Chapter XVIt was at the end of a month, when Charlotte looked forward with increasing dread to her husband’s return and to her own departure, that the lorchaDos Hermanos, their tried friend, left cargo and letters at the island. Collingwood wrote that he should delay his return another month. He sent down their commissaries, and Maclaughlin was to come up to Romblon harbor to meet the first June run of thePuerta Princesasteamer. Most of these details were contained in a letter to Maclaughlin. His letter to his wife, a very bulky epistle, dwelt upon their own difficulties. It was the first letter he had written to her, and Charlotte’s face, as she read it, was a study.”My dearest Girl:“You are that, after all. I’ve been thinking over our affairs, and I am willing to admit that I was hasty. But I don’t think that you treated me altogether fair. What I do see is that we haven’t got any time to jaw over what is done and gone. You have been talking about leavingme and all that, but that is just talk. I don’t suppose you ever really meant it, and I never took it seriously. We’ll kiss and be friends when I get back, and you’ll see that everything will come out all right.“I’ve been having a pretty fine time up here. About the first person I met was Barton. I had intended to kick him on sight, but I was still feeling pretty sore toward you, so I didn’t. He took me up to his clubs and entered my name, and the next night took me to call on that Mrs. Badgerly. Lord! Lord! that woman is inquisitive! She dug at me like a lawyer at a witness. I never gave anything away: swore you wouldn’t come along because you hated the sea trip so, and vowed I had come up on a sugar lorcha. Then this Mrs. Badgerly (she’s a corker; I like her style), told me she wanted to take me to see old General ——’s wife, because the old lady knew you at home. She was a mighty nice old lady—real motherly,—and she told me a lot of things that you never told me, and made a good many things clear that I’ve never understood. Then I was invited out to the General’s to a big dinner, where there were two or three other people who used to know you; and if I hadn’t been so fond of you, it would have made me all-fired mad the way they rammed it into me that I had married into a fine family, and a fine woman, and all that sort of thing. I didn’t need their verdict on you.“There was another old lady there who used to know you [here Martin named the mother of a very important civil officer], and both the old ladies took me to their hearts and purred over me. I bluffed the thing right through, invitedeverybody to Maylubi, and promised to bring you up some time this year. Barton was at the dinner too, and he piled it on thick about our island, made it quite romantic.“Well, the long and the short of the matter is that you call me. I’ll admit that the crowd here is a little swifter than any I have ever known, and maybe you have some right to your private opinions that I didn’t see before. And, as you said, you keep them to yourself, so I don’t see why I should let them bother me. I’ll stay another month or so, and by that time we will both have a chance to get over our grudges. You needn’t think I’ll let you go back to nursing; and as for me, I am willing to live with you on the old terms, and mighty anxious to get back to them.“I have put six dots here to represent six kisses (......). I’ll give you sixty when I get home.“Your affectionate husband,”Martin Collingwood.”“P. S. I am going to take both old ladies for a drive to-night. How am I getting on for a beau?”When she had twice read this epistle, Mrs. Martin Collingwood was startled by the realization of a great mental change in herself. For six weeks she had schooled herself to feel that she must leave her husband purely out of decent pride and self-respect. She had believed that she was actuated by the desire to remove an obnoxious presence from one who had ceased to take pleasure in it; and she had said to herself a hundred times that her affectionfor her husband had never wavered, but that to thrust it upon him was indecent.But as she laid down the letter after a second perusal, she was aghast to realize that she did not want to live again with Martin Collingwood: that she recoiled passionately from his easy sense of possession; that his taking her so completely for granted was an affront that she could not pardon. She became conscious of a slow process that had been going on in her mind during the dreary weeks, the death of the feeling that had cast a glamour over Martin Collingwood and his inability to understand her standards and traditions. He had lived with her for a year, and had been unable to comprehend that she was of different substance from Mrs. Maclaughlin or Mrs. Badgerly. He had been grossly offensive at the bare suggestion that she might be superior to one of them, but when she was ticketed with the other’s approval,—she drew an indignant breath,—he stood ready to exhibit her to the world, and to call its attention to the superfine partner whom he had drawn in the matrimonial lottery.Well, he would be disappointed. He had yet to learn that she was no readier to accept his termsthan he had been to accept hers. She had had her romance, and she would pay the price!Her social knowledge told her, also, that the Spencer family had taken steps to make its power felt across the Pacific, and that in spite of her marriage and her bitter letter, they were behind her, holding fast to the old tenet that blood is thicker than water. She knew that from both the ladies who had impressed Martin as motherly old dears she would have received at any time both courtesy and kindness; but they would not have taken especial notice of Martin Collingwood or have troubled themselves to introduce him without some sort of urgent appeal from the Boston family.The thought warmed her sad heart a little, for we are all grateful for good-will, and the world looked a lonely place to Charlotte at that time. She was very thoughtful, however, and she was inclined to regret that old family friends had arrived so inopportunely in Manila. It would make her lot harder, entail humiliating explanations exceedingly difficult to make and—crowning agony—it would mean that the disastrous outcome of her marriage would be immediately known and discussed by thevery persons whose knowledge of her affairs she most desired to restrict.She was sitting on her veranda, the letter upon her lap, her brows frowning, her lips pain-drawn, when Kingsnorth approached from his own cottage. He too had had a letter from Collingwood, and after a bath and a change of garments, had come over to discuss it with Mrs. Collingwood.He advanced with the hesitating and apologetic air which he had worn with her ever since that unfortunate evening on the beach. She roused herself to a cold courtesy, gave him a cup of tea, and then sat listlessly awaiting what she knew he had come to say.“I have a letter from Martin,” Kingsnorth began awkwardly, at length, “which I thought you might want to see. He says in it that he did not mention some of the business details to you and that I am to show it to you.”She took it, glanced through it, flushed slightly, but handed it back without comment. It was a characteristically brief but condensed epistle, dealing wholly with business save in the last paragraph.“Better show this to my wife. I wrote her, but had something more interesting to talk about than these matters. You were quite right. I have been a damn fool, but I am all right now, and she and I are going to be happy ever after.”As Charlotte returned the epistle, Kingsnorth fixed her with a curious eye, half interested, half apologetic. Then, as she said nothing, he stammered.“I hope it will be as Martin says, Mrs. Collingwood, and that no lasting ill will come out of my stupidity and insistence.”A slight flush tinged Mrs. Collingwood’s cheek. “Martin wrote what he meant to be a kindly letter, and I am grateful for it. But it really doesn’t affect the matter in the least. I am going away. You will have to know it sooner or later.”“You can’t forgive him?”“I can’t forgive myself. I have no hard feeling against him. But he showed me myself.” Her face burned.“Dear Mrs. Collingwood, don’t feel that way. Martin did not mean what he said.”She lifted her heavy eyes. “Wasn’t it true?”“No, it wasn’t; or, at least, the coloring he gaveit wasn’t true. It wouldn’t be true unless—” he paused and broke off confused.“Unless what?”“You know.” He looked at her steadily.“I don’t know.”“Unless you leave him. That’s what they do; that’s what I did when I got tired. But if you stay by what you promised, no human being can think of you with less than respect. It isn’t the game, it’s the way you play the game that counts.” His voice trembled with emotion.Charlotte sat very still, her cheeks burning. It seemed incomprehensible that she should be sitting there, listening to John Kingsnorth’s views on ethics. Where had she failed? What gradual disintegration had taken place in her, that she should be willing, nay, eager, to listen to moral advice from a man whose very presence had once seemed polluting?At the same time, she realized that his words had value. Is it, she asked herself, the cut and dried opinion of those who walk safely along a beaten path in company with myriads of their fellow beings, which really counts in this world? or is it the knowledge that comes of bitterness and experience?It is so easy to formulate high-sounding phrases; but what do these phrases amount to when one is confronted with life? In the past three years, what downward steps had she taken upon that pathway—she whose whole ideal had been to keep herself untainted from the common world and to walk serenely and gracefully along those heights where all the training of childhood and the instincts of heredity had made her believe that her path lay? When had she missed it? And then, like a flash, she saw in retrospect her conduct for years past; saw herself stopping here, twisting there, trying, at every instant, to evade the fate and the suffering allotted to her in life. Suddenly she realized how much she and John Kingsnorth had in common, for each was a coward. Neither had strength to take sorrow to his heart, and to bear it uncomplainingly. She was doing what he had done, failing as he had failed.The letter dropped from her shaking fingers, and she raised her eyes to his with a look so hopeless, shamed, and grief-stricken, that he shrank back and winced as if he had seen a gaping wound.“I can’t,” she said. “Something has snapped. I have changed. I can’t be Martin Collingwood’swife again. If the weight of my own self-contempt could crush me, I should be dead. Oh, why did they destroy my faith? There would have been the religious life at least.”“You must not talk that way,” Kingsnorth said. “Your path is as plain as a pikestaff. You married Martin Collingwood,—why, only you and your Maker know,—but you did marry him, and you have got to stay with him. He needs you.”“Oh, you men!” she cried scornfully. “And if he did not need me—if only I needed him—it would be equally my duty to leave him. However you arrange the scale of duties, they are always to suit your own interests.”“I am thinking of this from yours,” Kingsnorth said firmly. “I tell you, and I know, that the one thing the human soul can’t stand is to live on compromising with its own self-contempt. A woman of your brains can’t take the liberties with her conscience that her frivolous sisters do. You can’t stand the self-contempt. You’ll disintegrate under it. Convince yourself that you are a martyr if you can, and hug your martyrdom. They got something out of it when it was boiling oil, and melted lead, and crucifixion, and all the rest ofthose horrors. Be a martyr if you must, but do not try living under the weight of your own self-contempt. Of all failures that is the weakest, saddest, most loathsome. Dear lady, I’ve carried mine with me like an atmosphere. People have felt it; you did. I’ve seen you shrink from me as if I were a leper. And you were right. I am loathsome to myself.”He stopped, wiped his brow, and settled back into his chair with a heavy sigh. Charlotte sat on, her trembling fingers tightly clasped, her eyes fixed on the sea. She turned at last and shook her head.“I can’t. I can’t take up that thread of life. I don’t know how I got myself here—it is all a nightmare—but I must go away and work—by myself again.”Kingsnorth leaned forward, his hands loosely clasped between his knees.“Will you listen to the story of my life, Mrs. Collingwood?” he said with more of sharpness in his tone than was characteristic of him.Charlotte had little curiosity in anyone else’s affairs; but she would have listened to anything at that moment to slip away from the discussion of herown. She nodded listlessly, and Kingsnorth began speaking in a very judicial tone.“I was what is called in England well born, though my people were not rich. My father came of a very old and once distinguished family, but was the owner of an impoverished estate. My mother was equally well born, and possessed a small income of her own. You probably know that, in England, the eldest son is the family; nobody else really counts. In our family there were two girls, then my elder brother, the ‘heir,’ then myself, and another girl. I cannot remember the time when the rest of us were not all being pinched to keep things going for the heir. Tom was, on the whole, a pretty good fellow, but that sort of rearing would spoil the best nature that was ever born. He got into the way of thinking that the rest of us ought to sacrifice everything we had or could hope to have to his position. He was also a devilish good-looking fellow, easy-going and selfish, as was natural.“My two elder sisters were promptly married off, on the whole pretty well. The difficulty came with Tom. He had to marry money, and he had not enough in himself or the place to make money come begging for him.“Tom was in an expensive regiment. My dream of life was also the army, but the paternal pocketbook couldn’t stand it, so I was put in a bank instead. I promptly fell head-over-ears in love with the banker’s daughter.“Her family was what we called ‘new people’; but there was plenty of money, and if Elena wanted me, why she must have me. Therefore no objections were made to the engagement. I was in the seventh heaven of happiness. I do not deny that I was glad she had plenty of money; but I should have married her just the same if she had not had a cent.“Elena paid a visit to my home in the early days of our betrothal, and—well, she threw me over deliberately for my elder brother. Looking back now, I can see some excuse for her. I was unimportant in my family, of course, and Tom was its centre. He looked handsome in his uniform, and he was the heir. The place had age and dignity, and she knew its value.“I give Tom the credit of being ashamed and of feeling some remorse; but my father and mother planned—actually aided and abetted my betrayal. They wanted the money for the heir.“I made a row, naturally, but it was fruitless.Elena wept and declared that she would have her own way. Tom looked ashamed, but his bringing up had made him constitutionally selfish; and the parents on both sides joined to suppress me.“The end was that I cleared out, blind with rage and pain, cursing Elena and my kin; and in the next three years in London I went to what is commonly known as the dogs.“My self-pity is justifiable in my eyes to-day; but I made a fatal mistake. If I had had the right stuff in me, Elena couldn’t have driven me to the dogs. I might have hugged my griefs and have grown embittered; but my worst mistake was the desire to ‘drown sorrow’ with drink, with cards, with all the undesirable vices of men. If I had hugged sorrow and warmed it to my heart, I might have suffered more, but I should not have crumbled up morally like a gold ring in quicksilver.“England has always a frontier war or two on her hands, and I got into one. A private, a ‘gentleman ranker’ has a magnificent opportunity to sink in the English army. Afterwards I drifted over here, and got into pearl-fishing. I liked the life and its adventures (we had to fight a bit in the early days), and then when the Americans came,I fell in with Collingwood. We fancied each other on sight. Then we picked up Mac, and I lighted accidentally on this oyster bed, and we settled here.“Throughout all these years I have kept up a desultory correspondence with my married sisters; but I have drifted out of their lives, and I realize that I represent to them only a possible legacy. It is my business to make some money, and one day to die and leave it to them; and meanwhile a few gifts from the Orient are not unacceptable.“Well, to shorten this tale, I settled here and married my wife. You need not look so startled. She was my wife legally; bell, book, and candle were all there. I lived openly with her in my house till the morning when you landed on Maylubi. Then, after I had seen and talked with you, I went home and ordered her out. She loved me, and she obeyed me. Five months later she died.” He stopped and wiped a cold perspiration from his brow.“But how could you have kept it from me?” cried Charlotte. “Why did not Martin or Mrs. Maclaughlin tell me?”“Mrs. Mac had her orders from Mac. She never disobeys him. Martin was simply a good friend.”“But he brought me here.” She stopped, crimsoning with indignation.“Precisely. He brought you here to associate with me, a respectable married man, as he considered me. He has never understood my conduct. He doesn’t understand why I preferred you to believe me a profligate instead of a decent married man. He has never understood why I should be willing to have my child pass for illegitimate. But you understand, Mrs. Collingwood.”“Yes, I understand.” Then with sudden passion she cried, “But it was not my fault. I was trained to it.”“As I was. But, if I had had one spark of manhood in me, I should have stood by the woman I had married, and should have taken my child to my heart in the face of the world. But I did not have the courage. I writhed and twisted to get out of facing the consequences of my own actions; and since then the weight of my own self-contempt has grown steadily heavier. Don’t talk to me of reform,” he added savagely as she started to speak. “There isn’t any reform for such as I. I tell you the consciousness of my own moral cowardice is with me day and night. It never leaves me. Andit’s the ungodly unfairness of it all that kills me by inches. I see other men about me, living lives not so very different from mine: Collingwood himself has been no saint. But because I’ve wanted better things, because I drank my cup, knowing that it was poor drink, it has not slaked my thirst, and it has parched the last drop of sweetness out of my life.“Don’t you go another foot along this trail; you began it when you married Collingwood. If you double and twist on your tracks again, you are lost. Hug pain, hug misery, martyr yourself, if you will, but don’t try to indulge your own selfish will, and to square things by saying that you despise yourself. God in Heaven! Do you know what it is to despise yourself? You don’t now; but you will some day.” He wiped the perspiration that stood in great drops on his brow.Charlotte, who had turned very white, sat nerveless and trembling like a leaf. All her pride was in arms that John Kingsnorth, degraded scion of a decent family, should be giving advice to her; and then she saw, with sudden horror, what a tremendous distance she had drifted with the current before John Kingsnorth’s words could be true.For they were true! She had married Martin Collingwood, blaming herself for the weakness that made human affection and the freedom from the responsibility of self-support loom larger than all the traditions of birth and breeding. She had wanted her romance as every other woman in the world does; and romance, as it comes to most women, had been denied her. She might have gone out and found one, as many a woman does, and might, in time, have taken her flirtations lightly. But she had been too timid and too proud to flirt. The doubt came to her that it would have been better to play lightly at romance than to purchase it at the sacrifice of the second essential factor that makes a true marriage. Then came another throb of terror. She saw herself bent wilfully again on her own way, doubling, twisting, as Kingsnorth phrased it, trying to escape her conscience by saying that she despised herself: but the fact stared her in the face that she was turning on all the principles that had justified romance. She had married Collingwood against her reason, justifying herself for being swayed by human feeling by reiterating the finality of the action. For better, for worse, she had said—but now that it was for worse, itsfinality had somehow disappeared. Where was her mind—her will—her conscience?She sat for a long time in bitter silence, but roused herself as Kingsnorth, who had been furtively watching her, drew out his tobacco pouch and extracted from its depths a little ball of tissue paper. He unfolded it, and there appeared to her startled eyes a single pearl of unusual size and luster.“What a beauty!” she cried, bending forward to look at it.“Yes, it’s beautiful enough,” said Kingsnorth. “I’ve carried it about with me for three years. Even Collingwood has never seen it.”“I wish you had not—” she stopped, flushing.“I didn’t show it to you to tempt you. It’s my moral slough. There are times when I’ve felt that its hell luster was my soul, and that I had nothing but the blackened shell in my body. It stood for the dearest emotions a man can have—for love and vengeance.”“You are horrible,” she cried, shrinking from him.“I am better than I used to be,” replied Kingsnorth. “I found this bauble three years ago, beforeMartin and I went into business. I never intended to sell it. Do you know what I wanted it for? To buy her back, and to blacken the face of the man who stole her from me. Yes, shrink! God help me, I love that woman still with a love gone awry. Other women, yes, and better women, though they had not her grace and training, have loved me; but, in my heart of hearts, I have held them all cheap. It was she, the woman who jilted me before all the world, that I wanted. It was he, whose heart I wanted to wring. Poor cheap human nature! Twelve years I’ve roughed it in shacks and junks, a flannel shirt to my back, and pork and beans or rice and fish in my stomach; while he has sat beneath the oaks we played under in our childhood, and has slept in the panelled rooms of our home, and has held the woman he stole from me in his arms! Talk of family affection! There isn’t such a thing. What am I to the mother who bore me? A derelict son, adrift in the South Seas, who is not to come home without some money. What am I to the sisters who played with me and fought with me over our nursery tea? A scape-grace brother, who, it is hoped, will keep out of the way, but who ought to make some money and leaveit to their children. Money! I’ve toiled like a negro slave for money, but not for them—not for them! It was for her. I wanted to go back rich. She sold herself once; why not again? The pearl was not enough in itself to tempt. It was the bauble, the outward sign.”“You hoped—that?” She could not help glancing at his seamed, degenerate countenance.“Never after you came. The look in your eyes told me what I had become. Since then I have lived—with myself.” He smiled a wretched, drawn smile.She pointed gingerly to the bauble. “Why don’t you get rid of it? sell it?”“Sell my soul? Did I not tell you my soul is steeped in it? No, bury it with me. Somehow I know I’ll not last long. Take this word from me. If you know anything of me when death comes, see that this does not go to the women who betrayed me and pitied me not. Women are selfish creatures. They sun themselves on their own cat premises. They have no pity for the poor devils on the outside.”