Yet that is precisely what he did. The day’s work restored his natural sunny self. He dismissed the Judge from his mind with the mental reservation of kicking him on sight; and when he came home that night, he strode up the steps, caught his wife in his arms, and kissed her as naturally as if they had not, that very morning, omitted that lover’s benediction for the first time since their marriage.
He made no apology for his late spleen. Truth is, he hardly thought of it as affecting her. She clung to him as he kissed her, and he saw that she was pale and her eyes heavily lidded; but he asked her no questions. She had had, in truth, a hard day. As soon as the glowering man body was safely out of the way, Mrs. Maclaughlin came over, bent on extracting information. In her life and in the lives of most of her friends, connubial difficulties meant neighborhood confidences and lamentations. Charlotte parried her hints and, to a point-blank question, returned a look so rebuking that Mrs. Maclaughlin went home in high dudgeon. For the rest of the day, Charlotte struggled against the tears that would have betrayed her—struggled till her eyeballs ached and her weary head seemed drawn back upon her shoulders.
At dinner Kingsnorth stole one furtive glance, said to himself “Thoroughbred, by Jove,” and bent himself to seconding Mrs. Collingwood’s conversational efforts. After dinner they all played bridge till eleven o’clock.
So the whole incident was passed over without speech between husband and wife. But with it went the completeness, the golden, unreal joy of their honeymoon. Though they walked and talked together, and played at being lovers again, a sense of distrust hung over their relations. Collingwood secretly nursed his why; his wife still asked herself proudly if she had deserved public humiliation at his hands. Led by an evil genius he could not have selected a more adroit way to offend her and to arouse her critical faculties against him than that he had chosen. Private reproaches she could have endured with more fortitude than she could endure public sulking.
Nevertheless, she made a Spartan effort to clear him at her own expense, and a no less loyal attempt to conceal from him that a wound still rankled in her breast. But it did rankle, and, in the next six weeks, it seemed to her that she and Martin grew steadily apart; that in spite of every effort to stay the widening process, it went on slowly and relentlessly, and that it was leading them gradually but inevitably to that moment which she had so greatly dreaded before her marriage.
It was the custom at the island for the three men to take turns in going to Manila for commissaries, and to dispose of their pearls and shells. Collingwood had been engaged in this work the year before, when he met with the accident which landed him in the hospital; the Maclaughlins had been up since Charlotte’s marriage, and the next trip was Kingsnorth’s. But as the time drew near, he astounded them all by the announcement that he did not want to go, and that he wished Collingwood to take his place. When pressed for a reason for his apparent insanity, he declared that if a man had to live in purgatory or a worse place, he had better stay there all the time, and not seek spots that would emphasize its drawbacks when he returned to it. He insisted that Collingwood enjoyed Manila while to him it was the extreme of boredom, and that Martin ought to take his wife away for a change, that her spirits were drooping.
“Nonsense,” said Charlotte. “I am absolutely contented. I don’t feel droopy.”
But Collingwood had taken alarm. He stared at her. “But you are a bit pale,” he said. “I wonder why I had not noticed it. Besides, I should like to be in Manila again with you. Let’s accept. Kingsnorth proposed it himself. He can’t complain if we take him at his word.”
At this point, Mrs. Maclaughlin put in a bomb. “Why can’t I go too, then?” she said.
“We need a housekeeper,” cried Kingsnorth, while Maclaughlin remarked hastily, “Don’t talk of it.”