life without love.“It is hardly necessary to say that I am sacrificing my ambitions in this matter. To a woman brought up as I have been, a dependent, a brilliant marriage would represent the most successful thing, the most nearly compensating thing, that life could offer. It has not come to me, however, and I am making the best I can of what has offered.“You may wonder why this frankness at the end of the silence which has always existed between us. It is because my only hope in the future is based on the fact that, at last, I have courage to declare myself. To guard my every thought and feeling from your curiosity and criticism, I have separated myself from all the world, and in the beginningunknowingly, but in the end with full knowledge, have walked down a path which has ended here. I will not hamper myself in my new life by even the memory of my old cowardice. You may call me weak, call me sentimental, foolish, romantic, call me all the things which for years you have been trying to discover in me, and for which you have sought in vain beneath the mask I wore—I am going to have my share of living.“This is not written in bitterness toward you. I am grateful for all the care and the money lavished upon me, and I realize fully the sacrifice that you made in receiving me into your home and in treating me, as you did, with perfect justice. It was magnificent. I am simply one of those miserable beings who have come into this world unwelcome, born to be a worry and a trial to someone, and I have taken the only means I knew to escape from it.“Tell Uncle Cornelius that I am not ungrateful to him. Some day I’ll write you again. For the present I want to put every memory of the past out of my life. If the day ever comes when I can go back to it without its influencing my life as it has always done, I’ll write again.“Yours gratefully,”Charlotte Ponsonby.”
”My dear Aunt:
“This is the last letter I shall write you for some time, for to-morrow I am going to be married, and shall leave Manila for a remote island where the opportunity for correspondence is small.
“The man I am going to marry, whose name is Martin Collingwood, is engaged in pearl-fishing in the seas south of Manila. He is a man, I believe, with the money-making gift. However that is not the reason that I am marrying him. With me it is absolutely a matter of the heart. I am marrying him because, as nearly as I can see, he is the one human being who has ever loved me in this world, and because I cannot live life without love.
“It is hardly necessary to say that I am sacrificing my ambitions in this matter. To a woman brought up as I have been, a dependent, a brilliant marriage would represent the most successful thing, the most nearly compensating thing, that life could offer. It has not come to me, however, and I am making the best I can of what has offered.
“You may wonder why this frankness at the end of the silence which has always existed between us. It is because my only hope in the future is based on the fact that, at last, I have courage to declare myself. To guard my every thought and feeling from your curiosity and criticism, I have separated myself from all the world, and in the beginningunknowingly, but in the end with full knowledge, have walked down a path which has ended here. I will not hamper myself in my new life by even the memory of my old cowardice. You may call me weak, call me sentimental, foolish, romantic, call me all the things which for years you have been trying to discover in me, and for which you have sought in vain beneath the mask I wore—I am going to have my share of living.
“This is not written in bitterness toward you. I am grateful for all the care and the money lavished upon me, and I realize fully the sacrifice that you made in receiving me into your home and in treating me, as you did, with perfect justice. It was magnificent. I am simply one of those miserable beings who have come into this world unwelcome, born to be a worry and a trial to someone, and I have taken the only means I knew to escape from it.
“Tell Uncle Cornelius that I am not ungrateful to him. Some day I’ll write you again. For the present I want to put every memory of the past out of my life. If the day ever comes when I can go back to it without its influencing my life as it has always done, I’ll write again.
“Yours gratefully,
”Charlotte Ponsonby.”
Chapter VJudge Barton had to cut short his morning ride in order to reach the San Sebastian church at seven-thirty, but he admitted to himself that he would have gone without his daily exercise rather than have missed the wedding; and he was actually ten minutes early. He found the edifice empty but pervaded with a general stir which hinted at impending events. A dirty, bare-footed sacristan in marine blue cotton drawers and a transparent shirt was opening windows and lighting a few candles about the high altar. The early morning sunlight streamed through the apertures, while the noise of street traffic outside echoed hollowly through the dusty, empty silence of the church. Sparrows flashed across the moted sunbeams and lost themselves among the violet and orange shadows of the lantern. Apobreshuffled in to mutter his devotions, and a widow and her two daughters, who had been praying before oneof the chapel altars, lingered to discover the cause of the preparations.Soon one or two men dropped in, strangers to the Judge, and friends, as he instantly decided, of Collingwood. They stood about indecisively, and stared up into the vaulted roof, and whispered to one another in funereally regulated tones. Then came a group of five or six women, whom the Judge recognized as fellow-nurses of Miss Ponsonby; and almost immediately afterwards, without ceremonial or welcome of the organ, the bride and groom appeared. Both were in white; he in the military-cut blouse which is so popular in the Philippines, she in a simple street dress of white muslin with a hat of white embroidery. The marine sacristan went to summon the priest, while the bridal pair waited quietly in the shadow of one of the Gothic pillars.When the priest, a Spaniard of ascetic and noble countenance, had arrived and was embarked upon the marriage ceremony, Judge Barton took himself to task for the flutter of nervousness which, to his great discomfiture, he found obtruding into his judicial reflections. He had come to satisfy avery natural curiosity, and the affair had taken his sympathies unaware. He had never before attended a wedding in which the seriousness of matrimonial experiment appealed to him so strongly. He never before had felt the solemn happiness which his sympathy with that bride and groom awoke in him. He stole a glance at the other witnesses; they were as preternaturally grave as he. There was even a subdued air about Collingwood, full, however, of reserved triumph. As for the bride, her pallor and fatigue were quite evident, but she had an uplifted look which was most attractive. He caught himself wondering if there would be any kissing the bride, and then he decided it was time to rein in his imagination. “Emotions by the quart!” he thought to himself. “Have I turned sentimental old woman? Champagne wouldn’t make me more maudlin.”He waited quite discreetly after the ceremony, till the young men and the group of nurses had had their say, and it had been clearly demonstrated that there would be no kissing. Then he went up and offered Mrs. Collingwood his hand. There was a genuine friendliness in his manner, a warmth andsincerity in his few words that touched her. Her own reserve melted before them. He saw her eyes suffuse, and a faint color glow in her cheek.She was instantly aware, indeed, that she occupied a new plane in his thoughts. She had gained upon him personally, and, as the wife of a man engaged in developing one of the greatest resources of the islands, and likely to become a factor of local commercial life, she would receive consideration. She knew that he regarded her marriage as amésalliance, yet by making amésallianceshe had become a person to be taken into account. Stranger situations than this happen frequently in the world—in the governmental world—and Mrs. Collingwood did not betray her intuitions.“Well, Judge,” said Martin jocosely, “the Bureau of Health did not bear down on us after all.”“No; you are a Benedict, Collingwood, and ‘whom the Lord hath joined’—I don’t know whether it is in your service or not. My Latin is rusty.”“‘Let no man, not even a Civil Commissioner, put asunder,’” Collingwood finished for him. The Judge suspected that he felt some relief inhaving the possibility of a change of mind on his bride’s part obviated, and the two men smiled at each other openly.“I feel that my troubles are ended,” said Collingwood.His wife betrayed that she was still somewhat self-conscious. “It remains for Judge Barton to be trite and to warn you that they have just begun,” she said, a little stiltedly.“Nonsense! What does it matter whether your troubles are beginning or ending? The point is that you have your present, your romance. I dare say you will have your troubles—most of us do; but to-day—” The speaker paused expressively.“That is an extremely sensible view,” replied Mrs. Collingwood. “He has not your happy gift of expression, but it is Mr. Collingwood’s also. He told me as much yesterday. I had been foolish enough to anticipate the future.”“Is that what made you look so solemn?” the Judge inquired playfully.She blushed a little and shook her head reprovingly, “It is no joking matter. Try it yourself and see how you feel. Why, even Martin looked serious.”“Frankly, I was scared to death,” Collingwood admitted. His wife laughed softly. The Judge shook hands again with the newly made husband in an access of geniality.He declined an invitation to the hotel breakfast which was all they could offer in the line of wedding festivity, but he found time later to appear aboard their boat.“Mind,” he said as he wished Mrs. Collingwood good-by, “you have not seen the last of me. I am going to appear in your island paradise sometime when you least expect me. When things get unendurable here, I shall flee to you and solitude.”“How long do you think you would endure it?” she inquired.How long will you?”“Ah! I must. I’m pledged. I shall have no excuse for repining. I took the step with my eyes open.”“Well, I fancy you do not regret leaving Manila.” In the wholeness of his suddenly acquired sympathy with her, the Judge quite forgot that he had been one of the many persons contributing to the experience which had failed to endear Manila to her.“No; my experiences here have not been altogether happy, but perhaps I was partially to blame.” She hesitated and looked over at the shining roofs, at the patches of green shrubbery relieving them, and, in the background, at the mountains where Lawton died. The launch whistled for its passengers before Judge Barton could reply, but he wrung her hand with the intensity of a lifelong friendship. And such is the perversity of the human soul that his heart ached as the launch darted up the Pasig. She had waited upon him with infinite patience and gentleness through nearly a month of illness. He had seen her daily. She had been so situated that the faintest effort of real kindness or of chivalry on his part could have won her everlasting gratitude, and probably, if he had desired it, her affection. He certainly fulfilled the ideal which her social traditions demanded of her husband more nearly than Collingwood did, and the Judge knew how to make himself liked when he wanted to. But he had not tried to be kind to Miss Ponsonby. He had been patronizing, and at times almost impertinent and unmanly. He had not a shadow of right to the grudging sense of having something that should have been his snatchedaway from him. He had even a feeling of impatience with her, a thought that she had cheated him, that she had chosen to hide her real self from him, and to reveal it cruelly at the moment when Fate put an insurmountable barrier between them. He could not stifle the miserable regrets, the sense of baffled yearning, that took possession of him. He did his best to shake off the memory of the wedding and of her face as he had seen it at the altar, but he could not do so. Mrs. Collingwood became an obsession. Before the coastguard cutter had pulled its anchor, he was wondering how soon and by what means he could invent an excuse for visiting her at her home.The coastguard steamer on the Puerta Princesa run, on which the Collingwoods had elected to go as far as Cuyo where their own launch would pick them up, drove a clean white furrow, and, as Collingwood had predicted, passed Corregidor at noon. She went out through the Boca Chica with Corregidor on the left; and Mrs. Collingwood, who was resting in her steamer chair, smiled languidly as he glanced back at the island. “Corregidor over the stern,” she murmured as if repeating some well-worn quotation, and then went on, “Have your experienceshere led you into contact with a type of man who has but one iterated and reiterated wish,—he is, by the way, usually a major in the United States army,—which wish is ‘to see Corregidor over the stern’? I do not know how many times my tongue has burned to suggest that the wisher take a coasting steamer and see it.”“Oh, the army’s sore on the Philippines,” remarked Collingwood.She eyed him reflectively. “And you, who have been in it, seem to be ‘sore’ on the army.”