“Is it women alone? or isn’t it men as well, who are pitiless? Or isn’t it just life? Yet it isn’tpitiless to all. There are those who dance through it on rose-strewn paths.” She stopped, the sense of the great differences in individual lives overwhelming her.Kingsnorth rose. “Well, that hasn’t been my life or yours. I have seen that you suffer. But suffer! Don’t change that look on your face. Better poignant suffering than moral decay. I tell you, you are facing it.” He rose abruptly and walked away, leaving her like a figure carved in ivory, looking out on the waste of waters, that seemed the emblem of waste in her own life.Chapter XVIIn the month that elapsed between her conversation with Kingsnorth and the time set by Collingwood for his return, Charlotte had time for an exhausting and (as it seemed to her) fruitless self-inquisition. She was alternately the prey of a hopeless apathy and of a consuming impatience, but in either mood there ran a strong undercurrent of rebellion against all the formative influences of her life. At times the future yawned before her like a bottomless gulf, into the darkness and loneliness of which she must inevitably sink helpless. Out of love as she was with her husband, the prospect of going back to her forlorn, loveless state was one she could not contemplate. To get up day after day, knowing that there was, in all this world, no human being who took more than a casual interest in her; to go to bed at night, knowing that, if ruin and disaster overtook the world, no human thought would turn to her, no voice cry to hers out of the darkness, no warm humanhand reach for hers, seemed to her a fate infinitely worse than death. Yet she had lived just that life for twenty-eight years before she married Martin Collingwood to escape from it; and, though she had been most unhappy in it, she certainly had not regarded it as a tragedy. She remembered once having seen a young soldier come forth from the court-room after he had received a life sentence for shooting his corporal. The boy had lifted his hat with his manacled hands and had raised a white face to the touch of the cool morning wind. Something in the gesture had expressed his sense of helplessness in the grasp of that terrible thing we call the law. He was looking down the long vista of years at a living death ten thousand times worse than death, at a life from which every human ambition, every hope, every natural spring had been erased. His brother had followed behind him, a short distance of twenty or thirty feet, already the emblem of a separation that was to become complete. The brother was weeping as strong men do when their hearts are wrung; but, as she had looked at them, one so quiet, the other convulsed with grief, she had recognized that, to the second man, life held comfort and healing still. In the long years tocome, new interests would take the place of the old tie; a wife and babes would fill that life; healthy toil allied to honorable ambition would make the years seem to fly; and the memory of a convict brother would drop out of life, only to be recalled tenderly at those seasons when a universal festival brings back the old days and makes the rotting thread of memory seem new and strong once more. But what of the other? Nothing new would come to him, nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to live upon but memories that would be very, very bitter. There would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil, and the awful knowledge that long before he ceased to live he had ceased to be even to those who had been his nearest and dearest.Well, she had lived it once. She could live it again. As with the soldier there would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil. But the heart cries loudly for more than these things in life, until that heart is chastened into meekness. Would she ever be meek, she wondered sadly. If she could have accepted her fate with submission and sadness only, she would have felt herself indeed treated with mercy by the unseen fates. But there was noelement of submission in her mood. As often as she contemplated the future, and said to herself that these things must be, had to be, so often the wild will rose within her to say that they must not be. She lay often for hours at a time face downward on her bed, not a muscle moving, not a sound escaping her tense lips; but her passivity was the physical expression of an impotence that left her prostrate before the overwhelming fates.Often there recurred to her mind a conversation which had taken place between her and a fellow nurse, a young, joyous, magnetic creature for whom she had formed a friendship more nearly approximating intimacy than any other that had come into her life. It was in the last days of her engagement, and she had spoken of a fear of what unhappiness love might bring into her life. The other had looked at her with amazement. “Love!” she said. “I can imagine it bringing a lot of joy, but why unhappiness?”“Why unhappiness?” Charlotte asked in vain for the reason; but the fact stood stronger than any “why’s,” that there had been, in all her life, some fundamental outrage of human sentiment. It had existed in that strange paternal attitude of herfather’s; it had lived on in that perfunctory kindness of the nuns who had found her an antipathetic and incomprehensible child; and it had grown and intensified in the curious, prying interest developed in those who had governed her later years. That any such a condition could exist by a series of fortuitous events was out of the question. There had to be cause running through it all. Yet search her heart and mind as she would, she found there no wells of bitterness or evil thought or envy or malice to justify relations so peculiar as had finally established themselves between her and human society.The solution of the question came to her suddenly, when, on a particularly dreary day, she had been trying to discipline herself and to keep her thoughts from running on her own troubles. She had spent two hours trying to read the story, written by a great modern author, of three precocious school-boys. She had been a great admirer of the author, and, up to that time, had found fascination in his pages; but the three boys were little to her taste. As she mused sadly, a flash of insight came, and another; and, little by little, she saw clearly what had so long puzzled her.The precocious child is abnormal, and inspires in his fellow men that blind instinct to worry and torment which runs all through the animal world. She had been a precocious child, made uncanny by perceptions of the hidden currents and causes of life at a time when she should have been gurgling over its toys. As she recalled her sensitiveness to impressions, her powers of reading what was passing in others’ minds, and the singular growth of self-concealment and self-control that had grown out of them, it seemed to her that her keen brain had been her lifelong curse. Little by little, she went back to her convent days and tried to put herself in the place of the good sisters who had taught her. How distressing it must have been to them to feel the dumb interrogation that was always so strong under outward obedience! If she could have been unconscious of her father’s mental state and could have made a happy child’s claim upon his affections, would he not in time have come to love her? If, when she was a lonely orphan, living on her cousin’s sufferance, she had been able to reveal to her relatives the suffering that she really underwent in the strange ostracism which she had built up for herself, would not pity have conquered theirselfishness? She drew a long, pained sigh, as she thought of what a difference might have been made in her life by a little less brain and a little more moral courage.She was lying in her steamer chair on the veranda of her house at the time; and by her side, on a taboret, stood a glass of water. She picked it up and smiled over it. It was full of microbes (dead, of course, for Americans drink no unboiled water in the Philippines), and she knew it, and cared little, for she could not see them. But had she possessed an eye with the magnifying power of a strong microscope, she could not have tasted the water for the sight of the dead organisms would have made it unpalatable. She began to wonder what would be the effect on society, if there were let loose upon it a body of persons with microscopic eyes. They would shrink and exclaim and turn faint at dishes that the epicure delights in. How they would upset dinners and spoil little suppers and picnic luncheons! How eagerly would their society be avoided, and how soon their name become anathema!But though physically the microscopic eye does not yet exist, the mental and spiritual microscopic eye does exist, and it has about the same distressingeffect upon its human brethren who do not possess it as the other sort might have. She had had the microscopic eye—nothing could blind her to facts—and her starts and shrinkings had made her antipathetic to most of the persons with whom she had come in contact. It had remained for Martin, the indomitably ignorant, to be blind to her mental attitude, to assume her a normal woman of the world in which he found her. What of gratitude did she not owe him?The thought pricked her to her feet, set her to restless pacings of the floor. Whatever of gratitude she owed him, she was preparing ingratitude in the course she was still bent upon pursuing. Never had she appreciated the stubborn inheritance of her own will till she measured herself against it in this struggle. Whatever the conscience and the intelligence might say, her will said “No” as often as she contemplated forgiving Martin and going back to her life with him. The feeling which had been warm in her heart for him so long was dead—killed by his own brutal words, buried in her own shame and self-reproach. She saw with unutterable sadness, that there was no hope of its resuscitation. But did that break the tie that she had of herown volition forged? Could not that same will of hers which resisted so bitterly be schooled to duty and to right? For against a year’s tenderness and kindness, where was the justice of weighing the utterances of a single hour of pain and disappointment? The one ought not to balance the other. She had no right to think so for an instant. Alas, though, one did balance the other, outweighed it many times!Her marriage had been all wrong. But had she been less conscious of the fact on the day she married him than on the day when she vainly struggled to convince herself that she ought to go on living with him? Marriage can not be for love alone any more than it can be for selfish material interest alone. In its appeal to human emotion and in its relation to the family it may be, as the church calls it, a sacrament; but marriage as a lifelong partnership must have its material side. Love must enter in; but no healthy marriage can exist, unless there be equally the consciousness of a good bargain, of a legitimate exchange of values, added to the affection which sanctifies it. Well, Collingwood had played fairly. It was she who had entered into the alliance, knowing its weakness, knowing herself.But did she know herself? What more that was disappointing and agonizing was she to learn of herself? What was even then struggling in her breast? Was there some secret hope holding itself in concealment behind her oft repeated thought that life was ended for her? Did some hidden ambition prompt her to take the step that she believed came from self-respect? She had learned only too well her capacity for self-deception. She had advanced step by step along the path by which she had come to the church door with Martin Collingwood, denying every motive which, in the end, had proved itself the stronger. Was it possible that she was turning blindly, as women naturally turn, to a second man to lift her from the wreck to which she had brought her life with the first? Again she faced that truth which she had long before discovered, that too passionate a denial constitutes an assertion; and while every atom of her intelligence bade her distrust her own sophistry, every throb of a strong emotional nature bade her turn from the conclusions of her reason.In these hours of agonizing inquisition when her soul seemed literally torn in two, she contemplated with added despair, the loss of her early religiousfaith. It did not come back to her in the least. No impulse for prayer seized her. The conviction that the world is made up of blind forces, and that there is no help outside of ourselves was very strong in her. She might pray and pray, but when she arose from her knees, the elements of struggle would be there still, tearing at her, filling her soul with pain. Prayer would not bring sleep to her aching eyeballs in the night, it would not silence the cry in her heart, it would not keep the thronging thoughts from her weary brain. Time alone could do that. Give her time—she smiled bitterly—and change of circumstances, and she might put the experiences of the last three years behind her, put even the man who had ruled her life and thought for a year (and a happy year) behind her.Of course she wrestled with the temptations which must present themselves to the intelligent mind which has had the ways of the world set before it. Intelligence said that nothing mattered except the material. She could be good or bad, noble or contemptible, so long as she played her game well and kept on good terms with that thing we call the world. Little the world cares what we do or what we are, said intelligence; the question with it is howmuch power do we own in this vale of tears. Intelligence told her that with the backing of her family and the successful use of her own powers, and with Judge Barton’s political influence, they two might make a very comfortable place for themselves in this material universe. She felt dangerously sure of the Judge. The knowledge had come to her (how she knew not) that all she needed to insure her an absolute dominion over the man’s soul was a little less moral fastidiousness, a little more worldliness. Indeed, a strange confidence in her own powers of attraction was working itself out of all the miserable situation. She realized how completely she had under-estimated her own charm. Less conscience, less good taste, more charity (which is a much misused term in these days, signifying lack of all social and moral tradition), in fact, a general elimination of the best qualities of her nature would constitute a humanizing process which would work decidedly to her material advantage. But she was not willing to submit herself to the process. She wanted her own way, and she wanted to remain her ideal self. More and more clearly she saw the unreasonableness of her demand.So the days slipped by one by one, and she marked them off on her calendar. In the end, the time for the launch to go up to Romblon arrived without her having taken any decisive steps toward the act which she still declared to herself she was bent upon. She excused herself on the ground of Martin’s letter, saying to herself that she owed him a personal interview and explanation for her refusal to accept his offer of reconciliation. But in truth, she was pulling away again from the uncomfortable. She could contemplate the action, but until circumstances more disagreeable than those she was enduring forced her into activity, she would not take a decisive step.It had been the original intention that Kingsnorth should take the launch over for Collingwood, but, as the time slipped by, and the typhoon season was at hand this idea was deemed impracticable. Maclaughlin was a licensed engineer, while Kingsnorth was not, and the launch was not in the best of repair.Maclaughlin left at daybreak on an exceedingly hot morning, when the sea rolled lazily in long, metallic swells shining as if the brilliant surfacewere oiled. All that day the heat was like a vapor, but in mid-afternoon the clouds rolled up, showers fell at intervals, and cool gusts of wind made the cocoanut trees writhe and their stiff leaves to rattle. Once or twice Charlotte looked at the barometer, which fell steadily.At dinner their common anxiety made the three more companionable than anyone had hoped to be. “We are going to have abaguio, that’s flat,” said Kingsnorth, “but it has been kind in holding off. Mac’s safe in Romblon harbor by this time, and that is landlocked, and shut in by mountains. If Collingwood is there, they’ll wait anyway to come out. Mac’s got sense enough not to leave port on a falling barometer, though Collingwood might take the chances.”“I hope Martin isn’t out on the ocean to-night,” said Charlotte. “It makes me ill to think of it.” She shivered and glanced into the darkness where the oily surf fell over in ghostly green fire, and the wash rolled back pricked with millions of vanishing light points.“Spooky, isn’t it?” remarked Kingsnorth. He set down his coffee-cup (they were just finishingdinner), and as his hostess rose, held back the rattling shell curtain for her, then went to inspect the barometer. He whistled.“What is it?” inquired Mrs. Mac.“Oh, just so-so.” Something in his tone betrayed an effort to retrieve the impression made by his bit of carelessness. Mrs. Maclaughlin went over to the instrument.“It’s nearly 750,” she said in a dismayed tone.1“I’ve never known it to go that low without warning since I’ve lived on the island. I wish Mac and Martin were here.”Charlotte said nothing, but in her heart she echoed the other’s words.“Can’t be helped,” replied Kingsnorth, curtly. “I hope that you will not feel it presumptuous in me to suggest that Mrs. Maclaughlin stay with you to-night, Mrs. Collingwood. I’ll come over also if there is anything very bad.”Both women were grateful for the suggestion.Each had been secretly longing to broach the matter, and had felt ashamed to do so.“I’ll go over with you while you lock up your place,” said Kingsnorth to Mrs. Maclaughlin. They disappeared almost instantly in the profound blackness of the night. Charlotte marvelled at it. The gloom was like a solid substance save where the phosphorescence showed a glimpse of foaming suds, and a few lights gleaming from the distant village seemed golden by contrast with the green and blue fires.The servants all begged leave to absent themselves for the night. Each had discovered an ailing relative in the village to whom his presence was an absolute necessity.“Let ‘em go,” said Kingsnorth. “They are in a dead fright. They know we’ll probably have Tophet before the night is over, and they want to get into their flock.” Even as he spoke, a little moan of wind came off the sea, and a pattering shower drenched the earth.“Curtain rung up,” said Kingsnorth. He had been standing tentatively, hat in hand, after escorting back Mrs. Maclaughlin and some, as it seemed to Charlotte, preposterously large bundles. Charlottemotioned him to a chair. “We may as well watch the first act,” she smiled, humoring his metaphor.“Just as well,” he answered, “because I fancy we’ll be on the second.”“Do you mean that there may be any actual danger?” Charlotte asked, startled.“Danger? no! At the worst we might have to spend a night under the pandan bushes. But one of these big storms is a trying thing while it lasts.”“Tryingisn’t the word,” Mrs. Maclaughlin precipitated this dictum into the conversation with her usual vigor. “It’s just nerve-wracking. Lord! Lord! what fools we women are! Here are two of us out here likely to be swallowed up by a tidal wave or Heaven only knows what, just because we were so tarnation ready to take up with a man. I’ve traipsed around this world at Andrew Maclaughlin’s heels twenty-two years, and the good Lord only knows what he hasn’t asked me to go through with; and now he’s left me unprotected in the face of the biggest storm we’re likely to have.” She fairly choked with fear and anger.Mrs. Maclaughlin’s untrammelled speech was at all times an affront to Kingsnorth. The intimationthat he was a poor substitute for Maclaughlin as a protector stung him. When he spoke, his voice had a quality of suave ugliness that grated like a rasped saw on Charlotte’s nerves.“You’re panicky,” he said. “Why don’t you pattern on Mrs. Collingwood and me? We’re ready for anything; are we not, dear lady?”A heavy gust of wind and another downpour silenced them all for a few seconds.“This,” said Kingsnorth to Charlotte, as the gust subsided, “is just preliminary to the theme; it’s the scale playing in the key with which the virtuoso dazzles his audience before he rolls up his cuffs, runs both hands through his hair, and gets into the first movement. Ah, here’s the theme.”“What’s a virtuoso?” snapped Mrs. Maclaughlin.“A virtuoso is a gentleman who can play the piano or some other instrument exceedingly well,” Kingsnorth replied, with the same dangerous suavity.“I hate the nasty long-haired things.” It was quite evident that Mrs. Mac’s nerves had gone to splinters. Charlotte threw herself into the breach.“Well, don’t hate this storm,” she said, “even ifMr. Kingsnorth did compare it to a sonata. It’s beautiful. It’s grand.” Another howl and downpour, and this time the framework of the house shivered under its impact.“Merely theandante,” said Kingsnorth, shrugging his shoulders.“You make my blood run cold,” cried Mrs. Maclaughlin.It was too dark to see him, but Charlotte knew that his lips were apart and his teeth grinning in an evil smile.“But why, Mrs. Maclaughlin?” said Charlotte suddenly. “If danger is coming, it will come. No human power can stop it. The future is as unreadable as the very sky. But why borrow trouble for what we are powerless to resist? And if there is beauty and majesty in all this conflict of the elements, surely it is better to see that, than to sit dreading the unknown. Mr. Kingsnorth’s comparisons are not unjust. It is like a great piece of music, divided into movements. Whatever it may come to later, it is glorious now.”“Spoken like a brave woman,” Kingsnorth cried. “Let loose the dogs of war and make Rome howl! Well, we don’t care; do we, Mrs. Collingwood?”“Not much,” Charlotte assented, though somewhat coldly. Her manner brought him to a sudden check.“I forgot,” he stammered. “Excuse me.”“Forgot what?” This point blank query about a remark not addressed to herself emanated from Mrs. Maclaughlin.“Dear Mrs. Mac,” Kingsnorth said, and Charlotte winced at his tone, “you do not realize how quickly you deteriorate once out of reach of Mac’s disciplining eye. Mac would never have permitted you to ask that question. I often wonder if, had it been my good fortune to marry, I should have been able to exert the strong guiding influence over my wife that Mac evidently holds over you.”“Oh, you have,” replied Mrs. Mac, while Charlotte sat in helpless embarrassment at the scene. “Well, let me tell you that you wouldn’t have. You might have broken her heart, the Lord knows, as you’d probably have broken your children’s spirits, if you’d ’a’ had ’em; but no woman would ever be proud to be ruled by you as I’m proud to be ruled by Mac. I’m disciplined. You hit the nail on the head there. And maybe I fall back when Mac isn’t around. But I love that old manof mine. I’ve followed him over deserts and oceans. I may have let my mind go once in a while; but no woman on God’s green earth would have married you and lived with you twenty-two years, and still have loved you as I love Mac. I’ve been rebellious sometimes with the Almighty, and it hasn’t always seemed as if the powers above knew what they were about. But the good Lord did a wise thing when He kept women and children out of your hands, John Kingsnorth.” She arose with a snort of wrath and passed into the house. “Where’s my Bible?” they heard her saying to herself. “I brought it.”For a second or two, Charlotte remained like Kingsnorth, half paralyzed by the outburst. Then a helpless, pitying embarrassment settled upon her. It was all so terribly true, it was such a baring of naked underfeelings. Would it ever be possible, she wondered, to resume the island life after such an indecent exposure of what simmered deep in Mrs. Maclaughlin’s heart? Then, as the silence grew, she cast about vainly for some change of subject. As if divining her thoughts, Kingsnorth rose.“Already the tempest has broken,” he said.“It’s been brewing three years. I can’t complain; and I know you think she told the truth.”A sudden impulse stirred Charlotte. “No, no,” she said. “You must not think that. I believe that, if you had married the right woman (that’s the stock phrase, isn’t it?) you would have been a tender husband, and if you had had children, a kind father. I don’t know what perversity of fate kept those influences out of your life, but all that is wayward in you and bitter seems to have been caused by their lack.”She uttered the words with real warmth, and for an instant wondered that he made no reply. Then, as the pause grew more marked, she heard him breathing heavily, and it flashed into her mind that the man was on the point of an utter breakdown. Her few sincere words had gone straight through the armor that Mrs. Maclaughlin’s blows had apparently failed to affect. An absolute horror of such a possibility seized upon her. They had had, she felt, an indecent exhibition of naked human emotions. If more were to follow, what intimate revelations might not take place? Yet the impossibility of uttering some banality was clear to her mind. Anything short of the sincerity and earnestnessdemanded by the situation would be insulting. So she remained as if transfixed, in a kind of shivering expectation of what might be coming.Kingsnorth, however, pulled himself together after a convulsive movement or two of his chest. He stood for an instant without a word, and then walked away to his own quarters, whence Charlotte soon heard his voice shouting angrily for his servant.Mrs. Maclaughlin, somewhat appeased by finding the Bible which she had brought along for her usual nightly chapter, came out on the piazza as the strident tones of Kingsnorth penetrated the sitting-room.“Taking it out on his boy,” she remarked. “Well, I’ve been aching to tell the truth to John Kingsnorth for two years, and now I’ve done it.”“Do you feel any better for it?”“Yes—no. I’m always sorry when I blurt out. He’s right: Mac holds me in.” Her voice broke. “Oh, my Lord! My Lord! I wish I knew where he was this minute. You’re a strange woman, Charlotte Collingwood. You sit here and watch them waves roll in and hear the wind blowing, andyou don’t seem to give one thought to the man that you’ve lived here with side by side for a year. Ain’t you got no love for him?”Charlotte put up a hand. “I can’t discuss that with you, Mrs. Maclaughlin. Surely I have made it plain before this.”“You’ve made a lot plain,” replied Mrs. Maclaughlin. There was endless reservation in her tone. It heaped such mountains of unuttered reproach that Charlotte quite bowed under it.“The rain is coming in strong,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin, when she had extracted sufficient healing from her companion’s discomfort. “You’ll get drenched out here. I’m going to read my Bible. You had better come in.”But Charlotte motioned her away. “I’m not religiously inclined to-night,” she replied.“Charlotte Collingwood, do you defy your Maker?”“I’m rebellious to-night, Mrs. Maclaughlin. There are His waves and His winds, but still I’m rebellious. I’m not apologetic to-night, not even in the face of abaguio.”“I’ll speak for you,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin earnestly. She went inside, closed the doors and shellwindows to keep out the storm, and Charlotte heard her keeping her word. Mrs. Maclaughlin’s prayers were simple but fervent. They seemed to consist chiefly of a few reiterated sentences. “O Lord, protect and save my old husband. You know I love him, Lord; but it isn’t all selfishness. O God, give me back my Mac.” At times she asked that the Divine Power might soften the hardened heart of Mrs. Collingwood.1Barometric pressure in Philippines is measured in millimeters. In typhoons where fifth signal is flown, about 742 is lowest pressure recorded. In great storm of 1908, 739.8 was lowest. Generally the falling of the barometer is gradual for several days during the continuance of the storm. When it falls suddenly, as here indicated, before a storm, it means that a storm of short duration but of terrific violence is coming.
