Chapter VIII“Want a paseo, Charlotte?” Martin called from his deck chair on the vine-shaded veranda one Sunday afternoon. “It’s not so very hot. I feel like walking myself.”Mrs. Collingwood, who was dabbing a powder puff across her face as a finish to her afternoon toilet, responded at once, from the adjoining bedroom, that she was longing for a walk. In a few minutes, she appeared, tying the strings of a great sun hat, and handed her umbrella to Martin.“Have I got to lug this thing?” he groaned; but even as he spoke, he opened it and held it tenderly over her.Kingsnorth, smoking on his own veranda, nodded and asked them where they were going.“Most anywhere. Up the hill, probably. Charlotte likes to go there. Will you come along?”Mrs. Collingwood did not second the invitation, though she had time to do so before Kingsnorthreplied. “I’m too lazy. I’ll leave hill-climbing to you adventurous young persons.” To himself he added, “You don’t want me. You want to go up there and spoon. Oh, Lord! to be young again!” He did not add, “and to love and be loved”; but the words were bitter in his thoughts as he watched the young couple go along the clean beach.When they came to a path leading across the cocoanut grove to a spur of hill on the eastern side of the island, they took it, followed it through the shadowed green arcades, climbed a rather stiff hill, and, at length, found themselves in the shade of a bamboo clump at the head of a cleft filled with undergrowth. An outcropping of rock made a sort of natural seat for Charlotte, and Collingwood stretched himself at her feet. On the ridge above them a line of cocoanut trees drooped their great leaves, while over their heads the long bamboo stems swayed to every breath of air. Although the elevation was low—not more than fifty or sixty feet above the water—it gave the loungers an extended view. The sea rolled in long swells of deepest sapphire. Far away to the north, the great plateau mountain of Tablas was a violet shadow in thesky; but on the east the insistent sun searched out every ravine and spur of the Antique coast range. From that grim mountain king which lords it over them on the north to the far distance of the south their weathered sides lay outlined in long lines of pink and mauve, and in great patches of smoky-blue, where cloud shadows lay soft upon them. Here and there a distant sail gleamed, a mere speck of pearl against the lustre of sea and sky, and, in the north, a steamer’s smudge was plainly visible, though the vessel was hull down.“May be a tramp freighter going north, which slipped through the channel without our noticing her,” said Martin. “This is not the time for the Puerta Princesa steamer.” Boats were always a source of conversation at the island. They were charged with almost a romantic significance, coming and going, ever the mute reminders that, beyond the shining horizon line, people still lived and toiled, still built and populated the great cities of which Martin loved to speak.“I can’t see a line of smoke without a pang of homesickness,” he said. “Let’s see. We are thirteen hours ahead of Chicago time. It is now about four o’clock; it’s quiet enough in those emptystreets now. But about the time we were eating lunch, the theatres were just emptying. I can see the carriages drive up, and the women with their beautiful dresses showing under their opera cloaks; and the other kind, the kind that don’t go in carriages, hurrying off to catch a car, buttoning up their jackets as they come out into the cool—it’s just frosty weather there now—and the lights in the big restaurants, and the lamps flashing on carriages and automobiles. Meanwhile, we are here frizzling, and here we bid fair to stay till we make money enough to go home in style. I shall take you to the theatre some time that way, Charlotte. You’ll be in a low-necked dress with diamonds—do you think you’ll like diamonds?—and you shall have one of those long coats with the hoods, and I’ll be in my swallow-tail. We’ll spin up in an electric brougham, and rustle into our box. Then, after the performance, we’ll have a supper, and then I’ll say ‘Home’ kind of careless to the chauffeur. How does that strike your imagination?”He lay at her feet, smiling, and Charlotte hardly knew what to reply. How could she say to him that the experience on which his whole imagination had fastened was a matter of fact detail ofher past? She had rarely entered a theatre except under the circumstances which had made it a picture of delight to him. She did not deny that it would be pleasant to go again, and she did not, for an instant, underrate the pleasure which comes of knowing oneself among the envied few. But how could she take from him the pleasure of anticipating for her as well as for himself? Indeed, would not it make a perceptible rift in his present joy if he knew that his innocent outburst could find no echo in her breast? Would he not feel a little ridiculous? And how uncomfortable it was that that coil of misunderstanding always was most perceptible at Martin’s most exalted moments! Why had he chosen to assume that she was a stranger to luxury, and why had her good taste so resolutely declined to give him even a hint, until suddenly she found herself in a position where a hint would seem like an insult? She would have liked to tell him, then and there, a string of reminiscences, and to share half a hundred memories with him, but it was too late. To say anything then would be to pour cold water by the bucket over his enthusiasms. What she did say was:“I shall enjoy that immensely if it ever comes;but until it does come, I want you to understand that I am not discontented with our life here; and that if it never comes, I shall not let myself repine over it.”“Thank God for that,” he replied earnestly. And as she smiled at him faintly, puzzled by his emphasis, he added, “I took my chances when I brought you here, and there is no doubt that you are an unusual woman to have stood it as you have done. The queer part of it is that I knew what risks I was taking, but until it was too late to back out, I couldn’t own them to myself. One of the reasons that I wanted you so badly was that I hated it so here, and it was so all-fired lonely. But I kept on saying to myself that it wouldn’t be lonely for you because I would be here.”“Well,” she conceded, willing to gloss over the selfishness of which he stood ready to accuse himself, “so long as you are willing to believe that you would not be lonely because I would be here, that seems a fair exchange.”“No, it wasn’t fair at any point, because I knew exactly what the place was like and you were going into it blindfold. But a man can’t stop to look at things that way. If we did, nobody wouldever get anything in the world that he wanted. My mother used to say to me that God helps those who help themselves. I’ve come to the conclusion that He doesn’t do anything of the kind, but that He sits back and doesn’t interfere with those who take.”After this burst of unusual eloquence, Mr. Collingwood closed his eyes and puffed luxuriously at his cigar. But for the rhythm of the surf, nature seemed steeped in afternoon slumber. In the accentuated silence the voices of children digging clams far up the beach came to them like drowsy music.Collingwood smoked on, content with his own analysis of his conduct and delighting in his wife’s soft hand on his brow. Charlotte thought he was going to sleep, and smiled tenderly at his closed eyes. Martin not infrequently displayed his enjoyment of her society by a willingness to nap in it; but she was not petty enough to grudge him the indulgence. Besides, many of her tenderest thoughts, her best inspirations had come to her as she mused, on lazy afternoons, with his handsome profile in her lap. There seemed, at such times, to be a reversal of their ordinary relations. Sheleaned tremendously on Martin, not by making him a sharer in her domestic difficulties or by wearying him, already weary with toil, by that demand for petty services by which some women delight to vaunt their possession of a slave. As far as she could be a buffer between him and all the little cares and burdens of their daily life, Charlotte had kept her promise to herself to make Martin Collingwood a good wife. And though she measured his hourly joy in the pride of having her undivided affection, she felt herself meanly stinting him of that secret hoard of gratitude which lay so warm in her heart. Was he fairly treated, she asked herself, in being denied the knowledge that he alone of all the world had made her feel herself welcome in it? He thought her strong, when, in reality, all her strength came from him. Deprived of that crown and sceptre with which he had endowed her, would she be more than a poor shrinking outcast again, a creature at bay, ready to snap without discrimination at passing curiosity or at passing kindness. But pride was still strong in her heart—love had not subdued that; and there were some explanations that she could not force herself to make. When he lay supine, as on that afternoon,his pagan beauty even more markedly defined by a slumber that was like a child’s, she had an intuition of his unexpressed dependence on her. Was it possible that Martin had reservations also? The thought bred another. Is it possible for any soul to unbosom itself completely to another? Does not the very wealth of confidence entrain some final reservations, the inner sanctuary of that self-dignity with which the-gentlest spirit is reluctant to part? She decided that, freely as he revealed himself to her, Martin must carry deep in his heart, some feelings jealously guarded from her—thoughts and feelings perhaps that he had recklessly revealed to the young girls who at times had fired his imagination. It is the instinct of the human soul to guard those weaknesses of which it is self-conscious from those natures which cannot understand them, and, not understanding, cannot sympathize. Of what weakness did she make Martin self-conscious? She knew only too well the weaknesses of which he made her self-conscious; knew, too, her desperate fear that full cognizance of them might shake the foundations of his pride in her. They had been married eight months, and in that time they had hardly touched a jar in their lives. Hehad told her a thousand times that she was all the world to him, and she had replied a thousand times that she asked nothing more, and that, so long as she could be that, she was willing to bear solitude, and endure even privation. Was all her happiness hinged upon the chance dropping of a curtain in his speech or hers? upon the revelation of another self hidden away behind his merriment, behind her silence? She sighed and moved impatiently, trying to shake off her thoughts. Then she remembered that he was sleeping and glanced down to find him gazing at her quizzically.“I’ve been awake all the while,” he said, “watching your face. You have been doing a sight of thinking all to yourself. You thought I had dropped off, didn’t you?”“I’ve had reason to believe you capable of it, Martin.”“What I have done and what I am going to do this afternoon are two distinct things, Mrs. C.”“Oh, Martin, I hate ‘Mrs. C.’ It sounds like Dickens.”“Do you meanthedickens?”“No: if it comes to that, I’ll use the other word—the one you are so fond of using.”Mr. Collingwood almost sat up. “Say, you’re coming on,” he ejaculated. “You’d never have said that when we were first married.”“That’s true.” Mrs. Collingwood’s tone left open an inference which her husband must have perceived, for he laughed contentedly.“Youweremealy-mouthed,” he stated, with a genial retrospect in his voice.Charlotte looked at him demurely. “I was brought up to observe the conventional limitations of feminine speech, dear; but if your heart is set upon my enlarging upon them—”“Heaven forbid!” Martin ejaculated piously, as she came to her suggestive little pause. He added after a moment, “But I had a girl once that used to swear. It never sounded bad in her. It was just funny and cute.”If there was one habit of Martin Collingwood’s that came near rousing a visible resentment in his wife, it was his easy-going references to his “girls.” She knew that the term, as he used it, implied no disrespect, that it was his equivalent forinnamorata, and that each affair with a girl had represented one of his tentative ventures toward matrimony. She was not jealous of her predecessors in his affections,for there was an overwhelming sincerity in his invariable reassurance that none of them “came up to specifications”; that is, conformed to his ideal of womanhood, as she herself did. Nor did he hesitate to reveal that, in most cases, the breaking of sentimental ties was largely the result of his own initiative. If his frankness in these revelations had contained one element of personal vanity, it would have strained dangerously his wife’s respect for him. But although he had a happy self-confidence, Collingwood was utterly without self-conscious vanity. Charlotte realized, also, that his good looks and his personal charm which she, with her critically developed faculties, had been unable to withstand, must have made him an exceedingly popular swain with the type of young woman whom he had previously affected. But it was irritating to have him lump her with them so carelessly. It implied that, though she was the only perfect jewel according to his taste, the matter was, after all, one of taste and not of kind. She was human enough, however, to suffer some pangs of curiosity concerning her erstwhile rivals, and though she would not have asked a question,she was not dissatisfied when Martin went on:“It’s funny what differences there are in people. You are not glum, but you don’t laugh much. Even when you seem happiest, you are rather grave and quiet. But that girl giggled from morning till night, and she made me laugh too. She saw the funny side of everything that happened, and she was no fool either. She was quick as a flash. The last time I saw her was at the close of the Spanish War. It was about ten days before I enlisted. The Government sent a gunboat up the Mississippi River just to show the backwoods people what a real live gunboat that had been in the war looked like; and those blamed officers were making love to every pretty girl on both banks of the river wherever the boat lay long enough to have a reception for the officers or a smoker for the men. This girl was dancing with a sandy-haired little ensign, and he was piling it on thick as molasses on a hot cake. All of a sudden, she began to giggle. He wanted to know why. “I’ll bet a horse you’re married,” she said over his shoulder; and the fellow, like to split himself laughing,vowed he wasn’t. But when he got to St. Louis, there it was in the papers, how his wife had come out to join him for that week. When his boat went back down the river the next week, all the girls gave him the laugh. That little devil had told it on him, and all the talk he had given her.”“I like that girl,” said Charlotte. “What became of her? How did it happen that you didn’t make the best of your opportunities in her case?”“I did. She had me mighty anxious. But she played just a little too bluff a game. She got hold of a long-legged sergeant of volunteers and she let on that she didn’t have a minute to give me after he came along. I used to walk home from church with her pretty regularly, but the first Sunday after she picked up with him, she turned me down. I had to come along behind with her best friend: she was one of those girls that always have neglected women friends and run ‘em in and make you be civil to ‘em. I hated this other girl, and I was the maddest man that ever tagged up the street after his girl and another man. All of a sudden, I saw that every time she took a step, she turned the hem of her skirt with her heel. You know I just came to myself. I got to wondering if Iwanted to marry a girl with a jay-bird heel like that, and I decided I didn’t. I enlisted, came out here, served my country in China, and took back talk from a lot of West Point popinjays for two years—damn their souls—and that was all the patriotism I had. She married her volunteer and he served his three years and got a commission. I saw by a paper not very long ago that they are in Samar now. She was a good fellow, that girl. I should like to see her again. If the fool killer tried to kill her, the gun wouldn’t go off, sure.”“That is quite so,” Charlotte replied gravely, and then, as Martin relapsed into laziness again, she remained studying him and pondering the somewhat irrelevant motives which had influenced his life.“A jay-bird heel!” She looked with amused scrutiny at his somewhat emphasized masculine beauty. What magnificence, what unconscious arrogance of self-esteem lay unrebuked in this innocent youth; for in spite of the fact that he had known sin as she had never known it, that his unrestrained instincts had reached forth into experiments with life from which not only her sex, but the inheritance of tradition and of environment hadeternally debarred her—in spite of these facts, Charlotte had always a sense of cynical and satiated age beside his debonair innocence. It had been her lot to be both player and onlooker in that melodrama where the possession of ample means and the development of critical and æsthetic faculties have frowned upon the expression of a direct and creative ambition; and yet, where all that is subtly ambitious, and all that is meanly jealous, and all that is secretly arrogant, deprived of a natural and healthy expression, underlie and taint the whole body of society. She had come to realize that, in that world in which money must not be mentioned, money is the most indispensable necessity; that every instinct tabooed as vulgar has been so tabooed, because, when it is no longer recognized in speech, it may be the more successfully pursued in action. She had discovered that the exquisite charm of manner which is called high-bred unconsciousness is the result of a self-consciousness so unflagging that its possessor is incapable of losing herself utterly in any emotion; and that the final result of the developing process is an individuality whose utter selfishness and nullity are not patent simply because all the arts of society and all the material advantages ofwealth are bent to the concealment of the truth. Collingwood was, as he had said of his sweetheart, “no fool.” He had a keen interest in life, a rather broad knowledge of men and affairs as they are judged by concrete results; but of that sense of social values which amounts almost to a cult with our so-called aristocratic classes, Martin was as ignorant as his primeval parents were of sin. Suddenly, as she looked at him, a quotation flashed into Charlotte’s mind. She formed the words with her lips as her memory groped for them:The ancients set no value on that half feminine delicacy, that nervous sensibility which we call distinction, and on which we pride ourselves. For thedistinguéman of the present day, a salon is necessary; he is adilettanteand entertaining with ladies; although capable of enthusiasms, he is inclined to scepticism; his politeness is exquisite; he dislikes foul hands and disagreeable odors, and shrinks from being confounded with the vulgar. Alcibiades had no apprehension of being confounded with the vulgar.Martin opened his eyes as she was breathing the words to herself, but she did not stop. He stared at her, and when she paused, he asked:“What kind of hoodoo was that?”“That, O my Alcibiades, was a charm.” Sheleaned forward and kissed him—a half repentant, wholly tender little caress. It pleased him, for while she was ready enough to be petted, Charlotte was slow to offer endearments. Lifelong habit was stronger even than the impulses of a naturally demonstrative nature.“Who are you hoodooing? Me?”“No: myself. It was I that needed the charm.”“Now you are getting mysterious again. Tell me what it was about.” Collingwood had, when he desired to wheedle, not only a child’s persistency but a child’s alluringness. Charlotte had had experience in plenty with him, and knew her own weakness in resisting him. She cast a hasty glance around and perceived the steamer, the smoke of which had been visible when they gained the hill. They had, in seating themselves, half turned their backs in her direction, and she had crept very close to the island.“Martin, that boat seems to be coming nearer. She would not come this close if she were heading for Cuyo.”“Eh! Here?” Collingwood raised himself alertly and stared. “That’s strange. Coastguard. She isn’t making Iloilo, or she would not be cuttingacross our bows; but it is a queer route for Cuyo. Why didn’t she cut over to the west after leaving Romblon?”“You’ll have to signal her for information, Martin.”“Information be blanked. I’ll signal her for fresh beef if she gets close enough. We may be able to exchange a bit of fish. Have you seen the fishparaogo in yet?”“It went by a few minutes ago.”“That’s good. Maybe we had better go down and be ready to trade if she comes near enough. I’ll send out a note with the launch. It looks, though, as if she were heading straight for us.”“Would a coastguard steamer drop mail here?”“No: catch a Government captain dropping an anchor to oblige anybody. If she is coming in, it is either with somebody interested in pearl fishery statistics, or some sort of survey, or—” he turned suddenly, a teasing smile melting all his handsome features to winningness—“your friend Barton. Didn’t he promise us a visit sometime?”Martin had assumed a marital jocularity on the subject of the Judge. Charlotte had honestly but vainly tried to dispel from his mind his strong convictionthat Judge Barton was a rival who had hardly been allowed to approach the tentative stages of worship. Her quick frown and “Impossible!” only made her husband grin more broadly. “That was a mere civility at parting,” she insisted. “Judge Barton hasn’t a particle of interest in us.”“He hasn’t any in me, certainly; and he would be justified in not having any in you. Snapped his nose off, you did, every time he opened his mouth.”“Martin, you do not understand. I tried my best to be agreeable to Judge Barton, just as any nurse ought to be to any patient; and every time I ‘snapped his nose off’ as you express it, I did it in self-defence. He was very often impertinent to me.”“Why Charlotte, I heard pretty near every word he ever said to you, and I never heard anything out of the way.”They were going down hill by that time, Martin ahead, picking the trail; and Charlotte made a quaintly affectionate grimace behind his sturdy back. There were various reasons why she was unwilling to make any effort to enlighten Martin’sdenseness. There was no earthly danger of his appreciating unaided the delicate flavor of Judge Barton’s impertinence.“Anyway,” she remarked, deftly slipping from the discussion of facts upon which disagreement was certain, “he will have forgotten both of us completely by this time, and there is not one chance in a hundred of his being on that boat if it does stop here.” But Martin had time to correct her. He was willing to admit that there was not much certainty of the Judge’s being on the boat unless she stopped; and then he stood ready to back his judgment. By the time they had crossed the cocoanut grove and had gained the beach, it was evident that the boat was making for the island. Kingsnorth had sighted her, and had sent out the launch, which was puffing busily toward her. “Kingsnorth’s got as good a nose for fresh beef as I have,” Collingwood grunted approvingly. The Maclaughlins were on their veranda with a pair of binoculars, and some excitement could be perceived even in the distant village.The steamer slowed up in reply to signals from the launch, and evidently awaited advice about dropping anchor. When she did come to a halt,however, and put a boat out, Martin counted the persons who descended into it.