"Does the wood-pecker flit round the young ferash? Does the grass clothe a new-built wall?Is she under thirty, the woman who holds a boy in her thrall?"Kipling.
"Does the wood-pecker flit round the young ferash? Does the grass 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 thesallefor her to pass 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 gratitude. How natural!
Manners, and gratitude....
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 clingin their own heartsto 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 trespasses 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 reassured 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 passed.
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 hoarse 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. Cartwright, shod in the brown canvassandalettesof the neighbourhood, with lacings that clipped her to mid-calf like thecothurneribbons of a dancer. Before her tramped the high leather boots of the Flying-man; crunch—crunch—crunch, over the gravel and chipped shell. But still the paths that each was treading remained those of the secret labyrinth....
She, behind all the light composure of her manner, was more than disturbed. She was touched down to that mingling of inner tears and inner laughter, which was her very self. He cared for her, then, this charming lad, whose heart so far had known only his own people, only that other lad who had been his observer and his chum. He loved her. There could be no mistaking the tone in which he'd blurted out: "Don't talk to me about other men you've loved; I can't bear it!" Yes; he was hers—just as Keith Cartwright had been hers, and young Rolfe, who was killed on the Frontier, and Rex Mannering in Nineteen-oh-one,andthe man whose sea-blue regard had laughed through such black fringing lashes, and the others. She ought to have known. Here was this boy.... At twenty-two!... She had seen such affairs.... She had watched, not too sympathetically, the mature woman who receives the attentions of her son's contemporaries. Once she had heard a friend of hers, in all the glory of her twenty-four summer, declare, "It's such anelderlyhabit, letting youthsyounger than oneselffetch and carry for one. And oh, Claudia! I don't think you or I will ever have to know the humiliation of loving aboy!" Mrs. Cartwright had lost sight of this friend, who was a year older than herself.
Perhaps the unforseen had happened to her too. Certainly Mrs. Cartwright had never dreamed that this thing would ever happen to herself; to become at her age the object of a lad's first love. It made her feel, at the same time, suddenly old—and suddenly young.
Outwardly unchanged, she let her gaze sweep the flat stretches of sand before her, and then rest upon aparqueusewho waded by, a vivid figure in scarlet and black, carrying a square rope-bottomed oyster-basket.
"Wonderfully picturesque those wide black sunbonnets the women wear," Mrs. Cartwright commented. "Curious to think they're a survival of our occupation of this part of France, all those centuries ago."
"Are they? by Jove," was all that young Awdas replied. "That's interesting."
But for him, too, what he said was as a man talks in his sleep; what he saw about him was less clear than the landscape of a dream. In his heart the boy was awed and exultant. He had told her. It had leapt from his lips, rather. He was conscious of new power within him; something of the feeling that had been his on the morning when he had first gone up on a "solo." Now she knew what he had to say to her—for hewouldsay the rest of it presently. Not yet; not yet....
They pottered about the oyster-park, talking of oyster-culture. They had tea in the town, discussing the various tea-shops of their preference in London and Paris. Then he asked her if she were too tired to walk home and would like to take the little tramway; he knew he ought to ask her that, but he hoped inwardly that she would agree to walk. He breathed again when she protested that she was never tired. They took to the forest-path again, now gilded by the sun's rays, pointing through the pine-trunks; beyond the fringing branches the glimpse of sea and sky had changed from corn-cockle-blue to saffron-yellow. They walked, talking of those other fair woods of France that the War had turned into treeless, blasted wastes, spun over by webs of barbed wire. And then they came to that rise in the ground of the forest where the arbutus bushes seemed to fall back, and whence they had caught the first glimpse of the sea. It was here that he had spoken, on their way out. It was here that, on their way home, silence fell suddenly upon them. As if by tacit consent, they stopped walking. He turned to her.
"No," said Mrs. Cartwright hastily, as if he had said something. "No, no."
"Yes," said Jack Awdas, quietly and steadily, and just as if no time had elapsed between his first hurt "Don't" and this. "I am going to talk to you about it. I must."
"No, no. Please don't," gently and unhappily, from her. "It's better not. There's nothing to be said."
"Oh, isn't there, by Jove!" exclaimed the boy. "There is everything. I must tell you. I——Well, you know now, of course. I do care for you, most tremendously."
Tall woman as she was, he was looking down into her face as he went on quickly, composedly. The intensity of what he felt took from him all shyness.
He said: "I never thought it was in me to care so awfully about anybody. It's all come"—he sketched a gesture with his long arm—"like that! In me! I can't tell you what it's like. When I've heard other fellows talking, I've thought——But I see now it's absolutely true. Only more so. None of them cared as I do. They couldn't. They hadn't met—you."
