“It was just one of my boyhood headaches,” he admitted, “the kind that used to keep me in bed till nine o’clock, when school had taken up. Did you never have that sort of headache, Mrs. Collingwood?”
“Never. I was a conscientious child, though I am willing to admit that it was doubtless a great mistake to be so. Rufino, begin.” And Rufino began chantingly:
“E see a cuf. A ball is in de cuf. Srow de ball to me.” He paused triumphantly.
“I see a cup,” corrected Charlotte. “Say it after me—cup, cup” and she pronounced the final consonant so distinctly that Rufino proceeded without difficulty:—
“I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa. Srow de ball to me.” There was no little difficulty in inducing Rufino to say throw, and he did not succeed until Mrs. Collingwood made him take his tongue in his two fingers and pull it through his teeth, preliminary to attacking the word. His mates took exuberant joy in this feat, and the next boy, Wenceslao de los Angeles, started out glibly: “I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa,” and then dropped his book, gave his tongue a convulsive jerk and spluttered, “Srow de cuppa to me.”
The Judge gurgled as helplessly as the children did, blushed, tried to save the situation, and looked exceedingly severe. Mrs. Collingwood, a little flushed, threw him a protesting glance, smiled, bit her lip and went on with the reading lesson. When every aspirant had had a chance to see the cup and to pull his tongue, she proceeded to “develop” the lesson. The Judge was bored. It was one of the miseries of his strange infatuation for her that merely being with her or able to watch her afforded him no satisfaction. He wanted to monopolize her, to keep her attention constantly centred in himself. If this feeling was Nature, working in its own blind way to accomplish what the man’s intellect told him could not be done, the Judge ruefully reflected that Nature can sometimes keep a man very miserable, and that she wastes a great deal of human effort. For whether her thoughts were with him or away from him, he was secretly conscious of what she had told her husband, that there was for her, in one sense, but one man in the world. Her old suspicion of him was lulled, and she stood ready for fair honest friendship; but there never had been, in one glance of her eye, in her occasional merry laugh, or in her frank converse, the faintest evidence of that sex consciousness which is in no wise to be confounded with social self-consciousness, but which, as an element in woman’s entity, is the only possible excuse for the banalities which men are usually eager to exchange with them by the hour.
The Judge was wearily awaiting the close of the reading lesson when he received another disappointment in the sight of numerous physically incommoded individuals who strolled up by detachments, and squatted at the foot of the veranda steps. There was a consumptive in a talebon, or hammock, in which the sick are carried about. There was a small boy with a boil on his kneecap. He had plastered it with lime, a disinfectant for almost all skin troubles in the Philippines; and he alternately felt it gingerly, and glanced apprehensively, if fascinatedly, in the direction of the “medequilla.” There were ulcers, and yellow jaundiced folk suffering with a seasonal fever. The Judge decided that fully one-fifth of the island’s population was represented in the assemblage, and he gave a shrug of commiseration as he reflected how they must have suffered unaided before the coming of Charlotte.
He was watching her somewhat closely as she struggled with the limited understanding of one of her protégées, when she glanced down the beach, and he saw a great tide of crimson rush to her cool, clear skin. Naturally his eyes followed hers, but he saw approaching only a rather young and comely girl carrying a young child in her arms. He had barely time to perceive this when Mrs. Collingwood turned to him.
“I am going to dismiss my class and take these poor people next, and I can’t let you assist at that. I am dreadfully self-conscious about it with any on-lookers. There isn’t any evading the fact that it is really daring on my part to attempt to play physician, and nurse, too; but something has to be done for them. But I really couldn’t bear an audience.”
“I’m off,” said the Judge with a laugh. He did not, however, turn toward his tent, which would have taken him away from the approaching girl, but swung briskly down the sand in the direction from which she was advancing.