The Locusts' Years Part 16

Again she said nothing. The answer was burning on her lips. "You are the reason. The a.s.sociates you have given me here are the reasons." But she maintained silence. Collingwood was angered by what he thought her obstinacy.

"Well, what was the reason?" he demanded.

"He thought I might be ambitious."

It was an honest answer and as generous as it was frank. But Collingwood was in no mood to measure generosity.

"And you let him get away without giving me a chance to kick him into the Sulu Sea," he reproached her.

"I did. The greatest fear I had was that he would not get away without your doing it. Suppose you had kicked him--as you are quite capable of doing--and he had kicked back. One or the other would have been hurt. Suppose it had been you, do you think I should have enjoyed seeing you suffer? Or suppose you had hurt him, do you think it would have been a satisfaction to me to know that you had fought for me, and had to be punished for it? Do I want my husband in jail or maimed for rebuking an insolence that I could handle myself? I defended your dignity and mine, and Judge Barton has been a thousand times more rebuked by my tongue than he would have been by your fists."

With this speech and with the memory of her shrug and handshake, Martin's kindling jealousy had to be temporarily extinguished. He returned with a more conciliating manner to the charge.

"I should like to know what you said to him."

But Charlotte could suffer no more. "Don't ask me, don't ask me,"

she implored. She rose and walked away. The action was the result of lifelong habit. She had never allowed herself to indulge in emotion before others, and she had exercised almost the will of a red Indian to refrain from giving way to an overwhelming burst of tears; but when, after she had regained some control of herself, her thoughts returned to Collingwood, a sense of bitter disappointment in him mingled with her self-pity.

He had not followed her! He had shown her no sympathy in her momentary outburst of unhappiness. She was conscious of never having deserved better of his loyalty and sympathy, and she had never received less! She finally took up a book and endeavored to read, but her heart was sick with wounded love and pride. She found old feelings that she had believed scourged out of her being rising in tumultuous violence. There was the feeling of outraged pride and sensibility, the swelling sense of injustice, and a blind twisting and turning to see a way out of the situation. Suddenly that which the Judge had proposed leaped back into her mind. The ear which had been deaf to him when he appealed to her ambitions became sensitively alive to a whisper when that whisper promised succor from distaste. She was frightened at her own att.i.tude and took herself severely to task. She said to herself that she was morbid, that Martin had every right to be displeased with her, for she had denied him frankness; but even as she ranged these weights in her mind's eye the scale tipped lower and lower with the weight of his displeasure.

Live under the bane of his anger she could not. The tentative overtures, the timid looks or glances, the humility with which less spirited women propitiate an injured deity were foreign to her nature; but equally she was not calloused, as many women are, to conjugal frowns.

All the self-confidence which she had gained in months of happiness was jolted out of her at Martin's first angry word. Another woman might have turned his wrath away with a laugh, might have nestled her hand into his with a whisper and a kind look; but it was not in Charlotte Collingwood to offer a caress to an angry husband. It would have been to her an act beyond the pale of decency. Her heart harbored no revenge. Every moment as she sat listening for his step, she justified his resentment, she told herself over and over that she had no tact and no consideration, and that Martin was an abused husband; but to have risen and sought him when he was plainly averse to her society would have seemed to her the acme of unwomanliness.

Meanwhile Mr. Collingwood was pacing the sands. His temper was seething. He did not understand the situation, and the more he realized his inability to understand it, the higher rose his desire to hold somebody accountable. There was no doubting the sincerity of Charlotte's words, "I have not been flirting with him," but Martin Collingwood thought there had to be a reason for such a radical step on the part of so conservative a man as the Judge. Then there was the fact that the Judge had departed without that closer acquaintance with Martin Collingwood's footwear. To a man of Collingwood's temperament, being balked of the physical pleasures of revenge was worse even than the sting of the affront. Why had not Charlotte told him? She had clearly not meant to tell him. She had meant to let him go on shaking that viper by the hand when they met. But why? Ah, that why!

It was long after midnight when he entered his home. His wife was asleep or pretended to be so; and when he awoke late, after a troubled sleep, he found her dressed and gone. From the adjoining room, the clinking of cups and saucers told him that breakfast was going on.

Collingwood dressed quickly and went in to breakfast wearing an unpleasant face. After one quick glance, Charlotte gave him a smiling good morning, to which he vouchsafed a surly reply.

Kingsnorth remarked: "I thought I should have to go to work without you, old man. Mrs. Collingwood would not have you waked. She made us talk in whispers and eat in parenthesis, as it were."

"All tom-foolishness," said Martin. "I am no six-weeks-old baby. You let me oversleep like this again," he added, addressing the muchacho, "and I'll beat you with a dog whip."

