He stood looking after her, red-eyed, enraged, yet longing with all the fierce strength of his nature to seize her in his arms and conquer her as Martin Collingwood had once conquered her. When he heard the snap of her closing door, he fell into a sort of stupor, still sitting at the table, his head resting on his clasped hands.
The vehement forceful fury of his mood fell away from him, and he sat staring haggardly at the white cloth. The act was final, and having committed it, he had full opportunity to question its discretion. Strange tragedy of temperament, forcing eye and voice to utterance which no human power can revoke, though life itself would be reckoned a fair price for revocation! Sitting there alone with his thoughts, Alexander Barton was conscious of a shame that would stay with him for life, of a futile hopeless anger and despair with himself, of an ache that would take the taste out of life for many a month and year to come.
Meanwhile, Charlotte had passed into her room, where she stood very quietly looking out of the window. Her heart lay heavy within her, and a dull, gripping pain tugged at her throat. She had a sense of having been morally bruised and beaten. For she saw with painful distinctness, that it was not only brute feeling which had carried away Judge Barton’s self-control; but that deeper, subtler was his measurement of the compromise she had made with life. It was not Charlotte Collingwood’s personality, it was what she had done that opened the way to his advances.
After a time she lay down, and she remained so for the rest of the afternoon, with her face buried in her pillow. How was she to face Martin with the wretched story? How was she to dissemble her own misery? She was a fair actress to the world, taking refuge in a kind of stoic dignity. But how was she to hide her embarrassment and misery from the man who could measure her moods as a barometer measures pressure?
Chapter XII
The evening meal passed off more easily than had seemed possible to Mrs. Collingwood’s disturbed imagination. Judge Barton managed to appear perfectly at ease, and she played her own part better than she had fancied that she could. Only one dread preyed upon her. There was a readiness in Kingsnorth to devote himself to the entertainment of the guests, and a tact on his part in holding the household together which made her suspect that keen observer of a desire to aid her; and such a desire could only lead to the inference that he had, to some extent, grasped the situation. The thought was galling; but its bitterness was, for the time, mitigated by her sense of need.
She slept little that night, but toward morning she fell into a doze from which she was aroused by the sounds of breakfast preparations in the next room. She jumped up hurriedly, only to behold the bathers sporting in the sea, and the coastguard cutter lying a mile or so off shore. Dressing as quickly as she could she hastened down to the beach in time to meet the Commissioner as he came ashore.
The Commissioner’s first rush of enthusiasm had had time to cool, and he had thought much during his week’s absence. Without in the least abating his very high opinion of Mrs. Collingwood’s personality and attainments, he had had time to consider the possible attitude of Mrs. Commissioner, and the difficulties attendant upon too close a connection with the queer island ménage. The result of his reflections was a self-conscious restraint, and a very bungling masculine attempt to recede from a position without betraying himself in the act.
Charlotte read his self-consciousness aright, ignored the existence of a Mrs. Commissioner, saved his feelings for him, and bore him no grudge. She had accepted her husband’s associates kindly for his sake; but she had never ceased to look upon them with the clear vision of her upbringing. Socially Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins were “impossible.” It mattered little to her, because she had turned her back forever upon society and all its works. She even took satisfaction in playing her part gracefully. She enjoyed the Commissioner’s mystification, and the little access of deference in his manner when he spoke to her.