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 manuscripts. 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 passport 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 passions 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 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 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 passion 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-snatcher!" 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 sex 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 Passion. 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."
There was a short and agonizing pause in which both listened, without hearing it, to the sound of the wheels of a fiacre, drawing up outside the door of the hotel.
"Say 'yes,'" repeated young Awdas, more urgently, "or I clear right out."
"Better," she forced herself to murmur.
"Better?——And if I go, I won't remember what you did for me that night. 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 you would, 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 would have risen.
"No, you don't," he triumphed. "Now say 'yes,' and then perhaps you may get up, darling; darling——!"
At the delight of hearing it from his lips she shut her eyes even as a sweetheart of little Olwen's age might have done. It was her moment of ecstasy, poignant and ageless and pure....
A moment only.
There broke into it footsteps and a girl's voice, a charming voice, but of an inflection most un-English.
"Why, yes! Wasn't I expected? I wrote the hotel anyway.... J'ai écrit.... Miss Golden van Huysen.... Oh, pardon me——"
Mrs. Cartwright's eyes had opened upon something that seemed like a sunburst breaking in upon the dim and formal, Frenchily-furnished lounge. A vision it was of gold and colour. Radiance seemed to emanate from it—from her.... For it was just a girl, a blonde and generously-built girl, whose coat, thrown open, showed a crisp light uniform with the Red Cross. Her head, proudly carried, was backed by the hanging lamp that made a glory around it, and Miss Golden van Huysen, self-introduced, might have stood for a symbolical figure of Young America breaking into the War, descending upon the Old Continent with help in her hands.
She moved, and the light fell directly on her face. It had the contours and the bloom of a peach, and under her slouch hat her eyes, large and wonderfully wide apart, shone out with candour and young eagerness for life. Yes, youth, youth! That was the keynote of her. That, and the sweetness 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. So did 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 to herself) "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 that look at another.
And when the bustle of this arrival and of Madame and the chasseur and the "grips" and the Franco-American explanations had died away to the first landing, it was Mrs Cartwright, standing, who spoke.
She spoke quite lightly and with a smile on her lips. She came of soldier 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 five minutes before.
"No. That's all. I hope——No, don't come with me. Good night!"
Before he knew, she was gone.