The Locusts' Years Part 12

"I thirst to know what you do. I know a score of ladies who are suffering from nostalgia with far less excuse for loneliness than you have."

"Well, there is the housekeeping, though our servants are quite satisfactory, and it isn't onerous; and there is my mending and Martin's, and my sewing, and I have an hour's school each day for the children, and an hour's medical inspection, which usually runs into two or three; and if you will look on our table, you will not find it wholly empty of books and magazines. Then when Martin comes home, there is tea and talk, and then dinner. Sometimes after dinner, I read aloud, or Martin and I play a game of chess. We go to bed early and get up early for we are working people."

"Heavens!" said the Judge. "I stand confounded. It is virtue past all the known limits of exemplariness. I wish a few women of my acquaintance could hear you."

Charlotte lifted her brows and smiled with kindly malice. "Your friend Mrs. Badgerly is well?" she inquired sweetly.

"You are no less a mind reader than you formerly were, I perceive. My friend Mrs. Badgerly is quite well. She was in my thoughts when I gave utterance to my wish. My friend Mrs. Badgerly is one of your admirers, Mrs. Collingwood."

"Since when?"

"Since that memorable day on which you so effectually snubbed her."

"I am glad I did it," Charlotte said emphatically, and they both laughed.

"It has been done more brutally, I believe," said the Judge, "but never more thoroughly. She appreciates your powers. She really does."

To this bit of by-talk the Commissioner and Martin had been paying a desultory attention as they sipped their tea. At that point, Charlotte brought the conversation back to something which would include the other guests, and the Judge got no further opportunity to engross her attention, till, the dark falling, a servant lit a lamp in the sala, and Charlotte excused herself on the plea of a housekeeper's duties. She left the group on the veranda enjoying the warm starlit darkness, across which the steamer's lights gleamed cosily. Judge Barton, glancing behind him, saw her superintending the laying of the table in the living-room of the cottage, and he abruptly rose and joined her.

"Can't I help?" he said by way of excuse for presenting himself. "I have brought all this nuisance down upon you. I might be allowed to make myself useful if I can." Then in reply to her a.s.surance that there was nothing that he could do, and that she regarded the occasion as a treat and not as a nuisance, he went on, "Then can't I stay and talk to you?" He took the permission for granted and without waiting for a reply, glanced around the room, which, with its quaintly adorned walls, its tasteful photographs and water-colors, its gleaming bra.s.s, and the glancing lights on carved teak and inlaid blackwood, was full of charm.

"What an absolutely delightful room! and this old table! Where does Collingwood pick up these things?"

Charlotte smilingly laid a finger upon her lips, glancing in the direction of the Commissioner. "I think it's loot," she said.

"And I know this is," the Judge remarked, standing in front of the desk. "I remember hearing Collingwood say he was in the Chinese affair in 1900. Why wasn't it my fate to be there too? It's all very well to talk about our superior civilization, but there is something in the mere thought of looting treasures like these to make the mouth water."

"Martin did not loot these. Mr. Kingsnorth did. He gave them to me for a wedding present."

"Lucky dog! either to loot or to give."

"I am ashamed to confess," Charlotte admitted, twitching a tablecloth into better place as a servant laid it, "that I am getting dreadfully mixed upon matters of right and wrong. When I came out here, my principles were simple as day. There wasn't any doubt how I regarded looters and people who would accept looted goods. I should as soon have accepted a stolen ham. And here am I, the possessor of various pieces of looted furniture, brazenly rejoicing in them, and all the more because they were looted. I am degenerating hour by hour." She shook her head plaintively as she put a ma.s.sive bra.s.s candlestick of old Chinese design into its place.

Judge Barton, leaning against the open cas.e.m.e.nt, his two hands braced behind on the sill, stood a picture of smiling content as he studied her. His natural magnetism fairly radiated from him in his benignant mood. His wealth of grizzling hair, his large-featured, intellectual face, and one or two lines that bespoke the brute strength and will of the man, made him look like some roughly but powerfully sketched figure. His clothes were always fashionably cut and he wore them well, but the sense of the well formed muscular-body beneath them always dominated their lines. As he stood beaming upon her, it would have taken a stronger-minded woman than Mrs. Collingwood to weigh impartially the balanced charms of the powerful intellect and of the powerful animal in the man. She relaxed her old suspicious guard, which had revived for an instant when he followed her into the house, so clearly bent upon a tete-a-tete. Without the faintest suggestion of sentimental intimacy, they were encased in an atmosphere of congenial interest. An onlooker would have p.r.o.nounced them a pair of reunited chums.

