The Locusts' Years Part 14

"Your demands are modest." This in rather an inscrutable voice from the Judge.

"Do you really think so? Have you not learned that really modest demands on life are like elegantly simple clothing, the most expensive to be obtained? Get my husband to tell you his demands on life, and you will hear something that really is modest."

"Out with it, Collingwood. I have never given you credit for modest demands."

Collingwood puffed out two rings of smoke, and removed his cigar. He was sitting at his wife's feet as she sat on the banca, and he leaned his head back luxuriously against her knee.

"Above five millions as near as I can make it is my figure. I might do with more if I could get it, but I don't see where I can do with less."

"And you call that modest!" said Judge Barton ironically to Charlotte.

"I call any demand on life modest which can be expressed in dollars and cents. But Martin's only modest demand is for the five millions. He has others not so modest."

"Name one," challenged Collingwood, sitting up in some surprise.

"I shall do nothing of the kind. Find them out for yourself."

"And how about me?" There was a tone almost of abject anxiety in Judge Barton's voice.

"Ah, you! You know that you draw sight drafts on the universe daily."

"Which are seldom honored," the Judge remarked somewhat bitterly.

"This is all getting blamed mysterious to me," interrupted Collingwood. "I wish you two would talk down to my level."

"Talk up to it, you mean," replied Charlotte good-naturedly. "For you cannot believe for an instant that the irresponsible demands of two persons asking for the impossible are to be put on a higher level than a practical demand like yours that can be expressed in figures, even if it runs into seven. You ask nothing of life, Martin, that isn't in it; while those drafts of Judge Barton, as well as my own, are drawn on an ideal universe. The Judge and I are not content with things as they are. We do not own up often, but this seems a propitious moment. Deep in his heart each of us is echoing that old refrain of Omar's.

"Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits--and then Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!"

"That's pretty. Say that again," said Martin; and she repeated it. At its end he said wistfully, "I thought you and I had our hearts'

desires." And Judge Barton broke into his short, ironical laugh.

"Don't tell me my husband can't make pretty speeches," said Charlotte.

"He clings to his commercial instincts," said the Judge, "for he asked as much as he gave."

"Humph!" grunted Martin. "I am beginning to be proud of myself. I didn't know I gave or asked. I thought I referred to things that are understood. You are my heart's desire. All the rest is just working, and being glad when I succeed, and angry when I fail. It's taking hard knocks and gritting my teeth over them, and saying to myself that I'll blast what I want out of this universe yet. That's just living. But I don't want the world made over. It suits me all right, and I thought it suited you."

Judge Barton's gaze was fixed on the vague moving ma.s.s of waters before them, but Charlotte fancied she could detect a tense interest in her answer.

"It does not suit me altogether," she replied slowly, "but if Judge Barton will forgive an exchange of conjugal compliments, I'll admit that it has come very near suiting me, since I married you. My little burst of this evening is an echo of a former self. It's the sort of thing I have said so much in my life, that it ripples off my tongue through force of habit whenever anyone strikes a harmonious note. And now I am going in. I am tired and sleepy, and I know that you both want to talk business."

The Judge rose as she did. Martin remained on the upturned banca. "I'll follow you before long," he said, and before she was out of earshot she heard him say, "What do you think the administration is likely to do?" The rest trailed off in an indistinct murmur; but she smiled, knowing that Philippine policy was uppermost.

The next morning Judge Barton found his self-denying spirit in the minority, and a very insistent small voice demanding a reward for five days of self-immolation. Secure in the knowledge of his past will-power, and confident that the next day would see him off the island, he asked himself why there was any need of sacrificing himself to the heat and smells of another day on the launch. He pleaded a headache, ate little to bear evidence to his sincerity, and after breakfast retired to his tent with the honest intention of keeping it till noon at least for very consistency's sake. Through its open sides, he could view Mrs. Collingwood at her daily routine.

She came out upon the broad veranda, made a minute examination of the flower-pots, pulled a few dead fronds from a great air-fern which hung in one of the windows, and cut a nosegay from the hedge of golden cannas. Afterwards he saw her through the open cas.e.m.e.nt, sitting at her desk, and apparently making entries in an account book. At nine o'clock, six or eight children between the ages of seven and fourteen arrived and squatted down on the veranda. Charlotte came out with an armful of books, which she distributed; and with the help of one of the larger boys, she also brought out an easel on which was a rude blackboard.

At this point the Judge's resolution weakened. He donned a coat and ambled over to the veranda. To his hostess's somewhat suspicious, "Better so soon?" he returned an honest confession.