“Distinguished passengers,” he remarked concisely. “The captain would not put out the gang-way for his own use in that sea. Three men in white suits; three rowers; and the skipper is coming along. We’re in for visitors, Charlotte. What is there for dinner?”Charlotte was away on the instant. He heard her despatching boys—one to the village, bidding him secure the very best of the afternoon’s catch; another to the poultry yard with orders to bring up the two fattest capons, but not to slay them till further orders. Complaining shrieks of the storeroom door, the hinges of which were exceedingly rusty, bore testimony to repeated openings; and the voice of old Pedro was audible, cursing the ice-machine.By the time the boat was close in, the sun was fairly low and seemed to be sucking up the whole Visaya Sea is shafts of splendor. As soon as the narrowing distance permitted the little crafts’ passengers to be recognized, Collingwood cocked a humorous eye upon his wife and went into silent ecstasies of laughter, much to the amazement ofKingsnorth and the Maclaughlins. Charlotte blushed, bit her lips and then she laughed also, at first in helpless embarrassment, and finally with a sheer burst of merriment. She had barely time to recover her gravity when the boat grounded, and Judge Barton, as an acquaintance, took precedence of his fellow-passengers, and was carried ashore in time to introduce them as they landed. All had to avail themselves of the primitive transporting process by which Charlotte herself had made her landing, and it was in no hateful spirit that she admitted that dignity and such a progress are almost incompatible.Chapter IXThis is an unexpected pleasure, murmured Mrs. Collingwood, giving to Judge Barton a warm pressure of the hand. For though she was proud and sensitive, she was not vindictive, and the Judge’s conduct on her wedding day had gone far to blot out the recollection of their of their unamicable past. Also his presence was a compliment, an assurance that his professions of interest were not wholly perfunctory.“It should not be so,” he replied. “What did I tell you on your wedding day? You’ve forgotten. I haven’t, you see, and here I am! Moreover, I have brought you a commissioner and a gentleman interested in pearl shells.” By the time he had finished this long speech, the Judge had shaken hands with both husband and wife, and stood ready to introduce the men who followed him. They were respectively a member of the Philippine Commission and an American agent for a button factory in the United States, who was desirousof making arrangements for a permanent supply of shells.“The Commissioner is headed for Cuyo, and will go on there to-morrow,” said Judge Barton. “Mr. Jones would like to stay and see the field and talk business with Mr. Collingwood until the steamer returns, in about a week; and I have wondered if you could put up with me that long also. But nobody is to be inconvenienced. Knowing the limited resources of islands in the Visaya Sea, each of us has come provided with an army cot and bedding, and we have also a first-class shelter tent. Likewise, remembering Mr. Collingwood’s reminiscences in hospital, and being minded of the scarcity of fresh beef, I ventured to bring along the quarter of a cow—I believe a part of the hind quarter.”He got no further. Martin had again taken his hand between two bronzed paws and was shaking it fervently.“I understand, Judge,” he declared, “just why you hold your eminent position. A man can’t be great these days without a head for detail, and you have one. There are plenty of men who would have forgotten all I said about this place, but you haven’t. You remembered it at the right time.Now, frankly, Judge, where is that beef at the present moment?”The Judge hooked a thumb in the direction of the steamer’s boat. “Thatbeef is inthatdinghey,” he replied, “and, without desiring to advise Mrs. Collingwood in her domestic arrangements, I should suggest that the sooner it is eaten the better. The steamer’s ice-carrying facilities are limited, and it is by the grace of God that it has ‘kept’ till now.”“He means by the grace of Government coal, Mrs. Collingwood,” interrupted the steamer’s captain, who was standing by talking to Kingsnorth, whom he knew. “I had nearly to ruin my engines getting that beef down here, the Judge was so concerned about it.” It came ashore at that minute, a suggestively dead piece of beef in cheese-cloth wrappings, but the fishers received it almost with rites of welcome.Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins having been presented, the group wandered leisurely toward the Collingwood cottage. The newcomers protested that there was no need of Mrs. Collingwood’s giving herself trouble about dinner; they could go back to the steamer for dinner; it would be waiting forthem. It was the stereotyped convention throughout a land where hospitality is as catholic as is the necessity for it. Martin and Charlotte, naturally, would hear nothing of the visitors’ returning to the steamer before bedtime.“If you don’t mind dinner’s being a little late,” Charlotte added, while Mrs. Maclaughlin threw in, in response to a last weak protest, “Trouble! Why we would cook for twenty people to get to talk to one.”So the boat went back for the tent, the cots, and the luggage of the prospective guests, while the visitors sat on Charlotte’s veranda, enjoying the evening breeze and the sunset, as they drank tea and consumed delicious little triangles of buttered toast, and slices of sweet cake. The Commissioner wanted to know all about the island: who owned it? what crops did it produce? was there an intelligentteniente? “He obeys the orders that we give him,” replied Martin dryly, and the Commissioner smiled: Was there easy communication with the mainland? What did Mr. Collingwood think of coprax in the Visayas? Then, in an aside, to Charlotte, What a pity that he had not brought Mrs. Commissioner! she would have enjoyed this. Such acharming situation and such a delightful home! Mrs. Commissioner would never cease to regret having missed it. “We hope that you will have occasion to pass again, and will bring her with you,” Charlotte murmured politely, and the great man assured her that he should make a point of it. “She loves atmosphere,” he said. “We have more of that than anything else,” Kingsnorth interjected, and to the Commissioner’s hearty laugh, Martin added, “Specially when it is moving N.N.E. eighty miles an hour.”Meanwhile Judge Barton was trying out his Grand Army manner with Mrs. Maclaughlin, and privately taking stock of place and people.“Chickens!” he said regretfully in response to her remark that she guessed those chickens would live a day longer in view of that quarter of beef. “Have I contributed, by my own unselfishness, to my own undoing? The chickens of Manila are not chickens, they are merely delusions in the form of blood, bones, and feathers, bought, killed, and served, by a succession of inhuman Chinese cooks, for the sole purpose of tantalizing the American stomach. Do I understand that youfeedyour chickens, and that they are actually fat?”“Fat as butter,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin proudly.The Judge sighed with anticipation. “I’m glad I’m going to stay a week,” he declared. “I’m fond of chicken—when itischicken. But tell me, are you never lonely here, Mrs. Maclaughlin?”“I am. Charlotte ain’t.”The Judge took note of the familiarity, but the laughing eye he turned upon Mrs. Collingwood did not betray that fact. “Yes, we are talking about you,” he said in response to the glance she gave, hearing her name used. “Mrs. Maclaughlin says that you are never lonely.”“Of course I am not. I have too many occupations. I am busy from morning till night. There is no excuse for ennui.”“I thirst to know what you do. I know a score of ladies who are suffering from nostalgia with far less excuse for loneliness than you have.”“Well, there is the housekeeping, though our servants are quite satisfactory, and it isn’t onerous; and there is my mending and Martin’s, and my sewing, and I have an hour’s school each day for the children, and an hour’s medical inspection, which usually runs into two or three; and if you will look on our table, you will not find itwholly empty of books and magazines. Then when Martin comes home, there is tea and talk, and then dinner. Sometimes after dinner, I read aloud, or Martin and I play a game of chess. We go to bed early and get up early for we are working people.”“Heavens!” said the Judge. “I stand confounded. It is virtue past all the known limits of exemplariness. I wish a few women of my acquaintance could hear you.”Charlotte lifted her brows and smiled with kindly malice. “Your friend Mrs. Badgerly is well?” she inquired sweetly.“You are no less a mind reader than you formerly were, I perceive. My friend Mrs. Badgerly is quite well. She was in my thoughts when I gave utterance to my wish. My friend Mrs. Badgerly is one of your admirers, Mrs. Collingwood.”“Since when?”“Since that memorable day on which you so effectually snubbed her.”“I am glad I did it,” Charlotte said emphatically, and they both laughed.“It has been done more brutally, I believe,” saidthe Judge, “but never more thoroughly. She appreciates your powers. She really does.”To this bit of by-talk the Commissioner and Martin had been paying a desultory attention as they sipped their tea. At that point, Charlotte brought the conversation back to something which would include the other guests, and the Judge got no further opportunity to engross her attention, till, the dark falling, a servant lit a lamp in thesala, and Charlotte excused herself on the plea of a housekeeper’s duties. She left the group on the veranda enjoying the warm starlit darkness, across which the steamer’s lights gleamed cosily. Judge Barton, glancing behind him, saw her superintending the laying of the table in the living-room of the cottage, and he abruptly rose and joined her.“Can’t I help?” he said by way of excuse for presenting himself. “I have brought all this nuisance down upon you. I might be allowed to make myself useful if I can.” Then in reply to her assurance that there was nothing that he could do, and that she regarded the occasion as a treat and not as a nuisance, he went on, “Then can’t I stay and talk to you?” He took the permission for granted and without waiting for a reply, glanced around theroom, which, with its quaintly adorned walls, its tasteful photographs and water-colors, its gleaming brass, and the glancing lights on carved teak and inlaid blackwood, was full of charm.“What an absolutely delightful room! and this old table! Where does Collingwood pick up these things?”Charlotte smilingly laid a finger upon her lips, glancing in the direction of the Commissioner. “I think it’s loot,” she said.“And I know this is,” the Judge remarked, standing in front of the desk. “I remember hearing Collingwood say he was in the Chinese affair in 1900. Why wasn’t it my fate to be there too? It’s all very well to talk about our superior civilization, but there is something in the mere thought of looting treasures like these to make the mouth water.”“Martin did not loot these. Mr. Kingsnorth did. He gave them to me for a wedding present.”“Lucky dog! either to loot or to give.”“I am ashamed to confess,” Charlotte admitted, twitching a tablecloth into better place as a servant laid it, “that I am getting dreadfully mixed upon matters of right and wrong. When I cameout here, my principles were simple as day. There wasn’t any doubt how I regarded looters and people who would accept looted goods. I should as soon have accepted a stolen ham. And here am I, the possessor of various pieces of looted furniture, brazenly rejoicing in them, and all the more because they were looted. I am degenerating hour by hour.” She shook her head plaintively as she put a massive brass candlestick of old Chinese design into its place.Judge Barton, leaning against the open casement, his two hands braced behind on the sill, stood a picture of smiling content as he studied her. His natural magnetism fairly radiated from him in his benignant mood. His wealth of grizzling hair, his large-featured, intellectual face, and one or two lines that bespoke the brute strength and will of the man, made him look like some roughly but powerfully sketched figure. His clothes were always fashionably cut and he wore them well, but the sense of the well formed muscular-body beneath them always dominated their lines. As he stood beaming upon her, it would have taken a stronger-minded woman than Mrs. Collingwood to weigh impartially the balanced charms of the powerfulintellect and of the powerful animal in the man. She relaxed her old suspicious guard, which had revived for an instant when he followed her into the house, so clearly bent upon a tête-à-tête. Without the faintest suggestion of sentimental intimacy, they were encased in an atmosphere of congenial interest. An onlooker would have pronounced them a pair of reunited chums.“I am dying to say something,” said the Judge in response to her lament over her decaying morals, “but I don’t dare.”“Why?”“You know why very well. ‘I’m skeered o’ you.’” He threw a fine negro accent into the negro phrase.“Is it something so impertinent?”“If I may so express it, it is humanely impertinent. I know no other woman to whom I should hesitate to propound it at once, for it is a question. But I have been scathed by you before this, and I am not absolutely foolhardy.”“Oh, go ahead,” said Charlotte. “Impertinence acknowledged is impertinence disarmed. Besides, I may owe you some amends. I could never seehow I did it, but my husband says I used to snap your head off every time you spoke.”“You did, you did, indeed.” This was said with fervor.“Well, I promise not to snap this time.”“Don’t you find it more comfortable, then—being degenerate, I mean?”For an instant Mrs. Collingwood stared at him, and he broke into a peal of laughter in which she presently joined.“Indeed, I must be a formidable person if you were afraid to ask that,” she said. “Well, then, I do. Does my answer content you?”“Unspeakably. You know we all enjoy being degenerate, but I never hoped to hear you admit it.”At this instant, Mrs. Collingwood’s attention was diverted by the servant, who came back with a tray of cutlery. She indicated several places at which plates and silver were to be laid, but found time for an abstracted smile at her guest, who stood waiting her pleasure while she gave her directions.“I daresay—” she returned briskly to the subject after this lapse of time—“I was very priggish. Martin has humanized me—there is no doubt ofit—and I am grateful to him. He is so humorously practical. How do you think he is looking?”“Oh—fine!” Judge Barton was conscious of a restiveness suppressed. He said to himself that he had not come two hundred and fifty miles to talk about Martin Collingwood’s looks.“I am so glad you think so, because I think so myself. I fancy Mrs. Maclaughlin did not feed him properly in the old days, and men get so careless by themselves. He says I ‘hold him up to the collar beautifully’ and I really try to, and regular food and physical comfort will tell.”“Collingwood is the picture of health and of masculine good looks,” said Judge Barton; “and as for you, it is a joy to see anyone looking so healthy, so vital. You have changed immensely. I wonder, dear lady, if you yourself realized how tired and nearly broken-down you were in those old days.”“I was miserable, physically and nervously worn out, and I suppose I looked it. But I have had a glorious rest and nothing in the world to fret or worry about, and—” she raised her eyes to his, blushing as she approached the topic which had been the source of so much constraint between them—“and Martin and I have been ridiculously happy in each other. I may as well be frank and admit that half that was depressing me was sheer loneliness and wounded pride. Probably the loneliness was much my own fault, for I hardly met people half way; and the wounded pride was wholly my own fault, for I started out to earn my own living in defiance of all my relatives’ wishes. I suppose I had not the philosophy to meet the situation, in spite of that hateful little slap you gave me about ‘the unloveliest thing in women.’” The Judge started forward.“Thank you for giving me my opportunity,” he said in a low voice. “I could not have referred to it otherwise. I have writhed with shame every time I have thought of those words, Mrs. Collingwood. Will you permit me to apologize for them and for numerous other unmanly stabs that I have given you? I do not know why I did it; all the time I was longing to be friends with you.”“I suppose I irritated you,” Charlotte replied slowly, a little surprised by his vehemence. “It is inexplicable to me also when I look back upon it. I had really forgiven you long ago. You were very nice to us on our wedding day, I remember,and I felt forlorn and deserted enough on that occasion to be grateful to anyone who showed any signs of human interest in us. But I am glad that you have apologized, and am glad to express my forgiveness, and to regret that I was so snappish. All of which may be expressed in that homely phrase, ‘Let us bury the hatchet.’”“We were always meant to be friends, I think.” Some vibration in the voice made Charlotte sheer off from an approach to intensity. “Martin always liked you,” she said; and thus, ten seconds after their reconciliation, the Judge had cause to reflect with some irritation that there is no woman in the world so unsatisfying at times as one born without natural coquetry. He had a few minutes in which to develop this idea, while Charlotte made a voyage of investigation to the kitchen. She came back well satisfied. “I think we can count on dinner in half an hour,” she said, and carried him back with her to the veranda, where she did her duty by the Commissioner and the Honorable Mr. Jones, who was not expansive on any subject other than oyster shells.Kingsnorth, who had gone over to his own cottage and had donned the English mess jacket, whichis the standard evening attire in the Orient, came back, an undeniable English gentleman in spite of his degenerate countenance, and devoted himself to thejudicialluminary, who took stock of him as they chatted. Indeed, the Judge was profoundly interested in Charlotte’s island companions. The Maclaughlins were the sort of people he would expect to find in company with Collingwood, but the Englishman was a surprise. He said to himself that it must have strained all Mrs. Collingwood’s pride to accommodate herself to that household, and he marvelled at her tremendous growth in self-control and in social vagabondage. Six months before she would not have met so unconcernedly such a situation as that in which she found herself.At dinner the Commissioner, sitting on one side of Mrs. Collingwood with the Judge on the other, was secretly amazed at the house, the household, and the very agreeable woman who was his hostess. With one laughing remark—“My dear, I am the housekeeper, and I won’t be apologized for”—she had silenced Martin, who was inclined to drift into that apologetic and explanatory vein which demands continual reassurance from the guests of their appreciation of their food; and, picking upthe conversational ball, she had sent it spinning lightly here and there through all the courses of as perfectly served a dinner as the Commissioner had ever sat through. She was ably assisted by the two officials and Kingsnorth and even by Martin, whose delight in his wife’s grasp of the situation set his dry, keen wits at bubbling effervescence. Maclaughlin, though not partial to what he called “gentlefolk,” was a hard-headed Scot, not likely to rush in where angels tread lightly, and Mrs. Maclaughlin, who found the general trend of conversation too agile for her, may be said to have concentrated herself on the oyster-shell seeker and the Captain, who suffered also from a slowness of abstract speech.It was also, considering the fact that it was limited by the resources of a comparatively unproductive island, a good dinner, even in the opinion of two habitual diners-out. It began with a cocktail of Martin’s own mixing and was continued in a clear soup and in a baked fish which must have weighed ten pounds and was of incomparable flavor. “Never have I eaten such fish,” declared Judge Barton, helping himself the second time to the fish and its garnish of thin, sliced cucumbers.Then there was a roast of beef highly relished by the fisher folk,camote, or sweet potato, croquettes, a dish of bamboo sprouts cooked after a savory native recipe, and green peppers stuffed with force-meat. There was a crab salad, deliciously cold, and papaya ice.“But how do you obtain ice?” said the Commissioner.“We have a small machine which freezes one hundred pounds daily,” replied Charlotte, “just enough for each cottage and the mess kitchen.”“I remember when Collingwood proposed having that machine made by special order, how I pooh-poohed the idea,” remarked Kingsnorth. “I was not sufficiently Americanized to feel the need of it. But I am as bad as the rest of them now. Frozen desserts are the only ones fit for the tropics; and I’ve even learned to drink iced-tea.”A general chorus of assent went up. “You certainly make yourselves comfortable,” the Commissioner declared, “and, really, failing a fresh beef supply, you seem to have all that we get in Manila, in addition to a more charming situation. I suppose your only real difficulty is the matter of medical aid.”“That is our only realfear,” Collingwood replied. “We keep a supply of coal on hand for emergencies, and we never let it get below a certain point. We keep a reserve sufficient to take the launch over to Cuyo or to Romblon. But if there came a sudden need in bad weather, we should be in the deuce of a fix. It is the only thought that ever keeps me awake at night.”The Commissioner nodded and murmured something appreciative of a possible crisis. Certainly this very entertaining lady who sat beside him—a lady who had seen something of the world if he was any judge of personality—must feel herself strangely situated in that out of the way spot, chancing the dangers of tidal waves, of storms, and of illness without medical assistance. He fancied the situation was explicable. The compromises which women make for matrimony had offered him food for reflection long before he ever saw Mrs. Collingwood; but what he could not understand was why she should have been among those who have to make compromises. A woman of her grace and finish ought to have a pretty wide field of selection, he thought; but then one can never tell how circumstancesforce persons into unfortunate positions. The Englishman was a dose; not that he had altogether lost his breeding, but that the atmosphere of degeneration hung so palpably about him. “How he must hate himself,” thought the Commissioner, “to make us all so conscious of his fall!” He removed his eyes from Kingsnorth’s face after arriving at this conclusion, just in time to meet the clear gaze of his hostess, and to know, by her sudden blush and momentary shrinking, that she had read him like an open book, and to realize that she was self-conscious of her own situation.She was enough mistress of herself, however, to hold the conversation at its level. She asked with intelligent interest about those political events in the islands, concerning which it is tactful to question Commissioners. She drew the statesman out on the subject of his own hopes and plans for the islands. He in turn asked information from the fishers, and they, warming to the theme as men will when they talk of things in which they are experienced, gave him their practical, hard-headed views of men and conditions, spoke of native labor and its capacities and incapacities, of resources andpossibilities, and of the disadvantages of political unrest to a people more primitive than any that ever before held the reins of government.Even an illiterate man is interesting when he talks of his craft, and Martin Collingwood, however little natural development he had in social subtilties, was anything but illiterate or even ill informed. To his wife he seemed to gather new dignity as he took a leader’s natural position. It was plain that his business associates deferred to him; and in ten minutes it was plain that the Commissioner knew he was dealing with a man who would, in the financial world at least, make himself felt. Commissioners never ignore financiers. There came into the Commissioner’s manner as the dinner progressed, something more deferential than the mere civility of a guest to a host, something which implied his acceptance of Mr. Collingwood as a man to be considered.It was, on the whole, a most successful dinner. The newcomers had brought with them a current of the outer atmosphere, breathing interest and exhilaration into the little colony of self-exiles; and the exiles shared themselves so wholly with the outsiders that the outsiders grew to feel much at home.When, at eleven o’clock, they all walked down to the beach with the Commissioner and the Captain, regrets and good-byes were as hearty as they would have been if the acquaintance had been of long duration.As he was pulled out to the steamer, the Commissioner remembered that, on the way down, Barton had given him a hint of an odd situation, to which he had paid but a cursory attention. Well it was for the old gossip that he was safe ashore under the tent. “But I’ll have it out of him going back,” reflected the Commissioner. “Fine woman! Fine manly fellow, her husband; sort of man we need out here! He isn’t her equal socially, but I suppose women forget social differences just as we do when they come under the attraction of good looks and manly traits. Besides, if he makes money, she can float him with no difficulty. Aremarkablyfine woman.”