“That’s right,” he exclaimed heartily, “Any man who has once served his country as a high private and has gotten out is ‘agin the Government’ for the rest of his life. I came over on the troop deck of a transport, and I swore I’d go home on a liner or leave my bones here.”“Which seems likelier to be attained?” she asked, smiling idly.“Which do you think yourself? You’ve linked your fortunes with mine. Why?” he added fixing her with a sudden intensity of glance insistent for reply.His wife crimsoned and looked across the glinting sea.“I thought you answered that question to your satisfaction last night,” she murmured.“No; I tried to answer it for you. It was you that needed convincing. Here is a case of temperament,” he went on, half jocose, half serious. “So long as you hesitated and I had my side to urge, any old reason would do for me. I would clutch at a straw and hold on to it as if it were a cable. But now everything is settled and final, I want to understand. I want you to make yourself clear to me.”“But, my dear Martin! The idea is out of the question. Why, for a month you have professed to be able to make me clear to myself.”Martin ruffled his hair with a puzzled hand. “Did I?” he murmured. “Did it strike you as cheeky?”“No; I was heartily grateful. You helped me.”“In what way?”“In the way of common sense,” Charlotte said, as simply as if the remark were an everyday one, and her husband’s somewhat startled acceptance of the reply sent her into a ripple of laughter, in which, after an instant, he joined heartily.Their merriment attracted the attention of theonly other passengers, two enlisted men going out to join a hospital corps at Puerta Princesa. It also drew upon them a frown of disfavor from the captain.The captain was an old-time skipper from a tramp freighter, with the freighter’s contempt for passengers. He was not married, and he had little sympathy with the billings and cooings of newly married couples. As often as his eyes fell on the orchids and ferns and potted plants which were hanging from stanchions and cumbering his decks (Mrs. Collingwood was taking them down for the adornment of her new home) he cursed picturesquely. To his second officer he had expressed a desire for a typhoon that would roll the deadlights out of his boat, and blow the hyphenated “garden truck” into the Sulu Sea. He had emphasized his distaste for bridal society by setting a table for himself and his officers on the forward deck behind the steering apparatus, thus leaving the tiny dining-room entirely to the despised passengers.Yet there had been little enough sentimentality exhibited to arouse his displeasure. Mrs. Collingwood spent her day in the steamer chair while herhusband walked the deck with his cigar or sat chatting at her side. The hospital men, covertly watching them as everybody does a bridal pair, opined that they were a “queer proposition” but quite agreed that they seemed happy.To Collingwood, the change in Charlotte’s mood was an intense relief. The hesitations and self-questionings with which she had puzzled him for a month previous had apparently been quieted by the finality of the marriage ceremony. That she was nervously worn out by the strain of the previous weeks and by the disagreeable circumstances of her quarrel with the Government he realized; and with a delicacy for which she was thoroughly grateful, he refrained from the rather ardent demonstrations of his courtship, and treated her with matter-of-fact kindness and good fellowship. She was his, and she seemed contented and at peace. It was a glorious summer day, the sea was waveless, the boat was clean and quiet, and might almost have been their private yacht, so completely were they alone. A chance observer beholding a lazy young woman in a deck chair and a quiet young fellow pacing to and fro near her might have taken them for a young married couple of some weeks’ ormonths’ standing. He would hardly have suspected a bridal couple.Yet the young man’s mind, as they steamed past the beautiful wooded heights of Mindoro, and looked up and up at the giant forests or out over the gleaming water, was a tumult of joy and triumph and wonder—the wonder being by no means in the smallest proportion. His wife was not a beautiful woman, but his lover’s eyes endowed her with every beauty as she lay scanning the tree-clad mountains. That fine quality of breeding in her which Collingwood was unable to define, but which pleased him inordinately, was never more apparent. Moreover, he had found her in times past a rather difficult person to deal with, and behold! in the Scriptural “twinkling of an eye,” her thorniness had vanished and a docility as agreeable as it was unexpected had given him fresh cause for self-gratulation.Still, as he had confessed, his temperament inclined him to retroactive investigation. So long as she proved obdurate and was not yet won, Collingwood could not analyze. But with the struggle past he had time to take up the contradictions of her attitude, and he found little to justify his bold statementthat he could read her better than she could read herself. If, as he had somewhat daringly reminded her, she was happy in his arms, it was a happiness, as he could not but realize, of less ecstatic measure than that of many of the predecessors who, with or without the sanction of an engagement, had yielded to their pressure. She was a novice at love-making, as a man less experienced than her husband would easily have guessed; and she was reticent, not only in the voluntary expression of that fact, but in response to his tentative overtures to her to confess it. Collingwood was no less puzzled by the fact than by the philosophy of life which desired its concealment. He had known many young women in his life who were not novices at love-making, but who ardently desired to be thought so.An ironical sense of his wife’s power to baffle him tempered more than one of the affectionate glances he cast upon her as he strolled back and forth beside her chair. The consciousness of her mental superiority, of her obedience to perceptions and convictions which were only half formulated in his own mind, was literally seeping through Collingwood’s brain. He was inordinately proud ofher. Her excellence was a proof of his own good taste. He felt that she was a credit to him. He did not associate her intelligence and her grace with a class distinction. On the contrary, it was one of his sources of joy that he would take her out of the masses and make her of the classes, only Martin did not use those terms. In his simple philosophy, people with money were important, and people without it were not. Miss Ponsonby had been poor. She had earned her own living. Ergo, she was nobody. But he, Martin Collingwood, would make her somebody, and when he had done so, she would fill the position to his entire satisfaction. He did not ask himself if he would come up to her expectations. He did not understand that a woman can ask for more in a husband than for a lover, a master, and a provider of the world’s goods. In spite of his public-school education, Martin Collingwood’s philosophy of life was a very primitive one, based upon a sense of sex superiority. He could realize that a woman can be a man’s inferior; but he supposed that the mere fact of his sex makes any man the equal of the proudest woman who lives.So Collingwood continued to walk the deck in afool’s paradise, and his wife lounged away her day, if not in his blissful state of ignorance, a happy and contented woman, nevertheless. There was a soundness in that primitive philosophy of her husband’s which she was proving. If Collingwood did not have all the requisites of a woman’s ideal of her husband, he had at least three-fourths of them; and Mrs. Collingwood was enough of a philosopher (little as she liked being told so) not to cavil at the missing quarter when they were hurrying away from the conditions that made that quarter vital.The coastguard steamer skirted the coast of Mindoro and then turned her nose westward. The next day, she crept up under the pinnacled heights of Peñon de Coron in a jade-green sea, and entered the channel between Coron and Bushuanga. There the water was like purple glass, save where a rush of porpoises parted it in swift pursuit of the flying-fish. Fairy islets dotted its dazzling surface while the land masses on either hand were clothed in amethystine haze.The boat lay half a day off the curving beach of Culion, and the travellers stared up at the nipa houses of the leper colony, clinging to the hillsides,and at the gray old church and the fort on the left, speaking of the day when Moroparaoswere no strangers to the peaceful locality. On the third night, it anchored in Halsey Harbor, “which is,” said Collingwood, “the last place on earth except the one we are going to live in.”To this somewhat discouraging remark, Mrs. Collingwood, who was leaning over the rail, staring into darkness and the massed bulk of land near, made no reply. Immediately after the dropping of the anchor, the captain, accompanied by his third officer and the two hospital corps men, had gone ashore to call upon the single American family which was holding Halsey Harbor. He did not invite the Collingwoods to go, glad apparently to be out of their sight for a time. They laughed at their power to arouse his distaste, and agreed that they were the gainers by his dislike. The fiery cigar tip of the officer on watch was the only reminder that the boat was not wholly in their hands.Collingwood, throwing away his cigar, slipped an arm around his wife, who never objected to petting.“It’s wonderful,” she said dreamily; “I never knew before that tree toads made silence. I thought they made noise.”The night was one of those cloudy ones which occur so frequently in the tropics, when the vapors hang low at dusk, to dissipate later. The boat seemed to be at anchor in a bay shut in by low hills, for, at one point, a rift in the clouds showed the pallor of the sky and a single star, below which the solid blackness loomed in relief, and against which a clump of bamboo teased the eye with its phantom outline. A faint chorus of insects and tree toads and the insistent cry of anikulizard suggested that the boat must be fairly close to the shore, but, as Mrs. Collingwood had said, the sounds only emphasized the stillness. Low down in the gloom—so low as to suggest a valley between the hills—a light burned steadily with a sweet and human significance in the tremendous vagueness about them.There was almost trepidation in Collingwood’s inquiry if she found it lonesome.“Not in the least. Or rather, I find it tremendously lonely, and enjoy it. Are you worrying about me when it is too late? Do not do so. I shall find plenty to occupy me on the island.”“For a woman who held back as persistently as you did, you have experienced a wonderful change of heart.”“Did you think I was afraid of loneliness?”“Lord! I didn’t know what you were afraid of, but I could see you were afraid of something. I had to take it into consideration. It was one of a lot of things working against me which I had to combat.”There came a long, long pause. Eight bells sounded. The second engineer came out on the lower deck and cursed some of the Filipino crew who had stretched themselves for a night’s rest in such a manner as to block the passage-way.“Well,” insisted Collingwood, “am I a good guesser or not?”“About the island? No, dear. My imagination took hold of that at once. The thought of living on a practically uninhabited island stirred up all the romance there is in me.”“What was it, then? Come, we’re married. Out with it!”“You told me yourself in so many words that I was coquetting with myself.”“I never said anything like that,” declared Mr.Collingwood with a vivacity inspired by a premonition of the resentment she might feel. But Charlotte only laughed.“Those were your exact words,” she insisted. “They were quite true.”“That was not all,” he persisted. “It was more serious than that. I felt something mighty heavy in the atmosphere at times.”Mrs. Collingwood reflected a few minutes. “Don’t you think,” she said then, “that any woman of mature age—of my age—would hesitate to marry a man of whose family and antecedents she knew as little as I did of yours?”“No: I don’t see what my family had to do with it. In the first place I haven’t any near relatives living now, as I told you; and if I had, you wouldn’t have married them. You have married me. As for my antecedents (I suppose you mean my conduct), I told you myself that I had been no saint. I’m just a good average citizen. I’ve known better men than I am, and I have known worse. I have not been married before; that’s the main thing, after all; and no woman ever had cause for a breach-of-promise suit against me. I had ——” (he named a man locally prominent) “writeto you and tell you that he came from the same town with me, and he knew my record was what I had told you. Besides, I didn’t give a thought to your family, and you have talked less about them than I have talked of mine.”“That is true. Do you think me secretive? There is nothing to be secretive about. But my life with my relatives was too painful to talk about, even to you.”“I saw that. I guessed it must have been hard to anybody so loving and tender as you.”“Martin, when did you form the impression that I am loving and tender?”“Well, ain’t you?”“I think so; but most people have not thought so, you know. What made you decide differently?”