“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.”