"Please don't." She pressed her lips together. "I ought not to have let you say as much." She tried to meet his eyes frankly, but that young ardour in them disconcerted her. She looked aside, leant a hand on the hard red bark of the pine nearest to her. "Of course," she concluded (very feebly, as she felt!), "I am so glad you like me, Mr. Awdas.... I hope we shall always be ... great friends...."
"Friends?" echoed the boy. He put back his small head and laughed. "Like you? But I want you to marry me."
She looked at him, at a loss for just the right words.
He persisted, still smiling. "But, of course, you've got to marry me."
Now she gave a little hopeless laugh, glancing about as if to take on to her side the tall old trees, the distant sea, the sunset-clouds. She said, with an attempt to put the conversation on a more natural basis, "You know, you mustn't talk nonsense to me——"
"Why nonsense?" quickly. "This is dead earnest."
She said quietly: "Mr. Awdas, how old are you? Twenty-two, aren't you?"
"Yes; but look here! That's got absolutely nothing to do with this——"
"Everything," said the woman. "You're twenty-two; I am——"
"I don't want to know," he broke in. "You're—you. You've got nothing to do with ages, or age. You're so wonderful. There's nobody in the world like you. I love you," he ended, in a mutter. "I want you to marry me."
There was a lump in Mrs. Cartwright's throat as she said ruefully, "I might be your mother."
He cried out impatiently: "Oh, dash it all! So 'might' Madame Leroux, or anybody else, be my mother! The point is, they don't happen to be. You don't either. You aren't. And you're going to be my wife. Don't you see how I care for you?"
She was struck by the stark simplicity of him. He cared so much, then, that he should not think of its not meaning everything to the person beloved, as well as himself. He was looking down at her not only adoringly, but masterfully. To him this new love was so wonderful that it must needs be omnipotent. Sorry, and touched more deeply that she had dreamed, she sighed as she stood there in the wood and set herself to argue.
She went over them all, the old, the obvious, the stock facts that have proved themselves for centuries, the truths whose lasting light is put out only by the transient fairy glamour of Infatuation.
"You see, this is a passing thing. This happens< to almost every young man once in his life. He looks back and laughs at it."
"... fatal to marry out of one's generation!"
"In a little time you'll know how right I am——"
"... ten years hence you'd look at me, and see I was an old woman. You'd still be a young man. It would be horrible!"
The boy looked at her and smiled as she spoke, and she knew that the words meant nothing to him, the lips that uttered them were everything.
She said, resignedly, "Let's walk on," and they walked on down the narrow path between the thickening clumps of arbutus; this time he led, his head turned over his shoulder to watch her as she followed.
He began again (without alarm, it seemed): "You won't marry me, then?"
She was a little reassured by the cheerfulness in that husky boyish voice. She had flung cold water, then, to some purpose? He was ready to listen to reason.
"My dear boy, my dear child!" she exclaimed, laughing more naturally. "You weren'tbornwhen I'd been living for years and years. I was growing up and married when you were running about that paddock at home in a jersey suit. I'd been round the world when you were going to public school. Marry you? I shouldn't dream for one instant of such a thing. Not for one single instant."
"Just because ofages?" he tossed back over that wide shoulder as they went. "Is that all?"
"Isn't that more than enough?"
"What, just because you've lived in this world more years than I have? Eaten more breakfasts and dinners? Had time to wear out more pairs of shoes?" the boy took up quite gaily. He pushed aside a bush that straggled right across her path, offering his bouquet of white lily-of-the-valley-like flowers, growing on the same bough as the berries of scarlet and orange. Arbutus! She knew she would never see the plant again without being reminded of this hour. To her and to these others here with her it would always mean "that time at Les Pins...."
He broke off a spray, held it towards her. "Look, you're like that," he told her, more softly, and for the first time rather bashfully. "I was thinking so yesterday, in the woods. You may have been grown-up, and—and have known things and all that; that's ripeness and fruit, I suppose.... Yes; but, at the same time, you kept on being ... white flowers, and buds...."
She shook her head, silently refusing the flattery that she knew was meant sincerely.
But she took the spray from his hand, tucked it into her brown coat (tucking in as well an end of Olwen's pink ribbon that had escaped again).
The look of joyous mastery flashed into his eyes. He went on, fondly teasing, "Come to that, I've seen and done more things than you have in all that long, long life you talk so much about. I've beenupfurther, anyway, haven't I?" He tilted his crested head towards the pine-tops. "Andyou'venever crashed down a mile and a half from the clouds; now, have you?"
"Ah——" she said, and checked a little shiver. The sun had set now; it was growing dark under the trees.
"Let's walk faster," said Mrs. Cartwright, hurriedly. "Let's get in. And—we won't talk about all that any more."
He said nothing. His whole heart was filled with the utterly boyish, utterly obstinate Will-to-Get.
"There's a girl wanted there, there's a girl wanted there,And he don't care if she's dark or fair,There's a nice little home that she's wanted to share."Song of the Past.