“Oh, that first night in the hospital after they had fixed me up in the operating room, and the chloroform wore off, and my fever came up. God! I can feel it all now! And just when I thought that I could not stand things any longer, and must yell, you came along with an ice bag and gave me a piece to suck.” His wife smiled in the darkness at his homely phraseology. “Itseemed to me I had never heard a woman’s voice in my life as soft as yours was when you said, ‘You are in great pain, I know.’”“But that was what I should have done for anybody, Martin.”“I knew it. That’s why I felt that you were gentle and loving. I would have liked to put my arms around you and cry. I wanted to be babied. It is strange, isn’t it, how physical suffering can unman a fellow?”Charlotte turned her eyes on him for an instant. He could just see their gleam by the reflection of a ray streaming out on the water from a light on the lower deck, and they were infinitely tender yet mirthful. “You understand yourself thoroughly,” she said. “You were a brave baby and a good baby but you were a baby, Martin, a great six-foot baby.”“Well, if it made you fall in love with me—“Ah! but I didn’t then. You bullied me into being in love with you. You wouldn’t give me a chance to make myself heard.”“What about that time I kissed you?” said Martin, referring to that episode for the first time since his very formal and abject letter of apology hadmet an equally formal but cold forgiveness from her.To his consternation, she drew away from him in sudden displeasure. “Perhaps we had better not speak of it.”“Why shouldn’t we speak of it? Is it a crime for a man to kiss a woman he loves? Did it contaminate you?”“I had given you no right, no encouragement.”“I’d have done it if I had known I was to be kicked out of the hospital, broken ribs and all. Besides, how is a man to know whether he has any rights till he exercises them?”Martin put the question seriously in all good faith. It was his primitive philosophy again, the simple way in which he tested women in his sphere of life. She was at a loss how to reply, and somewhat sore put to hide her inexperience in affairs of the sort. She had been brought up to believe that milkmaids kiss their young men over the gate, but that, in refined society, men offer no caresses to girls whom they respect, unless a troth has first been plighted. Had she chummed more with girls and young women, she might have learned thateven in the best of society, young people pay little heed to the strong statements of their elders, and that, wise heads to the contrary, young blood will have its toll. But Charlotte had had no chums and had never exchanged gossip over late bedroom fires. Her views on the propriety of kissing were entirely theoretical. But that kiss was a sore remembrance with her. It marked the beginning of the end. It was an opening door which gave her an instant’s glance into the kingdom of love; and from its bestowal, she had known that she was confronted with a mighty temptation to open it further and to go boldly into the fair land. How hard she had fought with the inclination, she could never tell Martin Collingwood; but she had fought, and she had lost.She glanced up at him penitently after his last speech, and marked the cessation of her involuntary resentment by slipping back into his arm. He was emboldened to make a query which had been on his tongue a dozen times, but which, up to that hour, not even the proprietary sense of the husband had enabled him to regard as discreet.“Charlotte, am I really the first man you ever cared about?”“Absolutely the first to whom I ever gave a sentimental thought.”The delighted recipient of this compliment did not, in the joy of hearing it, examine it too closely. When he did begin to speak, his wife was pleased to note that he was less inclined to investigate the cause of the phenomenon than to speculate upon its uncommonness.“I don’t know what you were about,” he said. “It’s mighty good luck for me, but—not in an uncomplimentary sense—you must have been an awful goose.”“That’s it exactly. I was an awful goose; and, being so, I had an inspiration to keep out of love.”“Why so?”“Because I was afraid of being in love. Can you understand that? Because love was altogether associated in my mind with pain—the pain of losing, and the pain of loving and of not being loved, and of being generally misunderstood.”“And all that because you were raised an orphan. I don’t think you had a fair show, old girl.”“I know I had not,” said Mrs. Collingwood decisively. She added, “But I had rather not talk about it. It makes me morbid.”“Were your folks well to do?”“They were people of considerable wealth. I do not think they ever grudged me anything I cost them. But I was in a false position in their house, and I was conscious of it. The knowledge put me at a disadvantage with all the world. It made me feel myself different from everybody else. I was self-conscious, afraid of being an object of pity. It was like failing to possess some essential article of dress that everybody else has, and trying to cover up one’s nakedness.”“That’s it. I couldn’t put it into words, but that is exactly how you acted with Barton. You seemed to shrink away from him and to be ready to fight him if he spoke pleasantly to you.”“Oh, dear! was it so bad as that?” Charlotte’s heart sank. Her way of expressing facts differed considerably from his, and the balance of vividness and realism was in his favor.“It was, just like that. But you were not that way to me. Why not?”Her woman’s wit, already quickened by her increased experience with men, showed her how to be truthful, and, in so being, how to deceive him most. “Ah! you were different,” she murmured.But after he had led her, in response to her request, back to her chair, and was pacing to and fro beside her in quiet happiness, her heart reproached her. She had not shrunk from him because she knew that he was blind, because, to carry out her simile, he could perceive nothing lacking in her raiment. But those keen eyes of Judge Barton’s had questioned her, had perceived every rag and tatter!The captain returned and called Martin to deliver to him a message from the Inhabitant of Halsey Harbor. Charlotte was left alone to her musings.She was very happy. The old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind” was proving its appositeness in her case. No one was about her who could read her, who could perceive the absence of any necessary raiment, who would be conscious that there was anything odd in her being Martin Collingwood’s wife. She had, in one decisive action, destroyed all that was holding her spirit in leash. A woman yet young, whose emotions had been stifled for a lifetime, in whom the warmth of love had been overlaid by the calculating egoism of a nature wounded to the quick, she had emancipated herself at thefortuitous moment, alive to the rapture of passion, of freedom from all the restraints that had curbed her existence. She had thrown the admonitions and the self-restraint of a life-time aside for a romance. She had (but fortunately for a time she was able to put the fact out of mind) quite justified a conventional assumption that a woman’s nature is full of primitive evil, and that you must pitch your maxims pretty strong if you would have them believed at all, and that then, ten to one, she will demolish all your precautions at a bound if an object in trousers holds out his arms. She had profited by her husband’s view. “Come what may,” she said, “I will have my romance and pay the price afterwards.”So far, the price seemed a remote contingency. With every revolution of the steamer’s screw, Manila and her distant relatives whose pride she had outraged became the mere phantoms of memory, growing paler every hour. Nothing was left but the delightful sense of being an absolute necessity to Martin—she who had been a superfluity all her life!As for Collingwood himself, his kindness, hisshrewdness, his strength were gaining constantly in her esteem. He had proved himself innately delicate and refined. Of what possible importance were a fewdeficienciesin speech, a too vivid phraseology, the lack of the little courtesies which mark a man of the world? But (and here some of her elation diminished) if they mattered so little, why had she to convince herself so eagerly? If two negatives make an affirmative, too passionate a denial sometimes constitutes an assertion. Whenever she arrived at this stage of reflection, another cloud dimmed her horizon. Was not her whole attitude a practical deception of the man himself? Would Martin Collingwood have accepted her surrender so joyfully, could he have read that it was weighted with the condition of living with him on an uninhabited island? Would not all his self-esteem repudiate such a proposition? She had not lied when she said that she loved him, but would he content himself with a definition of love which excluded all natural pride of choice, and put a compromise value upon himself? As often as she found herself confronted with these thoughts, Charlotte took refuge in a bit of casuistry. If she saw Martin with clear eyes and underrated the proportionalvalue of his attainments, did he even see her clearly at all? Did she wrong him more in reserving an opinion of his social worth than he wronged her in not perceiving that she had any social worth? The fact that every person has a real personal value and an accredited worldly value, and that most effort is directed to making these two values coincide, or appear to do so, put a convenient weapon in her hand. Since, in only a few cases, the two values are really identical, happy marriages must be the result of a marvellous luck or of a wonderful power of self-deception. Was she to be taxed for not deceiving herself? Was her intelligence to be punished when his ignorance was rewarded? As often as she thought about it, it seemed that his incapacity to value certain qualities of her own justified her in a few mental reservations.Nevertheless she was afflicted with a sense of penitence in spite of her sophistry, and when, after a long conversation with the captain, her husband came back to her and bent over her, she put up her arms and drew his face down to hers, giving him the first voluntary caress which she had bestowed upon him since the hour of her surrender upon the Luneta.“Have you thought me a selfish, ungrateful wretch?” she asked him.“Never! But I have worried a little. There’s no getting around it—you are daffy about some things, Charlotte.”“Daffy is such a beautiful word. It’s so civil. I’ll adopt it. You are not daffy about anything but me, are you, Martin?”“Kingsnorth says I’m daffy about anything that I really like.”“Tell me about Mr. Kingsnorth—all about him. Analyze him for me.”“I can’t do that sort of thing. Besides, I want you to form your own impressions. You will see him in thirty-six hours.”“So soon as that.” She drew a long breath, and fell silent.“The captain says he is going out at dawn. We ought to make Cuyo by five to-morrow afternoon, and if Mac’s there with the launch, as he surely will be, we’ll get our freight transhipped and make the run over to-morrow night. That will bring us home by dawn the day after to-morrow. Home,” he repeated softly. “I’ve dreamed many dreamsin my life and some of them have come true, but I don’t think anything stranger could have happened to me than taking my wife home to an uninhabited island in the Pacific.”“Nothing stranger could have happened to you than finding yourself married at all. Isn’t that it?”“It’s a fact,” he admitted slowly. “I was not planning to marry for many a year. I don’t know that I thought seriously about doing it at all. In fact, I was so afraid that I might be injudicious and get married—or get myself married—” he smiled in the darkness—“that I swore off even on flirtations some time before I came out here. But when you came along with the ice-bag and your nice voice, and I got a good look at you next day, all that went up in the air. I knew then and there that I wanted to get married as quick as I could. I’d been in love before a half dozen times, but I knew every time that it wasn’t a love I wanted to marry on. It don’t matter how much a man loves a woman, he don’t love her in the right way unless she does him credit. I felt that way about you. You were the kind of woman I could be proud of all my life. ‘That’s the girl for me,’ I said, andsure enough—” his pause expressed the idea that the outcome had been foreordained.His desire to compliment her was so unmistakable, his admiration was so sincere, that Charlotte was able to stifle quickly the first instinct to rebuke his unconscious patronage. His egoism, after all, was of an inoffensive variety. He was not boasting himself as a connoisseur, but was testifying to the completeness with which she satisfied his ideal. The wife lay silent for a long time, studying his face, which was just dimly visible in the glow of his cigar. When she spoke, it was as she rose from her chair.“I hope I’ll always be able to live up to your conception of me,” she said. “I mean to try.”“Nonsense,” replied the man of common sense. “You just suit me perfectly as you are. Why, you’d spoil it all if you even thought of trying. What is there to try? You areyou. I wouldn’t have the biggest fault or the smallest virtue in you altered by the ten-millionth of an inch.”When Charlotte had shut the door of her stateroom and had snapped on the light, she sank for an instant on the locker, with a face in which pride, shame, and contrition were tumultuously mingled.For why had she spent twenty-eight years acquiring tastes and criterions which, at that moment, made her seem incredibly mean and ungenerous?
