The Locusts' Years Part 13

She was enough mistress of herself, however, to hold the conversation at its level. She asked with intelligent interest about those political events in the islands, concerning which it is tactful to question Commissioners. She drew the statesman out on the subject of his own hopes and plans for the islands. He in turn asked information from the fishers, and they, warming to the theme as men will when they talk of things in which they are experienced, gave him their practical, hard-headed views of men and conditions, spoke of native labor and its capacities and incapacities, of resources and possibilities, and of the disadvantages of political unrest to a people more primitive than any that ever before held the reins of government.

Even an illiterate man is interesting when he talks of his craft, and Martin Collingwood, however little natural development he had in social subtilties, was anything but illiterate or even ill informed. To his wife he seemed to gather new dignity as he took a leader's natural position. It was plain that his business a.s.sociates deferred to him; and in ten minutes it was plain that the Commissioner knew he was dealing with a man who would, in the financial world at least, make himself felt. Commissioners never ignore financiers. There came into the Commissioner's manner as the dinner progressed, something more deferential than the mere civility of a guest to a host, something which implied his acceptance of Mr. Collingwood as a man to be considered.

It was, on the whole, a most successful dinner. The newcomers had brought with them a current of the outer atmosphere, breathing interest and exhilaration into the little colony of self-exiles; and the exiles shared themselves so wholly with the outsiders that the outsiders grew to feel much at home. When, at eleven o'clock, they all walked down to the beach with the Commissioner and the Captain, regrets and good-byes were as hearty as they would have been if the acquaintance had been of long duration.

As he was pulled out to the steamer, the Commissioner remembered that, on the way down, Barton had given him a hint of an odd situation, to which he had paid but a cursory attention. Well it was for the old gossip that he was safe ash.o.r.e under the tent. "But I'll have it out of him going back," reflected the Commissioner. "Fine woman! Fine manly fellow, her husband; sort of man we need out here! He isn't her equal socially, but I suppose women forget social differences just as we do when they come under the attraction of good looks and manly traits. Besides, if he makes money, she can float him with no difficulty. A remarkably fine woman."

CHAPTER X

Judge Barton's servant, aided by Kingsnorth's boy and Martin's, had put up the tents and had seen thoroughly to the comfort of the visitors, so that there was nothing more to do than to bid the guests good night and to warn them of the island habit of sea bathing every morning. Jones had no bathing suit, but Kingsnorth said he would be able to lend him one; while Judge Barton, showing his fine white teeth in an appreciative smile, remarked that he never travelled without one. "We shall see you in the morning, then," said Charlotte, and she and Martin betook themselves to their own dwelling. Martin sank lazily into his hammock on the veranda for a final cigar, while Charlotte went to give some orders to her cook about breakfast. She found that gentleman asleep on the kitchen table with his head on a bread board. Rudely awakened and asked for explanations, he stated that he had not gone to his quarters, because the Senora had sent him word that she wished to speak with him; but finding the time pa.s.s slowly, he had fallen asleep as she had found him. He asked her plaintively why she had been so impatient with him for so small an offence, and he held out the bread board to show that it had suffered no harm. "Wash it with boiling water! Why not? but manana, manana! As she could plainly see there was no boiling water at that time."

The situation being one in which racial intelligence beats itself helplessly against racial unintelligence, Charlotte contented herself with a note in her housekeeping tablets to remind her to superintend the washing process the next morning, gave her orders, and returned to her room. Martin was standing before her gla.s.s in his shirt and trousers, a costume which always seemed to add to his stature.

"Now will you believe me?" he began teasingly. "What did I tell you about the Judge?"

"I haven't a word to say, but I was surprised. What do you suppose brought him down here?"

"I told you he wanted to see you."

"He said he wanted to see us, and we will treat him on that basis. That means that you must do your share of the entertaining. I do not want him on my hands all the time. He may just as well go with you each day as stay around the house. Promise me, dear, that you will take him on your shoulders."