"There's a girl wanted there, there's a girl wanted there,And he don't care if she's dark or fair,There's a nice little home that she's wanted to share."
Song of the Past.
The scene with which the last chapter closed would have been further undeniable proof to Olwen of the too-potent success of her talisman, had she known of it. But how about the working of the Charm, as it had been mapped out by herself?
As it was, guessing nothing as yet of how it had drawn to her friend, Mrs. Cartwright, the adoration of quite the wrong man, the girl was already in a mood of dissatisfaction. Chiefly, perhaps, because half the day was over, without a word or look for her from Captain Ross. It is true that the young Staff officer had announced the evening before that he guessed he was going to take the following day out in the open. But if her Charm had been strong as she had hoped it, Captain Ross would scarcely have wished to leave the hotel for an entire day while she (Olwen) was in it? Yet, how magic had been its effect in the case of Miss Walsh and her sergeant! They (the fiancés) were now inseparable, rather to the scandal of the French contingent, new to the code of the English betrothed. Olwen scarcely had a word with her friend, except for good night! Well, the unchaperoned Miss Walsh was entirely happy. That was one ray of brightness in the gloom of little Olwen's mood, for even she was now coming round to Mrs. Cartwright's expressed view that it was better to be happy with a quite unsuitable partner than to be bored with one who is apparently "cut out" for one. So much for what the Charm had done for Agatha Walsh.
But what about Olwen herself? What about Mrs. Cartwright? What about little Mr. Brown?... To the girl, in her present impatient frame of mind, there seemed to be absolutely "nothing doing," as Captain Ross would have said.
That very afternoon, when she and her Uncle were closeted together in that bare, shining study-room of his, she had tried to draw a discussion of Mrs. Cartwright into the rewriting of the Professor's article on old Welsh flower-names, but the old man was not to be diverted from his own subject.
"Never mind Mrs. Cartwright's new dress now, Olwenfach," he'd said, indulgently, but firmly. "Clothes, clothes, and stuffs——! Get on with this, now——" And he had laid down close to her typewriter a further page of notes, in his all but indecipherably small handwriting:
"Fox-glove—Bysedd cwn(Hound's fingers).Mullein—Canwyll yr adar(Bird's candle).Cotton-grass—Sidan y waun(Moor silk).Snowdrops—Clych Maban(Baby's bells)...."
"Fox-glove—Bysedd cwn(Hound's fingers).Mullein—Canwyll yr adar(Bird's candle).Cotton-grass—Sidan y waun(Moor silk).Snowdrops—Clych Maban(Baby's bells)...."
Olwen had tapped out a dozen of these names on a fresh sheet of paper, thinking, rebelliously: "Well, I don't see that these are any more important than 'clothes and stuffs' that one's got towear! Certainly not half as important as an awfully nice woman whom Uncle might be marrying all this time. I do call it a waste——" Then, as she pushed the roller of her machine along the carrier again, a more optimistic thought had struck her. "Perhaps he's making up his mind to propose to hernow."
"Perhaps he won't——Good gracious, what handwriting! What's this?
"'Briony—Paderau gatti(Cat's Rosary).'
"Perhaps he won't just say a word to me about Mrs. Cartwright, or how that goldeny jumper suits her, on purpose.He's afraid I might guess!"
Then the optimism had faded again into gloom.... Mechanically she finished her work, stamped the letters, tidied up the table after her Uncle had gone. She ought to write home, she knew. She owed letters to Auntie Margaret, who kept the big rambling house in Carnarvonshire for the family, and to her sisters Peggy and Myfanwy, and to some of the cousins. (The Howel-Jones family was as big and rambling as that old house of theirs.) But Olwen was in no mood for writing any letters of her own. She took out some picture postcards of the place, one showing the edge of the pine-forest silhouetted against the sea, one of theBaissinall a-flutter with the sails of yachts (a flight of giant butterflies) on regatta day, and one of a wave, marbled with foam, about to break on Biscay shore. On these Olwen scribbled messages to her home-people; then she took them up with her Uncle's letters, and ran out of the hotel to post them at the little bureau opposite to where the tramway started for Arcachon. Then, since there was nothing else to do until dinner-time, she turned to ramble in that forest that seemed to fling out its green, deep arms towards human beings clustered in their houses and villas, their hotels, and their chattering groups between its edge and the margin of the sea. That forest seemed to draw them as if it too held at its hidden heart some disturbing Charm, thought Olwen fancifully, as she roamed out westwards, apparently alone, but always in her thoughts accompanied by a sturdy compact form in khaki with scarlet tabs, his right sleeve tucked into his pocket, his gaze confident as the tone of his voice. Only, in her inmost thoughts, that voice was not wont to tease and laugh, and "rag" her, as in everyday life. She put, into the unexpectedly beautiful womanish mouth under that toothbrush moustache, the tone and the words that she would have wished to hear from it ... and one can hazard a guess at the feelings of Captain Ross and of most other young men could they but listen to the dream-language given to the dream-images of themselves by the girls who are interested in them.
