The Disturbing Charm Part 19

But the a.s.sembled 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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, G.o.d bless the moon and G.o.d 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 the _salle_ windows 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 the _Baissin_, 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 the _affaire_ Jack 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 pa.s.sion at once. He had actually proposed to her--to her who might be his mother. So much the better, as it happened; because _now_ she 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 the _Baissin_ with its twinkling lights, its guardian jewel flas.h.i.+ng 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 s.e.x 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 pa.s.sing moment to which every woman alive cries out within herself, "Oh _stay_! _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 you _were_ older."

"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 like _me_, is it? _Is_ it? 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. _Tell_ me 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 a.s.sured 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 swear _I_ shouldn'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.