The Locusts' Years Part 7

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. a.n.a.lyze 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 anch.o.r.ed off Cuyo, which, with its squat lighthouse and low sh.o.r.e, 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 ash.o.r.e.

"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 a.s.sertion 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 pa.s.sed the point of shocking. You have the towering imagination in profanity, Martin, of an architect of sky-sc.r.a.ping 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 a.s.sumption, 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. Snodgra.s.s ("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 Snodgra.s.s--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 ash.o.r.e 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. Snodgra.s.s (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 cla.s.s, believing that G.o.d 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. Snodgra.s.s regarded this remark as verbiage. "How funny!" she said. "I never felt that way."

"In other words," remarked Lieutenant Snodgra.s.s, 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 a.s.sented, "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?"