The Locusts' Years

The Locusts’ Years

By the time they had crossed the cocoanut grove and had gained the beach, it was evident that the boat was making for the island

[Page [179]]

The Locusts’ Years

By
Mary Helen Fee
Author of
A Woman’s Impressions of the Philippines, etc.
Illustrated by
Charles Sarka

Chicago
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1912

Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1912

Published October, 1912

Copyrighted in Great Britain

Press of the Vail Company
Coshocton, U. S. A.

To my Brother

The Locusts’ Years

Chapter I

When a man has reached the point where he can reflect, with cynical satisfaction, upon the brutality of organized society, and can contemplate unmoved one of its victims; and when the cause of his reflections is a woman not over thirty, whose worth and refinement are obvious to any reader of faces, that man either must possess a coarse-grained and cruel nature, or he must be very highly civilized.

No shade of doubt could have entered Judge Alexander Barton’s mind as to which of these adjectives applied to him. He would have repudiated the faintest hint that a taint of coarseness or cruelty could lie in him. His was one of those eminent political personalities which bubble up from the great caldron of American democracy. He had convictions and principles of a high order. They appeared frequently in the shape of addresses to young men’s political and reading clubs, or in a “few remarks” at church socials, where a programme of songs and recitations was followed by the distribution of home-made cakes and candies, and of uninspiriting beverages. It was sometimes remarked of him in that other world which he frequented that his conscientiousness in attending these mild-flavored symposia was the indisputable evidence of his fitness to adorn the roster of the Philippine judiciary. For to whom may we look for an example, if not to the interpreters of the law, whose position vests them with dignity, social and official? From whom may we demand the utterance of lofty principles and of high convictions, if not from the very men whose business it is to punish the unhappy wretches whose actions have declared their principles, expressed or otherwise, of the flimsiest?

Judge Barton was also frequently extolled as the pattern of American democracy, as, indeed, he was. Nothing could have been more catholic than his handshake, nothing more finely measured than the appreciation which it conveyed of the recipient’s relation to himself: to the veteran of the Army of the Philippines, it was hearty, and bespoke the comrade in arms; to the struggling young civil-service employee, it was encouraging, and it hinted, ever so delicately, that the inspiration for great ambitions ought to lie in the example of living statesmen; to the clergy and to the members of the Educational Department, who fairly swarm in the Philippines, it was fraternal and spoke confidentially of the tie which linked them in a great work; and to the effervescing spume from the Pacific coast, which is knocking about Manila, loud in vituperation of the change from democratic to bureaucratic society—to that segment of Young America whose disposition to criticise existing institutions led to the happy phrase “undesirable citizens”—the Judge’s democratic cordiality always embodied a hope that their mutual relations might continue forever harmonious, and it even intimated that no act on his part could make them otherwise.

The cause of the Judge’s highly civilized musings was one of those undesirable citizens of the feminine gender; and, if you ask how anything proper in the feminine gender may be classed as an undesirable citizen, there can only be cited an opinion from the Judge himself—one of those ex-cathedra sentiments which he held as infallible—that any one who refuses to accept pleasantly a situation which he is powerless to remedy, and who continues a quarrel which is futile and which can result only disastrously to its single champion, that person is, primarily, inefficient, and, secondarily, insane; either of which states is undesirable. Furthermore, there is nothing so repellent to a man as the feminine weakness which enlists his sympathy, and, at the same time, challenges the terms on which it is given. To find the shivering wretch on whom you would bestow an alms repudiating your charity and mutely reproaching you for the condition of things which makes you donor and him recipient—in such a metaphor, perhaps, the Judge might have condensed the musings which a month’s illness and the daily opportunity of studying Miss Ponsonby had bred.

The young woman who had received so much of His Honor’s valuable consideration did not look a very formidable antagonist in a quarrel with organized society. She stood at an open window of the hospital, gazing down on a convalescent-strewn lawn, where a military band was delighting the sick with a Christmas Eve concert. Her tall figure was very slender—so slender, in fact, as to make it quite evident that the blue cotton nurse’s dress which she wore was the survival of a plumper epoch. She was not a beautiful woman, nor was she even a pretty one, though she was far from being ugly. Her eyes were gray and kind, with well arched brows. Her nose was slightly aquiline, with sensitive nostrils. A rather low forehead, a broad mouth, and a shapely head covered with brown hair, were attributes which she shared with any number of women. What particularly marked her was a delicate grace of manner, an emanation of fastidiousness in every glance and movement, a reserve which at times became almost stiffness; in short, a distinction which, in happier circumstances, might have made her envied, but which in the mixture of a pioneer community served only to isolate her.

For at least two weeks of convalescence, Judge Barton had amused himself with the attempt to determine why Miss Ponsonby’s charm and distinction should be assets of so little practical value to her. His decision was that, in appearance most distinguished, she was singularly lacking in the unconscious self-confidence which usually accompanies distinction; that, a most feminine creature in many respects, she was unfemininely distrustful of her power over men. There was, in her perfectly dignified attitude toward the other sex, and in the absence of all coquetry, a sort of proud abdication of feminine rights. She resigned all a woman’s natural claim upon man’s emotional nature; and the keen analyst who had studied her so closely fancied that he could detect a repressed challenge of man’s superiority. He classified her (with a kind of shrugging pity) as one of those women of whom all men speak respectfully and many men admiringly, but who grow old and plain and bitter, unsought among their more frivolous sisters. At the same time, he admitted an attraction which had kept him bidding indirectly for her notice.

Miss Ponsonby’s impassive reserve with men was so wholly a confession, and, at the same time, so proud a disclaimer of the usual meek attitude of unpopular women, that it not only irritated the man who could analyze her, but it provoked his curiosity and led him into attempt after attempt to sting her into speech and unconscious revelations. And whenever he did so and retired, foiled, with the consciousness of having given an unmanly stab to weakness, his man’s desire to think well of himself made him put the blame upon her.

On the afternoon of that particular day, Miss Ponsonby’s feminine characteristics were in possession. She leaned rather languidly against the window frame, and her bodily fatigue, and a self-conscious forlornness which she strove habitually to conceal, were quite evident. Every movement betrayed the woman pushed beyond her strength; every sensitive, quivering line of her face hinted at emotions rioting under a repressed exterior.

If her very apparent dejection aroused no compunction in the Judge (he being so highly civilized) it evoked an ardent sympathy from the young man in the next bed; for, in those days, not even the potency of a Judge’s title could have commanded a private room in the hospital. As a next best expedient, Judge Barton had been placed in a small room opening from the main ward, and containing but two beds. The exigencies of an overcrowded surgical ward made it necessary that the second bed should be occupied by a young pearl fisher, with a crushed chest, who had been taken off a wrecked lorcha. His magnificent physique, and the face of a Greek statue, would have lured from a woman a more complimentary description than the term “young ruffian” which Judge Barton had instantly but inaudibly fastened upon him. “Young ruffian” is perhaps an exaggerated phrase to describe the beauty and insouciance which, in a male, may be qualified by a hat too far on one side. The Judge had never seen Collingwood in his hat, but he divined just the angle which the young man’s taste approved.

