The Disturbing Charm Part 26

There was a short and agonizing pause in which both listened, without hearing it, to the sound of the wheels of a _fiacre_, drawing up outside the door of the hotel.

"Say 'yes,'" repeated young Awdas, more urgently, "or I clear right out."

"_Better_," she forced herself to murmur.

"Better?----And if I go, I won't remember what you did for me that night. I shall try to forget it; d'you hear? I shall try----"

"Don't," she said, very low. "I couldn't forget it if I tried."

"_Ah!_" It broke from him exultantly. "Then you do care! I knew you would, I knew I could make you! The other was rot; I knew you did."

She threw her head back and aside; she made a last struggle. She would have risen.

"No, you don't," he triumphed. "Now say 'yes,' and then perhaps you may get up, darling; _darling_----!"

At the delight of hearing it from his lips she shut her eyes even as a sweetheart of little Olwen's age might have done. It was her moment of ecstasy, poignant and ageless and pure....

A moment only.

There broke into it footsteps and a girl's voice, a charming voice, but of an inflection most un-English.

"Why, yes! Wasn't I expected? I wrote the hotel anyway.... _J'ai ecrit_.... Miss Golden van Huysen.... Oh, pardon me----"

Mrs. Cartwright's eyes had opened upon something that seemed like a sunburst breaking in upon the dim and formal, Frenchily-furnished lounge. A vision it was of gold and colour. Radiance seemed to emanate from it--from her.... For it was just a girl, a blonde and generously-built girl, whose coat, thrown open, showed a crisp light uniform with the Red Cross. Her head, proudly carried, was backed by the hanging lamp that made a glory around it, and Miss Golden van Huysen, self-introduced, might have stood for a symbolical figure of Young America breaking into the War, descending upon the Old Continent with help in her hands.

She moved, and the light fell directly on her face. It had the contours and the bloom of a peach, and under her slouch hat her eyes, large and wonderfully wide apart, shone out with candour and young eagerness for life. Yes, youth, youth! That was the keynote of her. That, and the sweetness of honey, coloured like her hair; the kindliness of milk, white as her skin.

Mrs. Cartwright, with doom at her heart, looked at this young girl. So did Jack Awdas, who had sprung to his feet and off the wicker chair-arm.

The girl frankly returned the glances of the lady sitting back there, and of the boyish English officer who was (as she ingenuously put it to herself) "the loveliest looking young man she'd ever seen."

Jack Awdas did not know that he was staring almost rudely.... Mrs.

Cartwright knew. She also knew what a kiss had been interrupted by that look at another.

And when the bustle of this arrival and of Madame and the _cha.s.seur_ and the "grips" and the Franco-American explanations had died away to the first landing, it was Mrs Cartwright, standing, who spoke.

She spoke quite lightly and with a smile on her lips. She came of soldier people.

"Dear Jack, there's nothing more to be said. I know I'm right. But _you_ needn't go. I'm going instead. I must get back to my boys for half-term.

I shall be off early in the morning, so this is good-bye."

"But----" he protested, in a voice that was not quite that of five minutes before.

"No. That's all. I hope----No, don't come with me. Good night!"

Before he knew, she was gone.

CHAPTER XVII

DROP-SCENE

"There is no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend but he grieveth the less."

Bacon.

Mrs. Cartwright went up to her room, but she did not pack those bags of hers at once.

Instead, she put on her coat, tied a scarf over her head, changed her shoes, and went for a walk.

She knew that she must tire herself out. She had thought she was rather tired already from her tussle with the waves that afternoon, but that wasn't enough. She must be more exhausted before she could sleep for a few hours. She would order them to call her very early in the morning, so that she could be packed and off before any of the other visitors had left their rooms.

She set out, and she couldn't have told anybody in what direction. A path was soft--probably with pine-needles--beneath her feet. Before her eyes there was a striping of light on darkness; still a moon between the trees.

She walked. She could not have said off-hand what she thought about as she swung along. Not many definite thoughts filled her mind. Only a very definite picture of young Awdas's fair eaglet face, looking with startled and pleased surprise into the face of that beautiful girl. One look; the boy had just been taken aback at the sight of a stranger, and such an unusually pretty one. Then and there Claudia Cartwright didn't herself know _why_ she knew that this, the look that did not seem to mean anything, meant ... everything.

It meant that she, the woman at her last love affair who had been within an inch of accepting the proposal of that boy, must begin to pay, already, for her one moment of ecstasy.

The coming of that girl had stopped not one, but all kisses for her.

She knew what was coming between that boy, all awakened and malleable from his first pa.s.sion, and that girl. They were heritors of an age in which Love has quickened his pace to keep up with the double-march of war.

She was resigned. She had foreseen it. Hadn't she said to him, "Wait until you see me beside a real young girl"? It had come upon her rather abruptly, that was all, but she need not really allow herself to suffer....

She whistled a little tune between her teeth as she swung along. She was thinking of nothing, she was just moving quickly and regularly, as a mechanical toy that has been wound up to go for a certain time before the machinery runs down.

So mechanically, so fast she covered the ground. Suddenly a voice called out, "Halt! Who's there? Mrs. Cartwright?"

With a start, she found that she was in the forest, approaching the clearing and the woodcutter's hut. The st.u.r.dy, square-set figure that, coming away from the hut, had encountered her on the moon-dappled path, was that of Captain Ross.

"Hullo!" she returned, brightly. "Have you been cat-calling on Mr.

Brown? Isn't it perfectly lovely? After all, this is the time of day to go for walks, I find."

"Is that so? I thought this was the time of day you sat writing your great worrrks."

"Sometimes; but how did you know?"

"You told me you were sitting up working that last time Awdas had that infairrrnal dream of his," said the Staff-officer. "That was how."

But at this the machinery that had kept Mrs.

Cartwright going so steadily for the last hour or more, broke down without warning. Without warning, she blurted out in a low, unnatural voice, "Oh, Captain Ross! I am----in such trouble."

Her limbs failed her and she would have fallen.

The next moment she found that she was sitting upon a pine-log, with her head upon the solid support of Captain Ross's shoulder, and with his arm thrown very comfortingly about her. She wept, copiously and silently, all her tears; the only tears a man had ever seen Claudia Cartwright shed.