Chapter VIII“Want a paseo, Charlotte?” Martin called from his deck chair on the vine-shaded veranda one Sunday afternoon. “It’s not so very hot. I feel like walking myself.”Mrs. Collingwood, who was dabbing a powder puff across her face as a finish to her afternoon toilet, responded at once, from the adjoining bedroom, that she was longing for a walk. In a few minutes, she appeared, tying the strings of a great sun hat, and handed her umbrella to Martin.“Have I got to lug this thing?” he groaned; but even as he spoke, he opened it and held it tenderly over her.Kingsnorth, smoking on his own veranda, nodded and asked them where they were going.“Most anywhere. Up the hill, probably. Charlotte likes to go there. Will you come along?”Mrs. Collingwood did not second the invitation, though she had time to do so before Kingsnorthreplied. “I’m too lazy. I’ll leave hill-climbing to you adventurous young persons.” To himself he added, “You don’t want me. You want to go up there and spoon. Oh, Lord! to be young again!” He did not add, “and to love and be loved”; but the words were bitter in his thoughts as he watched the young couple go along the clean beach.When they came to a path leading across the cocoanut grove to a spur of hill on the eastern side of the island, they took it, followed it through the shadowed green arcades, climbed a rather stiff hill, and, at length, found themselves in the shade of a bamboo clump at the head of a cleft filled with undergrowth. An outcropping of rock made a sort of natural seat for Charlotte, and Collingwood stretched himself at her feet. On the ridge above them a line of cocoanut trees drooped their great leaves, while over their heads the long bamboo stems swayed to every breath of air. Although the elevation was low—not more than fifty or sixty feet above the water—it gave the loungers an extended view. The sea rolled in long swells of deepest sapphire. Far away to the north, the great plateau mountain of Tablas was a violet shadow in thesky; but on the east the insistent sun searched out every ravine and spur of the Antique coast range. From that grim mountain king which lords it over them on the north to the far distance of the south their weathered sides lay outlined in long lines of pink and mauve, and in great patches of smoky-blue, where cloud shadows lay soft upon them. Here and there a distant sail gleamed, a mere speck of pearl against the lustre of sea and sky, and, in the north, a steamer’s smudge was plainly visible, though the vessel was hull down.“May be a tramp freighter going north, which slipped through the channel without our noticing her,” said Martin. “This is not the time for the Puerta Princesa steamer.” Boats were always a source of conversation at the island. They were charged with almost a romantic significance, coming and going, ever the mute reminders that, beyond the shining horizon line, people still lived and toiled, still built and populated the great cities of which Martin loved to speak.“I can’t see a line of smoke without a pang of homesickness,” he said. “Let’s see. We are thirteen hours ahead of Chicago time. It is now about four o’clock; it’s quiet enough in those emptystreets now. But about the time we were eating lunch, the theatres were just emptying. I can see the carriages drive up, and the women with their beautiful dresses showing under their opera cloaks; and the other kind, the kind that don’t go in carriages, hurrying off to catch a car, buttoning up their jackets as they come out into the cool—it’s just frosty weather there now—and the lights in the big restaurants, and the lamps flashing on carriages and automobiles. Meanwhile, we are here frizzling, and here we bid fair to stay till we make money enough to go home in style. I shall take you to the theatre some time that way, Charlotte. You’ll be in a low-necked dress with diamonds—do you think you’ll like diamonds?—and you shall have one of those long coats with the hoods, and I’ll be in my swallow-tail. We’ll spin up in an electric brougham, and rustle into our box. Then, after the performance, we’ll have a supper, and then I’ll say ‘Home’ kind of careless to the chauffeur. How does that strike your imagination?”He lay at her feet, smiling, and Charlotte hardly knew what to reply. How could she say to him that the experience on which his whole imagination had fastened was a matter of fact detail ofher past? She had rarely entered a theatre except under the circumstances which had made it a picture of delight to him. She did not deny that it would be pleasant to go again, and she did not, for an instant, underrate the pleasure which comes of knowing oneself among the envied few. But how could she take from him the pleasure of anticipating for her as well as for himself? Indeed, would not it make a perceptible rift in his present joy if he knew that his innocent outburst could find no echo in her breast? Would he not feel a little ridiculous? And how uncomfortable it was that that coil of misunderstanding always was most perceptible at Martin’s most exalted moments! Why had he chosen to assume that she was a stranger to luxury, and why had her good taste so resolutely declined to give him even a hint, until suddenly she found herself in a position where a hint would seem like an insult? She would have liked to tell him, then and there, a string of reminiscences, and to share half a hundred memories with him, but it was too late. To say anything then would be to pour cold water by the bucket over his enthusiasms. What she did say was:“I shall enjoy that immensely if it ever comes;but until it does come, I want you to understand that I am not discontented with our life here; and that if it never comes, I shall not let myself repine over it.”“Thank God for that,” he replied earnestly. And as she smiled at him faintly, puzzled by his emphasis, he added, “I took my chances when I brought you here, and there is no doubt that you are an unusual woman to have stood it as you have done. The queer part of it is that I knew what risks I was taking, but until it was too late to back out, I couldn’t own them to myself. One of the reasons that I wanted you so badly was that I hated it so here, and it was so all-fired lonely. But I kept on saying to myself that it wouldn’t be lonely for you because I would be here.”“Well,” she conceded, willing to gloss over the selfishness of which he stood ready to accuse himself, “so long as you are willing to believe that you would not be lonely because I would be here, that seems a fair exchange.”“No, it wasn’t fair at any point, because I knew exactly what the place was like and you were going into it blindfold. But a man can’t stop to look at things that way. If we did, nobody wouldever get anything in the world that he wanted. My mother used to say to me that God helps those who help themselves. I’ve come to the conclusion that He doesn’t do anything of the kind, but that He sits back and doesn’t interfere with those who take.”After this burst of unusual eloquence, Mr. Collingwood closed his eyes and puffed luxuriously at his cigar. But for the rhythm of the surf, nature seemed steeped in afternoon slumber. In the accentuated silence the voices of children digging clams far up the beach came to them like drowsy music.Collingwood smoked on, content with his own analysis of his conduct and delighting in his wife’s soft hand on his brow. Charlotte thought he was going to sleep, and smiled tenderly at his closed eyes. Martin not infrequently displayed his enjoyment of her society by a willingness to nap in it; but she was not petty enough to grudge him the indulgence. Besides, many of her tenderest thoughts, her best inspirations had come to her as she mused, on lazy afternoons, with his handsome profile in her lap. There seemed, at such times, to be a reversal of their ordinary relations. Sheleaned tremendously on Martin, not by making him a sharer in her domestic difficulties or by wearying him, already weary with toil, by that demand for petty services by which some women delight to vaunt their possession of a slave. As far as she could be a buffer between him and all the little cares and burdens of their daily life, Charlotte had kept her promise to herself to make Martin Collingwood a good wife. And though she measured his hourly joy in the pride of having her undivided affection, she felt herself meanly stinting him of that secret hoard of gratitude which lay so warm in her heart. Was he fairly treated, she asked herself, in being denied the knowledge that he alone of all the world had made her feel herself welcome in it? He thought her strong, when, in reality, all her strength came from him. Deprived of that crown and sceptre with which he had endowed her, would she be more than a poor shrinking outcast again, a creature at bay, ready to snap without discrimination at passing curiosity or at passing kindness. But pride was still strong in her heart—love had not subdued that; and there were some explanations that she could not force herself to make. When he lay supine, as on that afternoon,his pagan beauty even more markedly defined by a slumber that was like a child’s, she had an intuition of his unexpressed dependence on her. Was it possible that Martin had reservations also? The thought bred another. Is it possible for any soul to unbosom itself completely to another? Does not the very wealth of confidence entrain some final reservations, the inner sanctuary of that self-dignity with which the-gentlest spirit is reluctant to part? She decided that, freely as he revealed himself to her, Martin must carry deep in his heart, some feelings jealously guarded from her—thoughts and feelings perhaps that he had recklessly revealed to the young girls who at times had fired his imagination. It is the instinct of the human soul to guard those weaknesses of which it is self-conscious from those natures which cannot understand them, and, not understanding, cannot sympathize. Of what weakness did she make Martin self-conscious? She knew only too well the weaknesses of which he made her self-conscious; knew, too, her desperate fear that full cognizance of them might shake the foundations of his pride in her. They had been married eight months, and in that time they had hardly touched a jar in their lives. Hehad told her a thousand times that she was all the world to him, and she had replied a thousand times that she asked nothing more, and that, so long as she could be that, she was willing to bear solitude, and endure even privation. Was all her happiness hinged upon the chance dropping of a curtain in his speech or hers? upon the revelation of another self hidden away behind his merriment, behind her silence? She sighed and moved impatiently, trying to shake off her thoughts. Then she remembered that he was sleeping and glanced down to find him gazing at her quizzically.“I’ve been awake all the while,” he said, “watching your face. You have been doing a sight of thinking all to yourself. You thought I had dropped off, didn’t you?”“I’ve had reason to believe you capable of it, Martin.”“What I have done and what I am going to do this afternoon are two distinct things, Mrs. C.”“Oh, Martin, I hate ‘Mrs. C.’ It sounds like Dickens.”“Do you meanthedickens?”“No: if it comes to that, I’ll use the other word—the one you are so fond of using.”Mr. Collingwood almost sat up. “Say, you’re coming on,” he ejaculated. “You’d never have said that when we were first married.”“That’s true.” Mrs. Collingwood’s tone left open an inference which her husband must have perceived, for he laughed contentedly.“Youweremealy-mouthed,” he stated, with a genial retrospect in his voice.Charlotte looked at him demurely. “I was brought up to observe the conventional limitations of feminine speech, dear; but if your heart is set upon my enlarging upon them—”“Heaven forbid!” Martin ejaculated piously, as she came to her suggestive little pause. He added after a moment, “But I had a girl once that used to swear. It never sounded bad in her. It was just funny and cute.”If there was one habit of Martin Collingwood’s that came near rousing a visible resentment in his wife, it was his easy-going references to his “girls.” She knew that the term, as he used it, implied no disrespect, that it was his equivalent forinnamorata, and that each affair with a girl had represented one of his tentative ventures toward matrimony. She was not jealous of her predecessors in his affections,for there was an overwhelming sincerity in his invariable reassurance that none of them “came up to specifications”; that is, conformed to his ideal of womanhood, as she herself did. Nor did he hesitate to reveal that, in most cases, the breaking of sentimental ties was largely the result of his own initiative. If his frankness in these revelations had contained one element of personal vanity, it would have strained dangerously his wife’s respect for him. But although he had a happy self-confidence, Collingwood was utterly without self-conscious vanity. Charlotte realized, also, that his good looks and his personal charm which she, with her critically developed faculties, had been unable to withstand, must have made him an exceedingly popular swain with the type of young woman whom he had previously affected. But it was irritating to have him lump her with them so carelessly. It implied that, though she was the only perfect jewel according to his taste, the matter was, after all, one of taste and not of kind. She was human enough, however, to suffer some pangs of curiosity concerning her erstwhile rivals, and though she would not have asked a question,she was not dissatisfied when Martin went on:“It’s funny what differences there are in people. You are not glum, but you don’t laugh much. Even when you seem happiest, you are rather grave and quiet. But that girl giggled from morning till night, and she made me laugh too. She saw the funny side of everything that happened, and she was no fool either. She was quick as a flash. The last time I saw her was at the close of the Spanish War. It was about ten days before I enlisted. The Government sent a gunboat up the Mississippi River just to show the backwoods people what a real live gunboat that had been in the war looked like; and those blamed officers were making love to every pretty girl on both banks of the river wherever the boat lay long enough to have a reception for the officers or a smoker for the men. This girl was dancing with a sandy-haired little ensign, and he was piling it on thick as molasses on a hot cake. All of a sudden, she began to giggle. He wanted to know why. “I’ll bet a horse you’re married,” she said over his shoulder; and the fellow, like to split himself laughing,vowed he wasn’t. But when he got to St. Louis, there it was in the papers, how his wife had come out to join him for that week. When his boat went back down the river the next week, all the girls gave him the laugh. That little devil had told it on him, and all the talk he had given her.”“I like that girl,” said Charlotte. “What became of her? How did it happen that you didn’t make the best of your opportunities in her case?”“I did. She had me mighty anxious. But she played just a little too bluff a game. She got hold of a long-legged sergeant of volunteers and she let on that she didn’t have a minute to give me after he came along. I used to walk home from church with her pretty regularly, but the first Sunday after she picked up with him, she turned me down. I had to come along behind with her best friend: she was one of those girls that always have neglected women friends and run ‘em in and make you be civil to ‘em. I hated this other girl, and I was the maddest man that ever tagged up the street after his girl and another man. All of a sudden, I saw that every time she took a step, she turned the hem of her skirt with her heel. You know I just came to myself. I got to wondering if Iwanted to marry a girl with a jay-bird heel like that, and I decided I didn’t. I enlisted, came out here, served my country in China, and took back talk from a lot of West Point popinjays for two years—damn their souls—and that was all the patriotism I had. She married her volunteer and he served his three years and got a commission. I saw by a paper not very long ago that they are in Samar now. She was a good fellow, that girl. I should like to see her again. If the fool killer tried to kill her, the gun wouldn’t go off, sure.”“That is quite so,” Charlotte replied gravely, and then, as Martin relapsed into laziness again, she remained studying him and pondering the somewhat irrelevant motives which had influenced his life.“A jay-bird heel!” She looked with amused scrutiny at his somewhat emphasized masculine beauty. What magnificence, what unconscious arrogance of self-esteem lay unrebuked in this innocent youth; for in spite of the fact that he had known sin as she had never known it, that his unrestrained instincts had reached forth into experiments with life from which not only her sex, but the inheritance of tradition and of environment hadeternally debarred her—in spite of these facts, Charlotte had always a sense of cynical and satiated age beside his debonair innocence. It had been her lot to be both player and onlooker in that melodrama where the possession of ample means and the development of critical and æsthetic faculties have frowned upon the expression of a direct and creative ambition; and yet, where all that is subtly ambitious, and all that is meanly jealous, and all that is secretly arrogant, deprived of a natural and healthy expression, underlie and taint the whole body of society. She had come to realize that, in that world in which money must not be mentioned, money is the most indispensable necessity; that every instinct tabooed as vulgar has been so tabooed, because, when it is no longer recognized in speech, it may be the more successfully pursued in action. She had discovered that the exquisite charm of manner which is called high-bred unconsciousness is the result of a self-consciousness so unflagging that its possessor is incapable of losing herself utterly in any emotion; and that the final result of the developing process is an individuality whose utter selfishness and nullity are not patent simply because all the arts of society and all the material advantages ofwealth are bent to the concealment of the truth. Collingwood was, as he had said of his sweetheart, “no fool.” He had a keen interest in life, a rather broad knowledge of men and affairs as they are judged by concrete results; but of that sense of social values which amounts almost to a cult with our so-called aristocratic classes, Martin was as ignorant as his primeval parents were of sin. Suddenly, as she looked at him, a quotation flashed into Charlotte’s mind. She formed the words with her lips as her memory groped for them:The ancients set no value on that half feminine delicacy, that nervous sensibility which we call distinction, and on which we pride ourselves. For thedistinguéman of the present day, a salon is necessary; he is adilettanteand entertaining with ladies; although capable of enthusiasms, he is inclined to scepticism; his politeness is exquisite; he dislikes foul hands and disagreeable odors, and shrinks from being confounded with the vulgar. Alcibiades had no apprehension of being confounded with the vulgar.Martin opened his eyes as she was breathing the words to herself, but she did not stop. He stared at her, and when she paused, he asked:“What kind of hoodoo was that?”“That, O my Alcibiades, was a charm.” Sheleaned forward and kissed him—a half repentant, wholly tender little caress. It pleased him, for while she was ready enough to be petted, Charlotte was slow to offer endearments. Lifelong habit was stronger even than the impulses of a naturally demonstrative nature.“Who are you hoodooing? Me?”“No: myself. It was I that needed the charm.”“Now you are getting mysterious again. Tell me what it was about.” Collingwood had, when he desired to wheedle, not only a child’s persistency but a child’s alluringness. Charlotte had had experience in plenty with him, and knew her own weakness in resisting him. She cast a hasty glance around and perceived the steamer, the smoke of which had been visible when they gained the hill. They had, in seating themselves, half turned their backs in her direction, and she had crept very close to the island.“Martin, that boat seems to be coming nearer. She would not come this close if she were heading for Cuyo.”“Eh! Here?” Collingwood raised himself alertly and stared. “That’s strange. Coastguard. She isn’t making Iloilo, or she would not be cuttingacross our bows; but it is a queer route for Cuyo. Why didn’t she cut over to the west after leaving Romblon?”“You’ll have to signal her for information, Martin.”“Information be blanked. I’ll signal her for fresh beef if she gets close enough. We may be able to exchange a bit of fish. Have you seen the fishparaogo in yet?”“It went by a few minutes ago.”“That’s good. Maybe we had better go down and be ready to trade if she comes near enough. I’ll send out a note with the launch. It looks, though, as if she were heading straight for us.”“Would a coastguard steamer drop mail here?”“No: catch a Government captain dropping an anchor to oblige anybody. If she is coming in, it is either with somebody interested in pearl fishery statistics, or some sort of survey, or—” he turned suddenly, a teasing smile melting all his handsome features to winningness—“your friend Barton. Didn’t he promise us a visit sometime?”Martin had assumed a marital jocularity on the subject of the Judge. Charlotte had honestly but vainly tried to dispel from his mind his strong convictionthat Judge Barton was a rival who had hardly been allowed to approach the tentative stages of worship. Her quick frown and “Impossible!” only made her husband grin more broadly. “That was a mere civility at parting,” she insisted. “Judge Barton hasn’t a particle of interest in us.”“He hasn’t any in me, certainly; and he would be justified in not having any in you. Snapped his nose off, you did, every time he opened his mouth.”“Martin, you do not understand. I tried my best to be agreeable to Judge Barton, just as any nurse ought to be to any patient; and every time I ‘snapped his nose off’ as you express it, I did it in self-defence. He was very often impertinent to me.”“Why Charlotte, I heard pretty near every word he ever said to you, and I never heard anything out of the way.”They were going down hill by that time, Martin ahead, picking the trail; and Charlotte made a quaintly affectionate grimace behind his sturdy back. There were various reasons why she was unwilling to make any effort to enlighten Martin’sdenseness. There was no earthly danger of his appreciating unaided the delicate flavor of Judge Barton’s impertinence.“Anyway,” she remarked, deftly slipping from the discussion of facts upon which disagreement was certain, “he will have forgotten both of us completely by this time, and there is not one chance in a hundred of his being on that boat if it does stop here.” But Martin had time to correct her. He was willing to admit that there was not much certainty of the Judge’s being on the boat unless she stopped; and then he stood ready to back his judgment. By the time they had crossed the cocoanut grove and had gained the beach, it was evident that the boat was making for the island. Kingsnorth had sighted her, and had sent out the launch, which was puffing busily toward her. “Kingsnorth’s got as good a nose for fresh beef as I have,” Collingwood grunted approvingly. The Maclaughlins were on their veranda with a pair of binoculars, and some excitement could be perceived even in the distant village.The steamer slowed up in reply to signals from the launch, and evidently awaited advice about dropping anchor. When she did come to a halt,however, and put a boat out, Martin counted the persons who descended into it.“Distinguished passengers,” he remarked concisely. “The captain would not put out the gang-way for his own use in that sea. Three men in white suits; three rowers; and the skipper is coming along. We’re in for visitors, Charlotte. What is there for dinner?”Charlotte was away on the instant. He heard her despatching boys—one to the village, bidding him secure the very best of the afternoon’s catch; another to the poultry yard with orders to bring up the two fattest capons, but not to slay them till further orders. Complaining shrieks of the storeroom door, the hinges of which were exceedingly rusty, bore testimony to repeated openings; and the voice of old Pedro was audible, cursing the ice-machine.By the time the boat was close in, the sun was fairly low and seemed to be sucking up the whole Visaya Sea is shafts of splendor. As soon as the narrowing distance permitted the little crafts’ passengers to be recognized, Collingwood cocked a humorous eye upon his wife and went into silent ecstasies of laughter, much to the amazement ofKingsnorth and the Maclaughlins. Charlotte blushed, bit her lips and then she laughed also, at first in helpless embarrassment, and finally with a sheer burst of merriment. She had barely time to recover her gravity when the boat grounded, and Judge Barton, as an acquaintance, took precedence of his fellow-passengers, and was carried ashore in time to introduce them as they landed. All had to avail themselves of the primitive transporting process by which Charlotte herself had made her landing, and it was in no hateful spirit that she admitted that dignity and such a progress are almost incompatible.