Collingwood was gradually recovering, but he was still unable to move without the assistance of a nurse or of one of the Filipino attendants. He had the black hair, the pink and white skin, and, the cameo-cut profile of a Celtic ancestry, modified by his father’s union with a woman of Tennessee pioneer stock. His eyes, which should have been the Irishman’s blue, were a steadfast brown. His frame was a little more massive than his father’s had been; the Irishman’s blarney had merged into the chaff of the Westerner; but enough of Irish humor remained to lend flavor to the practical, hard-headed sense which he had inherited from the mountaineer side of the family. His speech was cheery and careless, yet shrewd; lacking in polish, yet not uncouth. He was not uneducated, and took an innocent satisfaction in having credentials to show for that fact, being a graduate of a small high-school in one of the Middle States. The Judge had found him a not uninteresting companion, for he was outspoken, a born lover of adventure, and a born money-maker, if the Judge ever knew one.

However, Collingwood himself interested Judge Barton far less than did the growth of an emotion in the young man which the dignitary had covertly watched enlarge from an expansive gratitude to absorbing affection. The “young ruffian” had fallen head over ears in love with a woman whose critical faculties and fastidious instincts might well have shaken the courage of a more pretentious suitor; and he enjoyed the ruffian’s usual advantage of being sensitive to material difficulties only. If he felt the distinction in Miss Ponsonby’s manner, it was not as something which separated her from him, but as something which made her only more desirable. He mistook her reserve for shyness; her proud detachment, for meekness. He was aflame to seize the woman who not only appealed to his senses, but who stirred ambitions of which he was hardly conscious, and to bear her away from her overtasked life. He wished to play King Cophetua to the beggar maid; and he was saved from appearing supremely ridiculous only by his sincerity and by freedom from all self-consciousness in his desire.

It was so natural that a young ruffian should fall in love with probably the first gentlewoman with whom he had come into frequent association, that the Judge wasted no particular attention on Collingwood’s side of the case. What really interested that gentleman was Miss Ponsonby’s attitude. For, as he put it to himself, there was a woman with an undeniable personality, engaged in a dumb squabble with society because she could not obtain a recognition of that personality; and the only admirer and partisan she could muster was a young ruffian so far removed from atmospheric influences that he had not recognized that she was a personality; a man who would not have known what was meant by the word. She might have been the young woman who despatches telegrams from the lobby of a first-class hotel, so far as Collingwood’s assumption that she belonged to his world was concerned. Her nurse’s apron and cap were to him the indisputable evidences of his right to claim her for his friend or for his sweetheart, provided, of course, that the attraction was mutual; and that her taste might be influenced by any other standard than his own, he had no suspicion. Judge Barton had even detected at times the tacit overture for a class combination, the assumption that they of the toilers needed no chance civility from one temporarily thrown into their society. That the situation daily developing under his observant eyes must be humiliating to Miss Ponsonby, Judge Barton had not the least doubt. But he was sufficiently human to hope that the hour of Collingwood’s discomfiture (for of that also he had no doubt) might be delayed until he, the Judge, was ready to leave the hospital, and to find some other amusement than that of watching a proud woman’s struggle with her femininity.

Collingwood, quite unconscious of the Judge’s observant eye, lay watching Miss Ponsonby with an alertness which contrasted strangely with his maimed body. There was, in his slightly dilated nostril and in the glow of his eye, the suggestion of a horse which pricks forward its ears and accelerates its pace as it nears home; and perhaps some latent instinct of domesticity lay at the bottom of the man’s rather inexplicable fancy for Miss Ponsonby.

It was inexplicable, not only through the social gulf which actually divided them, but through the fact that she had never been a man’s woman, and that all Collingwood’s previous attachments had been for the type of woman who is adored by the opposite sex. Miss Ponsonby was not diffident under his advances, nor was she overwhelmed by a man’s favor, little as she had enjoyed of it. Attention of a sort she had had, because the position of the relatives who had brought her up was such that any member of their household had to be taken into consideration; but from the time she had left the shelter of their roof, she had received from men an indifference as profound as it was respectful. Collingwood’s very open admiration was the first tracery upon a page which was humiliatingly blank.

It had begun—his admiration—on his first night in the hospital, when he lay a bandaged mummy, racked with pain, a mounting fever adding its torments to the closeness of a muggy, tropical night. There were memories of its sufferings mingled with gentle ministrations, of touches soothing to his worn body, of a feeling of helplessness and dependence upon this gentleness, which carried him back to his half-forgotten childhood, and washed, as clean as his school-boy’s slate, a philosophy of life acquired in numerous love affairs with the young ladies of hotel lobbies, and of restaurant check stands.

The impression remained overnight and increased by reason of the succession of another nurse, who prided herself upon her jollity, and believed that her patients needed cheering up. Collingwood was in such a condition that jollity was an affront to him. He endured the cheerful lady as best he could, and counted the long hours till four o’clock brought back his madonna.

The word had no part in Collingwood’s vocabulary; but it is applicable because it expresses the quality of worship which he had injected into an otherwise very mundane emotion. Collingwood, who was as innocent as a babe of social traditions, who was an American democrat through and through, and believed that all men are equal, save as the possession of “the price” enables one man to command more of this world’s goods than another, was unable to account for the elements in Miss Ponsonby’s nature which whetted his desires, by any of the threads which contributed to the fabric of his philosophy; and he explained them by imputing to the lady the rare and peculiar quality of goodness.

Goodness! There you have the weak point in the arch of man’s philosophical structure, the thing which at once embodies his highest ideal and his most human distaste, the thing over which he has rhapsodized in poetry, which he has exalted into a theology, and which he has ruthlessly crucified whenever he has met it in the flesh. Collingwood supposed that Miss Ponsonby’s delicate rejection of his advances (a rejection qualified by some feeling which a lover’s instinct had to interpret to his advantage) originated in goodness, in a final struggle of the etherealized feminine nature before it submitted to its incarnation and became bound in the flesh. He thought the delicate self-restraint with which she met the caprices and fretfulness of her wards was founded on heavenly patience. He imagined that her occasional snubs of Judge Barton were the outcroppings of an inward shrinking from a passion to which she could not respond; for, loverlike, he assumed that all men must feel as he did about his divinity and he could not perceive the undercurrent of patronage in the Judge’s not infrequent gallantries, which was like an acid on Miss Ponsonby’s quivering nerves.

It was a delicious situation. Judge Barton rubbed his hands in enjoyment of it, and you must admit that he had some justification in the lady’s persistent refusal to make the best of his somewhat generous efforts to establish friendly relations. Oh, yes, it was a delicious situation; and the only one element in it which the Judge never suspected was that secret response to the young man’s tenderness which the lover himself had divined, which whetted him in spite of studied rebuffs, and which, his alleged democracy notwithstanding, all Judge Barton’s class instincts would have unhesitatingly pronounced unseemly—as, indeed, the young woman herself regarded it.