Chapter V
Judge Barton had to cut short his morning ride in order to reach the San Sebastian church at seven-thirty, but he admitted to himself that he would have gone without his daily exercise rather than have missed the wedding; and he was actually ten minutes early. He found the edifice empty but pervaded with a general stir which hinted at impending events. A dirty, bare-footed sacristan in marine blue cotton drawers and a transparent shirt was opening windows and lighting a few candles about the high altar. The early morning sunlight streamed through the apertures, while the noise of street traffic outside echoed hollowly through the dusty, empty silence of the church. Sparrows flashed across the moted sunbeams and lost themselves among the violet and orange shadows of the lantern. Apobreshuffled in to mutter his devotions, and a widow and her two daughters, who had been praying before oneof the chapel altars, lingered to discover the cause of the preparations.Soon one or two men dropped in, strangers to the Judge, and friends, as he instantly decided, of Collingwood. They stood about indecisively, and stared up into the vaulted roof, and whispered to one another in funereally regulated tones. Then came a group of five or six women, whom the Judge recognized as fellow-nurses of Miss Ponsonby; and almost immediately afterwards, without ceremonial or welcome of the organ, the bride and groom appeared. Both were in white; he in the military-cut blouse which is so popular in the Philippines, she in a simple street dress of white muslin with a hat of white embroidery. The marine sacristan went to summon the priest, while the bridal pair waited quietly in the shadow of one of the Gothic pillars.When the priest, a Spaniard of ascetic and noble countenance, had arrived and was embarked upon the marriage ceremony, Judge Barton took himself to task for the flutter of nervousness which, to his great discomfiture, he found obtruding into his judicial reflections. He had come to satisfy avery natural curiosity, and the affair had taken his sympathies unaware. He had never before attended a wedding in which the seriousness of matrimonial experiment appealed to him so strongly. He never before had felt the solemn happiness which his sympathy with that bride and groom awoke in him. He stole a glance at the other witnesses; they were as preternaturally grave as he. There was even a subdued air about Collingwood, full, however, of reserved triumph. As for the bride, her pallor and fatigue were quite evident, but she had an uplifted look which was most attractive. He caught himself wondering if there would be any kissing the bride, and then he decided it was time to rein in his imagination. “Emotions by the quart!” he thought to himself. “Have I turned sentimental old woman? Champagne wouldn’t make me more maudlin.”He waited quite discreetly after the ceremony, till the young men and the group of nurses had had their say, and it had been clearly demonstrated that there would be no kissing. Then he went up and offered Mrs. Collingwood his hand. There was a genuine friendliness in his manner, a warmth andsincerity in his few words that touched her. Her own reserve melted before them. He saw her eyes suffuse, and a faint color glow in her cheek.She was instantly aware, indeed, that she occupied a new plane in his thoughts. She had gained upon him personally, and, as the wife of a man engaged in developing one of the greatest resources of the islands, and likely to become a factor of local commercial life, she would receive consideration. She knew that he regarded her marriage as amésalliance, yet by making amésallianceshe had become a person to be taken into account. Stranger situations than this happen frequently in the world—in the governmental world—and Mrs. Collingwood did not betray her intuitions.“Well, Judge,” said Martin jocosely, “the Bureau of Health did not bear down on us after all.”“No; you are a Benedict, Collingwood, and ‘whom the Lord hath joined’—I don’t know whether it is in your service or not. My Latin is rusty.”“‘Let no man, not even a Civil Commissioner, put asunder,’” Collingwood finished for him. The Judge suspected that he felt some relief inhaving the possibility of a change of mind on his bride’s part obviated, and the two men smiled at each other openly.“I feel that my troubles are ended,” said Collingwood.His wife betrayed that she was still somewhat self-conscious. “It remains for Judge Barton to be trite and to warn you that they have just begun,” she said, a little stiltedly.“Nonsense! What does it matter whether your troubles are beginning or ending? The point is that you have your present, your romance. I dare say you will have your troubles—most of us do; but to-day—” The speaker paused expressively.“That is an extremely sensible view,” replied Mrs. Collingwood. “He has not your happy gift of expression, but it is Mr. Collingwood’s also. He told me as much yesterday. I had been foolish enough to anticipate the future.”“Is that what made you look so solemn?” the Judge inquired playfully.She blushed a little and shook her head reprovingly, “It is no joking matter. Try it yourself and see how you feel. Why, even Martin looked serious.”“Frankly, I was scared to death,” Collingwood admitted. His wife laughed softly. The Judge shook hands again with the newly made husband in an access of geniality.He declined an invitation to the hotel breakfast which was all they could offer in the line of wedding festivity, but he found time later to appear aboard their boat.“Mind,” he said as he wished Mrs. Collingwood good-by, “you have not seen the last of me. I am going to appear in your island paradise sometime when you least expect me. When things get unendurable here, I shall flee to you and solitude.”“How long do you think you would endure it?” she inquired.How long will you?”“Ah! I must. I’m pledged. I shall have no excuse for repining. I took the step with my eyes open.”“Well, I fancy you do not regret leaving Manila.” In the wholeness of his suddenly acquired sympathy with her, the Judge quite forgot that he had been one of the many persons contributing to the experience which had failed to endear Manila to her.“No; my experiences here have not been altogether happy, but perhaps I was partially to blame.” She hesitated and looked over at the shining roofs, at the patches of green shrubbery relieving them, and, in the background, at the mountains where Lawton died. The launch whistled for its passengers before Judge Barton could reply, but he wrung her hand with the intensity of a lifelong friendship. And such is the perversity of the human soul that his heart ached as the launch darted up the Pasig. She had waited upon him with infinite patience and gentleness through nearly a month of illness. He had seen her daily. She had been so situated that the faintest effort of real kindness or of chivalry on his part could have won her everlasting gratitude, and probably, if he had desired it, her affection. He certainly fulfilled the ideal which her social traditions demanded of her husband more nearly than Collingwood did, and the Judge knew how to make himself liked when he wanted to. But he had not tried to be kind to Miss Ponsonby. He had been patronizing, and at times almost impertinent and unmanly. He had not a shadow of right to the grudging sense of having something that should have been his snatchedaway from him. He had even a feeling of impatience with her, a thought that she had cheated him, that she had chosen to hide her real self from him, and to reveal it cruelly at the moment when Fate put an insurmountable barrier between them. He could not stifle the miserable regrets, the sense of baffled yearning, that took possession of him. He did his best to shake off the memory of the wedding and of her face as he had seen it at the altar, but he could not do so. Mrs. Collingwood became an obsession. Before the coastguard cutter had pulled its anchor, he was wondering how soon and by what means he could invent an excuse for visiting her at her home.The coastguard steamer on the Puerta Princesa run, on which the Collingwoods had elected to go as far as Cuyo where their own launch would pick them up, drove a clean white furrow, and, as Collingwood had predicted, passed Corregidor at noon. She went out through the Boca Chica with Corregidor on the left; and Mrs. Collingwood, who was resting in her steamer chair, smiled languidly as he glanced back at the island. “Corregidor over the stern,” she murmured as if repeating some well-worn quotation, and then went on, “Have your experienceshere led you into contact with a type of man who has but one iterated and reiterated wish,—he is, by the way, usually a major in the United States army,—which wish is ‘to see Corregidor over the stern’? I do not know how many times my tongue has burned to suggest that the wisher take a coasting steamer and see it.”“Oh, the army’s sore on the Philippines,” remarked Collingwood.She eyed him reflectively. “And you, who have been in it, seem to be ‘sore’ on the army.”“That’s right,” he exclaimed heartily, “Any man who has once served his country as a high private and has gotten out is ‘agin the Government’ for the rest of his life. I came over on the troop deck of a transport, and I swore I’d go home on a liner or leave my bones here.”“Which seems likelier to be attained?” she asked, smiling idly.“Which do you think yourself? You’ve linked your fortunes with mine. Why?” he added fixing her with a sudden intensity of glance insistent for reply.His wife crimsoned and looked across the glinting sea.“I thought you answered that question to your satisfaction last night,” she murmured.“No; I tried to answer it for you. It was you that needed convincing. Here is a case of temperament,” he went on, half jocose, half serious. “So long as you hesitated and I had my side to urge, any old reason would do for me. I would clutch at a straw and hold on to it as if it were a cable. But now everything is settled and final, I want to understand. I want you to make yourself clear to me.”“But, my dear Martin! The idea is out of the question. Why, for a month you have professed to be able to make me clear to myself.”Martin ruffled his hair with a puzzled hand. “Did I?” he murmured. “Did it strike you as cheeky?”“No; I was heartily grateful. You helped me.”“In what way?”“In the way of common sense,” Charlotte said, as simply as if the remark were an everyday one, and her husband’s somewhat startled acceptance of the reply sent her into a ripple of laughter, in which, after an instant, he joined heartily.Their merriment attracted the attention of theonly other passengers, two enlisted men going out to join a hospital corps at Puerta Princesa. It also drew upon them a frown of disfavor from the captain.The captain was an old-time skipper from a tramp freighter, with the freighter’s contempt for passengers. He was not married, and he had little sympathy with the billings and cooings of newly married couples. As often as his eyes fell on the orchids and ferns and potted plants which were hanging from stanchions and cumbering his decks (Mrs. Collingwood was taking them down for the adornment of her new home) he cursed picturesquely. To his second officer he had expressed a desire for a typhoon that would roll the deadlights out of his boat, and blow the hyphenated “garden truck” into the Sulu Sea. He had emphasized his distaste for bridal society by setting a table for himself and his officers on the forward deck behind the steering apparatus, thus leaving the tiny dining-room entirely to the despised passengers.Yet there had been little enough sentimentality exhibited to arouse his displeasure. Mrs. Collingwood spent her day in the steamer chair while herhusband walked the deck with his cigar or sat chatting at her side. The hospital men, covertly watching them as everybody does a bridal pair, opined that they were a “queer proposition” but quite agreed that they seemed happy.To Collingwood, the change in Charlotte’s mood was an intense relief. The hesitations and self-questionings with which she had puzzled him for a month previous had apparently been quieted by the finality of the marriage ceremony. That she was nervously worn out by the strain of the previous weeks and by the disagreeable circumstances of her quarrel with the Government he realized; and with a delicacy for which she was thoroughly grateful, he refrained from the rather ardent demonstrations of his courtship, and treated her with matter-of-fact kindness and good fellowship. She was his, and she seemed contented and at peace. It was a glorious summer day, the sea was waveless, the boat was clean and quiet, and might almost have been their private yacht, so completely were they alone. A chance observer beholding a lazy young woman in a deck chair and a quiet young fellow pacing to and fro near her might have taken them for a young married couple of some weeks’ ormonths’ standing. He would hardly have suspected a bridal couple.Yet the young man’s mind, as they steamed past the beautiful wooded heights of Mindoro, and looked up and up at the giant forests or out over the gleaming water, was a tumult of joy and triumph and wonder—the wonder being by no means in the smallest proportion. His wife was not a beautiful woman, but his lover’s eyes endowed her with every beauty as she lay scanning the tree-clad mountains. That fine quality of breeding in her which Collingwood was unable to define, but which pleased him inordinately, was never more apparent. Moreover, he had found her in times past a rather difficult person to deal with, and behold! in the Scriptural “twinkling of an eye,” her thorniness had vanished and a docility as agreeable as it was unexpected had given him fresh cause for self-gratulation.Still, as he had confessed, his temperament inclined him to retroactive investigation. So long as she proved obdurate and was not yet won, Collingwood could not analyze. But with the struggle past he had time to take up the contradictions of her attitude, and he found little to justify his bold statementthat he could read her better than she could read herself. If, as he had somewhat daringly reminded her, she was happy in his arms, it was a happiness, as he could not but realize, of less ecstatic measure than that of many of the predecessors who, with or without the sanction of an engagement, had yielded to their pressure. She was a novice at love-making, as a man less experienced than her husband would easily have guessed; and she was reticent, not only in the voluntary expression of that fact, but in response to his tentative overtures to her to confess it. Collingwood was no less puzzled by the fact than by the philosophy of life which desired its concealment. He