Mary H. Fee

“ My God! was ever man before such an imbecile? How can a man conceive such an affection for a woman who has given him one tremulous smile on her wedding day? What does this thing feed on? Am I coming to my dotage?”
In such strain did the Judge berate himself through ten or twelve weary days, and then the obsession left him as suddenly as it had come. Interest and ambition returned, he found his women friends as entertaining as ever, and though he thought often and kindly of Mrs. Collingwood, his meditations were tinged with a strain of that violet usually allotted to the dead. ”

“ There had been no way of evading the weight of what she had felt to be the world’s scorn but determinedly to make Martin Collingwood into something which he was not; in the moment of putting aside that world’s verdict, he and she swung as naturally into their normal relationships as a compass needle swings back to its rest.
Henceforward she would see Collingwood as he was: the democrat whose democracy is but the ladder of ambition, the raw, self-made man reaching out an eager clutch for those finer things of life which he knows only by their ticketed values. ”

“ As she strained her eyes through the blackness, Charlotte felt that the weight of ages lay on their aching pupils. Fatigue, despair, and fear all tore at her heart. There rose always before her the vision of Martin as she had imagined him in the little coastguard steamer’s cabin, and the cold dread clenched her heart that the waves had sucked him down and down to the bottomless sea, a lonely, dead thing in the awful vastness of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But you can’t any more make me put your values on life and people, than you can, because somebody wishes you to, convince yourself that there is no America; that all your past life has been a dream; that all you have known and felt and seen has been mere imagination, a fancy on your part. I’ll have no quarrel with you, no reproaches. I married you of my own free will, and married you for love. As for my philosophy of life or my views on worldly matters, what actual part need they play in our life? ”

“ One warm night, when the Maclaughlins, Kingsnorth, and the oyster-agent had given themselves up to the delights of bridge, the other three strolled along the beach till they came to an old banca lying bottom up on the sand. There was no moon, but the stars burned steadily overhead, their reflections rising and falling with each slow wave. A ghostly thread of white fire outlined each breaker that toppled lazily over, and the gentle succession of splashes was like a deep harmonic accompaniment to the shrill chorus of insect life which burst from the grove behind them. ”

“ Collingwood,” said the Judge. “To me you seem a woman so eminently fitted to be a part of the great world, that I cannot understand your getting along so well without it. It is like seeing a musician trying to live without music, or an artist without pencils and brushes.”
“Charlotte swam out into the big world and got a mouthful of salt water, and it made her sick,” Martin put it. He fancied the Judge’s words had reference to living in a city among hordes of fellow beings. Of society as a fine art, Martin had no conception. ”

“ Kingsnorth said, though some torment, physical or mental, twisted his lips into uncouth shapes as he dragged out the words. “He’ll come. Almighty God wouldn’t keep a man—from this.” With which words, of a poetic consistency with the weakness which had been his undoing, the voice of John Kingsnorth fell into eternal silence. For half an hour longer, perhaps, his eyes remained open, staring curiously, wistfully, sometimes at her face, sometimes at the deepening vapor line upon the sky. The steamer came full into view, a coastguard boat, undoubtedly heading for the island. ”

“ Kingsnorth said. “Your path is as plain as a pikestaff. You married Martin Collingwood,—why, only you and your Maker know,—but you did marry him, and you have got to stay with him. He needs you.”
“Oh, you men!” she cried scornfully. “And if he did not need me—if only I needed him—it would be equally my duty to leave him. However you arrange the scale of duties, they are always to suit your own interests.”
“I am thinking of this from yours,” Kingsnorth said firmly. “I tell you, and I know, that the one thing the human soul can’t stand is to live on compromising with its own self-contempt. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No shadow of fear darkened the almost ecstatic rebellion of her mood. As the tempest gathered force, and gusts of savage violence hurtled themselves out of the crashing void in front, the rain was driven like fine shot before them. In the lulls the great organ of the surf filled the starless night with crashing harmonies, and through sound or silence a snow field of tumbling froth showed a spectral glimmering through the inky gloom. A crimson glow came through the transparencies of Kingsnorth’s shell windows, a touch of warmth in the blinding convulsion of nature. ”

“ She knew that seventy per cent of her fellow women would condemn her for having married Martin Collingwood, and that more than that number would despise her for overlooking the crude insults of his letter and of his speech by the pandan bushes. Her face flamed as she recalled them. As long as she should live they would be a thorn in her flesh, a scourge, an agony to be relived.
Yet no flagellant ever bent more meekly under his own blows than Charlotte did as she resigned herself to bearing that cross. ”

“ Marriage can not be for love alone any more than it can be for selfish material interest alone. In its appeal to human emotion and in its relation to the family it may be, as the church calls it, a sacrament; but marriage as a lifelong partnership must have its material side. Love must enter in; but no healthy marriage can exist, unless there be equally the consciousness of a good bargain, of a legitimate exchange of values, added to the affection which sanctifies it. Well, Collingwood had played fairly. It was she who had entered into the alliance, knowing its weakness, knowing herself. ”

