The Disturbing Charm Part 13

Without looking at him, the girl had several times been aware that Captain Ross's dark quick glance had sought her out as soon as she appeared, and that it had followed her as she went out. Several times since the encounter in the hall, when she had told him that he "didn't know everything about girls," he had stopped to talk to her; always to "rag" her with some question or comment. But he had stopped.

Often she thought: "That means nothing! He never could think of me seriously. Why should he?"

Then again she felt that a time must come when he would stop longer, say more.

She waited for that time, outwardly indifferent, just as a branch studded with the brown scentless swellings of mid-winter waits for the spring that shall see them break into sweetest buds. She waited, fixing her bright gaze upon some point beyond her idol's broad shoulder as she answered his greeting with some snippy girlish flippancy, while her heart whispered--ah! what volumes of tenderness. She just waited; biding her time as a girl needs must, whether or not she knows of some secret Charm that backs her power.

She waited ... but now waiting and secret watching, uttered retort and unuttered yearning, were all alike tinged with a new apprehension.

That Charm! What unexpected way of its own was it going to take _next_?

CHAPTER IX

UNFORSEEN EFFECTS OF THE CHARM

"Does the wood-p.e.c.k.e.r flit round the young ferash? Does the gra.s.s clothe a new-built wall?

Is she under thirty, the woman who holds a boy in her thrall?"

Kipling.

It would have been a shock to little Olwen had she realized what other result of the Charm was manifesting itself already at that moment.

Probably the first, imperceptible manifestations would have been lost upon this quite young girl.

Had she noticed the gravitating towards Mrs. Cartwright's chair of an evening of Captain Ross's friend, the young flyer, had she observed the gradual way in which it was becoming a matter of course that when the writer was not working he was in attendance upon her, had she known of a bouquet of late roses, bought in the Ville d'Hiver and sent by the chambermaid to Room 23, had she heard what boyish confidences about flying, and Work, and Other Fellows, and even Home were being poured into an ear well used to hearing of such things by a tongue not well used to talking to women--well! Even had she known all this, Olwen would have looked upon it much as she looked upon her own impulses when she stooped quickly to pick up a pair of dropped spectacles for the old French lady, the little dark boy's grandmother, or held open the door of the _salle_ for her to pa.s.s out. It was merely "manners."

Further, if she had known of that night which Mrs. Cartwright had watched through with him, putting all her own Force between him and the forces of Horror, little Olwen would have thought she saw the whole reason for the young man's attentions to a woman nearly twenty years his senior. It was grat.i.tude. How natural!

Manners, and grat.i.tude....

This is what Olwen would have thought, and what Mrs. Cartwright herself would have said. It is true that the elder woman should have known better. Later, she might have confessed that she did know. At the time.... Well----

There is one subject in the world upon which more barefaced lying goes on than upon any other half a dozen subjects put together: sport included. The discussion of it turns nine men out of ten into what Captain Ross might describe as "a darned fabricator."

Golf and salmon fishing cannot compete with the lying records of Love!

Food it cannot be that the golfer and the fisherman cling _in their own hearts_ to the fabrications that they fling abroad.

Whereas, regarding the matter of Love, men (and even women) can actually believe exactly what they wish to believe.

This was not Mrs. Cartwright's habit. She was a woman sincere with herself as a rule. Into the lives of the sincerest of us there trespa.s.ses the exception that shows up the fallibility of human rules.

So when she told herself that this growing attraction towards her of the boyish Flying-officer was a normal and delightful friendship, she believed it herself; she insisted on believing that the look in his young eyes as they followed her movements was not the look she had been used to see in the eyes of Captain Keith Cartwright and of a dozen other men; yes, she made herself believe that her own more joyous mood was not the life-giving zest that every woman feels when she is admired, desired--and at no other time.

She deliberately believed it was the glorious autumn weather that made her feel this stimulant in the air, in the sea-bordered forest, in the society of young people; that amusing Captain Ross, little Mr. Brown, the pretty Howel-Jones child, and Mr. Awdas, for instance.

With pleasure she accepted Mr. Awdas's invitation, one afternoon, to walk through the forest with him and down to the oyster-beds, the pride of that part of the country. She thought that Captain Ross was coming too, but it appeared that Captain Ross and the little Brown boy had gone for a walk in the opposite direction, to prospect around that woodcutter's hut.