Chapter II

Charlotte Ponsonby continued to lean against the window in an abstraction which registered impressions very much as a flagellant’s ecstasy may note the pathway of his torment. The consciousness of her own perturbation made it exceedingly difficult to turn around. She was so unhappy that it seemed the fact must be evident to even a casual observer. She was afraid of a kindly word, or of a mere friendly glance, lest it should break through the self control she had been exerting.

When at length the National Anthem had been played, and lucent amber was fading into early dusk, the nurse had no further excuse for turning her back on the two patients in her ward. She did not glance at them as she moved away, but her quick return with a glass of milk showed that one of them, at least, was in her thoughts. She offered the refreshment to Collingwood with an explanation, in a dry, professional tone, for its being three minutes late.

He sipped it, looking over the rim with his steadfast brown eyes.

“I’m tired,” he said fretfully.

“I suppose you must be. I will move you when you have finished that.”

“I wonder,” Judge Barton mused, “if nurses do not sometimes feel like saying ‘So am I’ when we fellows complain of being tired, or nervous, or out of patience.”

Miss Ponsonby threw him a smile of recognition for the courtesy of the thought. “Very often they do,” she replied, “but that thought would not come in the case of Mr. Collingwood, because he is tired, and we know that he suffers. Nurses seldom think of themselves so long as they can reasonably think of their patients.” Her outstretched hand conveyed an intimation to the patient under discussion that he was taking an unusual time to consume a glass of milk.

Collingwood was not a man to be hurried when he had an object in taking time. He affected not to see her hand, when, in reality, he wanted to caress it; and he continued to sip his milk very slowly indeed.

“Christmas Eve,” he said lugubriously, “a bum Christmas if ever there was one.”

“Yes,” said Judge Barton. “Collingwood has an epoch now in life—a landmark. Hereafter he will class all events as before or after the Christmas he spent in hospital.”

“Oh, you,” Collingwood threw at him, “you can afford to smile. You have plenty of friends. It’s not the same with you as with a poor devil like me.”

“My dear fellow,” expostulated the Judge, “‘at night all cats are gray.’ Friends do not make a Christmas. When one is away from one’s home and family at this season, there are no gradations. Ask Miss Ponsonby.”

“Is it true, Miss Ponsonby, what he says?” inquired Collingwood with the air of one appealing to an infallible tribunal.

“I don’t know, Mr. Collingwood. Judge Barton must look for his support to someone who has passed through both experiences. I have passed Christmas away from my family, but I have not passed one surrounded by a host of friends.”

“Ah, but you understand so much,” the Judge murmured. Irritated by her unresponsiveness, he grew almost impertinent. “The keenness of your intelligence is only excelled by your kindness of heart.”

Miss Ponsonby’s cheek for an instant flew danger signals, but she said nothing. She looked at the Judge a moment and subdued him. Then—

“I do not believe you give me credit for any great kindness of heart,” she said simply.

“Then must I give you credit for the patience of Job.”

“That you may do.” She took the glass from Collingwood, who, after an ineffectual effort to convince himself that it was not empty, yielded it reluctantly.

The Judge, with a delicacy which he practised with almost ceremonial observance, turned on his pillow and gave them the benefit of a wealth of grizzled black hair, covering a massive head. He would not intrude upon the act of changing the young man’s wearied posture. His excess of delicacy robbed the act of its naturalness, made it seem personal and intimate.

Collingwood felt the nurse’s hesitation. His heart thumped in glad triumph. Let her rule her manner as she would, she could not make that service impersonal. He saw her teeth catch her underlip as she bent over him. Her eyes would not meet his, which glued themselves appealingly upon her face. She slipped her arm under him, however, while his own went about her neck.

In spite of her care, and the perfect training of her action, the slight change which she made in his position wrenched a groan from him. Yet as she laid him back and still stooped, drawing her arms from under him, his own clinging arms tightened, and he pressed his lips ardently against the cheek so near his own.

For a breath, the very shortest breath a man ever drew, he could have sworn he felt a response to the caress, a womanly yielding to all that affection and dependence may imply. Then her eyes, startled, met his, and on the heels of a fawn-like timidity, a wave of fierceness sent the red blood dyeing her cheek, set the high arched nostril aquiver. The intuition flashed into his brain that it was the first man’s caress which had ever touched her soft cheek, and that she was no less frightened than indignant. The joy of the thought drove his blood leaping and stifled his cry of protest, as she drew hurriedly back and left him. She moved rapidly toward the corridor, whence the babble of a woman’s voice, which grew louder as the owner advanced, came floating in.

The lady, weighted with flowers, who had come to bring the season’s remembrances to the suffering dignitary, had paid him several previous visits, was known to Charlotte, and was an object of no little curiosity to Collingwood. She was a member of a very fashionable set, and bore its stamp in dress and mannerisms. She was tall and large-boned, with an ugly, intense face framed in a mass of the then fashionable chestnut-red hair. Save for its haughty demand for consideration, her countenance was not unlike those of her fallen sisters in the suburbs of Manila. There were the same suggestions of life drained to the dregs, the challenge, the hard look about the eyes. She had the manner of an actress, a kind of studied, feline grace which fell into postures and left the observer in doubt whether her next move would be a purr or the stroke of a treacherous paw.

The lady took Miss Ponsonby’s hand and held it during the course of several honeyed utterances. Yet the effect of her courtesy was an impression not of kindness, but of insolence. She managed to convey the idea that civility to one’s inferiors is an attribute of a great lady, and that she was living up to the demands of her position. When she passed to the bedside of the afflicted one, however, a warmth, a glow of the magnetism which she could exert diffused itself like an essence in the bare, ugly room. She addressed the Judge in the abusive strain of intimacy.

“You fraudulent creature!” she reproached him, “lying here, pretending to be ill when I want you at my dinner.”

“Dear lady, don’t.” The Judge gestured away the phantom of that dinner. Being shut out of paradise, he could not talk of its glories.

Mrs. Badgerly laughed in his face. Then she looked around the room for the nurse. She wished her flowers arranged just so in the bowl of old Chinese bronze which her husband and she hoped would keep them green in a dear friend’s memory. Would Miss Ponsonby put them in one by one as she directed? She herself was afraid of ruining her frock, which had already led to recrimination between herself and her husband.

“You do it beautifully, you know,” she purred, as the nurse’s deft fingers planted sprays of green and white. “You must not mind my comments. I am supposed to be a critic—really competent. I took lessons in Japan. Nothing is so satisfying as to lie face down on the floor, sticking cherry blossoms into a Satsuma vase.”

“Speaking of Japan,” remarked Judge Barton, “have those silks which you promised to get for me come yet?”

“You are not to mention those silks. They are on a navy boat.”

“Smuggling again,” said the Judge. “I believe you women do it for the sake of intrigue. You will never rest till you have gotten some poor wretch cashiered and have driven me off the bench. I did not mind the duty, and I do mind the delay. Why didn’t you have them sent down by mail?”

“I mind the duty. I shall oppose it on principle whenever I can. I delight in evading customs duties. It is the greatest pleasure I have in life.”