Then electrically everybody knew that something was wrong in the Collingwood household. Mrs. Maclaughlin stole a frightened look at Charlotte whose face flamed, Maclaughlin stared first at Collingwood and then at his wife, and finally turned his wondering eyes on Kingsnorth, who met his gaze with an eye about as intelligent as that of an oculist's advertis.e.m.e.nt. A moment later Charlotte addressed some trifling remark to Kingsnorth who answered with a suspicious readiness, and they fell into conversation unshared by the rest of the table.

Collingwood continued to gloom after the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth, who had nearly finished when he appeared, had excused themselves. Charlotte sat on profoundly uncomfortable. She had no words in which to address his frowning majesty, but she was heartsick. She rose at last, saying, "If you will excuse me, Martin, I will leave you to finish alone, I forgot about those launch supplies;" and she made her errand in the kitchen detain her until she saw the launch puffing lazily across the blue, sparkling water.

She went back to her room and lay down half nauseated with the misery surging within her. Nothing in her experience had prepared her to meet the emergency she was confronting. She came of a family to whom the scene which had taken place in her breakfast-room could be possible only as a definite, final act of estrangement. She was as utterly ignorant of those persons who alternately frown and smile and betray joy or sorrow unthinkingly to the world as Martin was ignorant of the jealous guarding of appearances which pertained to her world. It never once occurred to her that Martin could publicly affront her at breakfast and forget all about it before dinner.

Yet that is precisely what he did. The day's work restored his natural sunny self. He dismissed the Judge from his mind with the mental reservation of kicking him on sight; and when he came home that night, he strode up the steps, caught his wife in his arms, and kissed her as naturally as if they had not, that very morning, omitted that lover's benediction for the first time since their marriage.

He made no apology for his late spleen. Truth is, he hardly thought of it as affecting her. She clung to him as he kissed her, and he saw that she was pale and her eyes heavily lidded; but he asked her no questions. She had had, in truth, a hard day. As soon as the glowering man body was safely out of the way, Mrs. Maclaughlin came over, bent on extracting information. In her life and in the lives of most of her friends, connubial difficulties meant neighborhood confidences and lamentations. Charlotte parried her hints and, to a point-blank question, returned a look so rebuking that Mrs. Maclaughlin went home in high dudgeon. For the rest of the day, Charlotte struggled against the tears that would have betrayed her--struggled till her eyeb.a.l.l.s ached and her weary head seemed drawn back upon her shoulders.

At dinner Kingsnorth stole one furtive glance, said to himself "Thoroughbred, by Jove," and bent himself to seconding Mrs. Collingwood's conversational efforts. After dinner they all played bridge till eleven o'clock.

So the whole incident was pa.s.sed over without speech between husband and wife. But with it went the completeness, the golden, unreal joy of their honeymoon. Though they walked and talked together, and played at being lovers again, a sense of distrust hung over their relations. Collingwood secretly nursed his why; his wife still asked herself proudly if she had deserved public humiliation at his hands. Led by an evil genius he could not have selected a more adroit way to offend her and to arouse her critical faculties against him than that he had chosen. Private reproaches she could have endured with more fort.i.tude than she could endure public sulking.

Nevertheless, she made a Spartan effort to clear him at her own expense, and a no less loyal attempt to conceal from him that a wound still rankled in her breast. But it did rankle, and, in the next six weeks, it seemed to her that she and Martin grew steadily apart; that in spite of every effort to stay the widening process, it went on slowly and relentlessly, and that it was leading them gradually but inevitably to that moment which she had so greatly dreaded before her marriage.

It was the custom at the island for the three men to take turns in going to Manila for commissaries, and to dispose of their pearls and sh.e.l.ls. Collingwood had been engaged in this work the year before, when he met with the accident which landed him in the hospital; the Maclaughlins had been up since Charlotte's marriage, and the next trip was Kingsnorth's. But as the time drew near, he astounded them all by the announcement that he did not want to go, and that he wished Collingwood to take his place. When pressed for a reason for his apparent insanity, he declared that if a man had to live in purgatory or a worse place, he had better stay there all the time, and not seek spots that would emphasize its drawbacks when he returned to it. He insisted that Collingwood enjoyed Manila while to him it was the extreme of boredom, and that Martin ought to take his wife away for a change, that her spirits were drooping.

"Nonsense," said Charlotte. "I am absolutely contented. I don't feel droopy."

But Collingwood had taken alarm. He stared at her. "But you are a bit pale," he said. "I wonder why I had not noticed it. Besides, I should like to be in Manila again with you. Let's accept. Kingsnorth proposed it himself. He can't complain if we take him at his word."