There was an unmistakable earnestness about Charlotte's manner. She was pulling hairpins out of her hair as she spoke, and she laid those feminine accessories somewhat vigorously in a mother of pearl box, which Martin, to honor his calling, had insisted on having made for her. Her husband sank suddenly into a rocking chair and pulled her down on his knee.

"You are the funniest woman I ever knew," he said reflectively, "the first one I ever knew who wouldn't play on a man's jealousy. The truth is I was just half inclined to be jealous, but you've disarmed me."

"I can't conceive myself, Martin, playing on your jealousy. The whole idea is abhorrent to me. Jealousy implies distrust. Do you think me capable of a flirtation with Judge Barton? Do you think I should enjoy making you distrust me?"

Martin's face was a study. "You might not mean anything but a little fun," he said apologetically. "Most women begin that way. And then you might find that you liked him best. That happens. It happens often. And the Judge is a big somebody, and I am a pearl-fisher."

His tone grew bitter as he p.r.o.nounced the last words. It was almost the first time that Charlotte had heard him refer to the worldly distinctions that he affected to despise. But if he had expected his self-disparagement to bring him a reward in a counter disparagement of the Judge, he was disappointed. Charlotte sat on his knee, a very earnest figure, her teeth nipping her lower lip, her brows frowning with a very real perplexity. Her manner brought back to him his old fear of her unexpectedness in thought and action. But even as he sat wondering, she turned and smiled, and he drew a long breath of relief.

"We may as well have this out now," she said. "Perhaps I am making a mistake in revealing myself to you frankly. I think men understand the other sort of woman better, the one who plays upon their jealousy. I believe they value her higher." She closed his protesting lips with a gentle finger. "I am afraid that I do not belong wholly to the twentieth century, Martin. They call it the age of individualism. But I believe yet in those old tenets which were not individual opinions, but the joint consensus of generations seeking a livable basis for men and women. I believe in marriage and the family, and a lot of old-fashioned things. I believe that what chast.i.ty is to a woman, physical courage is to a man. I believe that women are born into this world to bear children and that men are born to fight for woman and child. The men of the present day seem to entertain a dream of universal peace, so perhaps the women are excusable for entertaining a dream of universal barrenness. However, that's irrelevant. We can discuss that another time. But when I took you for my husband, Martin, believing in all these old-fashioned ideas, I did it in the consciousness that the choice was final, the determining factor of my life. So long as you live, there is between me and every other man in the world a barrier (I know not what it is) across which my mind will never step, and across which no man will ever try to address me twice. No, I won't be kissed--it is the first time I have ever repelled a caress from you, but to me this moment is too serious for caresses. You have the man's right to resent another man's possessive thought of me; but you have no right to be jealous of me. I do not say that I will always love you. There are offences which you could commit against me which would turn my love to hatred. I do not pose as the angelic, forgiving woman. I give fidelity. I demand it in return. If you ever cease to love me, somehow, if it breaks my heart, I shall cease to love you. I would not submit to personal brutality from you or from any living being. But so long as you live there will be, in a sentimental sense, but one man in the world for me. I want you to know that, to understand it and feel it in every fibre of your being, even though I know you hold me cheaper for so understanding it." Her bosom heaved, her cheeks were fiery, and she would have sprung from his knee only that he held her in a clasp that was iron. His own eyes flashed a reply to hers.

"You had no cause to say that last," he said hotly.

"No cause, when ten minutes ago, you a.s.sured me of my unlikeness to other women! Look into your heart of hearts and ask yourself if I am a dearer possession now that you know that, come good or ill, with you or apart from you, in love or in anger, I hold myself yours and no other man's. And I do so not out of any false loyalty to you, for there are conditions which might cancel your right to ask loyalty. No: it is loyalty to myself. And this much I know of the whole male s.e.x; that while you are infinitely content to know that there are women who can entertain such ideals and hold to them at any sacrifice, you hold the individual woman cheaper for the knowledge."

