by Berta Ruck
CHAPTER III
RECOVERY OF THE CHARM
"One sudden gleam of a face, and my cherished Ideal is real! There moved my miracle, there passed my Fate whom to see is to love."
Brunton Stephens.
Those eyes of Jack Awdas's had known their business from the start.
Wise Mrs. Cartwright, to have known what would happen, even as she satin that basket-chair in that hotel lounge at Les Pins, all those weeksago!
It had happened instantaneously. The electric flash had not been quickerthan the glance that had passed from young eyes to young eyes.
Those months ago!...
Mrs. Cartwright had left the French hotel the morning after--had leftLes Pins and the man she had refused. Her place at table next to JackAwdas had been given (as she guessed it would be given) to hersuccessor.
That goddess-built young American had made friends with everybody,easily and at once. The French families had regarded her as if she'dbeen a visitant from another planet. Olwen Howel-Jones had beensubjugated on the spot. But Jack Awdas from the very first _dejeuner_had scarcely for a moment left her side.
Never before had he seen a girl so frank, yet so apart, so boyish inher unaffected good-fellowship, yet so womanly.
Unchaperoned she had travelled from the States to join her father inLondon, where he was attached to the Embassy, and where she meant tocontinue her special War work. But upon landing at Bordeaux she hadfound a cable from him stating that he would be out town for some days.She'd had no use for an empty house. So she had decided to stay inFrance and by the sea for those few days.
To young Jack Awdas they were a gift from Destiny!
* * * * *
Some people consider that the truest and most human touch in the world'sgreatest love drama is that which pitches the young man alreadyinfatuated with one woman into the purest passion for another. There isno hiatus of feeling between the gloomy "_I am done_" of Romeo sighingfor Rosaline, and his quick "_What lady's that?_" when Juliet appears;there is no thought of that first lady afterwards.
Yet who shall measure what Juliet owes to Rosaline?--what rough waysmade smooth, what cold young crudities softened and warmed, whatkindling of susceptibility, what speeding-up of passion?
And, for all this, what thanks may Rosaline expect? "_Oh, she was justsomeone he used to think he cared for._" Or, "_I'm sure she couldn'thave been a very nice woman._" Or even "_Horrid! Robbing the cradle, Icall it; I don't know how any woman can!_"
But none of these verdicts would ever be passed by Golden van Huysen,either upon Claudia Cartwright or upon any other woman. She had read ofthe theory that women are "catty" to their own sex; smilingly shedisbelieved it. Like attracts like. Just as her own heart had neverknown an ungenerous prompting, so her own lips had never uttered aspiteful remark. She therefore never heard one. If she had, she wouldprobably have widened her blue eyes and exclaimed with a little air ofdiscovery, "Why, that's not _kind_!"
And this big and innocent creature was the very type which (if she'd hadher choice) Mrs. Cartwright would have chosen for the man whom sheherself was too old to choose.
* * * * *
He didn't ask Golden van Huysen to marry him on the first day of theiracquaintance. No! He had waited until the third day.
"Mustn't rush things," he'd told himself, as if those three days hadbeen three years' duteous service of a knight of old. So he had merelymade himself into this young girl's shadow.
To her it was no novelty to be attended and worshipped. Wasn't everygirl that she cared to know accustomed to this setting of masculineworship? Golden took as naturally as she took air and food the existenceof a train of such young knights.
Only ... from the first she realized vaguely that this one was somehowdifferent from the others she had known and liked. This tall young manwith the small crested head set on his sweeping, wing-like shoulders,who had drawn her first quick glance in the lounge. She admitted itquite frankly to herself this young flying-man _fascinated_ her.
Why was it?
She had met plenty of flying-men before. Hadn't she talked to them inthe aerodromes of her own country--which was also the birthplace of thatvery marvel, flying? Hadn't she been introduced to her aviators who hadbroken records for altitude, distance, and time? Hadn't she danced atballs with some of the very first pilots who'd ever looped? Flying andflyers had been no new proposition to her, but _this_ flyer....
Presently the young American girl began to realize what it was that wasnew and special about "this flyer."
It was symbolized in the little gold stripe on the cuff of hisflying-jacket. He was the very first _fighting_ flyer who had crossedher path. The first she'd met who had already given battle to men in theair, the first she'd known who had been shot down in fighting for thecause which was now her country's too.
Never before had she seen a man who had actually used her country'sinvention of flying as the instrument of battle.
She, with her whole country, had wished to use this invention as abeneficent gift.
Her country had seen that _before this gift could be so used_, sternwork lay before the men of the air. She saw it, too.... As thatWar-missioner had said. Her country was looking with other eyes upon herAllies.
For Golden these new friends were typified in the young Briton who worethe wound stripe as well as the wings.
She told herself wonderingly, "Now isn't it queer that I should evercome to like one of the English so well. This Bird-boy is quite niceenough to be an American...."
Neither of the young people remembered afterwards at what exact momentof that second day she had called him "Bird-boy." Though he took itwith a hidden lift of the heart, he did not use any name at all to heruntil the third day.
On the morning of that day she announced to him that it would be herlast day at Les Pins.
"What? Going?" he cried aghast, as if the idea that she must one day gohad never occurred to him.
