“Were your folks well to do?”
“They were people of considerable wealth. I do not think they ever grudged me anything I cost them. But I was in a false position in their house, and I was conscious of it. The knowledge put me at a disadvantage with all the world. It made me feel myself different from everybody else. I was self-conscious, afraid of being an object of pity. It was like failing to possess some essential article of dress that everybody else has, and trying to cover up one’s nakedness.”
“That’s it. I couldn’t put it into words, but that is exactly how you acted with Barton. You seemed to shrink away from him and to be ready to fight him if he spoke pleasantly to you.”
“Oh, dear! was it so bad as that?” Charlotte’s heart sank. Her way of expressing facts differed considerably from his, and the balance of vividness and realism was in his favor.
“It was, just like that. But you were not that way to me. Why not?”
Her woman’s wit, already quickened by her increased experience with men, showed her how to be truthful, and, in so being, how to deceive him most. “Ah! you were different,” she murmured. But after he had led her, in response to her request, back to her chair, and was pacing to and fro beside her in quiet happiness, her heart reproached her. She had not shrunk from him because she knew that he was blind, because, to carry out her simile, he could perceive nothing lacking in her raiment. But those keen eyes of Judge Barton’s had questioned her, had perceived every rag and tatter!
The captain returned and called Martin to deliver to him a message from the Inhabitant of Halsey Harbor. Charlotte was left alone to her musings.
She was very happy. The old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind” was proving its appositeness in her case. No one was about her who could read her, who could perceive the absence of any necessary raiment, who would be conscious that there was anything odd in her being Martin Collingwood’s wife. She had, in one decisive action, destroyed all that was holding her spirit in leash. A woman yet young, whose emotions had been stifled for a lifetime, in whom the warmth of love had been overlaid by the calculating egoism of a nature wounded to the quick, she had emancipated herself at the fortuitous moment, alive to the rapture of passion, of freedom from all the restraints that had curbed her existence. She had thrown the admonitions and the self-restraint of a life-time aside for a romance. She had (but fortunately for a time she was able to put the fact out of mind) quite justified a conventional assumption that a woman’s nature is full of primitive evil, and that you must pitch your maxims pretty strong if you would have them believed at all, and that then, ten to one, she will demolish all your precautions at a bound if an object in trousers holds out his arms. She had profited by her husband’s view. “Come what may,” she said, “I will have my romance and pay the price afterwards.”
So far, the price seemed a remote contingency. With every revolution of the steamer’s screw, Manila and her distant relatives whose pride she had outraged became the mere phantoms of memory, growing paler every hour. Nothing was left but the delightful sense of being an absolute necessity to Martin—she who had been a superfluity all her life!
As for Collingwood himself, his kindness, his shrewdness, his strength were gaining constantly in her esteem. He had proved himself innately delicate and refined. Of what possible importance were a few deficiencies in speech, a too vivid phraseology, the lack of the little courtesies which mark a man of the world? But (and here some of her elation diminished) if they mattered so little, why had she to convince herself so eagerly? If two negatives make an affirmative, too passionate a denial sometimes constitutes an assertion. Whenever she arrived at this stage of reflection, another cloud dimmed her horizon. Was not her whole attitude a practical deception of the man himself? Would Martin Collingwood have accepted her surrender so joyfully, could he have read that it was weighted with the condition of living with him on an uninhabited island? Would not all his self-esteem repudiate such a proposition? She had not lied when she said that she loved him, but would he content himself with a definition of love which excluded all natural pride of choice, and put a compromise value upon himself? As often as she found herself confronted with these thoughts, Charlotte took refuge in a bit of casuistry. If she saw Martin with clear eyes and underrated the proportional value of his attainments, did he even see her clearly at all? Did she wrong him more in reserving an opinion of his social worth than he wronged her in not perceiving that she had any social worth? The fact that every person has a real personal value and an accredited worldly value, and that most effort is directed to making these two values coincide, or appear to do so, put a convenient weapon in her hand. Since, in only a few cases, the two values are really identical, happy marriages must be the result of a marvellous luck or of a wonderful power of self-deception. Was she to be taxed for not deceiving herself? Was her intelligence to be punished when his ignorance was rewarded? As often as she thought about it, it seemed that his incapacity to value certain qualities of her own justified her in a few mental reservations.