“Badgerly votes a Republican ticket, doesn’t he?”

“What ticket he votes is immaterial. So is what you say. Would you find me guilty and sentence me to imprisonment if I came up for trial in your august court?”

“I’ve no doubt I should cast about for extenuating circumstances, though you would not deserve my doing so. So I am to be the purveyor of smuggled goods, eh?”

“Oh, if you are too holy—” she rippled.

“Dear me, I hope I don’t set up for being holy. I should almost prefer the title of smuggler. Still, in my position, it might look awkward. However, I’ve always been a pliant fool in a woman’s hands, and I haven’t the backbone to rise up and protest. If you are determined to smuggle, I suppose you must, but don’t tell me about it.”

“How you politicians do juggle with your consciences,” she retorted. “You would have liked me so much better if I hadn’t told you. You would have known, but you could have pretended not to.” She glanced up in time to catch a flicker of distaste in Miss Ponsonby’s eyes, as that lady hastily withdrew them after a covert scrutiny of the Judge. “But how I run on!” she declared flippantly. “I am afraid we are shocking your good nurse.”

If Miss Ponsonby took note of the condescension in Mrs. Badgerly’s choice of adjectives, she did not betray the fact. She quite repudiated any inclination to be shocked. “You could not do it,” she declared ambiguously, planting the last spray.

Mrs. Badgerly took Miss Ponsonby’s measure deliberately. She had long before admitted the personality. She now divined the quarrel. It gave her a rapturous moment of triumph to realize that there was a woman pulled down by the weight of material circumstances which buoyed her up. The full flavor of her insolence rioted in her blood. What was character, what was personality, to power?

She carried a swagger stick of Philippine camagon wood, tipped with a rare piece of Chinese ivory carving. She swung one knee over the other, revealing a mass of dainty petticoats, and silken hose, and a pair of high-heeled slippers. She lolled back, her keen face supported by one slender gloved hand, while she swished her voluminous draperies with the swagger stick. Even Judge Barton, who knew her so well, was stunned by her audacity. He felt as if each blow were a lash on the shoulders of the woman facing her, who had turned to leave them. He felt that Mrs. Badgerly wanted them so interpreted.

“So glad you are not narrow,” said Mrs. Badgerly suavely, “I hate cats, old feminine cats. I lunched with six of them yesterday. I tried to propitiate them. ‘I’ve been just as bad as bad can be,’ I said, ‘but I am not going to be so any more. I’m going to be good as gold from now on. I’ve even told my husband so.’”

She paused to let the full audacity of her remarks sink into her auditors’ minds. Judge Barton held his breath. It was a masterly inspiration to flaunt her impudence in the other’s face. “What is your purity worth? your delicacy? your refinement? your fastidiousness?” she seemed to exult. “Will they win you notice or consideration? You are not the companion, the friend of this man; I am that. You are his menial. What does his secret opinion of either of us matter? His deference is for me.”

“Yes,” went on Mrs. Badgerly, still blocking Miss Ponsonby’s way with her theatrically shod feet. “I made my little confession—wasn’t it dear of me?—in public, and they looked shocked. Nothing is more vulgar than to be shocked. They sat and stared at one another in helpless bewilderment. They had not a word to say.”

If Mrs. Badgerly felt that the helpless indignation of six ladies whose commercial and official relations with her husband through the medium of their husbands had to be supported by civility to his wife; if she felt that their action formed any precedent for the young woman in a nurse’s cap and apron, she made her first error then and there. The very faintest suggestion of contempt swept across Miss Ponsonby’s aristocratic features. She made a little forward movement, just sufficient to force Mrs. Badgerly to draw back her French slipper.

“Probably they did not believe you,” she said gently; “and, as they could not possibly say so, there was nothing else to be said.”

The snigger with which Collingwood received this (he had been listening, but it was Mrs. Badgerly’s fault, she pitched her voice too high) was drowned in an exclamation from the Judge.

“Ah-ha, Mrs. Badgerly, there you have your riposte. You must not try fencing with Miss Ponsonby. Did I not tell you long ago that she was clever, far too clever for you or me? But she is kind, too. She is too generous to take you at your word, though she does not mind countering with you for the pure skill of it.”

Charlotte’s response was a somewhat drawn smile as she moved away. Mrs. Badgerly, though taken aback, was not routed. She still felt that the sinews of war were in her hands, and, until the close of her visit, she made a series of demands upon the nurse which could not courteously be refused, but which kept that unfortunate always waiting upon her. She reserved a few arrows till her departure.

“Dear nurse,” she said, laying a hand on Miss Ponsonby’s arm, “I have been a dreadful nuisance, but I must be forgiven. People are so good to me. They always do forgive me. You will—I know you will. You look so tired, dear nurse. Won’t you let me send the carriage for you some evening when I am not going out? I am sure you ought to be rewarded in Heaven for the sacrifices you make on earth. Are you always occupied at this hour?—the only time when Manila is agreeable?”

Martin Collingwood, who was even more obtuse than the generality of men in matters where women’s finesse is concerned, took these feminine taunts at their face value. They moderated the resentment which, at first, the obvious prosperity and self-confidence of the visitor had aroused. He had anathematized her with the favorite adjective of democracy: he had mentally labelled her “stuck up.” But the tenor of the conversation went far to remove that impression. Its delicate thrusts, its cruel taunts, he missed; but the unvarnished effrontery of it reminded him, save for a flavor of smartness which he relished but could not define, of the frankness of some of the young ladies who had contributed to his discarded philosophy.

Nevertheless, he gloried somewhat inconsistently in Miss Ponsonby’s ill concealed reprobation. Her spunkiness (his own word, dear reader) delighted him as a further evidence of that holiness which was essential to his madonna. The remembrance of his stolen kiss flowed back to him, and he lay alternately quaking and enraptured at the thought of his own boldness.

Miss Ponsonby put aside Mrs. Badgerly’s thanks and declined her carriage. She went about her evening duties with a kind of startled grace like some nerve-tense creature, ready to leap at a sound. Not a single glance fell Collingwood’s way.

But at nine o’clock, when lights were to go out, the necessity of administering medicine to Judge Barton made her bear down on their little ward with a tray. She was very self-possessed, so much so that the keen man of the world guessed that her late encounter had been more trying than she was willing for him to know.

Still, the motive which made him utter a word or two of apology for his guest was not wholly kind. Miss Ponsonby had snubbed his friend, and to do that was to impugn the greatness of the man himself.

“I am afraid that my caller gave you a great deal of trouble,” he said.

Charlotte smiled. “It mattered little. I am here for that.”

“A great deal of trouble,” he repeated, detaining her by holding his medicine untasted. “But, as she said, she must be forgiven. Ah! there is nothing so perfect as the assurance of spoiled women!”

That hurt. It drew a contrast. She, Charlotte Ponsonby, was not spoiled, and she had no assurance, and he could not forgive her for it. Pain jarred an injudicious reply from her.

“Why are they spoiled?”