She stared at him accusingly, and at first, half confounded, half amused with her unusual intensity, he tried to stare back; but in the end, his eyes fell and a dull shame burned in his cheek. For he knew that what she said was true, and that in the very moment of her a.s.surances, he felt the loss of something to guard, felt that easy-going surety which a man of his experiences with women knows only too well how to diagnose. However, another emotion of a very great pride in her capacity and in her frankness and a sense of guilt made him very abject. He held her when she tried again to slip from his arms; and when, to his consternation, she put her head down on his shoulder and her body was shaken with noiseless sobs, he was as comforting as she could have desired him to be, and she felt a repentant tear mingle with her own.

She allowed herself no luxury of grief, and after a few convulsive efforts got control of herself. But she lay with her head on his shoulder for a long time, and when she spoke it was with a mournful dignity.

"We have had our tragic moment," she said, "and I with my wretched love of staring facts in the face have unearthed a family skeleton. Let's put it back in the cupboard, Martin. Yours was a bogey skeleton, and I was so anxious to show it up for a fraud, that I dragged out the genuine one. That's singularly in keeping with my lifelong habit. Don't look so long-faced, Martin. Are you angry?" She put her face caressingly against his.

"Angry! Why should I be angry? I wish you didn't a.n.a.lyze things so minutely, Lottie."

"I wish I didn't too, Martin, but I can't help it. That's my punishment for being I. Oh, how I wish I were not I!" She looked at him with eyes unfathomably tired and sad, eyes of that gentle appeal that went straight to the depths of his masculine heart.

"All the same, I love you as you," he said. "I can't measure how much more or less for being sure of you--but I'm mighty glad to be sure of you--and I can't take my own insides to pieces as you can, but all the same I love you, love you, Lottie."

But as he smoked a last cigar,--for he said that their talk had driven sleep from him--Mr. Collingwood uttered but one phrase as he monotonously paced back and forth across his veranda. Sometimes he uttered it with irritation, sometimes he mouthed it slowly as if its terse brevity were the outlet of profound conviction. Sometimes he even smiled tenderly over it, as a memory of his wife's earnestness brushed across his vision. But however he said it, he repeated it again and again; and it was, "Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned!" For the lady he had married had again said and done the unexpected thing.

Charlotte was still less inclined to sleep than her lord, though she went through the semblance of courting slumber. She was infinitely annoyed with herself for her own outburst, and was seeking what seemed a reasonable cause for so much emotion, but could not find one. She heartily wished Judge Barton had seen fit to wait for an invitation before he invaded Maylubi; and, though she declined to admit that she looked upon his coming as an omen, she was inclined to feel that he had been altogether too mixed in her romance. He had been an unsympathetic and amused onlooker at her courtship; he had been with them on that last crucial evening before their marriage;--she wondered how much his mere presence had influenced her in her subsequent speech with Martin;--he had been present at the wedding; and now his coming was contemporaneous with their nearest approach to a quarrel. As for what she had eased her mind of to Martin, she knew that she was right, but she added, self-accusingly, that her knowing it was all wrong. Quite mournfully she arraigned herself, and she a.s.sented whole-heartedly in what she knew must be Martin's secret verdict--that women have no business with ideas of a philosophy on s.e.x matters: that they should be limited to instincts and to principles. Long after Martin had ceased to pa.s.s upon his own condemnation, and was sleeping like an exaggerated infant, she lay wide-eyed, fearing she knew not what, but conscious of change impending. She had had eight months of a happiness more nearly perfect than she had ever dreamed could be hers, and it was not in the nature of things temporal as she knew them that such happiness could be of long duration.

