The Locusts' Years Part 23

CHAPTER XVIII

The mental suffering was, however, far from small. As she strained her eyes through the blackness, Charlotte felt that the weight of ages lay on their aching pupils. Fatigue, despair, and fear all tore at her heart. There rose always before her the vision of Martin as she had imagined him in the little coastguard steamer's cabin, and the cold dread clenched her heart that the waves had sucked him down and down to the bottomless sea, a lonely, dead thing in the awful vastness of it. Once only she spoke to Mrs. Maclaughlin.

"Do you think it can be near morning?" she asked; and Mrs. Maclaughlin negatived the idea sharply.

"It was about midnight when we cleared out," she said, "and time goes slowly in fixes like this.

It went infinitely worse than slowly. When, at last, the blackness became a gloom filled with shapes, and a pallor showed in the east, the two women, their hair in disorder, their faces drawn and haggard, had hardly courage to look about them. Broad daylight revealed a scene of desolation, with the sea running furiously against the strewn beach, and with the cocoanut grove a ragged waste, its snapped boles standing upright and the long plumy tops dragging on the ground. Kingsnorth's charred structure, their own homes sprawling drunkenly, and the distant village in ruins, presented a picture, which, to minds less engrossed with even more heartrending possibilities, would have meant despair.

With the first clear light, Mrs. Maclaughlin hunted up her basket of food and some water bottles which she had deposited at the side of the path, and each woman made a pretence of swallowing a few tinned biscuit, and eased her parched throat with drink. Charlotte moistened Kingsnorth's lips, but he seemed unable to swallow. After awhile, however, he opened his eyes, and she perceived that he was conscious.

He did not try to speak, but looked at her curiously, evidently wondering how he came to be lying on the ground with his head in her lap. He stared at her, nonplussed by her appearance, then slowly let his eyes travel about him. The wrecked houses, the general devastation had, apparently, significance but no recollection in his mind. He made a faint movement, but the pain stopped him, and then she saw that he desired to speak but could not.

Charlotte bent over him. "You are hurt, Mr. Kingsnorth. I don't think you can remember all that happened. After you went home, the storm grew much worse, and finally Mrs. Maclaughlin and I perceived that our houses were doomed. We went to your house and broke in a window. You were asleep with a lamp burning on the table beside you; we had some difficulty in awakening you; and when we succeeded, and you roused yourself to come out, another blast of wind came. We had barely time to spring back; but you went down with the house. It caught fire from the lamp--but we got you out and dragged you here. I have done what I could for your wounds." She stopped, a slight vibration in her voice, and glanced desperately across the still foaming sea. If help did not come to them, there was no hope for Kingsnorth.

The man himself knit his brows in a forceful attempt at remembrance. Little by little, the lines of effort gave way to lines of bitterness. His nostrils dilated, a slow painful flush deepened the pallor of his face, and his lips tightened in a smile of self-contempt. Her own eyes suffused with pity as she looked down on him, for she knew that he had pieced it all out, and that the self-consciousness of ultimate failure and debas.e.m.e.nt was overwhelming him. To be a man and yet to have been found wanting at the supreme hour to those with whose protection he had been charged was exceedingly bitter to John Kingsnorth. He closed his eyes, unable to look at her, but presently a tear forced its lonely way out, then another, and still another.

At the sight, the last shadow of her old distaste and resentment vanished from Charlotte's mind. She saw in him only the creature maimed and suffering, dignified by the near approach to the supreme hour, a man weighted with the sense of failure, and the knowledge that his last chance had come and gone, and that it, too, had pa.s.sed him unprofiting. With sudden tenderness,--a feeling that seemed to reach forth to the uttermost confines of desolation,--she gently wiped away the tears, and then, bending, kissed him on the brow. He smiled at her gratefully and spoke with painful effort.

"Ah that's good. I've been lonely, I've wanted a human hand in mine, a woman's of my own cla.s.s. I'm not all hard and bad."

The words came with the utmost difficulty, and she gently pressed her fingers on his lips to stop him. His hand sought hers weakly, and held her fingers there. Then he turned his face to her like a chidden child, and she spoke to him no more. Only occasionally she moistened his fevered lips or wiped away the b.l.o.o.d.y froth that lay upon them after a fit of coughing. His physical suffering was very great, great enough, she hoped, to dull the consciousness of his dangerous state.

