"The animals went in four by four,Hurray, Hurray!The animals went in four by fourAnd the big hippopotamus stuck in the door."
"The animals went in four by four,Hurray, Hurray!The animals went in four by fourAnd the big hippopotamus stuck in the door."
This last line, she considered, might almost have applied to several of theinvités!
All of them, as they approached the hotel, stiffened, pulled themselves together as if they were going past the saluting point of a review, assumed photographically unnatural expressions, and walked delicately; then they seemed to deflate and hurry as they slipped past the corner to the back entrance to the premises.
"Oh, I'm not a bit hungry," sighed the agitated Miss Walsh as she turned from the window and sat down next to Olwen at the long table. Thedéjeunerwas as perfectly cooked and served as if no subterranean banquet had been in preparation. "Oh, fancy having to be 'shown' to a host of people! Oh, I can't help feeling almost glad that Gustave's father and mother aren't alive! If they had been, you know, he would have had to ask their consent to marry me, even though he is thirty-eight. Oh, it is such a mercy that Madame didn't want me to sit through the whole of lunch."
"Much the best plan!" agreed Mrs. Cartwright from her side of the table.
"Oh, yes; I don't appear till they have to drink my health—oh, but I am so nervous! And do you think I look all right in this, Mrs. Cartwright?... honestly?"
She wore an expensive new dress of prune-colouredglacésilk, ornamented with a kind of lace bib and with rows and rows of little crimson buttons that fastened nothing. Both Mrs. Cartwright and Olwen fibbed valiantly, and had their reward. The loveliest frock in Paris could not have been more becoming to Agatha Walsh than her flush of pleasure.
Thatdéjeunerdownstairs was supposed to beintimeand private; but the distant sounds of it were already becoming audible to the more public part of the hotel.
First a soft but thunderous drumming as of applause upon the table-top was heard.
Then a skirl of laughter, the piercingness of which, near to, could only be guessed at.
Then, booming fragments of a voice that rose above others just as an occasional column of foam spouted higher than those other Biscay rollers on the reef. Then an uninterrupted booming.... Apparently a speech was in progress.
An involuntary and smiling silence seemed to fall upon the luncheon parties in thesalleabove, almost as if they would have felt it impolite to talk through what was going on below. Truly, Miss Walsh was making the hotel one that day—the hotel to which she had only come because of that hat-pin stuck in a guide-book and pricking at random a name on a page!
Then suddenly, the door of thesalle à mangeropened. The blue-and-red apparition of Sergeant Tronchet stood to attention just inside it: darkly flushed, beaming, silent.
(It may here be said that none of the visitors ever had known this swarthy well-set-up French soldier anything but silent. All that most of them had ever heard of his voice had been the murmured "Madame ... Mademoiselle ... Messieurs ..." that accompanied his heel-clicking bows. Only Miss Walsh had ever had any conversation with him. But had not this been to some purpose?)
"Oh, he's come to fetch me," she exclaimed now in a voice that failed. "Good-bye, Olwen dear," she added, as if she never expected to come back alive. "I shall see you and Mrs. Cartwright and the Professor at tea-time——you are all coming tomytea, aren't you?" she finished appealingly.
Then she disappeared, with her peacock-proudfiancé.
"The day has only just begun, my dear child!" declared Mrs. Cartwright to Olwen, rising. "Come to my room and take a rest beforewecome on in the next act. Run up, will you? I'll follow."
Olwen ran up; glad of a breathing space.
That party, three floors and five or six rooms away, did still dominate the whole hotel! She was glad to lie back in Mrs. Cartwright's basket-chair and to draw a long breath. She had nothing to do that afternoon, she thanked goodness....
But Mrs. Cartwright, as soon as she came in, drew a chair up to her writing-table and began to make notes, chuckling from time to time.
"Tell me when the people begin to go," she begged Olwen. "I had to make an errand about the tea, and take a peep in just now, I couldn't miss it.... My dear! The heat! And the din down there! Poor Miss Walsh! How Madame crammed them all in I don't know.... And Monsieur Leroux with his black domino beard and his pouchy eyes,andall those women exactly the same height whether they sit down or stand up...."