“My dear lady! Why is the earth scattered with the records of man’s folly? Because he feels, and they prey upon his miserable feelings. I am not sure that you are mundane enough to understand.”

“I am not certain that I do understand. But I am certain that my stupidity does not originate in any ultramundane flights.”

“Ah, you’re clever,” said the Judge, “dangerously clever.”

“No woman is dangerously clever till she uses her wits for evil purposes,” she said, flushing. “I resent your choice of adjectives.”

“A thousand pardons,” he cried. “I was thinking of the effect of your cleverness upon yourself, not upon others, and I cannot retract. It is dangerous for any woman’s happiness to analyze herself and all the world as you do.”

She gave a little shrug, and held out her hand for the glass.

“Bear with me,” he pleaded. “I am not sleepy, and you wish to turn out the lights and leave me in the darkness to ponder my sins.”

“It is my solemn duty to turn them out at once if you are going to do that.”

“I protest. Hold on just a minute, and I’ll swallow the nauseous stuff. Seriously, Miss Ponsonby, don’t you think—all advantages and disadvantages taken into consideration—that it is a good thing for a woman to be spoiled?”

“I am not certain. What do you mean by spoiled?”

“Oh, womanly will do for a definition.”

“Is Mrs. Badgerly womanly?”

“Not in the completest sense, but womanly enough to be spoiled—to base all her demands upon her charms, and not upon her rights.”

“I will think that over. It presents a field for interesting thought. But do drink your medicine.”

“Not until you have told me what you really think.”

“I think you leave no place for the women with no charms. Has she no rights either?”

“The proper sort of woman does not want any rights. She values her charms infinitely higher than all the rights that can be given her.”

“That must be exceedingly pleasant for the women who are born charming. But I insist that a sensible woman should value the attainable more than the unattainable. Charm is unattainable by any conscious process. The woman born without it had better make few claims if, to use a commercial metaphor, she wants her drafts honored. There is nothing for her to do but philosophically to make the best of the situation, and to accept those things which are the commonly admitted rights of her sex.”

“Ah! you reason so clearly and practically. But don’t be a philosopher. Don’t let philosophy creep upon you. Resist it. You know the quotation, I am sure, ‘That unloveliest of things in women, a philosopher.’”

He set the glass to his lips, so that he did not see how she paled under the thrust, nor how one hand went to her throat quickly as if a sudden pain had gripped her. When he had finished drinking and had set the empty glass upon her tray, she switched off the light without her usual “good-night,” and left him.

“Nurse—Miss Ponsonby,” said a small voice in the gloom, a most abject voice to issue from six feet of recumbent manhood, “won’t you come here a minute?”

Miss Ponsonby paused, but did not look back. “Are you awake?” she inquired evenly. “I thought you were asleep hours ago. You must be dreadfully tired. The attendant is here now, the one who handles you so nicely. I will send him to you immediately.”

A man cannot lie in the dark and cry for a nurse who will not come. Collingwood submitted, though fear had taken possession of him. His late audacity seemed madness.

The night wore on. Clouds obscured the sky, and a hot, choking darkness blocked the windows, with solid blackness. The sounds of traffic grew intermittent. Occasionally a carriage went past, full of drunken soldiers or marines, shouting and singing. Once the ambulance went out and came back with an emergency case.

Collingwood’s bed commanded the door which opened into the main ward, so that he had a perfect view of Miss Ponsonby, sitting at her desk and working at her report. A thick green shade cut the light from the room, but centred it like a halo around her shapely head.

By and by, though her features were composed, the watcher saw a glisten of light which flashed at recurrent intervals as a tear dropped downward. The sight filled him with repentance and perplexity. He associated the tears, though he could not tell why, with his stolen kiss. He had kissed more young women in his life than he had energy at that moment to remember; and no one before had felt his caresses a reasonable pretext for weeping. Here again was that mysterious goodness mixing up a situation which ought to have been simple as day, and yet he was glad that it was there to mix.

A faint sound from Judge Barton’s couch told him that the Judge, too, was wakeful and had seen the sparkling drops; but he could not hear what that gentleman was saying to himself.

“Not a philosopher,” he murmured, “not a philosopher, but uncompromising. Why isn’t she attractive! She ought to be attractive.” Then, quite gently, “Poor creature! Why doesn’t she surrender? Why doesn’t she accept the situation and compromise with life?”

There was no one to answer. Presently Miss Ponsonby, as if realising that there might be wakeful eyes among the patients, got up and went out into the corridor. A few minutes afterwards, the bells, the whistles, and the revolvers of enthusiastic exiles flung out a Christmas greeting, and her relief came.

Each man took unto himself a partial responsibility for her tears. Judge Barton planned to wipe out the memory of his unchivalrous conduct by his most deferential manner and his very best conversation. Collingwood dreamed of abasing himself, and of settling without delay all doubts as to his attitude. If he saw a rosy vision of Miss Ponsonby reconciled to him and forgiving, he was not altogether conceited. He had been a man decidedly popular with women. But when the sixteen weary hours had passed away, and the afternoon shift of nurses brought not Miss Ponsonby but the red-haired lady of cheerful temperament, Judge Barton’s instinctive sigh was speedily followed by a rapt interest in Collingwood. That young man had allowed his disappointment to express itself by an involuntary twist in bed, so that he yelled in agony.

Chapter III

Some five or six weeks after the events narrated in the preceding chapters, Judge Barton’s Australian chestnuts were rattling their silver-plated harness on the Luneta driveway at sunset, while their owner was threading the mazes of a Sunday-night carriage jam. He had that day returned from a short vacation in Japan, where he had gone to recuperate after his attack of fever.

The hot season was coming on apace, and but little breeze disturbed the waters of the bay, which were sombred by the reflections of slate-colored clouds streaked across the zenith. The brilliancy of the sunset seemed to have driven apart the clouds in the west, however, where the sky was enamelled in hues of jade and amber and turquoise, seamed here and there with gold, and occasionally with a fading line of dark vapor. With the purple shapes of the mountains extending to right and left, with the foreshortened sweep of the waters, and with the motionless lines of the anchored vessels, the distant picture flamed out like a theatre curtain, while the motley assemblage which filled the oval around the bandstand was not unsuggestive of a waiting audience.

As he was in the act of leaning forward to note the outline of a great five-masted freighter, anchored abreast the bandstand, Judge Barton caught sight of a profile which was vaguely familiar to him, but which, for a moment, he quite failed to associate with a name. A second later, he remembered that he had always seen Miss Ponsonby in her nurse’s cap, and he could not determine whether it was the harmonious effect of imported millinery or some radical change in herself which lent a charm to her face never found there before.

As for the man at her side, it was something of a triumph to perceive the hat at just the angle at which the Judge’s imagination had pictured it, the angle affected by a very smart enlisted man.

It was not wholly in response to the political instinct which, in a democracy, bestows handshakes in place of largesse, that Judge Barton made his way to the carriage in which Miss Ponsonby sat. Since the miserable Christmas Eve when he had succeeded in pricking her into a fencing match, he had not seen her. On the following day, she was put on day duty in another ward, in accordance with some mysterious system of change pursued in the hospital. Within three or four days more, the Judge was pronounced able to begin the journey up the China coast, from which he had only that day returned. When he left the hospital, Collingwood was convalescent, but was suffering from a moroseness which his observant neighbor attributed to thwarted affection.

