Again she said nothing. The answer was burning on her lips. “You are the reason. The associates you have given me here are the reasons.” But she maintained silence. Collingwood was angered by what he thought her obstinacy.
“Well, what was the reason?” he demanded.
“He thought I might be ambitious.”
It was an honest answer and as generous as it was frank. But Collingwood was in no mood to measure generosity.
“And you let him get away without giving me a chance to kick him into the Sulu Sea,” he reproached her.
“I did. The greatest fear I had was that he would not get away without your doing it. Suppose you had kicked him—as you are quite capable of doing—and he had kicked back. One or the other would have been hurt. Suppose it had been you, do you think I should have enjoyed seeing you suffer? Or suppose you had hurt him, do you think it would have been a satisfaction to me to know that you had fought for me, and had to be punished for it? Do I want my husband in jail or maimed for rebuking an insolence that I could handle myself? I defended your dignity and mine, and Judge Barton has been a thousand times more rebuked by my tongue than he would have been by your fists.”
With this speech and with the memory of her shrug and handshake, Martin’s kindling jealousy had to be temporarily extinguished. He returned with a more conciliating manner to the charge.
“I should like to know what you said to him.”
But Charlotte could suffer no more. “Don’t ask me, don’t ask me,” she implored. She rose and walked away. The action was the result of lifelong habit. She had never allowed herself to indulge in emotion before others, and she had exercised almost the will of a red Indian to refrain from giving way to an overwhelming burst of tears; but when, after she had regained some control of herself, her thoughts returned to Collingwood, a sense of bitter disappointment in him mingled with her self-pity.
He had not followed her! He had shown her no sympathy in her momentary outburst of unhappiness. She was conscious of never having deserved better of his loyalty and sympathy, and she had never received less! She finally took up a book and endeavored to read, but her heart was sick with wounded love and pride. She found old feelings that she had believed scourged out of her being rising in tumultuous violence. There was the feeling of outraged pride and sensibility, the swelling sense of injustice, and a blind twisting and turning to see a way out of the situation. Suddenly that which the Judge had proposed leaped back into her mind. The ear which had been deaf to him when he appealed to her ambitions became sensitively alive to a whisper when that whisper promised succor from distaste. She was frightened at her own attitude and took herself severely to task. She said to herself that she was morbid, that Martin had every right to be displeased with her, for she had denied him frankness; but even as she ranged these weights in her mind’s eye the scale tipped lower and lower with the weight of his displeasure.