Mrs. Maclaughlin, as the day grew apace, busied herself in erecting a low shelter over the dying man. She got some bamboo poles and stuck them up, and laid on them a roof of banana leaves. She tried to get a mattress out of one of the fallen houses, but was unable to do so. She lighted a fire of leaves and old cocoanut husks, over which she brewed a cup of strong coffee. Charlotte drank it gratefully and afterwards ate one or two of the long fragrant bananas called "boongoolan." Although she was greatly fatigued, the hot drink and the food brought strength back to her, and new courage animated her.

Their servants and the village folk came in curious groups to inspect the ruined houses; but--sinister omen--they did not approach the whites, but eyed them curiously from a distance. Charlotte realized that, helpless as he was, Kingsnorth was still a protection to them; and he knew it too, for once, when the j.a.panese diver came too near, he motioned feebly for the revolver strapped at Charlotte's waist. She gave it to him, smiling faintly. The j.a.p, however, beat a retreat as the revolver changed hands.

So the long morning wore away and the dying man still pillowed his head in Charlotte's lap. Her mind, as she looked down upon him, was a-surge with crowding thoughts. Pity was foremost. It was indeed pitiful, this slow, painful ending, in desolation and loneliness, of a life that should have closed in dignity and peace. As the face grew whiter, and the pinched look of death stole upon his features, the bitterness and the degeneracy seemed to yield to what had been the once lofty spirit of manhood before the corroding acids of life had preyed upon it. Step by step he had moved on the narrowing path that ended in a cul de sac. He had declared that the fault was his, and that if he had had the right stuff in him, he could not have made the failure that he had made; but the poor fellow had not selected the elements of his nature. They had been forged and linked upon him by the wills and pa.s.sions of others. Across the seas, the mother who had contributed perhaps to the poorer elements of his character, and who had chosen his father--that mother still lived an easy luxurious life. Did she really think as little of him as he had declared she did? Would no pangs of contrition for her selfishness strike deep at the roots of her complacency, when she should learn that her son had died an exile on the lonely island? The sisters who had played with him, and the woman whose faithless hand had given the impetus to his downward career--would no repentant pangs visit them when the news should come that he had lived? There were other women, too, as he had boasted; women who had loved him, in spite of his scorn. Where were they? What were they doing as this final hour pressed upon John Kingsnorth? Over in the Filipino village, the child who owed him life sported with his playthings, ignorant of the father who would never act a father's part to him; and on the sunny hillside mouldered the remains of the broken-hearted girl who had been his wife. It was such a waste, such a pitiable, useless, extravagant waste of human desire, and of human happiness; a life that should have been filled with decency and respect and honor, ending so meanly, so sordidly, beneath the shelter of a mere leaf-roofed hutch. Her heart ached for the sufferer, ached for his isolation, for the final hopeless ending of what he had once hoped would be an honorable and happy career.

It was almost noon when Kingsnorth roused again and declared weakly that he desired to make his will. In the pockets of the coat which she had removed from him were a note book and pencil, and, at his dictation, Charlotte scribbled down his wishes concerning the child whom he at last stood ready to recognize. All his worldly possessions were left to the orphan, and Collingwood was named as guardian. Kingsnorth then signed the doc.u.ment, which both women witnessed. At his request Charlotte once again pillowed his head in her lap, and he kissed her hand feebly in grat.i.tude.

Mrs. Maclaughlin after a last hopeless look at the sea, threw herself down in the shade of the pandan bushes and went to sleep. Kingsnorth watched her jealously and when he was certain that she was beyond listening or seeing, asked Charlotte for his tobacco pouch. She hunted it up in the pockets of his coat, and gave it into his weak, trembling hands. He fumbled with it; and at last drew out the pearl, wrapped in tissue paper, which he had shown her on the day they discussed Martin's letter.

"For you," he said weakly; but at her flush, and sudden impulsive gesture of protest, he went on more strongly; "I want you to have it. It means something--a beginning--something between you and want. You're right: you must not sacrifice yourself. You deserve something of life. But take--take with the strong hand."

