The Locusts' Years Part 3

"No, we haven't needed a dispensation from the Pope," said Collingwood, "but apparently we cannot manage our own affairs without the help of the Civil Government. I am not sure that we shall get through to-morrow without the appearance of some of the gang declaring that there are reasons why this woman should not be married to this man."

"The Civil Government?" repeated Judge Barton, mystified. Then a light broke upon him. "Of course--you are under contract." He addressed Miss Ponsonby.

"My service under contract was fulfilled five months ago," she replied. "I am at liberty to leave Government employ any moment I wish."

"But they are long on eminent medicos and short on nurses," went on Collingwood, whose spirits were evidently riotous, "and when Miss Ponsonby sent in her resignation, they informed her of the fact, and, by the Lord! they had the effrontery to expect us to arrange our affairs to suit their convenience. The letter has gone back and forth till it has eighteen endors.e.m.e.nts. It hove in sight a few days ago in an extra large envelope. I told Charlotte to put on a nineteenth, and to end the whole matter by telling the Civil Commission and the Bureau of Health and the Marine Hospital Service all three to go to the devil."

"Which it was manifestly impossible for me to do," added Miss Ponsonby, blus.h.i.+ng.

"Manifestly," a.s.sented the Judge, with a short laugh. To him whose whole policy was diplomacy here was temerity in a twentieth century citizen of the American Republic to mock the Civil Commission. As well a Venetian in the twelfth had jeered at the Council of Ten.

"Manifestly is a good word," Collingwood went on. "It was, as you say, manifestly impossible that Miss Ponsonby should tell the Bureau of Health to go to the devil, but it was manifestly ordained that I should write them a letter, telling them what I thought of them, and telling them to go to the devil's place of residence; which I did. Forthwith, Miss Ponsonby was fired, bag and baggage, from Civil employ. They had not seen their way to releasing her for six months, but when she crossed Their High-Mightinesses--or when I did it for her--they could let her go in twenty-four hours. Well, what's one man's meat is another man's poison. I don't know about their poison, but I knew my meat when they put it in my hand, and I'm not the man to let it go."

"I see." There was a falling off in Judge Barton's interest in the romance, but he struggled to conceal his feelings. He fancied also that Miss Ponsonby was embarra.s.sed, almost annoyed, at her lover's frankness. "To-morrow morning, you say, at seven-thirty? I'll be there."

He turned away after his most impressive handshake, and still pondering this inexplicable step on the lady's part, sought his own carriage. Was she led by romance simply, by the belated desire for love-making and mating which might easily seize upon a woman pus.h.i.+ng rapidly away from the age when romance is a right? Or had she, with a shrewdness which belied her late folly, decided to accommodate herself to the rather material atmosphere which prevails in Manila? Had she perceived that Collingwood was of the stuff to win out in whatever he undertook? And had she voluntarily embraced a temporary effacement with him in order to return to the world better equipped for the struggle to impress it with her personality? Whatever was her motive, she was not wholly a happy bride, and yet,--there was something in that fleeting smile which she had given Collingwood, something very tender, exquisitely feminine, which touched the Judge and roused in him a grudging spirit toward the man who had reached out his hand to take what he, Alexander Barton, had never dreamed of taking. The Judge was baffled, and was about to give up the problem, when the well-known figure of his friend Mrs. Badgerly recalled her cleverness in a.n.a.lysis and her unbounded effrontery in stating her conclusions. He went immediately to submit his difficulty to her.