Chapter XVIt was at the end of a month, when Charlotte looked forward with increasing dread to her husband’s return and to her own departure, that the lorchaDos Hermanos, their tried friend, left cargo and letters at the island. Collingwood wrote that he should delay his return another month. He sent down their commissaries, and Maclaughlin was to come up to Romblon harbor to meet the first June run of thePuerta Princesasteamer. Most of these details were contained in a letter to Maclaughlin. His letter to his wife, a very bulky epistle, dwelt upon their own difficulties. It was the first letter he had written to her, and Charlotte’s face, as she read it, was a study.”My dearest Girl:“You are that, after all. I’ve been thinking over our affairs, and I am willing to admit that I was hasty. But I don’t think that you treated me altogether fair. What I do see is that we haven’t got any time to jaw over what is done and gone. You have been talking about leavingme and all that, but that is just talk. I don’t suppose you ever really meant it, and I never took it seriously. We’ll kiss and be friends when I get back, and you’ll see that everything will come out all right.“I’ve been having a pretty fine time up here. About the first person I met was Barton. I had intended to kick him on sight, but I was still feeling pretty sore toward you, so I didn’t. He took me up to his clubs and entered my name, and the next night took me to call on that Mrs. Badgerly. Lord! Lord! that woman is inquisitive! She dug at me like a lawyer at a witness. I never gave anything away: swore you wouldn’t come along because you hated the sea trip so, and vowed I had come up on a sugar lorcha. Then this Mrs. Badgerly (she’s a corker; I like her style), told me she wanted to take me to see old General ——’s wife, because the old lady knew you at home. She was a mighty nice old lady—real motherly,—and she told me a lot of things that you never told me, and made a good many things clear that I’ve never understood. Then I was invited out to the General’s to a big dinner, where there were two or three other people who used to know you; and if I hadn’t been so fond of you, it would have made me all-fired mad the way they rammed it into me that I had married into a fine family, and a fine woman, and all that sort of thing. I didn’t need their verdict on you.“There was another old lady there who used to know you [here Martin named the mother of a very important civil officer], and both the old ladies took me to their hearts and purred over me. I bluffed the thing right through, invitedeverybody to Maylubi, and promised to bring you up some time this year. Barton was at the dinner too, and he piled it on thick about our island, made it quite romantic.“Well, the long and the short of the matter is that you call me. I’ll admit that the crowd here is a little swifter than any I have ever known, and maybe you have some right to your private opinions that I didn’t see before. And, as you said, you keep them to yourself, so I don’t see why I should let them bother me. I’ll stay another month or so, and by that time we will both have a chance to get over our grudges. You needn’t think I’ll let you go back to nursing; and as for me, I am willing to live with you on the old terms, and mighty anxious to get back to them.“I have put six dots here to represent six kisses (......). I’ll give you sixty when I get home.“Your affectionate husband,”Martin Collingwood.”“P. S. I am going to take both old ladies for a drive to-night. How am I getting on for a beau?”When she had twice read this epistle, Mrs. Martin Collingwood was startled by the realization of a great mental change in herself. For six weeks she had schooled herself to feel that she must leave her husband purely out of decent pride and self-respect. She had believed that she was actuated by the desire to remove an obnoxious presence from one who had ceased to take pleasure in it; and she had said to herself a hundred times that her affectionfor her husband had never wavered, but that to thrust it upon him was indecent.But as she laid down the letter after a second perusal, she was aghast to realize that she did not want to live again with Martin Collingwood: that she recoiled passionately from his easy sense of possession; that his taking her so completely for granted was an affront that she could not pardon. She became conscious of a slow process that had been going on in her mind during the dreary weeks, the death of the feeling that had cast a glamour over Martin Collingwood and his inability to understand her standards and traditions. He had lived with her for a year, and had been unable to comprehend that she was of different substance from Mrs. Maclaughlin or Mrs. Badgerly. He had been grossly offensive at the bare suggestion that she might be superior to one of them, but when she was ticketed with the other’s approval,—she drew an indignant breath,—he stood ready to exhibit her to the world, and to call its attention to the superfine partner whom he had drawn in the matrimonial lottery.Well, he would be disappointed. He had yet to learn that she was no readier to accept his termsthan he had been to accept hers. She had had her romance, and she would pay the price!Her social knowledge told her, also, that the Spencer family had taken steps to make its power felt across the Pacific, and that in spite of her marriage and her bitter letter, they were behind her, holding fast to the old tenet that blood is thicker than water. She knew that from both the ladies who had impressed Martin as motherly old dears she would have received at any time both courtesy and kindness; but they would not have taken especial notice of Martin Collingwood or have troubled themselves to introduce him without some sort of urgent appeal from the Boston family.The thought warmed her sad heart a little, for we are all grateful for good-will, and the world looked a lonely place to Charlotte at that time. She was very thoughtful, however, and she was inclined to regret that old family friends had arrived so inopportunely in Manila. It would make her lot harder, entail humiliating explanations exceedingly difficult to make and—crowning agony—it would mean that the disastrous outcome of her marriage would be immediately known and discussed by thevery persons whose knowledge of her affairs she most desired to restrict.She was sitting on her veranda, the letter upon her lap, her brows frowning, her lips pain-drawn, when Kingsnorth approached from his own cottage. He too had had a letter from Collingwood, and after a bath and a change of garments, had come over to discuss it with Mrs. Collingwood.He advanced with the hesitating and apologetic air which he had worn with her ever since that unfortunate evening on the beach. She roused herself to a cold courtesy, gave him a cup of tea, and then sat listlessly awaiting what she knew he had come to say.“I have a letter from Martin,” Kingsnorth began awkwardly, at length, “which I thought you might want to see. He says in it that he did not mention some of the business details to you and that I am to show it to you.”She took it, glanced through it, flushed slightly, but handed it back without comment. It was a characteristically brief but condensed epistle, dealing wholly with business save in the last paragraph.“Better show this to my wife. I wrote her, but had something more interesting to talk about than these matters. You were quite right. I have been a damn fool, but I am all right now, and she and I are going to be happy ever after.”As Charlotte returned the epistle, Kingsnorth fixed her with a curious eye, half interested, half apologetic. Then, as she said nothing, he stammered.“I hope it will be as Martin says, Mrs. Collingwood, and that no lasting ill will come out of my stupidity and insistence.”A slight flush tinged Mrs. Collingwood’s cheek. “Martin wrote what he meant to be a kindly letter, and I am grateful for it. But it really doesn’t affect the matter in the least. I am going away. You will have to know it sooner or later.”“You can’t forgive him?”“I can’t forgive myself. I have no hard feeling against him. But he showed me myself.” Her face burned.“Dear Mrs. Collingwood, don’t feel that way. Martin did not mean what he said.”She lifted her heavy eyes. “Wasn’t it true?”“No, it wasn’t; or, at least, the coloring he gaveit wasn’t true. It wouldn’t be true unless—” he paused and broke off confused.“Unless what?”“You know.” He looked at her steadily.“I don’t know.”“Unless you leave him. That’s what they do; that’s what I did when I got tired. But if you stay by what you promised, no human being can think of you with less than respect. It isn’t the game, it’s the way you play the game that counts.” His voice trembled with emotion.Charlotte sat very still, her cheeks burning. It seemed incomprehensible that she should be sitting there, listening to John Kingsnorth’s views on ethics. Where had she failed? What gradual disintegration had taken place in her, that she should be willing, nay, eager, to listen to moral advice from a man whose very presence had once seemed polluting?At the same time, she realized that his words had value. Is it, she asked herself, the cut and dried opinion of those who walk safely along a beaten path in company with myriads of their fellow beings, which really counts in this world? or is it the knowledge that comes of bitterness and experience?It is so easy to formulate high-sounding phrases; but what do these phrases amount to when one is confronted with life? In the past three years, what downward steps had she taken upon that pathway—she whose whole ideal had been to keep herself untainted from the common world and to walk serenely and gracefully along those heights where all the training of childhood and the instincts of heredity had made her believe that her path lay? When had she missed it? And then, like a flash, she saw in retrospect her conduct for years past; saw herself stopping here, twisting there, trying, at every instant, to evade the fate and the suffering allotted to her in life. Suddenly she realized how much she and John Kingsnorth had in common, for each was a coward. Neither had strength to take sorrow to his heart, and to bear it uncomplainingly. She was doing what he had done, failing as he had failed.The letter dropped from her shaking fingers, and she raised her eyes to his with a look so hopeless, shamed, and grief-stricken, that he shrank back and winced as if he had seen a gaping wound.“I can’t,” she said. “Something has snapped. I have changed. I can’t be Martin Collingwood’swife again. If the weight of my own self-contempt could crush me, I should be dead. Oh, why did they destroy my faith? There would have been the religious life at least.”“You must not talk that way,” Kingsnorth said. “Your path is as plain as a pikestaff. You married Martin Collingwood,—why, only you and your Maker know,—but you did marry him, and you have got to stay with him. He needs you.”“Oh, you men!” she cried scornfully. “And if he did not need me—if only I needed him—it would be equally my duty to leave him. However you arrange the scale of duties, they are always to suit your own interests.”“I am thinking of this from yours,” Kingsnorth said firmly. “I tell you, and I know, that the one thing the human soul can’t stand is to live on compromising with its own self-contempt. A woman of your brains can’t take the liberties with her conscience that her frivolous sisters do. You can’t stand the self-contempt. You’ll disintegrate under it. Convince yourself that you are a martyr if you can, and hug your martyrdom. They got something out of it when it was boiling oil, and melted lead, and crucifixion, and all the rest ofthose horrors. Be a martyr if you must, but do not try living under the weight of your own self-contempt. Of all failures that is the weakest, saddest, most loathsome. Dear lady, I’ve carried mine with me like an atmosphere. People have felt it; you did. I’ve seen you shrink from me as if I were a leper. And you were right. I am loathsome to myself.”He stopped, wiped his brow, and settled back into his chair with a heavy sigh. Charlotte sat on, her trembling fingers tightly clasped, her eyes fixed on the sea. She turned at last and shook her head.“I can’t. I can’t take up that thread of life. I don’t know how I got myself here—it is all a nightmare—but I must go away and work—by myself again.”Kingsnorth leaned forward, his hands loosely clasped between his knees.“Will you listen to the story of my life, Mrs. Collingwood?” he said with more of sharpness in his tone than was characteristic of him.Charlotte had little curiosity in anyone else’s affairs; but she would have listened to anything at that moment to slip away from the discussion of herown. She nodded listlessly, and Kingsnorth began speaking in a very judicial tone.“I was what is called in England well born, though my people were not rich. My father came of a very old and once distinguished family, but was the owner of an impoverished estate. My mother was equally well born, and possessed a small income of her own. You probably know that, in England, the eldest son is the family; nobody else really counts. In our family there were two girls, then my elder brother, the ‘heir,’ then myself, and another girl. I cannot remember the time when the rest of us were not all being pinched to keep things going for the heir. Tom was, on the whole, a pretty good fellow, but that sort of rearing would spoil the best nature that was ever born. He got into the way of thinking that the rest of us ought to sacrifice everything we had or could hope to have to his position. He was also a devilish good-looking fellow, easy-going and selfish, as was natural.“My two elder sisters were promptly married off, on the whole pretty well. The difficulty came with Tom. He had to marry money, and he had not enough in himself or the place to make money come begging for him.“Tom was in an expensive regiment. My dream of life was also the army, but the paternal pocketbook couldn’t stand it, so I was put in a bank instead. I promptly fell head-over-ears in love with the banker’s daughter.“Her family was what we called ‘new people’; but there was plenty of money, and if Elena wanted me, why she must have me. Therefore no objections were made to the engagement. I was in the seventh heaven of happiness. I do not deny that I was glad she had plenty of money; but I should have married her just the same if she had not had a cent.“Elena paid a visit to my home in the early days of our betrothal, and—well, she threw me over deliberately for my elder brother. Looking back now, I can see some excuse for her. I was unimportant in my family, of course, and Tom was its centre. He looked handsome in his uniform, and he was the heir. The place had age and dignity, and she knew its value.“I give Tom the credit of being ashamed and of feeling some remorse; but my father and mother planned—actually aided and abetted my betrayal. They wanted the money for the heir.“I made a row, naturally, but it was fruitless.Elena wept and declared that she would have her own way. Tom looked ashamed, but his bringing up had made him constitutionally selfish; and the parents on both sides joined to suppress me.“The end was that I cleared out, blind with rage and pain, cursing Elena and my kin; and in the next three years in London I went to what is commonly known as the dogs.“My self-pity is justifiable in my eyes to-day; but I made a fatal mistake. If I had had the right stuff in me, Elena couldn’t have driven me to the dogs. I might have hugged my griefs and have grown embittered; but my worst mistake was the desire to ‘drown sorrow’ with drink, with cards, with all the undesirable vices of men. If I had hugged sorrow and warmed it to my heart, I might have suffered more, but I should not have crumbled up morally like a gold ring in quicksilver.“England has always a frontier war or two on her hands, and I got into one. A private, a ‘gentleman ranker’ has a magnificent opportunity to sink in the English army. Afterwards I drifted over here, and got into pearl-fishing. I liked the life and its adventures (we had to fight a bit in the early days), and then when the Americans came,I fell in with Collingwood. We fancied each other on sight. Then we picked up Mac, and I lighted accidentally on this oyster bed, and we settled here.“Throughout all these years I have kept up a desultory correspondence with my married sisters; but I have drifted out of their lives, and I realize that I represent to them only a possible legacy. It is my business to make some money, and one day to die and leave it to them; and meanwhile a few gifts from the Orient are not unacceptable.“Well, to shorten this tale, I settled here and married my wife. You need not look so startled. She was my wife legally; bell, book, and candle were all there. I lived openly with her in my house till the morning when you landed on Maylubi. Then, after I had seen and talked with you, I went home and ordered her out. She loved me, and she obeyed me. Five months later she died.” He stopped and wiped a cold perspiration from his brow.“But how could you have kept it from me?” cried Charlotte. “Why did not Martin or Mrs. Maclaughlin tell me?”“Mrs. Mac had her orders from Mac. She never disobeys him. Martin was simply a good friend.”“But he brought me here.” She stopped, crimsoning with indignation.“Precisely. He brought you here to associate with me, a respectable married man, as he considered me. He has never understood my conduct. He doesn’t understand why I preferred you to believe me a profligate instead of a decent married man. He has never understood why I should be willing to have my child pass for illegitimate. But you understand, Mrs. Collingwood.”“Yes, I understand.” Then with sudden passion she cried, “But it was not my fault. I was trained to it.”“As I was. But, if I had had one spark of manhood in me, I should have stood by the woman I had married, and should have taken my child to my heart in the face of the world. But I did not have the courage. I writhed and twisted to get out of facing the consequences of my own actions; and since then the weight of my own self-contempt has grown steadily heavier. Don’t talk to me of reform,” he added savagely as she started to speak. “There isn’t any reform for such as I. I tell you the consciousness of my own moral cowardice is with me day and night. It never leaves me. Andit’s the ungodly unfairness of it all that kills me by inches. I see other men about me, living lives not so very different from mine: Collingwood himself has been no saint. But because I’ve wanted better things, because I drank my cup, knowing that it was poor drink, it has not slaked my thirst, and it has parched the last drop of sweetness out of my life.“Don’t you go another foot along this trail; you began it when you married Collingwood. If you double and twist on your tracks again, you are lost. Hug pain, hug misery, martyr yourself, if you will, but don’t try to indulge your own selfish will, and to square things by saying that you despise yourself. God in Heaven! Do you know what it is to despise yourself? You don’t now; but you will some day.” He wiped the perspiration that stood in great drops on his brow.Charlotte, who had turned very white, sat nerveless and trembling like a leaf. All her pride was in arms that John Kingsnorth, degraded scion of a decent family, should be giving advice to her; and then she saw, with sudden horror, what a tremendous distance she had drifted with the current before John Kingsnorth’s words could be true.For they were true! She had married Martin Collingwood, blaming herself for the weakness that made human affection and the freedom from the responsibility of self-support loom larger than all the traditions of birth and breeding. She had wanted her romance as every other woman in the world does; and romance, as it comes to most women, had been denied her. She might have gone out and found one, as many a woman does, and might, in time, have taken her flirtations lightly. But she had been too timid and too proud to flirt. The doubt came to her that it would have been better to play lightly at romance than to purchase it at the sacrifice of the second essential factor that makes a true marriage. Then came another throb of terror. She saw herself bent wilfully again on her own way, doubling, twisting, as Kingsnorth phrased it, trying to escape her conscience by saying that she despised herself: but the fact stared her in the face that she was turning on all the principles that had justified romance. She had married Collingwood against her reason, justifying herself for being swayed by human feeling by reiterating the finality of the action. For better, for worse, she had said—but now that it was for worse, itsfinality had somehow disappeared. Where was her mind—her will—her conscience?She sat for a long time in bitter silence, but roused herself as Kingsnorth, who had been furtively watching her, drew out his tobacco pouch and extracted from its depths a little ball of tissue paper. He unfolded it, and there appeared to her startled eyes a single pearl of unusual size and luster.“What a beauty!” she cried, bending forward to look at it.“Yes, it’s beautiful enough,” said Kingsnorth. “I’ve carried it about with me for three years. Even Collingwood has never seen it.”“I wish you had not—” she stopped, flushing.“I didn’t show it to you to tempt you. It’s my moral slough. There are times when I’ve felt that its hell luster was my soul, and that I had nothing but the blackened shell in my body. It stood for the dearest emotions a man can have—for love and vengeance.”“You are horrible,” she cried, shrinking from him.“I am better than I used to be,” replied Kingsnorth. “I found this bauble three years ago, beforeMartin and I went into business. I never intended to sell it. Do you know what I wanted it for? To buy her back, and to blacken the face of the man who stole her from me. Yes, shrink! God help me, I love that woman still with a love gone awry. Other women, yes, and better women, though they had not her grace and training, have loved me; but, in my heart of hearts, I have held them all cheap. It was she, the woman who jilted me before all the world, that I wanted. It was he, whose heart I wanted to wring. Poor cheap human nature! Twelve years I’ve roughed it in shacks and junks, a flannel shirt to my back, and pork and beans or rice and fish in my stomach; while he has sat beneath the oaks we played under in our childhood, and has slept in the panelled rooms of our home, and has held the woman he stole from me in his arms! Talk of family affection! There isn’t such a thing. What am I to the mother who bore me? A derelict son, adrift in the South Seas, who is not to come home without some money. What am I to the sisters who played with me and fought with me over our nursery tea? A scape-grace brother, who, it is hoped, will keep out of the way, but who ought to make some money and leaveit to their children. Money! I’ve toiled like a negro slave for money, but not for them—not for them! It was for her. I wanted to go back rich. She sold herself once; why not again? The pearl was not enough in itself to tempt. It was the bauble, the outward sign.”“You hoped—that?” She could not help glancing at his seamed, degenerate countenance.“Never after you came. The look in your eyes told me what I had become. Since then I have lived—with myself.” He smiled a wretched, drawn smile.She pointed gingerly to the bauble. “Why don’t you get rid of it? sell it?”“Sell my soul? Did I not tell you my soul is steeped in it? No, bury it with me. Somehow I know I’ll not last long. Take this word from me. If you know anything of me when death comes, see that this does not go to the women who betrayed me and pitied me not. Women are selfish creatures. They sun themselves on their own cat premises. They have no pity for the poor devils on the outside.”“Is it women alone? or isn’t it men as well, who are pitiless? Or isn’t it just life? Yet it isn’tpitiless to all. There are those who dance through it on rose-strewn paths.” She stopped, the sense of the great differences in individual lives overwhelming her.Kingsnorth rose. “Well, that hasn’t been my life or yours. I have seen that you suffer. But suffer! Don’t change that look on your face. Better poignant suffering than moral decay. I tell you, you are facing it.” He rose abruptly and walked away, leaving her like a figure carved in ivory, looking out on the waste of waters, that seemed the emblem of waste in her own life.
