The Disturbing Charm Part 14

Cartwright, shod in the brown canvas _sandalettes_ of the neighbourhood, with lacings that clipped her to mid-calf like the _cothurne_ ribbons of a dancer. Before her tramped the high leather boots of the Flying-man; crunch--crunch--crunch, over the gravel and chipped sh.e.l.l. 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, _and_ the 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 an _elderly_ habit, letting youths _younger than oneself_ fetch and carry for one. And oh, Claudia! I don't think you or I will ever have to know the humiliation of loving a _boy_!" 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 a _parqueuse_ who 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 he _would_ say 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-c.o.c.kle-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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sing 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 rea.s.sured 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't _born_ when 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 of _ages_?" 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 been _up_ further, anyway, haven't I?" He tilted his crested head towards the pine-tops.

"And _you've_ never crashed down a mile and a half from the clouds; now, have you?"