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 beforedinner-time.
"_We've_ had a ripping time!" Mrs. Cartwright said gaily, in answer toan enquiry from Captain Ross; young Jack Awdas, hearing, gave her areproachful glance. But there was no time for reproaches. Madame hadannounced "_On va servir!_" and there was a rush for rooms. But notbefore Awdas, at the door that was next to his own, had murmuredurgently, "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 toMadame's sitting-room, there to have a soul-satisfying "mourn" withMadame over the departure of Gustave, and to pick out of Madame's streamof reminiscences a pearl or so to remember of the boyhood of thatexcellent nephew. Little Olwen, who had overheard Mr. Brown saying,"Look here, Ross, none of your shoving me out of my place at table--evenif I do sleep out, there's no reason why I should be made to sit withthe back of my head towards everybody I want to look at, dashed ifthere is," was eager to run down to the _salle_, and with a glance or agreeting make an excuse for the right young man to be sitting facingher.
Only Mrs. Cartwright took her time and was rather late for dinner. Asshe redressed her hair, still damp from her bathe, and slipped into hertawny-golden tea-gown, the writer's face was intent. She was thinking,thinking hard. Even in moving about her room she kept glancing at acouple of pig-skin bags stowed into a corner. One of them bore the nameof Captain Keith Cartwright, and of his regiment; what service it hadseen since it had first gone out with them to India. She knew what sheought 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 andshoes and sorting her manuscripts. One word to Madame, and a _fiacre_could be obtained that same evening to take the bags, and herself withthem, to the hotel at the Ville d'Hiver, where she had already spent anight on her way here. There she could stay until her passport was madeout for England, and then she could go back to her rooms in town, backto be near her boys at school, and right away from this place ofconflict and too sweet disturbance--away from Jack Awdas, who wanted tosay something to her after dinner.
She knew well what it was. Ever since that moonlight walk he had beenbesieging her--not with words again, but with every glance of his blueeyes, every turn of his head towards her, every husky, beseeching noteof his voice.
Now for a third time he was going to put it into words. She did not knowhow to check him. It was because she wished--she so wished that she neednot.
Again and again already, by night, when she was tossing sleeplessly, byday, when she was talking of other things, she had gone over thequestion.
Marriage----with that boy.
He was not the first, he would not be the last who had adored a womanold enough to be his mother. And she herself was not the first womanwho, past what is considered the age for Love, had received, offered toher as a bouquet, the gathered share of love that could have sufficed ascore of young girls.
Had this been always a wrong and an unlovely thing?
* * * * *
As she slipped on her bangles after washing, Mrs. Cartwright foundherself thinking, with a half-mutinous, half-deprecating little smile,of some of the greatest love affairs of the world. They stood out in thehistory of human kind just as the lighthouse yonder towered above thelow-rising dunes. Their passions blazed white-hot and rosy-red throughthe night of centuries; but were they stories of the loves of immaturewomen?
Antony's Cleopatra--how old was she when she romped in the public streetto show her defiance of Age and Conventions generally?
How old was Ninon, beloved of lads not one, but two generations afterher girlhood?
"I'd never wish for _that_," thought Claudia Cartwright, "but what aboutDiane de Poictiers?"
She mused a moment upon that story, upon those sweetest of love-letterswritten by a young and ardent king to "_Madame ma Mie_." They bore thedates of many years, those letters signed by the cypher which was the"_Lac d'Amour_" for Henri and his Diane--the first Frenchwoman, Mrs.Cartwright reminded herself, to go in for the exotic practice of thecold tub. And she was forty--_forty_ when that affair was in blossom!Her statue as Diana, the bather, Mrs. Cartwright had seen in pictures,and the tall slim Englishwoman's vanity had recognized a familiar pose.
"I _am_ like her," she thought now.
But in the middle of her thought she pulled herself together, tossingaside the towel as she laughed without amusement.
What was the use of it; what? Why dwell on the outstanding Exceptions,of whom the very fame went to prove the relentless rule that a waningwoman and a boy may not find lasting happiness together? These storiesof Cleopatra, Ninon, and Diane were lamentably beside the mark. But thestories of matrons of today who had married their sons' contemporarieshadn't drifted across the writer's experience.
Stories of mistakes recognized almost at once, but too late. Of passionthat died quickly down on the one side, leaving on the other side anunrequited and consuming flame. Of sad-faced, elderly, neglected wivesat home. Of desperate efforts to retain fading attractions; of grotesquemake-up, of golden hair and gaiety, both false. Of the interests ofseparated generations, their claims, their mental outlook, always atwar! Of youth, fettered and fuming, straining towards his kind....
At best they were pathetic, these stories.
At worst they were ugly enough. They justified the contempt in the term"Baby-snatcher!" They established the principle, "A middle-aged womanwho will _marry_ a young boy is no sportswoman."
Now Mrs. Cartwright had always hoped that, with all her faults, shecould never be accused of being unsportsmanlike. Still confident ofthis, she ran downstairs to dinner.
Her lateness only postponed by a little the hour of reckoning.