She was scribbling sketches of them all to send to her boys....
The noise downstairs rose to sounds of confused singing—Le Chanson des Baisers, then fell at last.
"I think they're all going away now," said Olwen from the balconied window, and Mrs. Cartwright ran to join her and to watch the homeward-faring procession filing by.
First the notary, his white bowler hat a little dinted, appeared round the corner of the hotel. He was arm in arm with Monsieur Popinot, who still carried his wife's pink parasol, and who seemed to have an idea of putting it up over the pair of them as they went by the windows, but was restrained by a gesture, suppressed but fierce, from the notary. His purple-clad wife hustled the children ahead of her; the party in mourning were giggling joyously together, then assumed a gravity.
With the same effect of pompously pulling themselves together with which they had passed the front of the hotel, they all repassed it now.
Even as they turned their backs upon it, the strain was seen to relax again. Up went the pink parasol in the distance.
"Ah, there; there goes Gustave's comrade theartilleriste," commented Mrs. Cartwright. "First at the fight—and last at the feast; yes, he's the last."
Theartilleristeswaggered delightfully, turning to wave a farewell, and obviously caring little whether it were to the front of the hotel or the back....
And then, about seventy yards behind the last of these revellers there went by two other figures.
They were those of Captain Ross and Mr. Awdas, who had been making themselves scarce for the day.
And perhaps it was because Olwen was busy with her own effort not to look at one of them that she did not notice Mrs. Cartwright's swift glance at the other; the flying boy.
As if he felt that glance upon him, Jack Awdas looked up and put a hand to his cap; a smile rippling all over his face.
Olwen would not have read the purpose behind the smile.
"O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,That monthly changes in her circled orb,Lest thy love prove likewise variable."Shakespeare.
"O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,That monthly changes in her circled orb,Lest thy love prove likewise variable."
Shakespeare.
Now let us take the roof off, as is done in fairy stories about other charms.
Let us steal a peep, that is, inside various rooms of that hotel, where this story is laid.
In the basement, first of all, let us cast a glance at theappartementthat had echoed to the feasting of that luncheon party, and had been later the scene of a sedate and ultra-English tea. Nobody there now, except the hotel manageress and her husband. Monsieur Leroux with that black domino beard of his, is dozing in the most capacious chair; Madame is poring over her accounts. Every now and then her eye lights up with a spark from the smouldering fire of pride within her; for who but she has such a right of feeling proud at the end of that day of meals and acclamations (and washing-up?). She thinks of her nephew Gustave's brilliantpartie, and of the bedazzling of all her friends, most especially of the notary's wife, here in this very room. The little close room seems to her once more a-glitter with the glass and the silver and the display.... Only the prune-coloured velvet curtains are tightly drawn before the pots of imitation cyclamen, and there enters no gleam of the light that is bathing the forest and the sea without—light of the waning moon, melting and cool at once, at once disdainful and seductive.
Upstairs in thesalle à mangerthe engaged couple have been dining as guests of the guests. Mrs. Cartwright and the Professor had suggested this, and their proposal was cordially received. The health of thefiancéshad been drunk, and the old French gentleman with the red button-hole has added the toast to the next betrothed from that party there present tonight.
And now Gustave Tronchet and his bride-elect are still moving from group to group in thesalon, and the diffident, old-maidish Englishwoman is transfigured. It astonishes her to think that she could ever have felt that violent shyness so early in the day. She has forgotten how her knees trembled as she faced that perfect zoo of foreigners, all beards and bosoms, come to inspect Mees Ouallshe.
She feels now that she carried it off admirably. She has been amplifying to herself since the ten words of French that she had managed to stammer out then, and by now they appear to her a classic oration. She feels she was born to this kind of thing. On herfiancé'sstout arm she moves about the room like a spoon that is keeping on the stir a pan of hot and incredibly sweet social jam. As Mrs. Cartwright says to herself, "No ordinary English engagement to a man out of her own world could ever have brought the dear good creature these triumphs; let her enjoy them,"——and everybody enjoys seeing Miss Agatha Walsh radiant, while she even more enjoys being so seen.