Little Olwen's guileless imaginings, for instance, murmured, "Olwen! My sweetheart! My own, sweet, sweet little girl! No, no; I have never cared for any one else in my life. All my life I have been waiting for YOU; the one girl who was made for me. Tell me you've never cared for any one either; ah yes, darling! Tell me. Do tell me. I shan't be able to sleep all tonight unless you do——" Thus the Captain Ross of Olwen's maiden reverie.
"Then," she mused, with her head down and her eyes on the unseen carpet of pine needles, "I'd tease him for half an hour before I did tell him there'd never been anybody,seriously, but him. And then at last—yes, then I'd let him kiss me. Two or three times running, even," decided this abandoned Olwen, as she roamed the forest that might have been Arden, or Eden, or the woods of her native Wales, for all she noticed of it in her daydream.
Into that dream there broke a loud and cheerful shout of "Hullo, hullo, hullo, hullo!"
Olwen jumped on the path, glanced quickly to the right, and then found that she had reached, without knowing that she had come so far, that clearing among the pine-trunks where the paths converged upon the woodcutter's hut.
Upon that place the hand of Change had fallen. Those giant bramble-runners had been thrust aside from the entrance to it; a pile of green canvas camp-kit leant against the log-wall; a khaki coat and a service cap were hung upon the outstretched arm of the nearest tree; and, just within the open doorway, a small figure in shirt-sleeves was standing working. With the end of a bough, used as a maul, he was driving four stumpy stakes at right angles into the pine-needle strewn floor of the hut.
"Harry Tate, in 'Moving House,' that's what this is supposed to represent!" explained Mr. Brown cheerfully, as Olwen came up. "What d'you think of my little grey home in the West? Palatial and desirable family residence, is it not? (Not.) Standing in its own park-like grounds." He dropped the maul. "Allow me——"
He lifted the little green canvas chair out from among the pile of the other things, pulled the four legs of it into position, and set it on an even piece of ground close to the doorway.
"Take a pew, Miss Howel-Jones," said Mr. Brown, and Olwen sat down, laughing. In a whisk the shadowy and adorable companion of her dream had been for the moment banished. She turned to this substantial but unthrilling young man of everyday life.
"Are you really going to live out here?" she asked.
"Got to," said Mr. Brown, with a business-like nod of his bullet-head. He returned to his post just inside the doorway, and went on driving in his stake. She watched him; asked him what those were for?
"Table," he explained between thumps. "They're lending me a table-top from the hotel. (Very decent the old girl was as soon as she realized I wasn't going to do a flit without paying my bill.) These stakes are going to be the four legs, d'you see? Then I stick the festive board on top of 'em. Old Ross is bringing it along presently; he's been lending a hand."
"Oh, has he?" said Olwen, looking round with great interest at the rest of the furniture. "Are those all the things you've had in Camp, I suppose?"
"Things somebody's had in Camp," grinned the little subaltern. "I think——Yes, that is my bucket, with 'Brown' painted on it; but none of the other things seem to be mine. I've snaffled a lot of other fellows' kit. But then, they've snaffled mine—or where is it? The bed's marked 'Capt. Smith,' and the bath 'Robinson'—I'd better paint Crusoe in front o' that, eh? Monarch of all I survey touch."
She watched him as he drove in the last stake; then he turned, put down the clump of wood with which he had been hammering, and began to drag out the light, canvas-covered furniture.
"Shall I help you with that?" suggested the girl, idly, half rising.
He waved her back with his pink hands. "No! No! You sit here and watch me and talk to me. Having a pretty young lady to look on and make things pleasant when you're doing a job of work; what could be nicer?" prattled little Mr. Brown, picking up the camp-bed that, under his short arm, gave him rather the appearance of an ant carrying a twig. "There! I'll have done the lot before Ross comes back with that table-top; I bet he's getting in another drink while he's about it. Talking of drinks, won't you allow me to offer you a little light refreshment? Such as my humble mansion can afford; here you are——"
As he spoke he took his knife out of his pocket and gave a cut at one of those ten-foot bramble-runners that had sprawled before the doorway of the hut. He held it out; it was covered with clusters of those soft, juicy blackberries that grow largest in the shade.
"Try our fresh gathered fruit, at market prices," chattered the London-bred lad; he took the cut end of the prickly runner and stuck it between two logs of the wall, just to Olwen's hand. "There you are, you see. Help yourself, won't you?"
Olwen picked and ate a couple of the sweet cones, black and glossy as her own little hatless head. Then she held out half a dozen on her pink palm to her host. "Won't you have one?"
