The Disturbing Charm Part 21

But it is a form of self-preservation in Woman, for which Man alone is responsible....

Perhaps it is not fair to allege that every man in his heart is a dog in the manger, hating to see his fellow-men smiled upon by a pretty girl?

Perhaps it's not true that his interest in the girl is awakened when he sees her interested in another? No! Perhaps it's a libellous old theory that simply doesn't hold water as a rule.

Only, what myriads of exceptions it does take to prove that rule!

In her happiest voice Olwen, standing between the two men, began talking to Mr. Brown. "I do think that hut of yours must be a delightful place to live in! No cleaning! No sweeping! and you've only to put out your hand to get those lovely blackberries for breakfast----"

Captain Ross, leaning on the bal.u.s.trade, was seen to hump his back a little.

"Can't say I fancy blackberries as a breakfast myself, but I daresay it'll come to that," grumbled Mr. Brown, cheerily. "Blackberries, and 'bright _water is my drink from the crystal spring_.' Can you make anything out of this tangle about allowances, Ross?"

Captain Ross was apparently _not_ the finest judge of pay-warrants in Europe. A short "nope" came from over his humped shoulder. Olwen noticed that his one hand was resting on his left-side-jacket-pocket, that appeared to be bulging with something he had slipped into it.

"Dashed if I can make 'em out," said Mr. Brown, pleasantly. "According to my reckoning, Miss Olwen, there was my regimental pay for July, rations and lodgings for August, and they'll be in arrears for September--and no hospital stoppages.... c.o.x's do make mistakes; ask anybody. Anybody!"

Olwen agreed that c.o.x's did make mistakes. Honeyed sympathy informed her tone as she said so.

"Well, that's just that," Mr. Brown concluded, beaming upon her. "But, as I was just asking you, what about a turn on the prom. in the moonlight?"

Here the hump of Captain Ross's square shoulders suddenly straightened out.

He took his hand away from the packet in his pocket, gave a hitch to his belt, then, turning to Olwen, and in the most matter-of-fact voice imaginable, he told the fib that took her breath away.

"I guess Miss Howel-Jones is engaged to me for this dance. Isn't that so, Miss Howel-Jones?"

"Dance? But----" gasped little Olwen, stupefied. "n.o.body is dancing!"

"Then I guess we'll have to sit it out together on the old cannon or somewhairrr," said Captain Ross, coolly. "Shall you be all right without anything on your head?"

Now if Captain Ross expected that upon this hint Mr. Brown would retire in good order to his hut, there to brood upon allowances for the rest of the evening, he was no very fine judge of subalterns in the London Rifle Brigade.

Mr. Brown, M.C., stood firm. "Look here, Ross----" he was beginning, when another voice, a deep, genial, elderly voice, was heard behind the shutters of the window through which Captain Ross had come out upon the terrace.

The voice enquired, "Has anybody seen my niece?"

Little Olwen jumped.

"Oh, it's my Uncle. Do open the shutters, Uncle! I'm out here, with Mr.

Brown and Captain Ross," explained Olwen, hurriedly. "It's--it's ever so early, you know! We were all just thinking of going for a little walk----"

"No; I've got it," put in the unquenchable Mr. Brown. "What about a pull on the lagoon, to look at the phosph.o.r.escence? You too, Ross," he added, hospitably; guessing that Professor Howel-Jones was of an age that might allow its young nieces to go for moonlight rows in boats on lakes with two young men, but scarcely with one. "I saw a skiff drawn up by the jetty. You don't mind, Professor, do you?"

"At this hour?" demurred the Professor, looking out into the light that made of his ma.s.sive old head the summit of Mynedd Mawr in a snowy December. "For you to take your death of cold, Olwen _fach_, in the night air?"

Little Olwen, pulling up her storm-collar, murmured appealingly above it. "Oh, _darling_! I shall be as warm as warm! Do let me go."

She did not know that in her coaxing she was helped by a girl long dead.

It was to a certain note in the voice that she had from her mother that the Professor ceded now.

With a little nod he said, "Very well," and all but added "Mary." "Very well, Olwen _fach_. I trust you gentlemen not to keep her out long. I wish you a pleasant row; good night to you, good night!" And he went in.