As for Sergeant Gustave Tronchet, if he were not enjoying it, also, who should be? Accepted,rangé, adored!
He marshals her about fromsalletosalonand lounge, drawing her back as she peeps through the chink of the big hall door at the beckoning moonlight without.
"No, Agathe! You willinrhumeyourself——"
She turns to beam brighter than the moon itself at the comely dark face of the only man who has ever protested whether she took cold or not. He, too, has been studying a speech in the language of the country into which he is marrying.
He brings it out, and the ears of love are quick to understand even his English, even his accent.
"I oueelle trai to you rendaire 'appeee, Agathe!"
"Oh," she breathed, with a little clutch to the blue-sleeved arm. "Oh, but you do, youhave!"
They return to thesalle....
But the assembled visitors cannot spend the whole evening in contemplating the happiness of Miss Walsh and of Gustave Tronchet,serjent d'artillerie.
Other groups begin to make their own arrangements; in one of the bedrooms the Madonna-like French mother and the Brittany nurse are putting to bed Lucien, the little damson-dark boy, who was also at Miss Walsh's tea; he is repeating, with the correct pronunciation of a child to whom all language is new, a little prayer that she has taught him:
"I see the moon and the moon sees me,God bless the moon and God bless me!"
"I see the moon and the moon sees me,God bless the moon and God bless me!"
In another bedroom Olwen Howel-Jones has just run up to get into her big driving-coat; she thinks of going out for a breath of fresh air and of moonlight. Why not? Mrs. Cartwright will probably come if she's asked.
Roof on again here, please. For at this point of the story Mrs. Cartwright was standing just outside thesallewindows beside the dark spiky shape of a cactus; she had put on a pale-hued wrap, and in the puzzling light and shade she appeared gleaming and straight as the flowering rod of the plant. Just as she was looking out to where a few riding lights showed in theBaissin, Jack Awdas strode up beside her.
"Come for a turn down on the sands," he suggested, cheerfully. "It's not cold; it is one perfectly good night for a walk."
Now it is almost easier to take the roof off an hotel and to look down unchecked into its various rooms than it is to unveil and take stock of the contents of a woman's mind with its strata upon strata of confusing elements.
So, for what Mrs. Cartwright was feeling, we will take her word as she told herself that she felt relieved and settled about theaffaireJack Awdas.
She was glad it was all over. The boy had imagined himself in love with her.
A great mercy that he had not, after the manner of some men, allowed himself to dangle and sigh and create an atmosphere in which one did not quite know where one was. He had voiced his absurd and youthful passion at once. He had actually proposed to her—to her who might be his mother. So much the better, as it happened; becausenowshe had been able to say "No" definitely. It had all been definitely settled and tidied up in that wood on the way from the oyster park.
Now, it was finished.
Now, it was quite safe again.
It would be silly to avoid the boy since both of them knew where they were.
Besides, he had had that horrible nightmare. He would have to go flying again. Not even yet were his jangled nerves quite healed, poor child! He ought, he really ought to have some one to look after him, to give a thought to his welfare now and again ... some nice, sensible woman....
Mrs. Cartwright, in thus describing herself to herself, did not for one moment admit that if the boy had already proposed to her in the sunlight, he simply couldn't help himself in the moonlight.
So she answered him lightly and conventionally; she fell into step beside him. They walked.
She was too old for him, as she'd told him. A generation too old! But she was still not too old to walk with him, to listen to him. And ... When is a woman too old to wish she were young enough?
It was brusquely enough that Jack Awdas broke into speech.
"I say," he began, "how old should I have to be, then, before you'd want to marry me?"
She had been looking away across theBaissinwith its twinkling lights, its guardian jewel flashing from white to red. She turned abruptly, dismayed, as one is dismayed when some trouble, dimly foreseen (and defied) descends upon one's head.
Oh dear.... Oh dear.... It was not quite at an end then? She had not yet definitely put a stop to this very young man's folly?
"Oh," she returned. "Oh, but we had agreed, I think, not to talk about ...that, any more...."
