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The Locusts' Years

by Mary H. Fee · English · Gutenberg #37089 · 437,755 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Locusts' Years

Author: Mary H. Fee

Illustrator: Charles N. Sarka


        
Release date: August 14, 2011 [eBook #37089]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOCUSTS' YEARS ***




Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net/








                           THE LOCUSTS' YEARS

                                   By
                             MARY HELEN FEE

                               Author of
             A Woman's Impressions of the Philippines, etc.

                             Illustrated by
                             Charles Sarka



                                Chicago
                          A. C. McClurg & Co.
                                  1912






                             To my Brother






THE LOCUSTS' YEARS


CHAPTER I


When a man has reached the point where he can reflect, with cynical
satisfaction, upon the brutality of organized society, and can
contemplate unmoved one of its victims; and when the cause of his
reflections is a woman not over thirty, whose worth and refinement
are obvious to any reader of faces, that man either must possess a
coarse-grained and cruel nature, or he must be very highly civilized.

No shade of doubt could have entered Judge Alexander Barton's mind as
to which of these adjectives applied to him. He would have repudiated
the faintest hint that a taint of coarseness or cruelty could lie in
him. His was one of those eminent political personalities which bubble
up from the great caldron of American democracy. He had convictions
and principles of a high order. They appeared frequently in the shape
of addresses to young men's political and reading clubs, or in a "few
remarks" at church socials, where a programme of songs and recitations
was followed by the distribution of home-made cakes and candies,
and of uninspiriting beverages. It was sometimes remarked of him in
that other world which he frequented that his conscientiousness in
attending these mild-flavored symposia was the indisputable evidence
of his fitness to adorn the roster of the Philippine judiciary. For to
whom may we look for an example, if not to the interpreters of the law,
whose position vests them with dignity, social and official? From
whom may we demand the utterance of lofty principles and of high
convictions, if not from the very men whose business it is to punish
the unhappy wretches whose actions have declared their principles,
expressed or otherwise, of the flimsiest?

Judge Barton was also frequently extolled as the pattern of American
democracy, as, indeed, he was. Nothing could have been more catholic
than his handshake, nothing more finely measured than the appreciation
which it conveyed of the recipient's relation to himself: to the
veteran of the Army of the Philippines, it was hearty, and bespoke the
comrade in arms; to the struggling young civil-service employee, it was
encouraging, and it hinted, ever so delicately, that the inspiration
for great ambitions ought to lie in the example of living statesmen; to
the clergy and to the members of the Educational Department, who fairly
swarm in the Philippines, it was fraternal and spoke confidentially
of the tie which linked them in a great work; and to the effervescing
spume from the Pacific coast, which is knocking about Manila, loud in
vituperation of the change from democratic to bureaucratic society--to
that segment of Young America whose disposition to criticise existing
institutions led to the happy phrase "undesirable citizens"--the
Judge's democratic cordiality always embodied a hope that their mutual
relations might continue forever harmonious, and it even intimated
that no act on his part could make them otherwise.

The cause of the Judge's highly civilized musings was one of those
undesirable citizens of the feminine gender; and, if you ask how
anything proper in the feminine gender may be classed as an undesirable
citizen, there can only be cited an opinion from the Judge himself--one
of those ex-cathedra sentiments which he held as infallible--that any
one who refuses to accept pleasantly a situation which he is powerless
to remedy, and who continues a quarrel which is futile and which can
result only disastrously to its single champion, that person is,
primarily, inefficient, and, secondarily, insane; either of which
states is undesirable. Furthermore, there is nothing so repellent
to a man as the feminine weakness which enlists his sympathy, and,
at the same time, challenges the terms on which it is given. To find
the shivering wretch on whom you would bestow an alms repudiating
your charity and mutely reproaching you for the condition of things
which makes you donor and him recipient--in such a metaphor, perhaps,
the Judge might have condensed the musings which a month's illness
and the daily opportunity of studying Miss Ponsonby had bred.

The young woman who had received so much of His Honor's valuable
consideration did not look a very formidable antagonist in a quarrel
with organized society. She stood at an open window of the hospital,
gazing down on a convalescent-strewn lawn, where a military band was
delighting the sick with a Christmas Eve concert. Her tall figure
was very slender--so slender, in fact, as to make it quite evident
that the blue cotton nurse's dress which she wore was the survival
of a plumper epoch. She was not a beautiful woman, nor was she even
a pretty one, though she was far from being ugly. Her eyes were gray
and kind, with well arched brows. Her nose was slightly aquiline,
with sensitive nostrils. A rather low forehead, a broad mouth, and a
shapely head covered with brown hair, were attributes which she shared
with any number of women. What particularly marked her was a delicate
grace of manner, an emanation of fastidiousness in every glance and
movement, a reserve which at times became almost stiffness; in short,
a distinction which, in happier circumstances, might have made her
envied, but which in the mixture of a pioneer community served only
to isolate her.

For at least two weeks of convalescence, Judge Barton had amused
himself with the attempt to determine why Miss Ponsonby's charm and
distinction should be assets of so little practical value to her. His
decision was that, in appearance most distinguished, she was singularly
lacking in the unconscious self-confidence which usually accompanies
distinction; that, a most feminine creature in many respects, she
was unfemininely distrustful of her power over men. There was, in her
perfectly dignified attitude toward the other sex, and in the absence
of all coquetry, a sort of proud abdication of feminine rights. She
resigned all a woman's natural claim upon man's emotional nature; and
the keen analyst who had studied her so closely fancied that he could
detect a repressed challenge of man's superiority. He classified her
(with a kind of shrugging pity) as one of those women of whom all
men speak respectfully and many men admiringly, but who grow old and
plain and bitter, unsought among their more frivolous sisters. At
the same time, he admitted an attraction which had kept him bidding
indirectly for her notice.

Miss Ponsonby's impassive reserve with men was so wholly a confession,
and, at the same time, so proud a disclaimer of the usual meek
attitude of unpopular women, that it not only irritated the man
who could analyze her, but it provoked his curiosity and led him
into attempt after attempt to sting her into speech and unconscious
revelations. And whenever he did so and retired, foiled, with the
consciousness of having given an unmanly stab to weakness, his man's
desire to think well of himself made him put the blame upon her.

On the afternoon of that particular day, Miss Ponsonby's feminine
characteristics were in possession. She leaned rather languidly
against the window frame, and her bodily fatigue, and a self-conscious
forlornness which she strove habitually to conceal, were quite
evident. Every movement betrayed the woman pushed beyond her strength;
every sensitive, quivering line of her face hinted at emotions rioting
under a repressed exterior.

If her very apparent dejection aroused no compunction in the Judge
(he being so highly civilized) it evoked an ardent sympathy from the
young man in the next bed; for, in those days, not even the potency of
a Judge's title could have commanded a private room in the hospital. As
a next best expedient, Judge Barton had been placed in a small room
opening from the main ward, and containing but two beds. The exigencies
of an overcrowded surgical ward made it necessary that the second bed
should be occupied by a young pearl fisher, with a crushed chest,
who had been taken off a wrecked lorcha. His magnificent physique,
and the face of a Greek statue, would have lured from a woman a more
complimentary description than the term "young ruffian" which Judge
Barton had instantly but inaudibly fastened upon him. "Young ruffian"
is perhaps an exaggerated phrase to describe the beauty and insouciance
which, in a male, may be qualified by a hat too far on one side. The
Judge had never seen Collingwood in his hat, but he divined just the
angle which the young man's taste approved.

Collingwood was gradually recovering, but he was still unable to
move without the assistance of a nurse or of one of the Filipino
attendants. He had the black hair, the pink and white skin, and,
the cameo-cut profile of a Celtic ancestry, modified by his father's
union with a woman of Tennessee pioneer stock. His eyes, which should
have been the Irishman's blue, were a steadfast brown. His frame
was a little more massive than his father's had been; the Irishman's
blarney had merged into the chaff of the Westerner; but enough of Irish
humor remained to lend flavor to the practical, hard-headed sense
which he had inherited from the mountaineer side of the family. His
speech was cheery and careless, yet shrewd; lacking in polish, yet not
uncouth. He was not uneducated, and took an innocent satisfaction in
having credentials to show for that fact, being a graduate of a small
high-school in one of the Middle States. The Judge had found him a
not uninteresting companion, for he was outspoken, a born lover of
adventure, and a born money-maker, if the Judge ever knew one.

However, Collingwood himself interested Judge Barton far less than
did the growth of an emotion in the young man which the dignitary
had covertly watched enlarge from an expansive gratitude to absorbing
affection. The "young ruffian" had fallen head over ears in love with a
woman whose critical faculties and fastidious instincts might well have
shaken the courage of a more pretentious suitor; and he enjoyed the
ruffian's usual advantage of being sensitive to material difficulties
only. If he felt the distinction in Miss Ponsonby's manner, it was
not as something which separated her from him, but as something which
made her only more desirable. He mistook her reserve for shyness; her
proud detachment, for meekness. He was aflame to seize the woman who
not only appealed to his senses, but who stirred ambitions of which
he was hardly conscious, and to bear her away from her overtasked
life. He wished to play King Cophetua to the beggar maid; and he was
saved from appearing supremely ridiculous only by his sincerity and
by freedom from all self-consciousness in his desire.

It was so natural that a young ruffian should fall in love with
probably the first gentlewoman with whom he had come into frequent
association, that the Judge wasted no particular attention on
Collingwood's side of the case. What really interested that gentleman
was Miss Ponsonby's attitude. For, as he put it to himself, there was
a woman with an undeniable personality, engaged in a dumb squabble
with society because she could not obtain a recognition of that
personality; and the only admirer and partisan she could muster was
a young ruffian so far removed from atmospheric influences that he
had not recognized that she was a personality; a man who would not
have known what was meant by the word. She might have been the young
woman who despatches telegrams from the lobby of a first-class hotel,
so far as Collingwood's assumption that she belonged to his world was
concerned. Her nurse's apron and cap were to him the indisputable
evidences of his right to claim her for his friend or for his
sweetheart, provided, of course, that the attraction was mutual;
and that her taste might be influenced by any other standard than his
own, he had no suspicion. Judge Barton had even detected at times the
tacit overture for a class combination, the assumption that they of
the toilers needed no chance civility from one temporarily thrown
into their society. That the situation daily developing under his
observant eyes must be humiliating to Miss Ponsonby, Judge Barton had
not the least doubt. But he was sufficiently human to hope that the
hour of Collingwood's discomfiture (for of that also he had no doubt)
might be delayed until he, the Judge, was ready to leave the hospital,
and to find some other amusement than that of watching a proud woman's
struggle with her femininity.

Collingwood, quite unconscious of the Judge's observant eye, lay
watching Miss Ponsonby with an alertness which contrasted strangely
with his maimed body. There was, in his slightly dilated nostril and
in the glow of his eye, the suggestion of a horse which pricks forward
its ears and accelerates its pace as it nears home; and perhaps some
latent instinct of domesticity lay at the bottom of the man's rather
inexplicable fancy for Miss Ponsonby.

It was inexplicable, not only through the social gulf which actually
divided them, but through the fact that she had never been a man's
woman, and that all Collingwood's previous attachments had been for
the type of woman who is adored by the opposite sex. Miss Ponsonby
was not diffident under his advances, nor was she overwhelmed by a
man's favor, little as she had enjoyed of it. Attention of a sort
she had had, because the position of the relatives who had brought
her up was such that any member of their household had to be taken
into consideration; but from the time she had left the shelter of
their roof, she had received from men an indifference as profound as
it was respectful. Collingwood's very open admiration was the first
tracery upon a page which was humiliatingly blank.

It had begun--his admiration--on his first night in the hospital,
when he lay a bandaged mummy, racked with pain, a mounting fever
adding its torments to the closeness of a muggy, tropical night. There
were memories of its sufferings mingled with gentle ministrations,
of touches soothing to his worn body, of a feeling of helplessness
and dependence upon this gentleness, which carried him back to his
half-forgotten childhood, and washed, as clean as his school-boy's
slate, a philosophy of life acquired in numerous love affairs with
the young ladies of hotel lobbies, and of restaurant check stands.

The impression remained overnight and increased by reason of the
succession of another nurse, who prided herself upon her jollity,
and believed that her patients needed cheering up. Collingwood was
in such a condition that jollity was an affront to him. He endured
the cheerful lady as best he could, and counted the long hours till
four o'clock brought back his madonna.

The word had no part in Collingwood's vocabulary; but it is applicable
because it expresses the quality of worship which he had injected into
an otherwise very mundane emotion. Collingwood, who was as innocent as
a babe of social traditions, who was an American democrat through and
through, and believed that all men are equal, save as the possession
of "the price" enables one man to command more of this world's
goods than another, was unable to account for the elements in Miss
Ponsonby's nature which whetted his desires, by any of the threads
which contributed to the fabric of his philosophy; and he explained
them by imputing to the lady the rare and peculiar quality of goodness.

Goodness! There you have the weak point in the arch of man's
philosophical structure, the thing which at once embodies his
highest ideal and his most human distaste, the thing over which he
has rhapsodized in poetry, which he has exalted into a theology,
and which he has ruthlessly crucified whenever he has met it in the
flesh. Collingwood supposed that Miss Ponsonby's delicate rejection of
his advances (a rejection qualified by some feeling which a lover's
instinct had to interpret to his advantage) originated in goodness,
in a final struggle of the etherealized feminine nature before
it submitted to its incarnation and became bound in the flesh. He
thought the delicate self-restraint with which she met the caprices and
fretfulness of her wards was founded on heavenly patience. He imagined
that her occasional snubs of Judge Barton were the outcroppings of
an inward shrinking from a passion to which she could not respond;
for, loverlike, he assumed that all men must feel as he did about
his divinity and he could not perceive the undercurrent of patronage
in the Judge's not infrequent gallantries, which was like an acid on
Miss Ponsonby's quivering nerves.

It was a delicious situation. Judge Barton rubbed his hands in
enjoyment of it, and you must admit that he had some justification
in the lady's persistent refusal to make the best of his somewhat
generous efforts to establish friendly relations. Oh, yes, it was a
delicious situation; and the only one element in it which the Judge
never suspected was that secret response to the young man's tenderness
which the lover himself had divined, which whetted him in spite of
studied rebuffs, and which, his alleged democracy notwithstanding,
all Judge Barton's class instincts would have unhesitatingly pronounced
unseemly--as, indeed, the young woman herself regarded it.






CHAPTER II


Charlotte Ponsonby continued to lean against the window in an
abstraction which registered impressions very much as a flagellant's
ecstasy may note the pathway of his torment. The consciousness of her
own perturbation made it exceedingly difficult to turn around. She
was so unhappy that it seemed the fact must be evident to even
a casual observer. She was afraid of a kindly word, or of a mere
friendly glance, lest it should break through the self control she
had been exerting.

When at length the National Anthem had been played, and lucent
amber was fading into early dusk, the nurse had no further excuse
for turning her back on the two patients in her ward. She did not
glance at them as she moved away, but her quick return with a glass
of milk showed that one of them, at least, was in her thoughts. She
offered the refreshment to Collingwood with an explanation, in a dry,
professional tone, for its being three minutes late.

He sipped it, looking over the rim with his steadfast brown eyes.

"I'm tired," he said fretfully.

"I suppose you must be. I will move you when you have finished that."

"I wonder," Judge Barton mused, "if nurses do not sometimes feel like
saying 'So am I' when we fellows complain of being tired, or nervous,
or out of patience."

Miss Ponsonby threw him a smile of recognition for the courtesy of the
thought. "Very often they do," she replied, "but that thought would
not come in the case of Mr. Collingwood, because he is tired, and we
know that he suffers. Nurses seldom think of themselves so long as
they can reasonably think of their patients." Her outstretched hand
conveyed an intimation to the patient under discussion that he was
taking an unusual time to consume a glass of milk.

Collingwood was not a man to be hurried when he had an object in taking
time. He affected not to see her hand, when, in reality, he wanted
to caress it; and he continued to sip his milk very slowly indeed.

"Christmas Eve," he said lugubriously, "a bum Christmas if ever there
was one."

"Yes," said Judge Barton. "Collingwood has an epoch now in life--a
landmark. Hereafter he will class all events as before or after the
Christmas he spent in hospital."

"Oh, you," Collingwood threw at him, "you can afford to smile. You
have plenty of friends. It's not the same with you as with a poor
devil like me."

"My dear fellow," expostulated the Judge, "'at night all cats are
gray.' Friends do not make a Christmas. When one is away from one's
home and family at this season, there are no gradations. Ask Miss
Ponsonby."

"Is it true, Miss Ponsonby, what he says?" inquired Collingwood with
the air of one appealing to an infallible tribunal.

"I don't know, Mr. Collingwood. Judge Barton must look for his support
to someone who has passed through both experiences. I have passed
Christmas away from my family, but I have not passed one surrounded
by a host of friends."

"Ah, but you understand so much," the Judge murmured. Irritated by
her unresponsiveness, he grew almost impertinent. "The keenness of
your intelligence is only excelled by your kindness of heart."

Miss Ponsonby's cheek for an instant flew danger signals, but she
said nothing. She looked at the Judge a moment and subdued him. Then--

"I do not believe you give me credit for any great kindness of heart,"
she said simply.

"Then must I give you credit for the patience of Job."

"That you may do." She took the glass from Collingwood, who, after
an ineffectual effort to convince himself that it was not empty,
yielded it reluctantly.

The Judge, with a delicacy which he practised with almost ceremonial
observance, turned on his pillow and gave them the benefit of a wealth
of grizzled black hair, covering a massive head. He would not intrude
upon the act of changing the young man's wearied posture. His excess
of delicacy robbed the act of its naturalness, made it seem personal
and intimate.

Collingwood felt the nurse's hesitation. His heart thumped in glad
triumph. Let her rule her manner as she would, she could not make
that service impersonal. He saw her teeth catch her underlip as she
bent over him. Her eyes would not meet his, which glued themselves
appealingly upon her face. She slipped her arm under him, however,
while his own went about her neck.

In spite of her care, and the perfect training of her action, the
slight change which she made in his position wrenched a groan from
him. Yet as she laid him back and still stooped, drawing her arms
from under him, his own clinging arms tightened, and he pressed his
lips ardently against the cheek so near his own.

For a breath, the very shortest breath a man ever drew, he could have
sworn he felt a response to the caress, a womanly yielding to all
that affection and dependence may imply. Then her eyes, startled, met
his, and on the heels of a fawn-like timidity, a wave of fierceness
sent the red blood dyeing her cheek, set the high arched nostril
aquiver. The intuition flashed into his brain that it was the first
man's caress which had ever touched her soft cheek, and that she was
no less frightened than indignant. The joy of the thought drove his
blood leaping and stifled his cry of protest, as she drew hurriedly
back and left him. She moved rapidly toward the corridor, whence the
babble of a woman's voice, which grew louder as the owner advanced,
came floating in.

The lady, weighted with flowers, who had come to bring the season's
remembrances to the suffering dignitary, had paid him several previous
visits, was known to Charlotte, and was an object of no little
curiosity to Collingwood. She was a member of a very fashionable
set, and bore its stamp in dress and mannerisms. She was tall and
large-boned, with an ugly, intense face framed in a mass of the
then fashionable chestnut-red hair. Save for its haughty demand for
consideration, her countenance was not unlike those of her fallen
sisters in the suburbs of Manila. There were the same suggestions of
life drained to the dregs, the challenge, the hard look about the
eyes. She had the manner of an actress, a kind of studied, feline
grace which fell into postures and left the observer in doubt whether
her next move would be a purr or the stroke of a treacherous paw.

The lady took Miss Ponsonby's hand and held it during the course of
several honeyed utterances. Yet the effect of her courtesy was an
impression not of kindness, but of insolence. She managed to convey
the idea that civility to one's inferiors is an attribute of a great
lady, and that she was living up to the demands of her position. When
she passed to the bedside of the afflicted one, however, a warmth,
a glow of the magnetism which she could exert diffused itself like
an essence in the bare, ugly room. She addressed the Judge in the
abusive strain of intimacy.

"You fraudulent creature!" she reproached him, "lying here, pretending
to be ill when I want you at my dinner."

"Dear lady, don't." The Judge gestured away the phantom of that
dinner. Being shut out of paradise, he could not talk of its glories.

Mrs. Badgerly laughed in his face. Then she looked around the room
for the nurse. She wished her flowers arranged just so in the bowl
of old Chinese bronze which her husband and she hoped would keep them
green in a dear friend's memory. Would Miss Ponsonby put them in one
by one as she directed? She herself was afraid of ruining her frock,
which had already led to recrimination between herself and her husband.

