Chapter XV
It was at the end of a month, when Charlotte looked forward with increasing dread to her husband’s return and to her own departure, that the lorcha Dos Hermanos, their tried friend, left cargo and letters at the island. Collingwood wrote that he should delay his return another month. He sent down their commissaries, and Maclaughlin was to come up to Romblon harbor to meet the first June run of the Puerta Princesa steamer. Most of these details were contained in a letter to Maclaughlin. His letter to his wife, a very bulky epistle, dwelt upon their own difficulties. It was the first letter he had written to her, and Charlotte’s face, as she read it, was a study.
”My dearest Girl:
“You are that, after all. I’ve been thinking over our affairs, and I am willing to admit that I was hasty. But I don’t think that you treated me altogether fair. What I do see is that we haven’t got any time to jaw over what is done and gone. You have been talking about leaving me and all that, but that is just talk. I don’t suppose you ever really meant it, and I never took it seriously. We’ll kiss and be friends when I get back, and you’ll see that everything will come out all right.
“I’ve been having a pretty fine time up here. About the first person I met was Barton. I had intended to kick him on sight, but I was still feeling pretty sore toward you, so I didn’t. He took me up to his clubs and entered my name, and the next night took me to call on that Mrs. Badgerly. Lord! Lord! that woman is inquisitive! She dug at me like a lawyer at a witness. I never gave anything away: swore you wouldn’t come along because you hated the sea trip so, and vowed I had come up on a sugar lorcha. Then this Mrs. Badgerly (she’s a corker; I like her style), told me she wanted to take me to see old General ——’s wife, because the old lady knew you at home. She was a mighty nice old lady—real motherly,—and she told me a lot of things that you never told me, and made a good many things clear that I’ve never understood. Then I was invited out to the General’s to a big dinner, where there were two or three other people who used to know you; and if I hadn’t been so fond of you, it would have made me all-fired mad the way they rammed it into me that I had married into a fine family, and a fine woman, and all that sort of thing. I didn’t need their verdict on you.
“There was another old lady there who used to know you [here Martin named the mother of a very important civil officer], and both the old ladies took me to their hearts and purred over me. I bluffed the thing right through, invited everybody to Maylubi, and promised to bring you up some time this year. Barton was at the dinner too, and he piled it on thick about our island, made it quite romantic.
“Well, the long and the short of the matter is that you call me. I’ll admit that the crowd here is a little swifter than any I have ever known, and maybe you have some right to your private opinions that I didn’t see before. And, as you said, you keep them to yourself, so I don’t see why I should let them bother me. I’ll stay another month or so, and by that time we will both have a chance to get over our grudges. You needn’t think I’ll let you go back to nursing; and as for me, I am willing to live with you on the old terms, and mighty anxious to get back to them.
“I have put six dots here to represent six kisses (......). I’ll give you sixty when I get home.
“Your affectionate husband,
”Martin Collingwood.”
“P. S. I am going to take both old ladies for a drive to-night. How am I getting on for a beau?”
When she had twice read this epistle, Mrs. Martin Collingwood was startled by the realization of a great mental change in herself. For six weeks she had schooled herself to feel that she must leave her husband purely out of decent pride and self-respect. She had believed that she was actuated by the desire to remove an obnoxious presence from one who had ceased to take pleasure in it; and she had said to herself a hundred times that her affection for her husband had never wavered, but that to thrust it upon him was indecent.
But as she laid down the letter after a second perusal, she was aghast to realize that she did not want to live again with Martin Collingwood: that she recoiled passionately from his easy sense of possession; that his taking her so completely for granted was an affront that she could not pardon. She became conscious of a slow process that had been going on in her mind during the dreary weeks, the death of the feeling that had cast a glamour over Martin Collingwood and his inability to understand her standards and traditions. He had lived with her for a year, and had been unable to comprehend that she was of different substance from Mrs. Maclaughlin or Mrs. Badgerly. He had been grossly offensive at the bare suggestion that she might be superior to one of them, but when she was ticketed with the other’s approval,—she drew an indignant breath,—he stood ready to exhibit her to the world, and to call its attention to the superfine partner whom he had drawn in the matrimonial lottery.
