The Locusts' Years

by Mary H. Fee

She greeted him with the customary civility of Filipinos, and he vouchsafed her a nod. He dared not stop and speak to her, but he made directly for the native village, a mile away, where he asked the headman who she was. When he had extracted the full details of the story, he turned and strolled slowly back. But he did not rejoin Mrs. Collingwood. He went, instead, to his tent, where he sat gazing meditatively across the sea while he turned over and over the facts that he had heard.

She had compromised with life with a vengeance! He felt that she had gone far when he beheld the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth. But to live openly in daily converse with such a man, to sit at the table with him, and to minister to the needs of his illegitimate child—that was carrying tolerance or charity to a length unprecedented. He made no allowance for the fact that she found herself confronted with a situation in which to take action was to risk her domestic happiness. What he scorned in her was the fact that she could be happy under such circumstances. He knew very well that women put up with worse in the very circles which he was struggling so desperately to attain; but he knew also the veil of decent concealment which those circles know so well how to assume. He had to admit, also, that she had proved more of a philosopher than he had given her credit for being, and she had dared to reprove him for his gibe, and he had apologized with God knows what of contrition! The hunter instinct that is so strong in all men rose up in him; and suddenly he realized why he had so remorselessly wounded her and tormented her in those early days of their acquaintance. It was that deep in his mind had lain the desire for her, which still held, but which then he had been unwilling to gratify by marriage; and proportionally as he had felt that she was out of his reach and that he dared not insult her by one sign of sentimentality unbacked by the desire of marriage, he had hated her with the smouldering hatred of balked affection. Well, he loved her still, and he was willing to marry her. If she could get rid of Collingwood, he was willing to marry her. He hardly doubted that she would do it. He felt pretty sure of the motives which had made her marry the young ruffian, who had, he admitted, improved considerably under her hands. She was a feminine creature in spite of her brains, unable to face life without love, and she had been grateful to the man who offered it to her, and had given her the shelter of his roof. But that any woman of Charlotte Collingwood’s breeding would deliberately prefer Martin Collingwood to a man of her own class, Judge Alexander Barton declined to believe. Nor was he altogether wrong. She might not have taken Collingwood in the beginning, had the Judge been his honest rival at that time. But having taken him, she had no intention of questioning her bargain. The Judge read her very correctly up to that point of secret loyalty and gratitude, which to a man of his ambitions was outside the possibilities of human nature.

Why should she not, he asked himself, get rid of Collingwood without scandal and marry him. She was a woman to be proud of. He had seen her at her husband’s table and knew that she graced it. There must be somewhere in the United States an influential kindred who might not care to make too much of her as a nurse, but who would be glad to welcome the wife of an eminent jurist; and with proper family backing, the Judge saw many things. Why not a commissionership, yes, a governorship? And then (for everybody knows that a Governor of the Philippines has a great chance to keep in the public eye) why not something better by-and-by? The Judge’s visions grew more rosy than it is safe to chronicle here.

Strange it was that his week of intimate association had not shown him the utter futility and madness of thinking to approach Mrs. Collingwood with the audacious plan he had in mind. Partly, his own passion blinded his judgment; partly, he had so long been accustomed to the society of women to whom social preferment is the end of life that he had lost sight of the stronger and nobler elements of character that can live in the feminine breast. To be just to the society in which the Judge moved, there was a very fair sprinkling of noble women within it, but his restless ambition drove him into intimacy with those who could understand him and sympathize without the necessity of explanations.

The result of his musings was that he went to luncheon in a dangerous mood. It had full opportunity to show itself, for Mrs. Maclaughlin did not appear. She sent word that she had been engaged in the poultry yard all morning, had bathed late, and would prefer taking her luncheon in her wrapper at home. As the Judge had caught a glimpse of her drying her rather wiry gray tresses in the sunshine of a window, he was able to corroborate her statement; and Charlotte laughed as she gave orders for the preparation of the tray.

“You can be trusted to see all things that you are not wanted to see,” she added.

Then the Judge went point-blank and very indiscreetly at the matter in his mind. “Was that why you sent me away this morning?” he inquired.

For an instant her face flamed, and then the color left it white, with an angry gleam in her eyes. She played with her teaspoon a minute, and then she asked him a civil question about his impressions of her school. It was his turn to flush. The rebuke was the more scathing for its silence. His temper rose, and even in that instant he found time to wonder why he should have such an infatuation for a woman who had such power to enrage him.

“Why do you stand it?” he asked.

Charlotte was dumbfounded. She had her hospital patient on her hands again, when she had imagined, for nearly a week, that she had found a friend. Mechanically she pushed a dish of candied fruits (they were at dessert) toward him. “These are quite fine,” she said quietly. “You had better try them and then have your cigar. Meanwhile I must ask you to excuse me. My cook awaits dinner directions.”