Judge Barton meanwhile had retired to his tent, but had him drawn thence by a late-rising moon and his own cogitations. As he paced slowly up and down the silvery beach, his thoughts rushed one after another in confusing circles. First of all he anathematized himself for daring to put to the test that lulled security of his own feelings for Mrs. Collingwood. He had left her on her wedding day, himself a prey to a charm that had struck him, as it were, between the eyes, struck him with that force which emotion can attain only when it is suddenly aroused for one who has played an unheeded part in the subject's life up to the moment of its birth. It had been months since he deemed that his sudden obsession for Mrs. Collingwood was dead, killed by very weariness of itself, and by continual thwarting. For a week or ten days after his parting with her, he had gone about with her face constantly before him, with her voice in his ears. He had started at the sight of a figure in the distance, resembling hers. His appet.i.te had failed him, zest in all things had departed from him. The congratulations of his confreres on a brilliant decision had, it seemed to him, been mockery. He wanted her approval, n.o.body else's. The women of his acquaintance bored him to irritation. "I am in love,"

he admitted to himself, "in love with a married woman whom I probably might have married myself had I so desired. I saw her every day for six weeks, and far from entertaining any sentimental thoughts about her, I deliberately set myself to tease and annoy her. I lost all sight of her for six weeks, and in that time never gave her a thought; but when I found her with her lover at her side and saw her vow herself to him, for reasons only known to the imp of perversity I discovered that she was my long lost affinity. My G.o.d! was ever man before such an imbecile? How can a man conceive such an affection for a woman who has given him one tremulous smile on her wedding day? What does this thing feed on? Am I coming to my dotage?"

In such strain did the Judge berate himself through ten or twelve weary days, and then the obsession left him as suddenly as it had come. Interest and ambition returned, he found his women friends as entertaining as ever, and though he thought often and kindly of Mrs. Collingwood, his meditations were tinged with a strain of that violet usually allotted to the dead. Past experience had taught him that sentimental fancies about women, once chilled, are hard to resuscitate, and he felt quite certain that Mrs. Collingwood's ghost would trouble his musings no more. He fell into the habit of thinking about the experience humorously, he spoke of it to himself as "my tragedy," and once he nearly allowed a clever woman to worm the story out of him. The accidental intrusion of a third person was all that saved him from an access of garrulity; but having been saved, he was able to contemplate with retrospective horror his nearness to the brink and to avoid all subsequent promenadings on that path.

When by mere chance, he found himself invited to accompany the Commissioner and the oyster-sh.e.l.l agent on their voyage of discovery, he accepted the invitation with delight, regarding himself as a man protected by inoculation. He owned up, however, to a frank curiosity about the Collingwoods, and to a strong desire to see them together in their home; but he had as little expectation of a revival of his fancy for Mrs. Collingwood as he had of beholding so great a change in the lady herself.

But it had revived! It was there in full force, bringing with it the primitive man's sense that desire is right. From the moment he had again beheld Charlotte's high-bred face with her soul shining through the gray eyes, and had been again conscious of her fastidiousness and of her intelligence,--in short, of all the overpowering emanations of a unique personality,--his old pa.s.sion to dominate her, to hold her fascinated by his own powerful magnetism, burned like a fever within him. It burned the more that in the lapsed months some new element of charm had come to her, as if the enlarging of human experience had fused and melted into softer lines those st.u.r.dy elements of character which had repelled quite as often as they had attracted him. She was not to be flirted with--that he knew only too well, and he had to put on eyes and voice a guard that cost him dear; but he could not resist following her when she went to supervise her dinner preparations, he could not resist the grudging sense he had of every word addressed to another than himself.

He cursed his folly in submitting himself to temptation. By his own act he had put himself in this place and had burned his bridges behind him. He had let himself in for a week of the society of a woman, to a.s.sociate with whom, on the terms on which he must meet her, was sheer tantalization. She would not flirt with him, nor was she of the ingenuously simple sort which can be flirted with without knowing the fact. The Judge smiled ruefully as he tried to imagine Charlotte Collingwood dominated by any emotion which she could not a.n.a.lyze. Plainly, he had one course before him--to see as little as possible of Mrs. Collingwood except in her husband's presence, and to guard his eyes and tongue if by chance he should find himself alone with her. He was rather proud of his virtuous resolutions, but he dreaded the slow-going days--seven of them before the steamer would return and he could put time and distance between him and Charlotte Collingwood. The Judge had great faith in Time as a mender of all things.

