Yet no flagellant ever bent more meekly under his own blows than Charlotte did as she resigned herself to bearing that cross. His words had been but the irrepressible utterance of his own wounded vanity; his letter but the masterful outcropping of the man’s blind egoism. His illusions versus her illusions!—after all, what more had divided them than that? But greater than any illusion was life itself, the mingling of distracting hopes, fears, emotions, out of which only one thing is permanent and real, the consciousness of duty and right, as they are forever separated from material advantages; the expression of the human soul, which must move on struggling, fainting, vanquished or triumphant, asking perhaps for sympathy here or understanding there, but in the end recording its failures or its victories, companionless and voiceless.
Often and often, during her weeks of torment, a phrase had crept into her musings which she had repeated with God knows what of bitterness: “The years that the locust hath eaten.” In the clarity of her new-found light, it was those other years which the locusts had eaten—those long, empty, undeveloping years in which she had patterned herself on a social ideal; but which had brought her nothing of strength or of character.
She went slowly over the year of her life on the island. What had her association with the Maclaughlins cost her? A possible intimacy with a commissioner’s wife. What had it brought her? Much that was healthy in her viewpoint of life. That homely common sense of Mrs. 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! She felt the richening of her whole nature that had come from putting aside her pride, from walking hand in hand with an outcast upon the highway.
As for Judge Barton’s little drama, it had not hurt her in the least. Socially, it is true, it might be a stain. Even the semblance of an “affair” with the respected dignitary might cause gossip. But on her own soul that interview had left not one spot. It had soiled nothing in her but her pride. She realized that it is not dodging the temptations of life that makes character, but meeting them and resisting them. She made up her mind that if fate should ever throw her again into the society of Judge Barton, she would forgive him frankly; nor would she seek to overwhelm him with her offended dignity, nor press upon him the consciousness of his own sins. The man had had his moment of temptation and had fallen. He had wronged no one but himself. Far be it from her to decree his punishment.
Her thoughts turned then to Martin. The situation had its pathos for him as well as for her, though perhaps he might never know it; for there had come into the reality of her feeling for him the very elements which his own egoism had most feared and hated. She had, in the beginning loved him for loving’s sake, caring nothing, so far as she was concerned, for his faults and his weaknesses, only too willing to ascribe to him the worth that he set upon himself; afraid of the world, it is true, and hiding from its condemnation, but secretly quarrelling with what she knew would be its contrary judgment. She had married him because she needed him, because she leaned weakly upon him. Now, when the experiences to which he had subjected her had taught her to stand alone and to judge independently, she was taking him back because he needed her.
He had declared that he would live with no woman on terms of pity or of sufferance; but her heart was full of pity for him as it had never been before; and for the first time the consciousness of her own real superiority to Martin entered into her feeling for him. Up to that hour, she had exalted him always at her own expense. 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. But that fact no longer weighted him with a quality which needed apology or forgiveness; she saw in it growth, the only enduring, magnificent thing in this universal scheme. In all nature what is there but growth and decay, what but the steady effort to arrive at perfection, and the ensuing death out of which come new life and effort? Blind man, with Nature’s unvarying lesson spread before him, seeks to defy in his own being the law which can never be successfully defied; would seize and hold unchanged that moment of perfect development which precedes decadence; would make use of artificial distinctions, would endeavor to strengthen class differences; would invent caste systems, and sell his very soul to gratify his vain hope of retaining in himself or in his immediate descendants what he feels as the highest expression of his own development. He has never done it, he can never do it; but as instinctively as the flower reaches up to the sunlight, so must he ever struggle for the prolongation of his best matured product.
The question of Collingwood’s social status became in an instant trivial. She saw in him the new growth, vigorous, wholesome, needing but the right soil and nourishment to develop into a forest monarch; and she had in her the power to aid that growth, and she had been minded to turn her back upon him because he had not found out what meed of consideration was due her, because he had sapped unconsciously of her strength without asking himself why and whence it came!
The thought broke upon her like a splendor, that there might be more joy in helping Martin Collingwood to his perfected state than there would be in just loving him or in being loved by him. Many times she had repeated, as women are fond of doing, that threadbare quotation,
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;