"Had we?" he retorted. "You had 'agreed,' perhaps. I hadn't."
"But——Please! There must be no more of it."
"What?" He threw up his head. "We must have it out, you know. We are going to."
"No, no——"
"Yes, I say. Yes. As I was saying——How old should I have to be before you'd want to marry me?"
Mrs. Cartwright gave a little hopeless sort of laugh to herself as she threw upon him that quick glance that seemed to be not looking.
He put on his coat (at her orders), his flyer's coat with the wide collar that made his head seem even smaller and the oval of his face more perfect as it rested against the fur. That young, young face topping the athlete's body that towered above her own, that spring and lilt of his walk had never before made such appeal to the sense of physical beauty that was in her.
Claudia Cartwright thought that in this faculty she brought up the arrears of the countless members of her own sex who would seem to be entirely without it. A woman had once said to her, "I don't find any man much under forty-five worth considering. Youth doesn't appeal to me. I never can see the attraction!" and to Mrs. Cartwright this was exactly as though her friend had boasted, "I am colour-blind! I can't tell one tune from another, either! Also, I never care for flowers."
The boy at her side was beautiful, in the diffused and shifting light, as a young marble Hermes dressed in the trappings of today and come to life to court her. The next twenty years might teach him many, many things—but they must strip from him one by one the charms of which he was all unconscious, as he demanded of her how old he must be to please her.
She should stop him there, she knew. Since he had not seen that it had been the end, she should put the definite end to it; go in.
She should not dally or coquet with this thing.
Instincts that she had thought long dead were lifting their heads within her; too strong to be beaten down at once. For the life of her the woman could not help dallying with that passing moment to which every woman alive cries out within herself, "Ohstay!Thou art so fair——"
Aloud she said (truthfully enough, but in a sense that he did not follow), "I might not want to marry you if youwereolder."
"Why not? Why not? The other day in the wood you said it was my age that you barred," he went on, persistently. "It isn't that you don't likeme, is it?Isit? If you just happened to be my own age, then, you'd take me, wouldn't you?"
Would she? Ah, wouldn't she, she thought, vainly. And again for the life of her she could not keep that subtlest, faintest trace of coquetry out of her voice as she replied, "You seem very sure of that."
"Mustn't I be? Tell me at least.Tellme what you think of me!"
She seemed to catch herself back just in time from uttering follies. "I think you are a dear boy; one of the dearest that I have seen," she said, evenly. "But I know that you're wasting your time with an ageing woman like me."
"A what?" he almost snorted.
She repeated it all the more firmly, perhaps, because she knew that she was looking her youngest in that soft light of the waning moon.
"An ageing woman like me. For I am that. Just think of it, quite sensibly, for a moment. In a little while you would see me getting to be just the same as friends of your mother's, that you're specially nice to and talk to because they are old. Yes! Listen! It's coming. Before you have a line on your face or a grey thread in your hair."
"I shall get as bald as a coot. All flyers will; it's the tight leather caps, here——"
"Nonsense! Ages before that, my hair will be growing grey all over."
"It's quite grey now; absolutely white in the moonlight—silver! And it looks top-hole," he assured her, laughing down at her. "Why, you look wonderful. You always do. You can't talk about the usual sort of women getting old, and pretend you're going to be like that, because you aren't. How could you ever be? You're different."
"Only to you," she sighed, "and only for the moment."
"Moment! I swearIshouldn't ever alter——"
"No? Let's turn." They retraced on the sands the lines of their own footprints; his boot-marks making a contrast with the slim, light prints of the woman's shoes.
"What have you got on your feet?" he asked her presently, almost roughly, stopping to look down. "I never saw anything like the things women go out in. Haven't you gotanysensible boots?... You aren't fit to take care of yourself, as a matter of fact. You've got to let me take care of you."
"My dear boy," she smiled, shaking the head on which the moonlight was spinning those prophetic webs of silver, "all nice men at your age begin to feel that need of taking care of something. A young girl, that's what you ought to be seeing to the shoes of, and looking for wraps for, and all that. Not me, not me. A young girl."