Chapter XV
It was at the end of a month, when Charlotte looked forward with increasing dread to her husband’s return and to her own departure, that the lorchaDos Hermanos, their tried friend, left cargo and letters at the island. Collingwood wrote that he should delay his return another month. He sent down their commissaries, and Maclaughlin was to come up to Romblon harbor to meet the first June run of thePuerta Princesasteamer. Most of these details were contained in a letter to Maclaughlin. His letter to his wife, a very bulky epistle, dwelt upon their own difficulties. It was the first letter he had written to her, and Charlotte’s face, as she read it, was a study.”My dearest Girl:“You are that, after all. I’ve been thinking over our affairs, and I am willing to admit that I was hasty. But I don’t think that you treated me altogether fair. What I do see is that we haven’t got any time to jaw over what is done and gone. You have been talking about leavingme and all that, but that is just talk. I don’t suppose you ever really meant it, and I never took it seriously. We’ll kiss and be friends when I get back, and you’ll see that everything will come out all right.“I’ve been having a pretty fine time up here. About the first person I met was Barton. I had intended to kick him on sight, but I was still feeling pretty sore toward you, so I didn’t. He took me up to his clubs and entered my name, and the next night took me to call on that Mrs. Badgerly. Lord! Lord! that woman is inquisitive! She dug at me like a lawyer at a witness. I never gave anything away: swore you wouldn’t come along because you hated the sea trip so, and vowed I had come up on a sugar lorcha. Then this Mrs. Badgerly (she’s a corker; I like her style), told me she wanted to take me to see old General ——’s wife, because the old lady knew you at home. She was a mighty nice old lady—real motherly,—and she told me a lot of things that you never told me, and made a good many things clear that I’ve never understood. Then I was invited out to the General’s to a big dinner, where there were two or three other people who used to know you; and if I hadn’t been so fond of you, it would have made me all-fired mad the way they rammed it into me that I had married into a fine family, and a fine woman, and all that sort of thing. I didn’t need their verdict on you.“There was another old lady there who used to know you [here Martin named the mother of a very important civil officer], and both the old ladies took me to their hearts and purred over me. I bluffed the thing right through, invitedeverybody to Maylubi, and promised to bring you up some time this year. Barton was at the dinner too, and he piled it on thick about our island, made it quite romantic.“Well, the long and the short of the matter is that you call me. I’ll admit that the crowd here is a little swifter than any I have ever known, and maybe you have some right to your private opinions that I didn’t see before. And, as you said, you keep them to yourself, so I don’t see why I should let them bother me. I’ll stay another month or so, and by that time we will both have a chance to get over our grudges. You needn’t think I’ll let you go back to nursing; and as for me, I am willing to live with you on the old terms, and mighty anxious to get back to them.“I have put six dots here to represent six kisses (......). I’ll give you sixty when I get home.“Your affectionate husband,”Martin Collingwood.”“P. S. I am going to take both old ladies for a drive to-night. How am I getting on for a beau?”When she had twice read this epistle, Mrs. Martin Collingwood was startled by the realization of a great mental change in herself. For six weeks she had schooled herself to feel that she must leave her husband purely out of decent pride and self-respect. She had believed that she was actuated by the desire to remove an obnoxious presence from one who had ceased to take pleasure in it; and she had said to herself a hundred times that her affectionfor her husband had never wavered, but that to thrust it upon him was indecent.But as she laid down the letter after a second perusal, she was aghast to realize that she did not want to live again with Martin Collingwood: that she recoiled passionately from his easy sense of possession; that his taking her so completely for granted was an affront that she could not pardon. She became conscious of a slow process that had been going on in her mind during the dreary weeks, the death of the feeling that had cast a glamour over Martin Collingwood and his inability to understand her standards and traditions. He had lived with her for a year, and had been unable to comprehend that she was of different substance from Mrs. Maclaughlin or Mrs. Badgerly. He had been grossly offensive at the bare suggestion that she might be superior to one of them, but when she was ticketed with the other’s approval,—she drew an indignant breath,—he stood ready to exhibit her to the world, and to call its attention to the superfine partner whom he had drawn in the matrimonial lottery.Well, he would be disappointed. He had yet to learn that she was no readier to accept his termsthan he had been to accept hers. She had had her romance, and she would pay the price!Her social knowledge told her, also, that the Spencer family had taken steps to make its power felt across the Pacific, and that in spite of her marriage and her bitter letter, they were behind her, holding fast to the old tenet that blood is thicker than water. She knew that from both the ladies who had impressed Martin as motherly old dears she would have received at any time both courtesy and kindness; but they would not have taken especial notice of Martin Collingwood or have troubled themselves to introduce him without some sort of urgent appeal from the Boston family.The thought warmed her sad heart a little, for we are all grateful for good-will, and the world looked a lonely place to Charlotte at that time. She was very thoughtful, however, and she was inclined to regret that old family friends had arrived so inopportunely in Manila. It would make her lot harder, entail humiliating explanations exceedingly difficult to make and—crowning agony—it would mean that the disastrous outcome of her marriage would be immediately known and discussed by thevery persons whose knowledge of her affairs she most desired to restrict.She was sitting on her veranda, the letter upon her lap, her brows frowning, her lips pain-drawn, when Kingsnorth approached from his own cottage. He too had had a letter from Collingwood, and after a bath and a change of garments, had come over to discuss it with Mrs. Collingwood.He advanced with the hesitating and apologetic air which he had worn with her ever since that unfortunate evening on the beach. She roused herself to a cold courtesy, gave him a cup of tea, and then sat listlessly awaiting what she knew he had come to say.“I have a letter from Martin,” Kingsnorth began awkwardly, at length, “which I thought you might want to see. He says in it that he did not mention some of the business details to you and that I am to show it to you.”She took it, glanced through it, flushed slightly, but handed it back without comment. It was a characteristically brief but condensed epistle, dealing wholly with business save in the last paragraph.“Better show this to my wife. I wrote her, but had something more interesting to talk about than these matters. You were quite right. I have been a damn fool, but I am all right now, and she and I are going to be happy ever after.”As Charlotte returned the epistle, Kingsnorth fixed her with a curious eye, half interested, half apologetic. Then, as she said nothing, he stammered.“I hope it will be as Martin says, Mrs. Collingwood, and that no lasting ill will come out of my stupidity and insistence.”A slight flush tinged Mrs. Collingwood’s cheek. “Martin wrote what he meant to be a kindly letter, and I am grateful for it. But it really doesn’t affect the matter in the least. I am going away. You will have to know it sooner or later.”“You can’t forgive him?”“I can’t forgive myself. I have no hard feeling against him. But he showed me myself.” Her face burned.“Dear Mrs. Collingwood, don’t feel that way. Martin did not mean what he said.”She lifted her heavy eyes. “Wasn’t it true?”“No, it wasn’t; or, at least, the coloring he gaveit wasn’t true. It wouldn’t be true unless—” he paused and broke off confused.“Unless what?”“You know.” He looked at her steadily.“I don’t know.”“Unless you leave him. That’s what they do; that’s what I did when I got tired. But if you stay by what you promised, no human being can think of you with less than respect. It isn’t the game, it’s the way you play the game that counts.” His voice trembled with emotion.Charlotte sat very still, her cheeks burning. It seemed incomprehensible that she should be sitting there, listening to John Kingsnorth’s views on ethics. Where had she failed? What gradual disintegration had taken place in her, that she should be willing, nay, eager, to listen to moral advice from a man whose very presence had once seemed polluting?At the same time, she realized that his words had value. Is it, she asked herself, the cut and dried opinion of those who walk safely along a beaten path in company with myriads of their fellow beings, which really counts in this world? or is it the knowledge that comes of bitterness and experience?It is so easy to formulate high-sounding phrases; but what do these phrases amount to when one is confronted with life? In the past three years, what downward steps had she taken upon that pathway—she whose whole ideal had been to keep herself untainted from the common world and to walk serenely and gracefully along those heights where all the training of childhood and the instincts of heredity had made her believe that her path lay? When had she missed it? And then, like a flash, she saw in retrospect her conduct for years past; saw herself stopping here, twisting there, trying, at every instant, to evade the fate and the suffering allotted to her in life. Suddenly she realized how much she and John Kingsnorth had in common, for each was a coward. Neither had strength to take sorrow to his heart, and to bear it uncomplainingly. She was doing what he had done, failing as he had failed.The letter dropped from her shaking fingers, and she raised her eyes to his with a look so hopeless, shamed, and grief-stricken, that he shrank back and winced as if he had seen a gaping wound.“I can’t,” she said. “Something has snapped. I have changed. I can’t be Martin Collingwood’swife again. If the weight of my own self-contempt could crush me, I should be dead. Oh, why did they destroy my faith? There would have been the religious life at least.”“You must not talk that way,” Kingsnorth said. “Your path is as plain as a pikestaff. You married Martin Collingwood,—why, only you and your Maker know,—but you did marry him, and you have got to stay with him. He needs you.”“Oh, you men!” she cried scornfully. “And if he did not need me—if only I needed him—it would be equally my duty to leave him. However you arrange the scale of duties, they are always to suit your own interests.”“I am thinking of this from yours,” Kingsnorth said firmly. “I tell you, and I know, that the one thing the human soul can’t stand is to live on compromising with its own self-contempt. A woman of your brains can’t take the liberties with her conscience that her frivolous sisters do. You can’t stand the self-contempt. You’ll disintegrate under it. Convince yourself that you are a martyr if you can, and hug your martyrdom. They got something out of it when it was boiling oil, and melted lead, and crucifixion, and all the rest ofthose horrors. Be a martyr if you must, but do not try living under the weight of your own self-contempt. Of all failures that is the weakest, saddest, most loathsome. Dear lady, I’ve carried mine with me like an atmosphere. People have felt it; you did. I’ve seen you shrink from me as if I were a leper. And you were right. I am loathsome to myself.”He stopped, wiped his brow, and settled back into his chair with a heavy sigh. Charlotte sat on, her trembling fingers tightly clasped, her eyes fixed on the sea. She turned at last and shook her head.“I can’t. I can’t take up that thread of life. I don’t know how I got myself here—it is all a nightmare—but I must go away and work—by myself again.”Kingsnorth leaned forward, his hands loosely clasped between his knees.“Will you listen to the story of my life, Mrs. Collingwood?” he said with more of sharpness in his tone than was characteristic of him.Charlotte had little curiosity in anyone else’s affairs; but she would have listened to anything at that moment to slip away from the discussion of herown. She nodded listlessly, and Kingsnorth began speaking in a very judicial tone.“I was what is called in England well born, though my people were not rich. My father came of a very old and once distinguished family, but was the owner of an impoverished estate. My mother was equally well born, and possessed a small income of her own. You probably know that, in England, the eldest son is the family; nobody else really counts. In our family there were two girls, then my elder brother, the ‘heir,’ then myself, and another girl. I cannot remember the time when the rest of us were not all being pinched to keep things going for the heir. Tom was, on the whole, a pretty good fellow, but that sort of rearing would spoil the best nature that was ever born. He got into the way of thinking that the rest of us ought to sacrifice everything we had or could hope to have to his position. He was also a devilish good-looking fellow, easy-going and selfish, as was natural.“My two elder sisters were promptly married off, on the whole pretty well. The difficulty came with Tom. He had to marry money, and he had not enough in himself or the place to make money come begging for him.“Tom was in an expensive regiment. My dream of life was also the army, but the paternal pocketbook couldn’t stand it, so I was put in a bank instead. I promptly fell head-over-ears in love with the banker’s daughter.“Her family was what we called ‘new people’; but there was plenty of money, and if Elena wanted me, why she must have me. Therefore no objections were made to the engagement. I was in the seventh heaven of happiness. I do not deny that I was glad she had plenty of money; but I should have married her just the same if she had not had a cent.“Elena paid a visit to my home in the early days of our betrothal, and—well, she threw me over deliberately for my elder brother. Looking back now, I can see some excuse for her. I was unimportant in my family, of course, and Tom was its centre. He looked handsome in his uniform, and he was the heir. The place had age and dignity, and she knew its value.“I give Tom the credit of being ashamed and of feeling some remorse; but my father and mother planned—actually aided and abetted my betrayal. They wanted the money for the heir.“I made a row, naturally, but it was fruitless.Elena wept and declared that she would have her own way. Tom looked ashamed, but his bringing up had made him constitutionally selfish; and the parents on both sides joined to suppress me.“The end was that I cleared out, blind with rage and pain, cursing Elena and my kin; and in the next three years in London I went to what is commonly known as the dogs.“My self-pity is justifiable in my eyes to-day; but I made a fatal mistake. If I had had the right stuff in me, Elena couldn’t have driven me to the dogs. I might have hugged my griefs and have grown embittered; but my worst mistake was the desire to ‘drown sorrow’ with drink, with cards, with all the undesirable vices of men. If I had hugged sorrow and warmed it to my heart, I might have suffered more, but I should not have crumbled up morally like a gold ring in quicksilver.“England has always a frontier war or two on her hands, and I got into one. A private, a ‘gentleman ranker’ has a magnificent opportunity to sink in the English army. Afterwards I drifted over here, and got into pearl-fishing. I liked the life and its adventures (we had to fight a bit in the early days), and then when the Americans came,I fell in with Collingwood. We fancied each other on sight. Then we picked up Mac, and I lighted accidentally on this oyster bed, and we settled here.“Throughout all these years I have kept up a desultory correspondence with my married sisters; but I have drifted out of their lives, and I realize that I represent to them only a possible legacy. It is my business to make some money, and one day to die and leave it to them; and meanwhile a few gifts from the Orient are not unacceptable.“Well, to shorten this tale, I settled here and married my wife. You need not look so startled. She was my wife legally; bell, book, and candle were all there. I lived openly with her in my house till the morning when you landed on Maylubi. Then, after I had seen and talked with you, I went home and ordered her out. She loved me, and she obeyed me. Five months later she died.” He stopped and wiped a cold perspiration from his brow.“But how could you have kept it from me?” cried Charlotte. “Why did not Martin or Mrs. Maclaughlin tell me?”“Mrs. Mac had her orders from Mac. She never disobeys him. Martin was simply a good friend.”“But he brought me here.” She stopped, crimsoning with indignation.“Precisely. He brought you here to associate with me, a respectable married man, as he considered me. He has never understood my conduct. He doesn’t understand why I preferred you to believe me a profligate instead of a decent married man. He has never understood why I should be willing to have my child pass for illegitimate. But you understand, Mrs. Collingwood.”“Yes, I understand.” Then with sudden passion she cried, “But it was not my fault. I was trained to it.”“As I was. But, if I had had one spark of manhood in me, I should have stood by the woman I had married, and should have taken my child to my heart in the face of the world. But I did not have the courage. I writhed and twisted to get out of facing the consequences of my own actions; and since then the weight of my own self-contempt has grown steadily heavier. Don’t talk to me of reform,” he added savagely as she started to speak. “There isn’t any reform for such as I. I tell you the consciousness of my own moral cowardice is with me day and night. It never leaves me. Andit’s the ungodly unfairness of it all that kills me by inches. I see other men about me, living lives not so very different from mine: Collingwood himself has been no saint. But because I’ve wanted better things, because I drank my cup, knowing that it was poor drink, it has not slaked my thirst, and it has parched the last drop of sweetness out of my life.“Don’t you go another foot along this trail; you began it when you married Collingwood. If you double and twist on your tracks again, you are lost. Hug pain, hug misery, martyr yourself, if you will, but don’t try to indulge your own selfish will, and to square things by saying that you despise yourself. God in Heaven! Do you know what it is to despise yourself? You don’t now; but you will some day.” He wiped the perspiration that stood in great drops on his brow.Charlotte, who had turned very white, sat nerveless and trembling like a leaf. All her pride was in arms that John Kingsnorth, degraded scion of a decent family, should be giving advice to her; and then she saw, with sudden horror, what a tremendous distance she had drifted with the current before John Kingsnorth’s words could be true.For they were true! She had married Martin Collingwood, blaming herself for the weakness that made human affection and the freedom from the responsibility of self-support loom larger than all the traditions of birth and breeding. She had wanted her romance as every other woman in the world does; and romance, as it comes to most women, had been denied her. She might have gone out and found one, as many a woman does, and might, in time, have taken her flirtations lightly. But she had been too timid and too proud to flirt. The doubt came to her that it would have been better to play lightly at romance than to purchase it at the sacrifice of the second essential factor that makes a true marriage. Then came another throb of terror. She saw herself bent wilfully again on her own way, doubling, twisting, as Kingsnorth phrased it, trying to escape her conscience by saying that she despised herself: but the fact stared her in the face that she was turning on all the principles that had justified romance. She had married Collingwood against her reason, justifying herself for being swayed by human feeling by reiterating the finality of the action. For better, for worse, she had said—but now that it was for worse, itsfinality had somehow disappeared. Where was her mind—her will—her conscience?She sat for a long time in bitter silence, but roused herself as Kingsnorth, who had been furtively watching her, drew out his tobacco pouch and extracted from its depths a little ball of tissue paper. He unfolded it, and there appeared to her startled eyes a single pearl of unusual size and luster.“What a beauty!” she cried, bending forward to look at it.“Yes, it’s beautiful enough,” said Kingsnorth. “I’ve carried it about with me for three years. Even Collingwood has never seen it.”“I wish you had not—” she stopped, flushing.“I didn’t show it to you to tempt you. It’s my moral slough. There are times when I’ve felt that its hell luster was my soul, and that I had nothing but the blackened shell in my body. It stood for the dearest emotions a man can have—for love and vengeance.”“You are horrible,” she cried, shrinking from him.“I am better than I used to be,” replied Kingsnorth. “I found this bauble three years ago, beforeMartin and I went into business. I never intended to sell it. Do you know what I wanted it for? To buy her back, and to blacken the face of the man who stole her from me. Yes, shrink! God help me, I love that woman still with a love gone awry. Other women, yes, and better women, though they had not her grace and training, have loved me; but, in my heart of hearts, I have held them all cheap. It was she, the woman who jilted me before all the world, that I wanted. It was he, whose heart I wanted to wring. Poor cheap human nature! Twelve years I’ve roughed it in shacks and junks, a flannel shirt to my back, and pork and beans or rice and fish in my stomach; while he has sat beneath the oaks we played under in our childhood, and has slept in the panelled rooms of our home, and has held the woman he stole from me in his arms! Talk of family affection! There isn’t such a thing. What am I to the mother who bore me? A derelict son, adrift in the South Seas, who is not to come home without some money. What am I to the sisters who played with me and fought with me over our nursery tea? A scape-grace brother, who, it is hoped, will keep out of the way, but who ought to make some money and leaveit to their children. Money! I’ve toiled like a negro slave for money, but not for them—not for them! It was for her. I wanted to go back rich. She sold herself once; why not again? The pearl was not enough in itself to tempt. It was the bauble, the outward sign.”“You hoped—that?” She could not help glancing at his seamed, degenerate countenance.“Never after you came. The look in your eyes told me what I had become. Since then I have lived—with myself.” He smiled a wretched, drawn smile.She pointed gingerly to the bauble. “Why don’t you get rid of it? sell it?”“Sell my soul? Did I not tell you my soul is steeped in it? No, bury it with me. Somehow I know I’ll not last long. Take this word from me. If you know anything of me when death comes, see that this does not go to the women who betrayed me and pitied me not. Women are selfish creatures. They sun themselves on their own cat premises. They have no pity for the poor devils on the outside.”“Is it women alone? or isn’t it men as well, who are pitiless? Or isn’t it just life? Yet it isn’tpitiless to all. There are those who dance through it on rose-strewn paths.” She stopped, the sense of the great differences in individual lives overwhelming her.Kingsnorth rose. “Well, that hasn’t been my life or yours. I have seen that you suffer. But suffer! Don’t change that look on your face. Better poignant suffering than moral decay. I tell you, you are facing it.” He rose abruptly and walked away, leaving her like a figure carved in ivory, looking out on the waste of waters, that seemed the emblem of waste in her own life.
It was at the end of a month, when Charlotte looked forward with increasing dread to her husband’s return and to her own departure, that the lorchaDos Hermanos, their tried friend, left cargo and letters at the island. Collingwood wrote that he should delay his return another month. He sent down their commissaries, and Maclaughlin was to come up to Romblon harbor to meet the first June run of thePuerta Princesasteamer. Most of these details were contained in a letter to Maclaughlin. His letter to his wife, a very bulky epistle, dwelt upon their own difficulties. It was the first letter he had written to her, and Charlotte’s face, as she read it, was a study.
”My dearest Girl:“You are that, after all. I’ve been thinking over our affairs, and I am willing to admit that I was hasty. But I don’t think that you treated me altogether fair. What I do see is that we haven’t got any time to jaw over what is done and gone. You have been talking about leavingme and all that, but that is just talk. I don’t suppose you ever really meant it, and I never took it seriously. We’ll kiss and be friends when I get back, and you’ll see that everything will come out all right.“I’ve been having a pretty fine time up here. About the first person I met was Barton. I had intended to kick him on sight, but I was still feeling pretty sore toward you, so I didn’t. He took me up to his clubs and entered my name, and the next night took me to call on that Mrs. Badgerly. Lord! Lord! that woman is inquisitive! She dug at me like a lawyer at a witness. I never gave anything away: swore you wouldn’t come along because you hated the sea trip so, and vowed I had come up on a sugar lorcha. Then this Mrs. Badgerly (she’s a corker; I like her style), told me she wanted to take me to see old General ——’s wife, because the old lady knew you at home. She was a mighty nice old lady—real motherly,—and she told me a lot of things that you never told me, and made a good many things clear that I’ve never understood. Then I was invited out to the General’s to a big dinner, where there were two or three other people who used to know you; and if I hadn’t been so fond of you, it would have made me all-fired mad the way they rammed it into me that I had married into a fine family, and a fine woman, and all that sort of thing. I didn’t need their verdict on you.“There was another old lady there who used to know you [here Martin named the mother of a very important civil officer], and both the old ladies took me to their hearts and purred over me. I bluffed the thing right through, invitedeverybody to Maylubi, and promised to bring you up some time this year. Barton was at the dinner too, and he piled it on thick about our island, made it quite romantic.“Well, the long and the short of the matter is that you call me. I’ll admit that the crowd here is a little swifter than any I have ever known, and maybe you have some right to your private opinions that I didn’t see before. And, as you said, you keep them to yourself, so I don’t see why I should let them bother me. I’ll stay another month or so, and by that time we will both have a chance to get over our grudges. You needn’t think I’ll let you go back to nursing; and as for me, I am willing to live with you on the old terms, and mighty anxious to get back to them.“I have put six dots here to represent six kisses (......). I’ll give you sixty when I get home.“Your affectionate husband,”Martin Collingwood.”“P. S. I am going to take both old ladies for a drive to-night. How am I getting on for a beau?”
”My dearest Girl:
“You are that, after all. I’ve been thinking over our affairs, and I am willing to admit that I was hasty. But I don’t think that you treated me altogether fair. What I do see is that we haven’t got any time to jaw over what is done and gone. You have been talking about leavingme and all that, but that is just talk. I don’t suppose you ever really meant it, and I never took it seriously. We’ll kiss and be friends when I get back, and you’ll see that everything will come out all right.
“I’ve been having a pretty fine time up here. About the first person I met was Barton. I had intended to kick him on sight, but I was still feeling pretty sore toward you, so I didn’t. He took me up to his clubs and entered my name, and the next night took me to call on that Mrs. Badgerly. Lord! Lord! that woman is inquisitive! She dug at me like a lawyer at a witness. I never gave anything away: swore you wouldn’t come along because you hated the sea trip so, and vowed I had come up on a sugar lorcha. Then this Mrs. Badgerly (she’s a corker; I like her style), told me she wanted to take me to see old General ——’s wife, because the old lady knew you at home. She was a mighty nice old lady—real motherly,—and she told me a lot of things that you never told me, and made a good many things clear that I’ve never understood. Then I was invited out to the General’s to a big dinner, where there were two or three other people who used to know you; and if I hadn’t been so fond of you, it would have made me all-fired mad the way they rammed it into me that I had married into a fine family, and a fine woman, and all that sort of thing. I didn’t need their verdict on you.