"But Mr. Kingsnorth," she replied, "I have not told you, but I am not going away from Martin. I shall stay by him; he needs me, I think. At any rate, there is some happiness in that thought."

He frowned slightly, and then smiled. "All the more need. A woman ought not to be so utterly in a man's power. We're merciless wretches--selfish." The effort of speech seemed to be too great.

Seeing that to refuse him would cloud his dying hours, Charlotte ceased to argue and let him press the bauble into her palm. It lay there, the visible token of Kingsnorth's final allegiance to the ideals of the cla.s.s which he had once renounced. It was, as he had declared, a something to stand between her and want, a bridge perhaps in some hour of need, that thing which might furnish her with temporary support and independence if she chose to set Martin Collingwood and her marriage vows aside.

But she did not intend to do so. As the slow hours dragged by, that resolution shaped itself more and more definitely in her mind, and with it there fell away her old self-consciousness about the world's opinion of her actions. Through what throes this sense of moral independence had come to her, she knew; through what it might yet have to pa.s.s before it could obtain a perfect development, she had some intuition; but in her ultimate victory over the weaker and poorer elements of her nature she had perfect confidence.

As she sat on in the blinding heat, her life pa.s.sed in retrospect before her, and something half bitterness, half elation sprang up in her soul as she gazed upon it. Too clearly she perceived that its n.o.blest features had been those which had most obstructed the happiness she yearned for. Her ideals, those maxims which parent, teachers, and guardians alike had dinned in her ears as the guide-marks of life if she would be a lovely and loveable woman, had only served to isolate her from human kind; and so far as love and tenderness had come into her life at all they were owing to a quality which all her training had taught her to regard as, at best, a weakness, and at worst, a shame. A flush of humiliation stained her cheek as she realized that her husband had not loved her for her intelligence, for her truth, for her candor, for her fair judgment, for her human charity, or for that final tenderness of soul and spirit which she felt welling like some crystal stream in her bosom. No, it was for her capacity for pa.s.sion which his ruder instincts had a.s.sumed must underlie the polished surface of her mind. Judge Barton, too, had loved her, had striven to rouse in her an answering feeling to his own; but though he had been able from the first to put a proper value upon her breeding and intelligence, she could not blind herself to the fact that these attributes were mere accessories to what really attracted him--the development, in herself, of amorous possibilities which only marriage could have brought about. She knew incontrovertibly, that if, by a magician's stroke, she could be changed back into the girl she was when Alexander Barton first met her, his interest in her would fall flat in an instant. That girl had been neither priggish nor puritanical, only intelligent, full of ideals, and emotionally immature, dedicated to that vision of womankind which man himself has consciously created, but from which unconsciously he turns away, chilled and rebuked by its very perfection.

As she looked back, she wondered at herself and at her own temerity in having dared to break with the teachings of a life-time; in having set at defiance all that tremendous pressure which custom, social usage, family pride, and selfishness bring to bear upon a girl and her marriage. It had taken a certain amount of moral courage to do what she had done; it had taken still more to bear what she had borne. But if out of endurance there came knowledge,--not empty maxims and high sounding phrases, but real knowledge of her own strength and of her own weaknesses, and some true guiding sense of her own relations.h.i.+p to the thing we call life,--she grudged it as little as the mother grudges the birth-pains which give her her child.

Had she taken her courage in her hand with one splendid outburst of defiance, much of sorrow and of humiliation might have been spared her; but, on the whole, she was glad that she had not done so. That sort of courage is seldom moral; it is, at bottom, emotionalism. She had gone timidly inch by inch trying to fortify each step by her intelligence. The way had led through devious windings: it had been a trial of endurance for others as well as for herself; but in the end it was she who had come out benefited. Poor Martin (her eyes lighted tenderly) had trodden it side by side with her; but experience had brought him no enlightenment.

No: the real value of all those weeks of pain and humiliation had been for herself. They had been a preparation for the revelation that had come upon her of the false ideals which modern society gives women. It was incomprehensible that a woman of brains could have clung tenaciously to the ideal which she had cherished for twenty-eight years; and yet, all her training, all the influences which surround a "well-brought-up girl" had contributed to it. What she had asked for herself was a splendid nullity. She had expected to draw her skirts daintily about her, and to pick her way through the drawing-room of life, receiving all, giving nothing, too well-bred and too intellectual to be tempted by its pa.s.sions; and she had actually supposed this egoistic solitude was moral elevation! She had thought that trampling upon human love, setting aside the desire for home and husband and children unless in their possession she gratified her vanity and ambition, was self-respect! Well, she had not been alone in her delusion. She knew that seventy per cent of her fellow women would condemn her for having married Martin Collingwood, and that more than that number would despise her for overlooking the crude insults of his letter and of his speech by the pandan bushes. Her face flamed as she recalled them. As long as she should live they would be a thorn in her flesh, a scourge, an agony to be relived.

Yet no flagellant ever bent more meekly under his own blows than Charlotte did as she resigned herself to bearing that cross. His words had been but the irrepressible utterance of his own wounded vanity; his letter but the masterful outcropping of the man's blind egoism. His illusions versus her illusions!--after all, what more had divided them than that? But greater than any illusion was life itself, the mingling of distracting hopes, fears, emotions, out of which only one thing is permanent and real, the consciousness of duty and right, as they are forever separated from material advantages; the expression of the human soul, which must move on struggling, fainting, vanquished or triumphant, asking perhaps for sympathy here or understanding there, but in the end recording its failures or its victories, companionless and voiceless.

Often and often, during her weeks of torment, a phrase had crept into her musings which she had repeated with G.o.d knows what of bitterness: "The years that the locust hath eaten." In the clarity of her new-found light, it was those other years which the locusts had eaten--those long, empty, undeveloping years in which she had patterned herself on a social ideal; but which had brought her nothing of strength or of character.

She went slowly over the year of her life on the island. What had her a.s.sociation with the Maclaughlins cost her? A possible intimacy with a commissioner's wife. What had it brought her? Much that was healthy in her viewpoint of life. That homely common sense of Mrs. Maclaughlin, her outspoken dependence upon the man of her choice, her frank admission of her sense of duty and obedience to him, had a wholesome significance in these days, when women have thrown off all the old maxims of subjection without finding any new self-imposed obligations. What had her year's a.s.sociation with Kingsnorth, educated reprobate, well-bred degenerate, cost her? An insulting proposition from a worldly man; but what a wealth of human sympathy and charity and compa.s.sion had it not injected into her moral and intellectual exclusiveness! She felt the richening of her whole nature that had come from putting aside her pride, from walking hand in hand with an outcast upon the highway.

As for Judge Barton's little drama, it had not hurt her in the least. Socially, it is true, it might be a stain. Even the semblance of an "affair" with the respected dignitary might cause gossip. But on her own soul that interview had left not one spot. It had soiled nothing in her but her pride. She realized that it is not dodging the temptations of life that makes character, but meeting them and resisting them. She made up her mind that if fate should ever throw her again into the society of Judge Barton, she would forgive him frankly; nor would she seek to overwhelm him with her offended dignity, nor press upon him the consciousness of his own sins. The man had had his moment of temptation and had fallen. He had wronged no one but himself. Far be it from her to decree his punishment.

Her thoughts turned then to Martin. The situation had its pathos for him as well as for her, though perhaps he might never know it; for there had come into the reality of her feeling for him the very elements which his own egoism had most feared and hated. She had, in the beginning loved him for loving's sake, caring nothing, so far as she was concerned, for his faults and his weaknesses, only too willing to ascribe to him the worth that he set upon himself; afraid of the world, it is true, and hiding from its condemnation, but secretly quarrelling with what she knew would be its contrary judgment. She had married him because she needed him, because she leaned weakly upon him. Now, when the experiences to which he had subjected her had taught her to stand alone and to judge independently, she was taking him back because he needed her.

He had declared that he would live with no woman on terms of pity or of sufferance; but her heart was full of pity for him as it had never been before; and for the first time the consciousness of her own real superiority to Martin entered into her feeling for him. Up to that hour, she had exalted him always at her own expense. There had been no way of evading the weight of what she had felt to be the world's scorn but determinedly to make Martin Collingwood into something which he was not; in the moment of putting aside that world's verdict, he and she swung as naturally into their normal relations.h.i.+ps as a compa.s.s needle swings back to its rest.

Henceforward she would see Collingwood as he was: the democrat whose democracy is but the ladder of ambition, the raw, self-made man reaching out an eager clutch for those finer things of life which he knows only by their ticketed values. But that fact no longer weighted him with a quality which needed apology or forgiveness; she saw in it growth, the only enduring, magnificent thing in this universal scheme. In all nature what is there but growth and decay, what but the steady effort to arrive at perfection, and the ensuing death out of which come new life and effort? Blind man, with Nature's unvarying lesson spread before him, seeks to defy in his own being the law which can never be successfully defied; would seize and hold unchanged that moment of perfect development which precedes decadence; would make use of artificial distinctions, would endeavor to strengthen cla.s.s differences; would invent caste systems, and sell his very soul to gratify his vain hope of retaining in himself or in his immediate descendants what he feels as the highest expression of his own development. He has never done it, he can never do it; but as instinctively as the flower reaches up to the sunlight, so must he ever struggle for the prolongation of his best matured product.

The question of Collingwood's social status became in an instant trivial. She saw in him the new growth, vigorous, wholesome, needing but the right soil and nourishment to develop into a forest monarch; and she had in her the power to aid that growth, and she had been minded to turn her back upon him because he had not found out what meed of consideration was due her, because he had sapped unconsciously of her strength without asking himself why and whence it came!

The thought broke upon her like a splendor, that there might be more joy in helping Martin Collingwood to his perfected state than there would be in just loving him or in being loved by him. Many times she had repeated, as women are fond of doing, that threadbare quotation,

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; 'Tis woman's whole existence!

and she had accepted the common feminine view that the couplet is a testimonial to man's coa.r.s.er nature, and a subtle tribute to feminine "soul" and superiority. She saw in it suddenly the whole story of feminine weakness and selfishness. She honored Martin Collingwood that love had not been his whole existence. There in her lap, his head swathed in b.l.o.o.d.y bandages, was gasping out his life a man who, however manly he might have been in other respects, had been essentially feminine in his disposition to make love his whole existence; and who had felt that the thwarting of the one natural desire for the woman of his choice was sufficient to dull all the normal manly instincts of ambition and accomplishment.

She glanced about her at the evidences of ruin, and she bowed her head in grat.i.tude that it had been her lot to come to this primitive land, to know humiliation and sorrow and loneliness, and to free herself in its solitudes from the false ideals of her training. She looked down the long vista of years and saw herself always at Martin's side, helping, working with him, bearing with his weaknesses, struggling with her own; but the end of it all was life and character for them both, something bigger than mere loving or being loved. If she uttered a sigh or two for what was irrevocably gone, it was not wholly in regret. It was no dream life she was going back to, no Summer in Arcady (that was past), but plain, prosaic marriage, with disappointments and misunderstandings and misconceptions to be outlived and to make the best of; nor was there anything but health in the thought that Martin might find just as much to overlook as she might. Children would come to them, and she saw herself bearing them, rearing them, guiding into intelligent and ethical expression the forceful inheritance which would be theirs from him, finding in them the realization of her own will and soul expression, rejoicing in his pride in them. He would work and she would bear,--strange anomaly of fate that carried back to its primitive beginnings the product of so much effort and vanity and ambition!

The suns.h.i.+ne beat pitilessly on the leaf shelter; the fatigue of the long vigil told upon her; her crowding thoughts wearied her. She held herself upright with difficulty, and her eyelids drooped. Sitting unsupported, she slept.

Her own body falling forward roused her after the briefest of naps. Her quick movement to regain her balance jarred Kingsnorth, and he opened his eyes. His face was half turned to the sea, whereas her back was set squarely against it; and he instantly perceived the long trail of a steamer's smudge borne ahead of the vessel which was still hull down. He pointed feebly to call her attention to it.

"Good old Martin," he murmured weakly. "I knew--he--would come. He's not--like-- me. He--doesn't fail."

