The Disturbing Charm Part 22

Captain Ross, turned a little sideways on the cus.h.i.+ons 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 phosph.o.r.escence slid away from the oars.

Curtly he demanded, "You _do_ like 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 cus.h.i.+ons 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 st.u.r.dy 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 was _really_ holding it!"

She sat in the boat that glided through that fairy mere of lambert waves, s.h.i.+mmering with green. Little s.h.i.+vers 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 a.s.sured herself some time afterwards, "Well, how _could_ I? 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....

CHAPTER XIV

CLOUDS UPON THE CHARM

"The burden of bright colours. Thou shalt see Gold tarnished, and the grey above the green."

Swinburne.

After an evening of ecstasy such as Olwen had lived through upon those iridescent waves, what could the girl expect?

It is one of Fate's harshest rules that in one way or another we pay for our ecstasies. The more golden the moment the more dull and clouded must seem the hours that follow: and that is just because we have seen that magic green s.h.i.+mmer on the breaker's crest that the grey of these smooth waters looks to us so leaden. Ah, better to know the sadness of this than never to have set keel in any but the quiet waters! To have no reckoning to pay because no ecstasy has been ours to enjoy is surely the bitterest price that can be demanded of us.... But Olwen was too young to recognize this.

So, when the next day she emerged bit by bit from her dream, she was sore and resentful to find all life at its flattest.

To begin with (and, indeed, to go on with; for this was the whole leaven of discontent), Captain Ross encountered her as if there had been no magic voyage, no hand clasped in hand, no wildfire, no silent thrills between them. "Ah, good morrrrning, Miss Howel-Jones. Another beautiful day----"

Beautiful, indeed.... Olwen felt as if by rights the sun should have gone out and the rains should have come to weep over the lagoon. As a matter of fact the weather remained radiant. Her idol's easy, friendly manner had dealt her a blow that stunned her into a torper of low spirits, and there seemed n.o.body to give her a helping hand out of it.

Mrs. Cartwright, usually so sympathetic and interesting, talked to her (Olwen) as if her thoughts were far, far away: with her serial-people, the girl supposed vexedly, or with those boys of hers at school.

Young Mr. Awdas--well, he never talked to Olwen. An apathetic young man, she considered him. All flyers were interesting from their very job--otherwise _how_ uninteresting was Mr. Awdas! n.o.body but Mrs.

Cartwright (who was so kind), would bother to draw him out, Olwen thought.

Then Agatha Walsh--impossible to talk to _her_ today: her Sergeant Gustave Tronchet's leave was up, and he was to depart to join his battery that evening. They could not be married until his next leave.

Poor Agatha was paying too for her golden moments.

Mr. Brown--well, as for Mr. Brown (who had, after all, done all the work in that boat the night before), Olwen felt that she could have slapped him. Upon Mr. Brown's well-meaning bullet head she felt herself pouring the resentment that she might have reserved for Captain Ross and his forgetfulness, his insensibility. Silly little Mr. Brown! Why on earth couldn't he run away and attract somebody (hadn't Olwen given him a talisman for that very purpose?) instead of hanging about trying to talk to somebody who was already distracted enough as it was, because her own talisman seemed sometimes so potent, sometimes so useless? That it should have allured Mr. Brown into being sentimental about her seemed the last straw! (to Olwen.)

But it wasn't. For it was Professor Howel-Jones, it was her Uncle himself who contributed to his niece's burden, on this day of depression, what was really the last straw.

It happened as Olwen brought to him, with a little air of triumph, the typed copy and the duplicate of the last section of the last chapter of his book on "Agarics."

"So that's finished," she said.

"That's finished," agreed the Professor, his brown gaze running over the sheets. "Olwen, I've done well here. This has been an excellent place for work; excellent." He laid the copy down on that chaotic work-table of his, and added, with cheerfulness, "Well! There's nothing to keep us here any longer, now."

This Olwen did not take in at once. "Nothing to keep us, Uncle?"

"Only the pa.s.sports to be _vise'd_ and made out for Paris," returned the old man. "I want to stay a night or so in Paris before I go on to London."

A great blankness fell upon Olwen's small face. "The pa.s.sports," she repeated. "Paris!!! You mean you want us to leave quite soon?"

The Professor's head was bent over his work-table. "A couple of days, my dear, I suppose. You can be packed up and all that by then. You are broken in by now, aren't you, to your packing up and getting on without much warning?"

But this had taken Olwen without any warning, it appeared.

She stood there as if frozen, and said, "Away from here!" and in her heart exclaimed, "Away from _him_!" She stood aghast, an image of all the maids in love who have ever been sentenced to banishment from the presence of the beloved. She had put away from her up to now all thought of such a dreadful thing happening. Simply, she could not have imagined it. Going away from the hotel in the pine forest, while he still was left in it! Going away, before he had ever said to her a word that counted? Going away--with that Charm unproved?