Mrs. Maclaughlin after a last hopeless look at the sea, threw herself down in the shade of the pandan bushes and went to sleep. Kingsnorth watched her jealously and when he was certain that she was beyond listening or seeing, asked Charlotte for his tobacco pouch. She hunted it up in the pockets of his coat, and gave it into his weak, trembling hands. He fumbled with it; and at last drew out the pearl, wrapped in tissue paper, which he had shown her on the day they discussed Martin’s letter.
“For you,” he said weakly; but at her flush, and sudden impulsive gesture of protest, he went on more strongly; “I want you to have it. It means something—a beginning—something between you and want. You’re right: you must not sacrifice yourself. You deserve something of life. But take—take with the strong hand.”
“But Mr. Kingsnorth,” she replied, “I have not told you, but I am not going away from Martin. I shall stay by him; he needs me, I think. At any rate, there is some happiness in that thought.”
He frowned slightly, and then smiled. “All the more need. A woman ought not to be so utterly in a man’s power. We’re merciless wretches—selfish.” The effort of speech seemed to be too great.
Seeing that to refuse him would cloud his dying hours, Charlotte ceased to argue and let him press the bauble into her palm. It lay there, the visible token of Kingsnorth’s final allegiance to the ideals of the class which he had once renounced. It was, as he had declared, a something to stand between her and want, a bridge perhaps in some hour of need, that thing which might furnish her with temporary support and independence if she chose to set Martin Collingwood and her marriage vows aside.
But she did not intend to do so. As the slow hours dragged by, that resolution shaped itself more and more definitely in her mind, and with it there fell away her old self-consciousness about the world’s opinion of her actions. 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.
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. Her ideals, those maxims which parent, teachers, and guardians alike had dinned in her ears as the guide-marks of life if she would be a lovely and loveable woman, had only served to isolate her from human kind; and so far as love and tenderness had come into her life at all they were owing to a quality which all her training had taught her to regard as, at best, a weakness, and at worst, a shame. A flush of humiliation stained her cheek as she realized that her husband had not loved her for her intelligence, for her truth, for her candor, for her fair judgment, for her human charity, or for that final tenderness of soul and spirit which she felt welling like some crystal stream in her bosom. No, it was for her capacity for passion which his ruder instincts had assumed must underlie the polished surface of her mind. Judge Barton, too, had loved her, had striven to rouse in her an answering feeling to his own; but though he had been able from the first to put a proper value upon her breeding and intelligence, she could not blind herself to the fact that these attributes were mere accessories to what really attracted him—the development, in herself, of amorous possibilities which only marriage could have brought about. She knew incontrovertibly, that if, by a magician’s stroke, she could be changed back into the girl she was when Alexander Barton first met her, his interest in her would fall flat in an instant. That girl had been neither priggish nor puritanical, only intelligent, full of ideals, and emotionally immature, dedicated to that vision of womankind which man himself has consciously created, but from which unconsciously he turns away, chilled and rebuked by its very perfection.
As she looked back, she wondered at herself and at her own temerity in having dared to break with the teachings of a life-time; in having set at defiance all that tremendous pressure which custom, social usage, family pride, and selfishness bring to bear upon a girl and her marriage. It had taken a certain amount of moral courage to do what she had done; it had taken still more to bear what she had borne. But if out of endurance there came knowledge,—not empty maxims and high sounding phrases, but real knowledge of her own strength and of her own weaknesses, and some true guiding sense of her own relationship to the thing we call life,—she grudged it as little as the mother grudges the birth-pains which give her her child.
Had she taken her courage in her hand with one splendid outburst of defiance, much of sorrow and of humiliation might have been spared her; but, on the whole, she was glad that she had not done so. That sort of courage is seldom moral; it is, at bottom, emotionalism. She had gone timidly inch by inch trying to fortify each step by her intelligence. The way had led through devious windings: it had been a trial of endurance for others as well as for herself; but in the end it was she who had come out benefited. Poor Martin (her eyes lighted tenderly) had trodden it side by side with her; but experience had brought him no enlightenment.
No: the real value of all those weeks of pain and humiliation had been for herself. They had been a preparation for the revelation that had come upon her of the false ideals which modern society gives women. It was incomprehensible that a woman of brains could have clung tenaciously to the ideal which she had cherished for twenty-eight years; and yet, all her training, all the influences which surround a “well-brought-up girl” had contributed to it. What she had asked for herself was a splendid nullity. She had expected to draw her skirts daintily about her, and to pick her way through the drawing-room of life, receiving all, giving nothing, too well-bred and too intellectual to be tempted by its passions; and she had actually supposed this egoistic solitude was moral elevation! She had thought that trampling upon human love, setting aside the desire for home and husband and children unless in their possession she gratified her vanity and ambition, was self-respect! Well, she had not been alone in her delusion. 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.