"What young girl?" he demanded mutinously.
Mrs. Cartwright was silent as they passed into the darkness under the wooden jetty. Out into the light again they came, and up the beach, back, in the direction of the hotel piazza, and of the old cannon that stood on its stone plinth at the foot of the stone steps. They reached the cannon, and still she had not spoken.
She was thinking, hard.
A young girl, she had said; and she could think without "minding" it in the least, that the best thing this lad of twenty-two could do would be to fall in love with a young girl. She had thought so several times lately. It was odd, however, that she always thought of this solution as "a" young girl, not any particular one. Not little Olwen Howel-Jones, for instance; oh, no! Nor her (Mrs. Cartwright's) young niece Stella, not any of the Mabels or Ethels or Dorothys that she knew at home, and to whom she might have introduced the boy. None of these could she think of for one instant in connection with Jack Awdas. Yet, one of these days, some lucky girl must be responsible for the happiness of all his days (not just of one glamorous afternoon in the forest) and all his nights (not just of one night when the power of darkness had been kept at bay, and when he had fallen at last asleep "as one whom his mother comforteth"). Yes, later on, there must be "a" young girl for him....
He stopped by the cannon.
"Don't go in. Just a little minute," he coaxed, softly. "I can't talk to you in there."
"It's no use talking," murmured Mrs. Cartwright.
But she did pause.
And, as he sat down on the body of that obsolete gun, and then, unfastening his thick coat, spread a flap of it out, she did yield so far as to sit down, in her pale wrap, on that corner of his coat beside him.
He leant an arm on the cannon behind her. Both looked in silence over the lagoon, towards the reef.
White, red; white, red—flashed the warning light.
She felt herself at the beginning of a conflict that must tear her this way and that; but his mind was single and set. He was just blind, obstinate, and keen.
He said, "I told you that night when you sat up with me what I thought of girls. I don't want 'em. I wantyou, and you're all I want; or ever shall. I can swear to that. Oh, I know myself! I can swear to it."
The arm behind her trembled a little with his earnestness.
For one mad moment Mrs. Cartwright admitted to herself that if she could be twenty-two again for one year, she would buy that year with the rest of the time that she had to live. Ah, to be twenty-two! To let that hard boyish arm close round her, clasp her, crush her! To turn, with lips and eyes aglow, to turn to him as she felt herself drawn to do—drawn, driven——
But because she felt thus she kept around herself that invisible, intangible armour of refusal which is every woman's at need and which no outside power can pierce. She did not need to move one half-inch away from that corner of his coat on which she sat. Yet ... Yet she could hardly believe that he did not guess at the growing disturbance in the heart that beat not so far, after all, from his own.
Appealingly he broke out. "Youmust marry me. I don't know why on earth you want to talk about other girls to me!"
"'Other' girls——!"
"Yes. You're just a girl to me. Youarea girl, yourself. I can't see you as anything but a girl!"
She made a little gesture with her long arms, lithe and elastic still as when she was a schoolgirl, only more rounding in modelling; she pressed a hand to her hair, still brown and thickly growing. She turned away the face that showed lines brought by years of worry, of concentration upon her work; ah, they were there even in the moonlight and even though she tended her skin as prettier women often neglect to do. She could feel that in every inch and ounce of him this boy was alert and conscious of her nearness, of her suppleness of body, of that faint scent of rose, kuss-kuss and orris that clung about her.
It couldn't be. It mustn't be.
Lightly as little Olwen could have sprung up, Mrs. Cartwright sprang up from her seat upon the muzzled cannon and said quickly, "I am going in."
As she set her foot upon the first step of the piazza, she turned to young Jack Awdas with what she told herself would be, definitely, her last word upon the subject. Her little laugh was whimsical and mirthless as she said it.
"You think you see me as a girl? Ah! Wait until you see me beside arealgirl!"
"A light that shifts, a glare that drifts,Rekindling thus and thus."Kipling.
"A light that shifts, a glare that drifts,Rekindling thus and thus."
Kipling.
A little earlier, on that same evening, the disturbing Charm had set to work in other directions.