Chapter VIII
“Want a paseo, Charlotte?” Martin called from his deck chair on the vine-shaded veranda one Sunday afternoon. “It’s not so very hot. I feel like walking myself.”Mrs. Collingwood, who was dabbing a powder puff across her face as a finish to her afternoon toilet, responded at once, from the adjoining bedroom, that she was longing for a walk. In a few minutes, she appeared, tying the strings of a great sun hat, and handed her umbrella to Martin.“Have I got to lug this thing?” he groaned; but even as he spoke, he opened it and held it tenderly over her.Kingsnorth, smoking on his own veranda, nodded and asked them where they were going.“Most anywhere. Up the hill, probably. Charlotte likes to go there. Will you come along?”Mrs. Collingwood did not second the invitation, though she had time to do so before Kingsnorthreplied. “I’m too lazy. I’ll leave hill-climbing to you adventurous young persons.” To himself he added, “You don’t want me. You want to go up there and spoon. Oh, Lord! to be young again!” He did not add, “and to love and be loved”; but the words were bitter in his thoughts as he watched the young couple go along the clean beach.When they came to a path leading across the cocoanut grove to a spur of hill on the eastern side of the island, they took it, followed it through the shadowed green arcades, climbed a rather stiff hill, and, at length, found themselves in the shade of a bamboo clump at the head of a cleft filled with undergrowth. An outcropping of rock made a sort of natural seat for Charlotte, and Collingwood stretched himself at her feet. On the ridge above them a line of cocoanut trees drooped their great leaves, while over their heads the long bamboo stems swayed to every breath of air. Although the elevation was low—not more than fifty or sixty feet above the water—it gave the loungers an extended view. The sea rolled in long swells of deepest sapphire. Far away to the north, the great plateau mountain of Tablas was a violet shadow in thesky; but on the east the insistent sun searched out every ravine and spur of the Antique coast range. From that grim mountain king which lords it over them on the north to the far distance of the south their weathered sides lay outlined in long lines of pink and mauve, and in great patches of smoky-blue, where cloud shadows lay soft upon them. Here and there a distant sail gleamed, a mere speck of pearl against the lustre of sea and sky, and, in the north, a steamer’s smudge was plainly visible, though the vessel was hull down.“May be a tramp freighter going north, which slipped through the channel without our noticing her,” said Martin. “This is not the time for the Puerta Princesa steamer.” Boats were always a source of conversation at the island. They were charged with almost a romantic significance, coming and going, ever the mute reminders that, beyond the shining horizon line, people still lived and toiled, still built and populated the great cities of which Martin loved to speak.“I can’t see a line of smoke without a pang of homesickness,” he said. “Let’s see. We are thirteen hours ahead of Chicago time. It is now about four o’clock; it’s quiet enough in those emptystreets now. But about the time we were eating lunch, the theatres were just emptying. I can see the carriages drive up, and the women with their beautiful dresses showing under their opera cloaks; and the other kind, the kind that don’t go in carriages, hurrying off to catch a car, buttoning up their jackets as they come out into the cool—it’s just frosty weather there now—and the lights in the big restaurants, and the lamps flashing on carriages and automobiles. Meanwhile, we are here frizzling, and here we bid fair to stay till we make money enough to go home in style. I shall take you to the theatre some time that way, Charlotte. You’ll be in a low-necked dress with diamonds—do you think you’ll like diamonds?—and you shall have one of those long coats with the hoods, and I’ll be in my swallow-tail. We’ll spin up in an electric brougham, and rustle into our box. Then, after the performance, we’ll have a supper, and then I’ll say ‘Home’ kind of careless to the chauffeur. How does that strike your imagination?”He lay at her feet, smiling, and Charlotte hardly knew what to reply. How could she say to him that the experience on which his whole imagination had fastened was a matter of fact detail ofher past? She had rarely entered a theatre except under the circumstances which had made it a picture of delight to him. She did not deny that it would be pleasant to go again, and she did not, for an instant, underrate the pleasure which comes of knowing oneself among the envied few. But how could she take from him the pleasure of anticipating for her as well as for himself? Indeed, would not it make a perceptible rift in his present joy if he knew that his innocent outburst could find no echo in her breast? Would he not feel a little ridiculous? And how uncomfortable it was that that coil of misunderstanding always was most perceptible at Martin’s most exalted moments! Why had he chosen to assume that she was a stranger to luxury, and why had her good taste so resolutely declined to give him even a hint, until suddenly she found herself in a position where a hint would seem like an insult? She would have liked to tell him, then and there, a string of reminiscences, and to share half a hundred memories with him, but it was too late. To say anything then would be to pour cold water by the bucket over his enthusiasms. What she did say was:“I shall enjoy that immensely if it ever comes;but until it does come, I want you to understand that I am not discontented with our life here; and that if it never comes, I shall not let myself repine over it.”“Thank God for that,” he replied earnestly. And as she smiled at him faintly, puzzled by his emphasis, he added, “I took my chances when I brought you here, and there is no doubt that you are an unusual woman to have stood it as you have done. The queer part of it is that I knew what risks I was taking, but until it was too late to back out, I couldn’t own them to myself. One of the reasons that I wanted you so badly was that I hated it so here, and it was so all-fired lonely. But I kept on saying to myself that it wouldn’t be lonely for you because I would be here.”“Well,” she conceded, willing to gloss over the selfishness of which he stood ready to accuse himself, “so long as you are willing to believe that you would not be lonely because I would be here, that seems a fair exchange.”“No, it wasn’t fair at any point, because I knew exactly what the place was like and you were going into it blindfold. But a man can’t stop to look at things that way. If we did, nobody wouldever get anything in the world that he wanted. My mother used to say to me that God helps those who help themselves. I’ve come to the conclusion that He doesn’t do anything of the kind, but that He sits back and doesn’t interfere with those who take.”After this burst of unusual eloquence, Mr. Collingwood closed his eyes and puffed luxuriously at his cigar. But for the rhythm of the surf, nature seemed steeped in afternoon slumber. In the accentuated silence the voices of children digging clams far up the beach came to them like drowsy music.Collingwood smoked on, content with his own analysis of his conduct and delighting in his wife’s soft hand on his brow. Charlotte thought he was going to sleep, and smiled tenderly at his closed eyes. Martin not infrequently displayed his enjoyment of her society by a willingness to nap in it; but she was not petty enough to grudge him the indulgence. Besides, many of her tenderest thoughts, her best inspirations had come to her as she mused, on lazy afternoons, with his handsome profile in her lap. There seemed, at such times, to be a reversal of their ordinary relations. Sheleaned tremendously on Martin, not by making him a sharer in her domestic difficulties or by wearying him, already weary with toil, by that demand for petty services by which some women delight to vaunt their possession of a slave. As far as she could be a buffer between him and all the little cares and burdens of their daily life, Charlotte had kept her promise to herself to make Martin Collingwood a good wife. And though she measured his hourly joy in the pride of having her undivided affection, she felt herself meanly stinting him of that secret hoard of gratitude which lay so warm in her heart. Was he fairly treated, she asked herself, in being denied the knowledge that he alone of all the world had made her feel herself welcome in it? He thought her strong, when, in reality, all her strength came from him. Deprived of that crown and sceptre with which he had endowed her, would she be more than a poor shrinking outcast again, a creature at bay, ready to snap without discrimination at passing curiosity or at passing kindness. But pride was still strong in her heart—love had not subdued that; and there were some explanations that she could not force herself to make. When he lay supine, as on that afternoon,his pagan beauty even more markedly defined by a slumber that was like a child’s, she had an intuition of his unexpressed dependence on her. Was it possible that Martin had reservations also? The thought bred another. Is it possible for any soul to unbosom itself completely to another? Does not the very wealth of confidence entrain some final reservations, the inner sanctuary of that self-dignity with which the-gentlest spirit is reluctant to part? She decided that, freely as he revealed himself to her, Martin must carry deep in his heart, some feelings jealously guarded from her—thoughts and feelings perhaps that he had recklessly revealed to the young girls who at times had fired his imagination. It is the instinct of the human soul to guard those weaknesses of which it is self-conscious from those natures which cannot understand them, and, not understanding, cannot sympathize. Of what weakness did she make Martin self-conscious? She knew only too well the weaknesses of which he made her self-conscious; knew, too, her desperate fear that full cognizance of them might shake the foundations of his pride in her. They had been married eight months, and in that time they had hardly touched a jar in their lives. Hehad told her a thousand times that she was all the world to him, and she had replied a thousand times that she asked nothing more, and that, so long as she could be that, she was willing to bear solitude, and endure even privation. Was all her happiness hinged upon the chance dropping of a curtain in his speech or hers? upon the revelation of another self hidden away behind his merriment, behind her silence? She sighed and moved impatiently, trying to shake off her thoughts. Then she remembered that he was sleeping and glanced down to find him gazing at her quizzically.“I’ve been awake all the while,” he said, “watching your face. You have been doing a sight of thinking all to yourself. You thought I had dropped off, didn’t you?”“I’ve had reason to believe you capable of it, Martin.”“What I have done and what I am going to do this afternoon are two distinct things, Mrs. C.”“Oh, Martin, I hate ‘Mrs. C.’ It sounds like Dickens.”“Do you meanthedickens?”“No: if it comes to that, I’ll use the other word—the one you are so fond of using.”Mr. Collingwood almost sat up. “Say, you’re coming on,” he ejaculated. “You’d never have said that when we were first married.”“That’s true.” Mrs. Collingwood’s tone left open an inference which her husband must have perceived, for he laughed contentedly.“Youweremealy-mouthed,” he stated, with a genial retrospect in his voice.Charlotte looked at him demurely. “I was brought up to observe the conventional limitations of feminine speech, dear; but if your heart is set upon my enlarging upon them—”“Heaven forbid!” Martin ejaculated piously, as she came to her suggestive little pause. He added after a moment, “But I had a girl once that used to swear. It never sounded bad in her. It was just funny and cute.”If there was one habit of Martin Collingwood’s that came near rousing a visible resentment in his wife, it was his easy-going references to his “girls.” She knew that the term, as he used it, implied no disrespect, that it was his equivalent forinnamorata, and that each affair with a girl had represented one of his tentative ventures toward matrimony. She was not jealous of her predecessors in his affections,for there was an overwhelming sincerity in his invariable reassurance that none of them “came up to specifications”; that is, conformed to his ideal of womanhood, as she herself did. Nor did he hesitate to reveal that, in most cases, the breaking of sentimental ties was largely the result of his own initiative. If his frankness in these revelations had contained one element of personal vanity, it would have strained dangerously his wife’s respect for him. But although he had a happy self-confidence, Collingwood was utterly without self-conscious vanity. Charlotte realized, also, that his good looks and his personal charm which she, with her critically developed faculties, had been unable to withstand, must have made him an exceedingly popular swain with the type of young woman whom he had previously affected. But it was irritating to have him lump her with them so carelessly. It implied that, though she was the only perfect jewel according to his taste, the matter was, after all, one of taste and not of kind. She was human enough, however, to suffer some pangs of curiosity concerning her erstwhile rivals, and though she would not have asked a question,she was not dissatisfied when Martin went on:“It’s funny what differences there are in people. You are not glum, but you don’t laugh much. Even when you seem happiest, you are rather grave and quiet. But that girl giggled from morning till night, and she made me laugh too. She saw the funny side of everything that happened, and she was no fool either. She was quick as a flash. The last time I saw her was at the close of the Spanish War. It was about ten days before I enlisted. The Government sent a gunboat up the Mississippi River just to show the backwoods people what a real live gunboat that had been in the war looked like; and those blamed officers were making love to every pretty girl on both banks of the river wherever the boat lay long enough to have a reception for the officers or a smoker for the men. This girl was dancing with a sandy-haired little ensign, and he was piling it on thick as molasses on a hot cake. All of a sudden, she began to giggle. He wanted to know why. “I’ll bet a horse you’re married,” she said over his shoulder; and the fellow, like to split himself laughing,vowed he wasn’t. But when he got to St. Louis, there it was in the papers, how his wife had come out to join him for that week. When his boat went back down the river the next week, all the girls gave him the laugh. That little devil had told it on him, and all the talk he had given her.”“I like that girl,” said Charlotte. “What became of her? How did it happen that you didn’t make the best of your opportunities in her case?”“I did. She had me mighty anxious. But she played just a little too bluff a game. She got hold of a long-legged sergeant of volunteers and she let on that she didn’t have a minute to give me after he came along. I used to walk home from church with her pretty regularly, but the first Sunday after she picked up with him, she turned me down. I had to come along behind with her best friend: she was one of those girls that always have neglected women friends and run ‘em in and make you be civil to ‘em. I hated this other girl, and I was the maddest man that ever tagged up the street after his girl and another man. All of a sudden, I saw that every time she took a step, she turned the hem of her skirt with her heel. You know I just came to myself. I got to wondering if Iwanted to marry a girl with a jay-bird heel like that, and I decided I didn’t. I enlisted, came out here, served my country in China, and took back talk from a lot of West Point popinjays for two years—damn their souls—and that was all the patriotism I had. She married her volunteer and he served his three years and got a commission. I saw by a paper not very long ago that they are in Samar now. She was a good fellow, that girl. I should like to see her again. If the fool killer tried to kill her, the gun wouldn’t go off, sure.”“That is quite so,” Charlotte replied gravely, and then, as Martin relapsed into laziness again, she remained studying him and pondering the somewhat irrelevant motives which had influenced his life.“A jay-bird heel!” She looked with amused scrutiny at his somewhat emphasized masculine beauty. What magnificence, what unconscious arrogance of self-esteem lay unrebuked in this innocent youth; for in spite of the fact that he had known sin as she had never known it, that his unrestrained instincts had reached forth into experiments with life from which not only her sex, but the inheritance of tradition and of environment hadeternally debarred her—in spite of these facts, Charlotte had always a sense of cynical and satiated age beside his debonair innocence. It had been her lot to be both player and onlooker in that melodrama where the possession of ample means and the development of critical and æsthetic faculties have frowned upon the expression of a direct and creative ambition; and yet, where all that is subtly ambitious, and all that is meanly jealous, and all that is secretly arrogant, deprived of a natural and healthy expression, underlie and taint the whole body of society. She had come to realize that, in that world in which money must not be mentioned, money is the most indispensable necessity; that every instinct tabooed as vulgar has been so tabooed, because, when it is no longer recognized in speech, it may be the more successfully pursued in action. She had discovered that the exquisite charm of manner which is called high-bred unconsciousness is the result of a self-consciousness so unflagging that its possessor is incapable of losing herself utterly in any emotion; and that the final result of the developing process is an individuality whose utter selfishness and nullity are not patent simply because all the arts of society and all the material advantages ofwealth are bent to the concealment of the truth. Collingwood was, as he had said of his sweetheart, “no fool.” He had a keen interest in life, a rather broad knowledge of men and affairs as they are judged by concrete results; but of that sense of social values which amounts almost to a cult with our so-called aristocratic classes, Martin was as ignorant as his primeval parents were of sin. Suddenly, as she looked at him, a quotation flashed into Charlotte’s mind. She formed the words with her lips as her memory groped for them:The ancients set no value on that half feminine delicacy, that nervous sensibility which we call distinction, and on which we pride ourselves. For thedistinguéman of the present day, a salon is necessary; he is adilettanteand entertaining with ladies; although capable of enthusiasms, he is inclined to scepticism; his politeness is exquisite; he dislikes foul hands and disagreeable odors, and shrinks from being confounded with the vulgar. Alcibiades had no apprehension of being confounded with the vulgar.Martin opened his eyes as she was breathing the words to herself, but she did not stop. He stared at her, and when she paused, he asked:“What kind of hoodoo was that?”“That, O my Alcibiades, was a charm.” Sheleaned forward and kissed him—a half repentant, wholly tender little caress. It pleased him, for while she was ready enough to be petted, Charlotte was slow to offer endearments. Lifelong habit was stronger even than the impulses of a naturally demonstrative nature.“Who are you hoodooing? Me?”“No: myself. It was I that needed the charm.”“Now you are getting mysterious again. Tell me what it was about.” Collingwood had, when he desired to wheedle, not only a child’s persistency but a child’s alluringness. Charlotte had had experience in plenty with him, and knew her own weakness in resisting him. She cast a hasty glance around and perceived the steamer, the smoke of which had been visible when they gained the hill. They had, in seating themselves, half turned their backs in her direction, and she had crept very close to the island.“Martin, that boat seems to be coming nearer. She would not come this close if she were heading for Cuyo.”“Eh! Here?” Collingwood raised himself alertly and stared. “That’s strange. Coastguard. She isn’t making Iloilo, or she would not be cuttingacross our bows; but it is a queer route for Cuyo. Why didn’t she cut over to the west after leaving Romblon?”“You’ll have to signal her for information, Martin.”“Information be blanked. I’ll signal her for fresh beef if she gets close enough. We may be able to exchange a bit of fish. Have you seen the fishparaogo in yet?”“It went by a few minutes ago.”“That’s good. Maybe we had better go down and be ready to trade if she comes near enough. I’ll send out a note with the launch. It looks, though, as if she were heading straight for us.”“Would a coastguard steamer drop mail here?”“No: catch a Government captain dropping an anchor to oblige anybody. If she is coming in, it is either with somebody interested in pearl fishery statistics, or some sort of survey, or—” he turned suddenly, a teasing smile melting all his handsome features to winningness—“your friend Barton. Didn’t he promise us a visit sometime?”Martin had assumed a marital jocularity on the subject of the Judge. Charlotte had honestly but vainly tried to dispel from his mind his strong convictionthat Judge Barton was a rival who had hardly been allowed to approach the tentative stages of worship. Her quick frown and “Impossible!” only made her husband grin more broadly. “That was a mere civility at parting,” she insisted. “Judge Barton hasn’t a particle of interest in us.”“He hasn’t any in me, certainly; and he would be justified in not having any in you. Snapped his nose off, you did, every time he opened his mouth.”“Martin, you do not understand. I tried my best to be agreeable to Judge Barton, just as any nurse ought to be to any patient; and every time I ‘snapped his nose off’ as you express it, I did it in self-defence. He was very often impertinent to me.”“Why Charlotte, I heard pretty near every word he ever said to you, and I never heard anything out of the way.”They were going down hill by that time, Martin ahead, picking the trail; and Charlotte made a quaintly affectionate grimace behind his sturdy back. There were various reasons why she was unwilling to make any effort to enlighten Martin’sdenseness. There was no earthly danger of his appreciating unaided the delicate flavor of Judge Barton’s impertinence.“Anyway,” she remarked, deftly slipping from the discussion of facts upon which disagreement was certain, “he will have forgotten both of us completely by this time, and there is not one chance in a hundred of his being on that boat if it does stop here.” But Martin had time to correct her. He was willing to admit that there was not much certainty of the Judge’s being on the boat unless she stopped; and then he stood ready to back his judgment. By the time they had crossed the cocoanut grove and had gained the beach, it was evident that the boat was making for the island. Kingsnorth had sighted her, and had sent out the launch, which was puffing busily toward her. “Kingsnorth’s got as good a nose for fresh beef as I have,” Collingwood grunted approvingly. The Maclaughlins were on their veranda with a pair of binoculars, and some excitement could be perceived even in the distant village.The steamer slowed up in reply to signals from the launch, and evidently awaited advice about dropping anchor. When she did come to a halt,however, and put a boat out, Martin counted the persons who descended into it.“Distinguished passengers,” he remarked concisely. “The captain would not put out the gang-way for his own use in that sea. Three men in white suits; three rowers; and the skipper is coming along. We’re in for visitors, Charlotte. What is there for dinner?”Charlotte was away on the instant. He heard her despatching boys—one to the village, bidding him secure the very best of the afternoon’s catch; another to the poultry yard with orders to bring up the two fattest capons, but not to slay them till further orders. Complaining shrieks of the storeroom door, the hinges of which were exceedingly rusty, bore testimony to repeated openings; and the voice of old Pedro was audible, cursing the ice-machine.By the time the boat was close in, the sun was fairly low and seemed to be sucking up the whole Visaya Sea is shafts of splendor. As soon as the narrowing distance permitted the little crafts’ passengers to be recognized, Collingwood cocked a humorous eye upon his wife and went into silent ecstasies of laughter, much to the amazement ofKingsnorth and the Maclaughlins. Charlotte blushed, bit her lips and then she laughed also, at first in helpless embarrassment, and finally with a sheer burst of merriment. She had barely time to recover her gravity when the boat grounded, and Judge Barton, as an acquaintance, took precedence of his fellow-passengers, and was carried ashore in time to introduce them as they landed. All had to avail themselves of the primitive transporting process by which Charlotte herself had made her landing, and it was in no hateful spirit that she admitted that dignity and such a progress are almost incompatible.
