Chapter XI
The next morning at the matutinal swim the Judge affixed himself as a satellite to Kingsnorth, and left the married pair to take their morning recreation together. At breakfast, he talked business and accepted with apparent eagerness an invitation to visit the fishing grounds with the workers and the shell-purveyor. He went on that day and on five other days, enduring a great many sights and smells that he by no means enjoyed, but admitting to himself that anything was better than battling with the continual temptation to bombard Mrs. Collingwood with the declaration of his passion for her. He had enough to do to watch his betraying eye and voice during those long hours, from five o’clock till bedtime, during which the little colony was perforce united; and at the end of each day’s dragging torment, he balanced a mental account in which he itemized on one side his self-restraint, its pains and penances, and on the other Charlotte’s gradual revelation of all her hidden loveableness. At first, a shadow of her old guard had hung about her, and she had been reserved; but reassured by his frank geniality and his apparent desire to see as much of Collingwood as possible, she gradually relaxed her watchfulness, and admitted him to the place of a tried family friend.
One warm night, when the Maclaughlins, Kingsnorth, and the oyster-agent had given themselves up to the delights of bridge, the other three strolled along the beach till they came to an old banca lying bottom up on the sand. There was no moon, but the stars burned steadily overhead, their reflections rising and falling with each slow wave. A ghostly thread of white fire outlined each breaker that toppled lazily over, and the gentle succession of splashes was like a deep harmonic accompaniment to the shrill chorus of insect life which burst from the grove behind them. They sat and listened a long while, each under the same charm, which was a different charm. It was Charlotte who first broke the silence.
“In spite of the noise, isn’t it still, isn’t it lonely, isn’t it delightful?” she said. “It is like a sort of Truce of God thrown into our lives of struggle and overstrain.”
“I can never accustom myself to those sentiments from you, Mrs. Collingwood,” said the Judge. “To me you seem a woman so eminently fitted to be a part of the great world, that I cannot understand your getting along so well without it. It is like seeing a musician trying to live without music, or an artist without pencils and brushes.”
“Charlotte swam out into the big world and got a mouthful of salt water, and it made her sick,” Martin put it. He fancied the Judge’s words had reference to living in a city among hordes of fellow beings. Of society as a fine art, Martin had no conception.
“That’s quite true, Martin; but it isn’t my only reason for liking our present life. Your ‘great world,’ Judge Barton, means a continual drain upon one’s tact and patience, a continual smoothing over of difficulties, of forcing oneself to adapt oneself to people with whom one has no real sympathy. This life is a sort of moral drifting, with the consciousness that the current moves in the right direction. The other world is full of experiences. One passes from one perception to another, one’s being is wrung with the continual play of warring emotions; but here one sits down quietly to digest and to let one’s soul feed on the food one has gathered in that plethora of emotions.”
“I wonder if you know how aptly you illustrate your theory.”
“Oh, yes, I have grown,” she declared tranquilly. “It seems to me my horizon has broadened infinitely while I have been here. When I was a child living in a convent, we internes were given annually a week at the seashore. Our unfailing recreation was to run about with a tin pail and a spade, filling the pail with sea-shells, seaweed, and all the other seashore treasures which children delight in. And when we went home, I remember the joy I had in going through my pail. Things flopped in so rapidly during the day that I hardly knew what was there. But the ecstasy of the twilight hour when I sorted my treasures! My life here has been something like that tin pail sorting-out. I have sat down to review impressions, to throw away the valueless, to classify and arrange the rest. It has been a priceless experience.”
“Very good; but you don’t want to keep it up forever,” remarked Collingwood.