The Locusts' Years Part 6

"Did you think I was afraid of loneliness?"

"Lord! I didn't know what you were afraid of, but I could see you were afraid of something. I had to take it into consideration. It was one of a lot of things working against me which I had to combat."

There came a long, long pause. Eight bells sounded. The second engineer came out on the lower deck and cursed some of the Filipino crew who had stretched themselves for a night's rest in such a manner as to block the pa.s.sage-way.

"Well," insisted Collingwood, "am I a good guesser or not?"

"About the island? No, dear. My imagination took hold of that at once. The thought of living on a practically uninhabited island stirred up all the romance there is in me."

"What was it, then? Come, we're married. Out with it!"

"You told me yourself in so many words that I was coquetting with myself."

"I never said anything like that," declared Mr. Collingwood with a vivacity inspired by a premonition of the resentment she might feel. But Charlotte only laughed.

"Those were your exact words," she insisted. "They were quite true."

"That was not all," he persisted. "It was more serious than that. I felt something mighty heavy in the atmosphere at times."

Mrs. Collingwood reflected a few minutes. "Don't you think," she said then, "that any woman of mature age--of my age--would hesitate to marry a man of whose family and antecedents she knew as little as I did of yours?"

"No: I don't see what my family had to do with it. In the first place I haven't any near relatives living now, as I told you; and if I had, you wouldn't have married them. You have married me. As for my antecedents (I suppose you mean my conduct), I told you myself that I had been no saint. I'm just a good average citizen. I've known better men than I am, and I have known worse. I have not been married before; that's the main thing, after all; and no woman ever had cause for a breach-of-promise suit against me. I had ----"

(he named a man locally prominent) "write to you and tell you that he came from the same town with me, and he knew my record was what I had told you. Besides, I didn't give a thought to your family, and you have talked less about them than I have talked of mine."

"That is true. Do you think me secretive? There is nothing to be secretive about. But my life with my relatives was too painful to talk about, even to you."

"I saw that. I guessed it must have been hard to anybody so loving and tender as you."

"Martin, when did you form the impression that I am loving and tender?"

"Well, ain't you?"

"I think so; but most people have not thought so, you know. What made you decide differently?"

"Oh, that first night in the hospital after they had fixed me up in the operating room, and the chloroform wore off, and my fever came up. G.o.d! I can feel it all now! And just when I thought that I could not stand things any longer, and must yell, you came along with an ice bag and gave me a piece to suck." His wife smiled in the darkness at his homely phraseology. "It seemed to me I had never heard a woman's voice in my life as soft as yours was when you said, 'You are in great pain, I know.'"

"But that was what I should have done for anybody, Martin."

"I knew it. That's why I felt that you were gentle and loving. I would have liked to put my arms around you and cry. I wanted to be babied. It is strange, isn't it, how physical suffering can unman a fellow?"

Charlotte turned her eyes on him for an instant. He could just see their gleam by the reflection of a ray streaming out on the water from a light on the lower deck, and they were infinitely tender yet mirthful. "You understand yourself thoroughly," she said. "You were a brave baby and a good baby but you were a baby, Martin, a great six-foot baby."

"Well, if it made you fall in love with me--

"Ah! but I didn't then. You bullied me into being in love with you. You wouldn't give me a chance to make myself heard."

"What about that time I kissed you?" said Martin, referring to that episode for the first time since his very formal and abject letter of apology had met an equally formal but cold forgiveness from her.

To his consternation, she drew away from him in sudden displeasure. "Perhaps we had better not speak of it."

"Why shouldn't we speak of it? Is it a crime for a man to kiss a woman he loves? Did it contaminate you?"

"I had given you no right, no encouragement."

"I'd have done it if I had known I was to be kicked out of the hospital, broken ribs and all. Besides, how is a man to know whether he has any rights till he exercises them?"

Martin put the question seriously in all good faith. It was his primitive philosophy again, the simple way in which he tested women in his sphere of life. She was at a loss how to reply, and somewhat sore put to hide her inexperience in affairs of the sort. She had been brought up to believe that milkmaids kiss their young men over the gate, but that, in refined society, men offer no caresses to girls whom they respect, unless a troth has first been plighted. Had she chummed more with girls and young women, she might have learned that even in the best of society, young people pay little heed to the strong statements of their elders, and that, wise heads to the contrary, young blood will have its toll. But Charlotte had had no chums and had never exchanged gossip over late bedroom fires. Her views on the propriety of kissing were entirely theoretical. But that kiss was a sore remembrance with her. It marked the beginning of the end. It was an opening door which gave her an instant's glance into the kingdom of love; and from its bestowal, she had known that she was confronted with a mighty temptation to open it further and to go boldly into the fair land. How hard she had fought with the inclination, she could never tell Martin Collingwood; but she had fought, and she had lost.

She glanced up at him penitently after his last speech, and marked the cessation of her involuntary resentment by slipping back into his arm. He was emboldened to make a query which had been on his tongue a dozen times, but which, up to that hour, not even the proprietary sense of the husband had enabled him to regard as discreet.

"Charlotte, am I really the first man you ever cared about?"

"Absolutely the first to whom I ever gave a sentimental thought."