"I am dying to say something," said the Judge in response to her lament over her decaying morals, "but I don't dare."

"Why?"

"You know why very well. 'I'm skeered o' you.'" He threw a fine negro accent into the negro phrase.

"Is it something so impertinent?"

"If I may so express it, it is humanely impertinent. I know no other woman to whom I should hesitate to propound it at once, for it is a question. But I have been scathed by you before this, and I am not absolutely foolhardy."

"Oh, go ahead," said Charlotte. "Impertinence acknowledged is impertinence disarmed. Besides, I may owe you some amends. I could never see how I did it, but my husband says I used to snap your head off every time you spoke."

"You did, you did, indeed." This was said with fervor.

"Well, I promise not to snap this time."

"Don't you find it more comfortable, then--being degenerate, I mean?"

For an instant Mrs. Collingwood stared at him, and he broke into a peal of laughter in which she presently joined.

"Indeed, I must be a formidable person if you were afraid to ask that,"

she said. "Well, then, I do. Does my answer content you?"

"Unspeakably. You know we all enjoy being degenerate, but I never hoped to hear you admit it."

At this instant, Mrs. Collingwood's attention was diverted by the servant, who came back with a tray of cutlery. She indicated several places at which plates and silver were to be laid, but found time for an abstracted smile at her guest, who stood waiting her pleasure while she gave her directions.

"I daresay--" she returned briskly to the subject after this lapse of time--"I was very priggish. Martin has humanized me--there is no doubt of it--and I am grateful to him. He is so humorously practical. How do you think he is looking?"

"Oh--fine!" Judge Barton was conscious of a restiveness suppressed. He said to himself that he had not come two hundred and fifty miles to talk about Martin Collingwood's looks.

"I am so glad you think so, because I think so myself. I fancy Mrs. Maclaughlin did not feed him properly in the old days, and men get so careless by themselves. He says I 'hold him up to the collar beautifully' and I really try to, and regular food and physical comfort will tell."

"Collingwood is the picture of health and of masculine good looks,"

said Judge Barton; "and as for you, it is a joy to see anyone looking so healthy, so vital. You have changed immensely. I wonder, dear lady, if you yourself realized how tired and nearly broken-down you were in those old days."

"I was miserable, physically and nervously worn out, and I suppose I looked it. But I have had a glorious rest and nothing in the world to fret or worry about, and--" she raised her eyes to his, blushing as she approached the topic which had been the source of so much constraint between them--"and Martin and I have been ridiculously happy in each other. I may as well be frank and admit that half that was depressing me was sheer loneliness and wounded pride. Probably the loneliness was much my own fault, for I hardly met people half way; and the wounded pride was wholly my own fault, for I started out to earn my own living in defiance of all my relatives' wishes. I suppose I had not the philosophy to meet the situation, in spite of that hateful little slap you gave me about 'the unloveliest thing in women.'" The Judge started forward.

"Thank you for giving me my opportunity," he said in a low voice. "I could not have referred to it otherwise. I have writhed with shame every time I have thought of those words, Mrs. Collingwood. Will you permit me to apologize for them and for numerous other unmanly stabs that I have given you? I do not know why I did it; all the time I was longing to be friends with you."

"I suppose I irritated you," Charlotte replied slowly, a little surprised by his vehemence. "It is inexplicable to me also when I look back upon it. I had really forgiven you long ago. You were very nice to us on our wedding day, I remember, and I felt forlorn and deserted enough on that occasion to be grateful to anyone who showed any signs of human interest in us. But I am glad that you have apologized, and am glad to express my forgiveness, and to regret that I was so snappish. All of which may be expressed in that homely phrase, 'Let us bury the hatchet.'"

"We were always meant to be friends, I think." Some vibration in the voice made Charlotte sheer off from an approach to intensity. "Martin always liked you," she said; and thus, ten seconds after their reconciliation, the Judge had cause to reflect with some irritation that there is no woman in the world so unsatisfying at times as one born without natural coquetry. He had a few minutes in which to develop this idea, while Charlotte made a voyage of investigation to the kitchen. She came back well satisfied. "I think we can count on dinner in half an hour," she said, and carried him back with her to the veranda, where she did her duty by the Commissioner and the Honorable Mr. Jones, who was not expansive on any subject other than oyster sh.e.l.ls.