"Chuck it in," he said, from where he was squatting turning over the things in his hold-all, which was spread out on the ground almost at her feet. "Three shies a penny, Miss! Try your luck——"
He put back his head, opened his large pink mouth. He looked almost like a big bull-pup, to whom the girl was teaching, with lumps of sugar, the trick of "Trust" and "Paid for." Smilingly Olwen took aim with one blackberry after another, missing twice to each one that she dropped into the mouth not so far from her knee; a babyish game enough! But their combined ages scarcely reached forty-two. Their laughter rang pleasantly through the trees, greeting the ears of Captain Ross as he strode up with the light wooden table-top tucked under his left arm.
And it was quite an idyllic little picnic group that met his eyes in that woodland glade of green and russet-brown: the little lady-bird of a girl, black-headed and red-coated, enthroned there on that camp-chair set under the trees, and taking aim from a handful of fruit at the open-mouthed, wholesome-faced boy kneeling before those absurdly small boots of hers.
Perhaps the little slinger of blackberries aimed more successfully, at that moment, than she knew; hitting, as Woman often does, another mark than the one at which she looks.
Perhaps the Authority on Woman was not too pleased to see another man allowed a glance at his (the Authority's) special study, even at a stray page of it?
But it was with quite a genial "good afternoon" that Captain Ross set down the table-top beside the other furniture.
"Well, that's that, Brown," he said.
"Ah, thank you," from the other young officer. "Much obliged, I'm sure. Now, we'll fix this on to here——"
Olwen darted forward to help with the table-top, but the two young men had managed without her.
"That's the ticket. Now, Ross! What about this for a scene in a Canadian lumber camp? Yes; there's water over there, and I've got my old spirit-kettle. Might turn an honest penny, too, by giving teas in the forest. Parties catered for, eh? The Old Bull and Bush touch. Who speaks for the job of the pretty waitress?" with a cheerful grin at Olwen. "What, are you going on, Ross? I thought you'd come to lend a hand at my flit. Don't go. Stop and watch me work, anyway."
"I guess not," said the Staff Officer, with a flash of his splendid teeth, and with the gesture that always tore at Olwen's sympathy, the forward shrug of the shoulder that should have moved his right arm. "I'd just hate to think I was in anybody'sway——" He saluted, without looking at Miss Howel-Jones any more than she was looking at him.
Another moment and his scarlet tabs had ceased to brighten that glade of a French wood, that heart of a Welsh maid.
Poor little Olwen sat there by Mr. Brown's hut, feeling as if she could with her own hands have pulled it down about his ears, just for sheer exasperation. It's true that he, Mr. Brown, was wearing the Charm that her own hand had tucked into his pocket—but that had no power over her here. Here she was, left! Left for the rest of the afternoon, possibly, in the company of a young man whom she didn't care if she never saw again.Hecould talk to her, it seemed;hecould pick blackberries for her;hecould suggest that she would make a pretty waitress.
But the one and only young man for whose attentions and compliments she would have wished—what didhedo? Just chucked down, with a careless word, the table-top that he had been to fetch, and made off without a look or a thought for her, she told herself.
Yet she was wearing, as she always wore, hidden away next her heart, the disturbing Charm!
What was the meaning of that?
But for the engagement which it had already brought about, Olwen would have been forced to the conclusion that it was all a fraud, that Charm.
Couldn't be that for some people it possessed power, for others none at all?
Had it only no effect when it was worn by her, Olwen?
The "no" to this question came almost as she was asking it; but not in the way that the girl had wished.
Little Mr. Brown, having been busy as he chattered, unheeded by her! for the last ten minutes, had now moved into position the whole of his effects—except the canvas chair on which Olwen was sitting. His blue bulging eyes had glanced in her direction several times, as he pulled and shifted and set straight. Now he looked again, and at length.
"I say, you know, you do look top-hole, sitting there like that," he told her, suddenly. "Wish I'd got my little kodak that I had to leave at Southampton after all; I'd take a snap of you, just as you are. Sitting there, as if it were your own little place, and all——"
He paused, still looking at her with his head on one side. He had taken his coat down from the bough, and stood, one arm in a sleeve of it, while he considered Olwen as if from a new point of view.
He said: "It's just what it wants—what any house or cottage or anything wants. The little missus.... You'll be having a house of your own, o' course, one day."
Olwen shook her head. "Never," she said, with all the gloom of a temporary conviction.
"Oh! Come! Don't say that," Mr. Brown besought her, cheerily. "Course you will. All girls say they'll never marry, and all girlsdo, after all. All the pretty——All the ones like you, I'm sure."
"I shan't," persisted Olwen, a trifle cheered however. "I'mnot pretty."
"Oh! Who's fishing for compliments?" laughed Mr. Brown. He jerked the other arm into his coat and began to fasten it. "If you don't mind me saying so, you're the prettiest girl in the place by miles. You are. I'm not the only person in the hotel who thinks so, either."