The delighted recipient of this compliment did not, in the joy of hearing it, examine it too closely. When he did begin to speak, his wife was pleased to note that he was less inclined to investigate the cause of the phenomenon than to speculate upon its uncommonness.

"I don't know what you were about," he said. "It's mighty good luck for me, but--not in an uncomplimentary sense--you must have been an awful goose."

"That's it exactly. I was an awful goose; and, being so, I had an inspiration to keep out of love."

"Why so?"

"Because I was afraid of being in love. Can you understand that? Because love was altogether a.s.sociated in my mind with pain--the pain of losing, and the pain of loving and of not being loved, and of being generally misunderstood."

"And all that because you were raised an orphan. I don't think you had a fair show, old girl."

"I know I had not," said Mrs. Collingwood decisively. She added, "But I had rather not talk about it. It makes me morbid."

"Were your folks well to do?"

"They were people of considerable wealth. I do not think they ever grudged me anything I cost them. But I was in a false position in their house, and I was conscious of it. The knowledge put me at a disadvantage with all the world. It made me feel myself different from everybody else. I was self-conscious, afraid of being an object of pity. It was like failing to possess some essential article of dress that everybody else has, and trying to cover up one's nakedness."

"That's it. I couldn't put it into words, but that is exactly how you acted with Barton. You seemed to shrink away from him and to be ready to fight him if he spoke pleasantly to you."

"Oh, dear! was it so bad as that?" Charlotte's heart sank. Her way of expressing facts differed considerably from his, and the balance of vividness and realism was in his favor.

"It was, just like that. But you were not that way to me. Why not?"

Her woman's wit, already quickened by her increased experience with men, showed her how to be truthful, and, in so being, how to deceive him most. "Ah! you were different," she murmured. But after he had led her, in response to her request, back to her chair, and was pacing to and fro beside her in quiet happiness, her heart reproached her. She had not shrunk from him because she knew that he was blind, because, to carry out her simile, he could perceive nothing lacking in her raiment. But those keen eyes of Judge Barton's had questioned her, had perceived every rag and tatter!

The captain returned and called Martin to deliver to him a message from the Inhabitant of Halsey Harbor. Charlotte was left alone to her musings.

She was very happy. The old saying, "Out of sight, out of mind"

was proving its appositeness in her case. No one was about her who could read her, who could perceive the absence of any necessary raiment, who would be conscious that there was anything odd in her being Martin Collingwood's wife. She had, in one decisive action, destroyed all that was holding her spirit in leash. A woman yet young, whose emotions had been stifled for a lifetime, in whom the warmth of love had been overlaid by the calculating egoism of a nature wounded to the quick, she had emanc.i.p.ated herself at the fortuitous moment, alive to the rapture of pa.s.sion, of freedom from all the restraints that had curbed her existence. She had thrown the admonitions and the self-restraint of a life-time aside for a romance. She had (but fortunately for a time she was able to put the fact out of mind) quite justified a conventional a.s.sumption that a woman's nature is full of primitive evil, and that you must pitch your maxims pretty strong if you would have them believed at all, and that then, ten to one, she will demolish all your precautions at a bound if an object in trousers holds out his arms. She had profited by her husband's view. "Come what may," she said, "I will have my romance and pay the price afterwards."

So far, the price seemed a remote contingency. With every revolution of the steamer's screw, Manila and her distant relatives whose pride she had outraged became the mere phantoms of memory, growing paler every hour. Nothing was left but the delightful sense of being an absolute necessity to Martin--she who had been a superfluity all her life!

As for Collingwood himself, his kindness, his shrewdness, his strength were gaining constantly in her esteem. He had proved himself innately delicate and refined. Of what possible importance were a few deficiencies in speech, a too vivid phraseology, the lack of the little courtesies which mark a man of the world? But (and here some of her elation diminished) if they mattered so little, why had she to convince herself so eagerly? If two negatives make an affirmative, too pa.s.sionate a denial sometimes const.i.tutes an a.s.sertion. Whenever she arrived at this stage of reflection, another cloud dimmed her horizon. Was not her whole att.i.tude a practical deception of the man himself? Would Martin Collingwood have accepted her surrender so joyfully, could he have read that it was weighted with the condition of living with him on an uninhabited island? Would not all his self-esteem repudiate such a proposition? She had not lied when she said that she loved him, but would he content himself with a definition of love which excluded all natural pride of choice, and put a compromise value upon himself? As often as she found herself confronted with these thoughts, Charlotte took refuge in a bit of casuistry. If she saw Martin with clear eyes and underrated the proportional value of his attainments, did he even see her clearly at all? Did she wrong him more in reserving an opinion of his social worth than he wronged her in not perceiving that she had any social worth? The fact that every person has a real personal value and an accredited worldly value, and that most effort is directed to making these two values coincide, or appear to do so, put a convenient weapon in her hand. Since, in only a few cases, the two values are really identical, happy marriages must be the result of a marvellous luck or of a wonderful power of self-deception. Was she to be taxed for not deceiving herself? Was her intelligence to be punished when his ignorance was rewarded? As often as she thought about it, it seemed that his incapacity to value certain qualities of her own justified her in a few mental reservations.