Well, he would be disappointed. He had yet to learn that she was no readier to accept his terms than he had been to accept hers. She had had her romance, and she would pay the price!
Her social knowledge told her, also, that the Spencer family had taken steps to make its power felt across the Pacific, and that in spite of her marriage and her bitter letter, they were behind her, holding fast to the old tenet that blood is thicker than water. She knew that from both the ladies who had impressed Martin as motherly old dears she would have received at any time both courtesy and kindness; but they would not have taken especial notice of Martin Collingwood or have troubled themselves to introduce him without some sort of urgent appeal from the Boston family.
The thought warmed her sad heart a little, for we are all grateful for good-will, and the world looked a lonely place to Charlotte at that time. She was very thoughtful, however, and she was inclined to regret that old family friends had arrived so inopportunely in Manila. It would make her lot harder, entail humiliating explanations exceedingly difficult to make and—crowning agony—it would mean that the disastrous outcome of her marriage would be immediately known and discussed by the very persons whose knowledge of her affairs she most desired to restrict.
She was sitting on her veranda, the letter upon her lap, her brows frowning, her lips pain-drawn, when Kingsnorth approached from his own cottage. He too had had a letter from Collingwood, and after a bath and a change of garments, had come over to discuss it with Mrs. Collingwood.
He advanced with the hesitating and apologetic air which he had worn with her ever since that unfortunate evening on the beach. She roused herself to a cold courtesy, gave him a cup of tea, and then sat listlessly awaiting what she knew he had come to say.
“I have a letter from Martin,” Kingsnorth began awkwardly, at length, “which I thought you might want to see. He says in it that he did not mention some of the business details to you and that I am to show it to you.”
She took it, glanced through it, flushed slightly, but handed it back without comment. It was a characteristically brief but condensed epistle, dealing wholly with business save in the last paragraph.
“Better show this to my wife. I wrote her, but had something more interesting to talk about than these matters. You were quite right. I have been a damn fool, but I am all right now, and she and I are going to be happy ever after.”
As Charlotte returned the epistle, Kingsnorth fixed her with a curious eye, half interested, half apologetic. Then, as she said nothing, he stammered.
“I hope it will be as Martin says, Mrs. Collingwood, and that no lasting ill will come out of my stupidity and insistence.”
A slight flush tinged Mrs. Collingwood’s cheek. “Martin wrote what he meant to be a kindly letter, and I am grateful for it. But it really doesn’t affect the matter in the least. I am going away. You will have to know it sooner or later.”
“You can’t forgive him?”
“I can’t forgive myself. I have no hard feeling against him. But he showed me myself.” Her face burned.
“Dear Mrs. Collingwood, don’t feel that way. Martin did not mean what he said.”
She lifted her heavy eyes. “Wasn’t it true?”
“No, it wasn’t; or, at least, the coloring he gave it wasn’t true. It wouldn’t be true unless—” he paused and broke off confused.
“Unless what?”
“You know.” He looked at her steadily.
“I don’t know.”
“Unless you leave him. That’s what they do; that’s what I did when I got tired. But if you stay by what you promised, no human being can think of you with less than respect. It isn’t the game, it’s the way you play the game that counts.” His voice trembled with emotion.
Charlotte sat very still, her cheeks burning. It seemed incomprehensible that she should be sitting there, listening to John Kingsnorth’s views on ethics. Where had she failed? What gradual disintegration had taken place in her, that she should be willing, nay, eager, to listen to moral advice from a man whose very presence had once seemed polluting?