had known many young women in his life who were not novices at love-making, but who ardently desired to be thought so.An ironical sense of his wife’s power to baffle him tempered more than one of the affectionate glances he cast upon her as he strolled back and forth beside her chair. The consciousness of her mental superiority, of her obedience to perceptions and convictions which were only half formulated in his own mind, was literally seeping through Collingwood’s brain. He was inordinately proud ofher. Her excellence was a proof of his own good taste. He felt that she was a credit to him. He did not associate her intelligence and her grace with a class distinction. On the contrary, it was one of his sources of joy that he would take her out of the masses and make her of the classes, only Martin did not use those terms. In his simple philosophy, people with money were important, and people without it were not. Miss Ponsonby had been poor. She had earned her own living. Ergo, she was nobody. But he, Martin Collingwood, would make her somebody, and when he had done so, she would fill the position to his entire satisfaction. He did not ask himself if he would come up to her expectations. He did not understand that a woman can ask for more in a husband than for a lover, a master, and a provider of the world’s goods. In spite of his public-school education, Martin Collingwood’s philosophy of life was a very primitive one, based upon a sense of sex superiority. He could realize that a woman can be a man’s inferior; but he supposed that the mere fact of his sex makes any man the equal of the proudest woman who lives.So Collingwood continued to walk the deck in afool’s paradise, and his wife lounged away her day, if not in his blissful state of ignorance, a happy and contented woman, nevertheless. There was a soundness in that primitive philosophy of her husband’s which she was proving. If Collingwood did not have all the requisites of a woman’s ideal of her husband, he had at least three-fourths of them; and Mrs. Collingwood was enough of a philosopher (little as she liked being told so) not to cavil at the missing quarter when they were hurrying away from the conditions that made that quarter vital.The coastguard steamer skirted the coast of Mindoro and then turned her nose westward. The next day, she crept up under the pinnacled heights of Peñon de Coron in a jade-green sea, and entered the channel between Coron and Bushuanga. There the water was like purple glass, save where a rush of porpoises parted it in swift pursuit of the flying-fish. Fairy islets dotted its dazzling surface while the land masses on either hand were clothed in amethystine haze.The boat lay half a day off the curving beach of Culion, and the travellers stared up at the nipa houses of the leper colony, clinging to the hillsides,and at the gray old church and the fort on the left, speaking of the day when Moroparaoswere no strangers to the peaceful locality. On the third night, it anchored in Halsey Harbor, “which is,” said Collingwood, “the last place on earth except the one we are going to live in.”To this somewhat discouraging remark, Mrs. Collingwood, who was leaning over the rail, staring into darkness and the massed bulk of land near, made no reply. Immediately after the dropping of the anchor, the captain, accompanied by his third officer and the two hospital corps men, had gone ashore to call upon the single American family which was holding Halsey Harbor. He did not invite the Collingwoods to go, glad apparently to be out of their sight for a time. They laughed at their power to arouse his distaste, and agreed that they were the gainers by his dislike. The fiery cigar tip of the officer on watch was the only reminder that the boat was not wholly in their hands.Collingwood, throwing away his cigar, slipped an arm around his wife, who never objected to petting.“It’s wonderful,” she said dreamily; “I never knew before that tree toads made silence. I thought they made noise.”The night was one of those cloudy ones which occur so frequently in the tropics, when the vapors hang low at dusk, to dissipate later. The boat seemed to be at anchor in a bay shut in by low hills, for, at one point, a rift in the clouds showed the pallor of the sky and a single star, below which the solid blackness loomed in relief, and against which a clump of bamboo teased the eye with its phantom outline. A faint chorus of insects and tree toads and the insistent cry of anikulizard suggested that the boat must be fairly close to the shore, but, as Mrs. Collingwood had said, the sounds only emphasized the stillness. Low down in the gloom—so low as to suggest a valley between the hills—a light burned steadily with a sweet and human significance in the tremendous vagueness about them.There was almost trepidation in Collingwood’s inquiry if she found it lonesome.“Not in the least. Or rather, I find it tremendously lonely, and enjoy it. Are you worrying about me when it is too late? Do not do so. I shall find plenty to occupy me on the island.”“For a woman who held back as persistently as you did, you have experienced a wonderful change of heart.”“Did you think I was afraid of loneliness?”“Lord! I didn’t know what you were afraid of, but I could see you were afraid of something. I had to take it into consideration. It was one of a lot of things working against me which I had to combat.”There came a long, long pause. Eight bells sounded. The second engineer came out on the lower deck and cursed some of the Filipino crew who had stretched themselves for a night’s rest in such a manner as to block the passage-way.“Well,” insisted Collingwood, “am I a good guesser or not?”“About the island? No, dear. My imagination took hold of that at once. The thought of living on a practically uninhabited island stirred up all the romance there is in me.”“What was it, then? Come, we’re married. Out with it!”“You told me yourself in so many words that I was coquetting with myself.”“I never said anything like that,” declared Mr.Collingwood with a vivacity inspired by a premonition of the resentment she might feel. But Charlotte only laughed.“Those were your exact words,” she insisted. “They were quite true.”“That was not all,” he persisted. “It was more serious than that. I felt something mighty heavy in the atmosphere at times.”Mrs. Collingwood reflected a few minutes. “Don’t you think,” she said then, “that any woman of mature age—of my age—would hesitate to marry a man of whose family and antecedents she knew as little as I did of yours?”“No: I don’t see what my family had to do with it. In the first place I haven’t any near relatives living now, as I told you; and if I had, you wouldn’t have married them. You have married me. As for my antecedents (I suppose you mean my conduct), I told you myself that I had been no saint. I’m just a good average citizen. I’ve known better men than I am, and I have known worse. I have not been married before; that’s the main thing, after all; and no woman ever had cause for a breach-of-promise suit against me. I had ——” (he named a man locally prominent) “writeto you and tell you that he came from the same town with me, and he knew my record was what I had told you. Besides, I didn’t give a thought to your family, and you have talked less about them than I have talked of mine.”“That is true. Do you think me secretive? There is nothing to be secretive about. But my life with my relatives was too painful to talk about, even to you.”“I saw that. I guessed it must have been hard to anybody so loving and tender as you.”“Martin, when did you form the impression that I am loving and tender?”“Well, ain’t you?”“I think so; but most people have not thought so, you know. What made you decide differently?”“Oh, that first night in the hospital after they had fixed me up in the operating room, and the chloroform wore off, and my fever came up. God! I can feel it all now! And just when I thought that I could not stand things any longer, and must yell, you came along with an ice bag and gave me a piece to suck.” His wife smiled in the darkness at his homely phraseology. “Itseemed to me I had never heard a woman’s voice in my life as soft as yours was when you said, ‘You are in great pain, I know.’”“But that was what I should have done for anybody, Martin.”“I knew it. That’s why I felt that you were gentle and loving. I would have liked to put my arms around you and cry. I wanted to be babied. It is strange, isn’t it, how physical suffering can unman a fellow?”Charlotte turned her eyes on him for an instant. He could just see their gleam by the reflection of a ray streaming out on the water from a light on the lower deck, and they were infinitely tender yet mirthful. “You understand yourself thoroughly,” she said. “You were a brave baby and a good baby but you were a baby, Martin, a great six-foot baby.”“Well, if it made you fall in love with me—“Ah! but I didn’t then. You bullied me into being in love with you. You wouldn’t give me a chance to make myself heard.”“What about that time I kissed you?” said Martin, referring to that episode for the first time since his very formal and abject letter of apology hadmet an equally formal but cold forgiveness from her.To his consternation, she drew away from him in sudden displeasure. “Perhaps we had better not speak of it.”“Why shouldn’t we speak of it? Is it a crime for a man to kiss a woman he loves? Did it contaminate you?”“I had given you no right, no encouragement.”“I’d have done it if I had known I was to be kicked out of the hospital, broken ribs and all. Besides, how is a man to know whether he has any rights till he exercises them?”Martin put the question seriously in all good faith. It was his primitive philosophy again, the simple way in which he tested women in his sphere of life. She was at a loss how to reply, and somewhat sore put to hide her inexperience in affairs of the sort. She had been brought up to believe that milkmaids kiss their young men over the gate, but that, in refined society, men offer no caresses to girls whom they respect, unless a troth has first been plighted. Had she chummed more with girls and young women, she might have learned thateven in the best of society, young people pay little heed to the strong statements of their elders, and that, wise heads to the contrary, young blood will have its toll. But Charlotte had had no chums and had never exchanged gossip over late bedroom fires. Her views on the propriety of kissing were entirely theoretical. But that kiss was a sore remembrance with her. It marked the beginning of the end. It was an opening door which gave her an instant’s glance into the kingdom of love; and from its bestowal, she had known that she was confronted with a mighty temptation to open it further and to go boldly into the fair land. How hard she had fought with the inclination, she could never tell Martin Collingwood; but she had fought, and she had lost.She glanced up at him penitently after his last speech, and marked the cessation of her involuntary resentment by slipping back into his arm. He was emboldened to make a query which had been on his tongue a dozen times, but which, up to that hour, not even the proprietary sense of the husband had enabled him to regard as discreet.“Charlotte, am I really the first man you ever cared about?”“Absolutely the first to whom I ever gave a sentimental thought.”The delighted recipient of this compliment did not, in the joy of hearing it, examine it too closely. When he did begin to speak, his wife was pleased to note that he was less inclined to investigate the cause of the phenomenon than to speculate upon its uncommonness.“I don’t know what you were about,” he said. “It’s mighty good luck for me, but—not in an uncomplimentary sense—you must have been an awful goose.”“That’s it exactly. I was an awful goose; and, being so, I had an inspiration to keep out of love.”“Why so?”“Because I was afraid of being in love. Can you understand that? Because love was altogether associated in my mind with pain—the pain of losing, and the pain of loving and of not being loved, and of being generally misunderstood.”“And all that because you were raised an orphan. I don’t think you had a fair show, old girl.”“I know I had not,” said Mrs. Collingwood decisively. She added, “But I had rather not talk about it. It makes me morbid.”“Were your folks well to do?”“They were people of considerable wealth. I do not think they ever grudged me anything I cost them. But I was in a false position in their house, and I was conscious of it. The knowledge put me at a disadvantage with all the world. It made me feel myself different from everybody else. I was self-conscious, afraid of being an object of pity. It was like failing to possess some essential article of dress that everybody else has, and trying to cover up one’s nakedness.”“That’s it. I couldn’t put it into words, but that is exactly how you acted with Barton. You seemed to shrink away from him and to be ready to fight him if he spoke pleasantly to you.”“Oh, dear! was it so bad as that?” Charlotte’s heart sank. Her way of expressing facts differed considerably from his, and the balance of vividness and realism was in his favor.