“There was another old lady there who used to know you [here Martin named the mother of a very important civil officer], and both the old ladies took me to their hearts and purred over me. I bluffed the thing right through, invitedeverybody to Maylubi, and promised to bring you up some time this year. Barton was at the dinner too, and he piled it on thick about our island, made it quite romantic.
“Well, the long and the short of the matter is that you call me. I’ll admit that the crowd here is a little swifter than any I have ever known, and maybe you have some right to your private opinions that I didn’t see before. And, as you said, you keep them to yourself, so I don’t see why I should let them bother me. I’ll stay another month or so, and by that time we will both have a chance to get over our grudges. You needn’t think I’ll let you go back to nursing; and as for me, I am willing to live with you on the old terms, and mighty anxious to get back to them.
“I have put six dots here to represent six kisses (......). I’ll give you sixty when I get home.
“Your affectionate husband,
”Martin Collingwood.”
“P. S. I am going to take both old ladies for a drive to-night. How am I getting on for a beau?”
When she had twice read this epistle, Mrs. Martin Collingwood was startled by the realization of a great mental change in herself. For six weeks she had schooled herself to feel that she must leave her husband purely out of decent pride and self-respect. She had believed that she was actuated by the desire to remove an obnoxious presence from one who had ceased to take pleasure in it; and she had said to herself a hundred times that her affectionfor her husband had never wavered, but that to thrust it upon him was indecent.
But as she laid down the letter after a second perusal, she was aghast to realize that she did not want to live again with Martin Collingwood: that she recoiled passionately from his easy sense of possession; that his taking her so completely for granted was an affront that she could not pardon. She became conscious of a slow process that had been going on in her mind during the dreary weeks, the death of the feeling that had cast a glamour over Martin Collingwood and his inability to understand her standards and traditions. He had lived with her for a year, and had been unable to comprehend that she was of different substance from Mrs. Maclaughlin or Mrs. Badgerly. He had been grossly offensive at the bare suggestion that she might be superior to one of them, but when she was ticketed with the other’s approval,—she drew an indignant breath,—he stood ready to exhibit her to the world, and to call its attention to the superfine partner whom he had drawn in the matrimonial lottery.
Well, he would be disappointed. He had yet to learn that she was no readier to accept his termsthan he had been to accept hers. She had had her romance, and she would pay the price!
Her social knowledge told her, also, that the Spencer family had taken steps to make its power felt across the Pacific, and that in spite of her marriage and her bitter letter, they were behind her, holding fast to the old tenet that blood is thicker than water. She knew that from both the ladies who had impressed Martin as motherly old dears she would have received at any time both courtesy and kindness; but they would not have taken especial notice of Martin Collingwood or have troubled themselves to introduce him without some sort of urgent appeal from the Boston family.
The thought warmed her sad heart a little, for we are all grateful for good-will, and the world looked a lonely place to Charlotte at that time. She was very thoughtful, however, and she was inclined to regret that old family friends had arrived so inopportunely in Manila. It would make her lot harder, entail humiliating explanations exceedingly difficult to make and—crowning agony—it would mean that the disastrous outcome of her marriage would be immediately known and discussed by thevery persons whose knowledge of her affairs she most desired to restrict.
She was sitting on her veranda, the letter upon her lap, her brows frowning, her lips pain-drawn, when Kingsnorth approached from his own cottage. He too had had a letter from Collingwood, and after a bath and a change of garments, had come over to discuss it with Mrs. Collingwood.
He advanced with the hesitating and apologetic air which he had worn with her ever since that unfortunate evening on the beach. She roused herself to a cold courtesy, gave him a cup of tea, and then sat listlessly awaiting what she knew he had come to say.
“I have a letter from Martin,” Kingsnorth began awkwardly, at length, “which I thought you might want to see. He says in it that he did not mention some of the business details to you and that I am to show it to you.”
She took it, glanced through it, flushed slightly, but handed it back without comment. It was a characteristically brief but condensed epistle, dealing wholly with business save in the last paragraph.
“Better show this to my wife. I wrote her, but had something more interesting to talk about than these matters. You were quite right. I have been a damn fool, but I am all right now, and she and I are going to be happy ever after.”
“Better show this to my wife. I wrote her, but had something more interesting to talk about than these matters. You were quite right. I have been a damn fool, but I am all right now, and she and I are going to be happy ever after.”
As Charlotte returned the epistle, Kingsnorth fixed her with a curious eye, half interested, half apologetic. Then, as she said nothing, he stammered.
“I hope it will be as Martin says, Mrs. Collingwood, and that no lasting ill will come out of my stupidity and insistence.”
A slight flush tinged Mrs. Collingwood’s cheek. “Martin wrote what he meant to be a kindly letter, and I am grateful for it. But it really doesn’t affect the matter in the least. I am going away. You will have to know it sooner or later.”
“You can’t forgive him?”
“I can’t forgive myself. I have no hard feeling against him. But he showed me myself.” Her face burned.
“Dear Mrs. Collingwood, don’t feel that way. Martin did not mean what he said.”
She lifted her heavy eyes. “Wasn’t it true?”
“No, it wasn’t; or, at least, the coloring he gaveit wasn’t true. It wouldn’t be true unless—” he paused and broke off confused.
“Unless what?”
“You know.” He looked at her steadily.
“I don’t know.”
“Unless you leave him. That’s what they do; that’s what I did when I got tired. But if you stay by what you promised, no human being can think of you with less than respect. It isn’t the game, it’s the way you play the game that counts.” His voice trembled with emotion.
Charlotte sat very still, her cheeks burning. It seemed incomprehensible that she should be sitting there, listening to John Kingsnorth’s views on ethics. Where had she failed? What gradual disintegration had taken place in her, that she should be willing, nay, eager, to listen to moral advice from a man whose very presence had once seemed polluting?
At the same time, she realized that his words had value. Is it, she asked herself, the cut and dried opinion of those who walk safely along a beaten path in company with myriads of their fellow beings, which really counts in this world? or is it the knowledge that comes of bitterness and experience?It is so easy to formulate high-sounding phrases; but what do these phrases amount to when one is confronted with life? In the past three years, what downward steps had she taken upon that pathway—she whose whole ideal had been to keep herself untainted from the common world and to walk serenely and gracefully along those heights where all the training of childhood and the instincts of heredity had made her believe that her path lay? When had she missed it? And then, like a flash, she saw in retrospect her conduct for years past; saw herself stopping here, twisting there, trying, at every instant, to evade the fate and the suffering allotted to her in life. Suddenly she realized how much she and John Kingsnorth had in common, for each was a coward. Neither had strength to take sorrow to his heart, and to bear it uncomplainingly. She was doing what he had done, failing as he had failed.
The letter dropped from her shaking fingers, and she raised her eyes to his with a look so hopeless, shamed, and grief-stricken, that he shrank back and winced as if he had seen a gaping wound.
“I can’t,” she said. “Something has snapped. I have changed. I can’t be Martin Collingwood’swife again. If the weight of my own self-contempt could crush me, I should be dead. Oh, why did they destroy my faith? There would have been the religious life at least.”
“You must not talk that way,” Kingsnorth said. “Your path is as plain as a pikestaff. You married Martin Collingwood,—why, only you and your Maker know,—but you did marry him, and you have got to stay with him. He needs you.”
“Oh, you men!” she cried scornfully. “And if he did not need me—if only I needed him—it would be equally my duty to leave him. However you arrange the scale of duties, they are always to suit your own interests.”
“I am thinking of this from yours,” Kingsnorth said firmly. “I tell you, and I know, that the one thing the human soul can’t stand is to live on compromising with its own self-contempt. A woman of your brains can’t take the liberties with her conscience that her frivolous sisters do. You can’t stand the self-contempt. You’ll disintegrate under it. Convince yourself that you are a martyr if you can, and hug your martyrdom. They got something out of it when it was boiling oil, and melted lead, and crucifixion, and all the rest ofthose horrors. Be a martyr if you must, but do not try living under the weight of your own self-contempt. Of all failures that is the weakest, saddest, most loathsome. Dear lady, I’ve carried mine with me like an atmosphere. People have felt it; you did. I’ve seen you shrink from me as if I were a leper. And you were right. I am loathsome to myself.”
He stopped, wiped his brow, and settled back into his chair with a heavy sigh. Charlotte sat on, her trembling fingers tightly clasped, her eyes fixed on the sea. She turned at last and shook her head.
“I can’t. I can’t take up that thread of life. I don’t know how I got myself here—it is all a nightmare—but I must go away and work—by myself again.”
Kingsnorth leaned forward, his hands loosely clasped between his knees.
“Will you listen to the story of my life, Mrs. Collingwood?” he said with more of sharpness in his tone than was characteristic of him.
Charlotte had little curiosity in anyone else’s affairs; but she would have listened to anything at that moment to slip away from the discussion of herown. She nodded listlessly, and Kingsnorth began speaking in a very judicial tone.
“I was what is called in England well born, though my people were not rich. My father came of a very old and once distinguished family, but was the owner of an impoverished estate. My mother was equally well born, and possessed a small income of her own. You probably know that, in England, the eldest son is the family; nobody else really counts. In our family there were two girls, then my elder brother, the ‘heir,’ then myself, and another girl. I cannot remember the time when the rest of us were not all being pinched to keep things going for the heir. Tom was, on the whole, a pretty good fellow, but that sort of rearing would spoil the best nature that was ever born. He got into the way of thinking that the rest of us ought to sacrifice everything we had or could hope to have to his position. He was also a devilish good-looking fellow, easy-going and selfish, as was natural.
“My two elder sisters were promptly married off, on the whole pretty well. The difficulty came with Tom. He had to marry money, and he had not enough in himself or the place to make money come begging for him.
“Tom was in an expensive regiment. My dream of life was also the army, but the paternal pocketbook couldn’t stand it, so I was put in a bank instead. I promptly fell head-over-ears in love with the banker’s daughter.
“Her family was what we called ‘new people’; but there was plenty of money, and if Elena wanted me, why she must have me. Therefore no objections were made to the engagement. I was in the seventh heaven of happiness. I do not deny that I was glad she had plenty of money; but I should have married her just the same if she had not had a cent.
“Elena paid a visit to my home in the early days of our betrothal, and—well, she threw me over deliberately for my elder brother. Looking back now, I can see some excuse for her. I was unimportant in my family, of course, and Tom was its centre. He looked handsome in his uniform, and he was the heir. The place had age and dignity, and she knew its value.
“I give Tom the credit of being ashamed and of feeling some remorse; but my father and mother planned—actually aided and abetted my betrayal. They wanted the money for the heir.
“I made a row, naturally, but it was fruitless.Elena wept and declared that she would have her own way. Tom looked ashamed, but his bringing up had made him constitutionally selfish; and the parents on both sides joined to suppress me.
“The end was that I cleared out, blind with rage and pain, cursing Elena and my kin; and in the next three years in London I went to what is commonly known as the dogs.
“My self-pity is justifiable in my eyes to-day; but I made a fatal mistake. If I had had the right stuff in me, Elena couldn’t have driven me to the dogs. I might have hugged my griefs and have grown embittered; but my worst mistake was the desire to ‘drown sorrow’ with drink, with cards, with all the undesirable vices of men. If I had hugged sorrow and warmed it to my heart, I might have suffered more, but I should not have crumbled up morally like a gold ring in quicksilver.
“England has always a frontier war or two on her hands, and I got into one. A private, a ‘gentleman ranker’ has a magnificent opportunity to sink in the English army. Afterwards I drifted over here, and got into pearl-fishing. I liked the life and its adventures (we had to fight a bit in the early days), and then when the Americans came,I fell in with Collingwood. We fancied each other on sight. Then we picked up Mac, and I lighted accidentally on this oyster bed, and we settled here.
“Throughout all these years I have kept up a desultory correspondence with my married sisters; but I have drifted out of their lives, and I realize that I represent to them only a possible legacy. It is my business to make some money, and one day to die and leave it to them; and meanwhile a few gifts from the Orient are not unacceptable.
“Well, to shorten this tale, I settled here and married my wife. You need not look so startled. She was my wife legally; bell, book, and candle were all there. I lived openly with her in my house till the morning when you landed on Maylubi. Then, after I had seen and talked with you, I went home and ordered her out. She loved me, and she obeyed me. Five months later she died.” He stopped and wiped a cold perspiration from his brow.
“But how could you have kept it from me?” cried Charlotte. “Why did not Martin or Mrs. Maclaughlin tell me?”
“Mrs. Mac had her orders from Mac. She never disobeys him. Martin was simply a good friend.”
“But he brought me here.” She stopped, crimsoning with indignation.
“Precisely. He brought you here to associate with me, a respectable married man, as he considered me. He has never understood my conduct. He doesn’t understand why I preferred you to believe me a profligate instead of a decent married man. He has never understood why I should be willing to have my child pass for illegitimate. But you understand, Mrs. Collingwood.”
“Yes, I understand.” Then with sudden passion she cried, “But it was not my fault. I was trained to it.”
“As I was. But, if I had had one spark of manhood in me, I should have stood by the woman I had married, and should have taken my child to my heart in the face of the world. But I did not have the courage. I writhed and twisted to get out of facing the consequences of my own actions; and since then the weight of my own self-contempt has grown steadily heavier. Don’t talk to me of reform,” he added savagely as she started to speak. “There isn’t any reform for such as I. I tell you the consciousness of my own moral cowardice is with me day and night. It never leaves me. Andit’s the ungodly unfairness of it all that kills me by inches. I see other men about me, living lives not so very different from mine: Collingwood himself has been no saint. But because I’ve wanted better things, because I drank my cup, knowing that it was poor drink, it has not slaked my thirst, and it has parched the last drop of sweetness out of my life.
“Don’t you go another foot along this trail; you began it when you married Collingwood. If you double and twist on your tracks again, you are lost. Hug pain, hug misery, martyr yourself, if you will, but don’t try to indulge your own selfish will, and to square things by saying that you despise yourself. God in Heaven! Do you know what it is to despise yourself? You don’t now; but you will some day.” He wiped the perspiration that stood in great drops on his brow.
Charlotte, who had turned very white, sat nerveless and trembling like a leaf. All her pride was in arms that John Kingsnorth, degraded scion of a decent family, should be giving advice to her; and then she saw, with sudden horror, what a tremendous distance she had drifted with the current before John Kingsnorth’s words could be true.
For they were true! She had married Martin Collingwood, blaming herself for the weakness that made human affection and the freedom from the responsibility of self-support loom larger than all the traditions of birth and breeding. She had wanted her romance as every other woman in the world does; and romance, as it comes to most women, had been denied her. She might have gone out and found one, as many a woman does, and might, in time, have taken her flirtations lightly. But she had been too timid and too proud to flirt. The doubt came to her that it would have been better to play lightly at romance than to purchase it at the sacrifice of the second essential factor that makes a true marriage. Then came another throb of terror. She saw herself bent wilfully again on her own way, doubling, twisting, as Kingsnorth phrased it, trying to escape her conscience by saying that she despised herself: but the fact stared her in the face that she was turning on all the principles that had justified romance. She had married Collingwood against her reason, justifying herself for being swayed by human feeling by reiterating the finality of the action. For better, for worse, she had said—but now that it was for worse, itsfinality had somehow disappeared. Where was her mind—her will—her conscience?
She sat for a long time in bitter silence, but roused herself as Kingsnorth, who had been furtively watching her, drew out his tobacco pouch and extracted from its depths a little ball of tissue paper. He unfolded it, and there appeared to her startled eyes a single pearl of unusual size and luster.
“What a beauty!” she cried, bending forward to look at it.
“Yes, it’s beautiful enough,” said Kingsnorth. “I’ve carried it about with me for three years. Even Collingwood has never seen it.”
“I wish you had not—” she stopped, flushing.
“I didn’t show it to you to tempt you. It’s my moral slough. There are times when I’ve felt that its hell luster was my soul, and that I had nothing but the blackened shell in my body. It stood for the dearest emotions a man can have—for love and vengeance.”
“You are horrible,” she cried, shrinking from him.
“I am better than I used to be,” replied Kingsnorth. “I found this bauble three years ago, beforeMartin and I went into business. I never intended to sell it. Do you know what I wanted it for? To buy her back, and to blacken the face of the man who stole her from me. Yes, shrink! God help me, I love that woman still with a love gone awry. Other women, yes, and better women, though they had not her grace and training, have loved me; but, in my heart of hearts, I have held them all cheap. It was she, the woman who jilted me before all the world, that I wanted. It was he, whose heart I wanted to wring. Poor cheap human nature! Twelve years I’ve roughed it in shacks and junks, a flannel shirt to my back, and pork and beans or rice and fish in my stomach; while he has sat beneath the oaks we played under in our childhood, and has slept in the panelled rooms of our home, and has held the woman he stole from me in his arms! Talk of family affection! There isn’t such a thing. What am I to the mother who bore me? A derelict son, adrift in the South Seas, who is not to come home without some money. What am I to the sisters who played with me and fought with me over our nursery tea? A scape-grace brother, who, it is hoped, will keep out of the way, but who ought to make some money and leaveit to their children. Money! I’ve toiled like a negro slave for money, but not for them—not for them! It was for her. I wanted to go back rich. She sold herself once; why not again? The pearl was not enough in itself to tempt. It was the bauble, the outward sign.”
“You hoped—that?” She could not help glancing at his seamed, degenerate countenance.
“Never after you came. The look in your eyes told me what I had become. Since then I have lived—with myself.” He smiled a wretched, drawn smile.
She pointed gingerly to the bauble. “Why don’t you get rid of it? sell it?”
“Sell my soul? Did I not tell you my soul is steeped in it? No, bury it with me. Somehow I know I’ll not last long. Take this word from me. If you know anything of me when death comes, see that this does not go to the women who betrayed me and pitied me not. Women are selfish creatures. They sun themselves on their own cat premises. They have no pity for the poor devils on the outside.”
“Is it women alone? or isn’t it men as well, who are pitiless? Or isn’t it just life? Yet it isn’tpitiless to all. There are those who dance through it on rose-strewn paths.” She stopped, the sense of the great differences in individual lives overwhelming her.
Kingsnorth rose. “Well, that hasn’t been my life or yours. I have seen that you suffer. But suffer! Don’t change that look on your face. Better poignant suffering than moral decay. I tell you, you are facing it.” He rose abruptly and walked away, leaving her like a figure carved in ivory, looking out on the waste of waters, that seemed the emblem of waste in her own life.