Little Mr. Brown, who had taken his dinner as usual at the hotel, was lingering on the terrace on the other side of the building from the piazza. He was smoking a cigarette, which the "Défense" notices would forbid him at every turn on the forest; but, apart from this, it was not to be wondered at that the gregarious little Londoner was in no hurry to get back to that sylvan shanty of his. The contrast, after that evening, would have been as great as that between a chandeliered ballroom and a cave.
Oh, the loneliness of that hut at night! His cheerful urban soul got fairly fed-up, as he would express it, with all that wind-sighing-in-the-pine-tops business. Of course, as he'd have told you, the little old hut was good enough for lolling outside of with a book, or for writing his letters in of a morning. If only they'd allow him to smoke there he would be quite fond of the dashed little dug-out by now, but he didn't pretend to find it a very attractive spot of an evening.
Even of an evening, perhaps, it wouldn't have been so dusty if he'd had somebody with him. With his cigarette between his teeth he found himself humming a song of seven years back:
"It's all right if there's a girl there,That's the place where I'd like——"
"It's all right if there's a girl there,That's the place where I'd like——"
At that moment Olwen Howel-Jones, her slim shape buried in a big driving-coat, appeared upon the terrace.
He approached her joyously.
"Going for a little stroll round the houses, Miss Olwen?"
Olwen shrank within herself. She did not want any more of the obvious admiration of this quite nice boy; it had dismayed her to find that in shooting at a star (Captain Ross) she had hit a blackberry-bush (little Mr. Brown). After that declaration of his in the wood she had felt almost inclined to tear that misleading Charm she wore from its ribbon and to toss it down the wind into theBaissin! However, she could not be rude to him just because he didn't happen to be somebody else. Hesitatingly she replied that she had thought of going for a little walk with Mrs. Cartwright, who seemed to have disappeared.
(She, as we know, was at the moment pacing the sands beside Jack Awdas.)
"Ah, you're at a loose end, then, are you," returned Mr. Brown, cheerfully. "Well, if I might have the pleasure——?"
Before Olwen could either grant or refuse "the pleasure," there stepped out on to the terrace Captain Ross, who with a note of some purpose in his "good evening," took up his position on the other side of the girl.
Now, all through that thrilling day, something (heard quite at the beginning of it) had been humming in Olwen's heart like a wind-harp that responds to every passing breath. It was that something let fall by Madame Leroux, and it had tossed Olwen far too high up into the rosy clouds to take more than a quite superficial notice of the subsequent events of that rousing day. She had helped Miss Walsh, had listened and watched with Mrs. Cartwright, had drunk healths—but all the time she had been secretly hearing, over and over again, one lightly-uttered remark.
"Monsieur le Capitaine, he with one arm, who admires Mademoiselle already——"
Madame had thought that! There must be truth in it. The Charm was working and not only in the wrong direction. It was true that Captain Ross had talked to Olwen as if she were a little girl; he had avoided her in the forest when he was carrying that table-top for Mr. Brown, and he had blackened this evening for her by taking not the smallest notice of her at dinner; he hadn't even come up to touch his glass to hers when the toast had been proposed to the next engaged person for that hotel. To set off against all this, Madame Leroux (that piercingly acute Frenchwoman) had given it as her opinion that he admired Mademoiselle.
Now he joined her and Mr. Brown on the terrace.
His coming had a curious effect. Olwen became filled with apparent animation and delight in the company of little Mr. Brown. This was not deliberate coquetry, but pure instinct. The kindest-hearted girl in the world, the most kernel-sweet maid never hesitates before one form of feminine cruelty—to make use of the admirer for whom she does not care in order to spur the man she loves. It is not an admirable instinct. 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 balustrade, 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 'brightwater is my drink from the crystal spring.' Can you make anything out of this tangle about allowances, Ross?"
Captain Ross was apparentlynotthe 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.... Cox's do make mistakes; ask anybody. Anybody!"
Olwen agreed that Cox'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. "Nobody 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 phosphorescence? 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 massive old head the summit of Mynedd Mawr in a snowy December. "For you to take your death of cold, Olwenfach, 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, Olwenfach. 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 naïvely 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 phosphorescence 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 bumped 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."
