“You may wonder why this frankness at the end of the silence which has always existed between us. It is because my only hope in the future is based on the fact that, at last, I have courage to declare myself. To guard my every thought and feeling from your curiosity and criticism, I have separated myself from all the world, and in the beginning unknowingly, but in the end with full knowledge, have walked down a path which has ended here. I will not hamper myself in my new life by even the memory of my old cowardice. You may call me weak, call me sentimental, foolish, romantic, call me all the things which for years you have been trying to discover in me, and for which you have sought in vain beneath the mask I wore—I am going to have my share of living.
“This is not written in bitterness toward you. I am grateful for all the care and the money lavished upon me, and I realize fully the sacrifice that you made in receiving me into your home and in treating me, as you did, with perfect justice. It was magnificent. I am simply one of those miserable beings who have come into this world unwelcome, born to be a worry and a trial to someone, and I have taken the only means I knew to escape from it.
“Tell Uncle Cornelius that I am not ungrateful to him. Some day I’ll write you again. For the present I want to put every memory of the past out of my life. If the day ever comes when I can go back to it without its influencing my life as it has always done, I’ll write again.
“Yours gratefully,
”Charlotte Ponsonby.”
Chapter V
Judge Barton had to cut short his morning ride in order to reach the San Sebastian church at seven-thirty, but he admitted to himself that he would have gone without his daily exercise rather than have missed the wedding; and he was actually ten minutes early. He found the edifice empty but pervaded with a general stir which hinted at impending events. A dirty, bare-footed sacristan in marine blue cotton drawers and a transparent shirt was opening windows and lighting a few candles about the high altar. The early morning sunlight streamed through the apertures, while the noise of street traffic outside echoed hollowly through the dusty, empty silence of the church. Sparrows flashed across the moted sunbeams and lost themselves among the violet and orange shadows of the lantern. A pobre shuffled in to mutter his devotions, and a widow and her two daughters, who had been praying before one of the chapel altars, lingered to discover the cause of the preparations.
Soon one or two men dropped in, strangers to the Judge, and friends, as he instantly decided, of Collingwood. They stood about indecisively, and stared up into the vaulted roof, and whispered to one another in funereally regulated tones. Then came a group of five or six women, whom the Judge recognized as fellow-nurses of Miss Ponsonby; and almost immediately afterwards, without ceremonial or welcome of the organ, the bride and groom appeared. Both were in white; he in the military-cut blouse which is so popular in the Philippines, she in a simple street dress of white muslin with a hat of white embroidery. The marine sacristan went to summon the priest, while the bridal pair waited quietly in the shadow of one of the Gothic pillars.