Kingsnorth, who had gone over to his own cottage and had donned the English mess jacket, which is the standard evening attire in the Orient, came back, an undeniable English gentleman in spite of his degenerate countenance, and devoted himself to the judicial luminary, who took stock of him as they chatted. Indeed, the Judge was profoundly interested in Charlotte's island companions. The Maclaughlins were the sort of people he would expect to find in company with Collingwood, but the Englishman was a surprise. He said to himself that it must have strained all Mrs. Collingwood's pride to accommodate herself to that household, and he marvelled at her tremendous growth in self-control and in social vagabondage. Six months before she would not have met so unconcernedly such a situation as that in which she found herself.

At dinner the Commissioner, sitting on one side of Mrs. Collingwood with the Judge on the other, was secretly amazed at the house, the household, and the very agreeable woman who was his hostess. With one laughing remark--"My dear, I am the housekeeper, and I won't be apologized for"--she had silenced Martin, who was inclined to drift into that apologetic and explanatory vein which demands continual rea.s.surance from the guests of their appreciation of their food; and, picking up the conversational ball, she had sent it spinning lightly here and there through all the courses of as perfectly served a dinner as the Commissioner had ever sat through. She was ably a.s.sisted by the two officials and Kingsnorth and even by Martin, whose delight in his wife's grasp of the situation set his dry, keen wits at bubbling effervescence. Maclaughlin, though not partial to what he called "gentlefolk," was a hard-headed Scot, not likely to rush in where angels tread lightly, and Mrs. Maclaughlin, who found the general trend of conversation too agile for her, may be said to have concentrated herself on the oyster-sh.e.l.l seeker and the Captain, who suffered also from a slowness of abstract speech.

It was also, considering the fact that it was limited by the resources of a comparatively unproductive island, a good dinner, even in the opinion of two habitual diners-out. It began with a c.o.c.ktail of Martin's own mixing and was continued in a clear soup and in a baked fish which must have weighed ten pounds and was of incomparable flavor. "Never have I eaten such fish," declared Judge Barton, helping himself the second time to the fish and its garnish of thin, sliced cuc.u.mbers. Then there was a roast of beef highly relished by the fisher folk, camote, or sweet potato, croquettes, a dish of bamboo sprouts cooked after a savory native recipe, and green peppers stuffed with force-meat. There was a crab salad, deliciously cold, and papaya ice.

"But how do you obtain ice?" said the Commissioner.

"We have a small machine which freezes one hundred pounds daily,"

replied Charlotte, "just enough for each cottage and the mess kitchen."

"I remember when Collingwood proposed having that machine made by special order, how I pooh-poohed the idea," remarked Kingsnorth. "I was not sufficiently Americanized to feel the need of it. But I am as bad as the rest of them now. Frozen desserts are the only ones fit for the tropics; and I've even learned to drink iced-tea."

A general chorus of a.s.sent went up. "You certainly make yourselves comfortable," the Commissioner declared, "and, really, failing a fresh beef supply, you seem to have all that we get in Manila, in addition to a more charming situation. I suppose your only real difficulty is the matter of medical aid."

"That is our only real fear," Collingwood replied. "We keep a supply of coal on hand for emergencies, and we never let it get below a certain point. We keep a reserve sufficient to take the launch over to Cuyo or to Romblon. But if there came a sudden need in bad weather, we should be in the deuce of a fix. It is the only thought that ever keeps me awake at night."

The Commissioner nodded and murmured something appreciative of a possible crisis. Certainly this very entertaining lady who sat beside him--a lady who had seen something of the world if he was any judge of personality--must feel herself strangely situated in that out of the way spot, chancing the dangers of tidal waves, of storms, and of illness without medical a.s.sistance. He fancied the situation was explicable. The compromises which women make for matrimony had offered him food for reflection long before he ever saw Mrs. Collingwood; but what he could not understand was why she should have been among those who have to make compromises. A woman of her grace and finish ought to have a pretty wide field of selection, he thought; but then one can never tell how circ.u.mstances force persons into unfortunate positions. The Englishman was a dose; not that he had altogether lost his breeding, but that the atmosphere of degeneration hung so palpably about him. "How he must hate himself," thought the Commissioner, "to make us all so conscious of his fall!" He removed his eyes from Kingsnorth's face after arriving at this conclusion, just in time to meet the clear gaze of his hostess, and to know, by her sudden blush and momentary shrinking, that she had read him like an open book, and to realize that she was self-conscious of her own situation.