"You do it beautifully, you know," she purred, as the nurse's deft
fingers planted sprays of green and white. "You must not mind my
comments. I am supposed to be a critic--really competent. I took
lessons in Japan. Nothing is so satisfying as to lie face down on
the floor, sticking cherry blossoms into a Satsuma vase."

"Speaking of Japan," remarked Judge Barton, "have those silks which
you promised to get for me come yet?"

"You are not to mention those silks. They are on a navy boat."

"Smuggling again," said the Judge. "I believe you women do it for
the sake of intrigue. You will never rest till you have gotten some
poor wretch cashiered and have driven me off the bench. I did not mind
the duty, and I do mind the delay. Why didn't you have them sent down
by mail?"

"I mind the duty. I shall oppose it on principle whenever I can. I
delight in evading customs duties. It is the greatest pleasure I have
in life."

"Badgerly votes a Republican ticket, doesn't he?"

"What ticket he votes is immaterial. So is what you say. Would you
find me guilty and sentence me to imprisonment if I came up for trial
in your august court?"

"I've no doubt I should cast about for extenuating circumstances,
though you would not deserve my doing so. So I am to be the purveyor
of smuggled goods, eh?"

"Oh, if you are too holy--" she rippled.

"Dear me, I hope I don't set up for being holy. I should almost
prefer the title of smuggler. Still, in my position, it might look
awkward. However, I've always been a pliant fool in a woman's hands,
and I haven't the backbone to rise up and protest. If you are
determined to smuggle, I suppose you must, but don't tell me about it."

"How you politicians do juggle with your consciences," she
retorted. "You would have liked me so much better if I hadn't told
you. You would have known, but you could have pretended not to." She
glanced up in time to catch a flicker of distaste in Miss Ponsonby's
eyes, as that lady hastily withdrew them after a covert scrutiny of
the Judge. "But how I run on!" she declared flippantly. "I am afraid
we are shocking your good nurse."

If Miss Ponsonby took note of the condescension in Mrs. Badgerly's
choice of adjectives, she did not betray the fact. She quite repudiated
any inclination to be shocked. "You could not do it," she declared
ambiguously, planting the last spray.

Mrs. Badgerly took Miss Ponsonby's measure deliberately. She had long
before admitted the personality. She now divined the quarrel. It gave
her a rapturous moment of triumph to realize that there was a woman
pulled down by the weight of material circumstances which buoyed her
up. The full flavor of her insolence rioted in her blood. What was
character, what was personality, to power?

She carried a swagger stick of Philippine camagon wood, tipped with a
rare piece of Chinese ivory carving. She swung one knee over the other,
revealing a mass of dainty petticoats, and silken hose, and a pair
of high-heeled slippers. She lolled back, her keen face supported by
one slender gloved hand, while she swished her voluminous draperies
with the swagger stick. Even Judge Barton, who knew her so well, was
stunned by her audacity. He felt as if each blow were a lash on the
shoulders of the woman facing her, who had turned to leave them. He
felt that Mrs. Badgerly wanted them so interpreted.

"So glad you are not narrow," said Mrs. Badgerly suavely, "I hate
cats, old feminine cats. I lunched with six of them yesterday. I tried
to propitiate them. 'I've been just as bad as bad can be,' I said,
'but I am not going to be so any more. I'm going to be good as gold
from now on. I've even told my husband so.'"

She paused to let the full audacity of her remarks sink into her
auditors' minds. Judge Barton held his breath. It was a masterly
inspiration to flaunt her impudence in the other's face. "What is your
purity worth? your delicacy? your refinement? your fastidiousness?" she
seemed to exult. "Will they win you notice or consideration? You
are not the companion, the friend of this man; I am that. You are
his menial. What does his secret opinion of either of us matter? His
deference is for me."

"Yes," went on Mrs. Badgerly, still blocking Miss Ponsonby's way with
her theatrically shod feet. "I made my little confession--wasn't it
dear of me?--in public, and they looked shocked. Nothing is more
vulgar than to be shocked. They sat and stared at one another in
helpless bewilderment. They had not a word to say."

If Mrs. Badgerly felt that the helpless indignation of six ladies
whose commercial and official relations with her husband through the
medium of their husbands had to be supported by civility to his wife;
if she felt that their action formed any precedent for the young
woman in a nurse's cap and apron, she made her first error then and
there. The very faintest suggestion of contempt swept across Miss
Ponsonby's aristocratic features. She made a little forward movement,
just sufficient to force Mrs. Badgerly to draw back her French slipper.

"Probably they did not believe you," she said gently; "and, as they
could not possibly say so, there was nothing else to be said."

The snigger with which Collingwood received this (he had been
listening, but it was Mrs. Badgerly's fault, she pitched her voice
too high) was drowned in an exclamation from the Judge.

"Ah-ha, Mrs. Badgerly, there you have your riposte. You must not
try fencing with Miss Ponsonby. Did I not tell you long ago that she
was clever, far too clever for you or me? But she is kind, too. She
is too generous to take you at your word, though she does not mind
countering with you for the pure skill of it."

Charlotte's response was a somewhat drawn smile as she moved
away. Mrs. Badgerly, though taken aback, was not routed. She still
felt that the sinews of war were in her hands, and, until the close
of her visit, she made a series of demands upon the nurse which could
not courteously be refused, but which kept that unfortunate always
waiting upon her. She reserved a few arrows till her departure.

"Dear nurse," she said, laying a hand on Miss Ponsonby's arm, "I have
been a dreadful nuisance, but I must be forgiven. People are so good
to me. They always do forgive me. You will--I know you will. You look
so tired, dear nurse. Won't you let me send the carriage for you some
evening when I am not going out? I am sure you ought to be rewarded in
Heaven for the sacrifices you make on earth. Are you always occupied
at this hour?--the only time when Manila is agreeable?"

Martin Collingwood, who was even more obtuse than the generality of
men in matters where women's finesse is concerned, took these feminine
taunts at their face value. They moderated the resentment which,
at first, the obvious prosperity and self-confidence of the visitor
had aroused. He had anathematized her with the favorite adjective
of democracy: he had mentally labelled her "stuck up." But the tenor
of the conversation went far to remove that impression. Its delicate
thrusts, its cruel taunts, he missed; but the unvarnished effrontery
of it reminded him, save for a flavor of smartness which he relished
but could not define, of the frankness of some of the young ladies
who had contributed to his discarded philosophy.

Nevertheless, he gloried somewhat inconsistently in Miss Ponsonby's
ill concealed reprobation. Her spunkiness (his own word, dear reader)
delighted him as a further evidence of that holiness which was
essential to his madonna. The remembrance of his stolen kiss flowed
back to him, and he lay alternately quaking and enraptured at the
thought of his own boldness.

Miss Ponsonby put aside Mrs. Badgerly's thanks and declined her
carriage. She went about her evening duties with a kind of startled
grace like some nerve-tense creature, ready to leap at a sound. Not
a single glance fell Collingwood's way.

But at nine o'clock, when lights were to go out, the necessity of
administering medicine to Judge Barton made her bear down on their
little ward with a tray. She was very self-possessed, so much so that
the keen man of the world guessed that her late encounter had been
more trying than she was willing for him to know.

Still, the motive which made him utter a word or two of apology for
his guest was not wholly kind. Miss Ponsonby had snubbed his friend,
and to do that was to impugn the greatness of the man himself.

"I am afraid that my caller gave you a great deal of trouble," he said.

Charlotte smiled. "It mattered little. I am here for that."

"A great deal of trouble," he repeated, detaining her by holding his
medicine untasted. "But, as she said, she must be forgiven. Ah! there
is nothing so perfect as the assurance of spoiled women!"

That hurt. It drew a contrast. She, Charlotte Ponsonby, was not
spoiled, and she had no assurance, and he could not forgive her for
it. Pain jarred an injudicious reply from her.

"Why are they spoiled?"

"My dear lady! Why is the earth scattered with the records of man's
folly? Because he feels, and they prey upon his miserable feelings. I
am not sure that you are mundane enough to understand."

"I am not certain that I do understand. But I am certain that my
stupidity does not originate in any ultramundane flights."

"Ah, you're clever," said the Judge, "dangerously clever."

"No woman is dangerously clever till she uses her wits for evil
purposes," she said, flushing. "I resent your choice of adjectives."

"A thousand pardons," he cried. "I was thinking of the effect of your
cleverness upon yourself, not upon others, and I cannot retract. It
is dangerous for any woman's happiness to analyze herself and all
the world as you do."

She gave a little shrug, and held out her hand for the glass.

"Bear with me," he pleaded. "I am not sleepy, and you wish to turn
out the lights and leave me in the darkness to ponder my sins."

"It is my solemn duty to turn them out at once if you are going to
do that."

"I protest. Hold on just a minute, and I'll swallow the nauseous
stuff. Seriously, Miss Ponsonby, don't you think--all advantages and
disadvantages taken into consideration--that it is a good thing for
a woman to be spoiled?"

"I am not certain. What do you mean by spoiled?"

"Oh, womanly will do for a definition."

"Is Mrs. Badgerly womanly?"

"Not in the completest sense, but womanly enough to be spoiled--to
base all her demands upon her charms, and not upon her rights."

"I will think that over. It presents a field for interesting
thought. But do drink your medicine."

"Not until you have told me what you really think."

"I think you leave no place for the women with no charms. Has she no
rights either?"

"The proper sort of woman does not want any rights. She values her
charms infinitely higher than all the rights that can be given her."

"That must be exceedingly pleasant for the women who are born
charming. But I insist that a sensible woman should value the
attainable more than the unattainable. Charm is unattainable by
any conscious process. The woman born without it had better make
few claims if, to use a commercial metaphor, she wants her drafts
honored. There is nothing for her to do but philosophically to make
the best of the situation, and to accept those things which are the
commonly admitted rights of her sex."

"Ah! you reason so clearly and practically. But don't be a
philosopher. Don't let philosophy creep upon you. Resist it. You
know the quotation, I am sure, 'That unloveliest of things in women,
a philosopher.'"

He set the glass to his lips, so that he did not see how she paled
under the thrust, nor how one hand went to her throat quickly as if
a sudden pain had gripped her. When he had finished drinking and had
set the empty glass upon her tray, she switched off the light without
her usual "good-night," and left him.

"Nurse--Miss Ponsonby," said a small voice in the gloom, a most abject
voice to issue from six feet of recumbent manhood, "won't you come
here a minute?"

Miss Ponsonby paused, but did not look back. "Are you awake?" she
inquired evenly. "I thought you were asleep hours ago. You must be
dreadfully tired. The attendant is here now, the one who handles you
so nicely. I will send him to you immediately."

A man cannot lie in the dark and cry for a nurse who will not
come. Collingwood submitted, though fear had taken possession of
him. His late audacity seemed madness.

The night wore on. Clouds obscured the sky, and a hot, choking darkness
blocked the windows, with solid blackness. The sounds of traffic grew
intermittent. Occasionally a carriage went past, full of drunken
soldiers or marines, shouting and singing. Once the ambulance went
out and came back with an emergency case.

Collingwood's bed commanded the door which opened into the main ward,
so that he had a perfect view of Miss Ponsonby, sitting at her desk
and working at her report. A thick green shade cut the light from
the room, but centred it like a halo around her shapely head.

By and by, though her features were composed, the watcher saw a glisten
of light which flashed at recurrent intervals as a tear dropped
downward. The sight filled him with repentance and perplexity. He
associated the tears, though he could not tell why, with his stolen
kiss. He had kissed more young women in his life than he had energy
at that moment to remember; and no one before had felt his caresses
a reasonable pretext for weeping. Here again was that mysterious
goodness mixing up a situation which ought to have been simple as day,
and yet he was glad that it was there to mix.

A faint sound from Judge Barton's couch told him that the Judge, too,
was wakeful and had seen the sparkling drops; but he could not hear
what that gentleman was saying to himself.

"Not a philosopher," he murmured, "not a philosopher, but
uncompromising. Why isn't she attractive! She ought to be
attractive." Then, quite gently, "Poor creature! Why doesn't she
surrender? Why doesn't she accept the situation and compromise
with life?"

There was no one to answer. Presently Miss Ponsonby, as if realising
that there might be wakeful eyes among the patients, got up and
went out into the corridor. A few minutes afterwards, the bells,
the whistles, and the revolvers of enthusiastic exiles flung out a
Christmas greeting, and her relief came.

Each man took unto himself a partial responsibility for
her tears. Judge Barton planned to wipe out the memory of his
unchivalrous conduct by his most deferential manner and his very best
conversation. Collingwood dreamed of abasing himself, and of settling
without delay all doubts as to his attitude. If he saw a rosy vision of
Miss Ponsonby reconciled to him and forgiving, he was not altogether
conceited. He had been a man decidedly popular with women. But when
the sixteen weary hours had passed away, and the afternoon shift of
nurses brought not Miss Ponsonby but the red-haired lady of cheerful
temperament, Judge Barton's instinctive sigh was speedily followed
by a rapt interest in Collingwood. That young man had allowed his
disappointment to express itself by an involuntary twist in bed,
so that he yelled in agony.






CHAPTER III


Some five or six weeks after the events narrated in the preceding
chapters, Judge Barton's Australian chestnuts were rattling their
silver-plated harness on the Luneta driveway at sunset, while their
owner was threading the mazes of a Sunday-night carriage jam. He had
that day returned from a short vacation in Japan, where he had gone
to recuperate after his attack of fever.

The hot season was coming on apace, and but little breeze disturbed
the waters of the bay, which were sombred by the reflections of
slate-colored clouds streaked across the zenith. The brilliancy of the
sunset seemed to have driven apart the clouds in the west, however,
where the sky was enamelled in hues of jade and amber and turquoise,
seamed here and there with gold, and occasionally with a fading line
of dark vapor. With the purple shapes of the mountains extending to
right and left, with the foreshortened sweep of the waters, and with
the motionless lines of the anchored vessels, the distant picture
flamed out like a theatre curtain, while the motley assemblage
which filled the oval around the bandstand was not unsuggestive of
a waiting audience.

As he was in the act of leaning forward to note the outline of a
great five-masted freighter, anchored abreast the bandstand, Judge
Barton caught sight of a profile which was vaguely familiar to him,
but which, for a moment, he quite failed to associate with a name. A
second later, he remembered that he had always seen Miss Ponsonby
in her nurse's cap, and he could not determine whether it was the
harmonious effect of imported millinery or some radical change in
herself which lent a charm to her face never found there before.

As for the man at her side, it was something of a triumph to perceive
the hat at just the angle at which the Judge's imagination had pictured
it, the angle affected by a very smart enlisted man.

It was not wholly in response to the political instinct which, in a
democracy, bestows handshakes in place of largesse, that Judge Barton
made his way to the carriage in which Miss Ponsonby sat. Since the
miserable Christmas Eve when he had succeeded in pricking her into a
fencing match, he had not seen her. On the following day, she was put
on day duty in another ward, in accordance with some mysterious system
of change pursued in the hospital. Within three or four days more,
the Judge was pronounced able to begin the journey up the China coast,
from which he had only that day returned. When he left the hospital,
Collingwood was convalescent, but was suffering from a moroseness
which his observant neighbor attributed to thwarted affection.

Miss Ponsonby greeted her quondam patient not with coldness, which
may imply an intentionally concealed interest, but lifelessly, with an
indifference almost impertinent. Judge Barton felt the indifference,
was chilled by it, and revenged himself by a guarded significance
of manner which did not amount to ill breeding, but which hinted
at an expectation gratified, and made her, as he was delighted to
perceive, self-conscious and ill at ease. The feeling with which
he had approached her was genial and kindly. To find himself
suddenly enveloped in the atmosphere of challenge, of reserve,
of dumb interrogation of the providential workings of this world,
stirred up in him the old desire to push her just a little bit closer
to the wall against which her back was so resolutely set. It was not
a chivalrous feeling, but it was a very human and natural one, which
might have been shared by millions of the Judge's fellow-citizens,
far more pretentious than he was in the matter of Christian charity
and brotherhood.

Miss Ponsonby was looking even paler and thinner than she had looked
at Christmas. There was a purpling thickness in her eyelids, there was
a depth of shadow beneath, which, to an attentive observer, hinted at
tears and vigils in the night. In her listlessness, and in a sweet
effort in her smile, the Judge found, in the further course of the
talk, the signs of conquest. It was as if, driven to bay, she sought
help even from her enemies to ease the agony of surrender. The Judge
was not hard-hearted. So long as she fought, he was willing to stab
and prick. At the first sign of feminine weakness, at the sight of her
beaten and shrinking, he was ready to forget that only a few weeks
before he had been rather eager to see her reduced to humility. His
concern for her finally found utterance in the hope that she was
going to indulge in a much needed rest. "You know I always said,
when I was in the hospital, that you needed nursing just as much as
Collingwood and I did, if not more," he added.

She thanked him rather formally, and he detected in her stiffness an
access of shyness. A faint color dyed her cheek.

Collingwood, whose resemblance to a pagan deity--or to a young
ruffian--was stronger than ever, broke in joyously:

"Oh, she's going to take a vacation, all right--a long one, in fact,
for the rest of her life--with me. You are quite right, Judge. She
does need care, and I'll see that she gets it."

Miss Ponsonby's face rivalled the afterglow into which the gorgeous
spectacle before them was beginning to melt like metals fused in a
crucible; but, after an instant, she lifted her eyes and gazed with
a remarkable intensity at Judge Barton. If her self-consciousness had
originated in a prescience of his astonishment, it was not more painful
than his own chagrin at having betrayed himself. He had certainly not
expected her to marry Martin Collingwood. He had taken a mild pleasure
in letting her perceive that he divined her struggles in a compromise
with her pride for the sake of a few passing attentions and pleasures;
but never had it occurred to him that she could possibly bridge the
distance between herself and Collingwood in marriage. To have exhibited
his utter amazement enraged him with himself. He recovered himself
promptly, however, and, in turn, tendered a firm white hand to each.

"Bless you, my children," he said blandly, "I showed some surprise,
but really I don't know why. The thing is obviously appropriate."

There was a dryness in Collingwood's reply which made him, for a
moment, almost as impressive as the Judge himself.

"I am glad you think so. That was my opinion from the first, but I
had considerable difficulty in getting Miss Ponsonby to take my view
of it, and even yet she has her moments of doubt."

Miss Ponsonby gave him a shy little smile, but at the end of the
fleeting movement, her eyes again sought the Judge's with the same
questioning intensity, so that he was amazed to find himself answering
aloud.

"Obviously appropriate," he repeated, "and for a hundred reasons:
first, my dear young lady, so charming a person as yourself has
no business rusting out in the fatigues of your profession; second,
because this young free-lance needs somebody to look after him; third,
because marriage is to be encouraged on general principles." At
this point he seemed to recognize the necessity of steering the
conversational bark into safer waters, and endeavored to divert it
by pleasantry at his own expense. "Although I have not been able to
induce any young woman to share my joys and sorrows, believe me,
it is not because I am opposed to the institution. If I am an old
bachelor, it is not for lack of trying to marry."

It was Collingwood who made the humanely frank rejoinder, "I guess
you haven't tried very hard since you have been on the bench, have
you, Judge?"

It is strange how a man may both resent a fact and take pride in
it. Six weeks before, when the Judge had wished to put a squabbling
young woman in her place, he had rather gloried in the material
advantages connected with his position. A hint that his position
might win him a wife when his personality unaided could not do so,
rasped his nerves. Charlotte saw him wince and returned good for evil.

"Ah! you are not sincere. You are too modern to believe in marriage."

"Is it in an ironical spirit, then, do you think, that I beg an
invitation to yours?"

"But it will be so very quiet--not even cards or cake; and only one
or two of Mr. Collingwood's friends, and one or two of mine, to give
us countenance."

"To keep us from feeling that we are eloping," said Collingwood
blithely.

"Am I not the very man to do that? If there is no other way, I must
be railroaded in in an official capacity. Does not Collingwood need a
best man? Does not the marriage ceremony call for a parent to give the
bride away--'Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?'--and
all that?"

This was pure advertising propaganda, a way to one of those newspaper
squibs which delight both the snobbishness and the sentimentality of
Americans. In the slight pause which ensued, the Judge had a momentary
sensation of being weighed in a very delicately balanced mind, and
of being found wanting. But Charlotte only said, "You may come if
you wish. But it is sooner than you anticipate--very soon."

"To-morrow morning at seven-thirty," interjected Collingwood. "We
are going out on the Coastguard boat at ten."

