The Disturbing Charm Part 10

Mrs. Cartwright smiled obstinately. "My good young man, I am on night-duty. You called me 'Sister' yourself when I came in. I am going to be 'Sister' for once."

"You're too good," he said, with a sigh of obvious relief that she was not going. "I couldn't sleep ... but why should you miss yours?"

"I couldn't sleep now, either; I couldn't have slept. I'd only just finished working when you called out. I shall stay"--she tucked the dressing-gown a little more closely about her--"and----No, I won't have a cigarette. I'll light one for you, however. And here's your drink, and I shall just stay and talk to you until you go to sleep."

"Too good," he said again, taking the cigarette from her hand and giving her a shyly grateful glance. "I've been bucking no end--I don't know why--I don't generally talk a lot."

She knew it; knew also that the distraught boy would not have talked to a man as he had let himself babble, almost hysterically, to her. (It is only women, the so-called talkative s.e.x, who could give statistics of how much men talk, and of what they will talk, upon occasion!) Up to that night, he had not exchanged a dozen sentences with her since they had been staying at the hotel. That same evening, when Mrs. Cartwright and his friend Ross had chipped each other in the _salon_ over her "Manual of Courtship," had been the first occasion that Awdas had found himself sitting next to this tall countrywoman of his.

But now he turned his eyes upon her as if she were all that is meant by the word Home.

These wakeful, solitary, strange hours had made them friends such as two years of ordinary companionship could not have seen them. Both knew that never again could they be mere hotel acquaintances.

She looked at the face that was falling at last into lines of composure; no longer a white mask of strain and anguish. Colour was coming back, and a smile took the place of that intently thinking ghost behind the blue eyes. He lifted that small head, set so eagle-wise upon the wide shoulders, breathed more deeply; and she knew that it was she who had restored him, this fallen cloud-sweeper. Fancifully she thought of his daring job as something still verging on the super-human; after all, these flying lads, with their freedom of one element more, are the half-G.o.ds of our time. She thought of that myth of the other half-G.o.d Antaeus, who, to gain fresh life, must draw it from the touch of earth; and she remembered that Woman (that last creature to be civilized) is still generations nearer than man to the healing soil. Yes; she had healed him.

Without showing him that she did so, she studied his face, with its soft fruit-like oval that does not survive the first quarter of a century.

Twenty-two! He seemed, as most young soldiers do nowadays, more than his age. Yet in some ways he looked younger.

After a puff or two of cigarette-smoke had risen into the air, she asked gently, "Why did you say, just now, that a girl could never mean more to you than friendship?"

He said simply, "I don't know. Perhaps it is because I don't really know any girls much. They've never come my way."

"Not?" she exclaimed, scarcely believing this.

He said quite seriously: "You know it makes a lot of difference when one hasn't any sisters. I haven't any; there were just three of us; me, and my brother in the Navy, and the Nipper--the youngest. (Cadet Corps.) My people live in the country, you know--Kent. It's not a bad old place; orchards and a moat for punting about on when we were kids, and the paddock. We had quite a decent time. But there were no girls in the house."

Mrs. Cartwright suggested "Other people's sisters?"

"Not often. My mother used to try and get girls to stay with her sometimes, but----" He moved his wide shoulders. "It was rather a wash-out. When there aren't other girls to come for, you know. There's a sort of feeling of their having been dragged in. Everybody's shy and stiff. At least, they were; the girls who came. I suppose that's why I haven't thought much of girls. They always seemed a nuisance, and self-conscious, you know. Wooden. Glad when it was time for them to go, and I can tell you _I_ was. They were thundering difficult to talk to."

Mrs. Cartwright, always ready to hear of the bringing-up of boys, gave thanks inwardly that her Keith and Reggie possessed countless girl-cousins who were to them as sisters; creatures dispossessed of glamour, but a channel into those fields where glamour ripens. Then she said, softly, to this other boy: "But when you went away from Home, when you came up to Town, and--oh, all that sort of thing, like other young men of your age, surely you met plenty of girls who were--well! Easy enough to talk to?"

He nodded slightly. "Oh, yes; one met those. But----" There crept over his face the look that some think is more often to be seen in these days of Emanc.i.p.ation than in more guarded times; the scrutiny of the young man who is at least as fastidious in his love affairs as the young woman. "They weren't very amusing either--or, probably, I wasn't--to them. Of course, one knows lots of top-hole fellows who were always about with girls. Permanent address: 'Stagedoor, Frivolity,' sort of thing. But when I got leave, I'd just as soon go round with my people, or poor old Ferris, or some other fellow----"

He had finished his cigarette, and leant his fair rumpled head back on the pillow.

Mrs. Cartwright, watching it, knew suddenly and certainly that--but for his own mother and his nurses at that hospital--she was the first woman who had seen it thus.

Then she could hardly check the smile that rose to her lips; for there was stealing over his face a look that made it not merely boyish, but little-boyish. A film was blurring those keen blue eyes; he opened them more widely, precisely as she had seen the eyes of little Keith open widely, obstinately, against her breast when he was dropping with the sleep that he defied. Young Awdas, she saw, was fighting down a well-disguised yawn. For a moment there was silence in the bright, isolated room. Then he said, "Mrs. Cartwright, do go to bed."

"I am not sleepy."