CHAPTER XI

The next morning at the matutinal swim the Judge affixed himself as a satellite to Kingsnorth, and left the married pair to take their morning recreation together. At breakfast, he talked business and accepted with apparent eagerness an invitation to visit the fishing grounds with the workers and the sh.e.l.l-purveyor. He went on that day and on five other days, enduring a great many sights and smells that he by no means enjoyed, but admitting to himself that anything was better than battling with the continual temptation to bombard Mrs. Collingwood with the declaration of his pa.s.sion for her. He had enough to do to watch his betraying eye and voice during those long hours, from five o'clock till bedtime, during which the little colony was perforce united; and at the end of each day's dragging torment, he balanced a mental account in which he itemized on one side his self-restraint, its pains and penances, and on the other Charlotte's gradual revelation of all her hidden loveableness. At first, a shadow of her old guard had hung about her, and she had been reserved; but rea.s.sured by his frank geniality and his apparent desire to see as much of Collingwood as possible, she gradually relaxed her watchfulness, and admitted him to the place of a tried family friend.

One warm night, when the Maclaughlins, Kingsnorth, and the oyster-agent had given themselves up to the delights of bridge, the other three strolled along the beach till they came to an old banca lying bottom up on the sand. There was no moon, but the stars burned steadily overhead, their reflections rising and falling with each slow wave. A ghostly thread of white fire outlined each breaker that toppled lazily over, and the gentle succession of splashes was like a deep harmonic accompaniment to the shrill chorus of insect life which burst from the grove behind them. They sat and listened a long while, each under the same charm, which was a different charm. It was Charlotte who first broke the silence.

"In spite of the noise, isn't it still, isn't it lonely, isn't it delightful?" she said. "It is like a sort of Truce of G.o.d thrown into our lives of struggle and overstrain."

"I can never accustom myself to those sentiments from you, Mrs. Collingwood," said the Judge. "To me you seem a woman so eminently fitted to be a part of the great world, that I cannot understand your getting along so well without it. It is like seeing a musician trying to live without music, or an artist without pencils and brushes."

"Charlotte swam out into the big world and got a mouthful of salt water, and it made her sick," Martin put it. He fancied the Judge's words had reference to living in a city among hordes of fellow beings. Of society as a fine art, Martin had no conception.

"That's quite true, Martin; but it isn't my only reason for liking our present life. Your 'great world,' Judge Barton, means a continual drain upon one's tact and patience, a continual smoothing over of difficulties, of forcing oneself to adapt oneself to people with whom one has no real sympathy. This life is a sort of moral drifting, with the consciousness that the current moves in the right direction. The other world is full of experiences. One pa.s.ses from one perception to another, one's being is wrung with the continual play of warring emotions; but here one sits down quietly to digest and to let one's soul feed on the food one has gathered in that plethora of emotions."

"I wonder if you know how aptly you ill.u.s.trate your theory."

"Oh, yes, I have grown," she declared tranquilly. "It seems to me my horizon has broadened infinitely while I have been here. When I was a child living in a convent, we internes were given annually a week at the seash.o.r.e. Our unfailing recreation was to run about with a tin pail and a spade, filling the pail with sea-sh.e.l.ls, seaweed, and all the other seash.o.r.e treasures which children delight in. And when we went home, I remember the joy I had in going through my pail. Things flopped in so rapidly during the day that I hardly knew what was there. But the ecstasy of the twilight hour when I sorted my treasures! My life here has been something like that tin pail sorting-out. I have sat down to review impressions, to throw away the valueless, to cla.s.sify and arrange the rest. It has been a priceless experience."

"Very good; but you don't want to keep it up forever," remarked Collingwood.

"I fancy Mrs. Collingwood will begin constructing after she has finished sorting."

"A philosophy! Remember you warned me against it. Besides I have my doubts of a philosophy's ever being satisfactory to a woman. For myself I have no hopes of ever being more than consistently inconsistent."