Here was a burning of bridges, a lover who wooed and a maid who did
not dally! The Judge asked where the ceremony would take place, and
was told to come to a certain church not far from the hospital. Once
more his over-restraint betrayed him, and Miss Ponsonby guessed
his surprise.

"We were both brought up Catholics," she said, "and though we have
neither of us clung very closely to the Mother Church, that is
where we naturally turn on such an occasion. We have not needed a
dispensation. The path has been easy." She smiled enigmatically.

"No, we haven't needed a dispensation from the Pope," said Collingwood,
"but apparently we cannot manage our own affairs without the help
of the Civil Government. I am not sure that we shall get through
to-morrow without the appearance of some of the gang declaring that
there are reasons why this woman should not be married to this man."

"The Civil Government?" repeated Judge Barton, mystified. Then a light
broke upon him. "Of course--you are under contract." He addressed
Miss Ponsonby.

"My service under contract was fulfilled five months ago," she
replied. "I am at liberty to leave Government employ any moment
I wish."

"But they are long on eminent medicos and short on nurses," went on
Collingwood, whose spirits were evidently riotous, "and when Miss
Ponsonby sent in her resignation, they informed her of the fact,
and, by the Lord! they had the effrontery to expect us to arrange our
affairs to suit their convenience. The letter has gone back and forth
till it has eighteen endorsements. It hove in sight a few days ago
in an extra large envelope. I told Charlotte to put on a nineteenth,
and to end the whole matter by telling the Civil Commission and the
Bureau of Health and the Marine Hospital Service all three to go to
the devil."

"Which it was manifestly impossible for me to do," added Miss Ponsonby,
blushing.

"Manifestly," assented the Judge, with a short laugh. To him whose
whole policy was diplomacy here was temerity in a twentieth century
citizen of the American Republic to mock the Civil Commission. As
well a Venetian in the twelfth had jeered at the Council of Ten.

"Manifestly is a good word," Collingwood went on. "It was, as you
say, manifestly impossible that Miss Ponsonby should tell the Bureau
of Health to go to the devil, but it was manifestly ordained that
I should write them a letter, telling them what I thought of them,
and telling them to go to the devil's place of residence; which I
did. Forthwith, Miss Ponsonby was fired, bag and baggage, from Civil
employ. They had not seen their way to releasing her for six months,
but when she crossed Their High-Mightinesses--or when I did it for
her--they could let her go in twenty-four hours. Well, what's one
man's meat is another man's poison. I don't know about their poison,
but I knew my meat when they put it in my hand, and I'm not the man
to let it go."

"I see." There was a falling off in Judge Barton's interest in the
romance, but he struggled to conceal his feelings. He fancied also
that Miss Ponsonby was embarrassed, almost annoyed, at her lover's
frankness. "To-morrow morning, you say, at seven-thirty? I'll be
there."

He turned away after his most impressive handshake, and still pondering
this inexplicable step on the lady's part, sought his own carriage. Was
she led by romance simply, by the belated desire for love-making and
mating which might easily seize upon a woman pushing rapidly away from
the age when romance is a right? Or had she, with a shrewdness which
belied her late folly, decided to accommodate herself to the rather
material atmosphere which prevails in Manila? Had she perceived that
Collingwood was of the stuff to win out in whatever he undertook? And
had she voluntarily embraced a temporary effacement with him in order
to return to the world better equipped for the struggle to impress
it with her personality? Whatever was her motive, she was not wholly
a happy bride, and yet,--there was something in that fleeting smile
which she had given Collingwood, something very tender, exquisitely
feminine, which touched the Judge and roused in him a grudging
spirit toward the man who had reached out his hand to take what he,
Alexander Barton, had never dreamed of taking. The Judge was baffled,
and was about to give up the problem, when the well-known figure of
his friend Mrs. Badgerly recalled her cleverness in analysis and her
unbounded effrontery in stating her conclusions. He went immediately
to submit his difficulty to her.

Collingwood and his betrothed continued listening to the evening
concert in a silence which may have expressed their entire proprietary
assumption of each other, but which, on the gentleman's part, was
permeated with the watchfulness of one handling an overfilled glass. He
was anxious not to joggle his companion's reserve, as if he feared
that the spilling of a drop or two of what was passing in her mind
might leave a few acid scars upon his complacency. There had been, as
you felt, no easy courtship. If, in the presence of others, he chose
to carry it off with a high hand, when he was left alone with her,
he betrayed that, until the final blessing should have been said over
them the next day, he was more or less in doubt of his captive. His
blurting out the news of their approaching marriage to Judge Barton had
been a stroke of policy as well as an overflow of pride. His lover's
watchfulness, combating with his lover's tenderness, told him that
every pressure must be brought to bear to keep her from halting even
at the last moment. He had realized from his earliest acquaintance
with her that she was overworked and at the point of a nervous and
physical breakdown. He knew from her own admissions that she had no
relatives to whom she was willing to apply for assistance. He had
had her shy confession of affection for him and no few glimpses at a
depth of feeling which she would not wholly reveal. His own rashness
in meddling in her dispute with the Government officials had cost
her her means of livelihood, in the islands, at least, and his own
business was pressing him. These reasons, even unsupported by the
ardor of his love for her, seemed to justify him in applying all the
pressure he could to hurry Charlotte into marriage; but he could not
be blind to her reluctance, to a timidity and foreboding which she
would not explain but which caused her no little unhappiness.

Miss Ponsonby sat on in a reverie not altogether pleasant, as one
or two changes in her sensitive countenance testified. She was so
preoccupied that she remained unconscious of the playing of the
national anthem, of the dispersal of the crowd, and of the threats
of a few spattering raindrops which were not followed by a shower,
but which sent the coachman to put up the hood of their victoria. The
darkness had quite closed down upon them, the lights on the shipping
were huddled like little suburban villages on the plain of waters,
and the flash-light on Corregidor was winking an occasional red eye
low down against the sea, when Collingwood laid an almost timorous
hand upon his betrothed's arm.

"Don't worry. Leave that to me. It is my side of the contract. Why
do you take this ridiculous quarrel so seriously? Besides, it was my
fault. I jumped in--oh! just because I felt so good that I wanted to
tackle the world."

"It is an omen. It is the recurrence of conditions that have always
weighed me down. Whatever I do, there is someone to be annoyed and
offended at the act. I am in disgrace. I have been unutterably lonely
in Manila, and I felt that in our marriage, at least, there would be
the compensation of having no one to object; and now these offended
dignitaries project themselves into the affair, trailing their forked
lightnings of displeasure. Why must combat hover over my head? Why
must I fight for what drops into the laps of other women?"

"You couldn't fight," said Collingwood. "You haven't fought. You have
only been wearied and discouraged and unhappy. When I came in and did
a little fighting for you, it paralyzed you. What is a row more or
less--and least of all, under the circumstances? It would take more
than exchanging compliments with the Bureau of Health to unsettle my
spirits to-night."

"It crushes me," replied Charlotte. "Besides, you have not had
my life."

Collingwood studied her through the gloom. Her last words were a
lifting of the veil which, she had assured him, hid much pain. He
had been able to account for her reluctance in being hurried into an
early marriage through reasons which reflected credit upon her and were
not uncomplimentary to himself. To marry a man who had come into her
life less than three months before and who was planning to carry her
off to a practically uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean might
well have daunted the enthusiasm of a much more daring spirit than
hers. Collingwood's social traditions were rudimentary beside hers;
but even he, pagan that he was, could make allowances for nervousness
on that score. What he could not account for was her evident misgiving
of the ultimate outcome of their romance. She was vexed by doubts
which she was unwilling to share with him, and yet a few frank words in
the early days of their engagement had sufficed to remove all thought
that she was concealing from him anything that he ought to know.

She had told him that she had been practically an orphan since
infancy; that till she was fourteen years of age, she had been
brought up in a convent; that at fourteen she went to live in the
family of her mother's cousin; that she had been educated at Smith
College, taking her bachelor's degree there; that she had found the
bread of dependence exceedingly hard to eat, and, in defiance of her
relatives' wishes, had taken her training as a nurse; and finally,
that she had come to the Philippines to put as great a distance as
possible between herself and them, to whom her career was a source of
humiliation. "There has never been, in my past life, one act of which
you or I should be ashamed. There have been no events, no episodes,
nothing but a series of petty humiliations, of wasted efforts, and of
thwarted ambitions which I cannot talk about even to you. I want to
forget them. They have almost overwhelmed me. I have been--I am--on
the verge of becoming morbidly introspective and retrospective. Help
me to put the past away, but not because there is one thing in it
that you ought to know."

To such an appeal a lover can make but one reply. After that, whenever
Collingwood saw her struggling with one of her moods of gloom, he
bent his energies to its conquest, none the less willingly that he
had discovered a ready charm for its exorcising in the caresses for
which his own affection was glad to find an excuse.

He had early learned the futility of argument against her despondent
moods, not only because her intelligence was better trained than his
own, but because, as he admitted to himself, she had all the argument
on her side. But he possessed, in the final appeal to tenderness,
a power before which she was invariably vanquished. There was, in her
shy acceptance of his caresses, an element of childishness, of a child
yielding to some forbidden pleasure, self-rebuking, fearing a price
to be paid, yet infinitely content in the moment. She was wonderfully
self-reliant in her thinking processes, and adorably dependent in
her emotions. She could think, and she was begging of the unseen
Fates to be spared thinking. She could decide, but she was grateful
to him for taking decision out of her hands. She loved him, but she
found unutterable difficulty in voicing her feelings. He had found,
in truth, what the coquette must skilfully feign--the woman's dread
of her own emotions, the alternate advance and retreat, the struggle
with her own nature, before she could submit to a master. She was
veritably a wild creature, striving to conceal the fact, a woman of
nearly thirty as timid as a girl in her teens. He was secretly amused
at the evident difficulty she experienced in recognizing her own
capacity for romance and affection; but her careful repression of her
emotions lent savor to a wooing which had in it some of the elements
of mediaevalism. For the time when she would see fit to cease her own
struggle against the mysterious influences which he felt battling
against him, he could afford to wait. That such a time would come,
his natural optimism and his previous experiences with women made
him certain. In the meanwhile, he did not intend to risk a chance
word as he felt his hand so near closing on hers forever.

Protected by the darkness within the carriage hood, he threw an arm
about her and held her pressed to his side while he put his lips
against hers and finally pressed his face against her cheek in a
wordless caress.

"There is nothing to be said that we have not said," he murmured
at length. "But I entreat you, in God's name, put your fears aside
to-night. Are we the first man and woman who have dared risk and
calamity for the sake of loving? Oh! the word sticks in your throat,
I dare say. It is wonderful how you have coquetted with every reason
which may excuse our marriage except the only one that justifies it."

"Ah, if I only knew that we could be sure of ourselves," she
murmured. "But suppose it is a mistake; suppose you find me something
different from what you fancy me--I tell you every day that you
idealize me--that I cannot live up to your conception of me! Suppose
you come to hate me, as some men do hate women that are tied for life
to them, millstones around their necks!" She shuddered.

It was a line of thought so unnatural for a girl to indulge in on the
eve of her marriage, that Collingwood found time for a moment's wonder
what could have been the formative influences of her life to make her
look so despondently on her own powers of holding affection. But the
moment was not for indecision. Collingwood drew his face away from
hers although he still continued to encircle her with his arm.

"You may not be sure of yourself," he said. "The processes of your
education seem to have left you muddled on matters that you ought to
have been clear on before now. But I'm sure of myself. I'm marrying you
for love--for a consuming passion, if you like the term. I got it out
of a novel. I don't pretend to combat your reasons. All that you have
said may be in the light of prophecy. You may be right, but no power
on earth could make me give you up without the utmost struggle that I
am capable of. I believe that we have a happy life before us. But if
I believed that it was going to end in the blackest tribulation that
man ever entered into this side of the eternal torments, I would go
on and mortgage my life for the few weeks of joy I've had and the few
that may be ahead of us before the thing goes to smash. As for you, you
have resisted at every step, and I've felt every minute that you were
fighting yourself more than me." He crushed her against him suddenly,
and as suddenly dropped his arm from her waist. "There, now, you are
free. Do you mean to tell me that you like this better--that you are
not happy in my arms? Then something in you that isn't your tongue
lies. Why, I've felt it at every caress I've ever given you--the
struggle and the yielding and the gladness. Come! Stop coquetting
with yourself! Isn't it so?"

In the minute or two which intervened before her reply, he held
his breath for fear he had gone too far. Then the soundness of his
instinctive judgment was demonstrated to his entire satisfaction. For
a second or two Miss Ponsonby strained her clasped hands to her eyes,
then she deliberately nestled back to his side, and slipped an arm
around his neck. She began to cry, the first tears her lover had seen
her shed, though he suspected that she shed many, and he hushed her to
his breast as if she were a grieving child. She cried very quietly,
and he knew that she was ashamed of her weakness. She soon regained
control of herself, and she answered his question with an instinctive
sense of fairness which he had often noticed in her. Most women would
have taken advantage of the tears to evade an acknowledgment of defeat.

"You are right, Martin," she admitted. "I have coquetted with myself,
I have been pretending to myself that I meant ultimately to back out,
and in my heart of hearts I knew I would not, I knew I could not. I
have been selfish. I have spoiled your happiness, and refused to
accept my own for fear of the future. Yours is the only sensible
view. There are chances--but we cannot reason, we cannot think. We
must just take what life gives us; and if by and by comes sorrow, why,
we've had a little taste of joy. I am through coquetting, dear. I
am happy--now--here. I do not care what comes. I've been a wretched
prophet of evil, because secretly I meant to ride rough-shod over
whatever I summoned to oppose. I surrender. I throw myself on your
mercy. I don't deserve quarter, but I know you will give it."

There was a very long silence in the victoria. At the end of it,
Miss Ponsonby said with a little choking laugh, "But, Martin, I--I
distrust I'm marrying my master."

"Not the least doubt about it," said Collingwood. "But when masters
are the right sort--fellows like me, for instance--they are not a
bad thing for some women to have--women like you, for instance."






CHAPTER IV


What the buried archives are to the archaeologist, the trunkful of old
letters is to the novelist. But before those light-giving documents are
brought forth, a little family history should be detailed as preface.

In the year 1872 the Civil War had been more generally forgotten in
the North than in the South. In the State of Massachusetts, however,
a goodly circle of antislavery agitators still kept up the fight in
favor of the black man. The Fourteenth Amendment had not then been
made, nor those celebrated discussions which fixed its interpretation
and application; but the reconstruction of the Southern States still
left plenty of ground for bitter speech and feeling.

Prominent among that circle and among the old Boston families of
that day was the widow of a man who had literally given his life to
the antislavery cause, for he had died during the War of overwork
upon an antislavery journal. His widow belonged to a family that for
two hundred years or more had been prominent in state and national
affairs. When her husband died and left her and a half-grown daughter
almost penniless among a wealthy kindred, she found little or no
difficulty in getting along; for their pride in the editorial victim
was great, and she had been always a family favorite.

But if the mother was everywhere sought, her daughter Charlotte found
a less ready welcome. A tall, superb beauty, singularly cold at times
and reserved, at others fiercely vehement, she was as utterly unlike
the descendant of a staid New England family as can be imagined. It
is regrettable that she found little favor in the family eyes; and in
the year 1872 she came to an out and out rupture with all her kindred
by eloping with Mountjoy Ponsonby, a Marylander, a Roman Catholic,
and an irreconcilable son of slave-holding parents.

Mrs. K---- took to her bed and died of chagrin. Four years later the
unhappy girl followed her mother to the grave, leaving behind her a
baby daughter six months old.

Of that marriage so soon ended, the best and the worst that can be
said is that it was unhappy. The two undisciplined natures who had
defied tradition, family sentiment, religious training, and political
inheritance for the sake of each other, had not the patience to work
out their common happiness when the infatuation which had drawn them
together died, as all such sudden and violent emotions must.

When Mrs. Ponsonby turned her back on life and on an impoverished
Southern home where her New England thrift had struggled ceaselessly
with the indolence and sluggish ways of a slave-holding household,
it was after almost all possible recrimination had been exhausted
over religion, politics, family inheritance, and ideals of life. Her
husband, having buried her with due ceremony and observance in the
Maryland family vaults, betook himself to travel, leaving the child
to be cared for by a distant female relative. When little Charlotte
was four, the relative died, and, as an ultimate act of defiance to
his wife's kindred, Ponsonby placed his daughter in a Roman Catholic
convent.

There the little girl remained till her fourteenth year. In that
period, she saw her father some six or eight times. Their interviews
were constrained affairs, for Mountjoy Ponsonby was not a man of
domestic or affectionate nature, and the child of the wife with whom he
had quarrelled bitterly made little appeal to him. He usually gave his
daughter much good advice, found her exceedingly docile, but equally
difficult, and was always embarrassed by an unspoken appeal in her
nature which he dumbly resented. He looked forward with repugnance
and dread to the days when she could be no longer stuffed away in a
convent, and he rather hoped that she would feel herself religiously
called upon to stay there.

Like many other men, he had formed the habit of looking on himself
as immortal, so that when he was instantly killed by being thrown
from his horse, he had made no provision for his child's future. On
his own side of the family there was no near kindred; and the Boston
relatives instantly put in a claim for the custody of little Charlotte.

The man who was most actively interested in the little girl's future
was one Cornelius Spencer, a dry, hard-working, quiet man, capable of
loving with singular intensity and equally capable of concealing his
emotions. He had paid a quiet court to the beautiful Charlotte K----,
and family gossip said that he took her elopement very seriously;
but it was all conjecture, for he kept his own counsel. A year later,
he married Martha Winston, her cousin, a lady who, furthermore said
family gossip, had been in love with him for several years.

The Spencer marriage turned out well; how nearly that well may be
translated happily, who can say? At least, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius
Spencer were a decorous couple, he given to amassing this world's
goods, she devoted to a thrifty oversight of their expenditures
and to a calm enjoyment of their prosperity. Two daughters came to
them, handsome children whose education from the first was up to the
strictest standards of conservative Boston.

There was much sage wagging of heads among the Boston kin when
Cornelius Spencer came forward as the potential guardian of the orphan
immured in the convent. But though they conjectured again, Mrs. Spencer
kept her own counsel as her husband had kept his years before. Of
course, said the kinship, it was a bitter pill to her. Charlotte K----
had always outshone her in brains, in wit, in beauty. She had been
proud to marry the man whom Charlotte had refused; and to find that
man, eighteen years later, still cherishing sentimental memories
of her rival, determined to make himself a second father to that
rival's child,--ah, well, Martha was a remarkable woman to bear it
all so quietly!

It happened that, on the day the young girl appeared in charge of the
nun who brought her North, a very observant lady was calling upon
Mrs. Cornelius Spencer. The lady was the wife of an army officer,
and had a taste for letter-writing, in fact, felt that letter-writing
was her only gift. A few extracts from her epistle to her husband
will throw some light upon Charlotte Ponsonby's girlhood experiences.


    "--I have been visiting about for days among the K---- kin. They
    are as magnificently satisfied with themselves as ever, take
    themselves very seriously, are as proud of their money-making
    powers as of their blue blood; really it's wonderful how they all
    make money, and talk, as they have always done, from a very much
    higher plane than they really live on.

    "Among others, Martha Spencer asked me to luncheon, and I went
    there this morning. Really, Cornelius must have made oodles of
    money. The mere household accessories were simple enough; but the
    books, the pictures, and the curios were a joy. I feasted my soul,
    and I wished for you, my dear, to enjoy it with me.

    "But I'll talk of those things to you later. What I want to tell
    you about now is an incident that I am afraid may slip away from
    me, and I want to describe it while my impressions are fresh,

    "You remember I wrote you, in a previous letter, about the lawsuit
    and how old Dry-as-dust Cornelius has a real spark of romance
    in him after all, and of how he has disinterred his old love's
    child from a convent where she was to have been buried alive. It
    was my happy fate to see the sequel this morning.

    "Martha and I were sitting together just before lunch, when the
    bell rang. 'I think that must be the little relative whom we are
    expecting,' said Martha, and a second later the butler ushered
    in a nun and a fourteen-year-old girl.

    "I wish you could have seen Martha's greeting! It was exactly
    what she would have given a woman of the world, paying a morning
    call. She was concentrated extract of courtesy and breeding. The
    child, who was evidently nervous and expectant of a warmer welcome
    was instantly chilled by it. But she rose to it! She rose to it
    magnificently! She has rather fine eyes, her mother's eyes as
    I remember them, and a self-possessed manner for a child of her
    age. I tried to gush over her a bit, but she would have none of
    me. Having been rebuffed by her hostess, she had no intention of
    allowing an undetermined factor to the situation to make amends
    to her.

