The Disturbing Charm Part 23

[Ill.u.s.tration: She stood there as if frozen, and said: "Away from here!"

and in her heart exclaimed: "Away from him!"]

It was time the Charm required; Olwen was agitatedly certain of that now. Time.

It had taken so many days before he had even held her hand; given so many other days, and what might not happen? But she was not to know.

Those days were not to be allowed to her. She clenched into her palm the nails of those little fingers that Captain Ross had held in that warmly-caressing clasp. She was to go ... never to see him any more....

She cleared her throat, pulled herself together, and asked, "And after Paris, Uncle, where do we go; London, you said?"

Now, this was a gleam of hope; London!

For she had once heard Captain Ross, in talking to Mrs. Cartwright, tell the writer that when his sick leave was up and after he had been boarded, he had prospects of an office job in town. If he were in London, and if her Uncle and she were also in London ... well, then the outlook would not be entirely so black. It would not be the every day and several times a day encountering of this French hotel; but there surely might be meetings, if they were together, in London?

But the Professor, eyes still upon his papers, said, "London for a week or so, but I'm always glad enough to get out of the place. I shall be going down to Wales, then; I can leave you at your Auntie Margaret's, dear, before I go on to Liverpool. My plans will be unsettled----"

"You're not going to have me with you, then Uncle?"

"No, Olwen _fach_. For the present, not," he told her above the rustling of the papers. "I shan't require you for the work in hand for the next----Let me see, four or six months, perhaps. You will be able to go home; have a nice rest from work; help your Auntie in the house, see a little bit of your sisters and of your old friends."

Olwen felt precisely as if the genial-voiced old man were condemning her to penal servitude for the rest of her natural life.

"Uncle!" she exclaimed in horror.

It was met by a mildly surprised glance from the old man.

"What's the matter, small la.s.s? Aren't you glad to be seeing your home again?"

"No," blurted out Olwen. "I don't want to go. Oh, I don't. Uncle! I'd rather be with you. Much. But if you can't have me, I--I--I won't go back----"

She put up her little head, shaking it violently as if in the face of a vision of the home in which she'd been brought up. Comfortable, old-fashioned, rambling place that it was, set in wild beauty, and echoing with gay voices, it repelled her; it seemed to her a prison from which there would be no further escaping towards the Heart's Desire. At work as her Uncle's secretary, there still seemed chances of movement in her life, there still seemed possibilities.... But as a girl at home, she felt she would be chained and bound by a thousand chances against.

She told herself rebelliously, "Down there, I should never see him again! I won't go!"

Unconsciously her hands clasped themselves upon her breast, upon that slender talisman that she was wearing.

The old man regarded her, at a loss why the child should be agitated, she who had always seemed happy enough with her sisters at home.

"But, Olwen _fach_, if you don't go back, what do you want to do?"

"I want to stay on in London, Uncle!"

"In London--dear me--curious taste! Why? What could you do there?"

"I could do War work, like lots and lots--like every other girl!"

"Tut," retorted the Professor. Being a Welshman, he p.r.o.nounced this word to rhyme with "foot." Being a man of his generation, he still disliked to think of any girl at work except domestically or for him.

"What d'you want to do that for, Olwen _fach_?"

To this question Olwen could hardly answer with the whole truth.

How many girls insist upon working in London because there, also, is working their particular Captain Ross?

Olwen's mind was set upon a plan.

She would think out the "hows" as soon as she left this place.

Only a couple more days in which the Charm might work for her, here!

CHAPTER XV

THE LOSING OF THE CHARM

"Farewell, thou latter Spring! Farewell, All-hallown summer!"

Shakespeare.

"It's perfectly easy to have a good time in this world without any men,"

declared Mrs. Cartwright, smiling. "In fact, as easy as it is with them.

In many ways, easier!"

Her listeners looked at her without conviction. For they were Miss Walsh and Olwen Howel-Jones. Poor Miss Walsh, having pa.s.sed thirty-four years of her life in a manless world, having been then caught up into a Paradise for two, and, further, having been banished from it again with the departure of her Gustave, felt that nothing could be more untrue than this remark of the writer's.

As for Olwen--well, this was on the morning after her Uncle had sprung upon her the news that all _her_ "good time" was to end in two days'

time. And one whole precious day of that remaining two was to be wasted; _wasted_!

A somewhat mysterious message had come from Bordeaux, asking all three of the British officers then sojourning at Les Pins to go over and spend the day with their comrades-in-arms at a base about which none of these soldiers would answer any questions. They had gone, all three of them; Captain Ross, Mr. Awdas, and little Mr. Brown. They wouldn't be back all day. Not all day would Olwen have a glimpse of him whom presently she might never be seeing at all--and still Mrs. Cartwright affirmed that it would be possible to have a good time!

Probably Mrs. Cartwright guessed at the young girl's frame of mind as easily as at the less disguised feelings of Sergeant Tronchet's betrothed; it had not been for long that the writer had wondered "Who that child's so desperately in love with?" But brooding was a thing that Claudia Cartwright considered a wasteful and useless proceeding on the part of any young girl. She determined to put a stop to it, if possible, and that was why she went on gaily, "I often think of how Eve would have got on if she had been made first; probably she'd have thoroughly enjoyed having the whole of that Garden to herself, whereas Adam----!

Bored to tears, of course. Not good for man to be alone.... Well, since all the men have gone from here, why shouldn't we have a party of our own?"

"A party!" echoed Miss Walsh, lugubriously. "Oh, Mrs. Cartwright!"

"Why not? I am sure Sergeant Gustave doesn't want you to shut yourself up because he's gone back to the front; come and see something to put into your lovely long letters to him. And since those other three young men have gone off on a stag party to Bordeaux, we'll organize a dove lunch, as the American girls call it, and go off to Cap Ferret. It's perfectly lovely there. Olwen, where's the Professor? I'm going to beg leave for you. Come along, Miss Walsh----"

There was about Mrs. Cartwright that day an almost schoolgirlish flow of vitality that the other two found it impossible to resist; their own being at a low ebb, they let themselves drift with the current of hers.

The corners of Miss Walsh's mouth ceased to turn quite so definitely downward, and the clouds in Olwen's bright eyes seemed about to disperse. In half an hour they were all ready, and setting out for this trip to Cap Ferret, which lay beyond the _Baissin_, the dunes, and the lighthouse.

In the bright autumn sunlight the little motor-boat buzzed with them across the lagoon that had set such a fairy scene, that night.... But there was a gay wind blowing now, sending the big white clouds rolling across the sky in towering columns like those of the Biscay waves, seen from afar.

"We'll go right down to Biscay, after lunch," planned Mrs. Cartwright, as they landed at the small iron pier above the oyster parks. Then she guided them through the belt of pine woods that lay between the two borders of sandhills, past the lighthouse which they saw every day as a warning finger, but with which they now made acquaintance as the huge tower it was; she led them to the inn where they were to lunch. This was a long white building, its corners rounded and scoured by the flying sands borne on the gales of winter.

"Outside is the best dining-room," said Mrs. Cartwright. "I daresay Madame will think us mad--but it's an Indian summer day today. The Professor told me that you Welsh people call it '_the little summer of the Angels_.' Come along!"