The Locusts' Years Part 5

"Well, Judge," said Martin jocosely, "the Bureau of Health did not bear down on us after all."

"No; you are a Benedict, Collingwood, and 'whom the Lord hath joined'--I don't know whether it is in your service or not. My Latin is rusty."

"'Let no man, not even a Civil Commissioner, put asunder,'"

Collingwood finished for him. The Judge suspected that he felt some relief in having the possibility of a change of mind on his bride's part obviated, and the two men smiled at each other openly.

"I feel that my troubles are ended," said Collingwood.

His wife betrayed that she was still somewhat self-conscious. "It remains for Judge Barton to be trite and to warn you that they have just begun," she said, a little stiltedly.

"Nonsense! What does it matter whether your troubles are beginning or ending? The point is that you have your present, your romance. I dare say you will have your troubles--most of us do; but to-day--"

The speaker paused expressively.

"That is an extremely sensible view," replied Mrs. Collingwood. "He has not your happy gift of expression, but it is Mr. Collingwood's also. He told me as much yesterday. I had been foolish enough to antic.i.p.ate the future."

"Is that what made you look so solemn?" the Judge inquired playfully.

She blushed a little and shook her head reprovingly, "It is no joking matter. Try it yourself and see how you feel. Why, even Martin looked serious."

"Frankly, I was scared to death," Collingwood admitted. His wife laughed softly. The Judge shook hands again with the newly made husband in an access of geniality.

He declined an invitation to the hotel breakfast which was all they could offer in the line of wedding festivity, but he found time later to appear aboard their boat.

"Mind," he said as he wished Mrs. Collingwood good-by, "you have not seen the last of me. I am going to appear in your island paradise sometime when you least expect me. When things get unendurable here, I shall flee to you and solitude."

"How long do you think you would endure it?" she inquired.

How long will you?"

"Ah! I must. I'm pledged. I shall have no excuse for repining. I took the step with my eyes open."

"Well, I fancy you do not regret leaving Manila." In the wholeness of his suddenly acquired sympathy with her, the Judge quite forgot that he had been one of the many persons contributing to the experience which had failed to endear Manila to her.

"No; my experiences here have not been altogether happy, but perhaps I was partially to blame." She hesitated and looked over at the s.h.i.+ning roofs, at the patches of green shrubbery relieving them, and, in the background, at the mountains where Lawton died. The launch whistled for its pa.s.sengers before Judge Barton could reply, but he wrung her hand with the intensity of a lifelong friends.h.i.+p. And such is the perversity of the human soul that his heart ached as the launch darted up the Pasig. She had waited upon him with infinite patience and gentleness through nearly a month of illness. He had seen her daily. She had been so situated that the faintest effort of real kindness or of chivalry on his part could have won her everlasting grat.i.tude, and probably, if he had desired it, her affection. He certainly fulfilled the ideal which her social traditions demanded of her husband more nearly than Collingwood did, and the Judge knew how to make himself liked when he wanted to. But he had not tried to be kind to Miss Ponsonby. He had been patronizing, and at times almost impertinent and unmanly. He had not a shadow of right to the grudging sense of having something that should have been his s.n.a.t.c.hed away from him. He had even a feeling of impatience with her, a thought that she had cheated him, that she had chosen to hide her real self from him, and to reveal it cruelly at the moment when Fate put an insurmountable barrier between them. He could not stifle the miserable regrets, the sense of baffled yearning, that took possession of him. He did his best to shake off the memory of the wedding and of her face as he had seen it at the altar, but he could not do so. Mrs. Collingwood became an obsession. Before the coastguard cutter had pulled its anchor, he was wondering how soon and by what means he could invent an excuse for visiting her at her home.

The coastguard steamer on the Puerta Princesa run, on which the Collingwoods had elected to go as far as Cuyo where their own launch would pick them up, drove a clean white furrow, and, as Collingwood had predicted, pa.s.sed Corregidor at noon. She went out through the Boca Chica with Corregidor on the left; and Mrs. Collingwood, who was resting in her steamer chair, smiled languidly as he glanced back at the island. "Corregidor over the stern," she murmured as if repeating some well-worn quotation, and then went on, "Have your experiences here led you into contact with a type of man who has but one iterated and reiterated wish,--he is, by the way, usually a major in the United States army,--which wish is 'to see Corregidor over the stern'? I do not know how many times my tongue has burned to suggest that the wisher take a coasting steamer and see it."

"Oh, the army's sore on the Philippines," remarked Collingwood.

She eyed him reflectively. "And you, who have been in it, seem to be 'sore' on the army."