“Want a paseo, Charlotte?” Martin called from his deck chair on the vine-shaded veranda one Sunday afternoon. “It’s not so very hot. I feel like walking myself.”
Mrs. Collingwood, who was dabbing a powder puff across her face as a finish to her afternoon toilet, responded at once, from the adjoining bedroom, that she was longing for a walk. In a few minutes, she appeared, tying the strings of a great sun hat, and handed her umbrella to Martin.
“Have I got to lug this thing?” he groaned; but even as he spoke, he opened it and held it tenderly over her.
Kingsnorth, smoking on his own veranda, nodded and asked them where they were going.
“Most anywhere. Up the hill, probably. Charlotte likes to go there. Will you come along?”
Mrs. Collingwood did not second the invitation, though she had time to do so before Kingsnorthreplied. “I’m too lazy. I’ll leave hill-climbing to you adventurous young persons.” To himself he added, “You don’t want me. You want to go up there and spoon. Oh, Lord! to be young again!” He did not add, “and to love and be loved”; but the words were bitter in his thoughts as he watched the young couple go along the clean beach.
When they came to a path leading across the cocoanut grove to a spur of hill on the eastern side of the island, they took it, followed it through the shadowed green arcades, climbed a rather stiff hill, and, at length, found themselves in the shade of a bamboo clump at the head of a cleft filled with undergrowth. An outcropping of rock made a sort of natural seat for Charlotte, and Collingwood stretched himself at her feet. On the ridge above them a line of cocoanut trees drooped their great leaves, while over their heads the long bamboo stems swayed to every breath of air. Although the elevation was low—not more than fifty or sixty feet above the water—it gave the loungers an extended view. The sea rolled in long swells of deepest sapphire. Far away to the north, the great plateau mountain of Tablas was a violet shadow in thesky; but on the east the insistent sun searched out every ravine and spur of the Antique coast range. From that grim mountain king which lords it over them on the north to the far distance of the south their weathered sides lay outlined in long lines of pink and mauve, and in great patches of smoky-blue, where cloud shadows lay soft upon them. Here and there a distant sail gleamed, a mere speck of pearl against the lustre of sea and sky, and, in the north, a steamer’s smudge was plainly visible, though the vessel was hull down.
“May be a tramp freighter going north, which slipped through the channel without our noticing her,” said Martin. “This is not the time for the Puerta Princesa steamer.” Boats were always a source of conversation at the island. They were charged with almost a romantic significance, coming and going, ever the mute reminders that, beyond the shining horizon line, people still lived and toiled, still built and populated the great cities of which Martin loved to speak.
“I can’t see a line of smoke without a pang of homesickness,” he said. “Let’s see. We are thirteen hours ahead of Chicago time. It is now about four o’clock; it’s quiet enough in those emptystreets now. But about the time we were eating lunch, the theatres were just emptying. I can see the carriages drive up, and the women with their beautiful dresses showing under their opera cloaks; and the other kind, the kind that don’t go in carriages, hurrying off to catch a car, buttoning up their jackets as they come out into the cool—it’s just frosty weather there now—and the lights in the big restaurants, and the lamps flashing on carriages and automobiles. Meanwhile, we are here frizzling, and here we bid fair to stay till we make money enough to go home in style. I shall take you to the theatre some time that way, Charlotte. You’ll be in a low-necked dress with diamonds—do you think you’ll like diamonds?—and you shall have one of those long coats with the hoods, and I’ll be in my swallow-tail. We’ll spin up in an electric brougham, and rustle into our box. Then, after the performance, we’ll have a supper, and then I’ll say ‘Home’ kind of careless to the chauffeur. How does that strike your imagination?”
He lay at her feet, smiling, and Charlotte hardly knew what to reply. How could she say to him that the experience on which his whole imagination had fastened was a matter of fact detail ofher past? She had rarely entered a theatre except under the circumstances which had made it a picture of delight to him. She did not deny that it would be pleasant to go again, and she did not, for an instant, underrate the pleasure which comes of knowing oneself among the envied few. But how could she take from him the pleasure of anticipating for her as well as for himself? Indeed, would not it make a perceptible rift in his present joy if he knew that his innocent outburst could find no echo in her breast? Would he not feel a little ridiculous? And how uncomfortable it was that that coil of misunderstanding always was most perceptible at Martin’s most exalted moments! Why had he chosen to assume that she was a stranger to luxury, and why had her good taste so resolutely declined to give him even a hint, until suddenly she found herself in a position where a hint would seem like an insult? She would have liked to tell him, then and there, a string of reminiscences, and to share half a hundred memories with him, but it was too late. To say anything then would be to pour cold water by the bucket over his enthusiasms. What she did say was:
“I shall enjoy that immensely if it ever comes;but until it does come, I want you to understand that I am not discontented with our life here; and that if it never comes, I shall not let myself repine over it.”
“Thank God for that,” he replied earnestly. And as she smiled at him faintly, puzzled by his emphasis, he added, “I took my chances when I brought you here, and there is no doubt that you are an unusual woman to have stood it as you have done. The queer part of it is that I knew what risks I was taking, but until it was too late to back out, I couldn’t own them to myself. One of the reasons that I wanted you so badly was that I hated it so here, and it was so all-fired lonely. But I kept on saying to myself that it wouldn’t be lonely for you because I would be here.”
“Well,” she conceded, willing to gloss over the selfishness of which he stood ready to accuse himself, “so long as you are willing to believe that you would not be lonely because I would be here, that seems a fair exchange.”
“No, it wasn’t fair at any point, because I knew exactly what the place was like and you were going into it blindfold. But a man can’t stop to look at things that way. If we did, nobody wouldever get anything in the world that he wanted. My mother used to say to me that God helps those who help themselves. I’ve come to the conclusion that He doesn’t do anything of the kind, but that He sits back and doesn’t interfere with those who take.”
After this burst of unusual eloquence, Mr. Collingwood closed his eyes and puffed luxuriously at his cigar. But for the rhythm of the surf, nature seemed steeped in afternoon slumber. In the accentuated silence the voices of children digging clams far up the beach came to them like drowsy music.
Collingwood smoked on, content with his own analysis of his conduct and delighting in his wife’s soft hand on his brow. Charlotte thought he was going to sleep, and smiled tenderly at his closed eyes. Martin not infrequently displayed his enjoyment of her society by a willingness to nap in it; but she was not petty enough to grudge him the indulgence. Besides, many of her tenderest thoughts, her best inspirations had come to her as she mused, on lazy afternoons, with his handsome profile in her lap. There seemed, at such times, to be a reversal of their ordinary relations. Sheleaned tremendously on Martin, not by making him a sharer in her domestic difficulties or by wearying him, already weary with toil, by that demand for petty services by which some women delight to vaunt their possession of a slave. As far as she could be a buffer between him and all the little cares and burdens of their daily life, Charlotte had kept her promise to herself to make Martin Collingwood a good wife. And though she measured his hourly joy in the pride of having her undivided affection, she felt herself meanly stinting him of that secret hoard of gratitude which lay so warm in her heart. Was he fairly treated, she asked herself, in being denied the knowledge that he alone of all the world had made her feel herself welcome in it? He thought her strong, when, in reality, all her strength came from him. Deprived of that crown and sceptre with which he had endowed her, would she be more than a poor shrinking outcast again, a creature at bay, ready to snap without discrimination at passing curiosity or at passing kindness. But pride was still strong in her heart—love had not subdued that; and there were some explanations that she could not force herself to make. When he lay supine, as on that afternoon,his pagan beauty even more markedly defined by a slumber that was like a child’s, she had an intuition of his unexpressed dependence on her. Was it possible that Martin had reservations also? The thought bred another. Is it possible for any soul to unbosom itself completely to another? Does not the very wealth of confidence entrain some final reservations, the inner sanctuary of that self-dignity with which the-gentlest spirit is reluctant to part? She decided that, freely as he revealed himself to her, Martin must carry deep in his heart, some feelings jealously guarded from her—thoughts and feelings perhaps that he had recklessly revealed to the young girls who at times had fired his imagination. It is the instinct of the human soul to guard those weaknesses of which it is self-conscious from those natures which cannot understand them, and, not understanding, cannot sympathize. Of what weakness did she make Martin self-conscious? She knew only too well the weaknesses of which he made her self-conscious; knew, too, her desperate fear that full cognizance of them might shake the foundations of his pride in her. They had been married eight months, and in that time they had hardly touched a jar in their lives. Hehad told her a thousand times that she was all the world to him, and she had replied a thousand times that she asked nothing more, and that, so long as she could be that, she was willing to bear solitude, and endure even privation. Was all her happiness hinged upon the chance dropping of a curtain in his speech or hers? upon the revelation of another self hidden away behind his merriment, behind her silence? She sighed and moved impatiently, trying to shake off her thoughts. Then she remembered that he was sleeping and glanced down to find him gazing at her quizzically.
“I’ve been awake all the while,” he said, “watching your face. You have been doing a sight of thinking all to yourself. You thought I had dropped off, didn’t you?”
“I’ve had reason to believe you capable of it, Martin.”
“What I have done and what I am going to do this afternoon are two distinct things, Mrs. C.”
“Oh, Martin, I hate ‘Mrs. C.’ It sounds like Dickens.”
“Do you meanthedickens?”
“No: if it comes to that, I’ll use the other word—the one you are so fond of using.”
Mr. Collingwood almost sat up. “Say, you’re coming on,” he ejaculated. “You’d never have said that when we were first married.”
“That’s true.” Mrs. Collingwood’s tone left open an inference which her husband must have perceived, for he laughed contentedly.
“Youweremealy-mouthed,” he stated, with a genial retrospect in his voice.
Charlotte looked at him demurely. “I was brought up to observe the conventional limitations of feminine speech, dear; but if your heart is set upon my enlarging upon them—”
“Heaven forbid!” Martin ejaculated piously, as she came to her suggestive little pause. He added after a moment, “But I had a girl once that used to swear. It never sounded bad in her. It was just funny and cute.”
If there was one habit of Martin Collingwood’s that came near rousing a visible resentment in his wife, it was his easy-going references to his “girls.” She knew that the term, as he used it, implied no disrespect, that it was his equivalent forinnamorata, and that each affair with a girl had represented one of his tentative ventures toward matrimony. She was not jealous of her predecessors in his affections,for there was an overwhelming sincerity in his invariable reassurance that none of them “came up to specifications”; that is, conformed to his ideal of womanhood, as she herself did. Nor did he hesitate to reveal that, in most cases, the breaking of sentimental ties was largely the result of his own initiative. If his frankness in these revelations had contained one element of personal vanity, it would have strained dangerously his wife’s respect for him. But although he had a happy self-confidence, Collingwood was utterly without self-conscious vanity. Charlotte realized, also, that his good looks and his personal charm which she, with her critically developed faculties, had been unable to withstand, must have made him an exceedingly popular swain with the type of young woman whom he had previously affected. But it was irritating to have him lump her with them so carelessly. It implied that, though she was the only perfect jewel according to his taste, the matter was, after all, one of taste and not of kind. She was human enough, however, to suffer some pangs of curiosity concerning her erstwhile rivals, and though she would not have asked a question,she was not dissatisfied when Martin went on:
“It’s funny what differences there are in people. You are not glum, but you don’t laugh much. Even when you seem happiest, you are rather grave and quiet. But that girl giggled from morning till night, and she made me laugh too. She saw the funny side of everything that happened, and she was no fool either. She was quick as a flash. The last time I saw her was at the close of the Spanish War. It was about ten days before I enlisted. The Government sent a gunboat up the Mississippi River just to show the backwoods people what a real live gunboat that had been in the war looked like; and those blamed officers were making love to every pretty girl on both banks of the river wherever the boat lay long enough to have a reception for the officers or a smoker for the men. This girl was dancing with a sandy-haired little ensign, and he was piling it on thick as molasses on a hot cake. All of a sudden, she began to giggle. He wanted to know why. “I’ll bet a horse you’re married,” she said over his shoulder; and the fellow, like to split himself laughing,vowed he wasn’t. But when he got to St. Louis, there it was in the papers, how his wife had come out to join him for that week. When his boat went back down the river the next week, all the girls gave him the laugh. That little devil had told it on him, and all the talk he had given her.”
“I like that girl,” said Charlotte. “What became of her? How did it happen that you didn’t make the best of your opportunities in her case?”
“I did. She had me mighty anxious. But she played just a little too bluff a game. She got hold of a long-legged sergeant of volunteers and she let on that she didn’t have a minute to give me after he came along. I used to walk home from church with her pretty regularly, but the first Sunday after she picked up with him, she turned me down. I had to come along behind with her best friend: she was one of those girls that always have neglected women friends and run ‘em in and make you be civil to ‘em. I hated this other girl, and I was the maddest man that ever tagged up the street after his girl and another man. All of a sudden, I saw that every time she took a step, she turned the hem of her skirt with her heel. You know I just came to myself. I got to wondering if Iwanted to marry a girl with a jay-bird heel like that, and I decided I didn’t. I enlisted, came out here, served my country in China, and took back talk from a lot of West Point popinjays for two years—damn their souls—and that was all the patriotism I had. She married her volunteer and he served his three years and got a commission. I saw by a paper not very long ago that they are in Samar now. She was a good fellow, that girl. I should like to see her again. If the fool killer tried to kill her, the gun wouldn’t go off, sure.”
“That is quite so,” Charlotte replied gravely, and then, as Martin relapsed into laziness again, she remained studying him and pondering the somewhat irrelevant motives which had influenced his life.
“A jay-bird heel!” She looked with amused scrutiny at his somewhat emphasized masculine beauty. What magnificence, what unconscious arrogance of self-esteem lay unrebuked in this innocent youth; for in spite of the fact that he had known sin as she had never known it, that his unrestrained instincts had reached forth into experiments with life from which not only her sex, but the inheritance of tradition and of environment hadeternally debarred her—in spite of these facts, Charlotte had always a sense of cynical and satiated age beside his debonair innocence. It had been her lot to be both player and onlooker in that melodrama where the possession of ample means and the development of critical and æsthetic faculties have frowned upon the expression of a direct and creative ambition; and yet, where all that is subtly ambitious, and all that is meanly jealous, and all that is secretly arrogant, deprived of a natural and healthy expression, underlie and taint the whole body of society. She had come to realize that, in that world in which money must not be mentioned, money is the most indispensable necessity; that every instinct tabooed as vulgar has been so tabooed, because, when it is no longer recognized in speech, it may be the more successfully pursued in action. She had discovered that the exquisite charm of manner which is called high-bred unconsciousness is the result of a self-consciousness so unflagging that its possessor is incapable of losing herself utterly in any emotion; and that the final result of the developing process is an individuality whose utter selfishness and nullity are not patent simply because all the arts of society and all the material advantages ofwealth are bent to the concealment of the truth. Collingwood was, as he had said of his sweetheart, “no fool.” He had a keen interest in life, a rather broad knowledge of men and affairs as they are judged by concrete results; but of that sense of social values which amounts almost to a cult with our so-called aristocratic classes, Martin was as ignorant as his primeval parents were of sin. Suddenly, as she looked at him, a quotation flashed into Charlotte’s mind. She formed the words with her lips as her memory groped for them:
The ancients set no value on that half feminine delicacy, that nervous sensibility which we call distinction, and on which we pride ourselves. For thedistinguéman of the present day, a salon is necessary; he is adilettanteand entertaining with ladies; although capable of enthusiasms, he is inclined to scepticism; his politeness is exquisite; he dislikes foul hands and disagreeable odors, and shrinks from being confounded with the vulgar. Alcibiades had no apprehension of being confounded with the vulgar.
The ancients set no value on that half feminine delicacy, that nervous sensibility which we call distinction, and on which we pride ourselves. For thedistinguéman of the present day, a salon is necessary; he is adilettanteand entertaining with ladies; although capable of enthusiasms, he is inclined to scepticism; his politeness is exquisite; he dislikes foul hands and disagreeable odors, and shrinks from being confounded with the vulgar. Alcibiades had no apprehension of being confounded with the vulgar.
Martin opened his eyes as she was breathing the words to herself, but she did not stop. He stared at her, and when she paused, he asked:
“What kind of hoodoo was that?”
“That, O my Alcibiades, was a charm.” Sheleaned forward and kissed him—a half repentant, wholly tender little caress. It pleased him, for while she was ready enough to be petted, Charlotte was slow to offer endearments. Lifelong habit was stronger even than the impulses of a naturally demonstrative nature.
“Who are you hoodooing? Me?”
“No: myself. It was I that needed the charm.”
“Now you are getting mysterious again. Tell me what it was about.” Collingwood had, when he desired to wheedle, not only a child’s persistency but a child’s alluringness. Charlotte had had experience in plenty with him, and knew her own weakness in resisting him. She cast a hasty glance around and perceived the steamer, the smoke of which had been visible when they gained the hill. They had, in seating themselves, half turned their backs in her direction, and she had crept very close to the island.
“Martin, that boat seems to be coming nearer. She would not come this close if she were heading for Cuyo.”
“Eh! Here?” Collingwood raised himself alertly and stared. “That’s strange. Coastguard. She isn’t making Iloilo, or she would not be cuttingacross our bows; but it is a queer route for Cuyo. Why didn’t she cut over to the west after leaving Romblon?”
“You’ll have to signal her for information, Martin.”
“Information be blanked. I’ll signal her for fresh beef if she gets close enough. We may be able to exchange a bit of fish. Have you seen the fishparaogo in yet?”
“It went by a few minutes ago.”
“That’s good. Maybe we had better go down and be ready to trade if she comes near enough. I’ll send out a note with the launch. It looks, though, as if she were heading straight for us.”
“Would a coastguard steamer drop mail here?”
“No: catch a Government captain dropping an anchor to oblige anybody. If she is coming in, it is either with somebody interested in pearl fishery statistics, or some sort of survey, or—” he turned suddenly, a teasing smile melting all his handsome features to winningness—“your friend Barton. Didn’t he promise us a visit sometime?”
Martin had assumed a marital jocularity on the subject of the Judge. Charlotte had honestly but vainly tried to dispel from his mind his strong convictionthat Judge Barton was a rival who had hardly been allowed to approach the tentative stages of worship. Her quick frown and “Impossible!” only made her husband grin more broadly. “That was a mere civility at parting,” she insisted. “Judge Barton hasn’t a particle of interest in us.”
“He hasn’t any in me, certainly; and he would be justified in not having any in you. Snapped his nose off, you did, every time he opened his mouth.”
“Martin, you do not understand. I tried my best to be agreeable to Judge Barton, just as any nurse ought to be to any patient; and every time I ‘snapped his nose off’ as you express it, I did it in self-defence. He was very often impertinent to me.”
“Why Charlotte, I heard pretty near every word he ever said to you, and I never heard anything out of the way.”
They were going down hill by that time, Martin ahead, picking the trail; and Charlotte made a quaintly affectionate grimace behind his sturdy back. There were various reasons why she was unwilling to make any effort to enlighten Martin’sdenseness. There was no earthly danger of his appreciating unaided the delicate flavor of Judge Barton’s impertinence.
“Anyway,” she remarked, deftly slipping from the discussion of facts upon which disagreement was certain, “he will have forgotten both of us completely by this time, and there is not one chance in a hundred of his being on that boat if it does stop here.” But Martin had time to correct her. He was willing to admit that there was not much certainty of the Judge’s being on the boat unless she stopped; and then he stood ready to back his judgment. By the time they had crossed the cocoanut grove and had gained the beach, it was evident that the boat was making for the island. Kingsnorth had sighted her, and had sent out the launch, which was puffing busily toward her. “Kingsnorth’s got as good a nose for fresh beef as I have,” Collingwood grunted approvingly. The Maclaughlins were on their veranda with a pair of binoculars, and some excitement could be perceived even in the distant village.
The steamer slowed up in reply to signals from the launch, and evidently awaited advice about dropping anchor. When she did come to a halt,however, and put a boat out, Martin counted the persons who descended into it.
“Distinguished passengers,” he remarked concisely. “The captain would not put out the gang-way for his own use in that sea. Three men in white suits; three rowers; and the skipper is coming along. We’re in for visitors, Charlotte. What is there for dinner?”