"It was just one of my boyhood headaches," he admitted, "the kind that used to keep me in bed till nine o'clock, when school had taken up. Did you never have that sort of headache, Mrs. Collingwood?"

"Never. I was a conscientious child, though I am willing to admit that it was doubtless a great mistake to be so. Rufino, begin." And Rufino began chantingly:

"E see a cuf. A ball is in de cuf. Srow de ball to me." He paused triumphantly.

"I see a cup," corrected Charlotte. "Say it after me--cup, cup"

and she p.r.o.nounced the final consonant so distinctly that Rufino proceeded without difficulty:--

"I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa. Srow de ball to me." There was no little difficulty in inducing Rufino to say throw, and he did not succeed until Mrs. Collingwood made him take his tongue in his two fingers and pull it through his teeth, preliminary to attacking the word. His mates took exuberant joy in this feat, and the next boy, Wenceslao de los Angeles, started out glibly: "I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa," and then dropped his book, gave his tongue a convulsive jerk and spluttered, "Srow de cuppa to me."

The Judge gurgled as helplessly as the children did, blushed, tried to save the situation, and looked exceedingly severe. Mrs. Collingwood, a little flushed, threw him a protesting glance, smiled, bit her lip and went on with the reading lesson. When every aspirant had had a chance to see the cup and to pull his tongue, she proceeded to "develop"

the lesson. The Judge was bored. It was one of the miseries of his strange infatuation for her that merely being with her or able to watch her afforded him no satisfaction. He wanted to monopolize her, to keep her attention constantly centred in himself. If this feeling was Nature, working in its own blind way to accomplish what the man's intellect told him could not be done, the Judge ruefully reflected that Nature can sometimes keep a man very miserable, and that she wastes a great deal of human effort. For whether her thoughts were with him or away from him, he was secretly conscious of what she had told her husband, that there was for her, in one sense, but one man in the world. Her old suspicion of him was lulled, and she stood ready for fair honest friendship; but there never had been, in one glance of her eye, in her occasional merry laugh, or in her frank converse, the faintest evidence of that s.e.x consciousness which is in no wise to be confounded with social self-consciousness, but which, as an element in woman's ent.i.ty, is the only possible excuse for the ba.n.a.lities which men are usually eager to exchange with them by the hour.

The Judge was wearily awaiting the close of the reading lesson when he received another disappointment in the sight of numerous physically incommoded individuals who strolled up by detachments, and squatted at the foot of the veranda steps. There was a consumptive in a talebon, or hammock, in which the sick are carried about. There was a small boy with a boil on his kneecap. He had plastered it with lime, a disinfectant for almost all skin troubles in the Philippines; and he alternately felt it gingerly, and glanced apprehensively, if fascinatedly, in the direction of the "medequilla." There were ulcers, and yellow jaundiced folk suffering with a seasonal fever. The Judge decided that fully one-fifth of the island's population was represented in the a.s.semblage, and he gave a shrug of commiseration as he reflected how they must have suffered unaided before the coming of Charlotte.

He was watching her somewhat closely as she struggled with the limited understanding of one of her protegees, when she glanced down the beach, and he saw a great tide of crimson rush to her cool, clear skin. Naturally his eyes followed hers, but he saw approaching only a rather young and comely girl carrying a young child in her arms. He had barely time to perceive this when Mrs. Collingwood turned to him.

"I am going to dismiss my cla.s.s and take these poor people next, and I can't let you a.s.sist at that. I am dreadfully self-conscious about it with any on-lookers. There isn't any evading the fact that it is really daring on my part to attempt to play physician, and nurse, too; but something has to be done for them. But I really couldn't bear an audience."

"I'm off," said the Judge with a laugh. He did not, however, turn toward his tent, which would have taken him away from the approaching girl, but swung briskly down the sand in the direction from which she was advancing.

She greeted him with the customary civility of Filipinos, and he vouchsafed her a nod. He dared not stop and speak to her, but he made directly for the native village, a mile away, where he asked the headman who she was. When he had extracted the full details of the story, he turned and strolled slowly back. But he did not rejoin Mrs. Collingwood. He went, instead, to his tent, where he sat gazing meditatively across the sea while he turned over and over the facts that he had heard.