"Come on; let's make a dash for it," said young Brown.

He led the way; followed by Olwen and Captain Ross, the latter in a worse temper than he had been in since he left the hospital.

"Jump in," said Mr. Brown, as they came up to the little empty skiff moored at the foot of the jetty.

In the skiff little Mr. Brown, cheerfully resigned to doing all the work, took both oars; as he would navely have said, he rather fancied himself in a boat. He pushed his shirt-sleeves up above a pair of short but neatly-turned forearms, and as he rowed on that foreign lagoon margined by that French sea-wall, his cheerful chatter was all of the Thames above Richmond, of sunny Sundays and of parties on Eel-Pie Island. The two in the stern sat rather silently, letting him talk; Captain Ross sulking as he would never have admitted he sulked, Olwen uttering now and again a little "Ah" of delight at the phosph.o.r.escence on the water.

For it was wonderful, that sea that flamed as they pushed out into it.

The boat's keel cut into the shimmer of pale green as into a field of glow-worms; it lighted up to left and right, blazing, dying down, rekindling fitfully as love itself; raining in spangles from the oars, dripping in jewels from Olwen's fingers as she dipped them over the side of the boat.

"Trim, Miss Olwen," said Mr. Brown, jerking his bullet head. "A bit nearer to Ross, if you don't mind."

Olwen moved; in the softly rocking boat overbalancing a trifle, she b.u.mped against something hard and angular on the seat close to her companion. It felt like a camera or a book.

"Oh," she said, "did I knock you, Captain Ross?"

"No----" he said--and then he brought out of his jacket-pocket that which she had seen bulging it into that square shape on the terrace. It was a box covered with coloured satin and tied with gay ribbons.

"Candy," explained Captain Ross, somewhat curtly. He lifted the lid and offered the chocolates to Olwen, then perforce to Mr. Brown, who stopped rowing and leant forward, opening his mouth as he had done to the blackberries.

"Pop one in, Miss Olwen, please," he laughed, hands on the oars; but it was Captain Ross who leant forward in the boat and stuffed the sweet into his mouth.

"Thanks," said little Mr. Brown, with his mouth full. "Very pretty attention of yours, Ross, I must say, bringing out chocs for me when I like 'em."

Captain Ross planted the box on Olwen's lap.

"Don't," she laughed shyly. "I shall eat them all up."

"I guess you're meant to," he said shortly. "I got them for you in Bordeaux."

"For _me_?"

"Sure. I wanted to see if you'd eat candies, after what you said the other day to me in the lounge."

Through the soft noises of the water Olwen's soft voice took up "What I said?"

"Yes--when you said, 'Who wants candy?'"

"Oh, that," said Olwen, looking down at the green lambent water of which the rippling light beat up, soft and magical upon a face whose young curves could have dared a harsher radiance. She then looked back across the lagoon towards the big block of the hotel, picked out against the pale sky. She also glanced to her right, at the sand dunes that barricaded the waters of the _Baissin_ from those of Biscay Bay, and at the lighthouse, winking white and red. She looked, in fact, anywhere but at Captain Ross, sitting so close beside her in that boat.

She was bathed in such a rapturous dream of moonlight and phosph.o.r.escence and rosy clouds and proximity that she was afraid to look at him. Fear lest he might read a confession in her eyes did for her what wisdom itself might have prompted.

A sophisticated woman in Simla, for example, had once told Mrs.

Cartwright that she found no variation of the Glad Eye more successful with some men than the glance withheld. How dogmatically would this have been combated by Captain Ross! More than once had this expert in Woman's Ways affirmed, "_If there's a woman on this airrrrth that I've no use for, it's the woman who looks away when I'm speaking to her. I don't dawdle talking to a woman who doesn't look at ME all the time----_"

His impulse at that moment was to catch this little chit beside him by her slender shoulders and shake her good and hard. If he'd had two arms, he thought savagely, that's what he'd have wanted to do with 'em. He'd have loved to do that, then and there, and be hanged to that young b.u.t.ter-in of a Brown! Young Brown could be ignored, anyway. Let him get the boat along; the only pity was that he couldn't row with his back to the stern.