Chapter XVIIn the month that elapsed between her conversation with Kingsnorth and the time set by Collingwood for his return, Charlotte had time for an exhausting and (as it seemed to her) fruitless self-inquisition. She was alternately the prey of a hopeless apathy and of a consuming impatience, but in either mood there ran a strong undercurrent of rebellion against all the formative influences of her life. At times the future yawned before her like a bottomless gulf, into the darkness and loneliness of which she must inevitably sink helpless. Out of love as she was with her husband, the prospect of going back to her forlorn, loveless state was one she could not contemplate. To get up day after day, knowing that there was, in all this world, no human being who took more than a casual interest in her; to go to bed at night, knowing that, if ruin and disaster overtook the world, no human thought would turn to her, no voice cry to hers out of the darkness, no warm humanhand reach for hers, seemed to her a fate infinitely worse than death. Yet she had lived just that life for twenty-eight years before she married Martin Collingwood to escape from it; and, though she had been most unhappy in it, she certainly had not regarded it as a tragedy. She remembered once having seen a young soldier come forth from the court-room after he had received a life sentence for shooting his corporal. The boy had lifted his hat with his manacled hands and had raised a white face to the touch of the cool morning wind. Something in the gesture had expressed his sense of helplessness in the grasp of that terrible thing we call the law. He was looking down the long vista of years at a living death ten thousand times worse than death, at a life from which every human ambition, every hope, every natural spring had been erased. His brother had followed behind him, a short distance of twenty or thirty feet, already the emblem of a separation that was to become complete. The brother was weeping as strong men do when their hearts are wrung; but, as she had looked at them, one so quiet, the other convulsed with grief, she had recognized that, to the second man, life held comfort and healing still. In the long years tocome, new interests would take the place of the old tie; a wife and babes would fill that life; healthy toil allied to honorable ambition would make the years seem to fly; and the memory of a convict brother would drop out of life, only to be recalled tenderly at those seasons when a universal festival brings back the old days and makes the rotting thread of memory seem new and strong once more. But what of the other? Nothing new would come to him, nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to live upon but memories that would be very, very bitter. There would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil, and the awful knowledge that long before he ceased to live he had ceased to be even to those who had been his nearest and dearest.Well, she had lived it once. She could live it again. As with the soldier there would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil. But the heart cries loudly for more than these things in life, until that heart is chastened into meekness. Would she ever be meek, she wondered sadly. If she could have accepted her fate with submission and sadness only, she would have felt herself indeed treated with mercy by the unseen fates. But there was noelement of submission in her mood. As often as she contemplated the future, and said to herself that these things must be, had to be, so often the wild will rose within her to say that they must not be. She lay often for hours at a time face downward on her bed, not a muscle moving, not a sound escaping her tense lips; but her passivity was the physical expression of an impotence that left her prostrate before the overwhelming fates.Often there recurred to her mind a conversation which had taken place between her and a fellow nurse, a young, joyous, magnetic creature for whom she had formed a friendship more nearly approximating intimacy than any other that had come into her life. It was in the last days of her engagement, and she had spoken of a fear of what unhappiness love might bring into her life. The other had looked at her with amazement. “Love!” she said. “I can imagine it bringing a lot of joy, but why unhappiness?”“Why unhappiness?” Charlotte asked in vain for the reason; but the fact stood stronger than any “why’s,” that there had been, in all her life, some fundamental outrage of human sentiment. It had existed in that strange paternal attitude of herfather’s; it had lived on in that perfunctory kindness of the nuns who had found her an antipathetic and incomprehensible child; and it had grown and intensified in the curious, prying interest developed in those who had governed her later years. That any such a condition could exist by a series of fortuitous events was out of the question. There had to be cause running through it all. Yet search her heart and mind as she would, she found there no wells of bitterness or evil thought or envy or malice to justify relations so peculiar as had finally established themselves between her and human society.The solution of the question came to her suddenly, when, on a particularly dreary day, she had been trying to discipline herself and to keep her thoughts from running on her own troubles. She had spent two hours trying to read the story, written by a great modern author, of three precocious school-boys. She had been a great admirer of the author, and, up to that time, had found fascination in his pages; but the three boys were little to her taste. As she mused sadly, a flash of insight came, and another; and, little by little, she saw clearly what had so long puzzled her.The precocious child is abnormal, and inspires in his fellow men that blind instinct to worry and torment which runs all through the animal world. She had been a precocious child, made uncanny by perceptions of the hidden currents and causes of life at a time when she should have been gurgling over its toys. As she recalled her sensitiveness to impressions, her powers of reading what was passing in others’ minds, and the singular growth of self-concealment and self-control that had grown out of them, it seemed to her that her keen brain had been her lifelong curse. Little by little, she went back to her convent days and tried to put herself in the place of the good sisters who had taught her. How distressing it must have been to them to feel the dumb interrogation that was always so strong under outward obedience! If she could have been unconscious of her father’s mental state and could have made a happy child’s claim upon his affections, would he not in time have come to love her? If, when she was a lonely orphan, living on her cousin’s sufferance, she had been able to reveal to her relatives the suffering that she really underwent in the strange ostracism which she had built up for herself, would not pity have conquered theirselfishness? She drew a long, pained sigh, as she thought of what a difference might have been made in her life by a little less brain and a little more moral courage.She was lying in her steamer chair on the veranda of her house at the time; and by her side, on a taboret, stood a glass of water. She picked it up and smiled over it. It was full of microbes (dead, of course, for Americans drink no unboiled water in the Philippines), and she knew it, and cared little, for she could not see them. But had she possessed an eye with the magnifying power of a strong microscope, she could not have tasted the water for the sight of the dead organisms would have made it unpalatable. She began to wonder what would be the effect on society, if there were let loose upon it a body of persons with microscopic eyes. They would shrink and exclaim and turn faint at dishes that the epicure delights in. How they would upset dinners and spoil little suppers and picnic luncheons! How eagerly would their society be avoided, and how soon their name become anathema!But though physically the microscopic eye does not yet exist, the mental and spiritual microscopic eye does exist, and it has about the same distressingeffect upon its human brethren who do not possess it as the other sort might have. She had had the microscopic eye—nothing could blind her to facts—and her starts and shrinkings had made her antipathetic to most of the persons with whom she had come in contact. It had remained for Martin, the indomitably ignorant, to be blind to her mental attitude, to assume her a normal woman of the world in which he found her. What of gratitude did she not owe him?The thought pricked her to her feet, set her to restless pacings of the floor. Whatever of gratitude she owed him, she was preparing ingratitude in the course she was still bent upon pursuing. Never had she appreciated the stubborn inheritance of her own will till she measured herself against it in this struggle. Whatever the conscience and the intelligence might say, her will said “No” as often as she contemplated forgiving Martin and going back to her life with him. The feeling which had been warm in her heart for him so long was dead—killed by his own brutal words, buried in her own shame and self-reproach. She saw with unutterable sadness, that there was no hope of its resuscitation. But did that break the tie that she had of herown volition forged? Could not that same will of hers which resisted so bitterly be schooled to duty and to right? For against a year’s tenderness and kindness, where was the justice of weighing the utterances of a single hour of pain and disappointment? The one ought not to balance the other. She had no right to think so for an instant. Alas, though, one did balance the other, outweighed it many times!Her marriage had been all wrong. But had she been less conscious of the fact on the day she married him than on the day when she vainly struggled to convince herself that she ought to go on living with him? Marriage can not be for love alone any more than it can be for selfish material interest alone. In its appeal to human emotion and in its relation to the family it may be, as the church calls it, a sacrament; but marriage as a lifelong partnership must have its material side. Love must enter in; but no healthy marriage can exist, unless there be equally the consciousness of a good bargain, of a legitimate exchange of values, added to the affection which sanctifies it. Well, Collingwood had played fairly. It was she who had entered into the alliance, knowing its weakness, knowing herself.But did she know herself? What more that was disappointing and agonizing was she to learn of herself? What was even then struggling in her breast? Was there some secret hope holding itself in concealment behind her oft repeated thought that life was ended for her? Did some hidden ambition prompt her to take the step that she believed came from self-respect? She had learned only too well her capacity for self-deception. She had advanced step by step along the path by which she had come to the church door with Martin Collingwood, denying every motive which, in the end, had proved itself the stronger. Was it possible that she was turning blindly, as women naturally turn, to a second man to lift her from the wreck to which she had brought her life with the first? Again she faced that truth which she had long before discovered, that too passionate a denial constitutes an assertion; and while every atom of her intelligence bade her distrust her own sophistry, every throb of a strong emotional nature bade her turn from the conclusions of her reason.In these hours of agonizing inquisition when her soul seemed literally torn in two, she contemplated with added despair, the loss of her early religiousfaith. It did not come back to her in the least. No impulse for prayer seized her. The conviction that the world is made up of blind forces, and that there is no help outside of ourselves was very strong in her. She might pray and pray, but when she arose from her knees, the elements of struggle would be there still, tearing at her, filling her soul with pain. Prayer would not bring sleep to her aching eyeballs in the night, it would not silence the cry in her heart, it would not keep the thronging thoughts from her weary brain. Time alone could do that. Give her time—she smiled bitterly—and change of circumstances, and she might put the experiences of the last three years behind her, put even the man who had ruled her life and thought for a year (and a happy year) behind her.Of course she wrestled with the temptations which must present themselves to the intelligent mind which has had the ways of the world set before it. Intelligence said that nothing mattered except the material. She could be good or bad, noble or contemptible, so long as she played her game well and kept on good terms with that thing we call the world. Little the world cares what we do or what we are, said intelligence; the question with it is howmuch power do we own in this vale of tears. Intelligence told her that with the backing of her family and the successful use of her own powers, and with Judge Barton’s political influence, they two might make a very comfortable place for themselves in this material universe. She felt dangerously sure of the Judge. The knowledge had come to her (how she knew not) that all she needed to insure her an absolute dominion over the man’s soul was a little less moral fastidiousness, a little more worldliness. Indeed, a strange confidence in her own powers of attraction was working itself out of all the miserable situation. She realized how completely she had under-estimated her own charm. Less conscience, less good taste, more charity (which is a much misused term in these days, signifying lack of all social and moral tradition), in fact, a general elimination of the best qualities of her nature would constitute a humanizing process which would work decidedly to her material advantage. But she was not willing to submit herself to the process. She wanted her own way, and she wanted to remain her ideal self. More and more clearly she saw the unreasonableness of her demand.So the days slipped by one by one, and she marked them off on her calendar. In the end, the time for the launch to go up to Romblon arrived without her having taken any decisive steps toward the act which she still declared to herself she was bent upon. She excused herself on the ground of Martin’s letter, saying to herself that she owed him a personal interview and explanation for her refusal to accept his offer of reconciliation. But in truth, she was pulling away again from the uncomfortable. She could contemplate the action, but until circumstances more disagreeable than those she was enduring forced her into activity, she would not take a decisive step.It had been the original intention that Kingsnorth should take the launch over for Collingwood, but, as the time slipped by, and the typhoon season was at hand this idea was deemed impracticable. Maclaughlin was a licensed engineer, while Kingsnorth was not, and the launch was not in the best of repair.Maclaughlin left at daybreak on an exceedingly hot morning, when the sea rolled lazily in long, metallic swells shining as if the brilliant surfacewere oiled. All that day the heat was like a vapor, but in mid-afternoon the clouds rolled up, showers fell at intervals, and cool gusts of wind made the cocoanut trees writhe and their stiff leaves to rattle. Once or twice Charlotte looked at the barometer, which fell steadily.At dinner their common anxiety made the three more companionable than anyone had hoped to be. “We are going to have abaguio, that’s flat,” said Kingsnorth, “but it has been kind in holding off. Mac’s safe in Romblon harbor by this time, and that is landlocked, and shut in by mountains. If Collingwood is there, they’ll wait anyway to come out. Mac’s got sense enough not to leave port on a falling barometer, though Collingwood might take the chances.”“I hope Martin isn’t out on the ocean to-night,” said Charlotte. “It makes me ill to think of it.” She shivered and glanced into the darkness where the oily surf fell over in ghostly green fire, and the wash rolled back pricked with millions of vanishing light points.“Spooky, isn’t it?” remarked Kingsnorth. He set down his coffee-cup (they were just finishingdinner), and as his hostess rose, held back the rattling shell curtain for her, then went to inspect the barometer. He whistled.“What is it?” inquired Mrs. Mac.“Oh, just so-so.” Something in his tone betrayed an effort to retrieve the impression made by his bit of carelessness. Mrs. Maclaughlin went over to the instrument.“It’s nearly 750,” she said in a dismayed tone.1“I’ve never known it to go that low without warning since I’ve lived on the island. I wish Mac and Martin were here.”Charlotte said nothing, but in her heart she echoed the other’s words.“Can’t be helped,” replied Kingsnorth, curtly. “I hope that you will not feel it presumptuous in me to suggest that Mrs. Maclaughlin stay with you to-night, Mrs. Collingwood. I’ll come over also if there is anything very bad.”Both women were grateful for the suggestion.Each had been secretly longing to broach the matter, and had felt ashamed to do so.“I’ll go over with you while you lock up your place,” said Kingsnorth to Mrs. Maclaughlin. They disappeared almost instantly in the profound blackness of the night. Charlotte marvelled at it. The gloom was like a solid substance save where the phosphorescence showed a glimpse of foaming suds, and a few lights gleaming from the distant village seemed golden by contrast with the green and blue fires.The servants all begged leave to absent themselves for the night. Each had discovered an ailing relative in the village to whom his presence was an absolute necessity.“Let ‘em go,” said Kingsnorth. “They are in a dead fright. They know we’ll probably have Tophet before the night is over, and they want to get into their flock.” Even as he spoke, a little moan of wind came off the sea, and a pattering shower drenched the earth.“Curtain rung up,” said Kingsnorth. He had been standing tentatively, hat in hand, after escorting back Mrs. Maclaughlin and some, as it seemed to Charlotte, preposterously large bundles. Charlottemotioned him to a chair. “We may as well watch the first act,” she smiled, humoring his metaphor.“Just as well,” he answered, “because I fancy we’ll be on the second.”“Do you mean that there may be any actual danger?” Charlotte asked, startled.“Danger? no! At the worst we might have to spend a night under the pandan bushes. But one of these big storms is a trying thing while it lasts.”“Tryingisn’t the word,” Mrs. Maclaughlin precipitated this dictum into the conversation with her usual vigor. “It’s just nerve-wracking. Lord! Lord! what fools we women are! Here are two of us out here likely to be swallowed up by a tidal wave or Heaven only knows what, just because we were so tarnation ready to take up with a man. I’ve traipsed around this world at Andrew Maclaughlin’s heels twenty-two years, and the good Lord only knows what he hasn’t asked me to go through with; and now he’s left me unprotected in the face of the biggest storm we’re likely to have.” She fairly choked with fear and anger.Mrs. Maclaughlin’s untrammelled speech was at all times an affront to Kingsnorth. The intimationthat he was a poor substitute for Maclaughlin as a protector stung him. When he spoke, his voice had a quality of suave ugliness that grated like a rasped saw on Charlotte’s nerves.“You’re panicky,” he said. “Why don’t you pattern on Mrs. Collingwood and me? We’re ready for anything; are we not, dear lady?”A heavy gust of wind and another downpour silenced them all for a few seconds.“This,” said Kingsnorth to Charlotte, as the gust subsided, “is just preliminary to the theme; it’s the scale playing in the key with which the virtuoso dazzles his audience before he rolls up his cuffs, runs both hands through his hair, and gets into the first movement. Ah, here’s the theme.”“What’s a virtuoso?” snapped Mrs. Maclaughlin.“A virtuoso is a gentleman who can play the piano or some other instrument exceedingly well,” Kingsnorth replied, with the same dangerous suavity.“I hate the nasty long-haired things.” It was quite evident that Mrs. Mac’s nerves had gone to splinters. Charlotte threw herself into the breach.“Well, don’t hate this storm,” she said, “even ifMr. Kingsnorth did compare it to a sonata. It’s beautiful. It’s grand.” Another howl and downpour, and this time the framework of the house shivered under its impact.“Merely theandante,” said Kingsnorth, shrugging his shoulders.“You make my blood run cold,” cried Mrs. Maclaughlin.It was too dark to see him, but Charlotte knew that his lips were apart and his teeth grinning in an evil smile.“But why, Mrs. Maclaughlin?” said Charlotte suddenly. “If danger is coming, it will come. No human power can stop it. The future is as unreadable as the very sky. But why borrow trouble for what we are powerless to resist? And if there is beauty and majesty in all this conflict of the elements, surely it is better to see that, than to sit dreading the unknown. Mr. Kingsnorth’s comparisons are not unjust. It is like a great piece of music, divided into movements. Whatever it may come to later, it is glorious now.”“Spoken like a brave woman,” Kingsnorth cried. “Let loose the dogs of war and make Rome howl! Well, we don’t care; do we, Mrs. Collingwood?”“Not much,” Charlotte assented, though somewhat coldly. Her manner brought him to a sudden check.“I forgot,” he stammered. “Excuse me.”“Forgot what?” This point blank query about a remark not addressed to herself emanated from Mrs. Maclaughlin.“Dear Mrs. Mac,” Kingsnorth said, and Charlotte winced at his tone, “you do not realize how quickly you deteriorate once out of reach of Mac’s disciplining eye. Mac would never have permitted you to ask that question. I often wonder if, had it been my good fortune to marry, I should have been able to exert the strong guiding influence over my wife that Mac evidently holds over you.”“Oh, you have,” replied Mrs. Mac, while Charlotte sat in helpless embarrassment at the scene. “Well, let me tell you that you wouldn’t have. You might have broken her heart, the Lord knows, as you’d probably have broken your children’s spirits, if you’d ’a’ had ’em; but no woman would ever be proud to be ruled by you as I’m proud to be ruled by Mac. I’m disciplined. You hit the nail on the head there. And maybe I fall back when Mac isn’t around. But I love that old manof mine. I’ve followed him over deserts and oceans. I may have let my mind go once in a while; but no woman on God’s green earth would have married you and lived with you twenty-two years, and still have loved you as I love Mac. I’ve been rebellious sometimes with the Almighty, and it hasn’t always seemed as if the powers above knew what they were about. But the good Lord did a wise thing when He kept women and children out of your hands, John Kingsnorth.” She arose with a snort of wrath and passed into the house. “Where’s my Bible?” they heard her saying to herself. “I brought it.”For a second or two, Charlotte remained like Kingsnorth, half paralyzed by the outburst. Then a helpless, pitying embarrassment settled upon her. It was all so terribly true, it was such a baring of naked underfeelings. Would it ever be possible, she wondered, to resume the island life after such an indecent exposure of what simmered deep in Mrs. Maclaughlin’s heart? Then, as the silence grew, she cast about vainly for some change of subject. As if divining her thoughts, Kingsnorth rose.“Already the tempest has broken,” he said.“It’s been brewing three years. I can’t complain; and I know you think she told the truth.”A sudden impulse stirred Charlotte. “No, no,” she said. “You must not think that. I believe that, if you had married the right woman (that’s the stock phrase, isn’t it?) you would have been a tender husband, and if you had had children, a kind father. I don’t know what perversity of fate kept those influences out of your life, but all that is wayward in you and bitter seems to have been caused by their lack.”She uttered the words with real warmth, and for an instant wondered that he made no reply. Then, as the pause grew more marked, she heard him breathing heavily, and it flashed into her mind that the man was on the point of an utter breakdown. Her few sincere words had gone straight through the armor that Mrs. Maclaughlin’s blows had apparently failed to affect. An absolute horror of such a possibility seized upon her. They had had, she felt, an indecent exhibition of naked human emotions. If more were to follow, what intimate revelations might not take place? Yet the impossibility of uttering some banality was clear to her mind. Anything short of the sincerity and earnestnessdemanded by the situation would be insulting. So she remained as if transfixed, in a kind of shivering expectation of what might be coming.Kingsnorth, however, pulled himself together after a convulsive movement or two of his chest. He stood for an instant without a word, and then walked away to his own quarters, whence Charlotte soon heard his voice shouting angrily for his servant.Mrs. Maclaughlin, somewhat appeased by finding the Bible which she had brought along for her usual nightly chapter, came out on the piazza as the strident tones of Kingsnorth penetrated the sitting-room.“Taking it out on his boy,” she remarked. “Well, I’ve been aching to tell the truth to John Kingsnorth for two years, and now I’ve done it.”“Do you feel any better for it?”“Yes—no. I’m always sorry when I blurt out. He’s right: Mac holds me in.” Her voice broke. “Oh, my Lord! My Lord! I wish I knew where he was this minute. You’re a strange woman, Charlotte Collingwood. You sit here and watch them waves roll in and hear the wind blowing, andyou don’t seem to give one thought to the man that you’ve lived here with side by side for a year. Ain’t you got no love for him?”Charlotte put up a hand. “I can’t discuss that with you, Mrs. Maclaughlin. Surely I have made it plain before this.”“You’ve made a lot plain,” replied Mrs. Maclaughlin. There was endless reservation in her tone. It heaped such mountains of unuttered reproach that Charlotte quite bowed under it.“The rain is coming in strong,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin, when she had extracted sufficient healing from her companion’s discomfort. “You’ll get drenched out here. I’m going to read my Bible. You had better come in.”But Charlotte motioned her away. “I’m not religiously inclined to-night,” she replied.“Charlotte Collingwood, do you defy your Maker?”“I’m rebellious to-night, Mrs. Maclaughlin. There are His waves and His winds, but still I’m rebellious. I’m not apologetic to-night, not even in the face of abaguio.”“I’ll speak for you,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin earnestly. She went inside, closed the doors and shellwindows to keep out the storm, and Charlotte heard her keeping her word. Mrs. Maclaughlin’s prayers were simple but fervent. They seemed to consist chiefly of a few reiterated sentences. “O Lord, protect and save my old husband. You know I love him, Lord; but it isn’t all selfishness. O God, give me back my Mac.” At times she asked that the Divine Power might soften the hardened heart of Mrs. Collingwood.1Barometric pressure in Philippines is measured in millimeters. In typhoons where fifth signal is flown, about 742 is lowest pressure recorded. In great storm of 1908, 739.8 was lowest. Generally the falling of the barometer is gradual for several days during the continuance of the storm. When it falls suddenly, as here indicated, before a storm, it means that a storm of short duration but of terrific violence is coming.