"Forme?"
"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 theBaissinfrom 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 phosphorescence 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 butter-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.
Captain Ross, turned a little sideways on the cushions of the skiff, attempted, by looking the girl full in the face, to make the girl look straight back at him. Not a successful method. Olwen's soft bright glance slid away from him even as the phosphorescence slid away from the oars.
Curtly he demanded, "Youdolike candy, after all?"
"I don't call it 'candy.' That's American, or Canadian," Olwen said with that indifference which was her only idea of Love's camouflage. "I say, 'chocolate,' or 'sweets.'"
"Is that so?"
"Yes," said Olwen, looking now at the box that was, as she knew, to become her most precious and inseparable treasure, her first gift—from Him!
As she sat holding it, backed by luminous sky and luminous sea, the little slim Pandora with her casket, he too looked at it between her hands; touched the bow of it.
"That'll do for a hair-ribbon for you, I guess," he remarked.
All that Olwen could think of to say was "I don't ever wear any ribbons."
"Is that so?" retorted Captain Ross maliciously. "Then what's that little pink tie-thing you've gotten coming out over your coat-collar at the back?"
Precipitately, Olwen's hand went up to the ribbon that was sewn to her Charm, and that, according to the mysterious and osmotic nature of ribbons, had let an end work up and out again. She tucked it in, with the eyes of the two young men upon her little dark, ducking head, and the small hand white in the moonlight.
That moonlight flashed too on the line of Captain Ross's fine teeth. A great alteration had suddenly come over his dour mood. He had two reasons for laughing good-humouredly. One, because he had just given a welcome present (event that always adds to one's good will towards the receiver), and two, because he had scored off the little chit now, with her ribbon! Ha!
His bad temper had vanished as her pretty confusion appeared. Again she dipped her fingers into that gleaming wake; she shook them, dried them against the thick skirt of her coat.
"You've gotten your hands cold now," said Captain Ross, in a pleased tone, and his left hand caught hold of the fingers of her little chilled right hand as if to verify the fact.
His own was a short and rather stumpy hand, Olwen had often noticed, with beautifully kept nails and with the cushions of the palm developed and muscular from the double share of work that was put upon it; generally she had seen it held half-closed above the watch-bracelet on a sturdy wrist. She had never shaken hands with him....
She thought he meant only to touch her fingers and to let them go. But he held them. He held the little soft fingers, in the shadow of her loose cuff and under a fold of her thick coat. They lay, firmly tucked into that clever magnetic left hand of the soldier who had only that one hand to do everything with.
Olwen, a prisoner enraptured with her chain, sat silent and still. She thought, "I suppose I ought to take my hand away. Oh, need I? No; I can't. He's only holding it to warm it, perhaps. And then if I took it away he might think I thought he thought he wasreallyholding it!"
She sat in the boat that glided through that fairy mere of lambert waves, shimmering with green. Little shivers seemed to start in her elapsed hand and to run up her arm quick as wildfire, and spreading like wildfire through the whole of her slight frame. Yet she was now, as she had promised the Professor that she would be, "as warm as warm." Once she moved her hand a little in its prison, but that was only as a bird might stir and nestle in its cosy haunt. The man's clasp tightened a trifle, but she had made no effort to take away the hand that he was describing to himself as "a little bit of velvet."
As she assured herself some time afterwards, "Well, howcouldI? How can you possibly take your hand away from a man's who's only got one arm to hold you with?"
The boat sped on ... and the thrills that trembled through the girl did not, surely, leave the man unstirred.
"Well, what about it, Ross?" broke in the making-the-best-of-it voice of little Mr. Brown, resting at last on his oars. "What about another of those chocolates?"
With one of his quickest movements Captain Ross's hand left the shadow of Olwen's cuff and grabbed the biggest chocolate walnut out of the box. He crammed it into the other young man's mouth as if it were a gag.
Then, unseen, his hand sought the girl's again, found it, held it close.
The boat sped on through the whispering wildfire....