Collingwood and his betrothed continued listening to the evening concert in a silence which may have expressed their entire proprietary a.s.sumption of each other, but which, on the gentleman's part, was permeated with the watchfulness of one handling an overfilled gla.s.s. He was anxious not to joggle his companion's reserve, as if he feared that the spilling of a drop or two of what was pa.s.sing in her mind might leave a few acid scars upon his complacency. There had been, as you felt, no easy courts.h.i.+p. If, in the presence of others, he chose to carry it off with a high hand, when he was left alone with her, he betrayed that, until the final blessing should have been said over them the next day, he was more or less in doubt of his captive. His blurting out the news of their approaching marriage to Judge Barton had been a stroke of policy as well as an overflow of pride. His lover's watchfulness, combating with his lover's tenderness, told him that every pressure must be brought to bear to keep her from halting even at the last moment. He had realized from his earliest acquaintance with her that she was overworked and at the point of a nervous and physical breakdown. He knew from her own admissions that she had no relatives to whom she was willing to apply for a.s.sistance. He had had her shy confession of affection for him and no few glimpses at a depth of feeling which she would not wholly reveal. His own rashness in meddling in her dispute with the Government officials had cost her her means of livelihood, in the islands, at least, and his own business was pressing him. These reasons, even unsupported by the ardor of his love for her, seemed to justify him in applying all the pressure he could to hurry Charlotte into marriage; but he could not be blind to her reluctance, to a timidity and foreboding which she would not explain but which caused her no little unhappiness.

Miss Ponsonby sat on in a reverie not altogether pleasant, as one or two changes in her sensitive countenance testified. She was so preoccupied that she remained unconscious of the playing of the national anthem, of the dispersal of the crowd, and of the threats of a few spattering raindrops which were not followed by a shower, but which sent the coachman to put up the hood of their victoria. The darkness had quite closed down upon them, the lights on the s.h.i.+pping were huddled like little suburban villages on the plain of waters, and the flash-light on Corregidor was winking an occasional red eye low down against the sea, when Collingwood laid an almost timorous hand upon his betrothed's arm.

"Don't worry. Leave that to me. It is my side of the contract. Why do you take this ridiculous quarrel so seriously? Besides, it was my fault. I jumped in--oh! just because I felt so good that I wanted to tackle the world."

"It is an omen. It is the recurrence of conditions that have always weighed me down. Whatever I do, there is someone to be annoyed and offended at the act. I am in disgrace. I have been unutterably lonely in Manila, and I felt that in our marriage, at least, there would be the compensation of having no one to object; and now these offended dignitaries project themselves into the affair, trailing their forked lightnings of displeasure. Why must combat hover over my head? Why must I fight for what drops into the laps of other women?"

"You couldn't fight," said Collingwood. "You haven't fought. You have only been wearied and discouraged and unhappy. When I came in and did a little fighting for you, it paralyzed you. What is a row more or less--and least of all, under the circ.u.mstances? It would take more than exchanging compliments with the Bureau of Health to unsettle my spirits to-night."

"It crushes me," replied Charlotte. "Besides, you have not had my life."

Collingwood studied her through the gloom. Her last words were a lifting of the veil which, she had a.s.sured him, hid much pain. He had been able to account for her reluctance in being hurried into an early marriage through reasons which reflected credit upon her and were not uncomplimentary to himself. To marry a man who had come into her life less than three months before and who was planning to carry her off to a practically uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean might well have daunted the enthusiasm of a much more daring spirit than hers. Collingwood's social traditions were rudimentary beside hers; but even he, pagan that he was, could make allowances for nervousness on that score. What he could not account for was her evident misgiving of the ultimate outcome of their romance. She was vexed by doubts which she was unwilling to share with him, and yet a few frank words in the early days of their engagement had sufficed to remove all thought that she was concealing from him anything that he ought to know.

She had told him that she had been practically an orphan since infancy; that till she was fourteen years of age, she had been brought up in a convent; that at fourteen she went to live in the family of her mother's cousin; that she had been educated at Smith College, taking her bachelor's degree there; that she had found the bread of dependence exceedingly hard to eat, and, in defiance of her relatives' wishes, had taken her training as a nurse; and finally, that she had come to the Philippines to put as great a distance as possible between herself and them, to whom her career was a source of humiliation. "There has never been, in my past life, one act of which you or I should be ashamed. There have been no events, no episodes, nothing but a series of petty humiliations, of wasted efforts, and of thwarted ambitions which I cannot talk about even to you. I want to forget them. They have almost overwhelmed me. I have been--I am--on the verge of becoming morbidly introspective and retrospective. Help me to put the past away, but not because there is one thing in it that you ought to know."

