He dashed off, and Maclaughlin jumped into his boat with an order to the native rowers to hurry. For an instant, Charlotte was annoyed by their unceremonious departure, but her good sense soon rose superior to her training. Martin alert, talking business, with his hat on the back of his head, a long pencil emphasizing his gestures, was a very different figure from the insouciant young pagan, alternately jocose and pleading, that had wooed her. How quickly, too, the easy speech of the husband had possessed him. “Devil’s own time” came ripping out with unconscious force. At first, Charlotte’s fastidiousness revolted from it. Then she decided that it was virile and that she liked it. Still, she mused, if he felt the need of emphatic embellishment to point the assertion of so simple a fact as that, what might he not do when an occasion out of the ordinary arose?
Her question was answered before their goods and commissaries were aboard the launch, and, for a time, she could not tell whether she wanted to laugh or to cry. While she was still in doubt, her husband came back, red and perspiring, with his coat off. He held out a collar and necktie.
“Just look out for these things for me, won’t you?” he said. “My! I’m pretty well cussed out. Hope I didn’t shock you, pet.”
“You did, but it didn’t matter; or rather, it passed the point of shocking. You have the towering imagination in profanity, Martin, of an architect of sky-scraping buildings.”
Collingwood was able to extract a compliment from this, and looked grateful, though he was evidently impressed by the form of its expression. “I may have said a little too much,” he apologized, “but a man would have to be a saint not to lose his temper—Here!” he roared, as three of the crew, having mounted to the upper deck and having armed themselves with a flower pot apiece, started brazenly off with their burdens, “take two of those at a time. How many trips do you plan to make with this flower garden, anyway? You see that everything is right in the stateroom, won’t you?” he threw over his shoulder as he darted off.
“Certainly,” she replied, adding to herself, “for I shouldn’t like you to ‘cuss’ me.”
She felt quite safe from any such dire possibility, or she could not have joked about it even with herself. Nevertheless, she was very thoughtful as she gathered up their belongings and put them in the valises, leaving, however, the strapping and the pulling to be done by Martin.
When she had done all that there was to be done, and had put on her hat, she sank down on a locker, still holding her husband’s discarded collar, and let her thoughts dwell rosily on the part she could play in the island life. A guilty conscience urged her to acts of reparation. All that she could do to bring order and system and beauty into her husband’s home she was resolved to do. He had told her enough to let her know that he had lived in an unlovely fashion, and that he had aspirations for something better, though he could not define what he objected to in the past, or just what he wanted in the future. He was bent on making money, chiefly because he seemed to feel that there was no way of obtaining his ideal without large expenditures; and yet he was not ostentatious. He had been very liberal—extravagant, she had laughingly told him—in the purchase of household belongings; and she had told the truth when she said that she deserved the credit of restraining him. He was going to become the typical American husband, who labors unceasingly that his womankind may be decked in finery and may represent him in the whirl of society; but his wife could see that, until such a time as their prosperity should be at flood tide, he would expect her to administer wisely and economically. He gave much—as far as he was conscious of her needs—and he would ask proportionally in return. Charlotte’s head reared proudly to meet the thought. She would not fail him. And then she vowed for the hundredth time, that his unstinted devotion should meet with its just due, and that never, never should Martin suspect how she had had to battle with herself before she could conquer the feeling that her love was a shame to her.
Martin, coming to seek her in order to introduce her to the wife of a local military officer, found her sunk in reverie with his crumpled neck-wear pressed against her cheek. He put on a clean tie and collar and they went on deck together.
The military officer’s wife was a young woman, plainly of village origin, who was carrying the wide-spreading sail which many Americans in the Philippines elect to display in the exuberance of having journeyed to foreign lands. Her appearance jarred on Mrs. Collingwood, and her conversation, which was frivolous and full of assumption, reinforced the unfavorable impression.