The Locusts' Years Part 4

"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 acc.u.mulation 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, a.n.a.lyzing, 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--a.s.signed 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 a.n.a.lyzed 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, d.a.m.nable 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 n.o.ble 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.