The flying boy, rather pale but with a smile in his eyes, told her thathe had ordered coffee for her and himself to be brought into the lounge,since all the other people seemed to be drifting into the _salon_after dinner. In the further corner of that lounge, under anartificial-looking palm, he drew up for her a wicker-chair.
"Sit down there!" he ordered her with a new masterfulness in his huskycharming voice. "And listen to me. You'll sit there until you've givenme the answer that I want."
She sat, leaning back, lax and graceful.
He fastened his eyes upon her.
She could not meet them, but she was aware of every line of his face,printed upon her heart. She loved him. She did not deny to herself thatshe had come to love every look and every tone of him; and the factsthat their mental outlook must be different and that her own experience,her wider knowledge must yawn as a gulf between them did not lessen hisattraction for her, as it might have done for another woman. ClaudiaCartwright had often smiled when she heard certain prattlers of her ownsex avow their demand to have "their mentality fed, and their need ofbeing in perfect intellectual sympathy" with the men (sometimes elderlymen) whom they married.
In Mrs. Cartwright, as we know, the sense of physical perfection wasbetter developed ... the worse for her, all the worse for her now.
Jack Awdas, standing over her, was saying, "I can't go on like this, youknow. You've got to have me, or I've got to get away. It's come tothat."
Her heart, it seemed to her, seemed to miss a beat at this, then to beatfaster as she sat there. She shook her head, almost abstractedly, forher thoughts were racing ahead of the words she would have tried toframe. They were slipping from her, those wise and too true arguments towhich she had submitted, alone in her own room and without his eyes uponher, disarming her of all her wisdom. Instinct within her clamoured,"But I l
ove him so! I want him!"
She ought to be upstairs now, she knew, packing those bags for dearlife.
She ground the heel of her slender slipper into the floor of the loungebefore her as she thought of this, and she thought, "Ah, if marriagewere for a year, say! _Then!..._ If I could marry him and die before hebegan to tire--even his mother would not hate me then." Then came thebreath-taking thought, "He will be flying again presently. He may crashagain.... Ah!..." This was unendurable. She thrust it from her to think,"_For a time_ I could make him gloriously happy! Happier than any girlalive has power to do----"
And she thought wildly that there were plenty of girls in their earlytwenties who were older than she; as well as colder, with less gift forPassion. Girls who were narrower in their outlook, girls who were lessgenerous, less sympathetic, less adaptable than she, as his wife, couldbe. There were girls with petty minds and tongues that could say little,jealous, spiteful things about other women. These had nothing but theirignorant youth; did that outweigh all that she had to give? Ah, shecould point to girls still in their teens who were already nearer theend of their powers than she was, even nearer the end of their looks.Was it really better for him to choose a girl? It was her, Claudia, thewoman, that he wanted....
She could surely make of herself another exception to the unpitying rulethat Youth must mate with Youth.
"Say 'yes' to me; say 'yes,'" urged Jack Awdas, and he let himself down,softly, to sit on the wide wicker arm of the chair. She felt that if itwere to save her life, her lips could not now frame the word "no."
There was a short and agonizing pause in which both listened, withouthearing it, to the sound of the wheels of a _fiacre_, drawing up outsidethe door of the hotel.
"Say 'yes,'" repeated young Awdas, more urgently, "or I clear rightout."
"_Better_," she forced herself to murmur.
"Better?----And if I go, I won't remember what you did for me thatnight. 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 youwould, 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 wouldhave risen.
"No, you don't," he triumphed. "Now say 'yes,' and then perhaps you mayget up, darling; _darling_----!"
At the delight of hearing it from his lips she shut her eyes even as asweetheart of little Olwen's age might have done. It was her moment ofecstasy, poignant and ageless and pure....
A moment only.
There broke into it footsteps and a girl's voice, a charming voice, butof an inflection most un-English.
"Why, yes! Wasn't I expected? I wrote the hotel anyway.... _J'aiecrit_.... Miss Golden van Huysen.... Oh, pardon me----"
Mrs. Cartwright's eyes had opened upon something that seemed like asunburst breaking in upon the dim and formal, Frenchily-furnishedlounge. A vision it was of gold and colour. Radiance seemed to emanatefrom it--from her.... For it was just a girl, a blonde andgenerously-built girl, whose coat, thrown open, showed a crisp lightuniform with the Red Cross. Her head, proudly carried, was backed by thehanging lamp that made a glory around it, and Miss Golden van Huysen,self-introduced, might have stood for a symbolical figure of YoungAmerica breaking into the War, descending upon the Old Continent withhelp in her hands.
She moved, and the light fell directly on her face. It had the contoursand the bloom of a peach, and under her slouch hat her eyes, large andwonderfully wide apart, shone out with candour and young eagerness forlife. Yes, youth, youth! That was the keynote of her. That, and thesweetness 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. Sodid 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 toherself) "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 thatlook at another.
And when the bustle of this arrival and of Madame and the _chasseur_ andthe "grips" and the Franco-American explanations had died away to thefirst landing, it was Mrs Cartwright, standing, who spoke.
She spoke quite lightly and with a smile on her lips. She came ofsoldier 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 fiveminutes before.
"No. That's all. I hope----No, don't come with me. Good night!"
Before he knew, she was gone.