    "The nun would not remain, and departed immediately after formally
    handing over her charge. She kissed Charlotte (the child is named
    for her mother), and I rather fancied that, in spite of her cold
    welcome, the child is not reluctant to enter on a more brilliant
    life than the conventical one. At any rate, she did not shed
    any tears.

    "Charlotte was sent upstairs with a maid to make her toilette for
    luncheon. 'Your cousins regret not being here to welcome you,'
    said Martha suavely, 'but they went out to the country place of
    a friend for a day's skating. They will see you at dinner.'

    "'I am very glad they did not change their plans on my account,'
    said my little nun that might have been.

    "Cornelius came home for luncheon and was stiffer than Martha. He
    was self-conscious, that was apparent. We had the most perfect
    luncheon imaginable, but though Martha prides herself on her
    heating arrangements and their temperatures never vary a degree,
    I felt as if the outside air had crept through the whole house.

    "I am sorry for that girl from the bottom of my heart. Martha
    hates the sight of her, and the girl knew it before she had been
    twenty minutes in the house. She will have food and dress and
    every material luxury dealt out to her as lavishly as it is to
    Martha's own girls; but of good-will, kindness, human affection,
    not a drop. Instead, she will receive a courtesy measured by
    the most approved social standards. She will never be allowed
    to forget for one moment that it is given from a high sense of
    duty, and not from any sense of affection. I am not sure that
    Cornelius has done the child a kindness. She might have fared
    better in a boarding-school. At the same time, I have a great
    deal of sympathy for Martha. I shouldn't be at all nice about it,
    you know, if you raked up a dead and gone sweetheart's child and
    established her among our brood."


Within a few weeks after the writing of this epistle, Mrs. Spencer
expressed herself to an elderly relative perched in a very old colonial
home among the hills of Vermont.


    "Charlotte's little daughter is now with us. She is a very reserved
    child with beautiful manners--I suppose convent training does
    give that--and, her teachers think, has an exceptional mind. We
    have had private teachers for her this year because, though her
    elementary training is fair, she is greatly lacking in general
    information, though she has a curious accumulation of Roman
    Catholic religious lore.

    "She has a great deal of personality for a child of her age, which
    I have respected. I find myself constantly shrinking, however,
    from some undercurrent of feeling which she doesn't express. She
    gets on very well with my two girls, but they don't understand
    her any more than I do. Of course, she is treated exactly as they
    are--I really wouldn't get one a hair ribbon without buying its
    match for Charlotte.

    "For a convent-reared girl, she is not so difficult to deal with as
    might be. I send her to church every Sunday in the brougham with
    the parlor maid, who happens to be of her faith; and I called on
    the parish priest and commended her to his fatherly mercies. He
    is a rather robust person, clearly of Irish peasant origin,
    and speaks with a very decided brogue. She is plainly growing a
    bit fastidious about him, and I am inclined to feel that she is
    none too deeply enamored of her church. She has a curious gift
    of worldliness for a child brought up in a convent."


Eight years later Mrs. Spencer penned another brief note to this same
elderly relative's daughter.


    "I suppose it would be asking too much of you to run down to
    Smith and see Charlotte take her degree. I can't go--Natalie's
    engagement is just on--and somebody ought to appear from the
    family. She takes high honors, I understand. She wrote me a very
    pretty little note, saying it wasn't to be expected of any of us
    to get up, but I can see she is hurt. Do go if you can."


Six weeks later in that same year, the military lady found herself
at a very quiet and exclusive resort in the White Mountains, and once
more delivered herself to her husband of many impressions.


    "You remember that incident I told you of some years ago of seeing
    Charlotte K's daughter engulfed in the Spencer household. Well,
    they are all here for a brief stay, Martha engrossed in her
    two girls. Natalie's engagement to young X---- of the Navy
    has been announced. Charlotte Ponsonby is really a magnificent
    creature--from a woman's standpoint, that is. But the outcome of
    the affair is just what might have been expected. Somehow they
    have mortally wounded her, and to protect herself from them and
    their curiosity she has built a wall between herself and the
    whole world. I tried to cross it, and was most delicately and
    effectively rebuffed. She is the most solitary girl I have ever
    known, and yet she is not morbid. She moves among us in the most
    self-possessed, unasking spirit that was ever held by a girl of
    twenty-two. She is remarkably well bred, quite at ease outwardly,
    and is altogether too clever to please men--who are dreadfully shy
    of her, though they speak of her admiringly. I would not have you
    think that her cleverness is of that cheap type which sharpens
    its wits on others, and prides itself on its brilliancy. She is
    not in the least talkative, but she gives you the feeling of one
    who is weighing, sifting, analyzing, judging; who is using her
    brain to its best purposes at all times.

    "The pathetic part of it all is that she is playing up to a role
    that somebody--I don't know what idiot--assigned her. I find
    among all the kindred and all the family acquaintance the general
    opinion that Charlotte has no emotions, nothing but a brain;
    and the poor child is nothing but a bundle of emotions that she
    is desperately trying to conceal. I understand her perfectly. I
    never was so sorry for anyone in my life--anyone in our condition,
    that is. She has been tagged a girl of brains, and it has somehow
    been impressed upon her that, if she shows any feminine weakness,
    she will disgrace herself. So there she is, on her intellectual
    tiptoes, striving to conceal a very human disposition to come
    down on her heels, exiling herself from all that girlhood prizes.

    "Of course, you dear old goose, you are saying to yourself, 'Why
    don't you put her wise, then?' My dear, she has analyzed it all
    just as clearly as I have. She knows what is going on. She merely
    hasn't the courage to break through the convention and, on the
    whole, I don't wonder at it. It takes more courage to fight the
    accepted conception of oneself than it does to do any other sort
    of fighting in the world. Charlotte Ponsonby is a victim of the
    Spencer stupidity and of her own timidity and sensitiveness. There
    has grown up an impression that Charlotte doesn't care for dancing;
    and night after night she goes off to her room, pretending a
    desire to read when her heart is in her toes, where a normal
    girl's heart should be. If there is an expedition of any sort,
    Charlotte is always handed over to some elderly fossil because
    she is so intelligent and serious, and so entertaining to old
    gentlemen. If a man pays her the least attention, everybody notes
    it (and you know we pride ourselves an our breeding too); and so
    much interest, sympathy, and, yes, my dear, damnable curiosity,
    is openly shown in the matter that the girl's pride is outraged,
    and in sheer self-defence she snubs her admirer incontinently.

    "She lives and has always lived, as nearly as I can see,
    utterly without intimate companionship, confidence, or any of
    that wholesome dependence that belongs to girlhood. There is
    something infinitely pathetic in her isolation, which, much as I
    should like to, I dare not invade. There is a pride in life born
    of indigence as there is the pride of wealth. Charlotte Ponsonby
    is armored in the pride born of spiritual indigence. Her soul is
    hungering and thirsting for that thing for which all the world
    has decided she cares nothing. Mark my words, my dear, in the end,
    tragedy will come of it."


It was at the close of their stay in the mountains that Mrs. Spencer
again unburdened herself to the Vermont relative.


    "What do you think Charlotte is now bent on? She wants to be a
    trained nurse. I have felt for a long time that she had something
    revolutionary in her mind. It doesn't matter to me particularly,
    but Cornelius is grieved to the heart. However, we have no right
    to coerce her, and financial independence seems to be the one
    thing on which her mind is fixed."


Three years later she wrote again:


    "Charlotte has finished her training and is going to the
    Philippines. She came in from New York last week to break the
    news. I said little, and Cornelius said less. But we have talked
    it over, and have decided that she must judge for herself. I
    don't feel satisfied with the results of our care for Charlotte,
    and I don't know where the blame lies, but I do feel that she
    cherishes some bitterness of feeling in her heart, and that she
    is very unhappy.

    "Something in her nature wears clearer as she grows older, some
    ingrained romanticism which we did not suspect, and which repels
    me. However, it is too late to worry about now. She has taken
    her life into her own hands, and has decreed that it shall lie
    apart from ours; and I, for one, am thankful."


To these may be added a final word from Miss Ponsonby herself, written,
on her wedding eve after her return from the Luneta.


    "My dear Aunt:


    "This is the last letter I shall write you for some time, for
    to-morrow I am going to be married, and shall leave Manila for
    a remote island where the opportunity for correspondence is small.

    "The man I am going to marry, whose name is Martin Collingwood,
    is engaged in pearl-fishing in the seas south of Manila. He is a
    man, I believe, with the money-making gift. However that is not the
    reason that I am marrying him. With me it is absolutely a matter
    of the heart. I am marrying him because, as nearly as I can see,
    he is the one human being who has ever loved me in this world,
    and because I cannot live life without love.

    "It is hardly necessary to say that I am sacrificing my ambitions
    in this matter. To a woman brought up as I have been, a dependent,
    a brilliant marriage would represent the most successful thing,
    the most nearly compensating thing, that life could offer. It
    has not come to me, however, and I am making the best I can of
    what has offered.

    "You may wonder why this frankness at the end of the silence
    which has always existed between us. It is because my only hope in
    the future is based on the fact that, at last, I have courage to
    declare myself. To guard my every thought and feeling from your
    curiosity and criticism, I have separated myself from all the
    world, and in the beginning unknowingly, but in the end with full
    knowledge, have walked down a path which has ended here. I will
    not hamper myself in my new life by even the memory of my old
    cowardice. You may call me weak, call me sentimental, foolish,
    romantic, call me all the things which for years you have been
    trying to discover in me, and for which you have sought in vain
    beneath the mask I wore--I am going to have my share of living.

    "This is not written in bitterness toward you. I am grateful
    for all the care and the money lavished upon me, and I realize
    fully the sacrifice that you made in receiving me into your home
    and in treating me, as you did, with perfect justice. It was
    magnificent. I am simply one of those miserable beings who have
    come into this world unwelcome, born to be a worry and a trial to
    someone, and I have taken the only means I knew to escape from it.

    "Tell Uncle Cornelius that I am not ungrateful to him. Some day
    I'll write you again. For the present I want to put every memory
    of the past out of my life. If the day ever comes when I can go
    back to it without its influencing my life as it has always done,
    I'll write again.


        "Yours gratefully,

            "Charlotte Ponsonby."






CHAPTER V


Judge Barton had to cut short his morning ride in order to reach
the San Sebastian church at seven-thirty, but he admitted to himself
that he would have gone without his daily exercise rather than have
missed the wedding; and he was actually ten minutes early. He found
the edifice empty but pervaded with a general stir which hinted
at impending events. A dirty, bare-footed sacristan in marine
blue cotton drawers and a transparent shirt was opening windows
and lighting a few candles about the high altar. The early morning
sunlight streamed through the apertures, while the noise of street
traffic outside echoed hollowly through the dusty, empty silence
of the church. Sparrows flashed across the moted sunbeams and lost
themselves among the violet and orange shadows of the lantern. A
pobre shuffled in to mutter his devotions, and a widow and her two
daughters, who had been praying before one of the chapel altars,
lingered to discover the cause of the preparations.

Soon one or two men dropped in, strangers to the Judge, and friends,
as he instantly decided, of Collingwood. They stood about indecisively,
and stared up into the vaulted roof, and whispered to one another
in funereally regulated tones. Then came a group of five or six
women, whom the Judge recognized as fellow-nurses of Miss Ponsonby;
and almost immediately afterwards, without ceremonial or welcome
of the organ, the bride and groom appeared. Both were in white; he
in the military-cut blouse which is so popular in the Philippines,
she in a simple street dress of white muslin with a hat of white
embroidery. The marine sacristan went to summon the priest, while the
bridal pair waited quietly in the shadow of one of the Gothic pillars.

When the priest, a Spaniard of ascetic and noble countenance, had
arrived and was embarked upon the marriage ceremony, Judge Barton took
himself to task for the flutter of nervousness which, to his great
discomfiture, he found obtruding into his judicial reflections. He
had come to satisfy a very natural curiosity, and the affair had
taken his sympathies unaware. He had never before attended a wedding
in which the seriousness of matrimonial experiment appealed to him
so strongly. He never before had felt the solemn happiness which his
sympathy with that bride and groom awoke in him. He stole a glance at
the other witnesses; they were as preternaturally grave as he. There
was even a subdued air about Collingwood, full, however, of reserved
triumph. As for the bride, her pallor and fatigue were quite evident,
but she had an uplifted look which was most attractive. He caught
himself wondering if there would be any kissing the bride, and then
he decided it was time to rein in his imagination. "Emotions by
the quart!" he thought to himself. "Have I turned sentimental old
woman? Champagne wouldn't make me more maudlin."

He waited quite discreetly after the ceremony, till the young men
and the group of nurses had had their say, and it had been clearly
demonstrated that there would be no kissing. Then he went up and
offered Mrs. Collingwood his hand. There was a genuine friendliness
in his manner, a warmth and sincerity in his few words that touched
her. Her own reserve melted before them. He saw her eyes suffuse,
and a faint color glow in her cheek.

She was instantly aware, indeed, that she occupied a new plane in
his thoughts. She had gained upon him personally, and, as the wife
of a man engaged in developing one of the greatest resources of the
islands, and likely to become a factor of local commercial life, she
would receive consideration. She knew that he regarded her marriage as
a mesalliance, yet by making a mesalliance she had become a person to
be taken into account. Stranger situations than this happen frequently
in the world--in the governmental world--and Mrs. Collingwood did
not betray her intuitions.

"Well, Judge," said Martin jocosely, "the Bureau of Health did not
bear down on us after all."

"No; you are a Benedict, Collingwood, and 'whom the Lord hath
joined'--I don't know whether it is in your service or not. My Latin
is rusty."

"'Let no man, not even a Civil Commissioner, put asunder,'"
Collingwood finished for him. The Judge suspected that he felt some
relief in having the possibility of a change of mind on his bride's
part obviated, and the two men smiled at each other openly.

"I feel that my troubles are ended," said Collingwood.

His wife betrayed that she was still somewhat self-conscious. "It
remains for Judge Barton to be trite and to warn you that they have
just begun," she said, a little stiltedly.

"Nonsense! What does it matter whether your troubles are beginning
or ending? The point is that you have your present, your romance. I
dare say you will have your troubles--most of us do; but to-day--"
The speaker paused expressively.

"That is an extremely sensible view," replied Mrs. Collingwood. "He
has not your happy gift of expression, but it is Mr. Collingwood's
also. He told me as much yesterday. I had been foolish enough to
anticipate the future."

"Is that what made you look so solemn?" the Judge inquired playfully.

She blushed a little and shook her head reprovingly, "It is no joking
matter. Try it yourself and see how you feel. Why, even Martin looked
serious."

"Frankly, I was scared to death," Collingwood admitted. His wife
laughed softly. The Judge shook hands again with the newly made
husband in an access of geniality.

He declined an invitation to the hotel breakfast which was all they
could offer in the line of wedding festivity, but he found time later
to appear aboard their boat.

"Mind," he said as he wished Mrs. Collingwood good-by, "you have not
seen the last of me. I am going to appear in your island paradise
sometime when you least expect me. When things get unendurable here,
I shall flee to you and solitude."

"How long do you think you would endure it?" she inquired.

How long will you?"

"Ah! I must. I'm pledged. I shall have no excuse for repining. I took
the step with my eyes open."

"Well, I fancy you do not regret leaving Manila." In the wholeness of
his suddenly acquired sympathy with her, the Judge quite forgot that
he had been one of the many persons contributing to the experience
which had failed to endear Manila to her.

"No; my experiences here have not been altogether happy, but perhaps I
was partially to blame." She hesitated and looked over at the shining
roofs, at the patches of green shrubbery relieving them, and, in the
background, at the mountains where Lawton died. The launch whistled for
its passengers before Judge Barton could reply, but he wrung her hand
with the intensity of a lifelong friendship. And such is the perversity
of the human soul that his heart ached as the launch darted up the
Pasig. She had waited upon him with infinite patience and gentleness
through nearly a month of illness. He had seen her daily. She had been
so situated that the faintest effort of real kindness or of chivalry
on his part could have won her everlasting gratitude, and probably,
if he had desired it, her affection. He certainly fulfilled the ideal
which her social traditions demanded of her husband more nearly than
Collingwood did, and the Judge knew how to make himself liked when he
wanted to. But he had not tried to be kind to Miss Ponsonby. He had
been patronizing, and at times almost impertinent and unmanly. He had
not a shadow of right to the grudging sense of having something that
should have been his snatched away from him. He had even a feeling
of impatience with her, a thought that she had cheated him, that she
had chosen to hide her real self from him, and to reveal it cruelly
at the moment when Fate put an insurmountable barrier between them. He
could not stifle the miserable regrets, the sense of baffled yearning,
that took possession of him. He did his best to shake off the memory
of the wedding and of her face as he had seen it at the altar, but
he could not do so. Mrs. Collingwood became an obsession. Before the
coastguard cutter had pulled its anchor, he was wondering how soon and
by what means he could invent an excuse for visiting her at her home.

The coastguard steamer on the Puerta Princesa run, on which the
Collingwoods had elected to go as far as Cuyo where their own launch
would pick them up, drove a clean white furrow, and, as Collingwood
had predicted, passed Corregidor at noon. She went out through the
Boca Chica with Corregidor on the left; and Mrs. Collingwood, who
was resting in her steamer chair, smiled languidly as he glanced
back at the island. "Corregidor over the stern," she murmured as
if repeating some well-worn quotation, and then went on, "Have your
experiences here led you into contact with a type of man who has but
one iterated and reiterated wish,--he is, by the way, usually a major
in the United States army,--which wish is 'to see Corregidor over the
stern'? I do not know how many times my tongue has burned to suggest
that the wisher take a coasting steamer and see it."

"Oh, the army's sore on the Philippines," remarked Collingwood.

She eyed him reflectively. "And you, who have been in it, seem to be
'sore' on the army."

"That's right," he exclaimed heartily, "Any man who has once served his
country as a high private and has gotten out is 'agin the Government'
for the rest of his life. I came over on the troop deck of a transport,
and I swore I'd go home on a liner or leave my bones here."

"Which seems likelier to be attained?" she asked, smiling idly.

"Which do you think yourself? You've linked your fortunes with
mine. Why?" he added fixing her with a sudden intensity of glance
insistent for reply.

His wife crimsoned and looked across the glinting sea.

"I thought you answered that question to your satisfaction last night,"
she murmured.

"No; I tried to answer it for you. It was you that needed
convincing. Here is a case of temperament," he went on, half jocose,
half serious. "So long as you hesitated and I had my side to urge,
any old reason would do for me. I would clutch at a straw and hold on
to it as if it were a cable. But now everything is settled and final,
I want to understand. I want you to make yourself clear to me."

"But, my dear Martin! The idea is out of the question. Why, for a
month you have professed to be able to make me clear to myself."

Martin ruffled his hair with a puzzled hand. "Did I?" he murmured. "Did
it strike you as cheeky?"

"No; I was heartily grateful. You helped me."

"In what way?"

"In the way of common sense," Charlotte said, as simply as if the
remark were an everyday one, and her husband's somewhat startled
acceptance of the reply sent her into a ripple of laughter, in which,
after an instant, he joined heartily.

Their merriment attracted the attention of the only other passengers,
two enlisted men going out to join a hospital corps at Puerta
Princesa. It also drew upon them a frown of disfavor from the captain.

The captain was an old-time skipper from a tramp freighter, with
the freighter's contempt for passengers. He was not married, and he
had little sympathy with the billings and cooings of newly married
couples. As often as his eyes fell on the orchids and ferns and
potted plants which were hanging from stanchions and cumbering his
decks (Mrs. Collingwood was taking them down for the adornment of
her new home) he cursed picturesquely. To his second officer he had
expressed a desire for a typhoon that would roll the deadlights out
of his boat, and blow the hyphenated "garden truck" into the Sulu
Sea. He had emphasized his distaste for bridal society by setting a
table for himself and his officers on the forward deck behind the
steering apparatus, thus leaving the tiny dining-room entirely to
the despised passengers.

Yet there had been little enough sentimentality exhibited to arouse
his displeasure. Mrs. Collingwood spent her day in the steamer chair
while her husband walked the deck with his cigar or sat chatting at
her side. The hospital men, covertly watching them as everybody does
a bridal pair, opined that they were a "queer proposition" but quite
agreed that they seemed happy.

