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.”