The Way of Ambition

by Robert Hichens

Although she was quite, quite certain that neither her mother nor Claude Heath would discover what had been done with Halton's assistance, she was nevertheless sufficiently uncertain to feel a tremor as she put her hand on the drawing-room door, and it was a tremor in which a sense of shame had a part.

Claude Heath was in the room with Mrs. Mansfield. As Charmian looked at him getting quickly up from the sofa where he had been sitting he seemed to her a stranger. Was this really the man who had made her suffer, weep, confide in Susan Fleet, in Algeria? Had pink roses and dust, far-off and near sounds, movements and stillnesses, and that strange little island spoken to her of him, prophesied to her about him? She had a sense of banality, of disillusion, as if all that had been in her own brain only, almost crazily conceived without any action of events to prompt it.

But when she met his eyes the disagreeable sensation dropped away. For his eyes searched her in a way that made her feel suddenly important. He was looking for Africa, but she did not know it.

Although he did not see what Charmian had done to her face, he noticed change in her. She seemed to him more of a personage than she had seemed before she went away. He was not sure that he liked the change. But it made an impression upon him. And what he considered as the weakness within him felt a desire to please and conciliate it.

Mrs. Mansfield had seen at a glance that Charmian had touched up her face, but she showed nothing of what she felt, if she felt anything, about this new departure. And when Heath said to Charmian, "How well you are looking!" Mrs. Mansfield added:

"Your rest has done you good."

"Yes, I feel rather less idiotic!" said Charmian; "but only rather. You mustn't expect me to be quite my usual brilliant self, Mr. Heath. You must wait a day or two for that. What have you been doing all this time?"

It seemed to Heath that there was a hint of light patronage in her tone and manner. He was unpleasantly conscious of the woman of the world. But he did not realize how much Charmian had to conceal at this moment.

When almost immediately they went in to dinner, Mrs. Mansfield deliberately turned the conversation to Charmian's recent journey. This was to be Charmian's dinner. Charmian was the interesting person, the traveller from Algeria. Had not Claude Heath been invited to hear all about the trip? Mrs. Mansfield remembered the imaginative look which had transformed his face just before he had quoted Chateaubriand. And she remembered something else, something Charmian had once said to her: "You jump into minds and hearts and poor little I remain outside, squatting, like a hungry child!" She had a sincere horror of the elderly mother who clings to that power which should rightly be in the hands of youth. And to-night something in her heart said: "Give place! give place!" The fact which she had noticed in connection with Charmian's face had suddenly made something within her weep over the child, take herself to task. There was still much impulse in Mrs. Mansfield. To-night a subtlety in Charmian, which no man could have detected, set that impulse in a generous and warm blaze; filled her with a wish to abdicate in the child's favor, to make her the center of the evening's attention, the source of the evening's conversation; to show Heath that Charmian could be as interesting as herself and more attractive than she was.

The difficulty was to obtain the right response from Charmian. She had learnt, and had decided upon so much in Algiers that she was inclined to pretend that Algiers was very uninteresting. She did not fully realize that Claude Heath was naive as well as clever, was very boyish as well as very observant, very concentrated and very determined. And she feared to play the schoolgirl if she made much of her experience. Algiers meant so much to her just then that she belittled Algiers in self-defense.