To Collingwood, the change in Charlotte's mood was an intense
relief. The hesitations and self-questionings with which she had
puzzled him for a month previous had apparently been quieted by the
finality of the marriage ceremony. That she was nervously worn out by
the strain of the previous weeks and by the disagreeable circumstances
of her quarrel with the Government he realized; and with a delicacy for
which she was thoroughly grateful, he refrained from the rather ardent
demonstrations of his courtship, and treated her with matter-of-fact
kindness and good fellowship. She was his, and she seemed contented and
at peace. It was a glorious summer day, the sea was waveless, the boat
was clean and quiet, and might almost have been their private yacht,
so completely were they alone. A chance observer beholding a lazy young
woman in a deck chair and a quiet young fellow pacing to and fro near
her might have taken them for a young married couple of some weeks'
or months' standing. He would hardly have suspected a bridal couple.

Yet the young man's mind, as they steamed past the beautiful wooded
heights of Mindoro, and looked up and up at the giant forests or
out over the gleaming water, was a tumult of joy and triumph and
wonder--the wonder being by no means in the smallest proportion. His
wife was not a beautiful woman, but his lover's eyes endowed her with
every beauty as she lay scanning the tree-clad mountains. That fine
quality of breeding in her which Collingwood was unable to define,
but which pleased him inordinately, was never more apparent. Moreover,
he had found her in times past a rather difficult person to deal with,
and behold! in the Scriptural "twinkling of an eye," her thorniness
had vanished and a docility as agreeable as it was unexpected had
given him fresh cause for self-gratulation.

Still, as he had confessed, his temperament inclined him to retroactive
investigation. So long as she proved obdurate and was not yet won,
Collingwood could not analyze. But with the struggle past he had time
to take up the contradictions of her attitude, and he found little to
justify his bold statement that he could read her better than she could
read herself. If, as he had somewhat daringly reminded her, she was
happy in his arms, it was a happiness, as he could not but realize,
of less ecstatic measure than that of many of the predecessors who,
with or without the sanction of an engagement, had yielded to their
pressure. She was a novice at love-making, as a man less experienced
than her husband would easily have guessed; and she was reticent,
not only in the voluntary expression of that fact, but in response
to his tentative overtures to her to confess it. Collingwood was no
less puzzled by the fact than by the philosophy of life which desired
its concealment. He had known many young women in his life who were
not novices at love-making, but who ardently desired to be thought so.

An ironical sense of his wife's power to baffle him tempered more
than one of the affectionate glances he cast upon her as he strolled
back and forth beside her chair. The consciousness of her mental
superiority, of her obedience to perceptions and convictions which were
only half formulated in his own mind, was literally seeping through
Collingwood's brain. He was inordinately proud of her. Her excellence
was a proof of his own good taste. He felt that she was a credit to
him. He did not associate her intelligence and her grace with a class
distinction. On the contrary, it was one of his sources of joy that
he would take her out of the masses and make her of the classes, only
Martin did not use those terms. In his simple philosophy, people with
money were important, and people without it were not. Miss Ponsonby had
been poor. She had earned her own living. Ergo, she was nobody. But he,
Martin Collingwood, would make her somebody, and when he had done so,
she would fill the position to his entire satisfaction. He did not ask
himself if he would come up to her expectations. He did not understand
that a woman can ask for more in a husband than for a lover, a master,
and a provider of the world's goods. In spite of his public-school
education, Martin Collingwood's philosophy of life was a very primitive
one, based upon a sense of sex superiority. He could realize that a
woman can be a man's inferior; but he supposed that the mere fact of
his sex makes any man the equal of the proudest woman who lives.

So Collingwood continued to walk the deck in a fool's paradise, and his
wife lounged away her day, if not in his blissful state of ignorance,
a happy and contented woman, nevertheless. There was a soundness in
that primitive philosophy of her husband's which she was proving. If
Collingwood did not have all the requisites of a woman's ideal of her
husband, he had at least three-fourths of them; and Mrs. Collingwood
was enough of a philosopher (little as she liked being told so) not
to cavil at the missing quarter when they were hurrying away from
the conditions that made that quarter vital.

The coastguard steamer skirted the coast of Mindoro and then turned
her nose westward. The next day, she crept up under the pinnacled
heights of Penon de Coron in a jade-green sea, and entered the channel
between Coron and Bushuanga. There the water was like purple glass,
save where a rush of porpoises parted it in swift pursuit of the
flying-fish. Fairy islets dotted its dazzling surface while the land
masses on either hand were clothed in amethystine haze.

The boat lay half a day off the curving beach of Culion, and the
travellers stared up at the nipa houses of the leper colony, clinging
to the hillsides, and at the gray old church and the fort on the
left, speaking of the day when Moro paraos were no strangers to the
peaceful locality. On the third night, it anchored in Halsey Harbor,
"which is," said Collingwood, "the last place on earth except the
one we are going to live in."

To this somewhat discouraging remark, Mrs. Collingwood, who was leaning
over the rail, staring into darkness and the massed bulk of land
near, made no reply. Immediately after the dropping of the anchor,
the captain, accompanied by his third officer and the two hospital
corps men, had gone ashore to call upon the single American family
which was holding Halsey Harbor. He did not invite the Collingwoods to
go, glad apparently to be out of their sight for a time. They laughed
at their power to arouse his distaste, and agreed that they were the
gainers by his dislike. The fiery cigar tip of the officer on watch
was the only reminder that the boat was not wholly in their hands.

Collingwood, throwing away his cigar, slipped an arm around his wife,
who never objected to petting.

"It's wonderful," she said dreamily; "I never knew before that tree
toads made silence. I thought they made noise."

The night was one of those cloudy ones which occur so frequently in
the tropics, when the vapors hang low at dusk, to dissipate later. The
boat seemed to be at anchor in a bay shut in by low hills, for, at
one point, a rift in the clouds showed the pallor of the sky and
a single star, below which the solid blackness loomed in relief,
and against which a clump of bamboo teased the eye with its phantom
outline. A faint chorus of insects and tree toads and the insistent cry
of an iku lizard suggested that the boat must be fairly close to the
shore, but, as Mrs. Collingwood had said, the sounds only emphasized
the stillness. Low down in the gloom--so low as to suggest a valley
between the hills--a light burned steadily with a sweet and human
significance in the tremendous vagueness about them.

There was almost trepidation in Collingwood's inquiry if she found
it lonesome.

"Not in the least. Or rather, I find it tremendously lonely, and
enjoy it. Are you worrying about me when it is too late? Do not do
so. I shall find plenty to occupy me on the island."

"For a woman who held back as persistently as you did, you have
experienced a wonderful change of heart."

"Did you think I was afraid of loneliness?"

"Lord! I didn't know what you were afraid of, but I could see you
were afraid of something. I had to take it into consideration. It
was one of a lot of things working against me which I had to combat."

There came a long, long pause. Eight bells sounded. The second engineer
came out on the lower deck and cursed some of the Filipino crew who
had stretched themselves for a night's rest in such a manner as to
block the passage-way.

"Well," insisted Collingwood, "am I a good guesser or not?"

"About the island? No, dear. My imagination took hold of that at
once. The thought of living on a practically uninhabited island
stirred up all the romance there is in me."

"What was it, then? Come, we're married. Out with it!"

"You told me yourself in so many words that I was coquetting with
myself."

"I never said anything like that," declared Mr. Collingwood with
a vivacity inspired by a premonition of the resentment she might
feel. But Charlotte only laughed.

"Those were your exact words," she insisted. "They were quite true."

"That was not all," he persisted. "It was more serious than that. I
felt something mighty heavy in the atmosphere at times."

Mrs. Collingwood reflected a few minutes. "Don't you think," she
said then, "that any woman of mature age--of my age--would hesitate
to marry a man of whose family and antecedents she knew as little as
I did of yours?"

"No: I don't see what my family had to do with it. In the first
place I haven't any near relatives living now, as I told you; and if
I had, you wouldn't have married them. You have married me. As for
my antecedents (I suppose you mean my conduct), I told you myself
that I had been no saint. I'm just a good average citizen. I've
known better men than I am, and I have known worse. I have not
been married before; that's the main thing, after all; and no woman
ever had cause for a breach-of-promise suit against me. I had ----"
(he named a man locally prominent) "write to you and tell you that
he came from the same town with me, and he knew my record was what
I had told you. Besides, I didn't give a thought to your family,
and you have talked less about them than I have talked of mine."

"That is true. Do you think me secretive? There is nothing to be
secretive about. But my life with my relatives was too painful to
talk about, even to you."

"I saw that. I guessed it must have been hard to anybody so loving
and tender as you."

"Martin, when did you form the impression that I am loving and tender?"

"Well, ain't you?"

"I think so; but most people have not thought so, you know. What made
you decide differently?"

"Oh, that first night in the hospital after they had fixed me up
in the operating room, and the chloroform wore off, and my fever
came up. God! I can feel it all now! And just when I thought that
I could not stand things any longer, and must yell, you came along
with an ice bag and gave me a piece to suck." His wife smiled in
the darkness at his homely phraseology. "It seemed to me I had never
heard a woman's voice in my life as soft as yours was when you said,
'You are in great pain, I know.'"

"But that was what I should have done for anybody, Martin."

"I knew it. That's why I felt that you were gentle and loving. I would
have liked to put my arms around you and cry. I wanted to be babied. It
is strange, isn't it, how physical suffering can unman a fellow?"

Charlotte turned her eyes on him for an instant. He could just see
their gleam by the reflection of a ray streaming out on the water
from a light on the lower deck, and they were infinitely tender yet
mirthful. "You understand yourself thoroughly," she said. "You were
a brave baby and a good baby but you were a baby, Martin, a great
six-foot baby."

"Well, if it made you fall in love with me--

"Ah! but I didn't then. You bullied me into being in love with you. You
wouldn't give me a chance to make myself heard."

"What about that time I kissed you?" said Martin, referring to that
episode for the first time since his very formal and abject letter
of apology had met an equally formal but cold forgiveness from her.

To his consternation, she drew away from him in sudden
displeasure. "Perhaps we had better not speak of it."

"Why shouldn't we speak of it? Is it a crime for a man to kiss a
woman he loves? Did it contaminate you?"

"I had given you no right, no encouragement."

"I'd have done it if I had known I was to be kicked out of the
hospital, broken ribs and all. Besides, how is a man to know whether
he has any rights till he exercises them?"

Martin put the question seriously in all good faith. It was his
primitive philosophy again, the simple way in which he tested women
in his sphere of life. She was at a loss how to reply, and somewhat
sore put to hide her inexperience in affairs of the sort. She had been
brought up to believe that milkmaids kiss their young men over the
gate, but that, in refined society, men offer no caresses to girls whom
they respect, unless a troth has first been plighted. Had she chummed
more with girls and young women, she might have learned that even
in the best of society, young people pay little heed to the strong
statements of their elders, and that, wise heads to the contrary,
young blood will have its toll. But Charlotte had had no chums and
had never exchanged gossip over late bedroom fires. Her views on the
propriety of kissing were entirely theoretical. But that kiss was a
sore remembrance with her. It marked the beginning of the end. It was
an opening door which gave her an instant's glance into the kingdom
of love; and from its bestowal, she had known that she was confronted
with a mighty temptation to open it further and to go boldly into the
fair land. How hard she had fought with the inclination, she could
never tell Martin Collingwood; but she had fought, and she had lost.

She glanced up at him penitently after his last speech, and marked
the cessation of her involuntary resentment by slipping back into his
arm. He was emboldened to make a query which had been on his tongue
a dozen times, but which, up to that hour, not even the proprietary
sense of the husband had enabled him to regard as discreet.

"Charlotte, am I really the first man you ever cared about?"

"Absolutely the first to whom I ever gave a sentimental thought."

The delighted recipient of this compliment did not, in the joy of
hearing it, examine it too closely. When he did begin to speak, his
wife was pleased to note that he was less inclined to investigate
the cause of the phenomenon than to speculate upon its uncommonness.

"I don't know what you were about," he said. "It's mighty good luck
for me, but--not in an uncomplimentary sense--you must have been an
awful goose."

"That's it exactly. I was an awful goose; and, being so, I had an
inspiration to keep out of love."

"Why so?"

"Because I was afraid of being in love. Can you understand
that? Because love was altogether associated in my mind with pain--the
pain of losing, and the pain of loving and of not being loved, and
of being generally misunderstood."

"And all that because you were raised an orphan. I don't think you
had a fair show, old girl."

"I know I had not," said Mrs. Collingwood decisively. She added,
"But I had rather not talk about it. It makes me morbid."

"Were your folks well to do?"

"They were people of considerable wealth. I do not think they ever
grudged me anything I cost them. But I was in a false position in
their house, and I was conscious of it. The knowledge put me at a
disadvantage with all the world. It made me feel myself different
from everybody else. I was self-conscious, afraid of being an object
of pity. It was like failing to possess some essential article of
dress that everybody else has, and trying to cover up one's nakedness."

"That's it. I couldn't put it into words, but that is exactly how
you acted with Barton. You seemed to shrink away from him and to be
ready to fight him if he spoke pleasantly to you."

"Oh, dear! was it so bad as that?" Charlotte's heart sank. Her way
of expressing facts differed considerably from his, and the balance
of vividness and realism was in his favor.

"It was, just like that. But you were not that way to me. Why not?"

Her woman's wit, already quickened by her increased experience with
men, showed her how to be truthful, and, in so being, how to deceive
him most. "Ah! you were different," she murmured. But after he had led
her, in response to her request, back to her chair, and was pacing to
and fro beside her in quiet happiness, her heart reproached her. She
had not shrunk from him because she knew that he was blind, because,
to carry out her simile, he could perceive nothing lacking in her
raiment. But those keen eyes of Judge Barton's had questioned her,
had perceived every rag and tatter!

The captain returned and called Martin to deliver to him a message
from the Inhabitant of Halsey Harbor. Charlotte was left alone to
her musings.

She was very happy. The old saying, "Out of sight, out of mind"
was proving its appositeness in her case. No one was about her who
could read her, who could perceive the absence of any necessary
raiment, who would be conscious that there was anything odd in her
being Martin Collingwood's wife. She had, in one decisive action,
destroyed all that was holding her spirit in leash. A woman yet young,
whose emotions had been stifled for a lifetime, in whom the warmth of
love had been overlaid by the calculating egoism of a nature wounded
to the quick, she had emancipated herself at the fortuitous moment,
alive to the rapture of passion, of freedom from all the restraints
that had curbed her existence. She had thrown the admonitions and
the self-restraint of a life-time aside for a romance. She had (but
fortunately for a time she was able to put the fact out of mind) quite
justified a conventional assumption that a woman's nature is full of
primitive evil, and that you must pitch your maxims pretty strong if
you would have them believed at all, and that then, ten to one, she
will demolish all your precautions at a bound if an object in trousers
holds out his arms. She had profited by her husband's view. "Come what
may," she said, "I will have my romance and pay the price afterwards."

So far, the price seemed a remote contingency. With every revolution of
the steamer's screw, Manila and her distant relatives whose pride she
had outraged became the mere phantoms of memory, growing paler every
hour. Nothing was left but the delightful sense of being an absolute
necessity to Martin--she who had been a superfluity all her life!

As for Collingwood himself, his kindness, his shrewdness, his
strength were gaining constantly in her esteem. He had proved himself
innately delicate and refined. Of what possible importance were a
few deficiencies in speech, a too vivid phraseology, the lack of the
little courtesies which mark a man of the world? But (and here some
of her elation diminished) if they mattered so little, why had she
to convince herself so eagerly? If two negatives make an affirmative,
too passionate a denial sometimes constitutes an assertion. Whenever
she arrived at this stage of reflection, another cloud dimmed her
horizon. Was not her whole attitude a practical deception of the
man himself? Would Martin Collingwood have accepted her surrender so
joyfully, could he have read that it was weighted with the condition of
living with him on an uninhabited island? Would not all his self-esteem
repudiate such a proposition? She had not lied when she said that she
loved him, but would he content himself with a definition of love which
excluded all natural pride of choice, and put a compromise value upon
himself? As often as she found herself confronted with these thoughts,
Charlotte took refuge in a bit of casuistry. If she saw Martin with
clear eyes and underrated the proportional value of his attainments,
did he even see her clearly at all? Did she wrong him more in reserving
an opinion of his social worth than he wronged her in not perceiving
that she had any social worth? The fact that every person has a real
personal value and an accredited worldly value, and that most effort
is directed to making these two values coincide, or appear to do so,
put a convenient weapon in her hand. Since, in only a few cases, the
two values are really identical, happy marriages must be the result
of a marvellous luck or of a wonderful power of self-deception. Was
she to be taxed for not deceiving herself? Was her intelligence to
be punished when his ignorance was rewarded? As often as she thought
about it, it seemed that his incapacity to value certain qualities
of her own justified her in a few mental reservations.

Nevertheless she was afflicted with a sense of penitence in spite of
her sophistry, and when, after a long conversation with the captain,
her husband came back to her and bent over her, she put up her arms
and drew his face down to hers, giving him the first voluntary caress
which she had bestowed upon him since the hour of her surrender upon
the Luneta.

"Have you thought me a selfish, ungrateful wretch?" she asked him.

"Never! But I have worried a little. There's no getting around it--you
are daffy about some things, Charlotte."

"Daffy is such a beautiful word. It's so civil. I'll adopt it. You
are not daffy about anything but me, are you, Martin?"

"Kingsnorth says I'm daffy about anything that I really like."

"Tell me about Mr. Kingsnorth--all about him. Analyze him for me."

"I can't do that sort of thing. Besides, I want you to form your own
impressions. You will see him in thirty-six hours."

"So soon as that." She drew a long breath, and fell silent.

"The captain says he is going out at dawn. We ought to make Cuyo by
five to-morrow afternoon, and if Mac's there with the launch, as he
surely will be, we'll get our freight transhipped and make the run
over to-morrow night. That will bring us home by dawn the day after
to-morrow. Home," he repeated softly. "I've dreamed many dreams in
my life and some of them have come true, but I don't think anything
stranger could have happened to me than taking my wife home to an
uninhabited island in the Pacific."

"Nothing stranger could have happened to you than finding yourself
married at all. Isn't that it?"

"It's a fact," he admitted slowly. "I was not planning to marry for
many a year. I don't know that I thought seriously about doing it
at all. In fact, I was so afraid that I might be injudicious and get
married--or get myself married--" he smiled in the darkness--"that I
swore off even on flirtations some time before I came out here. But
when you came along with the ice-bag and your nice voice, and I got
a good look at you next day, all that went up in the air. I knew then
and there that I wanted to get married as quick as I could. I'd been in
love before a half dozen times, but I knew every time that it wasn't
a love I wanted to marry on. It don't matter how much a man loves a
woman, he don't love her in the right way unless she does him credit. I
felt that way about you. You were the kind of woman I could be proud
of all my life. 'That's the girl for me,' I said, and sure enough--"
his pause expressed the idea that the outcome had been foreordained.

His desire to compliment her was so unmistakable, his admiration was so
sincere, that Charlotte was able to stifle quickly the first instinct
to rebuke his unconscious patronage. His egoism, after all, was of an
inoffensive variety. He was not boasting himself as a connoisseur,
but was testifying to the completeness with which she satisfied his
ideal. The wife lay silent for a long time, studying his face, which
was just dimly visible in the glow of his cigar. When she spoke,
it was as she rose from her chair.

"I hope I'll always be able to live up to your conception of me,"
she said. "I mean to try."

"Nonsense," replied the man of common sense. "You just suit me
perfectly as you are. Why, you'd spoil it all if you even thought of
trying. What is there to try? You are you. I wouldn't have the biggest
fault or the smallest virtue in you altered by the ten-millionth of
an inch."

When Charlotte had shut the door of her stateroom and had snapped on
the light, she sank for an instant on the locker, with a face in which
pride, shame, and contrition were tumultuously mingled. For why had
she spent twenty-eight years acquiring tastes and criterions which,
at that moment, made her seem incredibly mean and ungenerous?






CHAPTER VI


It was well on in the afternoon of the next day when they anchored
off Cuyo, which, with its squat lighthouse and low shore, impressed
Charlotte as a dreary, lonesome spot. A launch, which was lying abreast
the lighthouse, saluted them with vociferous toots, and Collingwood
waved his hat in joyous response.

"That's Mac, all right," he said. "He'll be aboard directly. It's a
wonder he didn't hire the town band to welcome us."

Charlotte winced and secretly rejoiced that for once Mr. Maclaughlin's
initiative had failed to come up to its reputation. Yet when a boat
came alongside, and a grizzled Scotch-American stepped up the short
ladder, her greeting was warm enough to fully satisfy her husband.

"My soul!" said Mr. Maclaughlin, giving her a lengthy handshake and
a look of unqualified admiration, "but you could ha' knocked us down
with a feather the day the letter came saying that Martin would bring
back a wife. Kingsnorth nigh took to his bed on it."