Miss Ponsonby greeted her quondam patient not with coldness, which may imply an intentionally concealed interest, but lifelessly, with an indifference almost impertinent. Judge Barton felt the indifference, was chilled by it, and revenged himself by a guarded significance of manner which did not amount to ill breeding, but which hinted at an expectation gratified, and made her, as he was delighted to perceive, self-conscious and ill at ease. The feeling with which he had approached her was genial and kindly. To find himself suddenly enveloped in the atmosphere of challenge, of reserve, of dumb interrogation of the providential workings of this world, stirred up in him the old desire to push her just a little bit closer to the wall against which her back was so resolutely set. It was not a chivalrous feeling, but it was a very human and natural one, which might have been shared by millions of the Judge’s fellow-citizens, far more pretentious than he was in the matter of Christian charity and brotherhood.

Miss Ponsonby was looking even paler and thinner than she had looked at Christmas. There was a purpling thickness in her eyelids, there was a depth of shadow beneath, which, to an attentive observer, hinted at tears and vigils in the night. In her listlessness, and in a sweet effort in her smile, the Judge found, in the further course of the talk, the signs of conquest. It was as if, driven to bay, she sought help even from her enemies to ease the agony of surrender. The Judge was not hard-hearted. So long as she fought, he was willing to stab and prick. At the first sign of feminine weakness, at the sight of her beaten and shrinking, he was ready to forget that only a few weeks before he had been rather eager to see her reduced to humility. His concern for her finally found utterance in the hope that she was going to indulge in a much needed rest. “You know I always said, when I was in the hospital, that you needed nursing just as much as Collingwood and I did, if not more,” he added.

She thanked him rather formally, and he detected in her stiffness an access of shyness. A faint color dyed her cheek.

Collingwood, whose resemblance to a pagan deity—or to a young ruffian—was stronger than ever, broke in joyously:

“Oh, she’s going to take a vacation, all right—a long one, in fact, for the rest of her life—with me. You are quite right, Judge. She does need care, and I’ll see that she gets it.”

Miss Ponsonby’s face rivalled the afterglow into which the gorgeous spectacle before them was beginning to melt like metals fused in a crucible; but, after an instant, she lifted her eyes and gazed with a remarkable intensity at Judge Barton. If her self-consciousness had originated in a prescience of his astonishment, it was not more painful than his own chagrin at having betrayed himself. He had certainly not expected her to marry Martin Collingwood. He had taken a mild pleasure in letting her perceive that he divined her struggles in a compromise with her pride for the sake of a few passing attentions and pleasures; but never had it occurred to him that she could possibly bridge the distance between herself and Collingwood in marriage. To have exhibited his utter amazement enraged him with himself. He recovered himself promptly, however, and, in turn, tendered a firm white hand to each.

“Bless you, my children,” he said blandly, “I showed some surprise, but really I don’t know why. The thing is obviously appropriate.”

There was a dryness in Collingwood’s reply which made him, for a moment, almost as impressive as the Judge himself.

“I am glad you think so. That was my opinion from the first, but I had considerable difficulty in getting Miss Ponsonby to take my view of it, and even yet she has her moments of doubt.”

Miss Ponsonby gave him a shy little smile, but at the end of the fleeting movement, her eyes again sought the Judge’s with the same questioning intensity, so that he was amazed to find himself answering aloud.

“Obviously appropriate,” he repeated, “and for a hundred reasons: first, my dear young lady, so charming a person as yourself has no business rusting out in the fatigues of your profession; second, because this young free-lance needs somebody to look after him; third, because marriage is to be encouraged on general principles.” At this point he seemed to recognize the necessity of steering the conversational bark into safer waters, and endeavored to divert it by pleasantry at his own expense. “Although I have not been able to induce any young woman to share my joys and sorrows, believe me, it is not because I am opposed to the institution. If I am an old bachelor, it is not for lack of trying to marry.”

It was Collingwood who made the humanely frank rejoinder, “I guess you haven’t tried very hard since you have been on the bench, have you, Judge?”

It is strange how a man may both resent a fact and take pride in it. Six weeks before, when the Judge had wished to put a squabbling young woman in her place, he had rather gloried in the material advantages connected with his position. A hint that his position might win him a wife when his personality unaided could not do so, rasped his nerves. Charlotte saw him wince and returned good for evil.

“Ah! you are not sincere. You are too modern to believe in marriage.”

“Is it in an ironical spirit, then, do you think, that I beg an invitation to yours?”

“But it will be so very quiet—not even cards or cake; and only one or two of Mr. Collingwood’s friends, and one or two of mine, to give us countenance.”

“To keep us from feeling that we are eloping,” said Collingwood blithely.

“Am I not the very man to do that? If there is no other way, I must be railroaded in in an official capacity. Does not Collingwood need a best man? Does not the marriage ceremony call for a parent to give the bride away—’Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?’—and all that?”

This was pure advertising propaganda, a way to one of those newspaper squibs which delight both the snobbishness and the sentimentality of Americans. In the slight pause which ensued, the Judge had a momentary sensation of being weighed in a very delicately balanced mind, and of being found wanting. But Charlotte only said, “You may come if you wish. But it is sooner than you anticipate—very soon.”

“To-morrow morning at seven-thirty,” interjected Collingwood. “We are going out on the Coastguard boat at ten.”

Here was a burning of bridges, a lover who wooed and a maid who did not dally! The Judge asked where the ceremony would take place, and was told to come to a certain church not far from the hospital. Once more his over-restraint betrayed him, and Miss Ponsonby guessed his surprise.

“We were both brought up Catholics,” she said, “and though we have neither of us clung very closely to the Mother Church, that is where we naturally turn on such an occasion. We have not needed a dispensation. The path has been easy.” She smiled enigmatically.

“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 endorsements. 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, blushing.

“Manifestly,” assented 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 embarrassed, 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 pushing 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 analysis 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 assumption of each other, but which, on the gentleman’s part, was permeated with the watchfulness of one handling an overfilled glass. 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 passing in her mind might leave a few acid scars upon his complacency. There had been, as you felt, no easy courtship. 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 assistance. 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 shipping 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 circumstances? 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 assured 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 mediævalism. 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 God’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 passion, 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 archæologist, the trunkful of old letters is to the novelist. But before those light-giving documents 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 Massachusetts, 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 embarrassed 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 amassing 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 kinship, 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 cherishing 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.

“Martha and I were sitting together just before lunch, when the bell rang. ‘I think that must be the little relative whom we are expecting,’ said Martha, and a second later the butler ushered in a nun and a fourteen-year-old girl.