To such an appeal a lover can make but one reply. After that, whenever Collingwood saw her struggling with one of her moods of gloom, he bent his energies to its conquest, none the less willingly that he had discovered a ready charm for its exorcising in the caresses for which his own affection was glad to find an excuse.

He had early learned the futility of argument against her despondent moods, not only because her intelligence was better trained than his own, but because, as he admitted to himself, she had all the argument on her side. But he possessed, in the final appeal to tenderness, a power before which she was invariably vanquished. There was, in her shy acceptance of his caresses, an element of childishness, of a child yielding to some forbidden pleasure, self-rebuking, fearing a price to be paid, yet infinitely content in the moment. She was wonderfully self-reliant in her thinking processes, and adorably dependent in her emotions. She could think, and she was begging of the unseen Fates to be spared thinking. She could decide, but she was grateful to him for taking decision out of her hands. She loved him, but she found unutterable difficulty in voicing her feelings. He had found, in truth, what the coquette must skilfully feign--the woman's dread of her own emotions, the alternate advance and retreat, the struggle with her own nature, before she could submit to a master. She was veritably a wild creature, striving to conceal the fact, a woman of nearly thirty as timid as a girl in her teens. He was secretly amused at the evident difficulty she experienced in recognizing her own capacity for romance and affection; but her careful repression of her emotions lent savor to a wooing which had in it some of the elements of mediaevalism. For the time when she would see fit to cease her own struggle against the mysterious influences which he felt battling against him, he could afford to wait. That such a time would come, his natural optimism and his previous experiences with women made him certain. In the meanwhile, he did not intend to risk a chance word as he felt his hand so near closing on hers forever.

Protected by the darkness within the carriage hood, he threw an arm about her and held her pressed to his side while he put his lips against hers and finally pressed his face against her cheek in a wordless caress.

"There is nothing to be said that we have not said," he murmured at length. "But I entreat you, in G.o.d's name, put your fears aside to-night. Are we the first man and woman who have dared risk and calamity for the sake of loving? Oh! the word sticks in your throat, I dare say. It is wonderful how you have coquetted with every reason which may excuse our marriage except the only one that justifies it."

"Ah, if I only knew that we could be sure of ourselves," she murmured. "But suppose it is a mistake; suppose you find me something different from what you fancy me--I tell you every day that you idealize me--that I cannot live up to your conception of me! Suppose you come to hate me, as some men do hate women that are tied for life to them, millstones around their necks!" She shuddered.

It was a line of thought so unnatural for a girl to indulge in on the eve of her marriage, that Collingwood found time for a moment's wonder what could have been the formative influences of her life to make her look so despondently on her own powers of holding affection. But the moment was not for indecision. Collingwood drew his face away from hers although he still continued to encircle her with his arm.

"You may not be sure of yourself," he said. "The processes of your education seem to have left you muddled on matters that you ought to have been clear on before now. But I'm sure of myself. I'm marrying you for love--for a consuming pa.s.sion, if you like the term. I got it out of a novel. I don't pretend to combat your reasons. All that you have said may be in the light of prophecy. You may be right, but no power on earth could make me give you up without the utmost struggle that I am capable of. I believe that we have a happy life before us. But if I believed that it was going to end in the blackest tribulation that man ever entered into this side of the eternal torments, I would go on and mortgage my life for the few weeks of joy I've had and the few that may be ahead of us before the thing goes to smash. As for you, you have resisted at every step, and I've felt every minute that you were fighting yourself more than me." He crushed her against him suddenly, and as suddenly dropped his arm from her waist. "There, now, you are free. Do you mean to tell me that you like this better--that you are not happy in my arms? Then something in you that isn't your tongue lies. Why, I've felt it at every caress I've ever given you--the struggle and the yielding and the gladness. Come! Stop coquetting with yourself! Isn't it so?"

