The Locusts' Years

by Mary H. Fee

“I wish I didn’t too, Martin, but I can’t help it. That’s my punishment for being I. Oh, how I wish I were not I!” She looked at him with eyes unfathomably tired and sad, eyes of that gentle appeal that went straight to the depths of his masculine heart.

“All the same, I love you as you,” he said. “I can’t measure how much more or less for being sure of you—but I’m mighty glad to be sure of you—and I can’t take my own insides to pieces as you can, but all the same I love you, love you, Lottie.”

But as he smoked a last cigar,—for he said that their talk had driven sleep from him—Mr. Collingwood uttered but one phrase as he monotonously paced back and forth across his veranda. Sometimes he uttered it with irritation, sometimes he mouthed it slowly as if its terse brevity were the outlet of profound conviction. Sometimes he even smiled tenderly over it, as a memory of his wife’s earnestness brushed across his vision. But however he said it, he repeated it again and again; and it was, “Well, I’ll be damned!” For the lady he had married had again said and done the unexpected thing.

Charlotte was still less inclined to sleep than her lord, though she went through the semblance of courting slumber. She was infinitely annoyed with herself for her own outburst, and was seeking what seemed a reasonable cause for so much emotion, but could not find one. She heartily wished Judge Barton had seen fit to wait for an invitation before he invaded Maylubi; and, though she declined to admit that she looked upon his coming as an omen, she was inclined to feel that he had been altogether too mixed in her romance. He had been an unsympathetic and amused onlooker at her courtship; he had been with them on that last crucial evening before their marriage;—she wondered how much his mere presence had influenced her in her subsequent speech with Martin;—he had been present at the wedding; and now his coming was contemporaneous with their nearest approach to a quarrel. As for what she had eased her mind of to Martin, she knew that she was right, but she added, self-accusingly, that her knowing it was all wrong. Quite mournfully she arraigned herself, and she assented whole-heartedly in what she knew must be Martin’s secret verdict—that women have no business with ideas of a philosophy on sex matters: that they should be limited to instincts and to principles. Long after Martin had ceased to pass upon his own condemnation, and was sleeping like an exaggerated infant, she lay wide-eyed, fearing she knew not what, but conscious of change impending. She had had eight months of a happiness more nearly perfect than she had ever dreamed could be hers, and it was not in the nature of things temporal as she knew them that such happiness could be of long duration.

Judge Barton meanwhile had retired to his tent, but had him drawn thence by a late-rising moon and his own cogitations. As he paced slowly up and down the silvery beach, his thoughts rushed one after another in confusing circles. First of all he anathematized himself for daring to put to the test that lulled security of his own feelings for Mrs. Collingwood. He had left her on her wedding day, himself a prey to a charm that had struck him, as it were, between the eyes, struck him with that force which emotion can attain only when it is suddenly aroused for one who has played an unheeded part in the subject’s life up to the moment of its birth. It had been months since he deemed that his sudden obsession for Mrs. Collingwood was dead, killed by very weariness of itself, and by continual thwarting. For a week or ten days after his parting with her, he had gone about with her face constantly before him, with her voice in his ears. He had started at the sight of a figure in the distance, resembling hers. His appetite had failed him, zest in all things had departed from him. The congratulations of his confrères on a brilliant decision had, it seemed to him, been mockery. He wanted her approval, nobody else’s. The women of his acquaintance bored him to irritation. “I am in love,” he admitted to himself, “in love with a married woman whom I probably might have married myself had I so desired. I saw her every day for six weeks, and far from entertaining any sentimental thoughts about her, I deliberately set myself to tease and annoy her. I lost all sight of her for six weeks, and in that time never gave her a thought; but when I found her with her lover at her side and saw her vow herself to him, for reasons only known to the imp of perversity I discovered that she was my long lost affinity. My God! was ever man before such an imbecile? How can a man conceive such an affection for a woman who has given him one tremulous smile on her wedding day? What does this thing feed on? Am I coming to my dotage?”

In such strain did the Judge berate himself through ten or twelve weary days, and then the obsession left him as suddenly as it had come. Interest and ambition returned, he found his women friends as entertaining as ever, and though he thought often and kindly of Mrs. Collingwood, his meditations were tinged with a strain of that violet usually allotted to the dead. Past experience had taught him that sentimental fancies about women, once chilled, are hard to resuscitate, and he felt quite certain that Mrs. Collingwood’s ghost would trouble his musings no more. He fell into the habit of thinking about the experience humorously, he spoke of it to himself as “my tragedy,” and once he nearly allowed a clever woman to worm the story out of him. The accidental intrusion of a third person was all that saved him from an access of garrulity; but having been saved, he was able to contemplate with retrospective horror his nearness to the brink and to avoid all subsequent promenadings on that path.

When by mere chance, he found himself invited to accompany the Commissioner and the oyster-shell agent on their voyage of discovery, he accepted the invitation with delight, regarding himself as a man protected by inoculation. He owned up, however, to a frank curiosity about the Collingwoods, and to a strong desire to see them together in their home; but he had as little expectation of a revival of his fancy for Mrs. Collingwood as he had of beholding so great a change in the lady herself.

But it had revived! It was there in full force, bringing with it the primitive man’s sense that desire is right. From the moment he had again beheld Charlotte’s high-bred face with her soul shining through the gray eyes, and had been again conscious of her fastidiousness and of her intelligence,—in short, of all the overpowering emanations of a unique personality,—his old passion to dominate her, to hold her fascinated by his own powerful magnetism, burned like a fever within him. It burned the more that in the lapsed months some new element of charm had come to her, as if the enlarging of human experience had fused and melted into softer lines those sturdy elements of character which had repelled quite as often as they had attracted him. She was not to be flirted with—that he knew only too well, and he had to put on eyes and voice a guard that cost him dear; but he could not resist following her when she went to supervise her dinner preparations, he could not resist the grudging sense he had of every word addressed to another than himself.

He cursed his folly in submitting himself to temptation. By his own act he had put himself in this place and had burned his bridges behind him. He had let himself in for a week of the society of a woman, to associate with whom, on the terms on which he must meet her, was sheer tantalization. She would not flirt with him, nor was she of the ingenuously simple sort which can be flirted with without knowing the fact. The Judge smiled ruefully as he tried to imagine Charlotte Collingwood dominated by any emotion which she could not analyze. Plainly, he had one course before him—to see as little as possible of Mrs. Collingwood except in her husband’s presence, and to guard his eyes and tongue if by chance he should find himself alone with her. He was rather proud of his virtuous resolutions, but he dreaded the slow-going days—seven of them before the steamer would return and he could put time and distance between him and Charlotte Collingwood. The Judge had great faith in Time as a mender of all things.