Consternation was plainly written on Mrs. Collingwood's face. Her
sensitiveness was a-flutter, fearing a cold welcome from her husband's
friends.

"I'm sorry," she began, and then came to an awkward stop.

"No offence, I hope," said Maclaughlin, reading the signs, "He's
well over it by now. Kingsnorth is just one of those poor bodies we
call a woman-hater; and you'll notice, Mrs. Collingwood, that they
always begin life just the opposite. He thought he'd found a bunkie
for life in Martin, an' the lad fooled him! I don't say but we were
all surprised, but you'll find a hearty welcome at the island."

"Can we get out to-night?" asked Collingwood.

"Get out in an hour if we can get our freight transhipped, unless
Mrs. Collingwood is in a mind to stay and see the city by gaslight." He
jerked a derisive thumb in the direction of the iron and nipa roofs
ashore.

"All the light stuff is on deck now," said Martin whose instincts
to accomplish whatever was to be done mastered any tendency toward
conversation. He pointed, as he spoke, to a tarpaulin-covered heap
forward. "The heavy cases are stored where they can be hauled up in
a minute. I'll see the captain at once. He won't try to delay us,
not he. Get alongside right away, with the launch, can't you?"

"I doubt you've gone broke," remarked Maclaughlin, contemplating the
heap and smiling at Charlotte, who laughed.

"Not so had as that, I hope," she responded, "but some of the credit
is due me that he hasn't."

"That's a fact," her husband supplemented. "I wanted to buy out Manila
and wire additional supplies from Hong Kong. However, we can talk
about that later. Thank the Lord, there isn't any sea on. We would
have the devil's own time transhipping, if there were."

He dashed off, and Maclaughlin jumped into his boat with an order to
the native rowers to hurry. For an instant, Charlotte was annoyed by
their unceremonious departure, but her good sense soon rose superior
to her training. Martin alert, talking business, with his hat on the
back of his head, a long pencil emphasizing his gestures, was a very
different figure from the insouciant young pagan, alternately jocose
and pleading, that had wooed her. How quickly, too, the easy speech of
the husband had possessed him. "Devil's own time" came ripping out with
unconscious force. At first, Charlotte's fastidiousness revolted from
it. Then she decided that it was virile and that she liked it. Still,
she mused, if he felt the need of emphatic embellishment to point the
assertion of so simple a fact as that, what might he not do when an
occasion out of the ordinary arose?

Her question was answered before their goods and commissaries were
aboard the launch, and, for a time, she could not tell whether she
wanted to laugh or to cry. While she was still in doubt, her husband
came back, red and perspiring, with his coat off. He held out a collar
and necktie.

"Just look out for these things for me, won't you?" he said. "My! I'm
pretty well cussed out. Hope I didn't shock you, pet."

"You did, but it didn't matter; or rather, it passed the point of
shocking. You have the towering imagination in profanity, Martin,
of an architect of sky-scraping buildings."

Collingwood was able to extract a compliment from this, and looked
grateful, though he was evidently impressed by the form of its
expression. "I may have said a little too much," he apologized,
"but a man would have to be a saint not to lose his temper--Here!" he
roared, as three of the crew, having mounted to the upper deck and
having armed themselves with a flower pot apiece, started brazenly
off with their burdens, "take two of those at a time. How many trips
do you plan to make with this flower garden, anyway? You see that
everything is right in the stateroom, won't you?" he threw over his
shoulder as he darted off.

"Certainly," she replied, adding to herself, "for I shouldn't like
you to 'cuss' me."

She felt quite safe from any such dire possibility, or she could not
have joked about it even with herself. Nevertheless, she was very
thoughtful as she gathered up their belongings and put them in the
valises, leaving, however, the strapping and the pulling to be done
by Martin.

When she had done all that there was to be done, and had put on her
hat, she sank down on a locker, still holding her husband's discarded
collar, and let her thoughts dwell rosily on the part she could
play in the island life. A guilty conscience urged her to acts of
reparation. All that she could do to bring order and system and beauty
into her husband's home she was resolved to do. He had told her enough
to let her know that he had lived in an unlovely fashion, and that he
had aspirations for something better, though he could not define what
he objected to in the past, or just what he wanted in the future. He
was bent on making money, chiefly because he seemed to feel that there
was no way of obtaining his ideal without large expenditures; and yet
he was not ostentatious. He had been very liberal--extravagant, she
had laughingly told him--in the purchase of household belongings; and
she had told the truth when she said that she deserved the credit of
restraining him. He was going to become the typical American husband,
who labors unceasingly that his womankind may be decked in finery and
may represent him in the whirl of society; but his wife could see that,
until such a time as their prosperity should be at flood tide, he would
expect her to administer wisely and economically. He gave much--as
far as he was conscious of her needs--and he would ask proportionally
in return. Charlotte's head reared proudly to meet the thought. She
would not fail him. And then she vowed for the hundredth time, that
his unstinted devotion should meet with its just due, and that never,
never should Martin suspect how she had had to battle with herself
before she could conquer the feeling that her love was a shame to her.

Martin, coming to seek her in order to introduce her to the wife of
a local military officer, found her sunk in reverie with his crumpled
neck-wear pressed against her cheek. He put on a clean tie and collar
and they went on deck together.

The military officer's wife was a young woman, plainly of village
origin, who was carrying the wide-spreading sail which many Americans
in the Philippines elect to display in the exuberance of having
journeyed to foreign lands. Her appearance jarred on Mrs. Collingwood,
and her conversation, which was frivolous and full of assumption,
reinforced the unfavorable impression.

The lady had met Collingwood three or four times before, and had
treated him with scant courtesy, because he had been an enlisted
man. But when she heard that he was married, and that his wife was
aboard ship, her curiosity got the better of her exclusiveness--that
and her eagerness to hear the sound of her own voice, for there
were few Americans in Cuyo, and she was already on bad terms with
several families. She threw a gushing condescension into her manner
of greeting Charlotte, which put that young woman's nerves on edge at
once. But Mrs. Snodgrass ("What a name!" thought Charlotte, "I never
expected to meet it out of books!") was determined to make the best of
the conversational opportunity. After a somewhat ingenuous scrutiny,
she invited the Collingwoods to dinner. Charlotte was about to decline,
when Martin interrupted and said that their being delayed an hour or so
was of no importance; that it was evidently going to be a clear night,
and they had time enough to make the run over before dawn. Charlotte
supposed that some affection for Lieutenant Snodgrass--who had been
a captain of volunteers in the war, and Martin's officer--was the
cause of her husband's eagerness, and she accepted the invitation
at once. She went ashore with the Lieutenant's wife, while Martin
remained to see to a few last details, and to make some arrangements
with Maclaughlin.

Lieutenant and Mrs. Snodgrass (he had not been able to secure entrance
to the regular army with his volunteer rank) were comfortably
domiciled, and the meal was a good one, though Charlotte was made
uncomfortable by the hostess's repeated apologies both for her food
and her service. "The servants are such impossible creatures here,
don't you think?" fluttered the little woman who, before her marriage,
had been a stenographer working for twelve dollars a week, and who
had never enjoyed the luxury of a servant in her life till she came
to the Philippines.

Charlotte glanced at her in surprise. "I had not thought so," she
replied. "They need a great deal of training, of course, but I fancied
them ideal servants, so truly of the servant class, believing that
God ordained us to be masters, and them to serve. At home, I feel that
servants do not acquiesce in the situation, and the more intelligent
they are, the more sensitive I am to the undercurrent."

It was evident that Mrs. Snodgrass regarded this remark as
verbiage. "How funny!" she said. "I never felt that way."

"In other words," remarked Lieutenant Snodgrass, who was a self-made
man, but who was taking on his army training with great quickness,
"Mrs. Collingwood prefers an aristocratic social system to a democratic
one."

"I suppose so," Charlotte assented, "though theoretically I stand for
democracy like all good Americans. You inferred a condition of my mind
of which I was hardly conscious myself. But I suppose you are right."

"Do you hear that, Collingwood? You are the most rabid democrat I
know. Are you going to bring your wife over to your way of thinking?"

Martin was staring at Charlotte, who began to color with
embarrassment. Her view-point had seemed to her so natural and so
simple that she was quite unprepared for the comment it evoked.

"I'll have to coach you up before I turn you loose on people," he
said. "Why, I never thought it of you."

Lieutenant Snodgrass assumed the air of a man, the length of whose
matrimonial experience justifies him in extensive allusions to
feminine peculiarities.

"Oh, if she doesn't startle you any worse than that," he hinted darkly.

After dinner, Charlotte was left to a long hour of Mrs. Snodgrass's
company while their husbands reviewed war experiences and discussed
that never-ending theme of exiles, the Government's Philippine
policy. It was ten o'clock when the Collingwoods bade good-bye to
their hosts, with the usual promise of an exchange of visits. They
found Maclaughlin waiting for them at the landing with the boat. He
asked Mrs. Collingwood if she could steer and, being told that she
could, vacated his place in the stern for her.

The night was dark but not cloudy, like the previous one. The
moon would not rise till later, but the night azure of the sky
was unclouded, and all the constellations of the tropic belt were
glittering in its peaceful depths. The Southern Cross was there,
and the so-called False Cross, while, in the north, the "Big Dipper"
hung low and out of place. The water was phosphorescent, the oars
turning in green fire, which sent a million prickles flashing away
in the waves. When, now and then, a banca crept past them, its shape
was outlined in the same lurid radiance, and the noiseless paddles
dripped smears of unearthly flame. Charlotte pulled her tiller ropes
in silence, keeping a wary eye out for unlighted craft, and watching
the huddle of lights that was their launch. The coastguard cutter
had left half an hour before. She was a faint glimmer of dots on the
vague horizon; her smoke still lay a wavering, dark line across the
night sky.

Suddenly a tremor of deadly fear shook Charlotte. There went the chain
by which she had felt herself linked to the world and civilization. She
had put herself at the mercy of a man of whom she knew, after all,
next to nothing. Once aboard the launch, once out of Cuyo harbor,
she was as utterly in his power as any prisoner in a dungeon is in
the power of his captors. A wife may have rights and privileges in
the eye of the law, but they avail her little on an island where no
one of her own race save her husband's friends steps foot.

Her crowding thoughts sickened her, though she had enough will and
strength to guide the boat alongside the launch. Collingwood threw
away his cigar and held out his hands. "Up with you," he cried gayly.

The answer was a half movement and a groan as she dropped back with
her face in her hands.

"Charlotte, are you sick? My God! What's the matter?"

His vehemence and the fear in his voice reassured her. With indomitable
pride she raised herself. "My ankle turned; it was sickening pain
for an instant. It is all right, I think. The pain is growing less."

She hated herself for the lie. She despised herself for the little
pretence she still made at lameness as her husband would have picked
her up bodily. "I can walk," she said, and stepped over the thwarts.

Maclaughlin had clambered aboard ready to receive her as Martin lifted
her. They put her in the steamer chair which was to serve her as a
stateroom, and Martin hovered over, chafing her hands, offering her
brandy from his pocket flask. Mr. Maclaughlin, after making certain
that she was not seriously hurt, tactfully removed himself. Martin
called to him to wait a minute before pulling out; that it might be
necessary to get a doctor. Charlotte's face burned. She was grateful
for the darkness that hid it.

"It is not even sprained," she said truthfully. "There--see how I
can move it. It didn't amount to anything, only I am such a coward."

"You are sure now?" said Martin. She was only too glad to say that
she was.

An hour later, a waveless sea was gurgling musically as the launch cut
through it, and a tropical moon was scattering a pathway of brilliants
into which the little craft seemed desirous of plunging herself, but
which she could never quite attain. The Filipino steersman shifted
from foot to foot, a dim moving shape at his shadowed post. Mysterious
clanks and groans issued at intervals from the engine-room below. There
was no longer a wavering dark line across the night sky, though the
light on Cuyo was still visible. And in the exquisite peace a woman,
reared to luxury and social exclusiveness, lay in her deck chair
and listened to the talk of men who had known most of the shadows of
life and some of its pits of evil, took their homage, too, and found
it tasty.

Each had drawn up one of the three-legged, rattan stools which
are so common in the Philippines and they were seated one on each
side of her. Their talk wandered over many themes, but was always
terse and vivid. They agreed in damning the Government. All civilian
non-employees do that continually. They spoke of affairs on the island,
and discussed the administration of local justice with the simplicity
of men who do not quibble over political documents, but who have a
strong conviction that the powerful must rule the weak. One of the
Japanese divers was making trouble with the launch crew, preaching
the inferiority of the white race and the drubbing one part of it
was destined to receive. "I guess he's right on the Russians," said
Collingwood. "I believe the Japs will thrash them into the middle
of kingdom come; but if he goes to putting on any airs around me,
I'll kick him into the China Sea."

"No need," said Maclaughlin cheerily, "I did it for him last week. It
did him a world of good."

"How are findings?"

"None too good. We'll not make our fortunes this year, but we'll
make our keep, and a little to spare." The smile on the keen face
told Charlotte that the speaker was not dissatisfied.

"How's Kingsnorth?"

"Just himself."

"Poor devil," said Martin feelingly. Maclaughlin broke into a hearty
laugh. "Hear the married man," he cried, "an' if you could ha' heard
him six months gone, Mrs. Collingwood!"

"I probably shouldn't have liked it," said Charlotte dryly.

"Kingsnorth will snort when he hears that Mrs. Snodgrass asked us
to dinner," said Martin. "They don't like each other," he explained
to his wife. "I can't say I ever thought she liked me much till this
trip. She thinks I'm likelier to be a respectable member of society,
now I'm married. She thinks that because I was a soldier I went about
sowing wild oats by the cavan."

It happened that at the moment he finished the remark, Charlotte's
glance rested on Maclaughlin, whose face was fair in the moonlight. In
a flash--in just the instant's time that it took him to change his
expression--she read the man's judgment that Collingwood owed thanks to
his wife for any civility received from Mrs. Snodgrass. A man brought
up in the British empire has some sources of knowledge denied the
citizens of our great republic. Thirty years of kicking over American
frontiers had robbed the Scotchman of many a national trait. They
had not obscured his firm fixed impressions of gentility. He knew
Martin's wife for a gentlewoman.

"How did you like Mrs. Snodgrass?" Martin asked his wife.

Charlotte cast about for something truthful and non-committal. "I
thought she was very prettily dressed," she replied, "and that she
showed very good taste in her home. It was cosy, and the dinner
was excellent."

"Good heavens, Charlotte! I didn't ask you that. I asked you how you
liked her."

"She told you," said Maclaughlin with a short laugh.

"Of course I did," echoed Charlotte. "I put it in the most forcible
way I could. Don't pretend you did not understand."

"I understood well enough. I just wanted you to come out and out with
what you mean. Why don't you like her?"

"She is too commonplace and too assuming."

"What do you mean by commonplace?"

"I mean--I mean--" exasperation brought her to the point of unguarded
speech--"a woman who says 'Don't you know?' with every other breath, or
tacks on a sweet 'Isn't it so?' or 'Don't you think?' to qualify every
word she utters. I mean a woman of exactly Mrs. Snodgrass's type."

"Commonplace always means a woman then?"

But by that time Charlotte was laughing, partly at her flash of temper,
partly at the odd confusion of her definition, which Martin had so
quickly pointed out with his uncompromising finger.

"It doesn't mean a man like you," she said. "You are not commonplace,
but unique."

"The only one of my kind," said Martin yawning. She could see, under
his jocularity, his pride and pleasure in her (as he considered)
audacity. Her criticisms of the lady meant little to him, except as
they were the gauntlet thrown down, the laudable declaration that
Martin Collingwood's wife was not going to stand any patronizing from
the regular army. But she realized also that he was flattered by the
invitation they had received. To him Lieutenant and Mrs. Snodgrass
were people that counted. A pang of contrition shot through her that
what had been a sort of social triumph to him had been an unmitigated
bore to her. Then a sense of humor came uppermost. The boredom she
might conceal. But as well attempt to make water run up hill as to
make Charlotte Collingwood regard an acquaintance with Lieutenant
and Mrs. Snodgrass as a social triumph. Maclaughlin, who was to take
the first watch, went forward, and Collingwood curled himself up,
native fashion, on a mat at his wife's feet. Long after his deep
respirations told her that he was fast asleep, she lay with wide open
eyes, staring into the silvered pathway ahead of them, her thoughts
a blending of regret and of exquisite joy. When, at three o'clock,
Maclaughlin came to wake up Martin, she pretended to be asleep,
and shortly after she did fall into a slumber, from which she was
awakened by her husband's voice and the word "home."

She sprang to her feet with an instinctive movement of bewilderment,
and then caught her breath for sheer delight in what she saw.

The launch was riding a mile or more off the shore of a wedge-shaped
island perhaps three miles in length. Its backbone was a line of hills
which rose precipitously from the sea on the eastern side (as she later
discovered) but which, on the west sloped gently down to a level coast
plain, a quarter of a mile or more broad. The plain and the hills
were one huge cocoanut grove. In the foreground, the columned boles
and the graceful plumes made a great haunt of emerald shade, a dream
place of cool recesses and long cathedral aisles. Its rich, unvarying
greenness seemed the more vivid by contrast with the changing hues of
the shallow water, with the gleaming whiteness of the beach, and the
occasional overtopping of a wave like the dip of a sea-gull's wings.

At the northern apex of the island, situated where they not only
commanded the western sea, but looked eastward over a channel to the
coast line of Panay and a scarped mountain rearing its cloud-hung
flanks against a lustering sky, three steep nipa-roofed cottages
nestled among the palms. Southward, the beach line ran straight till
it curved out into a sharp point in front of one of the hills. There
stood a small nipa village.

Dawn flushes played across the sky behind the distant mountain, and
pearled the shining sea. A great fishing banca manned by at least
twelve oarsmen swept boldly past them. The naked backs were made
of rippling bronze. A lorcha, almost on the western horizon line,
showed in faint lines and in gleaming spots of mother of pearl. The
morning breeze was almost chill.

It came, a crowding of perceptions and sensations, but Charlotte's
pleasure was almost ecstatic.

"Beautiful, beautiful!" she murmured. "It is a veritable paradise."

"Is it?" said Maclaughlin's knowing voice behind her. "I'm glad you
think so, Mrs. Collingwood. My wife has been doubting you'd find
it dull. Martin and I will take ours with a bandstand and a few
trolley-cars and a chop-house thrown in, eh, Collingwood?"

"Oh, shut up, Mac, don't pour cold water on my wife's
enthusiasms. Besides, she's got a poetic soul, and you and I haven't."

Charlotte stared. "What will you endow me with next?" she asked. "A
poetic soul! Martin, who has been talking about poetry for the last
two months?"

"I don't mind admitting," said Mr. Collingwood shamelessly, "that
I have, or, at least, I've been dwelling on the poetry of love and
I found you responsive. Therefore I deduced a poetic soul--sort of
Sherlock Holmes. Sabe?"

She made no reply beyond one of those reproachful head shakes
which indicate the compromise between duty and inclination. Martin
grinned. He knew when she tried to be severe, but was yet secretly
pleased with him.

Charlotte did what she could to repair the dishevelled appearance
caused by sleeping dressed in the steamer chair. A few minutes
later, they were all in the boat, speeding straight for the nipa
cottages. Martin explained that the launch could go in no further
on account of the coral reef; but, he said, a mile or more to the
southward, where the hill jutted out, there was a channel cut through
the reef, and the launch could come close in and find anchorage in a
pool which lay under the cliff. A rude pier had been constructed there,
and there their freight would be landed and then dragged up to them
along the beach in a carabao cart; for they had one draft animal. He
further informed her that the launch lay down at the anchorage every
night, and came up abreast the cottages every morning to pick up the
fishers, for it was easier to be rowed out than to trudge down the
mile of sand.

As they drew near the shore, Charlotte perceived that, in spite of the
steep roofs, the cottages had something of an American air, having
broad verandas in front; while one, which she imagined must be the
Maclaughlin home, was covered with morning glory vines. The houses
sat back about fifty yards from the beach, just where the cocoanut
grove came to an end, and it was evident that the sea breeze made
them deliciously cool.

A man was pacing up and down the beach, and, as the boat grounded,
a woman emerged from the vine-wreathed cottage, and came swiftly
on, flapping a kitchen apron which she was wearing, and making
other gestures of welcome. Charlotte had little time to observe
either closely, for her attention was quite taken up with the novel
preparations for landing her and her companions. Full thirty feet of
water intervened between them and the dry sand, not deep enough to
drown in, but quite enough to spoil dress and shoes. The Filipino
oarsmen met the difficulty, however, by rolling up their trousers
and going overboard. They made a chair of their clasped hands, and
Charlotte, seating herself therein, was carried ashore and set down
in front of Mrs. Maclaughlin.