"Aren't you?" said Olwen, with a lift of her head, and of her heart. "Who——?"
"Why that old boy who keeps the hotel; old Leroux. He said you were 'très jolie' the other day, when you were passing the steps. I said 'wee, wee,très.' You've got such ripping eyes."
"I don't think they're anything," said Olwen, disconsolate again.
"They are," insisted little Mr. Brown, his pink, ordinary face becoming dignified by his sincerity. "And it's not only—not only that you've got a lovely little face. There's—well, I don't know what there is about it."
"A charm, perhaps," suggested Olwen, with would-be irony; but he took up quite gravely: "That's it! Just what I meant. A charm. One sort of feels glad there is the kind of think walking about. It's like the song
'When we was in the trenchesFighting beside the Frenchies,We'd 'a' given all we 'ad for a girl like 'er,Wouldn't we, Bill?Aye!'
'When we was in the trenchesFighting beside the Frenchies,We'd 'a' given all we 'ad for a girl like 'er,Wouldn't we, Bill?Aye!'
Or something of that sort. Really now. Seriously. It is awfully topping to know thereisa girl like you!"
Olwen shook her head again, laughed, deprecated.... Impossible to assert that she was offended at his homage, even from the wrong young man. She listened as the guileless Brown went on to tell her it was a very lucky man for whom she'd be making a little home, some day; and, by Jove, anybody might envy him——
"Very nice of you to say so," murmured Olwen, pink-eared, and ardently wishing that Captain Ross had stayed on to hear this declaration.
The next remark of Mr. Brown's seemed to have nothing to do with it.
"Well, the War can't go on for ever."
"No, I suppose not," said Olwen, uncertainly.
"And I suppose——Well, it oughtn't to be quite as hard for a chap to get some sort of a posish of his own afterwards," said little Mr. Brown, thoughtfully, and as if he were already looking ahead, to a time when he should no longer wear that uniform, that belt that he was fastening as he came and stood nearer to the girl, looking down.
"I mean to say, I'm not going back to any stuffy shop and serving a lot of old trout—I beg their pardons—ladies with two and a half yards of écru insertion, pay at the desk, please. Not much. 'Tisn't the life for me; I know it now. They ought to find something different for me, after this. They've got to. Don't you think so?"
"Oh yes," agreed Olwen, a little vaguely.
"Well! There you are! All sorts of things might happen, with luck, even if it's no good planning 'em out now," took up the cheery boyish voice; and then there was silence for a moment under the pines.
Then lowering the voice, he said: "I say, I'll tell you something. That little mascot I found"—he touched his coat—"that you tucked in there for me, I'll always keep that. Nobody else shall touch it, you bet."
Olwen rose from the chair, putting her hand on the back of it. She was suddenly a little fluttered, as if by some ripple in the atmosphere, set stirring by some small and secret Force. The ripple was setting towards her this time; not from her, as she was wont to feel when she was putting out that childish soul of herself towards another man. But it touched her, the tiny Disturbance.
"Don't you want this chair?" she asked quickly.
Little Mr. Brown put his own hand on the back of it, closing his fingers for one moment over Olwen's—his fingers that had handled laces in a ladies' shop, had handled a rifle later, and, later still, a blood-stained revolver.... Decency and honesty were written on every line of the little fellow's face at that moment; and even if he were of a pattern that everyday England turns out by the thousand—well, so much the better for England.
Quite simply, and as one stating a fact, he said to the girl beside him: "I don't suppose you've ever let any fellow kiss you?"
He himself had no doubt kissed girls in dozens, but he knew now that even to mention the word to this girl was a different thing. It did not need Olwen Howel-Jones's aghast little "What——?" to forbid him to go further than the word.
He took his hand away with a little rueful laugh.
"'Archibald, certainly not!' Eh?Iwouldn't have tried."
"No. Of course not," said Olwen, repressively, but feeling a trifle shaken. Who would have thought of his saying such a thing to her? Who would have dreamt that the Charm would threaten to work to cross-purposes like this? Her small face took an invulnerable look. She swept some bits of blackberry leaves off her skirt, and prepared to turn homewards.
He walked with her to where the trees met the telegraph-posts of the shaded road.
There, as he said good-bye to her, this little young officer added, with a wistfulness: "But I would give anything to!"
"There's that that would be thought upon,I trow, beside the bride.The business of the kitchen's great,For it is fit that men should eat,Nor was it there denied."Sir John Suckling.
"There's that that would be thought upon,I trow, beside the bride.The business of the kitchen's great,For it is fit that men should eat,Nor was it there denied."
Sir John Suckling.
Crowded hours were to follow that quiet afternoon in the forest.
A morning or so afterwards Olwen darted out into the hall, where she had caught a glimpse of the bride-to-be going past in a great hurry.
"Miss Walsh——!"