“It was, just like that. But you were not that way to me. Why not?”Her woman’s wit, already quickened by her increased experience with men, showed her how to be truthful, and, in so being, how to deceive him most. “Ah! you were different,” she murmured.But after he had led her, in response to her request, back to her chair, and was pacing to and fro beside her in quiet happiness, her heart reproached her. She had not shrunk from him because she knew that he was blind, because, to carry out her simile, he could perceive nothing lacking in her raiment. But those keen eyes of Judge Barton’s had questioned her, had perceived every rag and tatter!The captain returned and called Martin to deliver to him a message from the Inhabitant of Halsey Harbor. Charlotte was left alone to her musings.She was very happy. The old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind” was proving its appositeness in her case. No one was about her who could read her, who could perceive the absence of any necessary raiment, who would be conscious that there was anything odd in her being Martin Collingwood’s wife. She had, in one decisive action, destroyed all that was holding her spirit in leash. A woman yet young, whose emotions had been stifled for a lifetime, in whom the warmth of love had been overlaid by the calculating egoism of a nature wounded to the quick, she had emancipated herself at thefortuitous moment, alive to the rapture of passion, of freedom from all the restraints that had curbed her existence. She had thrown the admonitions and the self-restraint of a life-time aside for a romance. She had (but fortunately for a time she was able to put the fact out of mind) quite justified a conventional assumption that a woman’s nature is full of primitive evil, and that you must pitch your maxims pretty strong if you would have them believed at all, and that then, ten to one, she will demolish all your precautions at a bound if an object in trousers holds out his arms. She had profited by her husband’s view. “Come what may,” she said, “I will have my romance and pay the price afterwards.”So far, the price seemed a remote contingency. With every revolution of the steamer’s screw, Manila and her distant relatives whose pride she had outraged became the mere phantoms of memory, growing paler every hour. Nothing was left but the delightful sense of being an absolute necessity to Martin—she who had been a superfluity all her life!As for Collingwood himself, his kindness, hisshrewdness, his strength were gaining constantly in her esteem. He had proved himself innately delicate and refined. Of what possible importance were a fewdeficienciesin speech, a too vivid phraseology, the lack of the little courtesies which mark a man of the world? But (and here some of her elation diminished) if they mattered so little, why had she to convince herself so eagerly? If two negatives make an affirmative, too passionate a denial sometimes constitutes an assertion. Whenever she arrived at this stage of reflection, another cloud dimmed her horizon. Was not her whole attitude a practical deception of the man himself? Would Martin Collingwood have accepted her surrender so joyfully, could he have read that it was weighted with the condition of living with him on an uninhabited island? Would not all his self-esteem repudiate such a proposition? She had not lied when she said that she loved him, but would he content himself with a definition of love which excluded all natural pride of choice, and put a compromise value upon himself? As often as she found herself confronted with these thoughts, Charlotte took refuge in a bit of casuistry. If she saw Martin with clear eyes and underrated the proportionalvalue of his attainments, did he even see her clearly at all? Did she wrong him more in reserving an opinion of his social worth than he wronged her in not perceiving that she had any social worth? The fact that every person has a real personal value and an accredited worldly value, and that most effort is directed to making these two values coincide, or appear to do so, put a convenient weapon in her hand. Since, in only a few cases, the two values are really identical, happy marriages must be the result of a marvellous luck or of a wonderful power of self-deception. Was she to be taxed for not deceiving herself? Was her intelligence to be punished when his ignorance was rewarded? As often as she thought about it, it seemed that his incapacity to value certain qualities of her own justified her in a few mental reservations.Nevertheless she was afflicted with a sense of penitence in spite of her sophistry, and when, after a long conversation with the captain, her husband came back to her and bent over her, she put up her arms and drew his face down to hers, giving him the first voluntary caress which she had bestowed upon him since the hour of her surrender upon the Luneta.“Have you thought me a selfish, ungrateful wretch?” she asked him.“Never! But I have worried a little. There’s no getting around it—you are daffy about some things, Charlotte.”“Daffy is such a beautiful word. It’s so civil. I’ll adopt it. You are not daffy about anything but me, are you, Martin?”“Kingsnorth says I’m daffy about anything that I really like.”“Tell me about Mr. Kingsnorth—all about him. Analyze him for me.”“I can’t do that sort of thing. Besides, I want you to form your own impressions. You will see him in thirty-six hours.”“So soon as that.” She drew a long breath, and fell silent.“The captain says he is going out at dawn. We ought to make Cuyo by five to-morrow afternoon, and if Mac’s there with the launch, as he surely will be, we’ll get our freight transhipped and make the run over to-morrow night. That will bring us home by dawn the day after to-morrow. Home,” he repeated softly. “I’ve dreamed many dreamsin my life and some of them have come true, but I don’t think anything stranger could have happened to me than taking my wife home to an uninhabited island in the Pacific.”“Nothing stranger could have happened to you than finding yourself married at all. Isn’t that it?”“It’s a fact,” he admitted slowly. “I was not planning to marry for many a year. I don’t know that I thought seriously about doing it at all. In fact, I was so afraid that I might be injudicious and get married—or get myself married—” he smiled in the darkness—“that I swore off even on flirtations some time before I came out here. But when you came along with the ice-bag and your nice voice, and I got a good look at you next day, all that went up in the air. I knew then and there that I wanted to get married as quick as I could. I’d been in love before a half dozen times, but I knew every time that it wasn’t a love I wanted to marry on. It don’t matter how much a man loves a woman, he don’t love her in the right way unless she does him credit. I felt that way about you. You were the kind of woman I could be proud of all my life. ‘That’s the girl for me,’ I said, andsure enough—” his pause expressed the idea that the outcome had been foreordained.His desire to compliment her was so unmistakable, his admiration was so sincere, that Charlotte was able to stifle quickly the first instinct to rebuke his unconscious patronage. His egoism, after all, was of an inoffensive variety. He was not boasting himself as a connoisseur, but was testifying to the completeness with which she satisfied his ideal. The wife lay silent for a long time, studying his face, which was just dimly visible in the glow of his cigar. When she spoke, it was as she rose from her chair.“I hope I’ll always be able to live up to your conception of me,” she said. “I mean to try.”“Nonsense,” replied the man of common sense. “You just suit me perfectly as you are. Why, you’d spoil it all if you even thought of trying. What is there to try? You areyou. I wouldn’t have the biggest fault or the smallest virtue in you altered by the ten-millionth of an inch.”When Charlotte had shut the door of her stateroom and had snapped on the light, she sank for an instant on the locker, with a face in which pride, shame, and contrition were tumultuously mingled.For why had she spent twenty-eight years acquiring tastes and criterions which, at that moment, made her seem incredibly mean and ungenerous?
Judge Barton had to cut short his morning ride in order to reach the San Sebastian church at seven-thirty, but he admitted to himself that he would have gone without his daily exercise rather than have missed the wedding; and he was actually ten minutes early. He found the edifice empty but pervaded with a general stir which hinted at impending events. A dirty, bare-footed sacristan in marine blue cotton drawers and a transparent shirt was opening windows and lighting a few candles about the high altar. The early morning sunlight streamed through the apertures, while the noise of street traffic outside echoed hollowly through the dusty, empty silence of the church. Sparrows flashed across the moted sunbeams and lost themselves among the violet and orange shadows of the lantern. Apobreshuffled in to mutter his devotions, and a widow and her two daughters, who had been praying before oneof the chapel altars, lingered to discover the cause of the preparations.
Soon one or two men dropped in, strangers to the Judge, and friends, as he instantly decided, of Collingwood. They stood about indecisively, and stared up into the vaulted roof, and whispered to one another in funereally regulated tones. Then came a group of five or six women, whom the Judge recognized as fellow-nurses of Miss Ponsonby; and almost immediately afterwards, without ceremonial or welcome of the organ, the bride and groom appeared. Both were in white; he in the military-cut blouse which is so popular in the Philippines, she in a simple street dress of white muslin with a hat of white embroidery. The marine sacristan went to summon the priest, while the bridal pair waited quietly in the shadow of one of the Gothic pillars.
When the priest, a Spaniard of ascetic and noble countenance, had arrived and was embarked upon the marriage ceremony, Judge Barton took himself to task for the flutter of nervousness which, to his great discomfiture, he found obtruding into his judicial reflections. He had come to satisfy avery natural curiosity, and the affair had taken his sympathies unaware. He had never before attended a wedding in which the seriousness of matrimonial experiment appealed to him so strongly. He never before had felt the solemn happiness which his sympathy with that bride and groom awoke in him. He stole a glance at the other witnesses; they were as preternaturally grave as he. There was even a subdued air about Collingwood, full, however, of reserved triumph. As for the bride, her pallor and fatigue were quite evident, but she had an uplifted look which was most attractive. He caught himself wondering if there would be any kissing the bride, and then he decided it was time to rein in his imagination. “Emotions by the quart!” he thought to himself. “Have I turned sentimental old woman? Champagne wouldn’t make me more maudlin.”
He waited quite discreetly after the ceremony, till the young men and the group of nurses had had their say, and it had been clearly demonstrated that there would be no kissing. Then he went up and offered Mrs. Collingwood his hand. There was a genuine friendliness in his manner, a warmth andsincerity in his few words that touched her. Her own reserve melted before them. He saw her eyes suffuse, and a faint color glow in her cheek.
She was instantly aware, indeed, that she occupied a new plane in his thoughts. She had gained upon him personally, and, as the wife of a man engaged in developing one of the greatest resources of the islands, and likely to become a factor of local commercial life, she would receive consideration. She knew that he regarded her marriage as amésalliance, yet by making amésallianceshe had become a person to be taken into account. Stranger situations than this happen frequently in the world—in the governmental world—and Mrs. Collingwood did not betray her intuitions.
“Well, Judge,” said Martin jocosely, “the Bureau of Health did not bear down on us after all.”
“No; you are a Benedict, Collingwood, and ‘whom the Lord hath joined’—I don’t know whether it is in your service or not. My Latin is rusty.”
“‘Let no man, not even a Civil Commissioner, put asunder,’” Collingwood finished for him. The Judge suspected that he felt some relief inhaving the possibility of a change of mind on his bride’s part obviated, and the two men smiled at each other openly.
“I feel that my troubles are ended,” said Collingwood.
His wife betrayed that she was still somewhat self-conscious. “It remains for Judge Barton to be trite and to warn you that they have just begun,” she said, a little stiltedly.
“Nonsense! What does it matter whether your troubles are beginning or ending? The point is that you have your present, your romance. I dare say you will have your troubles—most of us do; but to-day—” The speaker paused expressively.
“That is an extremely sensible view,” replied Mrs. Collingwood. “He has not your happy gift of expression, but it is Mr. Collingwood’s also. He told me as much yesterday. I had been foolish enough to anticipate the future.”
“Is that what made you look so solemn?” the Judge inquired playfully.
She blushed a little and shook her head reprovingly, “It is no joking matter. Try it yourself and see how you feel. Why, even Martin looked serious.”
“Frankly, I was scared to death,” Collingwood admitted. His wife laughed softly. The Judge shook hands again with the newly made husband in an access of geniality.
He declined an invitation to the hotel breakfast which was all they could offer in the line of wedding festivity, but he found time later to appear aboard their boat.
“Mind,” he said as he wished Mrs. Collingwood good-by, “you have not seen the last of me. I am going to appear in your island paradise sometime when you least expect me. When things get unendurable here, I shall flee to you and solitude.”
“How long do you think you would endure it?” she inquired.
How long will you?”
“Ah! I must. I’m pledged. I shall have no excuse for repining. I took the step with my eyes open.”
“Well, I fancy you do not regret leaving Manila.” In the wholeness of his suddenly acquired sympathy with her, the Judge quite forgot that he had been one of the many persons contributing to the experience which had failed to endear Manila to her.
“No; my experiences here have not been altogether happy, but perhaps I was partially to blame.” She hesitated and looked over at the shining roofs, at the patches of green shrubbery relieving them, and, in the background, at the mountains where Lawton died. The launch whistled for its passengers before Judge Barton could reply, but he wrung her hand with the intensity of a lifelong friendship. And such is the perversity of the human soul that his heart ached as the launch darted up the Pasig. She had waited upon him with infinite patience and gentleness through nearly a month of illness. He had seen her daily. She had been so situated that the faintest effort of real kindness or of chivalry on his part could have won her everlasting gratitude, and probably, if he had desired it, her affection. He certainly fulfilled the ideal which her social traditions demanded of her husband more nearly than Collingwood did, and the Judge knew how to make himself liked when he wanted to. But he had not tried to be kind to Miss Ponsonby. He had been patronizing, and at times almost impertinent and unmanly. He had not a shadow of right to the grudging sense of having something that should have been his snatchedaway from him. He had even a feeling of impatience with her, a thought that she had cheated him, that she had chosen to hide her real self from him, and to reveal it cruelly at the moment when Fate put an insurmountable barrier between them. He could not stifle the miserable regrets, the sense of baffled yearning, that took possession of him. He did his best to shake off the memory of the wedding and of her face as he had seen it at the altar, but he could not do so. Mrs. Collingwood became an obsession. Before the coastguard cutter had pulled its anchor, he was wondering how soon and by what means he could invent an excuse for visiting her at her home.