Charlotte was away on the instant. He heard her despatching boys—one to the village, bidding him secure the very best of the afternoon’s catch; another to the poultry yard with orders to bring up the two fattest capons, but not to slay them till further orders. Complaining shrieks of the storeroom door, the hinges of which were exceedingly rusty, bore testimony to repeated openings; and the voice of old Pedro was audible, cursing the ice-machine.
By the time the boat was close in, the sun was fairly low and seemed to be sucking up the whole Visaya Sea is shafts of splendor. As soon as the narrowing distance permitted the little crafts’ passengers to be recognized, Collingwood cocked a humorous eye upon his wife and went into silent ecstasies of laughter, much to the amazement ofKingsnorth and the Maclaughlins. Charlotte blushed, bit her lips and then she laughed also, at first in helpless embarrassment, and finally with a sheer burst of merriment. She had barely time to recover her gravity when the boat grounded, and Judge Barton, as an acquaintance, took precedence of his fellow-passengers, and was carried ashore in time to introduce them as they landed. All had to avail themselves of the primitive transporting process by which Charlotte herself had made her landing, and it was in no hateful spirit that she admitted that dignity and such a progress are almost incompatible.
Chapter IXThis is an unexpected pleasure, murmured Mrs. Collingwood, giving to Judge Barton a warm pressure of the hand. For though she was proud and sensitive, she was not vindictive, and the Judge’s conduct on her wedding day had gone far to blot out the recollection of their of their unamicable past. Also his presence was a compliment, an assurance that his professions of interest were not wholly perfunctory.“It should not be so,” he replied. “What did I tell you on your wedding day? You’ve forgotten. I haven’t, you see, and here I am! Moreover, I have brought you a commissioner and a gentleman interested in pearl shells.” By the time he had finished this long speech, the Judge had shaken hands with both husband and wife, and stood ready to introduce the men who followed him. They were respectively a member of the Philippine Commission and an American agent for a button factory in the United States, who was desirousof making arrangements for a permanent supply of shells.“The Commissioner is headed for Cuyo, and will go on there to-morrow,” said Judge Barton. “Mr. Jones would like to stay and see the field and talk business with Mr. Collingwood until the steamer returns, in about a week; and I have wondered if you could put up with me that long also. But nobody is to be inconvenienced. Knowing the limited resources of islands in the Visaya Sea, each of us has come provided with an army cot and bedding, and we have also a first-class shelter tent. Likewise, remembering Mr. Collingwood’s reminiscences in hospital, and being minded of the scarcity of fresh beef, I ventured to bring along the quarter of a cow—I believe a part of the hind quarter.”He got no further. Martin had again taken his hand between two bronzed paws and was shaking it fervently.“I understand, Judge,” he declared, “just why you hold your eminent position. A man can’t be great these days without a head for detail, and you have one. There are plenty of men who would have forgotten all I said about this place, but you haven’t. You remembered it at the right time.Now, frankly, Judge, where is that beef at the present moment?”The Judge hooked a thumb in the direction of the steamer’s boat. “Thatbeef is inthatdinghey,” he replied, “and, without desiring to advise Mrs. Collingwood in her domestic arrangements, I should suggest that the sooner it is eaten the better. The steamer’s ice-carrying facilities are limited, and it is by the grace of God that it has ‘kept’ till now.”“He means by the grace of Government coal, Mrs. Collingwood,” interrupted the steamer’s captain, who was standing by talking to Kingsnorth, whom he knew. “I had nearly to ruin my engines getting that beef down here, the Judge was so concerned about it.” It came ashore at that minute, a suggestively dead piece of beef in cheese-cloth wrappings, but the fishers received it almost with rites of welcome.Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins having been presented, the group wandered leisurely toward the Collingwood cottage. The newcomers protested that there was no need of Mrs. Collingwood’s giving herself trouble about dinner; they could go back to the steamer for dinner; it would be waiting forthem. It was the stereotyped convention throughout a land where hospitality is as catholic as is the necessity for it. Martin and Charlotte, naturally, would hear nothing of the visitors’ returning to the steamer before bedtime.“If you don’t mind dinner’s being a little late,” Charlotte added, while Mrs. Maclaughlin threw in, in response to a last weak protest, “Trouble! Why we would cook for twenty people to get to talk to one.”So the boat went back for the tent, the cots, and the luggage of the prospective guests, while the visitors sat on Charlotte’s veranda, enjoying the evening breeze and the sunset, as they drank tea and consumed delicious little triangles of buttered toast, and slices of sweet cake. The Commissioner wanted to know all about the island: who owned it? what crops did it produce? was there an intelligentteniente? “He obeys the orders that we give him,” replied Martin dryly, and the Commissioner smiled: Was there easy communication with the mainland? What did Mr. Collingwood think of coprax in the Visayas? Then, in an aside, to Charlotte, What a pity that he had not brought Mrs. Commissioner! she would have enjoyed this. Such acharming situation and such a delightful home! Mrs. Commissioner would never cease to regret having missed it. “We hope that you will have occasion to pass again, and will bring her with you,” Charlotte murmured politely, and the great man assured her that he should make a point of it. “She loves atmosphere,” he said. “We have more of that than anything else,” Kingsnorth interjected, and to the Commissioner’s hearty laugh, Martin added, “Specially when it is moving N.N.E. eighty miles an hour.”Meanwhile Judge Barton was trying out his Grand Army manner with Mrs. Maclaughlin, and privately taking stock of place and people.“Chickens!” he said regretfully in response to her remark that she guessed those chickens would live a day longer in view of that quarter of beef. “Have I contributed, by my own unselfishness, to my own undoing? The chickens of Manila are not chickens, they are merely delusions in the form of blood, bones, and feathers, bought, killed, and served, by a succession of inhuman Chinese cooks, for the sole purpose of tantalizing the American stomach. Do I understand that youfeedyour chickens, and that they are actually fat?”“Fat as butter,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin proudly.The Judge sighed with anticipation. “I’m glad I’m going to stay a week,” he declared. “I’m fond of chicken—when itischicken. But tell me, are you never lonely here, Mrs. Maclaughlin?”“I am. Charlotte ain’t.”The Judge took note of the familiarity, but the laughing eye he turned upon Mrs. Collingwood did not betray that fact. “Yes, we are talking about you,” he said in response to the glance she gave, hearing her name used. “Mrs. Maclaughlin says that you are never lonely.”“Of course I am not. I have too many occupations. I am busy from morning till night. There is no excuse for ennui.”“I thirst to know what you do. I know a score of ladies who are suffering from nostalgia with far less excuse for loneliness than you have.”“Well, there is the housekeeping, though our servants are quite satisfactory, and it isn’t onerous; and there is my mending and Martin’s, and my sewing, and I have an hour’s school each day for the children, and an hour’s medical inspection, which usually runs into two or three; and if you will look on our table, you will not find itwholly empty of books and magazines. Then when Martin comes home, there is tea and talk, and then dinner. Sometimes after dinner, I read aloud, or Martin and I play a game of chess. We go to bed early and get up early for we are working people.”“Heavens!” said the Judge. “I stand confounded. It is virtue past all the known limits of exemplariness. I wish a few women of my acquaintance could hear you.”Charlotte lifted her brows and smiled with kindly malice. “Your friend Mrs. Badgerly is well?” she inquired sweetly.“You are no less a mind reader than you formerly were, I perceive. My friend Mrs. Badgerly is quite well. She was in my thoughts when I gave utterance to my wish. My friend Mrs. Badgerly is one of your admirers, Mrs. Collingwood.”“Since when?”“Since that memorable day on which you so effectually snubbed her.”“I am glad I did it,” Charlotte said emphatically, and they both laughed.“It has been done more brutally, I believe,” saidthe Judge, “but never more thoroughly. She appreciates your powers. She really does.”To this bit of by-talk the Commissioner and Martin had been paying a desultory attention as they sipped their tea. At that point, Charlotte brought the conversation back to something which would include the other guests, and the Judge got no further opportunity to engross her attention, till, the dark falling, a servant lit a lamp in thesala, and Charlotte excused herself on the plea of a housekeeper’s duties. She left the group on the veranda enjoying the warm starlit darkness, across which the steamer’s lights gleamed cosily. Judge Barton, glancing behind him, saw her superintending the laying of the table in the living-room of the cottage, and he abruptly rose and joined her.“Can’t I help?” he said by way of excuse for presenting himself. “I have brought all this nuisance down upon you. I might be allowed to make myself useful if I can.” Then in reply to her assurance that there was nothing that he could do, and that she regarded the occasion as a treat and not as a nuisance, he went on, “Then can’t I stay and talk to you?” He took the permission for granted and without waiting for a reply, glanced around theroom, which, with its quaintly adorned walls, its tasteful photographs and water-colors, its gleaming brass, and the glancing lights on carved teak and inlaid blackwood, was full of charm.“What an absolutely delightful room! and this old table! Where does Collingwood pick up these things?”Charlotte smilingly laid a finger upon her lips, glancing in the direction of the Commissioner. “I think it’s loot,” she said.“And I know this is,” the Judge remarked, standing in front of the desk. “I remember hearing Collingwood say he was in the Chinese affair in 1900. Why wasn’t it my fate to be there too? It’s all very well to talk about our superior civilization, but there is something in the mere thought of looting treasures like these to make the mouth water.”“Martin did not loot these. Mr. Kingsnorth did. He gave them to me for a wedding present.”“Lucky dog! either to loot or to give.”“I am ashamed to confess,” Charlotte admitted, twitching a tablecloth into better place as a servant laid it, “that I am getting dreadfully mixed upon matters of right and wrong. When I cameout here, my principles were simple as day. There wasn’t any doubt how I regarded looters and people who would accept looted goods. I should as soon have accepted a stolen ham. And here am I, the possessor of various pieces of looted furniture, brazenly rejoicing in them, and all the more because they were looted. I am degenerating hour by hour.” She shook her head plaintively as she put a massive brass candlestick of old Chinese design into its place.Judge Barton, leaning against the open casement, his two hands braced behind on the sill, stood a picture of smiling content as he studied her. His natural magnetism fairly radiated from him in his benignant mood. His wealth of grizzling hair, his large-featured, intellectual face, and one or two lines that bespoke the brute strength and will of the man, made him look like some roughly but powerfully sketched figure. His clothes were always fashionably cut and he wore them well, but the sense of the well formed muscular-body beneath them always dominated their lines. As he stood beaming upon her, it would have taken a stronger-minded woman than Mrs. Collingwood to weigh impartially the balanced charms of the powerfulintellect and of the powerful animal in the man. She relaxed her old suspicious guard, which had revived for an instant when he followed her into the house, so clearly bent upon a tête-à-tête. Without the faintest suggestion of sentimental intimacy, they were encased in an atmosphere of congenial interest. An onlooker would have pronounced them a pair of reunited chums.“I am dying to say something,” said the Judge in response to her lament over her decaying morals, “but I don’t dare.”“Why?”“You know why very well. ‘I’m skeered o’ you.’” He threw a fine negro accent into the negro phrase.“Is it something so impertinent?”“If I may so express it, it is humanely impertinent. I know no other woman to whom I should hesitate to propound it at once, for it is a question. But I have been scathed by you before this, and I am not absolutely foolhardy.”“Oh, go ahead,” said Charlotte. “Impertinence acknowledged is impertinence disarmed. Besides, I may owe you some amends. I could never seehow I did it, but my husband says I used to snap your head off every time you spoke.”“You did, you did, indeed.” This was said with fervor.“Well, I promise not to snap this time.”“Don’t you find it more comfortable, then—being degenerate, I mean?”For an instant Mrs. Collingwood stared at him, and he broke into a peal of laughter in which she presently joined.“Indeed, I must be a formidable person if you were afraid to ask that,” she said. “Well, then, I do. Does my answer content you?”“Unspeakably. You know we all enjoy being degenerate, but I never hoped to hear you admit it.”At this instant, Mrs. Collingwood’s attention was diverted by the servant, who came back with a tray of cutlery. She indicated several places at which plates and silver were to be laid, but found time for an abstracted smile at her guest, who stood waiting her pleasure while she gave her directions.“I daresay—” she returned briskly to the subject after this lapse of time—“I was very priggish. Martin has humanized me—there is no doubt ofit—and I am grateful to him. He is so humorously practical. How do you think he is looking?”“Oh—fine!” Judge Barton was conscious of a restiveness suppressed. He said to himself that he had not come two hundred and fifty miles to talk about Martin Collingwood’s looks.“I am so glad you think so, because I think so myself. I fancy Mrs. Maclaughlin did not feed him properly in the old days, and men get so careless by themselves. He says I ‘hold him up to the collar beautifully’ and I really try to, and regular food and physical comfort will tell.”“Collingwood is the picture of health and of masculine good looks,” said Judge Barton; “and as for you, it is a joy to see anyone looking so healthy, so vital. You have changed immensely. I wonder, dear lady, if you yourself realized how tired and nearly broken-down you were in those old days.”“I was miserable, physically and nervously worn out, and I suppose I looked it. But I have had a glorious rest and nothing in the world to fret or worry about, and—” she raised her eyes to his, blushing as she approached the topic which had been the source of so much constraint between them—“and Martin and I have been ridiculously happy in each other. I may as well be frank and admit that half that was depressing me was sheer loneliness and wounded pride. Probably the loneliness was much my own fault, for I hardly met people half way; and the wounded pride was wholly my own fault, for I started out to earn my own living in defiance of all my relatives’ wishes. I suppose I had not the philosophy to meet the situation, in spite of that hateful little slap you gave me about ‘the unloveliest thing in women.’” The Judge started forward.“Thank you for giving me my opportunity,” he said in a low voice. “I could not have referred to it otherwise. I have writhed with shame every time I have thought of those words, Mrs. Collingwood. Will you permit me to apologize for them and for numerous other unmanly stabs that I have given you? I do not know why I did it; all the time I was longing to be friends with you.”“I suppose I irritated you,” Charlotte replied slowly, a little surprised by his vehemence. “It is inexplicable to me also when I look back upon it. I had really forgiven you long ago. You were very nice to us on our wedding day, I remember,and I felt forlorn and deserted enough on that occasion to be grateful to anyone who showed any signs of human interest in us. But I am glad that you have apologized, and am glad to express my forgiveness, and to regret that I was so snappish. All of which may be expressed in that homely phrase, ‘Let us bury the hatchet.’”“We were always meant to be friends, I think.” Some vibration in the voice made Charlotte sheer off from an approach to intensity. “Martin always liked you,” she said; and thus, ten seconds after their reconciliation, the Judge had cause to reflect with some irritation that there is no woman in the world so unsatisfying at times as one born without natural coquetry. He had a few minutes in which to develop this idea, while Charlotte made a voyage of investigation to the kitchen. She came back well satisfied. “I think we can count on dinner in half an hour,” she said, and carried him back with her to the veranda, where she did her duty by the Commissioner and the Honorable Mr. Jones, who was not expansive on any subject other than oyster shells.Kingsnorth, who had gone over to his own cottage and had donned the English mess jacket, whichis the standard evening attire in the Orient, came back, an undeniable English gentleman in spite of his degenerate countenance, and devoted himself to thejudicialluminary, who took stock of him as they chatted. Indeed, the Judge was profoundly interested in Charlotte’s island companions. The Maclaughlins were the sort of people he would expect to find in company with Collingwood, but the Englishman was a surprise. He said to himself that it must have strained all Mrs. Collingwood’s pride to accommodate herself to that household, and he marvelled at her tremendous growth in self-control and in social vagabondage. Six months before she would not have met so unconcernedly such a situation as that in which she found herself.At dinner the Commissioner, sitting on one side of Mrs. Collingwood with the Judge on the other, was secretly amazed at the house, the household, and the very agreeable woman who was his hostess. With one laughing remark—“My dear, I am the housekeeper, and I won’t be apologized for”—she had silenced Martin, who was inclined to drift into that apologetic and explanatory vein which demands continual reassurance from the guests of their appreciation of their food; and, picking upthe conversational ball, she had sent it spinning lightly here and there through all the courses of as perfectly served a dinner as the Commissioner had ever sat through. She was ably assisted by the two officials and Kingsnorth and even by Martin, whose delight in his wife’s grasp of the situation set his dry, keen wits at bubbling effervescence. Maclaughlin, though not partial to what he called “gentlefolk,” was a hard-headed Scot, not likely to rush in where angels tread lightly, and Mrs. Maclaughlin, who found the general trend of conversation too agile for her, may be said to have concentrated herself on the oyster-shell seeker and the Captain, who suffered also from a slowness of abstract speech.It was also, considering the fact that it was limited by the resources of a comparatively unproductive island, a good dinner, even in the opinion of two habitual diners-out. It began with a cocktail of Martin’s own mixing and was continued in a clear soup and in a baked fish which must have weighed ten pounds and was of incomparable flavor. “Never have I eaten such fish,” declared Judge Barton, helping himself the second time to the fish and its garnish of thin, sliced cucumbers.Then there was a roast of beef highly relished by the fisher folk,camote, or sweet potato, croquettes, a dish of bamboo sprouts cooked after a savory native recipe, and green peppers stuffed with force-meat. There was a crab salad, deliciously cold, and papaya ice.“But how do you obtain ice?” said the Commissioner.“We have a small machine which freezes one hundred pounds daily,” replied Charlotte, “just enough for each cottage and the mess kitchen.”“I remember when Collingwood proposed having that machine made by special order, how I pooh-poohed the idea,” remarked Kingsnorth. “I was not sufficiently Americanized to feel the need of it. But I am as bad as the rest of them now. Frozen desserts are the only ones fit for the tropics; and I’ve even learned to drink iced-tea.”A general chorus of assent went up. “You certainly make yourselves comfortable,” the Commissioner declared, “and, really, failing a fresh beef supply, you seem to have all that we get in Manila, in addition to a more charming situation. I suppose your only real difficulty is the matter of medical aid.”“That is our only realfear,” Collingwood replied. “We keep a supply of coal on hand for emergencies, and we never let it get below a certain point. We keep a reserve sufficient to take the launch over to Cuyo or to Romblon. But if there came a sudden need in bad weather, we should be in the deuce of a fix. It is the only thought that ever keeps me awake at night.”The Commissioner nodded and murmured something appreciative of a possible crisis. Certainly this very entertaining lady who sat beside him—a lady who had seen something of the world if he was any judge of personality—must feel herself strangely situated in that out of the way spot, chancing the dangers of tidal waves, of storms, and of illness without medical assistance. He fancied the situation was explicable. The compromises which women make for matrimony had offered him food for reflection long before he ever saw Mrs. Collingwood; but what he could not understand was why she should have been among those who have to make compromises. A woman of her grace and finish ought to have a pretty wide field of selection, he thought; but then one can never tell how circumstancesforce persons into unfortunate positions. The Englishman was a dose; not that he had altogether lost his breeding, but that the atmosphere of degeneration hung so palpably about him. “How he must hate himself,” thought the Commissioner, “to make us all so conscious of his fall!” He removed his eyes from Kingsnorth’s face after arriving at this conclusion, just in time to meet the clear gaze of his hostess, and to know, by her sudden blush and momentary shrinking, that she had read him like an open book, and to realize that she was self-conscious of her own situation.She was enough mistress of herself, however, to hold the conversation at its level. She asked with intelligent interest about those political events in the islands, concerning which it is tactful to question Commissioners. She drew the statesman out on the subject of his own hopes and plans for the islands. He in turn asked information from the fishers, and they, warming to the theme as men will when they talk of things in which they are experienced, gave him their practical, hard-headed views of men and conditions, spoke of native labor and its capacities and incapacities, of resources andpossibilities, and of the disadvantages of political unrest to a people more primitive than any that ever before held the reins of government.Even an illiterate man is interesting when he talks of his craft, and Martin Collingwood, however little natural development he had in social subtilties, was anything but illiterate or even ill informed. To his wife he seemed to gather new dignity as he took a leader’s natural position. It was plain that his business associates deferred to him; and in ten minutes it was plain that the Commissioner knew he was dealing with a man who would, in the financial world at least, make himself felt. Commissioners never ignore financiers. There came into the Commissioner’s manner as the dinner progressed, something more deferential than the mere civility of a guest to a host, something which implied his acceptance of Mr. Collingwood as a man to be considered.It was, on the whole, a most successful dinner. The newcomers had brought with them a current of the outer atmosphere, breathing interest and exhilaration into the little colony of self-exiles; and the exiles shared themselves so wholly with the outsiders that the outsiders grew to feel much at home.When, at eleven o’clock, they all walked down to the beach with the Commissioner and the Captain, regrets and good-byes were as hearty as they would have been if the acquaintance had been of long duration.As he was pulled out to the steamer, the Commissioner remembered that, on the way down, Barton had given him a hint of an odd situation, to which he had paid but a cursory attention. Well it was for the old gossip that he was safe ashore under the tent. “But I’ll have it out of him going back,” reflected the Commissioner. “Fine woman! Fine manly fellow, her husband; sort of man we need out here! He isn’t her equal socially, but I suppose women forget social differences just as we do when they come under the attraction of good looks and manly traits. Besides, if he makes money, she can float him with no difficulty. Aremarkablyfine woman.”