“ Charlotte found that, with a prospect of returning to the world, a variety of interests which she had thought quite extinct revived and grew clamorous. Memory was busy, too, with the days of her courtship. That strange mingling of ecstasy and misery through which she had passed seemed quite remote and, in retrospect, quite unnecessary. A hundred times she asked herself why she had been such a goose, why she had hesitated, why she had permitted the possible opinion of the world at large to influence her. She went about almost uplifted with the sense of new moral independence. ”

“ She had married Martin Collingwood, blaming herself for the weakness that made human affection and the freedom from the responsibility of self-support loom larger than all the traditions of birth and breeding. She had wanted her romance as every other woman in the world does; and romance, as it comes to most women, had been denied her. She might have gone out and found one, as many a woman does, and might, in time, have taken her flirtations lightly. ”

“ That’s quite true, Martin; but it isn’t my only reason for liking our present life. Your ‘great world,’ Judge Barton, means a continual drain upon one’s tact and patience, a continual smoothing over of difficulties, of forcing oneself to adapt oneself to people with whom one has no real sympathy. This life is a sort of moral drifting, with the consciousness that the current moves in the right direction. The other world is full of experiences. One passes from one perception to another, one’s being is wrung with the continual play of warring emotions ”

“ But when I took you for my husband, Martin, believing in all these old-fashioned ideas, I did it in the consciousness that the choice was final, the determining factor of my life. So long as you live, there is between me and every other man in the world a barrier (I know not what it is) across which my mind will never step, and across which no man will ever try to address me twice. No, I won’t be kissed—it is the first time I have ever repelled a caress from you, but to me this moment is too serious for caresses. You have the man’s right to resent another man’s possessive thought of me ”

“ 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. ”

“ She had put herself at the mercy of a man of whom she knew, after all, next to nothing. Once aboard the launch, once out of Cuyo harbor, she was as utterly in his power as any prisoner in a dungeon is in the power of his captors. A wife may have rights and privileges in the eye of the law, but they avail her little on an island where no one of her own race save her husband’s friends steps foot.
Her crowding thoughts sickened her, though she had enough will and strength to guide the boat alongside the launch. Collingwood threw away his cigar and held out his hands. ”

“ The precocious child is abnormal, and inspires in his fellow men that blind instinct to worry and torment which runs all through the animal world. She had been a precocious child, made uncanny by perceptions of the hidden currents and causes of life at a time when she should have been gurgling over its toys. As she recalled her sensitiveness to impressions, her powers of reading what was passing in others’ minds, and the singular growth of self-concealment and self-control that had grown out of them, it seemed to her that her keen brain had been her lifelong curse. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Through what throes this sense of moral independence had come to her, she knew; through what it might yet have to pass before it could obtain a perfect development, she had some intuition; but in her ultimate victory over the weaker and poorer elements of her nature she had perfect confidence. [360]
As she sat on in the blinding heat, her life passed in retrospect before her, and something half bitterness, half elation sprang up in her soul as she gazed upon it. Too clearly she perceived that its noblest features had been those which had most obstructed the happiness she yearned for. ”

“ Maclaughlin, her outspoken dependence upon the man of her choice, her frank admission of her sense of duty and obedience to him, had a wholesome significance in these days, when women have thrown off all the old maxims of subjection without finding any new self-imposed obligations. What had her year’s association with Kingsnorth, educated reprobate, well-bred degenerate, cost her? An insulting proposition from a worldly man; but what a wealth of human sympathy and charity and compassion had it not injected into her moral and intellectual exclusiveness! ”

“ So the long morning wore away and the dying man still pillowed his head in Charlotte’s lap. Her mind, as she looked down upon him, was a-surge with crowding thoughts. Pity was foremost. It was indeed pitiful, this slow, painful ending, in desolation and loneliness, of a life that should have closed in dignity and peace. As the face grew whiter, and the pinched look of death stole upon his features, the bitterness and the degeneracy seemed to yield to what had been the once lofty spirit of manhood before the corroding acids of life had [356] preyed upon it. ”

“ Was it possible that she was turning blindly, as women naturally turn, to a second man to lift her from the wreck to which she had brought her life with the first? Again she faced that truth which she had long before discovered, that too passionate a denial constitutes an assertion; and while every atom of her intelligence bade her distrust her own sophistry, every throb of a strong emotional nature bade her turn from the conclusions of her reason. ”

“ To get up day after day, knowing that there was, in all this world, no human being who took more than a casual interest in her; to go to bed at night, knowing that, if ruin and disaster overtook the world, no human thought would turn to her, no voice cry to hers out of the darkness, no warm human [315] hand reach for hers, seemed to her a fate infinitely worse than death. Yet she had lived just that life for twenty-eight years before she married Martin Collingwood to escape from it ”

“ 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. ”