"Oh, Olwen," said Miss Walsh, stopping breathlessly. "Oh, I do want to talk to you, but I haven't a moment. It's the lunch today, you know, thedéjeuner intimefor all his relations and friends. They've had the cards——"
Olwen nodded; she had sent her "faire part" card home to Wales as a curiosity.
"It's to be down in Madame Leroux's own sitting-room; she says better so than having the party in thesalleafter the hotel visitors have had lunch," explained Miss Walsh, always breathless. "Oh, I feel I must go down and see if I can help her, but it is so difficult to understand when she will talk French so dreadfully fast——"
"Let me come too," entreated Olwen, eyes suddenly alight. "Let me help, do! I can generally make out even her fast French."
"Very well—ifyouask her!"
Madame Leroux was talking faster French that morning than they had ever heard from her before. They found her in the basement, a whole region of the hotel that was unknown ground to Olwen, peopled by a tribe of workers whose sallow faces she had never seen before, and who were flying hither and thither on errands undreamt of on the upper floors. Even so the stoke-hole of a liner is unthought about on its polished decks.
The manageress was in theappartementthat adjoined the kitchen, a domain smaller but pleasanter of aspect than any of the big rooms above, and more comfortable, except for one narrow space that was neither kitchen norappartement. This space between the walls seemed to be a sound magnifier of the rumbling service-lift, the whistles of speaking-tubes, and the hissing and running of every water-pipe in the place. The door into the huge French kitchen stood open, giving a glimpse of marmites, burnished copper pans, crocks, and five-decker cookers; of vegetables piled haystack high, of ramparts of yard-long rolls, of twenty other kinds of provisions.
Beyond the kitchen a second door opened out into thecour, where buckets clanked, a tap splashed, and the whistling of a knife-cleaning machine could be heard. By yet another door Marie and Rosalie were bringing in chairs collected from bedrooms, attics, landings, and any other corner.
"May we both come in?" Miss Walsh asked timidly.
Madame Leroux turned.
"Ah! Enter always, Mademoiselle. It is not to all the world that I permit it—but for the little demoiselle of M. the Professor, but yes, but yes——To help? But certainly, if that gives her pleasure. One would have said that she would have preferred to spend the fine morning with M. le Capitaine in the forest, he with the one arm who admires her already——" Madame's glance was as swift as the dart of a chameleon's tongue after a fly.
She was already dressed for the day, her dark hair dragged up to the top of her head in a fist-shaped knob, secured with combs, and her front locksfrisésabove her mercilessly intelligent face. Over her tightly-fitted gown of blackbrochéandpassementerie, showing a fat white V of neck, a velvet band and a pendant, she had passed an enormous apron of blue-and-white check.
She was looking over her well-covered shoulder with eyes that were everywhere at once, and giving orders in a voice that was as shrill as a whipsaw and as quick as a mill-race.
"Hold! Prop that door open, Rosalie, instead of bumping it each time with the good chair, little careless one; one would say a swing!" (She took breath in a gasp.)
"And those oysters from Monsieur Paul; are they not yet arrived? Do not open them immediately, as last time; and even so, see that you open me but half of them in order that they may keep. And thou, Marcel, take me that mat into the yard instead of brushing me the dust over the vegetables!" (Gasps.) "Bon dieu, one would need twenty eyes——As for these knives, Etienne, have you the intention to grind them to powder rather than find other work? It is then not necessary that they serve us for another day?" (Gasp.) "My faith!... Ah, Mees Ouall she—Agathe——but no, it is not necessary that you help. Go, go and make yourself beautiful for after thedéjeuner, when you are presented to the friends. Make yourself beautiful for Pierre, who shall mount up afterwards to beg you to descend for a little half-hour, like a princess!" (Gasp.) "Eh bien, if you hold to assisting me now, but not in the kitchen, no, no; if you will have the goodness to dispose on the table within theserviettesthat I have already placed in a heap. Also the glasses; they are in those cupboards there; no, not there, Mademoiselle, here, here, here. Arrange them all precisely as in England, at yourchâteau, yes? It is that! It is perfect!" (Gasp.) "And the little demoiselle of the Professor shall set out the cards with the names——But no, no, no, no, no; she does not know the names nor where they sit. Better to place these pots of cyclamen on the window-sill, Mademoiselle, if you please. One would say real flowers, would one not? But two francs." (Gasp.) "Fifty! It is true!Ah, pas ça——" seeing Agatha Walsh, entirely at a loss, picking up from the sofa-corner and unrolling a tricolor flag. "Not that. It should have been interlaced with the other. I was desolated, but one could not obtain in time, the Union Jacques. Flowers only, therefore.Tiens, I have not placed a cloth over the safe——"
She spread over the iron cash-safe a cloth edged and inserted with the lovely pillow-made lace of the neighbourhood, while her nimble French tongue ran ceaselessly on.