At the same time, she realized that his words had value. Is it, she asked herself, the cut and dried opinion of those who walk safely along a beaten path in company with myriads of their fellow beings, which really counts in this world? or is it the knowledge that comes of bitterness and experience? It is so easy to formulate high-sounding phrases; but what do these phrases amount to when one is confronted with life? In the past three years, what downward steps had she taken upon that pathway—she whose whole ideal had been to keep herself untainted from the common world and to walk serenely and gracefully along those heights where all the training of childhood and the instincts of heredity had made her believe that her path lay? When had she missed it? And then, like a flash, she saw in retrospect her conduct for years past; saw herself stopping here, twisting there, trying, at every instant, to evade the fate and the suffering allotted to her in life. Suddenly she realized how much she and John Kingsnorth had in common, for each was a coward. Neither had strength to take sorrow to his heart, and to bear it uncomplainingly. She was doing what he had done, failing as he had failed.
The letter dropped from her shaking fingers, and she raised her eyes to his with a look so hopeless, shamed, and grief-stricken, that he shrank back and winced as if he had seen a gaping wound.
“I can’t,” she said. “Something has snapped. I have changed. I can’t be Martin Collingwood’s wife again. If the weight of my own self-contempt could crush me, I should be dead. Oh, why did they destroy my faith? There would have been the religious life at least.”
“You must not talk that way,” 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. A woman of your brains can’t take the liberties with her conscience that her frivolous sisters do. You can’t stand the self-contempt. You’ll disintegrate under it. Convince yourself that you are a martyr if you can, and hug your martyrdom. They got something out of it when it was boiling oil, and melted lead, and crucifixion, and all the rest of those horrors. Be a martyr if you must, but do not try living under the weight of your own self-contempt. Of all failures that is the weakest, saddest, most loathsome. Dear lady, I’ve carried mine with me like an atmosphere. People have felt it; you did. I’ve seen you shrink from me as if I were a leper. And you were right. I am loathsome to myself.”
He stopped, wiped his brow, and settled back into his chair with a heavy sigh. Charlotte sat on, her trembling fingers tightly clasped, her eyes fixed on the sea. She turned at last and shook her head.
“I can’t. I can’t take up that thread of life. I don’t know how I got myself here—it is all a nightmare—but I must go away and work—by myself again.”
Kingsnorth leaned forward, his hands loosely clasped between his knees.
“Will you listen to the story of my life, Mrs. Collingwood?” he said with more of sharpness in his tone than was characteristic of him.
Charlotte had little curiosity in anyone else’s affairs; but she would have listened to anything at that moment to slip away from the discussion of her own. She nodded listlessly, and Kingsnorth began speaking in a very judicial tone.
“I was what is called in England well born, though my people were not rich. My father came of a very old and once distinguished family, but was the owner of an impoverished estate. My mother was equally well born, and possessed a small income of her own. You probably know that, in England, the eldest son is the family; nobody else really counts. In our family there were two girls, then my elder brother, the ‘heir,’ then myself, and another girl. I cannot remember the time when the rest of us were not all being pinched to keep things going for the heir. Tom was, on the whole, a pretty good fellow, but that sort of rearing would spoil the best nature that was ever born. He got into the way of thinking that the rest of us ought to sacrifice everything we had or could hope to have to his position. He was also a devilish good-looking fellow, easy-going and selfish, as was natural.
“My two elder sisters were promptly married off, on the whole pretty well. The difficulty came with Tom. He had to marry money, and he had not enough in himself or the place to make money come begging for him.
“Tom was in an expensive regiment. My dream of life was also the army, but the paternal pocketbook couldn’t stand it, so I was put in a bank instead. I promptly fell head-over-ears in love with the banker’s daughter.
“Her family was what we called ‘new people’; but there was plenty of money, and if Elena wanted me, why she must have me. Therefore no objections were made to the engagement. I was in the seventh heaven of happiness. I do not deny that I was glad she had plenty of money; but I should have married her just the same if she had not had a cent.
“Elena paid a visit to my home in the early days of our betrothal, and—well, she threw me over deliberately for my elder brother. Looking back now, I can see some excuse for her. I was unimportant in my family, of course, and Tom was its centre. He looked handsome in his uniform, and he was the heir. The place had age and dignity, and she knew its value.
“I give Tom the credit of being ashamed and of feeling some remorse; but my father and mother planned—actually aided and abetted my betrayal. They wanted the money for the heir.
“I made a row, naturally, but it was fruitless. Elena wept and declared that she would have her own way. Tom looked ashamed, but his bringing up had made him constitutionally selfish; and the parents on both sides joined to suppress me.
“The end was that I cleared out, blind with rage and pain, cursing Elena and my kin; and in the next three years in London I went to what is commonly known as the dogs.
“My self-pity is justifiable in my eyes to-day; but I made a fatal mistake. If I had had the right stuff in me, Elena couldn’t have driven me to the dogs. I might have hugged my griefs and have grown embittered; but my worst mistake was the desire to ‘drown sorrow’ with drink, with cards, with all the undesirable vices of men. If I had hugged sorrow and warmed it to my heart, I might have suffered more, but I should not have crumbled up morally like a gold ring in quicksilver.
“England has always a frontier war or two on her hands, and I got into one. A private, a ‘gentleman ranker’ has a magnificent opportunity to sink in the English army. Afterwards I drifted over here, and got into pearl-fishing. I liked the life and its adventures (we had to fight a bit in the early days), and then when the Americans came, I fell in with Collingwood. We fancied each other on sight. Then we picked up Mac, and I lighted accidentally on this oyster bed, and we settled here.
“Throughout all these years I have kept up a desultory correspondence with my married sisters; but I have drifted out of their lives, and I realize that I represent to them only a possible legacy. It is my business to make some money, and one day to die and leave it to them; and meanwhile a few gifts from the Orient are not unacceptable.
“Well, to shorten this tale, I settled here and married my wife. You need not look so startled. She was my wife legally; bell, book, and candle were all there. I lived openly with her in my house till the morning when you landed on Maylubi. Then, after I had seen and talked with you, I went home and ordered her out. She loved me, and she obeyed me. Five months later she died.” He stopped and wiped a cold perspiration from his brow.
“But how could you have kept it from me?” cried Charlotte. “Why did not Martin or Mrs. Maclaughlin tell me?”
“Mrs. Mac had her orders from Mac. She never disobeys him. Martin was simply a good friend.”
“But he brought me here.” She stopped, crimsoning with indignation.
“Precisely. He brought you here to associate with me, a respectable married man, as he considered me. He has never understood my conduct. He doesn’t understand why I preferred you to believe me a profligate instead of a decent married man. He has never understood why I should be willing to have my child pass for illegitimate. But you understand, Mrs. Collingwood.”
“Yes, I understand.” Then with sudden passion she cried, “But it was not my fault. I was trained to it.”
“As I was. But, if I had had one spark of manhood in me, I should have stood by the woman I had married, and should have taken my child to my heart in the face of the world. But I did not have the courage. I writhed and twisted to get out of facing the consequences of my own actions; and since then the weight of my own self-contempt has grown steadily heavier. Don’t talk to me of reform,” he added savagely as she started to speak. “There isn’t any reform for such as I. I tell you the consciousness of my own moral cowardice is with me day and night. It never leaves me. And it’s the ungodly unfairness of it all that kills me by inches. I see other men about me, living lives not so very different from mine: Collingwood himself has been no saint. But because I’ve wanted better things, because I drank my cup, knowing that it was poor drink, it has not slaked my thirst, and it has parched the last drop of sweetness out of my life.
“Don’t you go another foot along this trail; you began it when you married Collingwood. If you double and twist on your tracks again, you are lost. Hug pain, hug misery, martyr yourself, if you will, but don’t try to indulge your own selfish will, and to square things by saying that you despise yourself. God in Heaven! Do you know what it is to despise yourself? You don’t now; but you will some day.” He wiped the perspiration that stood in great drops on his brow.
Charlotte, who had turned very white, sat nerveless and trembling like a leaf. All her pride was in arms that John Kingsnorth, degraded scion of a decent family, should be giving advice to her; and then she saw, with sudden horror, what a tremendous distance she had drifted with the current before John Kingsnorth’s words could be true.
For they were true! 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. But she had been too timid and too proud to flirt. The doubt came to her that it would have been better to play lightly at romance than to purchase it at the sacrifice of the second essential factor that makes a true marriage. Then came another throb of terror. She saw herself bent wilfully again on her own way, doubling, twisting, as Kingsnorth phrased it, trying to escape her conscience by saying that she despised herself: but the fact stared her in the face that she was turning on all the principles that had justified romance. She had married Collingwood against her reason, justifying herself for being swayed by human feeling by reiterating the finality of the action. For better, for worse, she had said—but now that it was for worse, its finality had somehow disappeared. Where was her mind—her will—her conscience?
She sat for a long time in bitter silence, but roused herself as Kingsnorth, who had been furtively watching her, drew out his tobacco pouch and extracted from its depths a little ball of tissue paper. He unfolded it, and there appeared to her startled eyes a single pearl of unusual size and luster.
“What a beauty!” she cried, bending forward to look at it.
“Yes, it’s beautiful enough,” said Kingsnorth. “I’ve carried it about with me for three years. Even Collingwood has never seen it.”
“I wish you had not—” she stopped, flushing.
“I didn’t show it to you to tempt you. It’s my moral slough. There are times when I’ve felt that its hell luster was my soul, and that I had nothing but the blackened shell in my body. It stood for the dearest emotions a man can have—for love and vengeance.”
“You are horrible,” she cried, shrinking from him.
“I am better than I used to be,” replied Kingsnorth. “I found this bauble three years ago, before Martin and I went into business. I never intended to sell it. Do you know what I wanted it for? To buy her back, and to blacken the face of the man who stole her from me. Yes, shrink! God help me, I love that woman still with a love gone awry. Other women, yes, and better women, though they had not her grace and training, have loved me; but, in my heart of hearts, I have held them all cheap. It was she, the woman who jilted me before all the world, that I wanted. It was he, whose heart I wanted to wring. Poor cheap human nature! Twelve years I’ve roughed it in shacks and junks, a flannel shirt to my back, and pork and beans or rice and fish in my stomach; while he has sat beneath the oaks we played under in our childhood, and has slept in the panelled rooms of our home, and has held the woman he stole from me in his arms! Talk of family affection! There isn’t such a thing. What am I to the mother who bore me? A derelict son, adrift in the South Seas, who is not to come home without some money. What am I to the sisters who played with me and fought with me over our nursery tea? A scape-grace brother, who, it is hoped, will keep out of the way, but who ought to make some money and leave it to their children. Money! I’ve toiled like a negro slave for money, but not for them—not for them! It was for her. I wanted to go back rich. She sold herself once; why not again? The pearl was not enough in itself to tempt. It was the bauble, the outward sign.”
“You hoped—that?” She could not help glancing at his seamed, degenerate countenance.
“Never after you came. The look in your eyes told me what I had become. Since then I have lived—with myself.” He smiled a wretched, drawn smile.
She pointed gingerly to the bauble. “Why don’t you get rid of it? sell it?”
“Sell my soul? Did I not tell you my soul is steeped in it? No, bury it with me. Somehow I know I’ll not last long. Take this word from me. If you know anything of me when death comes, see that this does not go to the women who betrayed me and pitied me not. Women are selfish creatures. They sun themselves on their own cat premises. They have no pity for the poor devils on the outside.”
“Is it women alone? or isn’t it men as well, who are pitiless? Or isn’t it just life? Yet it isn’t pitiless to all. There are those who dance through it on rose-strewn paths.” She stopped, the sense of the great differences in individual lives overwhelming her.
Kingsnorth rose. “Well, that hasn’t been my life or yours. I have seen that you suffer. But suffer! Don’t change that look on your face. Better poignant suffering than moral decay. I tell you, you are facing it.” He rose abruptly and walked away, leaving her like a figure carved in ivory, looking out on the waste of waters, that seemed the emblem of waste in her own life.