She and the young flyer set out together, walking lightly and quickly in step; their shadows, flung on the road in front of them, showed a curious likeness that one would not, looking at the pair, have noticed, he so blond, and blue-eyed, and boyish--she whimsical, brown-haired, plain of feature. But the shapes of both, blue silhouettes on the white road, were young and supple, both characteristically small-headed, wide in the shoulder, slim in the flank, and long from hip to knee. Seeing them from their shadows only, one might have guessed a brother and his sister swinging easily along together.

The shadows broke, striping the red bodies of the pines as they entered the forest from the road.

"It's jollier walking further up," said Mrs. Cartwright, taking a path to the left. "We get glimpses of the sea all the way along; this way."

He followed her in silence. He had been in a silent mood all day, she had noticed. She asked him, looking back with a little glance of concern, if he had not been sleeping again.

"Oh yes, I've slept all right--slept like a top," he rea.s.sured her from behind. The path was so narrow that they could only walk one abreast through the arbutus bushes. He told her: "I haven't had any bother at all since--that night----"

"Good!" said Mrs. Cartwright heartily, but he had not finished speaking; he was concluding in a low voice, "that night when you were such an angel to me."

"Oh, please don't!" she laughed, looking ahead. "You make me feel like something off a Christmas card of my childhood; it's not a bit like me, believe me." She was not looking at him; she did not know, just now, that his eyes were fastened on the lithe brown length of her as she made her way through the bushes that seemed to catch at her, offering their bouquets of white flowers, their jewels of orange and scarlet, as she pa.s.sed.

Presently they grew less thickly, the arbutus bushes; they seemed to fall back into the forest.

The two people walking, reached a little rise in the ground, and now a rush of salter air was mingling with the warm pine-scent that hung everywhere about them, and now there was a familiar sapphire gleam through the pine-boughs that showed black and fringed against sea and sky.

"One can't walk for long in this wood without coming upon that glimpse of the sea outside," remarked Mrs. Cartwright, gazing at it, and taking in a deep, enjoying breath. "Sea through pine-needles is so like the blink of very blue eyes fringed by thick black lashes! It reminds me so of a man I was once very much in love with----"

Quick as a shot came the interruption to what she was saying; a hoa.r.s.e curt "Don't!" over her shoulder; a hand that clutched at her upper arm, and then dropped as soon as it had touched her.

She wheeled, startled. She faced the angry, hurt, and jealous eyes of a man.

Jack Awdas, looking steadily down into her astonished face, repeated in that husky, angry tone; "Don't. Don't do it! Don't talk to me about any man you've loved. I can't bear it. D'you see? You----I----You mustn't."

She said nothing, in the extreme of surprise. He said nothing more either. It is possible that he was as startled as she was by the declaration that had broken from his lips, and whose sound was still ringing in their ears. The boy had not meant to say it. He had not known what he had meant to say; his mind had been, as it were, filled by some luminous and bewildering and concealing mist.

Now a breath had blown aside a corner of that mist: he caught a glimpse of the heights and depths that it had been hiding--for how many hours, how many days? He did not know. Only it seemed to him that since that night of his bad dream, since his eyes had closed upon the sight of that woman watching, lovely with Pity, he had woken up to a new world.

It was full of strangeness and unrest, that world; it was full of sudden thrills. It held impatience to hear her voice, to touch her hand. It held longing and mystery. It held worship of a laugh or gesture from her. It held amazement at oneself; incredulity that one could feel these things. Now, he found, it held also Pain....

This woman had been made part of his life by that vigil shared. He could not bear the thought of her in other men's lives; couldn't bear to think of it, much less to hear of it in words.... It couldn't be. She was his!

They walked on in silence, these two English people from the hotel; each treading a maze of hidden thought as they went. No word of it escaped them for the present. Jack Awdas was the first to speak.

He said, his husky voice once more composed: "You haven't had a look at this place yet, have you?"

"No," replied Mrs. Cartwright, also in the accents of every day. "You know the way, don't you?"

"Yes; Ross and I explored the oyster-beds the first day we came over.

Rather interesting. I thought perhaps the place might come in useful to you as--as 'copy.'"

"Oh yes," murmured Mrs. Cartwright, out of the labyrinth of her thoughts....

It would have augured ill for the next chapters of her serial had she depended for "copy" upon what she was to see of that French oyster-park that afternoon. Neither she nor the boy, who was her guide, had anything but a cursory eye, an abstracted mind, to give to that lightsome, airy picture of wide sea and sand, mapped out with stakes and sills and basins, and peopled with busy barefoot women in their picturesque garb of black sunbonnet, print jumper and long scarlet trousers.

Up and down the narrow paths stepped those long slender feet of Mrs.