Charlotte stared, her eyes aglow, her face aflame with hope. She lifted her hand to her throat, choked by what was throbbing there. There were hope and succor fast enough; but also what message of despair might not that vessel bring? What if she, like Kingsnorth, had delayed too long, and the Unseen Powers had decreed there should be no more chances for her? Then as she glanced down, she met Kingsnorth's intent eyes, puzzled, their keen intelligence slightly dimmed, but full of some question that he dared not ask. A sudden impulse moved her.

"I want to tell you before it is too late," she said with difficulty, "just how I feel. I glory in Martin Collingwood; I am glad I am his wife. I have had the indecency to be ashamed of myself for the most human and womanly thing I ever did in my life. Well, I'm emanc.i.p.ated." She stopped, drew a long breath, and broke into a little, low, nervous laugh. "There seems to be growing up a conviction among women that the only door of emanc.i.p.ation is the divorce court, and that the only way to a.s.sert their personality is in insurrection. I don't want that door. I had the effrontery to marry Martin Collingwood to be adored--as if either he or I or anybody else has the right to make that the end of life. That is the cry of the effete, of the thing which must soon fall into decay. But Heaven helping me, I'm going to make myself into a woman, and I'm going to be the right influence in his life. It's not going to be easy or free from heartache, but we'll do it." A sudden recollection overcame her. Her bravery dropped from her, the light vanished from her eye. "If it isn't too late," she whispered, "if it isn't too late."

"No, no," Kingsnorth said, though some torment, physical or mental, twisted his lips into uncouth shapes as he dragged out the words. "He'll come. Almighty G.o.d wouldn't keep a man--from this." With which words, of a poetic consistency with the weakness which had been his undoing, the voice of John Kingsnorth fell into eternal silence. For half an hour longer, perhaps, his eyes remained open, staring curiously, wistfully, sometimes at her face, sometimes at the deepening vapor line upon the sky. The steamer came full into view, a coastguard boat, undoubtedly heading for the island. The day's heat diminished; the shadows lengthened; the sea ran more and more gently; and the light of late afternoon deepened to etherealized amber. Its magic seemed to bring peace and resignation to the dying man. Once again with a pathetic sigh he turned his face to hers and tried to nestle closer to her as a penitent child clings to the mother who has conquered him. She bent and kissed him again, this time upon the lips. Shortly after, she perceived that he was unconscious.

Still the labored breathing went on and on a long time,--time enough for their servants to gather, a meek and hospitable group some little distance away, watching the vessel which would restore the whites to their old status on the island; time enough for the steamer to drop her anchor and to put out a boat; but at last, in a long shuddering sigh, it ceased. John Kingsnorth, disreputable offspring of a proud family, had gone to his reckoning. In time they would go to theirs.

For a few minutes, Charlotte made no attempt to move. Then she gently laid him down, and without disturbing Mrs. Maclaughlin still in the deep sleep of exhaustion, dragged herself painfully to her feet. The movement dislodged the pearl, which had slipped unnoticed into her lap. She picked it up and stood looking upon it meditatively. Its l.u.s.ter had no sinister significance in spite of those rather revolting confessions of Kingsnorth's about his musings over it. It was just a beautiful bauble, one of those s.h.i.+ning gauds for which women break their hearts or with which they seek to break other women's. It had no worth apart from human vanity. Back of all its commercial value, lay a human weakness.

She did not care for it. She said to herself that she would keep it long enough to learn the news that the boat brought her. If Martin was alive, well she knew how quickly he would repudiate the gift, how his man's pride would revolt at her having financial independence of him. She could not but realize how utterly his own self-respect must hang on his power to work for her, to give her the things he wanted for her. Nor did she wish to repeat to him what Kingsnorth had told her. It was a confession he would not willingly have made to Collingwood; it was the woman in him crying out to the woman. But if Martin was no more, then she would accept the gift, thankful for the help it would give her, knowing well that Martin would not have grudged it.

Stiffly she made her way to the beach and shading her eyes, peered at the approaching boat. The dazzle of the sunset was in them and the boat was well out; but someone was standing, waving frantic arms at her. Her heart gave one great throb as she realized that no one but Martin would so energetically have welcomed the sight of her; and then as it came nearer and she saw him plainly, the throbs settled into steady, confident beating. Her chance had come, and would find her ready to profit.