She had compromised with life with a vengeance! He felt that she had gone far when he beheld the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth. But to live openly in daily converse with such a man, to sit at the table with him, and to minister to the needs of his illegitimate child--that was carrying tolerance or charity to a length unprecedented. He made no allowance for the fact that she found herself confronted with a situation in which to take action was to risk her domestic happiness. What he scorned in her was the fact that she could be happy under such circ.u.mstances. He knew very well that women put up with worse in the very circles which he was struggling so desperately to attain; but he knew also the veil of decent concealment which those circles know so well how to a.s.sume. He had to admit, also, that she had proved more of a philosopher than he had given her credit for being, and she had dared to reprove him for his gibe, and he had apologized with G.o.d knows what of contrition! The hunter instinct that is so strong in all men rose up in him; and suddenly he realized why he had so remorselessly wounded her and tormented her in those early days of their acquaintance. It was that deep in his mind had lain the desire for her, which still held, but which then he had been unwilling to gratify by marriage; and proportionally as he had felt that she was out of his reach and that he dared not insult her by one sign of sentimentality unbacked by the desire of marriage, he had hated her with the smouldering hatred of balked affection. Well, he loved her still, and he was willing to marry her. If she could get rid of Collingwood, he was willing to marry her. He hardly doubted that she would do it. He felt pretty sure of the motives which had made her marry the young ruffian, who had, he admitted, improved considerably under her hands. She was a feminine creature in spite of her brains, unable to face life without love, and she had been grateful to the man who offered it to her, and had given her the shelter of his roof. But that any woman of Charlotte Collingwood's breeding would deliberately prefer Martin Collingwood to a man of her own cla.s.s, Judge Alexander Barton declined to believe. Nor was he altogether wrong. She might not have taken Collingwood in the beginning, had the Judge been his honest rival at that time. But having taken him, she had no intention of questioning her bargain. The Judge read her very correctly up to that point of secret loyalty and grat.i.tude, which to a man of his ambitions was outside the possibilities of human nature.

Why should she not, he asked himself, get rid of Collingwood without scandal and marry him. She was a woman to be proud of. He had seen her at her husband's table and knew that she graced it. There must be somewhere in the United States an influential kindred who might not care to make too much of her as a nurse, but who would be glad to welcome the wife of an eminent jurist; and with proper family backing, the Judge saw many things. Why not a commissionership, yes, a governorship? And then (for everybody knows that a Governor of the Philippines has a great chance to keep in the public eye) why not something better by-and-by? The Judge's visions grew more rosy than it is safe to chronicle here.

Strange it was that his week of intimate a.s.sociation had not shown him the utter futility and madness of thinking to approach Mrs. Collingwood with the audacious plan he had in mind. Partly, his own pa.s.sion blinded his judgment; partly, he had so long been accustomed to the society of women to whom social preferment is the end of life that he had lost sight of the stronger and n.o.bler elements of character that can live in the feminine breast. To be just to the society in which the Judge moved, there was a very fair sprinkling of n.o.ble women within it, but his restless ambition drove him into intimacy with those who could understand him and sympathize without the necessity of explanations.

The result of his musings was that he went to luncheon in a dangerous mood. It had full opportunity to show itself, for Mrs. Maclaughlin did not appear. She sent word that she had been engaged in the poultry yard all morning, had bathed late, and would prefer taking her luncheon in her wrapper at home. As the Judge had caught a glimpse of her drying her rather wiry gray tresses in the sunshine of a window, he was able to corroborate her statement; and Charlotte laughed as she gave orders for the preparation of the tray.

"You can be trusted to see all things that you are not wanted to see,"

she added.

Then the Judge went point-blank and very indiscreetly at the matter in his mind. "Was that why you sent me away this morning?" he inquired.

For an instant her face flamed, and then the color left it white, with an angry gleam in her eyes. She played with her teaspoon a minute, and then she asked him a civil question about his impressions of her school. It was his turn to flush. The rebuke was the more scathing for its silence. His temper rose, and even in that instant he found time to wonder why he should have such an infatuation for a woman who had such power to enrage him.

"Why do you stand it?" he asked.

Charlotte was dumbfounded. She had her hospital patient on her hands again, when she had imagined, for nearly a week, that she had found a friend. Mechanically she pushed a dish of candied fruits (they were at dessert) toward him. "These are quite fine," she said quietly. "You had better try them and then have your cigar. Meanwhile I must ask you to excuse me. My cook awaits dinner directions."

She was rising, but he reached a hand across and seized hers as it rested on the table edge.

"Do you think you can put this scene off?" he demanded. "You have got to listen. You had no business to marry Collingwood in the first place. It is time the thing came to an end."