Mrs. Maclaughlin was tall and bony with iron-gray hair and a large
featured, strong face, characteristic of the pioneer. She was not
shy, and she seized Mrs. Collingwood by both hands and kissed her,
then held her off for inspection.

"Well, Martin Collingwood's a fool for luck," she remarked. "I never
thought he'd get a nice, peart, stylish girl like you to follow him
off to a place like this. You're either mad--and you don't look it--or
you're worse in love than any woman ever was before you."

The informality of the greeting took Charlotte's breath. As she stood
blushing, a large, brown, and well-made hand was extended to her.

"How do you do, Mrs. Collingwood?" said a voice in the refined accents
of the upper class Englishman. "I don't need to introduce myself,
do I? Martin has told you all about us, and there are not enough
of us to confuse. Don't let Mrs. Mac's plainness of speech annoy
you. When you are well acquainted, you'll rather like it. It breaks
the monotony of things."

She tried to make some trivial, laughing rejoinder; but the words
faltered on her lips, for, as she glanced up into his eyes, she saw
there the instant recognition of all that she was, the interrogation
flashing into quickly throttled life, as to why she was Martin
Collingwood's wife, and what she could possibly have to do with a
colony of fisher folk composed of one insouciant blade of fortune, two
typical bits of western flotsam, and a renegade from decent society.






CHAPTER VII


On a certain cloudless September morning eight months later, five
persons were merrily disporting themselves in the warm billows
that rolled upon the island beach. It was one of those radiantly
clear mornings which so often occur in the tropical rainy seasons
when every particle of dust has been washed out of the air, and the
morning breeze is of a spring-like freshness. The sun had not yet
peeped over the Antique coast range, but the mountain flanks were
outlined in soft mauve and gray against the glowing sky. A fishing
fleet off the coast showed tints of pearl, and thin threads of masts
above the quiet sea. Westward there was a sapphire expanse, and a
whole string of lorchas, every inch of canvas set to take advantage
of the fresh wind, standing across on a tack for San Jose or Cuyo.

Charlotte Collingwood, slipping out of the water, paused an instant to
breathe deeply and to feast her eyes upon the solitary beauty of the
scene, before she betook herself to housekeeping cares. Then hastening
across the short extent of ground between the beach and her cottage,
she sought her bathroom and the brisk dousing with fresh water that
would remove the sticky effects of the sea bath.

Half an hour later she emerged from her bedroom as hearty looking a
young woman as you could desire to see. Her shapely figure, clad in a
simple white pique dress, was considerably fuller than it had been in
her hospital days, though it had not degenerated into stoutness. Her
skin was still colorless, for color once faded in the tropics is gone
forever; but her face was fuller, her eye brighter, her expression
one of happiness and content.

The room which she contemplated with a possessive and complacent
eye was one so typical of American housekeeping in the Philippines
that it merits description. It was a perfectly square apartment,
generous in its proportion. Two sides were almost entirely taken
up by windows opening on a deep-eaved veranda. The series of shell
lattices were pushed back to their fullest extent, and on the broad
window-seats were rows of potted ferns, rose geraniums, and foliage
plants, some in gleaming brass jardinieres, some in old blue and
white Chinese jars. The walls were of the plaited bamboo in its
natural color called suali; but the woodwork of soft American pine
had been carefully burnt by Charlotte herself, and gave some richness
of coloring. The floor of close tied bamboo slats was covered with
blue and white Japanese mats. One inside wall was almost entirely
hidden by a great Romblon mat, upon which Collingwood's collection of
spears, bolos, and head axes was artfully displayed. Beneath this,
an army cot, a mattress, and some blue and white Japanese crepe had
been combined into a tempting couch heaped with pillows. The other
inside wall held a very fair collection of hats, ranging from the
cheap sun-defence of the field laborer to the old-time aristocrat's
head-piece of tortoise-shell ornamented with silver. Below these were
some home-made shelves with Charlotte's books upon them. One corner
was occupied by a desk of carved teak inlaid with mother of pearl,
a veritable treasure which Kingsnorth had given to Charlotte as a
wedding present. Another corner held a tall, brass-bound Korean chest
of drawers, which Charlotte had picked up at an auction in Manila. A
suit of Moro armor in carabao horn and link copper hung beside this,
and everywhere there was brass--brass samovars from Manchuria, incense
burners from Japan, Moro gongs and betel-nut boxes, an Indian tea
table with its shining tray. Wherever there was room for them, framed
photographs decorated the walls. Rattan easy-chairs and rockers and a
steamer chair with gay cushions lent a homely comfort to the apartment.

As the room was living-room and dining-room combined, its centre was
occupied by a round narra-table--a beautiful piece of old Spanish
workmanship, the glories of which were hidden at that moment by
the whitest of cloths--and a service of Japanese blue and white
china. There, too, gleamed the remains of the Maryland silver which
had once been the pride of a county--the great breakfast tray with its
urn and attendant dishes, the heavy knives and forks and spoons. It had
lain for twenty years in chests, and Charlotte had brought it with her
to the Philippines, not so much anticipating a use for it, as making
it the evidence of final separation from all that her life had known.

Mrs. Collingwood never ceased to contemplate her living-room,
and especially her table, with satisfaction. The snowy linen, the
gleaming silver and glass, stood for her tastes. She could remember
vividly the depression she had experienced at meal times during her
first two weeks at the island, when the mess made its headquarters
with the Maclaughlins. Mrs. Maclaughlin's dream of table luxury
was a red and white checked cloth, much colored glass in the form
of tumblers, sugar bowl, cream pitcher, and vinegar cruets, a set of
brown and white "semi-porcelain" dishes, and knives and forks of German
silver. Charlotte had endured the meals for which Martin had half-way
prepared her, by the exercise of fortitude only; but she had waited
patiently for Mrs. Maclaughlin's own suggestion of a division of labor.

It happened that Mrs. Maclaughlin greatly desired to devote herself to
poultry and gardening. The islanders had to depend wholly upon poultry,
fish, pigs, and goats for meat, and upon tinned vegetables. Everybody
yearned for green foods and better meats, so that Mrs. Maclaughlin's
ambitions received a hearty support. A kitchen was added to the
Collingwood quarters, the stove and kitchen utensils were transferred,
and Charlotte found plenty of occupation in her new duties.

The work was naturally to her taste. She possessed an ample
home-making instinct, and she had had, in addition to the usual
"Domestic Science" course of a modern college, her nurse's training in
dietetics. Collingwood's exuberant delight in the changes she made in
their manner of living was just second to Kingsnorth's. For decency's
sake, that gentleman had refrained from comment in Mrs. Maclaughlin's
presence; but after their first meal he had taken Mrs. Collingwood
aside, and had assured her with unmistakable sincerity that she
was no less than a fairy godmother in their midst. He execrated
Mrs. Maclaughlin's cooking, her taste in foods, and her ideas of
table service; and his gratitude to Charlotte was profound.

Mrs. Collingwood was contemplating her breakfast table and smiling
softly at the memory, when her husband came out of their bedroom in
his working clothes--flannel shirt, khaki trousers, and sea boots. He
gave her a hearty kiss.

"You vain creature," he said, "looking at your housekeeping and
thinking how you can lay it over Mrs. Mac."

"That wouldn't be much to do. Do you remember that red and white
tablecloth?"

"Don't I? And how Kingsnorth used to curse it!" He eyed her
reflectively. "Kingsnorth is mighty grateful to you, Charlotte,
and mighty fond of you."

To this, at first, no answer was returned. Mrs. Collingwood fingered
a bowl which stood in the window, flushed slightly, and looked
embarrassed. At last, as if his continued silence demanded response,
she said perfunctorily:

"Well, of course, if I have made things pleasanter for him,
incidentally, in doing it for you, I'm glad."

"That's the only thing you've disappointed me in. I wanted you and him
to be good friends. I think he has tried, but you have been stubborn;
there's no denying that, pet."

"I've tried my very hardest. I'm sorry, Martin. You'll have to give
me time."

"Give you all the time you want," he cried gayly. "But you'll have to
come round in the end." She shrugged her shoulders half seriously,
half teasingly, but a reply was obviated by the entrance of the
Maclaughlins and of the person under discussion.

The Englishman, beak nosed, high nostrilled, fair, and tall, was
typical of his race. But drink had dulled his eye, his skin was
flabby, and an unspeakable air of degeneration hung about him. Even
the exaggerated deference of his manner to Mrs. Collingwood seemed
a travesty upon the once easy courtesy of the well-born Briton. As
for Charlotte, she stiffened perceptibly. Try as she would, she could
not overcome her proud resentment at being expected to associate with
John Kingsnorth.

"Any special plans for to-day, Mrs. Collingwood?" Kingsnorth demanded
as they sat down to breakfast.

"There never are any, I believe. I am going to make a lemon pie under
the direct supervision of Mrs. Maclaughlin. My husband has impressed
it upon me that I can never fulfil his ideal of a cook till I can
make such lemon pies as Mrs. Maclaughlin does."

In a second Kingsnorth's manner changed, just a fine hostile change
which implied that no pie made by Mrs. Maclaughlin's recipes could
interest him. "With limoncitos" he said slightingly, "or with those big
knotty yellow things that the women use in laundering their camisas?"

"Why, you are quite up in native customs," Charlotte exclaimed. "I
didn't know that. Are you sure?"

A faintly cynical smile played for an instant over Kingsnorth's
features. "Oh, yes, I'm sure," he replied.

Charlotte became suddenly aware of a changed atmosphere. Martin and
Maclaughlin were looking discreetly into their plates, Mrs. Maclaughlin
was gazing with a hostile eye at Kingsnorth.

"You certainly do know a great deal about Filipino customs," she
said meaningly.

"You keep still, Jenny," Maclaughlin threw in hastily. His wife tossed
her head scornfully, but subsided. Kingsnorth went on eating. His
expression was not agreeable. Charlotte threw herself into the silence
that followed.

"Martin, who is that bucolic looking Japanese that I saw strolling
up the beach this morning?"

"Bucolic! What do you mean by that long word? You are always springing
the dictionary upon me."

This charge was an indication that Collingwood was highly pleased. It
was the nearest open tribute he ever paid to his wife's education. She
made no reply but smiled at him, indulgent of his wit.

"Well, explain," Martin went on teasingly. "What does it mean?" But
Charlotte only went on smiling.

"Greek for hayseed," Kingsnorth put in lightly. "You know that word,
Collingwood?"

"Right you are. He is a hayseed. That is our new diver. He came down
on the lorcha last week, and we picked him up with the launch. Been
promenading around here, did you say?"

"In kimono and parasol," said Charlotte.

"Well, he goes to work to-morrow. He won't get much more time to
parade."

"Have you three divers, then?"

"No. The fellow that Mac kicked hasn't been able to get over it. He
resigned immediately, but I succeeded in convincing him that he
couldn't quit the job till I got a new man in his place. I believe
he wants to go to law about it."

"Can he make any trouble? Isn't that taking the law into your own
hands?"

Martin shrugged his shoulders. Kingsnorth laughed. "It would
be dangerous on British soil," he said, "but not under the great
republic. Who is going to tack back and forth across this channel in
a lorcha or a parao, because a Jap got kicked? His nearest magistrate
is a Filipino juez de paz on the Antique coast. I wish him joy of
all the law he can get there. When it comes to the island of Maylubi,
Martin, Mac, and I are the law. 'L'etat, c'est nous.'"

Mrs. Collingwood smiled discreetly at the French, and pushed her chair
back. Kingsnorth often threw a phrase of French into his speech, and
she felt that it was aimed directly at her, and implied an exclusion
of the others from their superior plane of conversation. It was
not an act characteristic of an Englishman of his class, and she
realized that only the intensity of his desire to establish himself
on a footing of intimacy could induce him to use such methods.

They all walked down to the beach together, and after Charlotte
had watched their row-boat pull alongside the launch, she sat down
on a bit of sand grass beneath a cocoanut tree and revelled in the
morning breeze. It was a "four man breeze" as they say when four men
are needed on the outriggers of the paraos; and more than one deep-sea
fishing craft swept by with its four naked squatting outriders sitting
at ease on their well sprayed stations with the great sail bellying
above them. As the tide went out, troops of children wandered up the
beach, digging skilfully with their toes for clams, or pouncing with
shrieks of delight on some stranded jelly fish. From the field beyond
the house, their gardener could be heard hissing at their one draft
animal, and once in awhile Mrs. Maclaughlin's voice arose in a rain
of pigeon Spanish as she bent over her garden beds, or ranged through
her poultry yards.

It was very lonely, but Charlotte did not mind it. Barring
the discomforts of their experiences in the early days with
Mrs. Maclaughlin's food, and the difficulty of holding John Kingsnorth
in his place without betraying her feelings about him to Martin, she
might have said that her island life hardly boasted of the crumpled
rose leaf. Even Kingsnorth's evident determination to be accepted
as an intimate, did not imply a desire to establish any sentimental
relation to herself, nor could she explain to her whole satisfaction
just why she so vigorously thwarted him. She was only conscious of
feeling that to accept his tacit offer of good fellowship was a clearly
defined step downward, an open throwing over of standards which, if
she had endangered them by her marriage, she had still high hopes of
maintaining, and to which she hoped ultimately to win her husband.

On the whole, her thoughts were very sweet and wholesome as she sat
there in the growing warmth. More than once a sense of housekeeping
responsibility urged her to rise and betake herself indoors, but
she could not bring herself to disturb her reverie till a respectful
cough attracted her attention.

An old man and a young girl, carrying a child in her arms, stood a
few feet away. The man was dressed in spotless white trousers with
a Chinese shirt of white muslin. One sleeve was decorously adorned
with a black mourning band, and his white bamboo plaited hat was also
wreathed in sable. The girl was dressed in the deepest of Filipino
mourning--black calico skirt, black alpaca tapis, or apron, and a
camisa of thin barred black net, shiny and stiff with starch. Through
its gauzy texture her white chemise, trimmed with scarlet embroidery,
showed garishly, while the immense sleeves made no pretence of hiding
her plump, gold-colored arms. Her face, of a very Malaysian type, was
decidedly pretty, and the haughty column of her neck and a wealth of
jetty hair lent still further charm. As she caught Charlotte's eye,
she stepped forward, throwing back, as she did so, the black veil
which had hidden the child's face.

Charlotte's first exclamation of surprise and pity was followed by
an indignant flush. The child, which was evidently dying of anaemia,
was a mestizo. Its blue eye, its almost fair hair above a pasty skin
and something indefinably British in the stamp of its expression
betrayed its paternity at once.

The man spoke neither Spanish nor English, and the girl had only a
few phrases of each; but with Charlotte's command of the vernacular
she managed to get a few facts in some sort of sequence. For brevity
and to spare the reader an elliptical conversation in three languages
they can be set down as Charlotte summed them up afterwards.

The man was the child's grandfather; the girl, its aunt. Its mother had
died a week or so before at a village on the Antique coast. The woman
and her people had lived with Kingsnorth openly in his house up to the
morning of the senora Americana's arrival. At that time Kingsnorth had
come in in great excitement, had bundled them all off in short order,
and had established them in the coast village. As he was their only
source of income, they accepted his mandate without question.

But the mother had died, of what they could not make quite clear,
though the girl pressed her hands upon her heart and repeated "muy,
muy triste" more than once. After the mother's death, the baby lacked
nourishment, though its father gave money to buy milk. They had come
over on a fish parao to show it to its father, and had received orders
to keep out of Mrs. Collingwood's way; but hearing from the villagers
of that lady's skill in curing the sick and of her willingness to use
it, they could not forbear bringing the child to her. But with tears,
they besought her to keep the secret. The old man made a very fair
representation of bestowing a hearty kick, and the girl, weeping,
ejaculated "Pega, pega mucho," many times.

Charlotte had been interested during her hospital experience
in a series of experiments made by one of the surgeons in
infant-feeding. The mortality among Filipino children is enormous,
and much attention is given to infant care. It happened that she had
been trying the food process on one or two babies in the village,
and it was doubtless the news of that fact which had induced the
people to risk Kingsnorth's anger and appeal to her.

She led them homeward, gave the child some nourishment, and set to work
to show the girl how to prepare the canned milk for future use. It
was not till they had departed that she realized that they had not
said whether or not the mother had been legally married. Later she
decided that the fact was immaterial, but she was inclined to believe
the child illegitimate.

For the next ten days the girl presented herself with the child for
treatment. She watched carefully to see that the fishers had gone
each day, and that Mrs. Maclaughlin was not around. The child thrived,
and with returning health showed a somewhat engaging appearance.

Charlotte could never be quite certain of her reasons for keeping
silence to her husband on the subject. At first undoubtedly she desired
to avoid making trouble for the old man and the girl; but later, when
Mrs. Maclaughlin had met the girl face to face on Charlotte's veranda
steps, and she knew the fact had been retailed to Maclaughlin and
to the other men, she was still wordless. For a few days the sullen
demeanor of Kingsnorth showed that he dumbly resented her knowledge;
but in the end his proteges established themselves in the village,
and when Charlotte walked that way she often saw his taffy-colored
son, in a single garment, staring with incongruous blue eyes from
the floor of a nipa shack.

What was stranger, even, than anything else, Mrs. Maclaughlin showed
an eager desire to avoid the subject. Charlotte had anticipated, with
some dread, that the lady would break forth garrulously once the cat
was out of the bag; but she was most pleasantly disappointed. Between
herself and Martin the matter was never mentioned. There were times
when she would have liked to ask him what he had really expected
her to do before Kingsnorth saved the situation by packing off his
impedimenta; but she was afraid that, if the subject were ever opened
up between them, she would express herself too frankly, and she was
too thoroughly happy with her husband to care to risk disturbing their
satisfaction in each other. As time went on, she ceased to give the
matter any thought at all. After all, she reflected, had she not known
it all potentially the first time she ever saw Kingsnorth? What did
the addition of a few specific data matter? At that time all her will
was bent to the determination to make the best of her romance, to be
happy at any cost, and to postpone indefinitely, if not ultimately,
any hour of settlement.






CHAPTER VIII


"Want a paseo, Charlotte?" Martin called from his deck chair on the
vine-shaded veranda one Sunday afternoon. "It's not so very hot. I
feel like walking myself."

Mrs. Collingwood, who was dabbing a powder puff across her face
as a finish to her afternoon toilet, responded at once, from the
adjoining bedroom, that she was longing for a walk. In a few minutes,
she appeared, tying the strings of a great sun hat, and handed her
umbrella to Martin.

"Have I got to lug this thing?" he groaned; but even as he spoke,
he opened it and held it tenderly over her.

Kingsnorth, smoking on his own veranda, nodded and asked them where
they were going.

"Most anywhere. Up the hill, probably. Charlotte likes to go
there. Will you come along?"

Mrs. Collingwood did not second the invitation, though she had
time to do so before Kingsnorth replied. "I'm too lazy. I'll leave
hill-climbing to you adventurous young persons." To himself he added,
"You don't want me. You want to go up there and spoon. Oh, Lord! to
be young again!" He did not add, "and to love and be loved"; but the
words were bitter in his thoughts as he watched the young couple go
along the clean beach.

When they came to a path leading across the cocoanut grove to a spur
of hill on the eastern side of the island, they took it, followed it
through the shadowed green arcades, climbed a rather stiff hill, and,
at length, found themselves in the shade of a bamboo clump at the head
of a cleft filled with undergrowth. An outcropping of rock made a sort
of natural seat for Charlotte, and Collingwood stretched himself at her
feet. On the ridge above them a line of cocoanut trees drooped their
great leaves, while over their heads the long bamboo stems swayed to
every breath of air. Although the elevation was low--not more than
fifty or sixty feet above the water--it gave the loungers an extended
view. The sea rolled in long swells of deepest sapphire. Far away to
the north, the great plateau mountain of Tablas was a violet shadow
in the sky; but on the east the insistent sun searched out every
ravine and spur of the Antique coast range. From that grim mountain
king which lords it over them on the north to the far distance of the
south their weathered sides lay outlined in long lines of pink and
mauve, and in great patches of smoky-blue, where cloud shadows lay
soft upon them. Here and there a distant sail gleamed, a mere speck
of pearl against the lustre of sea and sky, and, in the north, a
steamer's smudge was plainly visible, though the vessel was hull down.

