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 washing, 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.

Cartwright reminded herself, to go in for the exotic practice of the cold 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, tossing aside the towel as she laughed without amus.e.m.e.nt.

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 waning woman and a boy may not find lasting happiness together? These stories of Cleopatra, Ninon, and Diane were lamentably beside the mark. But the stories of matrons of today who had married their sons' contemporaries hadn't drifted across the writer's experience.

Stories of mistakes recognized almost at once, but too late. Of pa.s.sion that died quickly down on the one side, leaving on the other side an unrequited and consuming flame. Of sad-faced, elderly, neglected wives at home. Of desperate efforts to retain fading attractions; of grotesque make-up, of golden hair and gaiety, both false. Of the interests of separated generations, their claims, their mental outlook, always at war! 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-s.n.a.t.c.her!" They established the principle, "A middle-aged woman who will _marry_ a young boy is no sportswoman."

Now Mrs. Cartwright had always hoped that, with all her faults, she could never be accused of being unsportsmanlike. Still confident of this, 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 that he 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 an artificial-looking palm, he drew up for her a wicker-chair.

"Sit down there!" he ordered her with a new masterfulness in his husky charming voice. "And listen to me. You'll sit there until you've given me 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 that she had come to love every look and every tone of him; and the facts that their mental outlook must be different and that her own experience, her wider knowledge must yawn as a gulf between them did not lessen his attraction for her, as it might have done for another woman. Claudia Cartwright had often smiled when she heard certain prattlers of her own s.e.x avow their demand to have "their mentality fed, and their need of being in perfect intellectual sympathy" with the men (sometimes elderly men) whom they married.

In Mrs. Cartwright, as we know, the sense of physical perfection was better 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, you know. You've got to have me, or I've got to get away. It's come to that."

Her heart, it seemed to her, seemed to miss a beat at this, then to beat faster as she sat there. She shook her head, almost abstractedly, for her thoughts were racing ahead of the words she would have tried to frame. They were slipping from her, those wise and too true arguments to which she had submitted, alone in her own room and without his eyes upon her, disarming her of all her wisdom. Instinct within her clamoured, "But I love him so! I want him!"

She ought to be upstairs now, she knew, packing those bags for dear life.

She ground the heel of her slender slipper into the floor of the lounge before her as she thought of this, and she thought, "Ah, if marriage were for a year, say! _Then!..._ If I could marry him and die before he began to tire--even his mother would not hate me then." Then came the breath-taking thought, "He will be flying again presently. He may crash again.... Ah!..." This was unendurable. She thrust it from her to think, "_For a time_ I could make him gloriously happy! Happier than any girl alive has power to do----"

And she thought wildly that there were plenty of girls in their early twenties who were older than she; as well as colder, with less gift for Pa.s.sion. Girls who were narrower in their outlook, girls who were less generous, less sympathetic, less adaptable than she, as his wife, could be. There were girls with petty minds and tongues that could say little, jealous, spiteful things about other women. These had nothing but their ignorant youth; did that outweigh all that she had to give? Ah, she could point to girls still in their teens who were already nearer the end 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, the woman, that he wanted....

She could surely make of herself another exception to the unpitying rule that 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 it were to save her life, her lips could not now frame the word "no."