In the minute or two which intervened before her reply, he held his breath for fear he had gone too far. Then the soundness of his instinctive judgment was demonstrated to his entire satisfaction. For a second or two Miss Ponsonby strained her clasped hands to her eyes, then she deliberately nestled back to his side, and slipped an arm around his neck. She began to cry, the first tears her lover had seen her shed, though he suspected that she shed many, and he hushed her to his breast as if she were a grieving child. She cried very quietly, and he knew that she was ashamed of her weakness. She soon regained control of herself, and she answered his question with an instinctive sense of fairness which he had often noticed in her. Most women would have taken advantage of the tears to evade an acknowledgment of defeat.

"You are right, Martin," she admitted. "I have coquetted with myself, I have been pretending to myself that I meant ultimately to back out, and in my heart of hearts I knew I would not, I knew I could not. I have been selfish. I have spoiled your happiness, and refused to accept my own for fear of the future. Yours is the only sensible view. There are chances--but we cannot reason, we cannot think. We must just take what life gives us; and if by and by comes sorrow, why, we've had a little taste of joy. I am through coquetting, dear. I am happy--now--here. I do not care what comes. I've been a wretched prophet of evil, because secretly I meant to ride rough-shod over whatever I summoned to oppose. I surrender. I throw myself on your mercy. I don't deserve quarter, but I know you will give it."

There was a very long silence in the victoria. At the end of it, Miss Ponsonby said with a little choking laugh, "But, Martin, I--I distrust I'm marrying my master."

"Not the least doubt about it," said Collingwood. "But when masters are the right sort--fellows like me, for instance--they are not a bad thing for some women to have--women like you, for instance."

CHAPTER IV

What the buried archives are to the archaeologist, the trunkful of old letters is to the novelist. But before those light-giving doc.u.ments are brought forth, a little family history should be detailed as preface.

In the year 1872 the Civil War had been more generally forgotten in the North than in the South. In the State of Ma.s.sachusetts, however, a goodly circle of antislavery agitators still kept up the fight in favor of the black man. The Fourteenth Amendment had not then been made, nor those celebrated discussions which fixed its interpretation and application; but the reconstruction of the Southern States still left plenty of ground for bitter speech and feeling.

Prominent among that circle and among the old Boston families of that day was the widow of a man who had literally given his life to the antislavery cause, for he had died during the War of overwork upon an antislavery journal. His widow belonged to a family that for two hundred years or more had been prominent in state and national affairs. When her husband died and left her and a half-grown daughter almost penniless among a wealthy kindred, she found little or no difficulty in getting along; for their pride in the editorial victim was great, and she had been always a family favorite.

But if the mother was everywhere sought, her daughter Charlotte found a less ready welcome. A tall, superb beauty, singularly cold at times and reserved, at others fiercely vehement, she was as utterly unlike the descendant of a staid New England family as can be imagined. It is regrettable that she found little favor in the family eyes; and in the year 1872 she came to an out and out rupture with all her kindred by eloping with Mountjoy Ponsonby, a Marylander, a Roman Catholic, and an irreconcilable son of slave-holding parents.

Mrs. K---- took to her bed and died of chagrin. Four years later the unhappy girl followed her mother to the grave, leaving behind her a baby daughter six months old.

Of that marriage so soon ended, the best and the worst that can be said is that it was unhappy. The two undisciplined natures who had defied tradition, family sentiment, religious training, and political inheritance for the sake of each other, had not the patience to work out their common happiness when the infatuation which had drawn them together died, as all such sudden and violent emotions must.