Chapter XVI
In the month that elapsed between her conversation with Kingsnorth and the time set by Collingwood for his return, Charlotte had time for an exhausting and (as it seemed to her) fruitless self-inquisition. She was alternately the prey of a hopeless apathy and of a consuming impatience, but in either mood there ran a strong undercurrent of rebellion against all the formative influences of her life. At times the future yawned before her like a bottomless gulf, into the darkness and loneliness of which she must inevitably sink helpless. Out of love as she was with her husband, the prospect of going back to her forlorn, loveless state was one she could not contemplate. To get up day after day, knowing that there was, in all this world, no human being who took more than a casual interest in her; to go to bed at night, knowing that, if ruin and disaster overtook the world, no human thought would turn to her, no voice cry to hers out of the darkness, no warm humanhand reach for hers, seemed to her a fate infinitely worse than death. Yet she had lived just that life for twenty-eight years before she married Martin Collingwood to escape from it; and, though she had been most unhappy in it, she certainly had not regarded it as a tragedy. She remembered once having seen a young soldier come forth from the court-room after he had received a life sentence for shooting his corporal. The boy had lifted his hat with his manacled hands and had raised a white face to the touch of the cool morning wind. Something in the gesture had expressed his sense of helplessness in the grasp of that terrible thing we call the law. He was looking down the long vista of years at a living death ten thousand times worse than death, at a life from which every human ambition, every hope, every natural spring had been erased. His brother had followed behind him, a short distance of twenty or thirty feet, already the emblem of a separation that was to become complete. The brother was weeping as strong men do when their hearts are wrung; but, as she had looked at them, one so quiet, the other convulsed with grief, she had recognized that, to the second man, life held comfort and healing still. In the long years tocome, new interests would take the place of the old tie; a wife and babes would fill that life; healthy toil allied to honorable ambition would make the years seem to fly; and the memory of a convict brother would drop out of life, only to be recalled tenderly at those seasons when a universal festival brings back the old days and makes the rotting thread of memory seem new and strong once more. But what of the other? Nothing new would come to him, nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to live upon but memories that would be very, very bitter. There would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil, and the awful knowledge that long before he ceased to live he had ceased to be even to those who had been his nearest and dearest.Well, she had lived it once. She could live it again. As with the soldier there would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil. But the heart cries loudly for more than these things in life, until that heart is chastened into meekness. Would she ever be meek, she wondered sadly. If she could have accepted her fate with submission and sadness only, she would have felt herself indeed treated with mercy by the unseen fates. But there was noelement of submission in her mood. As often as she contemplated the future, and said to herself that these things must be, had to be, so often the wild will rose within her to say that they must not be. She lay often for hours at a time face downward on her bed, not a muscle moving, not a sound escaping her tense lips; but her passivity was the physical expression of an impotence that left her prostrate before the overwhelming fates.Often there recurred to her mind a conversation which had taken place between her and a fellow nurse, a young, joyous, magnetic creature for whom she had formed a friendship more nearly approximating intimacy than any other that had come into her life. It was in the last days of her engagement, and she had spoken of a fear of what unhappiness love might bring into her life. The other had looked at her with amazement. “Love!” she said. “I can imagine it bringing a lot of joy, but why unhappiness?”“Why unhappiness?” Charlotte asked in vain for the reason; but the fact stood stronger than any “why’s,” that there had been, in all her life, some fundamental outrage of human sentiment. It had existed in that strange paternal attitude of herfather’s; it had lived on in that perfunctory kindness of the nuns who had found her an antipathetic and incomprehensible child; and it had grown and intensified in the curious, prying interest developed in those who had governed her later years. That any such a condition could exist by a series of fortuitous events was out of the question. There had to be cause running through it all. Yet search her heart and mind as she would, she found there no wells of bitterness or evil thought or envy or malice to justify relations so peculiar as had finally established themselves between her and human society.The solution of the question came to her suddenly, when, on a particularly dreary day, she had been trying to discipline herself and to keep her thoughts from running on her own troubles. She had spent two hours trying to read the story, written by a great modern author, of three precocious school-boys. She had been a great admirer of the author, and, up to that time, had found fascination in his pages; but the three boys were little to her taste. As she mused sadly, a flash of insight came, and another; and, little by little, she saw clearly what had so long puzzled her.The precocious child is abnormal, and inspires in his fellow men that blind instinct to worry and torment which runs all through the animal world. She had been a precocious child, made uncanny by perceptions of the hidden currents and causes of life at a time when she should have been gurgling over its toys. As she recalled her sensitiveness to impressions, her powers of reading what was passing in others’ minds, and the singular growth of self-concealment and self-control that had grown out of them, it seemed to her that her keen brain had been her lifelong curse. Little by little, she went back to her convent days and tried to put herself in the place of the good sisters who had taught her. How distressing it must have been to them to feel the dumb interrogation that was always so strong under outward obedience! If she could have been unconscious of her father’s mental state and could have made a happy child’s claim upon his affections, would he not in time have come to love her? If, when she was a lonely orphan, living on her cousin’s sufferance, she had been able to reveal to her relatives the suffering that she really underwent in the strange ostracism which she had built up for herself, would not pity have conquered theirselfishness? She drew a long, pained sigh, as she thought of what a difference might have been made in her life by a little less brain and a little more moral courage.She was lying in her steamer chair on the veranda of her house at the time; and by her side, on a taboret, stood a glass of water. She picked it up and smiled over it. It was full of microbes (dead, of course, for Americans drink no unboiled water in the Philippines), and she knew it, and cared little, for she could not see them. But had she possessed an eye with the magnifying power of a strong microscope, she could not have tasted the water for the sight of the dead organisms would have made it unpalatable. She began to wonder what would be the effect on society, if there were let loose upon it a body of persons with microscopic eyes. They would shrink and exclaim and turn faint at dishes that the epicure delights in. How they would upset dinners and spoil little suppers and picnic luncheons! How eagerly would their society be avoided, and how soon their name become anathema!But though physically the microscopic eye does not yet exist, the mental and spiritual microscopic eye does exist, and it has about the same distressingeffect upon its human brethren who do not possess it as the other sort might have. She had had the microscopic eye—nothing could blind her to facts—and her starts and shrinkings had made her antipathetic to most of the persons with whom she had come in contact. It had remained for Martin, the indomitably ignorant, to be blind to her mental attitude, to assume her a normal woman of the world in which he found her. What of gratitude did she not owe him?The thought pricked her to her feet, set her to restless pacings of the floor. Whatever of gratitude she owed him, she was preparing ingratitude in the course she was still bent upon pursuing. Never had she appreciated the stubborn inheritance of her own will till she measured herself against it in this struggle. Whatever the conscience and the intelligence might say, her will said “No” as often as she contemplated forgiving Martin and going back to her life with him. The feeling which had been warm in her heart for him so long was dead—killed by his own brutal words, buried in her own shame and self-reproach. She saw with unutterable sadness, that there was no hope of its resuscitation. But did that break the tie that she had of herown volition forged? Could not that same will of hers which resisted so bitterly be schooled to duty and to right? For against a year’s tenderness and kindness, where was the justice of weighing the utterances of a single hour of pain and disappointment? The one ought not to balance the other. She had no right to think so for an instant. Alas, though, one did balance the other, outweighed it many times!Her marriage had been all wrong. But had she been less conscious of the fact on the day she married him than on the day when she vainly struggled to convince herself that she ought to go on living with him? Marriage can not be for love alone any more than it can be for selfish material interest alone. In its appeal to human emotion and in its relation to the family it may be, as the church calls it, a sacrament; but marriage as a lifelong partnership must have its material side. Love must enter in; but no healthy marriage can exist, unless there be equally the consciousness of a good bargain, of a legitimate exchange of values, added to the affection which sanctifies it. Well, Collingwood had played fairly. It was she who had entered into the alliance, knowing its weakness, knowing herself.But did she know herself? What more that was disappointing and agonizing was she to learn of herself? What was even then struggling in her breast? Was there some secret hope holding itself in concealment behind her oft repeated thought that life was ended for her? Did some hidden ambition prompt her to take the step that she believed came from self-respect? She had learned only too well her capacity for self-deception. She had advanced step by step along the path by which she had come to the church door with Martin Collingwood, denying every motive which, in the end, had proved itself the stronger. Was it possible that she was turning blindly, as women naturally turn, to a second man to lift her from the wreck to which she had brought her life with the first? Again she faced that truth which she had long before discovered, that too passionate a denial constitutes an assertion; and while every atom of her intelligence bade her distrust her own sophistry, every throb of a strong emotional nature bade her turn from the conclusions of her reason.In these hours of agonizing inquisition when her soul seemed literally torn in two, she contemplated with added despair, the loss of her early religiousfaith. It did not come back to her in the least. No impulse for prayer seized her. The conviction that the world is made up of blind forces, and that there is no help outside of ourselves was very strong in her. She might pray and pray, but when she arose from her knees, the elements of struggle would be there still, tearing at her, filling her soul with pain. Prayer would not bring sleep to her aching eyeballs in the night, it would not silence the cry in her heart, it would not keep the thronging thoughts from her weary brain. Time alone could do that. Give her time—she smiled bitterly—and change of circumstances, and she might put the experiences of the last three years behind her, put even the man who had ruled her life and thought for a year (and a happy year) behind her.Of course she wrestled with the temptations which must present themselves to the intelligent mind which has had the ways of the world set before it. Intelligence said that nothing mattered except the material. She could be good or bad, noble or contemptible, so long as she played her game well and kept on good terms with that thing we call the world. Little the world cares what we do or what we are, said intelligence; the question with it is howmuch power do we own in this vale of tears. Intelligence told her that with the backing of her family and the successful use of her own powers, and with Judge Barton’s political influence, they two might make a very comfortable place for themselves in this material universe. She felt dangerously sure of the Judge. The knowledge had come to her (how she knew not) that all she needed to insure her an absolute dominion over the man’s soul was a little less moral fastidiousness, a little more worldliness. Indeed, a strange confidence in her own powers of attraction was working itself out of all the miserable situation. She realized how completely she had under-estimated her own charm. Less conscience, less good taste, more charity (which is a much misused term in these days, signifying lack of all social and moral tradition), in fact, a general elimination of the best qualities of her nature would constitute a humanizing process which would work decidedly to her material advantage. But she was not willing to submit herself to the process. She wanted her own way, and she wanted to remain her ideal self. More and more clearly she saw the unreasonableness of her demand.So the days slipped by one by one, and she marked them off on her calendar. In the end, the time for the launch to go up to Romblon arrived without her having taken any decisive steps toward the act which she still declared to herself she was bent upon. She excused herself on the ground of Martin’s letter, saying to herself that she owed him a personal interview and explanation for her refusal to accept his offer of reconciliation. But in truth, she was pulling away again from the uncomfortable. She could contemplate the action, but until circumstances more disagreeable than those she was enduring forced her into activity, she would not take a decisive step.It had been the original intention that Kingsnorth should take the launch over for Collingwood, but, as the time slipped by, and the typhoon season was at hand this idea was deemed impracticable. Maclaughlin was a licensed engineer, while Kingsnorth was not, and the launch was not in the best of repair.Maclaughlin left at daybreak on an exceedingly hot morning, when the sea rolled lazily in long, metallic swells shining as if the brilliant surfacewere oiled. All that day the heat was like a vapor, but in mid-afternoon the clouds rolled up, showers fell at intervals, and cool gusts of wind made the cocoanut trees writhe and their stiff leaves to rattle. Once or twice Charlotte looked at the barometer, which fell steadily.At dinner their common anxiety made the three more companionable than anyone had hoped to be. “We are going to have abaguio, that’s flat,” said Kingsnorth, “but it has been kind in holding off. Mac’s safe in Romblon harbor by this time, and that is landlocked, and shut in by mountains. If Collingwood is there, they’ll wait anyway to come out. Mac’s got sense enough not to leave port on a falling barometer, though Collingwood might take the chances.”“I hope Martin isn’t out on the ocean to-night,” said Charlotte. “It makes me ill to think of it.” She shivered and glanced into the darkness where the oily surf fell over in ghostly green fire, and the wash rolled back pricked with millions of vanishing light points.“Spooky, isn’t it?” remarked Kingsnorth. He set down his coffee-cup (they were just finishingdinner), and as his hostess rose, held back the rattling shell curtain for her, then went to inspect the barometer. He whistled.“What is it?” inquired Mrs. Mac.“Oh, just so-so.” Something in his tone betrayed an effort to retrieve the impression made by his bit of carelessness. Mrs. Maclaughlin went over to the instrument.“It’s nearly 750,” she said in a dismayed tone.1“I’ve never known it to go that low without warning since I’ve lived on the island. I wish Mac and Martin were here.”Charlotte said nothing, but in her heart she echoed the other’s words.“Can’t be helped,” replied Kingsnorth, curtly. “I hope that you will not feel it presumptuous in me to suggest that Mrs. Maclaughlin stay with you to-night, Mrs. Collingwood. I’ll come over also if there is anything very bad.”Both women were grateful for the suggestion.Each had been secretly longing to broach the matter, and had felt ashamed to do so.“I’ll go over with you while you lock up your place,” said Kingsnorth to Mrs. Maclaughlin. They disappeared almost instantly in the profound blackness of the night. Charlotte marvelled at it. The gloom was like a solid substance save where the phosphorescence showed a glimpse of foaming suds, and a few lights gleaming from the distant village seemed golden by contrast with the green and blue fires.The servants all begged leave to absent themselves for the night. Each had discovered an ailing relative in the village to whom his presence was an absolute necessity.“Let ‘em go,” said Kingsnorth. “They are in a dead fright. They know we’ll probably have Tophet before the night is over, and they want to get into their flock.” Even as he spoke, a little moan of wind came off the sea, and a pattering shower drenched the earth.“Curtain rung up,” said Kingsnorth. He had been standing tentatively, hat in hand, after escorting back Mrs. Maclaughlin and some, as it seemed to Charlotte, preposterously large bundles. Charlottemotioned him to a chair. “We may as well watch the first act,” she smiled, humoring his metaphor.“Just as well,” he answered, “because I fancy we’ll be on the second.”“Do you mean that there may be any actual danger?” Charlotte asked, startled.“Danger? no! At the worst we might have to spend a night under the pandan bushes. But one of these big storms is a trying thing while it lasts.”“Tryingisn’t the word,” Mrs. Maclaughlin precipitated this dictum into the conversation with her usual vigor. “It’s just nerve-wracking. Lord! Lord! what fools we women are! Here are two of us out here likely to be swallowed up by a tidal wave or Heaven only knows what, just because we were so tarnation ready to take up with a man. I’ve traipsed around this world at Andrew Maclaughlin’s heels twenty-two years, and the good Lord only knows what he hasn’t asked me to go through with; and now he’s left me unprotected in the face of the biggest storm we’re likely to have.” She fairly choked with fear and anger.Mrs. Maclaughlin’s untrammelled speech was at all times an affront to Kingsnorth. The intimationthat he was a poor substitute for Maclaughlin as a protector stung him. When he spoke, his voice had a quality of suave ugliness that grated like a rasped saw on Charlotte’s nerves.“You’re panicky,” he said. “Why don’t you pattern on Mrs. Collingwood and me? We’re ready for anything; are we not, dear lady?”A heavy gust of wind and another downpour silenced them all for a few seconds.“This,” said Kingsnorth to Charlotte, as the gust subsided, “is just preliminary to the theme; it’s the scale playing in the key with which the virtuoso dazzles his audience before he rolls up his cuffs, runs both hands through his hair, and gets into the first movement. Ah, here’s the theme.”“What’s a virtuoso?” snapped Mrs. Maclaughlin.“A virtuoso is a gentleman who can play the piano or some other instrument exceedingly well,” Kingsnorth replied, with the same dangerous suavity.“I hate the nasty long-haired things.” It was quite evident that Mrs. Mac’s nerves had gone to splinters. Charlotte threw herself into the breach.“Well, don’t hate this storm,” she said, “even ifMr. Kingsnorth did compare it to a sonata. It’s beautiful. It’s grand.” Another howl and downpour, and this time the framework of the house shivered under its impact.“Merely theandante,” said Kingsnorth, shrugging his shoulders.“You make my blood run cold,” cried Mrs. Maclaughlin.It was too dark to see him, but Charlotte knew that his lips were apart and his teeth grinning in an evil smile.“But why, Mrs. Maclaughlin?” said Charlotte suddenly. “If danger is coming, it will come. No human power can stop it. The future is as unreadable as the very sky. But why borrow trouble for what we are powerless to resist? And if there is beauty and majesty in all this conflict of the elements, surely it is better to see that, than to sit dreading the unknown. Mr. Kingsnorth’s comparisons are not unjust. It is like a great piece of music, divided into movements. Whatever it may come to later, it is glorious now.”“Spoken like a brave woman,” Kingsnorth cried. “Let loose the dogs of war and make Rome howl! Well, we don’t care; do we, Mrs. Collingwood?”“Not much,” Charlotte assented, though somewhat coldly. Her manner brought him to a sudden check.“I forgot,” he stammered. “Excuse me.”“Forgot what?” This point blank query about a remark not addressed to herself emanated from Mrs. Maclaughlin.“Dear Mrs. Mac,” Kingsnorth said, and Charlotte winced at his tone, “you do not realize how quickly you deteriorate once out of reach of Mac’s disciplining eye. Mac would never have permitted you to ask that question. I often wonder if, had it been my good fortune to marry, I should have been able to exert the strong guiding influence over my wife that Mac evidently holds over you.”“Oh, you have,” replied Mrs. Mac, while Charlotte sat in helpless embarrassment at the scene. “Well, let me tell you that you wouldn’t have. You might have broken her heart, the Lord knows, as you’d probably have broken your children’s spirits, if you’d ’a’ had ’em; but no woman would ever be proud to be ruled by you as I’m proud to be ruled by Mac. I’m disciplined. You hit the nail on the head there. And maybe I fall back when Mac isn’t around. But I love that old manof mine. I’ve followed him over deserts and oceans. I may have let my mind go once in a while; but no woman on God’s green earth would have married you and lived with you twenty-two years, and still have loved you as I love Mac. I’ve been rebellious sometimes with the Almighty, and it hasn’t always seemed as if the powers above knew what they were about. But the good Lord did a wise thing when He kept women and children out of your hands, John Kingsnorth.” She arose with a snort of wrath and passed into the house. “Where’s my Bible?” they heard her saying to herself. “I brought it.”For a second or two, Charlotte remained like Kingsnorth, half paralyzed by the outburst. Then a helpless, pitying embarrassment settled upon her. It was all so terribly true, it was such a baring of naked underfeelings. Would it ever be possible, she wondered, to resume the island life after such an indecent exposure of what simmered deep in Mrs. Maclaughlin’s heart? Then, as the silence grew, she cast about vainly for some change of subject. As if divining her thoughts, Kingsnorth rose.“Already the tempest has broken,” he said.“It’s been brewing three years. I can’t complain; and I know you think she told the truth.”A sudden impulse stirred Charlotte. “No, no,” she said. “You must not think that. I believe that, if you had married the right woman (that’s the stock phrase, isn’t it?) you would have been a tender husband, and if you had had children, a kind father. I don’t know what perversity of fate kept those influences out of your life, but all that is wayward in you and bitter seems to have been caused by their lack.”She uttered the words with real warmth, and for an instant wondered that he made no reply. Then, as the pause grew more marked, she heard him breathing heavily, and it flashed into her mind that the man was on the point of an utter breakdown. Her few sincere words had gone straight through the armor that Mrs. Maclaughlin’s blows had apparently failed to affect. An absolute horror of such a possibility seized upon her. They had had, she felt, an indecent exhibition of naked human emotions. If more were to follow, what intimate revelations might not take place? Yet the impossibility of uttering some banality was clear to her mind. Anything short of the sincerity and earnestnessdemanded by the situation would be insulting. So she remained as if transfixed, in a kind of shivering expectation of what might be coming.Kingsnorth, however, pulled himself together after a convulsive movement or two of his chest. He stood for an instant without a word, and then walked away to his own quarters, whence Charlotte soon heard his voice shouting angrily for his servant.Mrs. Maclaughlin, somewhat appeased by finding the Bible which she had brought along for her usual nightly chapter, came out on the piazza as the strident tones of Kingsnorth penetrated the sitting-room.“Taking it out on his boy,” she remarked. “Well, I’ve been aching to tell the truth to John Kingsnorth for two years, and now I’ve done it.”“Do you feel any better for it?”“Yes—no. I’m always sorry when I blurt out. He’s right: Mac holds me in.” Her voice broke. “Oh, my Lord! My Lord! I wish I knew where he was this minute. You’re a strange woman, Charlotte Collingwood. You sit here and watch them waves roll in and hear the wind blowing, andyou don’t seem to give one thought to the man that you’ve lived here with side by side for a year. Ain’t you got no love for him?”Charlotte put up a hand. “I can’t discuss that with you, Mrs. Maclaughlin. Surely I have made it plain before this.”“You’ve made a lot plain,” replied Mrs. Maclaughlin. There was endless reservation in her tone. It heaped such mountains of unuttered reproach that Charlotte quite bowed under it.“The rain is coming in strong,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin, when she had extracted sufficient healing from her companion’s discomfort. “You’ll get drenched out here. I’m going to read my Bible. You had better come in.”But Charlotte motioned her away. “I’m not religiously inclined to-night,” she replied.“Charlotte Collingwood, do you defy your Maker?”“I’m rebellious to-night, Mrs. Maclaughlin. There are His waves and His winds, but still I’m rebellious. I’m not apologetic to-night, not even in the face of abaguio.”“I’ll speak for you,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin earnestly. She went inside, closed the doors and shellwindows to keep out the storm, and Charlotte heard her keeping her word. Mrs. Maclaughlin’s prayers were simple but fervent. They seemed to consist chiefly of a few reiterated sentences. “O Lord, protect and save my old husband. You know I love him, Lord; but it isn’t all selfishness. O God, give me back my Mac.” At times she asked that the Divine Power might soften the hardened heart of Mrs. Collingwood.
In the month that elapsed between her conversation with Kingsnorth and the time set by Collingwood for his return, Charlotte had time for an exhausting and (as it seemed to her) fruitless self-inquisition. She was alternately the prey of a hopeless apathy and of a consuming impatience, but in either mood there ran a strong undercurrent of rebellion against all the formative influences of her life. At times the future yawned before her like a bottomless gulf, into the darkness and loneliness of which she must inevitably sink helpless. Out of love as she was with her husband, the prospect of going back to her forlorn, loveless state was one she could not contemplate. To get up day after day, knowing that there was, in all this world, no human being who took more than a casual interest in her; to go to bed at night, knowing that, if ruin and disaster overtook the world, no human thought would turn to her, no voice cry to hers out of the darkness, no warm humanhand reach for hers, seemed to her a fate infinitely worse than death. Yet she had lived just that life for twenty-eight years before she married Martin Collingwood to escape from it; and, though she had been most unhappy in it, she certainly had not regarded it as a tragedy. She remembered once having seen a young soldier come forth from the court-room after he had received a life sentence for shooting his corporal. The boy had lifted his hat with his manacled hands and had raised a white face to the touch of the cool morning wind. Something in the gesture had expressed his sense of helplessness in the grasp of that terrible thing we call the law. He was looking down the long vista of years at a living death ten thousand times worse than death, at a life from which every human ambition, every hope, every natural spring had been erased. His brother had followed behind him, a short distance of twenty or thirty feet, already the emblem of a separation that was to become complete. The brother was weeping as strong men do when their hearts are wrung; but, as she had looked at them, one so quiet, the other convulsed with grief, she had recognized that, to the second man, life held comfort and healing still. In the long years tocome, new interests would take the place of the old tie; a wife and babes would fill that life; healthy toil allied to honorable ambition would make the years seem to fly; and the memory of a convict brother would drop out of life, only to be recalled tenderly at those seasons when a universal festival brings back the old days and makes the rotting thread of memory seem new and strong once more. But what of the other? Nothing new would come to him, nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to live upon but memories that would be very, very bitter. There would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil, and the awful knowledge that long before he ceased to live he had ceased to be even to those who had been his nearest and dearest.