"No, nor am I," with a drowsy smile. "If you go, I'll get out a book and read until it's time to get up."

"Don't do that," she said. "I suppose you wouldn't try and go to sleep for a bit?"

"I couldn't." The blue eyes opened again fixedly upon her face. "I----"

It seemed in the midst of the sentence that his lashes fell against his cheeks, closely and suddenly as the lashes of her babies used to fall.

In the idiom of those old days he was "off," he was "down."

Afraid of moving, to snap off the lights, lest she might disturb the sleeper, she sat on, watching that peaceful face, that broad chest heaving rhythmically. She sat, watching him; or letting her glance take in the room with his neat, soldier-like appointments; his folding-case for brushes and shaving-kit, his one photograph (obviously of his mother) in a celluloid glazed frame, his leather writing-case, with his name and the name of his Corps printed in ink on the cover. Her eyes upturned to him, as she sat--thinking ... thinking....

It was nearly five o'clock when the door opened cautiously, and Captain Ross, that adequate campaigner, entered, with a Service dressing-gown over his zebra-stripes, and carrying two steaming cups of excellently-made tea. His glance fell upon Jack Awdas, slumbering like a child. Mrs. Cartwright, rather cramped, rather chilled, and rather drawn in the face between her straight-falling plaits of hair, was still sitting there like a statue, in a white robe with gold patterns, from the folds of which there peeped an end of narrow pink ribbon--the ribbon which held, hidden at her breast, and all unsuspected, a Charm.

CHAPTER VII

THE SPREADING OF THE CHARM

"When England needs The sons she breeds, And there's fighting to be done, No matter where, You will find him _there_, The Man behind the Gun....

It's Bill, Bill, Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy Brown, Of Putney, Piccadilly, Camden Town; Why! It's Mister---- Bill, Billy Brown---- Of London!"

Fragson's Song.

The following morning brought a small disappointment to that little plotter for the commonweal, Olwen Howel-Jones.

No Mrs. Cartwright at _dejeuner_!

Olwen (knowing nothing of that vigil of the night before, or of the slumber into which the woman, drained of vitality, had dropped as soon as she returned to her room) imagined her working through luncheon-time.

Too bad! For now it must be postponed, the sight of how that Charm, given to the writer, would affect Professor Howel-Jones. It could not begin at once then, that Darby-and-Joan pairing-off that so suitable match which little Olwen had planned. What a pity! Still it was not put off for long, she cheerfully hoped.

The other wearer of the Charm was also absent from the midday gathering in the _salle_, but that was all to the good, Olwen had pa.s.sed Miss Walsh, with her hair done in that new way! speeding off as excitedly as an Early Victorian to her first dance; speeding down to the pier, where the motor-boat awaited her, with Sergeant Tronchet. Madame Leroux had put up a basket of provisions for them, and they were going to make a picnic of their excursion across the lagoon.

Captain Ross came in to lunch with his friend Mr. Awdas, but so late that the two young men crossed the path of Olwen and her Uncle (who had finished their meal early) in the hall. The girl had paused here for a moment to slip into the Red Cross collection-box that hundred-franc note which had been bestowed upon her yesterday by Miss Walsh.

Captain Ross noticed her action.

"You're making a mistake, Miss Howel-Jones," he said banteringly, and smiled as he might have smiled at one of the little pigtailed daughters of the manageress. "That's not the box you put ten centimes into and get two sticks of candy."

Olwen, half in delight that he had spoken to her, half in resentment that it was in the tone he might have used to a child, raised her pointed chin on its white childish neck, looked down under her lids, and demanded, with what she considered great stateliness, "Who wants _candy_?"

"All little girls, I guess," returned Captain Ross, his robin's eyes twinkling, his perfect teeth flashing in another teasing smile. Olwen, glancing under those dropped lids at this somewhat showy vision of black-and-white-and-brown-and-scarlet-and-khaki, felt that she would die for him.

There was a magic about him, she thought; even if he were dictatorial or teasing, or seemed to think rather a lot of himself--a magic! At the same instant she remembered that, yes! There was a secret magic about her too, now. A magic that had proved itself unmistakably once; a Charm that she herself was wearing. Confidence seemed to rush, in a warming flood, about her heart.

Quite defiantly she tilted her black head, and looking straight over Captain Ross's shoulder, she laughed, for pure joy of her secret.

"_You_ don't know everything about girls!" she told the finest judge of women in Europe.

And before the young Staff-Officer could retort, before he could even open his eyes over the temerity of this chit, this schoolgirl, who had said this thing to him (_Him!_), those little French boots of hers had skipped away, carrying her upstairs towards the study where she must type out the notes which she had taken down for her Uncle in shorthand that morning. Those boots fitted the chit's ankles like a coat of black paint, he noticed as he looked after her, too amused to be annoyed, of course. The piece of Impertinence----! Awfully neat.... They disappeared, the little twinkling heels. He went on to join Jack Awdas at table.

Olwen, at an angle in the corridor a floor higher, ran into the young _femme-de-chambre_ for that floor, carrying over her arm a khaki tunic.

They stopped to smile and to exchange "_bonjours_," these two girls much of an age and much of a race, for Marie came from Brittany, and already the Professor and his niece had amused themselves by finding out how many Welsh words the Breton maid could understand; the simple words which were the same in her own tongue.