"That's right," he exclaimed heartily, "Any man who has once served his country as a high private and has gotten out is 'agin the Government'

for the rest of his life. I came over on the troop deck of a transport, and I swore I'd go home on a liner or leave my bones here."

"Which seems likelier to be attained?" she asked, smiling idly.

"Which do you think yourself? You've linked your fortunes with mine. Why?" he added fixing her with a sudden intensity of glance insistent for reply.

His wife crimsoned and looked across the glinting sea.

"I thought you answered that question to your satisfaction last night,"

she murmured.

"No; I tried to answer it for you. It was you that needed convincing. Here is a case of temperament," he went on, half jocose, half serious. "So long as you hesitated and I had my side to urge, any old reason would do for me. I would clutch at a straw and hold on to it as if it were a cable. But now everything is settled and final, I want to understand. I want you to make yourself clear to me."

"But, my dear Martin! The idea is out of the question. Why, for a month you have professed to be able to make me clear to myself."

Martin ruffled his hair with a puzzled hand. "Did I?" he murmured. "Did it strike you as cheeky?"

"No; I was heartily grateful. You helped me."

"In what way?"

"In the way of common sense," Charlotte said, as simply as if the remark were an everyday one, and her husband's somewhat startled acceptance of the reply sent her into a ripple of laughter, in which, after an instant, he joined heartily.

Their merriment attracted the attention of the only other pa.s.sengers, two enlisted men going out to join a hospital corps at Puerta Princesa. It also drew upon them a frown of disfavor from the captain.

The captain was an old-time skipper from a tramp freighter, with the freighter's contempt for pa.s.sengers. He was not married, and he had little sympathy with the billings and cooings of newly married couples. As often as his eyes fell on the orchids and ferns and potted plants which were hanging from stanchions and c.u.mbering his decks (Mrs. Collingwood was taking them down for the adornment of her new home) he cursed picturesquely. To his second officer he had expressed a desire for a typhoon that would roll the deadlights out of his boat, and blow the hyphenated "garden truck" into the Sulu Sea. He had emphasized his distaste for bridal society by setting a table for himself and his officers on the forward deck behind the steering apparatus, thus leaving the tiny dining-room entirely to the despised pa.s.sengers.

Yet there had been little enough sentimentality exhibited to arouse his displeasure. Mrs. Collingwood spent her day in the steamer chair while her husband walked the deck with his cigar or sat chatting at her side. The hospital men, covertly watching them as everybody does a bridal pair, opined that they were a "queer proposition" but quite agreed that they seemed happy.

To Collingwood, the change in Charlotte's mood was an intense relief. The hesitations and self-questionings with which she had puzzled him for a month previous had apparently been quieted by the finality of the marriage ceremony. That she was nervously worn out by the strain of the previous weeks and by the disagreeable circ.u.mstances of her quarrel with the Government he realized; and with a delicacy for which she was thoroughly grateful, he refrained from the rather ardent demonstrations of his courts.h.i.+p, and treated her with matter-of-fact kindness and good fellows.h.i.+p. She was his, and she seemed contented and at peace. It was a glorious summer day, the sea was waveless, the boat was clean and quiet, and might almost have been their private yacht, so completely were they alone. A chance observer beholding a lazy young woman in a deck chair and a quiet young fellow pacing to and fro near her might have taken them for a young married couple of some weeks'

or months' standing. He would hardly have suspected a bridal couple.

Yet the young man's mind, as they steamed past the beautiful wooded heights of Mindoro, and looked up and up at the giant forests or out over the gleaming water, was a tumult of joy and triumph and wonder--the wonder being by no means in the smallest proportion. His wife was not a beautiful woman, but his lover's eyes endowed her with every beauty as she lay scanning the tree-clad mountains. That fine quality of breeding in her which Collingwood was unable to define, but which pleased him inordinately, was never more apparent. Moreover, he had found her in times past a rather difficult person to deal with, and behold! in the Scriptural "twinkling of an eye," her thorniness had vanished and a docility as agreeable as it was unexpected had given him fresh cause for self-gratulation.

Still, as he had confessed, his temperament inclined him to retroactive investigation. So long as she proved obdurate and was not yet won, Collingwood could not a.n.a.lyze. But with the struggle past he had time to take up the contradictions of her att.i.tude, and he found little to justify his bold statement that he could read her better than she could read herself. If, as he had somewhat daringly reminded her, she was happy in his arms, it was a happiness, as he could not but realize, of less ecstatic measure than that of many of the predecessors who, with or without the sanction of an engagement, had yielded to their pressure. She was a novice at love-making, as a man less experienced than her husband would easily have guessed; and she was reticent, not only in the voluntary expression of that fact, but in response to his tentative overtures to her to confess it. Collingwood was no less puzzled by the fact than by the philosophy of life which desired its concealment. He had known many young women in his life who were not novices at love-making, but who ardently desired to be thought so.