"May be a tramp freighter going north, which slipped through the
channel without our noticing her," said Martin. "This is not the
time for the Puerta Princesa steamer." Boats were always a source of
conversation at the island. They were charged with almost a romantic
significance, coming and going, ever the mute reminders that, beyond
the shining horizon line, people still lived and toiled, still built
and populated the great cities of which Martin loved to speak.

"I can't see a line of smoke without a pang of homesickness," he
said. "Let's see. We are thirteen hours ahead of Chicago time. It
is now about four o'clock; it's quiet enough in those empty streets
now. But about the time we were eating lunch, the theatres were just
emptying. I can see the carriages drive up, and the women with their
beautiful dresses showing under their opera cloaks; and the other
kind, the kind that don't go in carriages, hurrying off to catch a
car, buttoning up their jackets as they come out into the cool--it's
just frosty weather there now--and the lights in the big restaurants,
and the lamps flashing on carriages and automobiles. Meanwhile, we
are here frizzling, and here we bid fair to stay till we make money
enough to go home in style. I shall take you to the theatre some time
that way, Charlotte. You'll be in a low-necked dress with diamonds--do
you think you'll like diamonds?--and you shall have one of those long
coats with the hoods, and I'll be in my swallow-tail. We'll spin up
in an electric brougham, and rustle into our box. Then, after the
performance, we'll have a supper, and then I'll say 'Home' kind of
careless to the chauffeur. How does that strike your imagination?"

He lay at her feet, smiling, and Charlotte hardly knew what to
reply. How could she say to him that the experience on which his whole
imagination had fastened was a matter of fact detail of her past? She
had rarely entered a theatre except under the circumstances which had
made it a picture of delight to him. She did not deny that it would
be pleasant to go again, and she did not, for an instant, underrate
the pleasure which comes of knowing oneself among the envied few. But
how could she take from him the pleasure of anticipating for her as
well as for himself? Indeed, would not it make a perceptible rift
in his present joy if he knew that his innocent outburst could find
no echo in her breast? Would he not feel a little ridiculous? And
how uncomfortable it was that that coil of misunderstanding always
was most perceptible at Martin's most exalted moments! Why had he
chosen to assume that she was a stranger to luxury, and why had her
good taste so resolutely declined to give him even a hint, until
suddenly she found herself in a position where a hint would seem
like an insult? She would have liked to tell him, then and there,
a string of reminiscences, and to share half a hundred memories with
him, but it was too late. To say anything then would be to pour cold
water by the bucket over his enthusiasms. What she did say was:

"I shall enjoy that immensely if it ever comes; but until it does come,
I want you to understand that I am not discontented with our life here;
and that if it never comes, I shall not let myself repine over it."

"Thank God for that," he replied earnestly. And as she smiled at him
faintly, puzzled by his emphasis, he added, "I took my chances when
I brought you here, and there is no doubt that you are an unusual
woman to have stood it as you have done. The queer part of it is that
I knew what risks I was taking, but until it was too late to back out,
I couldn't own them to myself. One of the reasons that I wanted you so
badly was that I hated it so here, and it was so all-fired lonely. But
I kept on saying to myself that it wouldn't be lonely for you because
I would be here."

"Well," she conceded, willing to gloss over the selfishness of which
he stood ready to accuse himself, "so long as you are willing to
believe that you would not be lonely because I would be here, that
seems a fair exchange."

"No, it wasn't fair at any point, because I knew exactly what the
place was like and you were going into it blindfold. But a man can't
stop to look at things that way. If we did, nobody would ever get
anything in the world that he wanted. My mother used to say to me that
God helps those who help themselves. I've come to the conclusion that
He doesn't do anything of the kind, but that He sits back and doesn't
interfere with those who take."

After this burst of unusual eloquence, Mr. Collingwood closed his
eyes and puffed luxuriously at his cigar. But for the rhythm of the
surf, nature seemed steeped in afternoon slumber. In the accentuated
silence the voices of children digging clams far up the beach came
to them like drowsy music.

Collingwood smoked on, content with his own analysis of his conduct
and delighting in his wife's soft hand on his brow. Charlotte
thought he was going to sleep, and smiled tenderly at his closed
eyes. Martin not infrequently displayed his enjoyment of her society
by a willingness to nap in it; but she was not petty enough to grudge
him the indulgence. Besides, many of her tenderest thoughts, her
best inspirations had come to her as she mused, on lazy afternoons,
with his handsome profile in her lap. There seemed, at such times,
to be a reversal of their ordinary relations. She leaned tremendously
on Martin, not by making him a sharer in her domestic difficulties or
by wearying him, already weary with toil, by that demand for petty
services by which some women delight to vaunt their possession of a
slave. As far as she could be a buffer between him and all the little
cares and burdens of their daily life, Charlotte had kept her promise
to herself to make Martin Collingwood a good wife. And though she
measured his hourly joy in the pride of having her undivided affection,
she felt herself meanly stinting him of that secret hoard of gratitude
which lay so warm in her heart. Was he fairly treated, she asked
herself, in being denied the knowledge that he alone of all the world
had made her feel herself welcome in it? He thought her strong, when,
in reality, all her strength came from him. Deprived of that crown and
sceptre with which he had endowed her, would she be more than a poor
shrinking outcast again, a creature at bay, ready to snap without
discrimination at passing curiosity or at passing kindness. But
pride was still strong in her heart--love had not subdued that;
and there were some explanations that she could not force herself to
make. When he lay supine, as on that afternoon, his pagan beauty even
more markedly defined by a slumber that was like a child's, she had
an intuition of his unexpressed dependence on her. Was it possible
that Martin had reservations also? The thought bred another. Is it
possible for any soul to unbosom itself completely to another? Does
not the very wealth of confidence entrain some final reservations,
the inner sanctuary of that self-dignity with which the-gentlest spirit
is reluctant to part? She decided that, freely as he revealed himself
to her, Martin must carry deep in his heart, some feelings jealously
guarded from her--thoughts and feelings perhaps that he had recklessly
revealed to the young girls who at times had fired his imagination. It
is the instinct of the human soul to guard those weaknesses of which
it is self-conscious from those natures which cannot understand them,
and, not understanding, cannot sympathize. Of what weakness did she
make Martin self-conscious? She knew only too well the weaknesses of
which he made her self-conscious; knew, too, her desperate fear that
full cognizance of them might shake the foundations of his pride in
her. They had been married eight months, and in that time they had
hardly touched a jar in their lives. He had told her a thousand times
that she was all the world to him, and she had replied a thousand
times that she asked nothing more, and that, so long as she could be
that, she was willing to bear solitude, and endure even privation. Was
all her happiness hinged upon the chance dropping of a curtain in his
speech or hers? upon the revelation of another self hidden away behind
his merriment, behind her silence? She sighed and moved impatiently,
trying to shake off her thoughts. Then she remembered that he was
sleeping and glanced down to find him gazing at her quizzically.

"I've been awake all the while," he said, "watching your face. You
have been doing a sight of thinking all to yourself. You thought I
had dropped off, didn't you?"

"I've had reason to believe you capable of it, Martin."

"What I have done and what I am going to do this afternoon are two
distinct things, Mrs. C."

"Oh, Martin, I hate 'Mrs. C.' It sounds like Dickens."

"Do you mean the dickens?"

"No: if it comes to that, I'll use the other word--the one you are
so fond of using."

Mr. Collingwood almost sat up. "Say, you're coming on," he
ejaculated. "You'd never have said that when we were first married."

"That's true." Mrs. Collingwood's tone left open an inference which
her husband must have perceived, for he laughed contentedly.

"You were mealy-mouthed," he stated, with a genial retrospect in
his voice.

Charlotte looked at him demurely. "I was brought up to observe the
conventional limitations of feminine speech, dear; but if your heart
is set upon my enlarging upon them--"

"Heaven forbid!" Martin ejaculated piously, as she came to her
suggestive little pause. He added after a moment, "But I had a girl
once that used to swear. It never sounded bad in her. It was just
funny and cute."

If there was one habit of Martin Collingwood's that came near rousing
a visible resentment in his wife, it was his easy-going references
to his "girls." She knew that the term, as he used it, implied no
disrespect, that it was his equivalent for innamorata, and that each
affair with a girl had represented one of his tentative ventures
toward matrimony. She was not jealous of her predecessors in his
affections, for there was an overwhelming sincerity in his invariable
reassurance that none of them "came up to specifications"; that is,
conformed to his ideal of womanhood, as she herself did. Nor did he
hesitate to reveal that, in most cases, the breaking of sentimental
ties was largely the result of his own initiative. If his frankness
in these revelations had contained one element of personal vanity,
it would have strained dangerously his wife's respect for him. But
although he had a happy self-confidence, Collingwood was utterly
without self-conscious vanity. Charlotte realized, also, that his
good looks and his personal charm which she, with her critically
developed faculties, had been unable to withstand, must have made him
an exceedingly popular swain with the type of young woman whom he had
previously affected. But it was irritating to have him lump her with
them so carelessly. It implied that, though she was the only perfect
jewel according to his taste, the matter was, after all, one of taste
and not of kind. She was human enough, however, to suffer some pangs
of curiosity concerning her erstwhile rivals, and though she would not
have asked a question, she was not dissatisfied when Martin went on:

"It's funny what differences there are in people. You are not glum,
but you don't laugh much. Even when you seem happiest, you are rather
grave and quiet. But that girl giggled from morning till night, and she
made me laugh too. She saw the funny side of everything that happened,
and she was no fool either. She was quick as a flash. The last time
I saw her was at the close of the Spanish War. It was about ten days
before I enlisted. The Government sent a gunboat up the Mississippi
River just to show the backwoods people what a real live gunboat
that had been in the war looked like; and those blamed officers were
making love to every pretty girl on both banks of the river wherever
the boat lay long enough to have a reception for the officers or a
smoker for the men. This girl was dancing with a sandy-haired little
ensign, and he was piling it on thick as molasses on a hot cake. All
of a sudden, she began to giggle. He wanted to know why. "I'll bet
a horse you're married," she said over his shoulder; and the fellow,
like to split himself laughing, vowed he wasn't. But when he got to
St. Louis, there it was in the papers, how his wife had come out to
join him for that week. When his boat went back down the river the
next week, all the girls gave him the laugh. That little devil had
told it on him, and all the talk he had given her."

"I like that girl," said Charlotte. "What became of her? How did
it happen that you didn't make the best of your opportunities in
her case?"

"I did. She had me mighty anxious. But she played just a little too
bluff a game. She got hold of a long-legged sergeant of volunteers
and she let on that she didn't have a minute to give me after he came
along. I used to walk home from church with her pretty regularly,
but the first Sunday after she picked up with him, she turned me
down. I had to come along behind with her best friend: she was one
of those girls that always have neglected women friends and run
'em in and make you be civil to 'em. I hated this other girl, and I
was the maddest man that ever tagged up the street after his girl
and another man. All of a sudden, I saw that every time she took
a step, she turned the hem of her skirt with her heel. You know I
just came to myself. I got to wondering if I wanted to marry a girl
with a jay-bird heel like that, and I decided I didn't. I enlisted,
came out here, served my country in China, and took back talk from a
lot of West Point popinjays for two years--damn their souls--and that
was all the patriotism I had. She married her volunteer and he served
his three years and got a commission. I saw by a paper not very long
ago that they are in Samar now. She was a good fellow, that girl. I
should like to see her again. If the fool killer tried to kill her,
the gun wouldn't go off, sure."

"That is quite so," Charlotte replied gravely, and then, as Martin
relapsed into laziness again, she remained studying him and pondering
the somewhat irrelevant motives which had influenced his life.

"A jay-bird heel!" She looked with amused scrutiny at his somewhat
emphasized masculine beauty. What magnificence, what unconscious
arrogance of self-esteem lay unrebuked in this innocent youth; for
in spite of the fact that he had known sin as she had never known it,
that his unrestrained instincts had reached forth into experiments with
life from which not only her sex, but the inheritance of tradition and
of environment had eternally debarred her--in spite of these facts,
Charlotte had always a sense of cynical and satiated age beside
his debonair innocence. It had been her lot to be both player and
onlooker in that melodrama where the possession of ample means and
the development of critical and aesthetic faculties have frowned upon
the expression of a direct and creative ambition; and yet, where all
that is subtly ambitious, and all that is meanly jealous, and all that
is secretly arrogant, deprived of a natural and healthy expression,
underlie and taint the whole body of society. She had come to realize
that, in that world in which money must not be mentioned, money is
the most indispensable necessity; that every instinct tabooed as
vulgar has been so tabooed, because, when it is no longer recognized
in speech, it may be the more successfully pursued in action. She
had discovered that the exquisite charm of manner which is called
high-bred unconsciousness is the result of a self-consciousness so
unflagging that its possessor is incapable of losing herself utterly
in any emotion; and that the final result of the developing process
is an individuality whose utter selfishness and nullity are not patent
simply because all the arts of society and all the material advantages
of wealth are bent to the concealment of the truth. Collingwood was,
as he had said of his sweetheart, "no fool." He had a keen interest
in life, a rather broad knowledge of men and affairs as they are
judged by concrete results; but of that sense of social values which
amounts almost to a cult with our so-called aristocratic classes,
Martin was as ignorant as his primeval parents were of sin. Suddenly,
as she looked at him, a quotation flashed into Charlotte's mind. She
formed the words with her lips as her memory groped for them:


    The ancients set no value on that half feminine delicacy,
    that nervous sensibility which we call distinction, and on
    which we pride ourselves. For the distingue man of the present
    day, a salon is necessary; he is a dilettante and entertaining
    with ladies; although capable of enthusiasms, he is inclined to
    scepticism; his politeness is exquisite; he dislikes foul hands
    and disagreeable odors, and shrinks from being confounded with
    the vulgar. Alcibiades had no apprehension of being confounded
    with the vulgar.


Martin opened his eyes as she was breathing the words to herself,
but she did not stop. He stared at her, and when she paused, he asked:

"What kind of hoodoo was that?"

"That, O my Alcibiades, was a charm." She leaned forward and kissed
him--a half repentant, wholly tender little caress. It pleased him,
for while she was ready enough to be petted, Charlotte was slow to
offer endearments. Lifelong habit was stronger even than the impulses
of a naturally demonstrative nature.

"Who are you hoodooing? Me?"

"No: myself. It was I that needed the charm."

"Now you are getting mysterious again. Tell me what it was
about." Collingwood had, when he desired to wheedle, not only a
child's persistency but a child's alluringness. Charlotte had had
experience in plenty with him, and knew her own weakness in resisting
him. She cast a hasty glance around and perceived the steamer, the
smoke of which had been visible when they gained the hill. They had,
in seating themselves, half turned their backs in her direction,
and she had crept very close to the island.

"Martin, that boat seems to be coming nearer. She would not come this
close if she were heading for Cuyo."

"Eh! Here?" Collingwood raised himself alertly and stared. "That's
strange. Coastguard. She isn't making Iloilo, or she would not be
cutting across our bows; but it is a queer route for Cuyo. Why didn't
she cut over to the west after leaving Romblon?"

"You'll have to signal her for information, Martin."

"Information be blanked. I'll signal her for fresh beef if she gets
close enough. We may be able to exchange a bit of fish. Have you seen
the fish parao go in yet?"

"It went by a few minutes ago."

"That's good. Maybe we had better go down and be ready to trade if
she comes near enough. I'll send out a note with the launch. It looks,
though, as if she were heading straight for us."

"Would a coastguard steamer drop mail here?"

"No: catch a Government captain dropping an anchor to oblige
anybody. If she is coming in, it is either with somebody interested
in pearl fishery statistics, or some sort of survey, or--" he
turned suddenly, a teasing smile melting all his handsome features
to winningness--"your friend Barton. Didn't he promise us a visit
sometime?"

Martin had assumed a marital jocularity on the subject of the
Judge. Charlotte had honestly but vainly tried to dispel from his mind
his strong conviction that Judge Barton was a rival who had hardly
been allowed to approach the tentative stages of worship. Her quick
frown and "Impossible!" only made her husband grin more broadly. "That
was a mere civility at parting," she insisted. "Judge Barton hasn't
a particle of interest in us."

"He hasn't any in me, certainly; and he would be justified in not
having any in you. Snapped his nose off, you did, every time he opened
his mouth."

"Martin, you do not understand. I tried my best to be agreeable
to Judge Barton, just as any nurse ought to be to any patient; and
every time I 'snapped his nose off' as you express it, I did it in
self-defence. He was very often impertinent to me."

"Why Charlotte, I heard pretty near every word he ever said to you,
and I never heard anything out of the way."

They were going down hill by that time, Martin ahead, picking the
trail; and Charlotte made a quaintly affectionate grimace behind
his sturdy back. There were various reasons why she was unwilling
to make any effort to enlighten Martin's denseness. There was no
earthly danger of his appreciating unaided the delicate flavor of
Judge Barton's impertinence.

"Anyway," she remarked, deftly slipping from the discussion of facts
upon which disagreement was certain, "he will have forgotten both
of us completely by this time, and there is not one chance in a
hundred of his being on that boat if it does stop here." But Martin
had time to correct her. He was willing to admit that there was not
much certainty of the Judge's being on the boat unless she stopped;
and then he stood ready to back his judgment. By the time they had
crossed the cocoanut grove and had gained the beach, it was evident
that the boat was making for the island. Kingsnorth had sighted
her, and had sent out the launch, which was puffing busily toward
her. "Kingsnorth's got as good a nose for fresh beef as I have,"
Collingwood grunted approvingly. The Maclaughlins were on their
veranda with a pair of binoculars, and some excitement could be
perceived even in the distant village.

The steamer slowed up in reply to signals from the launch, and
evidently awaited advice about dropping anchor. When she did come to
a halt, however, and put a boat out, Martin counted the persons who
descended into it.

"Distinguished passengers," he remarked concisely. "The captain would
not put out the gang-way for his own use in that sea. Three men in
white suits; three rowers; and the skipper is coming along. We're in
for visitors, Charlotte. What is there for dinner?"

Charlotte was away on the instant. He heard her despatching boys--one
to the village, bidding him secure the very best of the afternoon's
catch; another to the poultry yard with orders to bring up the two
fattest capons, but not to slay them till further orders. Complaining
shrieks of the storeroom door, the hinges of which were exceedingly
rusty, bore testimony to repeated openings; and the voice of old
Pedro was audible, cursing the ice-machine.

By the time the boat was close in, the sun was fairly low and seemed
to be sucking up the whole Visaya Sea is shafts of splendor. As soon
as the narrowing distance permitted the little crafts' passengers
to be recognized, Collingwood cocked a humorous eye upon his wife
and went into silent ecstasies of laughter, much to the amazement of
Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins. Charlotte blushed, bit her lips and
then she laughed also, at first in helpless embarrassment, and finally
with a sheer burst of merriment. She had barely time to recover her
gravity when the boat grounded, and Judge Barton, as an acquaintance,
took precedence of his fellow-passengers, and was carried ashore in
time to introduce them as they landed. All had to avail themselves
of the primitive transporting process by which Charlotte herself had
made her landing, and it was in no hateful spirit that she admitted
that dignity and such a progress are almost incompatible.






CHAPTER IX


This is an unexpected pleasure, murmured Mrs. Collingwood, giving to
Judge Barton a warm pressure of the hand. For though she was proud
and sensitive, she was not vindictive, and the Judge's conduct on
her wedding day had gone far to blot out the recollection of their
of their unamicable past. Also his presence was a compliment, an
assurance that his professions of interest were not wholly perfunctory.

"It should not be so," he replied. "What did I tell you on your wedding
day? You've forgotten. I haven't, you see, and here I am! Moreover,
I have brought you a commissioner and a gentleman interested in pearl
shells." By the time he had finished this long speech, the Judge had
shaken hands with both husband and wife, and stood ready to introduce
the men who followed him. They were respectively a member of the
Philippine Commission and an American agent for a button factory
in the United States, who was desirous of making arrangements for a
permanent supply of shells.

"The Commissioner is headed for Cuyo, and will go on there to-morrow,"
said Judge Barton. "Mr. Jones would like to stay and see the field
and talk business with Mr. Collingwood until the steamer returns, in
about a week; and I have wondered if you could put up with me that long
also. But nobody is to be inconvenienced. Knowing the limited resources
of islands in the Visaya Sea, each of us has come provided with an army
cot and bedding, and we have also a first-class shelter tent. Likewise,
remembering Mr. Collingwood's reminiscences in hospital, and being
minded of the scarcity of fresh beef, I ventured to bring along the
quarter of a cow--I believe a part of the hind quarter."

He got no further. Martin had again taken his han

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