“I wish you could have seen Martha’s greeting! It was exactly what she would have given a woman of the world, paying a morning call. She was concentrated extract of courtesy and breeding. The child, who was evidently nervous and expectant of a warmer welcome was instantly chilled by it. But she rose to it! She rose to it magnificently! She has rather fine eyes, her mother’s eyes as I remember them, and a self-possessed manner for a child of her age. I tried to gush over her a bit, but she would have none of me. Having been rebuffed by her hostess, she had no intention of allowing an undetermined factor to the situation to make amends to her.

“The nun would not remain, and departed immediately after formally handing over her charge. She kissed Charlotte (the child is named for her mother), and I rather fancied that, in spite of her cold welcome, the child is not reluctant to enter on a more brilliant life than the conventical one. At any rate, she did not shed any tears.

“Charlotte was sent upstairs with a maid to make her toilette for luncheon. ‘Your cousins regret not being here to welcome you,’ said Martha suavely, ‘but they went out to the country place of a friend for a day’s skating. They will see you at dinner.’

“‘I am very glad they did not change their plans on my account,’ said my little nun that might have been.

“Cornelius came home for luncheon and was stiffer than Martha. He was self-conscious, that was apparent. We had the most perfect luncheon imaginable, but though Martha prides herself on her heating arrangements and their temperatures never vary a degree, I felt as if the outside air had crept through the whole house.

“I am sorry for that girl from the bottom of my heart. Martha hates the sight of her, and the girl knew it before she had been twenty minutes in the house. She will have food and dress and every material luxury dealt out to her as lavishly as it is to Martha’s own girls; but of good-will, kindness, human affection, not a drop. Instead, she will receive a courtesy measured by the most approved social standards. She will never be allowed to forget for one moment that it is given from a high sense of duty, and not from any sense of affection. I am not sure that Cornelius has done the child a kindness. She might have fared better in a boarding-school. At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy for Martha. I shouldn’t be at all nice about it, you know, if you raked up a dead and gone sweetheart’s child and established her among our brood.”

Within a few weeks after the writing of this epistle, Mrs. Spencer expressed herself to an elderly relative perched in a very old colonial home among the hills of Vermont.

“Charlotte’s little daughter is now with us. She is a very reserved child with beautiful manners—I suppose convent training does give that—and, her teachers think, has an exceptional mind. We have had private teachers for her this year because, though her elementary training is fair, she is greatly lacking in general information, though she has a curious accumulation of Roman Catholic religious lore.

“She has a great deal of personality for a child of her age, which I have respected. I find myself constantly shrinking, however, from some undercurrent of feeling which she doesn’t express. She gets on very well with my two girls, but they don’t understand her any more than I do. Of course, she is treated exactly as they are—I really wouldn’t get one a hair ribbon without buying its match for Charlotte.

“For a convent-reared girl, she is not so difficult to deal with as might be. I send her to church every Sunday in the brougham with the parlor maid, who happens to be of her faith; and I called on the parish priest and commended her to his fatherly mercies. He is a rather robust person, clearly of Irish peasant origin, and speaks with a very decided brogue. She is plainly growing a bit fastidious about him, and I am inclined to feel that she is none too deeply enamored of her church. She has a curious gift of worldliness for a child brought up in a convent.”

Eight years later Mrs. Spencer penned another brief note to this same elderly relative’s daughter.

“I suppose it would be asking too much of you to run down to Smith and see Charlotte take her degree. I can’t go—Natalie’s engagement is just on—and somebody ought to appear from the family. She takes high honors, I understand. She wrote me a very pretty little note, saying it wasn’t to be expected of any of us to get up, but I can see she is hurt. Do go if you can.”

Six weeks later in that same year, the military lady found herself at a very quiet and exclusive resort in the White Mountains, and once more delivered herself to her husband of many impressions.

“You remember that incident I told you of some years ago of seeing Charlotte K’s daughter engulfed in the Spencer household. Well, they are all here for a brief stay, Martha engrossed in her two girls. Natalie’s engagement to young X—— of the Navy has been announced. Charlotte Ponsonby is really a magnificent creature—from a woman’s standpoint, that is. But the outcome of the affair is just what might have been expected. Somehow they have mortally wounded her, and to protect herself from them and their curiosity she has built a wall between herself and the whole world. I tried to cross it, and was most delicately and effectively rebuffed. She is the most solitary girl I have ever known, and yet she is not morbid. She moves among us in the most self-possessed, unasking spirit that was ever held by a girl of twenty-two. She is remarkably well bred, quite at ease outwardly, and is altogether too clever to please men—who are dreadfully shy of her, though they speak of her admiringly. I would not have you think that her cleverness is of that cheap type which sharpens its wits on others, and prides itself on its brilliancy. She is not in the least talkative, but she gives you the feeling of one who is weighing, sifting, analyzing, judging; who is using her brain to its best purposes at all times.

“The pathetic part of it all is that she is playing up to a rôle that somebody—I don’t know what idiot—assigned her. I find among all the kindred and all the family acquaintance the general opinion that Charlotte has no emotions, nothing but a brain; and the poor child is nothing but a bundle of emotions that she is desperately trying to conceal. I understand her perfectly. I never was so sorry for anyone in my life—anyone in our condition, that is. She has been tagged a girl of brains, and it has somehow been impressed upon her that, if she shows any feminine weakness, she will disgrace herself. So there she is, on her intellectual tiptoes, striving to conceal a very human disposition to come down on her heels, exiling herself from all that girlhood prizes.

“Of course, you dear old goose, you are saying to yourself, ‘Why don’t you put her wise, then?’ My dear, she has analyzed it all just as clearly as I have. She knows what is going on. She merely hasn’t the courage to break through the convention and, on the whole, I don’t wonder at it. It takes more courage to fight the accepted conception of oneself than it does to do any other sort of fighting in the world. Charlotte Ponsonby is a victim of the Spencer stupidity and of her own timidity and sensitiveness. There has grown up an impression that Charlotte doesn’t care for dancing; and night after night she goes off to her room, pretending a desire to read when her heart is in her toes, where a normal girl’s heart should be. If there is an expedition of any sort, Charlotte is always handed over to some elderly fossil because she is so intelligent and serious, and so entertaining to old gentlemen. If a man pays her the least attention, everybody notes it (and you know we pride ourselves an our breeding too); and so much interest, sympathy, and, yes, my dear, damnable curiosity, is openly shown in the matter that the girl’s pride is outraged, and in sheer self-defence she snubs her admirer incontinently.

“She lives and has always lived, as nearly as I can see, utterly without intimate companionship, confidence, or any of that wholesome dependence that belongs to girlhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in her isolation, which, much as I should like to, I dare not invade. There is a pride in life born of indigence as there is the pride of wealth. Charlotte Ponsonby is armored in the pride born of spiritual indigence. Her soul is hungering and thirsting for that thing for which all the world has decided she cares nothing. Mark my words, my dear, in the end, tragedy will come of it.”

It was at the close of their stay in the mountains that Mrs. Spencer again unburdened herself to the Vermont relative.

“What do you think Charlotte is now bent on? She wants to be a trained nurse. I have felt for a long time that she had something revolutionary in her mind. It doesn’t matter to me particularly, but Cornelius is grieved to the heart. However, we have no right to coerce her, and financial independence seems to be the one thing on which her mind is fixed.”