When Mrs. Ponsonby turned her back on life and on an impoverished Southern home where her New England thrift had struggled ceaselessly with the indolence and sluggish ways of a slave-holding household, it was after almost all possible recrimination had been exhausted over religion, politics, family inheritance, and ideals of life. Her husband, having buried her with due ceremony and observance in the Maryland family vaults, betook himself to travel, leaving the child to be cared for by a distant female relative. When little Charlotte was four, the relative died, and, as an ultimate act of defiance to his wife's kindred, Ponsonby placed his daughter in a Roman Catholic convent.

There the little girl remained till her fourteenth year. In that period, she saw her father some six or eight times. Their interviews were constrained affairs, for Mountjoy Ponsonby was not a man of domestic or affectionate nature, and the child of the wife with whom he had quarrelled bitterly made little appeal to him. He usually gave his daughter much good advice, found her exceedingly docile, but equally difficult, and was always embarra.s.sed by an unspoken appeal in her nature which he dumbly resented. He looked forward with repugnance and dread to the days when she could be no longer stuffed away in a convent, and he rather hoped that she would feel herself religiously called upon to stay there.

Like many other men, he had formed the habit of looking on himself as immortal, so that when he was instantly killed by being thrown from his horse, he had made no provision for his child's future. On his own side of the family there was no near kindred; and the Boston relatives instantly put in a claim for the custody of little Charlotte.

The man who was most actively interested in the little girl's future was one Cornelius Spencer, a dry, hard-working, quiet man, capable of loving with singular intensity and equally capable of concealing his emotions. He had paid a quiet court to the beautiful Charlotte K----, and family gossip said that he took her elopement very seriously; but it was all conjecture, for he kept his own counsel. A year later, he married Martha Winston, her cousin, a lady who, furthermore said family gossip, had been in love with him for several years.

The Spencer marriage turned out well; how nearly that well may be translated happily, who can say? At least, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Spencer were a decorous couple, he given to ama.s.sing this world's goods, she devoted to a thrifty oversight of their expenditures and to a calm enjoyment of their prosperity. Two daughters came to them, handsome children whose education from the first was up to the strictest standards of conservative Boston.

There was much sage wagging of heads among the Boston kin when Cornelius Spencer came forward as the potential guardian of the orphan immured in the convent. But though they conjectured again, Mrs. Spencer kept her own counsel as her husband had kept his years before. Of course, said the kins.h.i.+p, it was a bitter pill to her. Charlotte K---- had always outshone her in brains, in wit, in beauty. She had been proud to marry the man whom Charlotte had refused; and to find that man, eighteen years later, still cheris.h.i.+ng sentimental memories of her rival, determined to make himself a second father to that rival's child,--ah, well, Martha was a remarkable woman to bear it all so quietly!

It happened that, on the day the young girl appeared in charge of the nun who brought her North, a very observant lady was calling upon Mrs. Cornelius Spencer. The lady was the wife of an army officer, and had a taste for letter-writing, in fact, felt that letter-writing was her only gift. A few extracts from her epistle to her husband will throw some light upon Charlotte Ponsonby's girlhood experiences.

"--I have been visiting about for days among the K---- kin. They are as magnificently satisfied with themselves as ever, take themselves very seriously, are as proud of their money-making powers as of their blue blood; really it's wonderful how they all make money, and talk, as they have always done, from a very much higher plane than they really live on.

"Among others, Martha Spencer asked me to luncheon, and I went there this morning. Really, Cornelius must have made oodles of money. The mere household accessories were simple enough; but the books, the pictures, and the curios were a joy. I feasted my soul, and I wished for you, my dear, to enjoy it with me.

"But I'll talk of those things to you later. What I want to tell you about now is an incident that I am afraid may slip away from me, and I want to describe it while my impressions are fresh,

"You remember I wrote you, in a previous letter, about the lawsuit and how old Dry-as-dust Cornelius has a real spark of romance in him after all, and of how he has disinterred his old love's child from a convent where she was to have been buried alive. It was my happy fate to see the sequel this morning.