"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 got _any_ sensible 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 pa.s.sed 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 want _you_, 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. "_You_ must 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. You _are_ a 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 a _real_ girl!"
CHAPTER XIII
WILD-FIRE AND THE CHARM
"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 "_Defense_" 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----"
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 the _Baissin_! 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 pa.s.sing 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 gla.s.s 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.