At this point, Mrs. Maclaughlin put in a bomb. "Why can't I go too, then?" she said.

"We need a housekeeper," cried Kingsnorth, while Maclaughlin remarked hastily, "Don't talk of it."

"Fiddlesticks," Martin said. "You can get along by yourself a while. It's just the thing. Charlotte will have somebody for company while I am at business."

By this time, Charlotte was ready with a smile and an echo of his remark. Kingsnorth grew morose while Mrs. Maclaughlin began to enumerate the things which actually demanded her presence in Manila. Maclaughlin gave her one or two frowns; but she had taken the bit in her teeth; and it was soon decided that she was to have her way.

Charlotte's heart sank and her antic.i.p.ation of pleasure subsided into dread. Mrs. Maclaughlin was, at all times, a trial to her. She had little sympathy with the self-complacent temperament which is not subject to atmospheric influences; and Mrs. Maclaughlin's society seemed to her several degrees less desirable in Manila than it did in Maylubi. She made no objection, however, and even succeeded in forcing herself to a half-hearted share in Martin's enthusiasm.

CHAPTER XIII

It was all finally settled, and preparations such as could be made were begun. Charlotte found that, with a prospect of returning to the world, a variety of interests which she had thought quite extinct revived and grew clamorous. Memory was busy, too, with the days of her courts.h.i.+p. That strange mingling of ecstasy and misery through which she had pa.s.sed seemed quite remote and, in retrospect, quite unnecessary. A hundred times she asked herself why she had been such a goose, why she had hesitated, why she had permitted the possible opinion of the world at large to influence her. She went about almost uplifted with the sense of new moral independence.

Collingwood was childishly eager for the change. His head, too, was full of memories and of places--how they would revisit the place where such and such a conversation had taken place,--did she remember that wrestle of their two individualities,--or drive over the ground where he had pleaded so fiercely for the right to take care of her, to stand between her and the bread-and-b.u.t.ter struggle. Particularly he looked forward to the Luneta evenings, for, of all moments in his life, he held that moment on the Luneta when she had dropped her flag the sweetest. He said as much to her, and she blushed like a girl. He also said something to the same effect to Mrs. Mac when that lady was sharpening her imagination one evening at dinner.

"We are going to run off and leave you just once, Mrs. Mac," he said. "I've got one drive with my wife all planned out; it will be a Sunday evening. I am going to take her to the Luneta that evening; just she and I."

"Oh, I can understand," replied Mrs. Mac. "For that matter, Mac and I were young once ourselves."

Kingsnorth, who had preserved a kind of displeased reticence ever since it had been settled that Mrs. Mac was to go to Manila with the Collingwoods, started to say something, bestowed upon the lady an unfriendly glance, and somewhat pointedly asked Mrs. Collingwood if she was going to join the bridge game after dinner.

Charlotte smiled across the table at her husband. "Not unless I'm actually needed," she replied.

"You hate it so badly, you'll have to be excused," Collingwood said. "Better let Kingsnorth take you for a stroll. You need exercise and his temper needs sweetening. He has been in a devilish mood all day."

"You make me feel like a prescription," said Charlotte, laughingly. "Mr. Kingsnorth, if your temper does not improve after a dose of my society, my husband's faith in me as a panacea for all troubles of the mind will have gone forever."

"I note that fact," said Kingsnorth, gravely. "I commit myself now to come back grinning like a Ches.h.i.+re cat." But he knew, in spite of her light manner, that Charlotte was displeased. It was seldom that she permitted herself the least badinage with him; and he recognized it nearly always as a cloak to cover some hasty and more aggressive instinct.

Nevertheless, when they started away after dinner, she fell into a more intimate tone with him than she generally used. The sunset was just dying out, and its flaming radiance seemed to exaggerate the wide sweep of the waters, the white stretch of sand, and the lithe, swaying boles of the cocoanut groves. Charlotte paused to look about her in a sudden rush of tenderness for the solitude.

"It is wonderful how contented one can be in such a situation as this," she said. "I am amazed at myself. I am never sad, seldom even lonely. I have a feeling, at times, that this could go on and on and on in endless aeons, and I could ask no more than one day's suns.h.i.+ne and that same day's sunset. It is inexplicable and yet it is all in myself; anything to upset that harmony between my soul and this could make it a nightmare, an endless nightmare."

"As it is to me," Kingsnorth rejoined. "I don't know why I stand it from day to day. I don't see how mere dollars and cents can compensate for stagnating here. Yet I am such a slave to the dollar that I do stay; the good Lord only knows when I shall go away."