Well, she had lived it once. She could live it again. As with the soldier there would be toil and food and rest, and renewed toil. But the heart cries loudly for more than these things in life, until that heart is chastened into meekness. Would she ever be meek, she wondered sadly. If she could have accepted her fate with submission and sadness only, she would have felt herself indeed treated with mercy by the unseen fates. But there was noelement of submission in her mood. As often as she contemplated the future, and said to herself that these things must be, had to be, so often the wild will rose within her to say that they must not be. She lay often for hours at a time face downward on her bed, not a muscle moving, not a sound escaping her tense lips; but her passivity was the physical expression of an impotence that left her prostrate before the overwhelming fates.
Often there recurred to her mind a conversation which had taken place between her and a fellow nurse, a young, joyous, magnetic creature for whom she had formed a friendship more nearly approximating intimacy than any other that had come into her life. It was in the last days of her engagement, and she had spoken of a fear of what unhappiness love might bring into her life. The other had looked at her with amazement. “Love!” she said. “I can imagine it bringing a lot of joy, but why unhappiness?”
“Why unhappiness?” Charlotte asked in vain for the reason; but the fact stood stronger than any “why’s,” that there had been, in all her life, some fundamental outrage of human sentiment. It had existed in that strange paternal attitude of herfather’s; it had lived on in that perfunctory kindness of the nuns who had found her an antipathetic and incomprehensible child; and it had grown and intensified in the curious, prying interest developed in those who had governed her later years. That any such a condition could exist by a series of fortuitous events was out of the question. There had to be cause running through it all. Yet search her heart and mind as she would, she found there no wells of bitterness or evil thought or envy or malice to justify relations so peculiar as had finally established themselves between her and human society.
The solution of the question came to her suddenly, when, on a particularly dreary day, she had been trying to discipline herself and to keep her thoughts from running on her own troubles. She had spent two hours trying to read the story, written by a great modern author, of three precocious school-boys. She had been a great admirer of the author, and, up to that time, had found fascination in his pages; but the three boys were little to her taste. As she mused sadly, a flash of insight came, and another; and, little by little, she saw clearly what had so long puzzled her.
The precocious child is abnormal, and inspires in his fellow men that blind instinct to worry and torment which runs all through the animal world. She had been a precocious child, made uncanny by perceptions of the hidden currents and causes of life at a time when she should have been gurgling over its toys. As she recalled her sensitiveness to impressions, her powers of reading what was passing in others’ minds, and the singular growth of self-concealment and self-control that had grown out of them, it seemed to her that her keen brain had been her lifelong curse. Little by little, she went back to her convent days and tried to put herself in the place of the good sisters who had taught her. How distressing it must have been to them to feel the dumb interrogation that was always so strong under outward obedience! If she could have been unconscious of her father’s mental state and could have made a happy child’s claim upon his affections, would he not in time have come to love her? If, when she was a lonely orphan, living on her cousin’s sufferance, she had been able to reveal to her relatives the suffering that she really underwent in the strange ostracism which she had built up for herself, would not pity have conquered theirselfishness? She drew a long, pained sigh, as she thought of what a difference might have been made in her life by a little less brain and a little more moral courage.
She was lying in her steamer chair on the veranda of her house at the time; and by her side, on a taboret, stood a glass of water. She picked it up and smiled over it. It was full of microbes (dead, of course, for Americans drink no unboiled water in the Philippines), and she knew it, and cared little, for she could not see them. But had she possessed an eye with the magnifying power of a strong microscope, she could not have tasted the water for the sight of the dead organisms would have made it unpalatable. She began to wonder what would be the effect on society, if there were let loose upon it a body of persons with microscopic eyes. They would shrink and exclaim and turn faint at dishes that the epicure delights in. How they would upset dinners and spoil little suppers and picnic luncheons! How eagerly would their society be avoided, and how soon their name become anathema!
But though physically the microscopic eye does not yet exist, the mental and spiritual microscopic eye does exist, and it has about the same distressingeffect upon its human brethren who do not possess it as the other sort might have. She had had the microscopic eye—nothing could blind her to facts—and her starts and shrinkings had made her antipathetic to most of the persons with whom she had come in contact. It had remained for Martin, the indomitably ignorant, to be blind to her mental attitude, to assume her a normal woman of the world in which he found her. What of gratitude did she not owe him?
The thought pricked her to her feet, set her to restless pacings of the floor. Whatever of gratitude she owed him, she was preparing ingratitude in the course she was still bent upon pursuing. Never had she appreciated the stubborn inheritance of her own will till she measured herself against it in this struggle. Whatever the conscience and the intelligence might say, her will said “No” as often as she contemplated forgiving Martin and going back to her life with him. The feeling which had been warm in her heart for him so long was dead—killed by his own brutal words, buried in her own shame and self-reproach. She saw with unutterable sadness, that there was no hope of its resuscitation. But did that break the tie that she had of herown volition forged? Could not that same will of hers which resisted so bitterly be schooled to duty and to right? For against a year’s tenderness and kindness, where was the justice of weighing the utterances of a single hour of pain and disappointment? The one ought not to balance the other. She had no right to think so for an instant. Alas, though, one did balance the other, outweighed it many times!
Her marriage had been all wrong. But had she been less conscious of the fact on the day she married him than on the day when she vainly struggled to convince herself that she ought to go on living with him? Marriage can not be for love alone any more than it can be for selfish material interest alone. In its appeal to human emotion and in its relation to the family it may be, as the church calls it, a sacrament; but marriage as a lifelong partnership must have its material side. Love must enter in; but no healthy marriage can exist, unless there be equally the consciousness of a good bargain, of a legitimate exchange of values, added to the affection which sanctifies it. Well, Collingwood had played fairly. It was she who had entered into the alliance, knowing its weakness, knowing herself.
But did she know herself? What more that was disappointing and agonizing was she to learn of herself? What was even then struggling in her breast? Was there some secret hope holding itself in concealment behind her oft repeated thought that life was ended for her? Did some hidden ambition prompt her to take the step that she believed came from self-respect? She had learned only too well her capacity for self-deception. She had advanced step by step along the path by which she had come to the church door with Martin Collingwood, denying every motive which, in the end, had proved itself the stronger. Was it possible that she was turning blindly, as women naturally turn, to a second man to lift her from the wreck to which she had brought her life with the first? Again she faced that truth which she had long before discovered, that too passionate a denial constitutes an assertion; and while every atom of her intelligence bade her distrust her own sophistry, every throb of a strong emotional nature bade her turn from the conclusions of her reason.
In these hours of agonizing inquisition when her soul seemed literally torn in two, she contemplated with added despair, the loss of her early religiousfaith. It did not come back to her in the least. No impulse for prayer seized her. The conviction that the world is made up of blind forces, and that there is no help outside of ourselves was very strong in her. She might pray and pray, but when she arose from her knees, the elements of struggle would be there still, tearing at her, filling her soul with pain. Prayer would not bring sleep to her aching eyeballs in the night, it would not silence the cry in her heart, it would not keep the thronging thoughts from her weary brain. Time alone could do that. Give her time—she smiled bitterly—and change of circumstances, and she might put the experiences of the last three years behind her, put even the man who had ruled her life and thought for a year (and a happy year) behind her.
Of course she wrestled with the temptations which must present themselves to the intelligent mind which has had the ways of the world set before it. Intelligence said that nothing mattered except the material. She could be good or bad, noble or contemptible, so long as she played her game well and kept on good terms with that thing we call the world. Little the world cares what we do or what we are, said intelligence; the question with it is howmuch power do we own in this vale of tears. Intelligence told her that with the backing of her family and the successful use of her own powers, and with Judge Barton’s political influence, they two might make a very comfortable place for themselves in this material universe. She felt dangerously sure of the Judge. The knowledge had come to her (how she knew not) that all she needed to insure her an absolute dominion over the man’s soul was a little less moral fastidiousness, a little more worldliness. Indeed, a strange confidence in her own powers of attraction was working itself out of all the miserable situation. She realized how completely she had under-estimated her own charm. Less conscience, less good taste, more charity (which is a much misused term in these days, signifying lack of all social and moral tradition), in fact, a general elimination of the best qualities of her nature would constitute a humanizing process which would work decidedly to her material advantage. But she was not willing to submit herself to the process. She wanted her own way, and she wanted to remain her ideal self. More and more clearly she saw the unreasonableness of her demand.
So the days slipped by one by one, and she marked them off on her calendar. In the end, the time for the launch to go up to Romblon arrived without her having taken any decisive steps toward the act which she still declared to herself she was bent upon. She excused herself on the ground of Martin’s letter, saying to herself that she owed him a personal interview and explanation for her refusal to accept his offer of reconciliation. But in truth, she was pulling away again from the uncomfortable. She could contemplate the action, but until circumstances more disagreeable than those she was enduring forced her into activity, she would not take a decisive step.
It had been the original intention that Kingsnorth should take the launch over for Collingwood, but, as the time slipped by, and the typhoon season was at hand this idea was deemed impracticable. Maclaughlin was a licensed engineer, while Kingsnorth was not, and the launch was not in the best of repair.
Maclaughlin left at daybreak on an exceedingly hot morning, when the sea rolled lazily in long, metallic swells shining as if the brilliant surfacewere oiled. All that day the heat was like a vapor, but in mid-afternoon the clouds rolled up, showers fell at intervals, and cool gusts of wind made the cocoanut trees writhe and their stiff leaves to rattle. Once or twice Charlotte looked at the barometer, which fell steadily.
At dinner their common anxiety made the three more companionable than anyone had hoped to be. “We are going to have abaguio, that’s flat,” said Kingsnorth, “but it has been kind in holding off. Mac’s safe in Romblon harbor by this time, and that is landlocked, and shut in by mountains. If Collingwood is there, they’ll wait anyway to come out. Mac’s got sense enough not to leave port on a falling barometer, though Collingwood might take the chances.”
“I hope Martin isn’t out on the ocean to-night,” said Charlotte. “It makes me ill to think of it.” She shivered and glanced into the darkness where the oily surf fell over in ghostly green fire, and the wash rolled back pricked with millions of vanishing light points.
“Spooky, isn’t it?” remarked Kingsnorth. He set down his coffee-cup (they were just finishingdinner), and as his hostess rose, held back the rattling shell curtain for her, then went to inspect the barometer. He whistled.
“What is it?” inquired Mrs. Mac.
“Oh, just so-so.” Something in his tone betrayed an effort to retrieve the impression made by his bit of carelessness. Mrs. Maclaughlin went over to the instrument.
“It’s nearly 750,” she said in a dismayed tone.1“I’ve never known it to go that low without warning since I’ve lived on the island. I wish Mac and Martin were here.”
Charlotte said nothing, but in her heart she echoed the other’s words.
“Can’t be helped,” replied Kingsnorth, curtly. “I hope that you will not feel it presumptuous in me to suggest that Mrs. Maclaughlin stay with you to-night, Mrs. Collingwood. I’ll come over also if there is anything very bad.”
Both women were grateful for the suggestion.Each had been secretly longing to broach the matter, and had felt ashamed to do so.
“I’ll go over with you while you lock up your place,” said Kingsnorth to Mrs. Maclaughlin. They disappeared almost instantly in the profound blackness of the night. Charlotte marvelled at it. The gloom was like a solid substance save where the phosphorescence showed a glimpse of foaming suds, and a few lights gleaming from the distant village seemed golden by contrast with the green and blue fires.
The servants all begged leave to absent themselves for the night. Each had discovered an ailing relative in the village to whom his presence was an absolute necessity.
“Let ‘em go,” said Kingsnorth. “They are in a dead fright. They know we’ll probably have Tophet before the night is over, and they want to get into their flock.” Even as he spoke, a little moan of wind came off the sea, and a pattering shower drenched the earth.
“Curtain rung up,” said Kingsnorth. He had been standing tentatively, hat in hand, after escorting back Mrs. Maclaughlin and some, as it seemed to Charlotte, preposterously large bundles. Charlottemotioned him to a chair. “We may as well watch the first act,” she smiled, humoring his metaphor.
“Just as well,” he answered, “because I fancy we’ll be on the second.”
“Do you mean that there may be any actual danger?” Charlotte asked, startled.
“Danger? no! At the worst we might have to spend a night under the pandan bushes. But one of these big storms is a trying thing while it lasts.”
“Tryingisn’t the word,” Mrs. Maclaughlin precipitated this dictum into the conversation with her usual vigor. “It’s just nerve-wracking. Lord! Lord! what fools we women are! Here are two of us out here likely to be swallowed up by a tidal wave or Heaven only knows what, just because we were so tarnation ready to take up with a man. I’ve traipsed around this world at Andrew Maclaughlin’s heels twenty-two years, and the good Lord only knows what he hasn’t asked me to go through with; and now he’s left me unprotected in the face of the biggest storm we’re likely to have.” She fairly choked with fear and anger.
Mrs. Maclaughlin’s untrammelled speech was at all times an affront to Kingsnorth. The intimationthat he was a poor substitute for Maclaughlin as a protector stung him. When he spoke, his voice had a quality of suave ugliness that grated like a rasped saw on Charlotte’s nerves.
“You’re panicky,” he said. “Why don’t you pattern on Mrs. Collingwood and me? We’re ready for anything; are we not, dear lady?”
A heavy gust of wind and another downpour silenced them all for a few seconds.
“This,” said Kingsnorth to Charlotte, as the gust subsided, “is just preliminary to the theme; it’s the scale playing in the key with which the virtuoso dazzles his audience before he rolls up his cuffs, runs both hands through his hair, and gets into the first movement. Ah, here’s the theme.”
“What’s a virtuoso?” snapped Mrs. Maclaughlin.
“A virtuoso is a gentleman who can play the piano or some other instrument exceedingly well,” Kingsnorth replied, with the same dangerous suavity.
“I hate the nasty long-haired things.” It was quite evident that Mrs. Mac’s nerves had gone to splinters. Charlotte threw herself into the breach.
“Well, don’t hate this storm,” she said, “even ifMr. Kingsnorth did compare it to a sonata. It’s beautiful. It’s grand.” Another howl and downpour, and this time the framework of the house shivered under its impact.
“Merely theandante,” said Kingsnorth, shrugging his shoulders.
“You make my blood run cold,” cried Mrs. Maclaughlin.
It was too dark to see him, but Charlotte knew that his lips were apart and his teeth grinning in an evil smile.
“But why, Mrs. Maclaughlin?” said Charlotte suddenly. “If danger is coming, it will come. No human power can stop it. The future is as unreadable as the very sky. But why borrow trouble for what we are powerless to resist? And if there is beauty and majesty in all this conflict of the elements, surely it is better to see that, than to sit dreading the unknown. Mr. Kingsnorth’s comparisons are not unjust. It is like a great piece of music, divided into movements. Whatever it may come to later, it is glorious now.”
“Spoken like a brave woman,” Kingsnorth cried. “Let loose the dogs of war and make Rome howl! Well, we don’t care; do we, Mrs. Collingwood?”
“Not much,” Charlotte assented, though somewhat coldly. Her manner brought him to a sudden check.
“I forgot,” he stammered. “Excuse me.”
“Forgot what?” This point blank query about a remark not addressed to herself emanated from Mrs. Maclaughlin.
“Dear Mrs. Mac,” Kingsnorth said, and Charlotte winced at his tone, “you do not realize how quickly you deteriorate once out of reach of Mac’s disciplining eye. Mac would never have permitted you to ask that question. I often wonder if, had it been my good fortune to marry, I should have been able to exert the strong guiding influence over my wife that Mac evidently holds over you.”
“Oh, you have,” replied Mrs. Mac, while Charlotte sat in helpless embarrassment at the scene. “Well, let me tell you that you wouldn’t have. You might have broken her heart, the Lord knows, as you’d probably have broken your children’s spirits, if you’d ’a’ had ’em; but no woman would ever be proud to be ruled by you as I’m proud to be ruled by Mac. I’m disciplined. You hit the nail on the head there. And maybe I fall back when Mac isn’t around. But I love that old manof mine. I’ve followed him over deserts and oceans. I may have let my mind go once in a while; but no woman on God’s green earth would have married you and lived with you twenty-two years, and still have loved you as I love Mac. I’ve been rebellious sometimes with the Almighty, and it hasn’t always seemed as if the powers above knew what they were about. But the good Lord did a wise thing when He kept women and children out of your hands, John Kingsnorth.” She arose with a snort of wrath and passed into the house. “Where’s my Bible?” they heard her saying to herself. “I brought it.”
For a second or two, Charlotte remained like Kingsnorth, half paralyzed by the outburst. Then a helpless, pitying embarrassment settled upon her. It was all so terribly true, it was such a baring of naked underfeelings. Would it ever be possible, she wondered, to resume the island life after such an indecent exposure of what simmered deep in Mrs. Maclaughlin’s heart? Then, as the silence grew, she cast about vainly for some change of subject. As if divining her thoughts, Kingsnorth rose.
“Already the tempest has broken,” he said.“It’s been brewing three years. I can’t complain; and I know you think she told the truth.”
A sudden impulse stirred Charlotte. “No, no,” she said. “You must not think that. I believe that, if you had married the right woman (that’s the stock phrase, isn’t it?) you would have been a tender husband, and if you had had children, a kind father. I don’t know what perversity of fate kept those influences out of your life, but all that is wayward in you and bitter seems to have been caused by their lack.”
She uttered the words with real warmth, and for an instant wondered that he made no reply. Then, as the pause grew more marked, she heard him breathing heavily, and it flashed into her mind that the man was on the point of an utter breakdown. Her few sincere words had gone straight through the armor that Mrs. Maclaughlin’s blows had apparently failed to affect. An absolute horror of such a possibility seized upon her. They had had, she felt, an indecent exhibition of naked human emotions. If more were to follow, what intimate revelations might not take place? Yet the impossibility of uttering some banality was clear to her mind. Anything short of the sincerity and earnestnessdemanded by the situation would be insulting. So she remained as if transfixed, in a kind of shivering expectation of what might be coming.
Kingsnorth, however, pulled himself together after a convulsive movement or two of his chest. He stood for an instant without a word, and then walked away to his own quarters, whence Charlotte soon heard his voice shouting angrily for his servant.
Mrs. Maclaughlin, somewhat appeased by finding the Bible which she had brought along for her usual nightly chapter, came out on the piazza as the strident tones of Kingsnorth penetrated the sitting-room.
“Taking it out on his boy,” she remarked. “Well, I’ve been aching to tell the truth to John Kingsnorth for two years, and now I’ve done it.”
“Do you feel any better for it?”
“Yes—no. I’m always sorry when I blurt out. He’s right: Mac holds me in.” Her voice broke. “Oh, my Lord! My Lord! I wish I knew where he was this minute. You’re a strange woman, Charlotte Collingwood. You sit here and watch them waves roll in and hear the wind blowing, andyou don’t seem to give one thought to the man that you’ve lived here with side by side for a year. Ain’t you got no love for him?”
Charlotte put up a hand. “I can’t discuss that with you, Mrs. Maclaughlin. Surely I have made it plain before this.”
“You’ve made a lot plain,” replied Mrs. Maclaughlin. There was endless reservation in her tone. It heaped such mountains of unuttered reproach that Charlotte quite bowed under it.
“The rain is coming in strong,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin, when she had extracted sufficient healing from her companion’s discomfort. “You’ll get drenched out here. I’m going to read my Bible. You had better come in.”
But Charlotte motioned her away. “I’m not religiously inclined to-night,” she replied.
“Charlotte Collingwood, do you defy your Maker?”
“I’m rebellious to-night, Mrs. Maclaughlin. There are His waves and His winds, but still I’m rebellious. I’m not apologetic to-night, not even in the face of abaguio.”
“I’ll speak for you,” said Mrs. Maclaughlin earnestly. She went inside, closed the doors and shellwindows to keep out the storm, and Charlotte heard her keeping her word. Mrs. Maclaughlin’s prayers were simple but fervent. They seemed to consist chiefly of a few reiterated sentences. “O Lord, protect and save my old husband. You know I love him, Lord; but it isn’t all selfishness. O God, give me back my Mac.” At times she asked that the Divine Power might soften the hardened heart of Mrs. Collingwood.
1Barometric pressure in Philippines is measured in millimeters. In typhoons where fifth signal is flown, about 742 is lowest pressure recorded. In great storm of 1908, 739.8 was lowest. Generally the falling of the barometer is gradual for several days during the continuance of the storm. When it falls suddenly, as here indicated, before a storm, it means that a storm of short duration but of terrific violence is coming.
1Barometric pressure in Philippines is measured in millimeters. In typhoons where fifth signal is flown, about 742 is lowest pressure recorded. In great storm of 1908, 739.8 was lowest. Generally the falling of the barometer is gradual for several days during the continuance of the storm. When it falls suddenly, as here indicated, before a storm, it means that a storm of short duration but of terrific violence is coming.