The Disturbing Charm Part 49

Ah, the solidity of this square grey house, padded with ancient ivy and roofed with purple slate! Oh, the density of that laurel hedge, screening its lawn from the road that wound up towards the mountains!

Heavens, the ponderous comfort of the furniture; every mahogany "piece,"

every _portiere_, every vast Landseer steel engraving upon the walls seemed to remind Olwen "We were here in your grandmamma's time, and your great-grandmother's and you, little superficial upstart, what right have you to turn up your nose at what was good enough for them?"

Yes; it had taken three reigns to bring these things together; details that dragged the generations behind them as they settled down, heavily, into a permanent, complete and dominant whole, which it would now take an earthquake or a revolution to shift.

But Olwen, as it happened, felt no desire to "turn up her nose." She was enjoying this return to the days of old. It was a rest and a refreshment to her after all her war-time gipsying, after her eating in Soho restaurants, after her coming and going, after that whole life of the bird on the twig. For there is no place like home, the old, established, st.u.r.dy, stolid British home ... when one knows that one is only there on ten days' leave.

Then there were the home-dwellers. Olwen had never before realized how pretty and amusing were her young sisters Peggy and Myfanwy; especially Peggy, in her V.A.D. kit! She had wrested three days' leave from her hospital in the town in order to be with her sister from London; and there were also gathered together on a visit in the old home a selection of cousins--Howel-Joneses, Pritchards, and little Llewella Price--to welcome the wanderer home. Never before had they "made such a fuss of her," or she of them.

Even Auntie Margaret (who was THE Miss Howel-Jones, the head of the household, and a despotic version of the Professor in petticoats), even Auntie Margaret did not seem nearly as "trying" to Olwen as in those pre-War days when the present Honeycomb war-worker was a girl at home.

Why, Olwen had been in the house for two whole days, and Auntie had only been really exasperating once! And even then she had almost immediately afterwards bestowed upon Olwen an exquisite old coral brooch and a bristly kiss. After all, there were no people like one's home-people ... once one wasn't obliged always to live with them.

Yes; Olwen enjoyed them. She enjoyed the accent of the young creature who brought up hot water to her old bedroom (and who was described by Auntie as "no servant, but a colt off the mountains!"). And she enjoyed the forgotten ambrosia of the Welsh b.u.t.ter, and the family tea to which they all sat down about the family table, and the family jokes--all as old as her beloved hills.

There was no news, except of a bazaar in aid of comforts for the town's recruits; that had happened a month since, but it seemed still as important to the family as anything that Olwen could tell them of what had been happening in London. It was only on the Sunday when this function had been described to the last detail by each relation in turn that they left it at last to enquire about what raid; had Olwen seen anything of this?

The question was put to her at tea-time.

Olwen, munching Auntie's hot cakes, told them of the interrupted party and of her delayed journey home.

"In one of those wretchedly draughty trains! I wonder you didn't take your death," was her aunt's aghast comment.

A Pritchard cousin added, "In the dark! Weren't you terrified all alone?"

Olwen explained.

"Oh! _With_ somebody," exclaimed another cousin.

"Sitting with a man from that place of yours.... In khaki, then? No; a _sailor_? Oh, how _lovely_!... How old; twenty-four--five? It must have felt just like being at the Cinema. Olwen, what _did_ he talk about?"

"Asked me to marry him," Olwen replied, tranquil in the a.s.surance that this unembellished truth would never be believed.

A gale of girlish laughter broke out round the table; a clatter of feminine questions.

The Welsh speaking-voice, which normally resembles the coo of the ring-dove (_vide_ a paper on "Timbre" read by a college-friend of Professor Howel-Jones), is capable of rising, in excitement, above the corncrake note of the average Saxon, to the parrot-screech of the Continental. It did so now, as the stay-at-homes cross-examined their wanderer.

"No; but really?"

"Do tell us what sort of a young man he was?"

"Yes; come on, Olwen _fach_. We never see a young man down here; might as well describe to us what one looks like----"

It was at this very moment that the young man who was pa.s.sing the dining-room windows on his way to the front door caught a glimpse of cl.u.s.tered black heads all alike and heard a breaking wave of talk and giggling. This tide rose until it swamped the sound of his ring at the bell.