An ironical sense of his wife's power to baffle him tempered more than one of the affectionate glances he cast upon her as he strolled back and forth beside her chair. The consciousness of her mental superiority, of her obedience to perceptions and convictions which were only half formulated in his own mind, was literally seeping through Collingwood's brain. He was inordinately proud of her. Her excellence was a proof of his own good taste. He felt that she was a credit to him. He did not a.s.sociate her intelligence and her grace with a cla.s.s distinction. On the contrary, it was one of his sources of joy that he would take her out of the ma.s.ses and make her of the cla.s.ses, only Martin did not use those terms. In his simple philosophy, people with money were important, and people without it were not. Miss Ponsonby had been poor. She had earned her own living. Ergo, she was n.o.body. But he, Martin Collingwood, would make her somebody, and when he had done so, she would fill the position to his entire satisfaction. He did not ask himself if he would come up to her expectations. He did not understand that a woman can ask for more in a husband than for a lover, a master, and a provider of the world's goods. In spite of his public-school education, Martin Collingwood's philosophy of life was a very primitive one, based upon a sense of s.e.x superiority. He could realize that a woman can be a man's inferior; but he supposed that the mere fact of his s.e.x makes any man the equal of the proudest woman who lives.

So Collingwood continued to walk the deck in a fool's paradise, and his wife lounged away her day, if not in his blissful state of ignorance, a happy and contented woman, nevertheless. There was a soundness in that primitive philosophy of her husband's which she was proving. If Collingwood did not have all the requisites of a woman's ideal of her husband, he had at least three-fourths of them; and Mrs. Collingwood was enough of a philosopher (little as she liked being told so) not to cavil at the missing quarter when they were hurrying away from the conditions that made that quarter vital.

The coastguard steamer skirted the coast of Mindoro and then turned her nose westward. The next day, she crept up under the pinnacled heights of Penon de Coron in a jade-green sea, and entered the channel between Coron and Bushuanga. There the water was like purple gla.s.s, save where a rush of porpoises parted it in swift pursuit of the flying-fish. Fairy islets dotted its dazzling surface while the land ma.s.ses on either hand were clothed in amethystine haze.

The boat lay half a day off the curving beach of Culion, and the travellers stared up at the nipa houses of the leper colony, clinging to the hillsides, and at the gray old church and the fort on the left, speaking of the day when Moro paraos were no strangers to the peaceful locality. On the third night, it anch.o.r.ed in Halsey Harbor, "which is," said Collingwood, "the last place on earth except the one we are going to live in."

To this somewhat discouraging remark, Mrs. Collingwood, who was leaning over the rail, staring into darkness and the ma.s.sed bulk of land near, made no reply. Immediately after the dropping of the anchor, the captain, accompanied by his third officer and the two hospital corps men, had gone ash.o.r.e to call upon the single American family which was holding Halsey Harbor. He did not invite the Collingwoods to go, glad apparently to be out of their sight for a time. They laughed at their power to arouse his distaste, and agreed that they were the gainers by his dislike. The fiery cigar tip of the officer on watch was the only reminder that the boat was not wholly in their hands.

Collingwood, throwing away his cigar, slipped an arm around his wife, who never objected to petting.

"It's wonderful," she said dreamily; "I never knew before that tree toads made silence. I thought they made noise."

The night was one of those cloudy ones which occur so frequently in the tropics, when the vapors hang low at dusk, to dissipate later. The boat seemed to be at anchor in a bay shut in by low hills, for, at one point, a rift in the clouds showed the pallor of the sky and a single star, below which the solid blackness loomed in relief, and against which a clump of bamboo teased the eye with its phantom outline. A faint chorus of insects and tree toads and the insistent cry of an iku lizard suggested that the boat must be fairly close to the sh.o.r.e, but, as Mrs. Collingwood had said, the sounds only emphasized the stillness. Low down in the gloom--so low as to suggest a valley between the hills--a light burned steadily with a sweet and human significance in the tremendous vagueness about them.

There was almost trepidation in Collingwood's inquiry if she found it lonesome.

"Not in the least. Or rather, I find it tremendously lonely, and enjoy it. Are you worrying about me when it is too late? Do not do so. I shall find plenty to occupy me on the island."

"For a woman who held back as persistently as you did, you have experienced a wonderful change of heart."