Martin ruffled his hair with a puzzled hand. “Did I?” he murmured. “Did it strike you as cheeky?”
“No; I was heartily grateful. You helped me.”
“In what way?”
“In the way of common sense,” Charlotte said, as simply as if the remark were an everyday one, and her husband’s somewhat startled acceptance of the reply sent her into a ripple of laughter, in which, after an instant, he joined heartily.
Their merriment attracted the attention of the only other passengers, two enlisted men going out to join a hospital corps at Puerta Princesa. It also drew upon them a frown of disfavor from the captain.
The captain was an old-time skipper from a tramp freighter, with the freighter’s contempt for passengers. He was not married, and he had little sympathy with the billings and cooings of newly married couples. As often as his eyes fell on the orchids and ferns and potted plants which were hanging from stanchions and cumbering his decks (Mrs. Collingwood was taking them down for the adornment of her new home) he cursed picturesquely. To his second officer he had expressed a desire for a typhoon that would roll the deadlights out of his boat, and blow the hyphenated “garden truck” into the Sulu Sea. He had emphasized his distaste for bridal society by setting a table for himself and his officers on the forward deck behind the steering apparatus, thus leaving the tiny dining-room entirely to the despised passengers.
Yet there had been little enough sentimentality exhibited to arouse his displeasure. Mrs. Collingwood spent her day in the steamer chair while her husband walked the deck with his cigar or sat chatting at her side. The hospital men, covertly watching them as everybody does a bridal pair, opined that they were a “queer proposition” but quite agreed that they seemed happy.
To Collingwood, the change in Charlotte’s mood was an intense relief. The hesitations and self-questionings with which she had puzzled him for a month previous had apparently been quieted by the finality of the marriage ceremony. That she was nervously worn out by the strain of the previous weeks and by the disagreeable circumstances of her quarrel with the Government he realized; and with a delicacy for which she was thoroughly grateful, he refrained from the rather ardent demonstrations of his courtship, and treated her with matter-of-fact kindness and good fellowship. She was his, and she seemed contented and at peace. It was a glorious summer day, the sea was waveless, the boat was clean and quiet, and might almost have been their private yacht, so completely were they alone. A chance observer beholding a lazy young woman in a deck chair and a quiet young fellow pacing to and fro near her might have taken them for a young married couple of some weeks’ or months’ standing. He would hardly have suspected a bridal couple.
Yet the young man’s mind, as they steamed past the beautiful wooded heights of Mindoro, and looked up and up at the giant forests or out over the gleaming water, was a tumult of joy and triumph and wonder—the wonder being by no means in the smallest proportion. His wife was not a beautiful woman, but his lover’s eyes endowed her with every beauty as she lay scanning the tree-clad mountains. That fine quality of breeding in her which Collingwood was unable to define, but which pleased him inordinately, was never more apparent. Moreover, he had found her in times past a rather difficult person to deal with, and behold! in the Scriptural “twinkling of an eye,” her thorniness had vanished and a docility as agreeable as it was unexpected had given him fresh cause for self-gratulation.
Still, as he had confessed, his temperament inclined him to retroactive investigation. So long as she proved obdurate and was not yet won, Collingwood could not analyze. But with the struggle past he had time to take up the contradictions of her attitude, and he found little to justify his bold statement that he could read her better than she could read herself. If, as he had somewhat daringly reminded her, she was happy in his arms, it was a happiness, as he could not but realize, of less ecstatic measure than that of many of the predecessors who, with or without the sanction of an engagement, had yielded to their pressure. She was a novice at love-making, as a man less experienced than her husband would easily have guessed; and she was reticent, not only in the voluntary expression of that fact, but in response to his tentative overtures to her to confess it. Collingwood was no less puzzled by the fact than by the philosophy of life which desired its concealment. He had known many young women in his life who were not novices at love-making, but who ardently desired to be thought so.