Presently, without warning, there burst into the dining-room that ap.r.o.ned colt from the mountains who had answered the door.

In an explosive whisper she announced, "Some _gent----tleman_! Some gentleman is in the drawing-room!"

"Who is it?" asked the mistress.

"Some gentleman wanting to see Miss S'Olwen," the little maid hissed on every "S." (A sudden quiet fell upon the party.) "Some _Captain_, or something, he say."

"Of course!" shrilled Olwen's youngest cousin Llewella, in a voice that could (and did) carry easily across the hall into the drawing-room and beyond the lawn outside, "This _must_ be her _sailor_ young man!"

But Olwen (rising from the tea-table with the sudden sensation of having had no tea or any other meal for about a fortnight) knew better. She was the only one at that tea-table who had not been too absorbed in talk to notice the caller pa.s.sing the window. Against the dark green laurel hedge and the lavender mountains beyond she had caught the flash of gayer colour, scarlet on khaki.

_Captain Ross----!_

"He's come," she thought in a whirl of happiest flurry. "What did Golden say!"

Her heart seemed to stand still as she crossed the hall. On the mat she waited for one second. She must look as if absolutely nothing had happened or could happen. Then she opened the heavily-draped door and went into the drawing-room.

Captain Ross had planted himself just where she had expected that he might; he was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the log fire.

That hearthrug was wide and white and fluffy; there was a bra.s.s-edged gla.s.s screen before the fender. The mantelpiece was of white alabaster and hung with looped drapery of peac.o.c.k-blue brocade, l.u.s.trous and pompous and ball-fringed, dating from 1889. Upon the mantelshelf itself there stood under a tall gla.s.s shade an ormolu clock, with figures of nymphs and Cupid. On each side of this gleamed candlesticks with dangling prisms.

There were also china ornaments, a miniature of Margaret Howel-Jones at eighteen and another gla.s.s shade protecting a branch of white coral; the whole reflected in a gilt-framed mirror.

Everything in that drawing-room was in key with that mantelpiece. And into that complete and Victorian harmony there broke the Neo-Georgian note of a girl wearing the little modern serge frock, the pert effective shoes, and the hair-dressing of the instant.

But Captain Ross, turning abruptly did not see the dramatic contradiction of that girl to this room.

What he saw was the girl at last in the background that suited her. Yes; here she was, where she should be. None of your gimcrack hotels or grimy offices or fly-blown, cotton-glove restaurants! A girl like that ought never to leave a place like this. The place into which any decent man instinctively wants to put the sweetest woman he knows----A Nice, Comfortable Home of her Own.

(That the woman invariably longs to be "put" there has never yet been questioned by this type.)

To him every detail of the place seemed in league to "set" her; sweetly, worthily. For the first time he saw her as in a shrine--therefore to be worshipped, yes! worshipped.

But there was nothing of this to be read in Captain Ross's face as he returned her soft-voiced, surprised-sounding greeting. He was positively scowling.

And why was the finest judge of women in Europe scowling like this?

It was because of the unforseen way in which all his plans were going astray. On the way down in the train he'd had everything beautifully planned. He'd intended to tell this little Olwen casually but quite authoritatively that he'd something to say to her, and that "as he was in Wales" he guessed he'd look in and say it right then. (These women had to be handled--firmly.) He thought that a darned good opening ... in the train.

But suddenly that "was in Wales" didn't seem the strong card he'd thought. It seemed, in fact, remarkably weak. He admitted that as he glanced round that immutably Victorian room. It might have done for the Honeycomb, but not here. Set-back Number One.

Next, he must look as if he'd come down here on purpose to see this aggravating chit. Which of course, he had not done. Or at least hadn't meant to. Or, anyway, wouldn't have done if there had been any other way. Captain Ross could explain this position to himself, perfectly. But appearances were all against him.... Set-back Number Two.

For Set-back Number Three, had he not just heard half a sentence (before a door closed), in a shrill girlish voice, about a "_sailor_ young man"?

_d.a.m.n_ young Ellerton!

His anger against the sailor gave the send-off to the very first sentence that he addressed to the girl.

With a forward jerk of his head he brought out the startling abrupt remark, "Look, Miss Howel-Jones, don't you think this has gone on long enough?"