Three years later she wrote again:

“Charlotte has finished her training and is going to the Philippines. She came in from New York last week to break the news. I said little, and Cornelius said less. But we have talked it over, and have decided that she must judge for herself. I don’t feel satisfied with the results of our care for Charlotte, and I don’t know where the blame lies, but I do feel that she cherishes some bitterness of feeling in her heart, and that she is very unhappy.

“Something in her nature wears clearer as she grows older, some ingrained romanticism which we did not suspect, and which repels me. However, it is too late to worry about now. She has taken her life into her own hands, and has decreed that it shall lie apart from ours; and I, for one, am thankful.”

To these may be added a final word from Miss Ponsonby herself, written, on her wedding eve after her return from the Luneta.

”My dear Aunt:

“This is the last letter I shall write you for some time, for to-morrow I am going to be married, and shall leave Manila for a remote island where the opportunity for correspondence is small.

“The man I am going to marry, whose name is Martin Collingwood, is engaged in pearl-fishing in the seas south of Manila. He is a man, I believe, with the money-making gift. However that is not the reason that I am marrying him. With me it is absolutely a matter of the heart. I am marrying him because, as nearly as I can see, he is the one human being who has ever loved me in this world, and because I cannot live life without love.

“It is hardly necessary to say that I am sacrificing my ambitions in this matter. To a woman brought up as I have been, a dependent, a brilliant marriage would represent the most successful thing, the most nearly compensating thing, that life could offer. It has not come to me, however, and I am making the best I can of what has offered.

“You may wonder why this frankness at the end of the silence which has always existed between us. It is because my only hope in the future is based on the fact that, at last, I have courage to declare myself. To guard my every thought and feeling from your curiosity and criticism, I have separated myself from all the world, and in the beginning unknowingly, but in the end with full knowledge, have walked down a path which has ended here. I will not hamper myself in my new life by even the memory of my old cowardice. You may call me weak, call me sentimental, foolish, romantic, call me all the things which for years you have been trying to discover in me, and for which you have sought in vain beneath the mask I wore—I am going to have my share of living.

“This is not written in bitterness toward you. I am grateful for all the care and the money lavished upon me, and I realize fully the sacrifice that you made in receiving me into your home and in treating me, as you did, with perfect justice. It was magnificent. I am simply one of those miserable beings who have come into this world unwelcome, born to be a worry and a trial to someone, and I have taken the only means I knew to escape from it.

“Tell Uncle Cornelius that I am not ungrateful to him. Some day I’ll write you again. For the present I want to put every memory of the past out of my life. If the day ever comes when I can go back to it without its influencing my life as it has always done, I’ll write again.

“Yours gratefully,

”Charlotte Ponsonby.”

Chapter V

Judge Barton had to cut short his morning ride in order to reach the San Sebastian church at seven-thirty, but he admitted to himself that he would have gone without his daily exercise rather than have missed the wedding; and he was actually ten minutes early. He found the edifice empty but pervaded with a general stir which hinted at impending events. A dirty, bare-footed sacristan in marine blue cotton drawers and a transparent shirt was opening windows and lighting a few candles about the high altar. The early morning sunlight streamed through the apertures, while the noise of street traffic outside echoed hollowly through the dusty, empty silence of the church. Sparrows flashed across the moted sunbeams and lost themselves among the violet and orange shadows of the lantern. A pobre shuffled in to mutter his devotions, and a widow and her two daughters, who had been praying before one of the chapel altars, lingered to discover the cause of the preparations.

Soon one or two men dropped in, strangers to the Judge, and friends, as he instantly decided, of Collingwood. They stood about indecisively, and stared up into the vaulted roof, and whispered to one another in funereally regulated tones. Then came a group of five or six women, whom the Judge recognized as fellow-nurses of Miss Ponsonby; and almost immediately afterwards, without ceremonial or welcome of the organ, the bride and groom appeared. Both were in white; he in the military-cut blouse which is so popular in the Philippines, she in a simple street dress of white muslin with a hat of white embroidery. The marine sacristan went to summon the priest, while the bridal pair waited quietly in the shadow of one of the Gothic pillars.

When the priest, a Spaniard of ascetic and noble countenance, had arrived and was embarked upon the marriage ceremony, Judge Barton took himself to task for the flutter of nervousness which, to his great discomfiture, he found obtruding into his judicial reflections. He had come to satisfy a very natural curiosity, and the affair had taken his sympathies unaware. He had never before attended a wedding in which the seriousness of matrimonial experiment appealed to him so strongly. He never before had felt the solemn happiness which his sympathy with that bride and groom awoke in him. He stole a glance at the other witnesses; they were as preternaturally grave as he. There was even a subdued air about Collingwood, full, however, of reserved triumph. As for the bride, her pallor and fatigue were quite evident, but she had an uplifted look which was most attractive. He caught himself wondering if there would be any kissing the bride, and then he decided it was time to rein in his imagination. “Emotions by the quart!” he thought to himself. “Have I turned sentimental old woman? Champagne wouldn’t make me more maudlin.”

He waited quite discreetly after the ceremony, till the young men and the group of nurses had had their say, and it had been clearly demonstrated that there would be no kissing. Then he went up and offered Mrs. Collingwood his hand. There was a genuine friendliness in his manner, a warmth and sincerity in his few words that touched her. Her own reserve melted before them. He saw her eyes suffuse, and a faint color glow in her cheek.

She was instantly aware, indeed, that she occupied a new plane in his thoughts. She had gained upon him personally, and, as the wife of a man engaged in developing one of the greatest resources of the islands, and likely to become a factor of local commercial life, she would receive consideration. She knew that he regarded her marriage as a mésalliance, yet by making a mésalliance she had become a person to be taken into account. Stranger situations than this happen frequently in the world—in the governmental world—and Mrs. Collingwood did not betray her intuitions.

“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 anticipate 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 shining roofs, at the patches of green shrubbery relieving them, and, in the background, at the mountains where Lawton died. The launch whistled for its passengers before Judge Barton could reply, but he wrung her hand with the intensity of a lifelong friendship. 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 gratitude, 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 snatched 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, passed 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 passengers, 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 passengers. 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 cumbering 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 passengers.

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 circumstances 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 courtship, and treated her with matter-of-fact kindness and good fellowship. 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 analyze. But with the struggle past he had time to take up the contradictions of her attitude, 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 associate her intelligence and her grace with a class distinction. On the contrary, it was one of his sources of joy that he would take her out of the masses and make her of the classes, 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 nobody. 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 sex superiority. He could realize that a woman can be a man’s inferior; but he supposed that the mere fact of his sex 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 Peñon de Coron in a jade-green sea, and entered the channel between Coron and Bushuanga. There the water was like purple glass, save where a rush of porpoises parted it in swift pursuit of the flying-fish. Fairy islets dotted its dazzling surface while the land masses 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 anchored 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 massed 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 ashore 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 shore, 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.”