The coastguard steamer on the Puerta Princesa run, on which the Collingwoods had elected to go as far as Cuyo where their own launch would pick them up, drove a clean white furrow, and, as Collingwood had predicted, passed Corregidor at noon. She went out through the Boca Chica with Corregidor on the left; and Mrs. Collingwood, who was resting in her steamer chair, smiled languidly as he glanced back at the island. “Corregidor over the stern,” she murmured as if repeating some well-worn quotation, and then went on, “Have your experienceshere led you into contact with a type of man who has but one iterated and reiterated wish,—he is, by the way, usually a major in the United States army,—which wish is ‘to see Corregidor over the stern’? I do not know how many times my tongue has burned to suggest that the wisher take a coasting steamer and see it.”
“Oh, the army’s sore on the Philippines,” remarked Collingwood.
She eyed him reflectively. “And you, who have been in it, seem to be ‘sore’ on the army.”
“That’s right,” he exclaimed heartily, “Any man who has once served his country as a high private and has gotten out is ‘agin the Government’ for the rest of his life. I came over on the troop deck of a transport, and I swore I’d go home on a liner or leave my bones here.”
“Which seems likelier to be attained?” she asked, smiling idly.
“Which do you think yourself? You’ve linked your fortunes with mine. Why?” he added fixing her with a sudden intensity of glance insistent for reply.
His wife crimsoned and looked across the glinting sea.
“I thought you answered that question to your satisfaction last night,” she murmured.
“No; I tried to answer it for you. It was you that needed convincing. Here is a case of temperament,” he went on, half jocose, half serious. “So long as you hesitated and I had my side to urge, any old reason would do for me. I would clutch at a straw and hold on to it as if it were a cable. But now everything is settled and final, I want to understand. I want you to make yourself clear to me.”
“But, my dear Martin! The idea is out of the question. Why, for a month you have professed to be able to make me clear to myself.”
Martin ruffled his hair with a puzzled hand. “Did I?” he murmured. “Did it strike you as cheeky?”
“No; I was heartily grateful. You helped me.”
“In what way?”
“In the way of common sense,” Charlotte said, as simply as if the remark were an everyday one, and her husband’s somewhat startled acceptance of the reply sent her into a ripple of laughter, in which, after an instant, he joined heartily.
Their merriment attracted the attention of theonly other passengers, two enlisted men going out to join a hospital corps at Puerta Princesa. It also drew upon them a frown of disfavor from the captain.
The captain was an old-time skipper from a tramp freighter, with the freighter’s contempt for passengers. He was not married, and he had little sympathy with the billings and cooings of newly married couples. As often as his eyes fell on the orchids and ferns and potted plants which were hanging from stanchions and cumbering his decks (Mrs. Collingwood was taking them down for the adornment of her new home) he cursed picturesquely. To his second officer he had expressed a desire for a typhoon that would roll the deadlights out of his boat, and blow the hyphenated “garden truck” into the Sulu Sea. He had emphasized his distaste for bridal society by setting a table for himself and his officers on the forward deck behind the steering apparatus, thus leaving the tiny dining-room entirely to the despised passengers.
Yet there had been little enough sentimentality exhibited to arouse his displeasure. Mrs. Collingwood spent her day in the steamer chair while herhusband walked the deck with his cigar or sat chatting at her side. The hospital men, covertly watching them as everybody does a bridal pair, opined that they were a “queer proposition” but quite agreed that they seemed happy.
To Collingwood, the change in Charlotte’s mood was an intense relief. The hesitations and self-questionings with which she had puzzled him for a month previous had apparently been quieted by the finality of the marriage ceremony. That she was nervously worn out by the strain of the previous weeks and by the disagreeable circumstances of her quarrel with the Government he realized; and with a delicacy for which she was thoroughly grateful, he refrained from the rather ardent demonstrations of his courtship, and treated her with matter-of-fact kindness and good fellowship. She was his, and she seemed contented and at peace. It was a glorious summer day, the sea was waveless, the boat was clean and quiet, and might almost have been their private yacht, so completely were they alone. A chance observer beholding a lazy young woman in a deck chair and a quiet young fellow pacing to and fro near her might have taken them for a young married couple of some weeks’ ormonths’ standing. He would hardly have suspected a bridal couple.
Yet the young man’s mind, as they steamed past the beautiful wooded heights of Mindoro, and looked up and up at the giant forests or out over the gleaming water, was a tumult of joy and triumph and wonder—the wonder being by no means in the smallest proportion. His wife was not a beautiful woman, but his lover’s eyes endowed her with every beauty as she lay scanning the tree-clad mountains. That fine quality of breeding in her which Collingwood was unable to define, but which pleased him inordinately, was never more apparent. Moreover, he had found her in times past a rather difficult person to deal with, and behold! in the Scriptural “twinkling of an eye,” her thorniness had vanished and a docility as agreeable as it was unexpected had given him fresh cause for self-gratulation.
Still, as he had confessed, his temperament inclined him to retroactive investigation. So long as she proved obdurate and was not yet won, Collingwood could not analyze. But with the struggle past he had time to take up the contradictions of her attitude, and he found little to justify his bold statementthat he could read her better than she could read herself. If, as he had somewhat daringly reminded her, she was happy in his arms, it was a happiness, as he could not but realize, of less ecstatic measure than that of many of the predecessors who, with or without the sanction of an engagement, had yielded to their pressure. She was a novice at love-making, as a man less experienced than her husband would easily have guessed; and she was reticent, not only in the voluntary expression of that fact, but in response to his tentative overtures to her to confess it. Collingwood was no less puzzled by the fact than by the philosophy of life which desired its concealment. He had known many young women in his life who were not novices at love-making, but who ardently desired to be thought so.
An ironical sense of his wife’s power to baffle him tempered more than one of the affectionate glances he cast upon her as he strolled back and forth beside her chair. The consciousness of her mental superiority, of her obedience to perceptions and convictions which were only half formulated in his own mind, was literally seeping through Collingwood’s brain. He was inordinately proud ofher. Her excellence was a proof of his own good taste. He felt that she was a credit to him. He did not associate her intelligence and her grace with a class distinction. On the contrary, it was one of his sources of joy that he would take her out of the masses and make her of the classes, only Martin did not use those terms. In his simple philosophy, people with money were important, and people without it were not. Miss Ponsonby had been poor. She had earned her own living. Ergo, she was nobody. But he, Martin Collingwood, would make her somebody, and when he had done so, she would fill the position to his entire satisfaction. He did not ask himself if he would come up to her expectations. He did not understand that a woman can ask for more in a husband than for a lover, a master, and a provider of the world’s goods. In spite of his public-school education, Martin Collingwood’s philosophy of life was a very primitive one, based upon a sense of sex superiority. He could realize that a woman can be a man’s inferior; but he supposed that the mere fact of his sex makes any man the equal of the proudest woman who lives.
So Collingwood continued to walk the deck in afool’s paradise, and his wife lounged away her day, if not in his blissful state of ignorance, a happy and contented woman, nevertheless. There was a soundness in that primitive philosophy of her husband’s which she was proving. If Collingwood did not have all the requisites of a woman’s ideal of her husband, he had at least three-fourths of them; and Mrs. Collingwood was enough of a philosopher (little as she liked being told so) not to cavil at the missing quarter when they were hurrying away from the conditions that made that quarter vital.
The coastguard steamer skirted the coast of Mindoro and then turned her nose westward. The next day, she crept up under the pinnacled heights of Peñon de Coron in a jade-green sea, and entered the channel between Coron and Bushuanga. There the water was like purple glass, save where a rush of porpoises parted it in swift pursuit of the flying-fish. Fairy islets dotted its dazzling surface while the land masses on either hand were clothed in amethystine haze.
The boat lay half a day off the curving beach of Culion, and the travellers stared up at the nipa houses of the leper colony, clinging to the hillsides,and at the gray old church and the fort on the left, speaking of the day when Moroparaoswere no strangers to the peaceful locality. On the third night, it anchored in Halsey Harbor, “which is,” said Collingwood, “the last place on earth except the one we are going to live in.”
To this somewhat discouraging remark, Mrs. Collingwood, who was leaning over the rail, staring into darkness and the massed bulk of land near, made no reply. Immediately after the dropping of the anchor, the captain, accompanied by his third officer and the two hospital corps men, had gone ashore to call upon the single American family which was holding Halsey Harbor. He did not invite the Collingwoods to go, glad apparently to be out of their sight for a time. They laughed at their power to arouse his distaste, and agreed that they were the gainers by his dislike. The fiery cigar tip of the officer on watch was the only reminder that the boat was not wholly in their hands.
Collingwood, throwing away his cigar, slipped an arm around his wife, who never objected to petting.
“It’s wonderful,” she said dreamily; “I never knew before that tree toads made silence. I thought they made noise.”
The night was one of those cloudy ones which occur so frequently in the tropics, when the vapors hang low at dusk, to dissipate later. The boat seemed to be at anchor in a bay shut in by low hills, for, at one point, a rift in the clouds showed the pallor of the sky and a single star, below which the solid blackness loomed in relief, and against which a clump of bamboo teased the eye with its phantom outline. A faint chorus of insects and tree toads and the insistent cry of anikulizard suggested that the boat must be fairly close to the shore, but, as Mrs. Collingwood had said, the sounds only emphasized the stillness. Low down in the gloom—so low as to suggest a valley between the hills—a light burned steadily with a sweet and human significance in the tremendous vagueness about them.
There was almost trepidation in Collingwood’s inquiry if she found it lonesome.
“Not in the least. Or rather, I find it tremendously lonely, and enjoy it. Are you worrying about me when it is too late? Do not do so. I shall find plenty to occupy me on the island.”
“For a woman who held back as persistently as you did, you have experienced a wonderful change of heart.”
“Did you think I was afraid of loneliness?”
“Lord! I didn’t know what you were afraid of, but I could see you were afraid of something. I had to take it into consideration. It was one of a lot of things working against me which I had to combat.”
There came a long, long pause. Eight bells sounded. The second engineer came out on the lower deck and cursed some of the Filipino crew who had stretched themselves for a night’s rest in such a manner as to block the passage-way.
“Well,” insisted Collingwood, “am I a good guesser or not?”
“About the island? No, dear. My imagination took hold of that at once. The thought of living on a practically uninhabited island stirred up all the romance there is in me.”
“What was it, then? Come, we’re married. Out with it!”
“You told me yourself in so many words that I was coquetting with myself.”
“I never said anything like that,” declared Mr.Collingwood with a vivacity inspired by a premonition of the resentment she might feel. But Charlotte only laughed.
“Those were your exact words,” she insisted. “They were quite true.”
“That was not all,” he persisted. “It was more serious than that. I felt something mighty heavy in the atmosphere at times.”
Mrs. Collingwood reflected a few minutes. “Don’t you think,” she said then, “that any woman of mature age—of my age—would hesitate to marry a man of whose family and antecedents she knew as little as I did of yours?”
“No: I don’t see what my family had to do with it. In the first place I haven’t any near relatives living now, as I told you; and if I had, you wouldn’t have married them. You have married me. As for my antecedents (I suppose you mean my conduct), I told you myself that I had been no saint. I’m just a good average citizen. I’ve known better men than I am, and I have known worse. I have not been married before; that’s the main thing, after all; and no woman ever had cause for a breach-of-promise suit against me. I had ——” (he named a man locally prominent) “writeto you and tell you that he came from the same town with me, and he knew my record was what I had told you. Besides, I didn’t give a thought to your family, and you have talked less about them than I have talked of mine.”
“That is true. Do you think me secretive? There is nothing to be secretive about. But my life with my relatives was too painful to talk about, even to you.”
