“The things you have in mind can’t be changed by will power, dear. They are the results of education, association, environment. New environment may change them gradually. What you ask I cannot give. ‘I’ve done all I can do, come as far to meet you as I can.’ I’m not stubborn, Martin. I would do anything in my power to meet your wishes. You are quarrelling not with what I do, but with what I am.”
The answer was a grunt of impatience as Martin flung away again. He raged helplessly against the truth of her words.
When, at last, the launch was hull down on the sky line, Charlotte went to bed, and shutting out Mrs. Maclaughlin’s insistent curiosity, permitted herself the luxury of nearly a week’s retirement. Though at times she wept, for the most part she tried to shut out the past, and to concentrate her thoughts on the future. Collingwood’s idea that her dread of business life would outweigh her sense of humiliation and her wounded self-love was entirely wrong. She shrank, it is true, from the world; but the thought that there was an alternative never suggested itself to her. Collingwood had said that he would not live with her, or what had seemed to her the equivalent of that. She took him at his word. The fact that legally he was her husband counted no more in her summing up of the situation than if he had been a chance stranger encountered in the street. Live for an hour more than was absolutely necessary under the same roof with a man who entertained such feelings for her? She turned sick at the thought.
When at last she emerged from her retirement she was the woman of hospital days, the super-sensitive orphan, feeling herself unwelcome to all the world, everybody’s hand against her, her hand against everybody; but she took them, as Kingsnorth phrased it to himself, in the hollow of her own hand. In the presence of her reserve, even Mrs. Maclaughlin’s frank speech grew guarded. Kingsnorth merely looked at her in a kind of mute apology. Again and again she caught his glance with its furtive appeal; but each time her own eyes met it, not with studied blankness, but with a naturalness that was almost histrionic.
Maclaughlin had returned with the launch before her seclusion was at an end, and after a family discussion of what was patent to their eyes, he went vigorously on her side. She was “gentle folks,” he maintained, a deal sight too good for Martin Collingwood; and Collingwood was behaving like a fool. Mrs. Maclaughlin’s democratic partiality, naturally roused in Martin’s favor, was somewhat rudely snubbed.
Chapter XV
It was at the end of a month, when Charlotte looked forward with increasing dread to her husband’s return and to her own departure, that the lorcha Dos Hermanos, their tried friend, left cargo and letters at the island. Collingwood wrote that he should delay his return another month. He sent down their commissaries, and Maclaughlin was to come up to Romblon harbor to meet the first June run of the Puerta Princesa steamer. Most of these details were contained in a letter to Maclaughlin. His letter to his wife, a very bulky epistle, dwelt upon their own difficulties. It was the first letter he had written to her, and Charlotte’s face, as she read it, was a study.
”My dearest Girl:
“You are that, after all. I’ve been thinking over our affairs, and I am willing to admit that I was hasty. But I don’t think that you treated me altogether fair. What I do see is that we haven’t got any time to jaw over what is done and gone. You have been talking about leaving me and all that, but that is just talk. I don’t suppose you ever really meant it, and I never took it seriously. We’ll kiss and be friends when I get back, and you’ll see that everything will come out all right.