Chapter IX
This is an unexpected pleasure, murmured Mrs. Collingwood, giving to Judge Barton a warm pressure of the hand. For though she was proud and sensitive, she was not vindictive, and the Judge’s conduct on her wedding day had gone far to blot out the recollection of their of their unamicable past. Also his presence was a compliment, an assurance that his professions of interest were not wholly perfunctory.“It should not be so,” he replied. “What did I tell you on your wedding day? You’ve forgotten. I haven’t, you see, and here I am! Moreover, I have brought you a commissioner and a gentleman interested in pearl shells.” By the time he had finished this long speech, the Judge had shaken hands with both husband and wife, and stood ready to introduce the men who followed him. They were respectively a member of the Philippine Commission and an American agent for a button factory in the United States, who was desirousof making arrangements for a permanent supply of shells.“The Commissioner is headed for Cuyo, and will go on there to-morrow,” said Judge Barton. “Mr. Jones would like to stay and see the field and talk business with Mr. Collingwood until the steamer returns, in about a week; and I have wondered if you could put up with me that long also. But nobody is to be inconvenienced. Knowing the limited resources of islands in the Visaya Sea, each of us has come provided with an army cot and bedding, and we have also a first-class shelter tent. Likewise, remembering Mr. Collingwood’s reminiscences in hospital, and being minded of the scarcity of fresh beef, I ventured to bring along the quarter of a cow—I believe a part of the hind quarter.”He got no further. Martin had again taken his hand between two bronzed paws and was shaking it fervently.“I understand, Judge,” he declared, “just why you hold your eminent position. A man can’t be great these days without a head for detail, and you have one. There are plenty of men who would have forgotten all I said about this place, but you haven’t. You remembered it at the right time.Now, frankly, Judge, where is that beef at the present moment?”The Judge hooked a thumb in the direction of the steamer’s boat. “Thatbeef is inthatdinghey,” he replied, “and, without desiring to advise Mrs. Collingwood in her domestic arrangements, I should suggest that the sooner it is eaten the better. The steamer’s ice-carrying facilities are limited, and it is by the grace of God that it has ‘kept’ till now.”“He means by the grace of Government coal, Mrs. Collingwood,” interrupted the steamer’s captain, who was standing by talking to Kingsnorth, whom he knew. “I had nearly to ruin my engines getting that beef down here, the Judge was so concerned about it.” It came ashore at that minute, a suggestively dead piece of beef in cheese-cloth wrappings, but the fishers received it almost with rites of welcome.Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins having been presented, the group wandered leisurely toward the Collingwood cottage. The newcomers protested that there was no need of Mrs. Collingwood’s giving herself trouble about dinner; they could go back to the steamer for dinner; it would be waiting forthem. It was the stereotyped convention throughout a land where hospitality is as catholic as is the necessity for it. Martin and Charlotte, naturally, would hear nothing of the visitors’ returning to the steamer before bedtime.“If you don’t mind dinner’s being a little late,” Charlotte added, while Mrs. Maclaughlin threw in, in response to a last weak protest, “Trouble! Why we would cook for twenty people to get to talk to one.”So the boat went back for the tent, the cots, and the luggage of the prospective guests, while the visitors sat on Charlotte’s veranda, enjoying the evening breeze and the sunset, as they drank tea and consumed delicious little triangles of buttered toast, and slices of sweet cake. The Commissioner wanted to know all about the island: who owned it? what crops did it produce? was there an intelligentteniente? “He obeys the orders that we give him,” replied Martin dryly, and the Commissioner smiled: Was there easy communication with the mainland? What did Mr. Collingwood think of coprax in the Visayas? Then, in an aside, to Charlotte, What a pity that he had not brought Mrs. Commissioner! she would have enjoyed this. Such acharming situation and such a delightful home! Mrs. Commissioner would never cease to regret having missed it. “We hope that you will have occasion to pass again, and will bring her with you,” Charlotte murmured politely, and the great man assured her that he should make a point of it. “She loves atmosphere,” he said. “We have more of that than anything else,” Kingsnorth interjected, and to the Commissioner’s hearty laugh, Martin added, “Specially when it is moving N.N.E. eighty miles an hour.”Meanwhile Judge Barton was trying out his Grand Army manner with Mrs. Maclaughlin, and privately taking stock of place and people.“Chickens!” he said regretfully in response to her remark that she guessed those chickens would live a day longer in view of that quarter of beef. “Have I contributed, by my own unselfishness, to my own undoing? The chickens of Manila are not chickens, they are merely delusions in the form of blood, bones, and feathers, bought, killed, and served, by a succession of inhuman Chinese cooks, for the sole purpose of tantalizing the American stomach. Do I understand that youfeedyour chickens, and that they are actually fat?”“Fat as butter,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin proudly.The Judge sighed with anticipation. “I’m glad I’m going to stay a week,” he declared. “I’m fond of chicken—when itischicken. But tell me, are you never lonely here, Mrs. Maclaughlin?”“I am. Charlotte ain’t.”The Judge took note of the familiarity, but the laughing eye he turned upon Mrs. Collingwood did not betray that fact. “Yes, we are talking about you,” he said in response to the glance she gave, hearing her name used. “Mrs. Maclaughlin says that you are never lonely.”“Of course I am not. I have too many occupations. I am busy from morning till night. There is no excuse for ennui.”“I thirst to know what you do. I know a score of ladies who are suffering from nostalgia with far less excuse for loneliness than you have.”“Well, there is the housekeeping, though our servants are quite satisfactory, and it isn’t onerous; and there is my mending and Martin’s, and my sewing, and I have an hour’s school each day for the children, and an hour’s medical inspection, which usually runs into two or three; and if you will look on our table, you will not find itwholly empty of books and magazines. Then when Martin comes home, there is tea and talk, and then dinner. Sometimes after dinner, I read aloud, or Martin and I play a game of chess. We go to bed early and get up early for we are working people.”“Heavens!” said the Judge. “I stand confounded. It is virtue past all the known limits of exemplariness. I wish a few women of my acquaintance could hear you.”Charlotte lifted her brows and smiled with kindly malice. “Your friend Mrs. Badgerly is well?” she inquired sweetly.“You are no less a mind reader than you formerly were, I perceive. My friend Mrs. Badgerly is quite well. She was in my thoughts when I gave utterance to my wish. My friend Mrs. Badgerly is one of your admirers, Mrs. Collingwood.”“Since when?”“Since that memorable day on which you so effectually snubbed her.”“I am glad I did it,” Charlotte said emphatically, and they both laughed.“It has been done more brutally, I believe,” saidthe Judge, “but never more thoroughly. She appreciates your powers. She really does.”To this bit of by-talk the Commissioner and Martin had been paying a desultory attention as they sipped their tea. At that point, Charlotte brought the conversation back to something which would include the other guests, and the Judge got no further opportunity to engross her attention, till, the dark falling, a servant lit a lamp in thesala, and Charlotte excused herself on the plea of a housekeeper’s duties. She left the group on the veranda enjoying the warm starlit darkness, across which the steamer’s lights gleamed cosily. Judge Barton, glancing behind him, saw her superintending the laying of the table in the living-room of the cottage, and he abruptly rose and joined her.“Can’t I help?” he said by way of excuse for presenting himself. “I have brought all this nuisance down upon you. I might be allowed to make myself useful if I can.” Then in reply to her assurance that there was nothing that he could do, and that she regarded the occasion as a treat and not as a nuisance, he went on, “Then can’t I stay and talk to you?” He took the permission for granted and without waiting for a reply, glanced around theroom, which, with its quaintly adorned walls, its tasteful photographs and water-colors, its gleaming brass, and the glancing lights on carved teak and inlaid blackwood, was full of charm.“What an absolutely delightful room! and this old table! Where does Collingwood pick up these things?”Charlotte smilingly laid a finger upon her lips, glancing in the direction of the Commissioner. “I think it’s loot,” she said.“And I know this is,” the Judge remarked, standing in front of the desk. “I remember hearing Collingwood say he was in the Chinese affair in 1900. Why wasn’t it my fate to be there too? It’s all very well to talk about our superior civilization, but there is something in the mere thought of looting treasures like these to make the mouth water.”“Martin did not loot these. Mr. Kingsnorth did. He gave them to me for a wedding present.”“Lucky dog! either to loot or to give.”“I am ashamed to confess,” Charlotte admitted, twitching a tablecloth into better place as a servant laid it, “that I am getting dreadfully mixed upon matters of right and wrong. When I cameout here, my principles were simple as day. There wasn’t any doubt how I regarded looters and people who would accept looted goods. I should as soon have accepted a stolen ham. And here am I, the possessor of various pieces of looted furniture, brazenly rejoicing in them, and all the more because they were looted. I am degenerating hour by hour.” She shook her head plaintively as she put a massive brass candlestick of old Chinese design into its place.Judge Barton, leaning against the open casement, his two hands braced behind on the sill, stood a picture of smiling content as he studied her. His natural magnetism fairly radiated from him in his benignant mood. His wealth of grizzling hair, his large-featured, intellectual face, and one or two lines that bespoke the brute strength and will of the man, made him look like some roughly but powerfully sketched figure. His clothes were always fashionably cut and he wore them well, but the sense of the well formed muscular-body beneath them always dominated their lines. As he stood beaming upon her, it would have taken a stronger-minded woman than Mrs. Collingwood to weigh impartially the balanced charms of the powerfulintellect and of the powerful animal in the man. She relaxed her old suspicious guard, which had revived for an instant when he followed her into the house, so clearly bent upon a tête-à-tête. Without the faintest suggestion of sentimental intimacy, they were encased in an atmosphere of congenial interest. An onlooker would have pronounced them a pair of reunited chums.“I am dying to say something,” said the Judge in response to her lament over her decaying morals, “but I don’t dare.”“Why?”“You know why very well. ‘I’m skeered o’ you.’” He threw a fine negro accent into the negro phrase.“Is it something so impertinent?”“If I may so express it, it is humanely impertinent. I know no other woman to whom I should hesitate to propound it at once, for it is a question. But I have been scathed by you before this, and I am not absolutely foolhardy.”“Oh, go ahead,” said Charlotte. “Impertinence acknowledged is impertinence disarmed. Besides, I may owe you some amends. I could never seehow I did it, but my husband says I used to snap your head off every time you spoke.”“You did, you did, indeed.” This was said with fervor.“Well, I promise not to snap this time.”“Don’t you find it more comfortable, then—being degenerate, I mean?”For an instant Mrs. Collingwood stared at him, and he broke into a peal of laughter in which she presently joined.“Indeed, I must be a formidable person if you were afraid to ask that,” she said. “Well, then, I do. Does my answer content you?”“Unspeakably. You know we all enjoy being degenerate, but I never hoped to hear you admit it.”At this instant, Mrs. Collingwood’s attention was diverted by the servant, who came back with a tray of cutlery. She indicated several places at which plates and silver were to be laid, but found time for an abstracted smile at her guest, who stood waiting her pleasure while she gave her directions.“I daresay—” she returned briskly to the subject after this lapse of time—“I was very priggish. Martin has humanized me—there is no doubt ofit—and I am grateful to him. He is so humorously practical. How do you think he is looking?”“Oh—fine!” Judge Barton was conscious of a restiveness suppressed. He said to himself that he had not come two hundred and fifty miles to talk about Martin Collingwood’s looks.“I am so glad you think so, because I think so myself. I fancy Mrs. Maclaughlin did not feed him properly in the old days, and men get so careless by themselves. He says I ‘hold him up to the collar beautifully’ and I really try to, and regular food and physical comfort will tell.”“Collingwood is the picture of health and of masculine good looks,” said Judge Barton; “and as for you, it is a joy to see anyone looking so healthy, so vital. You have changed immensely. I wonder, dear lady, if you yourself realized how tired and nearly broken-down you were in those old days.”“I was miserable, physically and nervously worn out, and I suppose I looked it. But I have had a glorious rest and nothing in the world to fret or worry about, and—” she raised her eyes to his, blushing as she approached the topic which had been the source of so much constraint between them—“and Martin and I have been ridiculously happy in each other. I may as well be frank and admit that half that was depressing me was sheer loneliness and wounded pride. Probably the loneliness was much my own fault, for I hardly met people half way; and the wounded pride was wholly my own fault, for I started out to earn my own living in defiance of all my relatives’ wishes. I suppose I had not the philosophy to meet the situation, in spite of that hateful little slap you gave me about ‘the unloveliest thing in women.’” The Judge started forward.“Thank you for giving me my opportunity,” he said in a low voice. “I could not have referred to it otherwise. I have writhed with shame every time I have thought of those words, Mrs. Collingwood. Will you permit me to apologize for them and for numerous other unmanly stabs that I have given you? I do not know why I did it; all the time I was longing to be friends with you.”“I suppose I irritated you,” Charlotte replied slowly, a little surprised by his vehemence. “It is inexplicable to me also when I look back upon it. I had really forgiven you long ago. You were very nice to us on our wedding day, I remember,and I felt forlorn and deserted enough on that occasion to be grateful to anyone who showed any signs of human interest in us. But I am glad that you have apologized, and am glad to express my forgiveness, and to regret that I was so snappish. All of which may be expressed in that homely phrase, ‘Let us bury the hatchet.’”“We were always meant to be friends, I think.” Some vibration in the voice made Charlotte sheer off from an approach to intensity. “Martin always liked you,” she said; and thus, ten seconds after their reconciliation, the Judge had cause to reflect with some irritation that there is no woman in the world so unsatisfying at times as one born without natural coquetry. He had a few minutes in which to develop this idea, while Charlotte made a voyage of investigation to the kitchen. She came back well satisfied. “I think we can count on dinner in half an hour,” she said, and carried him back with her to the veranda, where she did her duty by the Commissioner and the Honorable Mr. Jones, who was not expansive on any subject other than oyster shells.Kingsnorth, who had gone over to his own cottage and had donned the English mess jacket, whichis the standard evening attire in the Orient, came back, an undeniable English gentleman in spite of his degenerate countenance, and devoted himself to thejudicialluminary, who took stock of him as they chatted. Indeed, the Judge was profoundly interested in Charlotte’s island companions. The Maclaughlins were the sort of people he would expect to find in company with Collingwood, but the Englishman was a surprise. He said to himself that it must have strained all Mrs. Collingwood’s pride to accommodate herself to that household, and he marvelled at her tremendous growth in self-control and in social vagabondage. Six months before she would not have met so unconcernedly such a situation as that in which she found herself.At dinner the Commissioner, sitting on one side of Mrs. Collingwood with the Judge on the other, was secretly amazed at the house, the household, and the very agreeable woman who was his hostess. With one laughing remark—“My dear, I am the housekeeper, and I won’t be apologized for”—she had silenced Martin, who was inclined to drift into that apologetic and explanatory vein which demands continual reassurance from the guests of their appreciation of their food; and, picking upthe conversational ball, she had sent it spinning lightly here and there through all the courses of as perfectly served a dinner as the Commissioner had ever sat through. She was ably assisted by the two officials and Kingsnorth and even by Martin, whose delight in his wife’s grasp of the situation set his dry, keen wits at bubbling effervescence. Maclaughlin, though not partial to what he called “gentlefolk,” was a hard-headed Scot, not likely to rush in where angels tread lightly, and Mrs. Maclaughlin, who found the general trend of conversation too agile for her, may be said to have concentrated herself on the oyster-shell seeker and the Captain, who suffered also from a slowness of abstract speech.It was also, considering the fact that it was limited by the resources of a comparatively unproductive island, a good dinner, even in the opinion of two habitual diners-out. It began with a cocktail of Martin’s own mixing and was continued in a clear soup and in a baked fish which must have weighed ten pounds and was of incomparable flavor. “Never have I eaten such fish,” declared Judge Barton, helping himself the second time to the fish and its garnish of thin, sliced cucumbers.Then there was a roast of beef highly relished by the fisher folk,camote, or sweet potato, croquettes, a dish of bamboo sprouts cooked after a savory native recipe, and green peppers stuffed with force-meat. There was a crab salad, deliciously cold, and papaya ice.“But how do you obtain ice?” said the Commissioner.“We have a small machine which freezes one hundred pounds daily,” replied Charlotte, “just enough for each cottage and the mess kitchen.”“I remember when Collingwood proposed having that machine made by special order, how I pooh-poohed the idea,” remarked Kingsnorth. “I was not sufficiently Americanized to feel the need of it. But I am as bad as the rest of them now. Frozen desserts are the only ones fit for the tropics; and I’ve even learned to drink iced-tea.”A general chorus of assent went up. “You certainly make yourselves comfortable,” the Commissioner declared, “and, really, failing a fresh beef supply, you seem to have all that we get in Manila, in addition to a more charming situation. I suppose your only real difficulty is the matter of medical aid.”“That is our only realfear,” Collingwood replied. “We keep a supply of coal on hand for emergencies, and we never let it get below a certain point. We keep a reserve sufficient to take the launch over to Cuyo or to Romblon. But if there came a sudden need in bad weather, we should be in the deuce of a fix. It is the only thought that ever keeps me awake at night.”The Commissioner nodded and murmured something appreciative of a possible crisis. Certainly this very entertaining lady who sat beside him—a lady who had seen something of the world if he was any judge of personality—must feel herself strangely situated in that out of the way spot, chancing the dangers of tidal waves, of storms, and of illness without medical assistance. He fancied the situation was explicable. The compromises which women make for matrimony had offered him food for reflection long before he ever saw Mrs. Collingwood; but what he could not understand was why she should have been among those who have to make compromises. A woman of her grace and finish ought to have a pretty wide field of selection, he thought; but then one can never tell how circumstancesforce persons into unfortunate positions. The Englishman was a dose; not that he had altogether lost his breeding, but that the atmosphere of degeneration hung so palpably about him. “How he must hate himself,” thought the Commissioner, “to make us all so conscious of his fall!” He removed his eyes from Kingsnorth’s face after arriving at this conclusion, just in time to meet the clear gaze of his hostess, and to know, by her sudden blush and momentary shrinking, that she had read him like an open book, and to realize that she was self-conscious of her own situation.She was enough mistress of herself, however, to hold the conversation at its level. She asked with intelligent interest about those political events in the islands, concerning which it is tactful to question Commissioners. She drew the statesman out on the subject of his own hopes and plans for the islands. He in turn asked information from the fishers, and they, warming to the theme as men will when they talk of things in which they are experienced, gave him their practical, hard-headed views of men and conditions, spoke of native labor and its capacities and incapacities, of resources andpossibilities, and of the disadvantages of political unrest to a people more primitive than any that ever before held the reins of government.Even an illiterate man is interesting when he talks of his craft, and Martin Collingwood, however little natural development he had in social subtilties, was anything but illiterate or even ill informed. To his wife he seemed to gather new dignity as he took a leader’s natural position. It was plain that his business associates deferred to him; and in ten minutes it was plain that the Commissioner knew he was dealing with a man who would, in the financial world at least, make himself felt. Commissioners never ignore financiers. There came into the Commissioner’s manner as the dinner progressed, something more deferential than the mere civility of a guest to a host, something which implied his acceptance of Mr. Collingwood as a man to be considered.It was, on the whole, a most successful dinner. The newcomers had brought with them a current of the outer atmosphere, breathing interest and exhilaration into the little colony of self-exiles; and the exiles shared themselves so wholly with the outsiders that the outsiders grew to feel much at home.When, at eleven o’clock, they all walked down to the beach with the Commissioner and the Captain, regrets and good-byes were as hearty as they would have been if the acquaintance had been of long duration.As he was pulled out to the steamer, the Commissioner remembered that, on the way down, Barton had given him a hint of an odd situation, to which he had paid but a cursory attention. Well it was for the old gossip that he was safe ashore under the tent. “But I’ll have it out of him going back,” reflected the Commissioner. “Fine woman! Fine manly fellow, her husband; sort of man we need out here! He isn’t her equal socially, but I suppose women forget social differences just as we do when they come under the attraction of good looks and manly traits. Besides, if he makes money, she can float him with no difficulty. Aremarkablyfine woman.”