“I saw that. I guessed it must have been hard to anybody so loving and tender as you.”
“Martin, when did you form the impression that I am loving and tender?”
“Well, ain’t you?”
“I think so; but most people have not thought so, you know. What made you decide differently?”
“Oh, that first night in the hospital after they had fixed me up in the operating room, and the chloroform wore off, and my fever came up. God! I can feel it all now! And just when I thought that I could not stand things any longer, and must yell, you came along with an ice bag and gave me a piece to suck.” His wife smiled in the darkness at his homely phraseology. “Itseemed to me I had never heard a woman’s voice in my life as soft as yours was when you said, ‘You are in great pain, I know.’”
“But that was what I should have done for anybody, Martin.”
“I knew it. That’s why I felt that you were gentle and loving. I would have liked to put my arms around you and cry. I wanted to be babied. It is strange, isn’t it, how physical suffering can unman a fellow?”
Charlotte turned her eyes on him for an instant. He could just see their gleam by the reflection of a ray streaming out on the water from a light on the lower deck, and they were infinitely tender yet mirthful. “You understand yourself thoroughly,” she said. “You were a brave baby and a good baby but you were a baby, Martin, a great six-foot baby.”
“Well, if it made you fall in love with me—
“Ah! but I didn’t then. You bullied me into being in love with you. You wouldn’t give me a chance to make myself heard.”
“What about that time I kissed you?” said Martin, referring to that episode for the first time since his very formal and abject letter of apology hadmet an equally formal but cold forgiveness from her.
To his consternation, she drew away from him in sudden displeasure. “Perhaps we had better not speak of it.”
“Why shouldn’t we speak of it? Is it a crime for a man to kiss a woman he loves? Did it contaminate you?”
“I had given you no right, no encouragement.”
“I’d have done it if I had known I was to be kicked out of the hospital, broken ribs and all. Besides, how is a man to know whether he has any rights till he exercises them?”
Martin put the question seriously in all good faith. It was his primitive philosophy again, the simple way in which he tested women in his sphere of life. She was at a loss how to reply, and somewhat sore put to hide her inexperience in affairs of the sort. She had been brought up to believe that milkmaids kiss their young men over the gate, but that, in refined society, men offer no caresses to girls whom they respect, unless a troth has first been plighted. Had she chummed more with girls and young women, she might have learned thateven in the best of society, young people pay little heed to the strong statements of their elders, and that, wise heads to the contrary, young blood will have its toll. But Charlotte had had no chums and had never exchanged gossip over late bedroom fires. Her views on the propriety of kissing were entirely theoretical. But that kiss was a sore remembrance with her. It marked the beginning of the end. It was an opening door which gave her an instant’s glance into the kingdom of love; and from its bestowal, she had known that she was confronted with a mighty temptation to open it further and to go boldly into the fair land. How hard she had fought with the inclination, she could never tell Martin Collingwood; but she had fought, and she had lost.
She glanced up at him penitently after his last speech, and marked the cessation of her involuntary resentment by slipping back into his arm. He was emboldened to make a query which had been on his tongue a dozen times, but which, up to that hour, not even the proprietary sense of the husband had enabled him to regard as discreet.
“Charlotte, am I really the first man you ever cared about?”
“Absolutely the first to whom I ever gave a sentimental thought.”
The delighted recipient of this compliment did not, in the joy of hearing it, examine it too closely. When he did begin to speak, his wife was pleased to note that he was less inclined to investigate the cause of the phenomenon than to speculate upon its uncommonness.
“I don’t know what you were about,” he said. “It’s mighty good luck for me, but—not in an uncomplimentary sense—you must have been an awful goose.”
“That’s it exactly. I was an awful goose; and, being so, I had an inspiration to keep out of love.”
“Why so?”
“Because I was afraid of being in love. Can you understand that? Because love was altogether associated in my mind with pain—the pain of losing, and the pain of loving and of not being loved, and of being generally misunderstood.”
“And all that because you were raised an orphan. I don’t think you had a fair show, old girl.”
“I know I had not,” said Mrs. Collingwood decisively. She added, “But I had rather not talk about it. It makes me morbid.”
“Were your folks well to do?”
“They were people of considerable wealth. I do not think they ever grudged me anything I cost them. But I was in a false position in their house, and I was conscious of it. The knowledge put me at a disadvantage with all the world. It made me feel myself different from everybody else. I was self-conscious, afraid of being an object of pity. It was like failing to possess some essential article of dress that everybody else has, and trying to cover up one’s nakedness.”
“That’s it. I couldn’t put it into words, but that is exactly how you acted with Barton. You seemed to shrink away from him and to be ready to fight him if he spoke pleasantly to you.”
“Oh, dear! was it so bad as that?” Charlotte’s heart sank. Her way of expressing facts differed considerably from his, and the balance of vividness and realism was in his favor.
“It was, just like that. But you were not that way to me. Why not?”
Her woman’s wit, already quickened by her increased experience with men, showed her how to be truthful, and, in so being, how to deceive him most. “Ah! you were different,” she murmured.But after he had led her, in response to her request, back to her chair, and was pacing to and fro beside her in quiet happiness, her heart reproached her. She had not shrunk from him because she knew that he was blind, because, to carry out her simile, he could perceive nothing lacking in her raiment. But those keen eyes of Judge Barton’s had questioned her, had perceived every rag and tatter!
The captain returned and called Martin to deliver to him a message from the Inhabitant of Halsey Harbor. Charlotte was left alone to her musings.
She was very happy. The old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind” was proving its appositeness in her case. No one was about her who could read her, who could perceive the absence of any necessary raiment, who would be conscious that there was anything odd in her being Martin Collingwood’s wife. She had, in one decisive action, destroyed all that was holding her spirit in leash. A woman yet young, whose emotions had been stifled for a lifetime, in whom the warmth of love had been overlaid by the calculating egoism of a nature wounded to the quick, she had emancipated herself at thefortuitous moment, alive to the rapture of passion, of freedom from all the restraints that had curbed her existence. She had thrown the admonitions and the self-restraint of a life-time aside for a romance. She had (but fortunately for a time she was able to put the fact out of mind) quite justified a conventional assumption that a woman’s nature is full of primitive evil, and that you must pitch your maxims pretty strong if you would have them believed at all, and that then, ten to one, she will demolish all your precautions at a bound if an object in trousers holds out his arms. She had profited by her husband’s view. “Come what may,” she said, “I will have my romance and pay the price afterwards.”
So far, the price seemed a remote contingency. With every revolution of the steamer’s screw, Manila and her distant relatives whose pride she had outraged became the mere phantoms of memory, growing paler every hour. Nothing was left but the delightful sense of being an absolute necessity to Martin—she who had been a superfluity all her life!
As for Collingwood himself, his kindness, hisshrewdness, his strength were gaining constantly in her esteem. He had proved himself innately delicate and refined. Of what possible importance were a fewdeficienciesin speech, a too vivid phraseology, the lack of the little courtesies which mark a man of the world? But (and here some of her elation diminished) if they mattered so little, why had she to convince herself so eagerly? If two negatives make an affirmative, too passionate a denial sometimes constitutes an assertion. Whenever she arrived at this stage of reflection, another cloud dimmed her horizon. Was not her whole attitude a practical deception of the man himself? Would Martin Collingwood have accepted her surrender so joyfully, could he have read that it was weighted with the condition of living with him on an uninhabited island? Would not all his self-esteem repudiate such a proposition? She had not lied when she said that she loved him, but would he content himself with a definition of love which excluded all natural pride of choice, and put a compromise value upon himself? As often as she found herself confronted with these thoughts, Charlotte took refuge in a bit of casuistry. If she saw Martin with clear eyes and underrated the proportionalvalue of his attainments, did he even see her clearly at all? Did she wrong him more in reserving an opinion of his social worth than he wronged her in not perceiving that she had any social worth? The fact that every person has a real personal value and an accredited worldly value, and that most effort is directed to making these two values coincide, or appear to do so, put a convenient weapon in her hand. Since, in only a few cases, the two values are really identical, happy marriages must be the result of a marvellous luck or of a wonderful power of self-deception. Was she to be taxed for not deceiving herself? Was her intelligence to be punished when his ignorance was rewarded? As often as she thought about it, it seemed that his incapacity to value certain qualities of her own justified her in a few mental reservations.
Nevertheless she was afflicted with a sense of penitence in spite of her sophistry, and when, after a long conversation with the captain, her husband came back to her and bent over her, she put up her arms and drew his face down to hers, giving him the first voluntary caress which she had bestowed upon him since the hour of her surrender upon the Luneta.
“Have you thought me a selfish, ungrateful wretch?” she asked him.
“Never! But I have worried a little. There’s no getting around it—you are daffy about some things, Charlotte.”
“Daffy is such a beautiful word. It’s so civil. I’ll adopt it. You are not daffy about anything but me, are you, Martin?”
“Kingsnorth says I’m daffy about anything that I really like.”
“Tell me about Mr. Kingsnorth—all about him. Analyze him for me.”
“I can’t do that sort of thing. Besides, I want you to form your own impressions. You will see him in thirty-six hours.”
“So soon as that.” She drew a long breath, and fell silent.
“The captain says he is going out at dawn. We ought to make Cuyo by five to-morrow afternoon, and if Mac’s there with the launch, as he surely will be, we’ll get our freight transhipped and make the run over to-morrow night. That will bring us home by dawn the day after to-morrow. Home,” he repeated softly. “I’ve dreamed many dreamsin my life and some of them have come true, but I don’t think anything stranger could have happened to me than taking my wife home to an uninhabited island in the Pacific.”
“Nothing stranger could have happened to you than finding yourself married at all. Isn’t that it?”
“It’s a fact,” he admitted slowly. “I was not planning to marry for many a year. I don’t know that I thought seriously about doing it at all. In fact, I was so afraid that I might be injudicious and get married—or get myself married—” he smiled in the darkness—“that I swore off even on flirtations some time before I came out here. But when you came along with the ice-bag and your nice voice, and I got a good look at you next day, all that went up in the air. I knew then and there that I wanted to get married as quick as I could. I’d been in love before a half dozen times, but I knew every time that it wasn’t a love I wanted to marry on. It don’t matter how much a man loves a woman, he don’t love her in the right way unless she does him credit. I felt that way about you. You were the kind of woman I could be proud of all my life. ‘That’s the girl for me,’ I said, andsure enough—” his pause expressed the idea that the outcome had been foreordained.
His desire to compliment her was so unmistakable, his admiration was so sincere, that Charlotte was able to stifle quickly the first instinct to rebuke his unconscious patronage. His egoism, after all, was of an inoffensive variety. He was not boasting himself as a connoisseur, but was testifying to the completeness with which she satisfied his ideal. The wife lay silent for a long time, studying his face, which was just dimly visible in the glow of his cigar. When she spoke, it was as she rose from her chair.
“I hope I’ll always be able to live up to your conception of me,” she said. “I mean to try.”
“Nonsense,” replied the man of common sense. “You just suit me perfectly as you are. Why, you’d spoil it all if you even thought of trying. What is there to try? You areyou. I wouldn’t have the biggest fault or the smallest virtue in you altered by the ten-millionth of an inch.”
When Charlotte had shut the door of her stateroom and had snapped on the light, she sank for an instant on the locker, with a face in which pride, shame, and contrition were tumultuously mingled.For why had she spent twenty-eight years acquiring tastes and criterions which, at that moment, made her seem incredibly mean and ungenerous?