If her very apparent dejection aroused no compunction in the Judge (he being so highly civilized) it evoked an ardent sympathy from the young man in the next bed; for, in those days, not even the potency of a Judge’s title could have commanded a private room in the hospital. As a next best expedient, Judge Barton had been placed in a small room opening from the main ward, and containing but two beds. The exigencies of an overcrowded surgical ward made it necessary that the second bed should be occupied by a young pearl fisher, with a crushed chest, who had been taken off a wrecked lorcha. His magnificent physique, and the face of a Greek statue, would have lured from a woman a more complimentary description than the term “young ruffian” which Judge Barton had instantly but inaudibly fastened upon him. “Young ruffian” is perhaps an exaggerated phrase to describe the beauty and insouciance which, in a male, may be qualified by a hat too far on one side. The Judge had never seen Collingwood in his hat, but he divined just the angle which the young man’s taste approved.
Collingwood was gradually recovering, but he was still unable to move without the assistance of a nurse or of one of the Filipino attendants. He had the black hair, the pink and white skin, and, the cameo-cut profile of a Celtic ancestry, modified by his father’s union with a woman of Tennessee pioneer stock. His eyes, which should have been the Irishman’s blue, were a steadfast brown. His frame was a little more massive than his father’s had been; the Irishman’s blarney had merged into the chaff of the Westerner; but enough of Irish humor remained to lend flavor to the practical, hard-headed sense which he had inherited from the mountaineer side of the family. His speech was cheery and careless, yet shrewd; lacking in polish, yet not uncouth. He was not uneducated, and took an innocent satisfaction in having credentials to show for that fact, being a graduate of a small high-school in one of the Middle States. The Judge had found him a not uninteresting companion, for he was outspoken, a born lover of adventure, and a born money-maker, if the Judge ever knew one.
However, Collingwood himself interested Judge Barton far less than did the growth of an emotion in the young man which the dignitary had covertly watched enlarge from an expansive gratitude to absorbing affection. The “young ruffian” had fallen head over ears in love with a woman whose critical faculties and fastidious instincts might well have shaken the courage of a more pretentious suitor; and he enjoyed the ruffian’s usual advantage of being sensitive to material difficulties only. If he felt the distinction in Miss Ponsonby’s manner, it was not as something which separated her from him, but as something which made her only more desirable. He mistook her reserve for shyness; her proud detachment, for meekness. He was aflame to seize the woman who not only appealed to his senses, but who stirred ambitions of which he was hardly conscious, and to bear her away from her overtasked life. He wished to play King Cophetua to the beggar maid; and he was saved from appearing supremely ridiculous only by his sincerity and by freedom from all self-consciousness in his desire.
It was so natural that a young ruffian should fall in love with probably the first gentlewoman with whom he had come into frequent association, that the Judge wasted no particular attention on Collingwood’s side of the case. What really interested that gentleman was Miss Ponsonby’s attitude. For, as he put it to himself, there was a woman with an undeniable personality, engaged in a dumb squabble with society because she could not obtain a recognition of that personality; and the only admirer and partisan she could muster was a young ruffian so far removed from atmospheric influences that he had not recognized that she was a personality; a man who would not have known what was meant by the word. She might have been the young woman who despatches telegrams from the lobby of a first-class hotel, so far as Collingwood’s assumption that she belonged to his world was concerned. Her nurse’s apron and cap were to him the indisputable evidences of his right to claim her for his friend or for his sweetheart, provided, of course, that the attraction was mutual; and that her taste might be influenced by any other standard than his own, he had no suspicion. Judge Barton had even detected at times the tacit overture for a class combination, the assumption that they of the toilers needed no chance civility from one temporarily thrown into their society. That the situation daily developing under his observant eyes must be humiliating to Miss Ponsonby, Judge Barton had not the least doubt. But he was sufficiently human to hope that the hour of Collingwood’s discomfiture (for of that also he had no doubt) might be delayed until he, the Judge, was ready to leave the hospital, and to find some other amusement than that of watching a proud woman’s struggle with her femininity.
Collingwood, quite unconscious of the Judge’s observant eye, lay watching Miss Ponsonby with an alertness which contrasted strangely with his maimed body. There was, in his slightly dilated nostril and in the glow of his eye, the suggestion of a horse which pricks forward its ears and accelerates its pace as it nears home; and perhaps some latent instinct of domesticity lay at the bottom of the man’s rather inexplicable fancy for Miss Ponsonby.
It was inexplicable, not only through the social gulf which actually divided them, but through the fact that she had never been a man’s woman, and that all Collingwood’s previous attachments had been for the type of woman who is adored by the opposite sex. Miss Ponsonby was not diffident under his advances, nor was she overwhelmed by a man’s favor, little as she had enjoyed of it. Attention of a sort she had had, because the position of the relatives who had brought her up was such that any member of their household had to be taken into consideration; but from the time she had left the shelter of their roof, she had received from men an indifference as profound as it was respectful. Collingwood’s very open admiration was the first tracery upon a page which was humiliatingly blank.
It had begun—his admiration—on his first night in the hospital, when he lay a bandaged mummy, racked with pain, a mounting fever adding its torments to the closeness of a muggy, tropical night. There were memories of its sufferings mingled with gentle ministrations, of touches soothing to his worn body, of a feeling of helplessness and dependence upon this gentleness, which carried him back to his half-forgotten childhood, and washed, as clean as his school-boy’s slate, a philosophy of life acquired in numerous love affairs with the young ladies of hotel lobbies, and of restaurant check stands.
The impression remained overnight and increased by reason of the succession of another nurse, who prided herself upon her jollity, and believed that her patients needed cheering up. Collingwood was in such a condition that jollity was an affront to him. He endured the cheerful lady as best he could, and counted the long hours till four o’clock brought back his madonna.
The word had no part in Collingwood’s vocabulary; but it is applicable because it expresses the quality of worship which he had injected into an otherwise very mundane emotion. Collingwood, who was as innocent as a babe of social traditions, who was an American democrat through and through, and believed that all men are equal, save as the possession of “the price” enables one man to command more of this world’s goods than another, was unable to account for the elements in Miss Ponsonby’s nature which whetted his desires, by any of the threads which contributed to the fabric of his philosophy; and he explained them by imputing to the lady the rare and peculiar quality of goodness.
Goodness! There you have the weak point in the arch of man’s philosophical structure, the thing which at once embodies his highest ideal and his most human distaste, the thing over which he has rhapsodized in poetry, which he has exalted into a theology, and which he has ruthlessly crucified whenever he has met it in the flesh. Collingwood supposed that Miss Ponsonby’s delicate rejection of his advances (a rejection qualified by some feeling which a lover’s instinct had to interpret to his advantage) originated in goodness, in a final struggle of the etherealized feminine nature before it submitted to its incarnation and became bound in the flesh. He thought the delicate self-restraint with which she met the caprices and fretfulness of her wards was founded on heavenly patience. He imagined that her occasional snubs of Judge Barton were the outcroppings of an inward shrinking from a passion to which she could not respond; for, loverlike, he assumed that all men must feel as he did about his divinity and he could not perceive the undercurrent of patronage in the Judge’s not infrequent gallantries, which was like an acid on Miss Ponsonby’s quivering nerves.