Her niece-by-marriage-to-be, helped by Olwen, set to work with all the good will in the world to lay the large round table. From the cupboard drawers indicated by Madame's plump hands they brought a tablecloth, an ornately embroidered table-centre, and napkins of the finest linen, all wedded to that beautiful lace; from the cupboards they took old and exquisite glass, and silver that could not have been bettered at the Grange of Miss Walsh's youth. Olwen noticed that the old-fashioned carved bread-cradle that swung from the ceiling had already been filled with blossomed and berried boughs of the arbutus, patron plant of the place. She thought as Mrs. Cartwright had thought, "I shall always think of arbutus—and here."
The chairs, some of them rush-bottomed, others of carved gilt, were ranged about the table; then Olwen and Agatha Walsh sped out into the yard and returned with the knives that Etienne, the boy in the green drugget apron, had at last polished to his satisfaction.
In the middle of the red-tiled kitchen Madame Leroux still stormed as shrilly as though she alone of all excellent housewives possessed worthless servants.
"Is it not enough that I myself must arise at half-past four today, and it is that I must doallmyself, me, as well as to entertain the friends and the relations of Monsieur, they who are eating their blood with jealousy because he marries himself with an English lady of the high nobility? And why are the boards not placed over the bowls of soup? My faith, it is then thatImust work,Imust arrange,Imust plan,Imust have the eyes everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, while you let the fire die down, female idle ones who do nothing but regard with open mouths and talk in corners and try to eat me theglacésfruits out of the dishes?" (Gasp for breath.) "Take you these immediately, Marie Claire——" she waved towards a score of trussed chickens that looked like a frieze of poultry—"and set them in the pans. And pose you those lids so that the pottage may simmer as it must." She pointed to the vast arched fireplace with the grid running from one end to the other. "Mon Dieu, if this boy here had as many legs as an octopus he could not more expressly place them in my way. That he does at each moment! Is it that I have sent my own children out to receiveles amiseven at Arcachon, to be encumbered by thee? The children? They will feast out here in the yard with the children of the notary and the little cousins; I do not wish that they are the whole time with the grown ones when one talks——"
And she bustled out into thecourto look to the long trestled table there which had been surrounded by a still further variety of chairs.
It was here that Miss Walsh in her halting French asked where was Gustave, where was Monsieur Leroux?
"The men?" Madame gabbled. "Ah, for that, where would they be? Invisibles, so long as there is work to be done," with a half-indulgent laugh. "You will see also, in good time, you English ladies, that which theservice militairedoes for the men! They make their service. They return. They put themselves at their ease. Behold, they are required to do nothing further for the rest of their life. It is we, Mesdemoiselles, we who are accustomed to it; we other French wives. You also, you will see! Ah, hold, the oysters! Now, Etienne, you will dust me once again the seats of all these chairs, I say to you, and with a dry duster, I pray you, not a wet one; dry, dry, dry, dry, dry——"
In this exalting hubbub did Olwen pass the whole morning with her friend until the sallow little Italian waiter came down to announce thatdéjeunerwas served.
They went up. How cool and quiet, it struck them, were those upper reaches of the hotel....
But as they were seeking their places a quick "Oh, come and look!" from Miss Walsh brought Olwen running to the side window. "Oh, here are the people——"
The procession of the Frenchinvitéswas coming down the road from the little tramway terminus. It was solemnly headed by the three little pigtailed Leroux girls, each holding by the hand another child, bare from mid-thigh to ankle, and wearing an adaptation of the sailor suit. After them, in a broken line of twos and ones and threes, came the grown-up people.
First and most resplendent of them appeared the individual whom Olwen rightly guessed to be thenotairefrom Bordeaux. He wore a white bowler hat, a white waistcoat, and he carried in his hands, which he held well out in front of him, a large bouquet tied with tricolour streamers and the Union Jacques which Madame Leroux had desired, and he overshadowed even his rotundendimanchéewife in her purple costume and forward raking hat, who bobbed in his wake. She was escorted by Monsieur Leroux. Next came Monsieur Popinot, the clerk from the passports office, all in black, but carrying Madame Popinot's pink parasol. She, a plump and pretty little woman, carried a year-old baby in a corolla of lace.
Then came a sister of Madame Leroux, as dark, as mercilessly intelligent as the manageress herself, talking eagerly to Pierre Tronchet, effective in his blue and red.
Anotherartilleristeon leave, evidently a comrade from the regiment, walked a pace or so behind them, between two silent young girls; then a trio of stout, bearded old men gesticulating freely, then a lady in another forward raking hat, then a party wearing deepest mourning, but wreathed in smiles, then others ... then again others.... Tronchets, Leroux, ramifications of both families, relatives, friends, and those whom it was intended to dazzle....
Olwen, gazing upon thiscortège, suppressed a wish to think aloud of a rhyme of her childhood: