Part 25 (1/2)
Olwen watched; anxious. But Claudia Cartwright was not to be caught in and swept away; not she. It was something else that was to be so lost; unseen by Olwen, unthought about at all.
From where the bather's garments lay in a soft heap under a smooth heavy stone that she had set down to keep them from blowing away, there disentangled itself a ribbon that she had worn about her neck and that she had untied, carelessly, just before she ran down to plunge into the sea.
It blew along the sands above the scatter of sh.e.l.ls.
It blew along, fast and faster, the pink thread holding that feather-light Charm that the wind had swept away.
CHAPTER XVI
THE COUNTER-CHARM
”Too old, by Heaven; let still the woman take An elder than herself; so wears she to him, So sways she level in her husband's heart.”
Shakespeare.
The two parties (those of the stag gathering and the dove lunch) returned to the hotel at almost the same moment, just before dinner-time.
”_We've_ had a ripping time!” Mrs. Cartwright said gaily, in answer to an enquiry from Captain Ross; young Jack Awdas, hearing, gave her a reproachful glance. But there was no time for reproaches. Madame had announced ”_On va servir!_” and there was a rush for rooms. But not before Awdas, at the door that was next to his own, had murmured urgently, ”I want to talk to you afterwards, there's something that I _must_ say to you. Come down quickly, won't you?”
The others tore through their dressing. Miss Walsh wanted to retire to Madame's sitting-room, there to have a soul-satisfying ”mourn” with Madame over the departure of Gustave, and to pick out of Madame's stream of reminiscences a pearl or so to remember of the boyhood of that excellent nephew. Little Olwen, who had overheard Mr. Brown saying, ”Look here, Ross, none of your shoving me out of my place at table--even if I do sleep out, there's no reason why I should be made to sit with the back of my head towards everybody I want to look at, dashed if there is,” was eager to run down to the _salle_, and with a glance or a greeting make an excuse for the right young man to be sitting facing her.
Only Mrs. Cartwright took her time and was rather late for dinner. As she redressed her hair, still damp from her bathe, and slipped into her tawny-golden tea-gown, the writer's face was intent. She was thinking, thinking hard. Even in moving about her room she kept glancing at a couple of pig-skin bags stowed into a corner. One of them bore the name of Captain Keith Cartwright, and of his regiment; what service it had seen since it had first gone out with them to India. She knew what she ought to be doing with those bags at this moment.
Packing them up, to go.
Yes, she ought to be folding her skirts and wrapping up her boots and shoes and sorting her ma.n.u.scripts. One word to Madame, and a _fiacre_ could be obtained that same evening to take the bags, and herself with them, to the hotel at the Ville d'Hiver, where she had already spent a night on her way here. There she could stay until her pa.s.sport was made out for England, and then she could go back to her rooms in town, back to be near her boys at school, and right away from this place of conflict and too sweet disturbance--away from Jack Awdas, who wanted to say something to her after dinner.
She knew well what it was. Ever since that moonlight walk he had been besieging her--not with words again, but with every glance of his blue eyes, every turn of his head towards her, every husky, beseeching note of his voice.
Now for a third time he was going to put it into words. She did not know how to check him. It was because she wished--she so wished that she need not.
Again and again already, by night, when she was tossing sleeplessly, by day, when she was talking of other things, she had gone over the question.
Marriage----with that boy.
He was not the first, he would not be the last who had adored a woman old enough to be his mother. And she herself was not the first woman who, past what is considered the age for Love, had received, offered to her as a bouquet, the gathered share of love that could have sufficed a score of young girls.
Had this been always a wrong and an unlovely thing?
As she slipped on her bangles after was.h.i.+ng, Mrs. Cartwright found herself thinking, with a half-mutinous, half-deprecating little smile, of some of the greatest love affairs of the world. They stood out in the history of human kind just as the lighthouse yonder towered above the low-rising dunes. Their pa.s.sions blazed white-hot and rosy-red through the night of centuries; but were they stories of the loves of immature women?
Antony's Cleopatra--how old was she when she romped in the public street to show her defiance of Age and Conventions generally?
How old was Ninon, beloved of lads not one, but two generations after her girlhood?
”I'd never wish for _that_,” thought Claudia Cartwright, ”but what about Diane de Poictiers?”
She mused a moment upon that story, upon those sweetest of love-letters written by a young and ardent king to ”_Madame ma Mie_.” They bore the dates of many years, those letters signed by the cypher which was the ”_Lac d'Amour_” for Henri and his Diane--the first Frenchwoman, Mrs.