This is an unexpected pleasure, murmured Mrs. Collingwood, giving to Judge Barton a warm pressure of the hand. For though she was proud and sensitive, she was not vindictive, and the Judge’s conduct on her wedding day had gone far to blot out the recollection of their of their unamicable past. Also his presence was a compliment, an assurance that his professions of interest were not wholly perfunctory.
“It should not be so,” he replied. “What did I tell you on your wedding day? You’ve forgotten. I haven’t, you see, and here I am! Moreover, I have brought you a commissioner and a gentleman interested in pearl shells.” By the time he had finished this long speech, the Judge had shaken hands with both husband and wife, and stood ready to introduce the men who followed him. They were respectively a member of the Philippine Commission and an American agent for a button factory in the United States, who was desirousof making arrangements for a permanent supply of shells.
“The Commissioner is headed for Cuyo, and will go on there to-morrow,” said Judge Barton. “Mr. Jones would like to stay and see the field and talk business with Mr. Collingwood until the steamer returns, in about a week; and I have wondered if you could put up with me that long also. But nobody is to be inconvenienced. Knowing the limited resources of islands in the Visaya Sea, each of us has come provided with an army cot and bedding, and we have also a first-class shelter tent. Likewise, remembering Mr. Collingwood’s reminiscences in hospital, and being minded of the scarcity of fresh beef, I ventured to bring along the quarter of a cow—I believe a part of the hind quarter.”
He got no further. Martin had again taken his hand between two bronzed paws and was shaking it fervently.
“I understand, Judge,” he declared, “just why you hold your eminent position. A man can’t be great these days without a head for detail, and you have one. There are plenty of men who would have forgotten all I said about this place, but you haven’t. You remembered it at the right time.Now, frankly, Judge, where is that beef at the present moment?”
The Judge hooked a thumb in the direction of the steamer’s boat. “Thatbeef is inthatdinghey,” he replied, “and, without desiring to advise Mrs. Collingwood in her domestic arrangements, I should suggest that the sooner it is eaten the better. The steamer’s ice-carrying facilities are limited, and it is by the grace of God that it has ‘kept’ till now.”
“He means by the grace of Government coal, Mrs. Collingwood,” interrupted the steamer’s captain, who was standing by talking to Kingsnorth, whom he knew. “I had nearly to ruin my engines getting that beef down here, the Judge was so concerned about it.” It came ashore at that minute, a suggestively dead piece of beef in cheese-cloth wrappings, but the fishers received it almost with rites of welcome.
Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins having been presented, the group wandered leisurely toward the Collingwood cottage. The newcomers protested that there was no need of Mrs. Collingwood’s giving herself trouble about dinner; they could go back to the steamer for dinner; it would be waiting forthem. It was the stereotyped convention throughout a land where hospitality is as catholic as is the necessity for it. Martin and Charlotte, naturally, would hear nothing of the visitors’ returning to the steamer before bedtime.
“If you don’t mind dinner’s being a little late,” Charlotte added, while Mrs. Maclaughlin threw in, in response to a last weak protest, “Trouble! Why we would cook for twenty people to get to talk to one.”
So the boat went back for the tent, the cots, and the luggage of the prospective guests, while the visitors sat on Charlotte’s veranda, enjoying the evening breeze and the sunset, as they drank tea and consumed delicious little triangles of buttered toast, and slices of sweet cake. The Commissioner wanted to know all about the island: who owned it? what crops did it produce? was there an intelligentteniente? “He obeys the orders that we give him,” replied Martin dryly, and the Commissioner smiled: Was there easy communication with the mainland? What did Mr. Collingwood think of coprax in the Visayas? Then, in an aside, to Charlotte, What a pity that he had not brought Mrs. Commissioner! she would have enjoyed this. Such acharming situation and such a delightful home! Mrs. Commissioner would never cease to regret having missed it. “We hope that you will have occasion to pass again, and will bring her with you,” Charlotte murmured politely, and the great man assured her that he should make a point of it. “She loves atmosphere,” he said. “We have more of that than anything else,” Kingsnorth interjected, and to the Commissioner’s hearty laugh, Martin added, “Specially when it is moving N.N.E. eighty miles an hour.”
Meanwhile Judge Barton was trying out his Grand Army manner with Mrs. Maclaughlin, and privately taking stock of place and people.
“Chickens!” he said regretfully in response to her remark that she guessed those chickens would live a day longer in view of that quarter of beef. “Have I contributed, by my own unselfishness, to my own undoing? The chickens of Manila are not chickens, they are merely delusions in the form of blood, bones, and feathers, bought, killed, and served, by a succession of inhuman Chinese cooks, for the sole purpose of tantalizing the American stomach. Do I understand that youfeedyour chickens, and that they are actually fat?”
“Fat as butter,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin proudly.
The Judge sighed with anticipation. “I’m glad I’m going to stay a week,” he declared. “I’m fond of chicken—when itischicken. But tell me, are you never lonely here, Mrs. Maclaughlin?”
“I am. Charlotte ain’t.”
The Judge took note of the familiarity, but the laughing eye he turned upon Mrs. Collingwood did not betray that fact. “Yes, we are talking about you,” he said in response to the glance she gave, hearing her name used. “Mrs. Maclaughlin says that you are never lonely.”
“Of course I am not. I have too many occupations. I am busy from morning till night. There is no excuse for ennui.”
“I thirst to know what you do. I know a score of ladies who are suffering from nostalgia with far less excuse for loneliness than you have.”
“Well, there is the housekeeping, though our servants are quite satisfactory, and it isn’t onerous; and there is my mending and Martin’s, and my sewing, and I have an hour’s school each day for the children, and an hour’s medical inspection, which usually runs into two or three; and if you will look on our table, you will not find itwholly empty of books and magazines. Then when Martin comes home, there is tea and talk, and then dinner. Sometimes after dinner, I read aloud, or Martin and I play a game of chess. We go to bed early and get up early for we are working people.”
“Heavens!” said the Judge. “I stand confounded. It is virtue past all the known limits of exemplariness. I wish a few women of my acquaintance could hear you.”
Charlotte lifted her brows and smiled with kindly malice. “Your friend Mrs. Badgerly is well?” she inquired sweetly.
“You are no less a mind reader than you formerly were, I perceive. My friend Mrs. Badgerly is quite well. She was in my thoughts when I gave utterance to my wish. My friend Mrs. Badgerly is one of your admirers, Mrs. Collingwood.”
“Since when?”
“Since that memorable day on which you so effectually snubbed her.”
“I am glad I did it,” Charlotte said emphatically, and they both laughed.
“It has been done more brutally, I believe,” saidthe Judge, “but never more thoroughly. She appreciates your powers. She really does.”
To this bit of by-talk the Commissioner and Martin had been paying a desultory attention as they sipped their tea. At that point, Charlotte brought the conversation back to something which would include the other guests, and the Judge got no further opportunity to engross her attention, till, the dark falling, a servant lit a lamp in thesala, and Charlotte excused herself on the plea of a housekeeper’s duties. She left the group on the veranda enjoying the warm starlit darkness, across which the steamer’s lights gleamed cosily. Judge Barton, glancing behind him, saw her superintending the laying of the table in the living-room of the cottage, and he abruptly rose and joined her.
“Can’t I help?” he said by way of excuse for presenting himself. “I have brought all this nuisance down upon you. I might be allowed to make myself useful if I can.” Then in reply to her assurance that there was nothing that he could do, and that she regarded the occasion as a treat and not as a nuisance, he went on, “Then can’t I stay and talk to you?” He took the permission for granted and without waiting for a reply, glanced around theroom, which, with its quaintly adorned walls, its tasteful photographs and water-colors, its gleaming brass, and the glancing lights on carved teak and inlaid blackwood, was full of charm.
“What an absolutely delightful room! and this old table! Where does Collingwood pick up these things?”
Charlotte smilingly laid a finger upon her lips, glancing in the direction of the Commissioner. “I think it’s loot,” she said.
“And I know this is,” the Judge remarked, standing in front of the desk. “I remember hearing Collingwood say he was in the Chinese affair in 1900. Why wasn’t it my fate to be there too? It’s all very well to talk about our superior civilization, but there is something in the mere thought of looting treasures like these to make the mouth water.”
“Martin did not loot these. Mr. Kingsnorth did. He gave them to me for a wedding present.”
“Lucky dog! either to loot or to give.”
“I am ashamed to confess,” Charlotte admitted, twitching a tablecloth into better place as a servant laid it, “that I am getting dreadfully mixed upon matters of right and wrong. When I cameout here, my principles were simple as day. There wasn’t any doubt how I regarded looters and people who would accept looted goods. I should as soon have accepted a stolen ham. And here am I, the possessor of various pieces of looted furniture, brazenly rejoicing in them, and all the more because they were looted. I am degenerating hour by hour.” She shook her head plaintively as she put a massive brass candlestick of old Chinese design into its place.
Judge Barton, leaning against the open casement, his two hands braced behind on the sill, stood a picture of smiling content as he studied her. His natural magnetism fairly radiated from him in his benignant mood. His wealth of grizzling hair, his large-featured, intellectual face, and one or two lines that bespoke the brute strength and will of the man, made him look like some roughly but powerfully sketched figure. His clothes were always fashionably cut and he wore them well, but the sense of the well formed muscular-body beneath them always dominated their lines. As he stood beaming upon her, it would have taken a stronger-minded woman than Mrs. Collingwood to weigh impartially the balanced charms of the powerfulintellect and of the powerful animal in the man. She relaxed her old suspicious guard, which had revived for an instant when he followed her into the house, so clearly bent upon a tête-à-tête. Without the faintest suggestion of sentimental intimacy, they were encased in an atmosphere of congenial interest. An onlooker would have pronounced them a pair of reunited chums.
“I am dying to say something,” said the Judge in response to her lament over her decaying morals, “but I don’t dare.”
“Why?”
“You know why very well. ‘I’m skeered o’ you.’” He threw a fine negro accent into the negro phrase.
“Is it something so impertinent?”
“If I may so express it, it is humanely impertinent. I know no other woman to whom I should hesitate to propound it at once, for it is a question. But I have been scathed by you before this, and I am not absolutely foolhardy.”
“Oh, go ahead,” said Charlotte. “Impertinence acknowledged is impertinence disarmed. Besides, I may owe you some amends. I could never seehow I did it, but my husband says I used to snap your head off every time you spoke.”
“You did, you did, indeed.” This was said with fervor.
“Well, I promise not to snap this time.”
“Don’t you find it more comfortable, then—being degenerate, I mean?”
For an instant Mrs. Collingwood stared at him, and he broke into a peal of laughter in which she presently joined.
“Indeed, I must be a formidable person if you were afraid to ask that,” she said. “Well, then, I do. Does my answer content you?”
“Unspeakably. You know we all enjoy being degenerate, but I never hoped to hear you admit it.”
At this instant, Mrs. Collingwood’s attention was diverted by the servant, who came back with a tray of cutlery. She indicated several places at which plates and silver were to be laid, but found time for an abstracted smile at her guest, who stood waiting her pleasure while she gave her directions.
“I daresay—” she returned briskly to the subject after this lapse of time—“I was very priggish. Martin has humanized me—there is no doubt ofit—and I am grateful to him. He is so humorously practical. How do you think he is looking?”
“Oh—fine!” Judge Barton was conscious of a restiveness suppressed. He said to himself that he had not come two hundred and fifty miles to talk about Martin Collingwood’s looks.
“I am so glad you think so, because I think so myself. I fancy Mrs. Maclaughlin did not feed him properly in the old days, and men get so careless by themselves. He says I ‘hold him up to the collar beautifully’ and I really try to, and regular food and physical comfort will tell.”
“Collingwood is the picture of health and of masculine good looks,” said Judge Barton; “and as for you, it is a joy to see anyone looking so healthy, so vital. You have changed immensely. I wonder, dear lady, if you yourself realized how tired and nearly broken-down you were in those old days.”
“I was miserable, physically and nervously worn out, and I suppose I looked it. But I have had a glorious rest and nothing in the world to fret or worry about, and—” she raised her eyes to his, blushing as she approached the topic which had been the source of so much constraint between them—“and Martin and I have been ridiculously happy in each other. I may as well be frank and admit that half that was depressing me was sheer loneliness and wounded pride. Probably the loneliness was much my own fault, for I hardly met people half way; and the wounded pride was wholly my own fault, for I started out to earn my own living in defiance of all my relatives’ wishes. I suppose I had not the philosophy to meet the situation, in spite of that hateful little slap you gave me about ‘the unloveliest thing in women.’” The Judge started forward.
“Thank you for giving me my opportunity,” he said in a low voice. “I could not have referred to it otherwise. I have writhed with shame every time I have thought of those words, Mrs. Collingwood. Will you permit me to apologize for them and for numerous other unmanly stabs that I have given you? I do not know why I did it; all the time I was longing to be friends with you.”
“I suppose I irritated you,” Charlotte replied slowly, a little surprised by his vehemence. “It is inexplicable to me also when I look back upon it. I had really forgiven you long ago. You were very nice to us on our wedding day, I remember,and I felt forlorn and deserted enough on that occasion to be grateful to anyone who showed any signs of human interest in us. But I am glad that you have apologized, and am glad to express my forgiveness, and to regret that I was so snappish. All of which may be expressed in that homely phrase, ‘Let us bury the hatchet.’”
“We were always meant to be friends, I think.” Some vibration in the voice made Charlotte sheer off from an approach to intensity. “Martin always liked you,” she said; and thus, ten seconds after their reconciliation, the Judge had cause to reflect with some irritation that there is no woman in the world so unsatisfying at times as one born without natural coquetry. He had a few minutes in which to develop this idea, while Charlotte made a voyage of investigation to the kitchen. She came back well satisfied. “I think we can count on dinner in half an hour,” she said, and carried him back with her to the veranda, where she did her duty by the Commissioner and the Honorable Mr. Jones, who was not expansive on any subject other than oyster shells.
Kingsnorth, who had gone over to his own cottage and had donned the English mess jacket, whichis the standard evening attire in the Orient, came back, an undeniable English gentleman in spite of his degenerate countenance, and devoted himself to thejudicialluminary, who took stock of him as they chatted. Indeed, the Judge was profoundly interested in Charlotte’s island companions. The Maclaughlins were the sort of people he would expect to find in company with Collingwood, but the Englishman was a surprise. He said to himself that it must have strained all Mrs. Collingwood’s pride to accommodate herself to that household, and he marvelled at her tremendous growth in self-control and in social vagabondage. Six months before she would not have met so unconcernedly such a situation as that in which she found herself.
At dinner the Commissioner, sitting on one side of Mrs. Collingwood with the Judge on the other, was secretly amazed at the house, the household, and the very agreeable woman who was his hostess. With one laughing remark—“My dear, I am the housekeeper, and I won’t be apologized for”—she had silenced Martin, who was inclined to drift into that apologetic and explanatory vein which demands continual reassurance from the guests of their appreciation of their food; and, picking upthe conversational ball, she had sent it spinning lightly here and there through all the courses of as perfectly served a dinner as the Commissioner had ever sat through. She was ably assisted by the two officials and Kingsnorth and even by Martin, whose delight in his wife’s grasp of the situation set his dry, keen wits at bubbling effervescence. Maclaughlin, though not partial to what he called “gentlefolk,” was a hard-headed Scot, not likely to rush in where angels tread lightly, and Mrs. Maclaughlin, who found the general trend of conversation too agile for her, may be said to have concentrated herself on the oyster-shell seeker and the Captain, who suffered also from a slowness of abstract speech.
It was also, considering the fact that it was limited by the resources of a comparatively unproductive island, a good dinner, even in the opinion of two habitual diners-out. It began with a cocktail of Martin’s own mixing and was continued in a clear soup and in a baked fish which must have weighed ten pounds and was of incomparable flavor. “Never have I eaten such fish,” declared Judge Barton, helping himself the second time to the fish and its garnish of thin, sliced cucumbers.Then there was a roast of beef highly relished by the fisher folk,camote, or sweet potato, croquettes, a dish of bamboo sprouts cooked after a savory native recipe, and green peppers stuffed with force-meat. There was a crab salad, deliciously cold, and papaya ice.
“But how do you obtain ice?” said the Commissioner.
“We have a small machine which freezes one hundred pounds daily,” replied Charlotte, “just enough for each cottage and the mess kitchen.”
“I remember when Collingwood proposed having that machine made by special order, how I pooh-poohed the idea,” remarked Kingsnorth. “I was not sufficiently Americanized to feel the need of it. But I am as bad as the rest of them now. Frozen desserts are the only ones fit for the tropics; and I’ve even learned to drink iced-tea.”
A general chorus of assent went up. “You certainly make yourselves comfortable,” the Commissioner declared, “and, really, failing a fresh beef supply, you seem to have all that we get in Manila, in addition to a more charming situation. I suppose your only real difficulty is the matter of medical aid.”
“That is our only realfear,” Collingwood replied. “We keep a supply of coal on hand for emergencies, and we never let it get below a certain point. We keep a reserve sufficient to take the launch over to Cuyo or to Romblon. But if there came a sudden need in bad weather, we should be in the deuce of a fix. It is the only thought that ever keeps me awake at night.”
The Commissioner nodded and murmured something appreciative of a possible crisis. Certainly this very entertaining lady who sat beside him—a lady who had seen something of the world if he was any judge of personality—must feel herself strangely situated in that out of the way spot, chancing the dangers of tidal waves, of storms, and of illness without medical assistance. He fancied the situation was explicable. The compromises which women make for matrimony had offered him food for reflection long before he ever saw Mrs. Collingwood; but what he could not understand was why she should have been among those who have to make compromises. A woman of her grace and finish ought to have a pretty wide field of selection, he thought; but then one can never tell how circumstancesforce persons into unfortunate positions. The Englishman was a dose; not that he had altogether lost his breeding, but that the atmosphere of degeneration hung so palpably about him. “How he must hate himself,” thought the Commissioner, “to make us all so conscious of his fall!” He removed his eyes from Kingsnorth’s face after arriving at this conclusion, just in time to meet the clear gaze of his hostess, and to know, by her sudden blush and momentary shrinking, that she had read him like an open book, and to realize that she was self-conscious of her own situation.
She was enough mistress of herself, however, to hold the conversation at its level. She asked with intelligent interest about those political events in the islands, concerning which it is tactful to question Commissioners. She drew the statesman out on the subject of his own hopes and plans for the islands. He in turn asked information from the fishers, and they, warming to the theme as men will when they talk of things in which they are experienced, gave him their practical, hard-headed views of men and conditions, spoke of native labor and its capacities and incapacities, of resources andpossibilities, and of the disadvantages of political unrest to a people more primitive than any that ever before held the reins of government.
Even an illiterate man is interesting when he talks of his craft, and Martin Collingwood, however little natural development he had in social subtilties, was anything but illiterate or even ill informed. To his wife he seemed to gather new dignity as he took a leader’s natural position. It was plain that his business associates deferred to him; and in ten minutes it was plain that the Commissioner knew he was dealing with a man who would, in the financial world at least, make himself felt. Commissioners never ignore financiers. There came into the Commissioner’s manner as the dinner progressed, something more deferential than the mere civility of a guest to a host, something which implied his acceptance of Mr. Collingwood as a man to be considered.
It was, on the whole, a most successful dinner. The newcomers had brought with them a current of the outer atmosphere, breathing interest and exhilaration into the little colony of self-exiles; and the exiles shared themselves so wholly with the outsiders that the outsiders grew to feel much at home.When, at eleven o’clock, they all walked down to the beach with the Commissioner and the Captain, regrets and good-byes were as hearty as they would have been if the acquaintance had been of long duration.
As he was pulled out to the steamer, the Commissioner remembered that, on the way down, Barton had given him a hint of an odd situation, to which he had paid but a cursory attention. Well it was for the old gossip that he was safe ashore under the tent. “But I’ll have it out of him going back,” reflected the Commissioner. “Fine woman! Fine manly fellow, her husband; sort of man we need out here! He isn’t her equal socially, but I suppose women forget social differences just as we do when they come under the attraction of good looks and manly traits. Besides, if he makes money, she can float him with no difficulty. Aremarkablyfine woman.”