"Why, yes! I'd never meant to stay here at all. It was just because offather, and now he cables me he'll be back in London before I shall."
"Well, but I say!" Jack Awdas broke in in consternation. "Shan't I seeyou any more?" It seemed unspeakable.
"Didn't you tell me you were coming back to London at the end of thefall, to a Board or something? My father would be pleased if you cameand saw us then."
"But that's not for ages!" he cried, his face blank. "I'm not due backin town for another month! When are you going? Tonight? Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow morning early, to Bordeaux; then on to Paris, then London."
"All by yourself?" exclaimed the young Englishman stupefied.
She laughed. "Why, certainly, 'all by myself.' That's funny! Why, I'vemade all the travelling arrangements for father and myself since I wastwelve! I'm a lot more useful than he is, that way. I've been most allover the world. 'All by myself.' Why, yes! You're shocked? Now isn'tthat real old-fashioned, and English? It's the way they talk in thosenovels with the sweet little heroine in book-muslin, whatever that is,in the days of Queen Victoria. Haven't you got past that, in this War?If you haven't it's time America did come in and teach you a few things!I guess I'm as capable as you are of looking after myself, Bird-boy!"
"You certainly aren't," he declared resolutely. "I shouldn't let you,if--if I were anything to do with you." He pulled himself together andadded, "Well, there's all today, anyhow. Look here, can't you let metake you somewhere jolly all by myself, just for today?"
He could never have made this suggestion to a young woman of thetraditions and upbringing of, say Miss Agatha Walsh. But already he knewthat SHE would take it as it was meant.
"Why, yes, if you like," she said.
So they'd gone off to Cap Ferret. Midday had found this tall girl andboy upon Biscay shore where four days before Mrs. Cartwright'sdove-lunch party had walked, watching those rollers. Soaring to crash,gathering and soaring once again to crash, those great w
aves boomed thechorus that had sounded across wide sea and wide shore long "before themonths had names." It would go on sounding long after the names of thosetwo on the seashore had ceased to be music to those who loved them.
But this was the moment when the waves sang for them, only for them.
Golden van Huysen had said something about surf-riding. The youngaviator, his eyes turning for a moment from her to the tumultuouswaters, had muttered, "Dangerous game for a girl!"
She laughed. "What a lot of things there are that you English think agirl can't do! It would do you lots of good to get to know someAmerican girls. Then you'd see!"
He made no reply. His eyes were again upon her.
She wore what he had come to know were (out of uniform) her onlycolours; white and gold. Her dress of some creamy white stuff, perfectlycut, and over it she had slipped a knitted coat of yellowy silk. Crispas a gardenia-petal, her skirt blew out above her ankles, and her feet,not small, but shapely as those of a sandalled Hermes. No hat hid herhair, which glinted like a casque in the sun as they turned away fromthe sea towards the dunes.
Here Jack Awdas took the plunge.
"See some American girls, you say? You're all the girl I want to see,"he declared, not knowing that he spoke with the boyish vehemence thathad so lately taken Claudia Cartwright's breath. The persistence withwhich he'd wooed that first love he now turned upon this--this only loveof his.
"You're all the girls in the world to me," said he. "D'you understand?"
She did, and she did not. She stared at him: her uncovered gold headalmost on a level with his own fair head, crested by that flyer's cap.
"Yes, rather!" continued the lad, definitely. "Now, what about it?"
He held out a hand to help her up the dunes, but she climbed as lightlyas he.
"What about it, please?" he repeated. "What about your belonging to mefor keeps, I mean?"
The girl had a curious little gesture as she looked at him, then away.
Surprise was in it, and protest, and a virginal dignity; also amusement,unpreparedness, and wonder....
She repeated his words. "'Belong' to you? To you? Oh! No, I----"
"Don't you like me?" he shot out.
"Oh! I like you very well," she answered quickly, almost hurt herself bythe thought that she might have hurt him. "I like you so well! I like tobe with you. I like to talk to you. I--yes, I like to look at you," andshe turned one of her frank and friendly glances upon that handsomefigure striding by her side, that fresh face, all pink in thesea-breezes. "But I guess I'd never want to 'belong' to any man!"
He smiled into the sweet bewildered eyes. It was the smiling side of hisobstinacy; obstinate and keen again, in love as in war!
"I say----How old are you?" he asked.
"Twenty-one," she told him.
"Well, then! You don't mind my asking, do you? Hasn't any man everwanted you to belong to him before?"
"You mean asked me to marry them?"
"Yes."
"Why, yes," she admitted with her crystal straightness. "Men, proposedto me? Why, stacks of them! But they didn't do it that way."
She looked back and out to sea, as though she could see on the otherside of that severing Atlantic the half-score of her splendid youngcountrymen who had offered her marriage as tribute is offered to a youngqueen.
"You are--queer people over here," she said softly.
"Queer?"
"The way you talk of 'belonging.'"
"Queer, if it's the right man and the girl he wants?" Jack Awdas asked.
"But," she said, sweet and stately, "I should always want to belong tomyself."
Then he understood. He said quickly, "Of course I'd always want that foryou, too. But--oh, look here! Would the other stop that? As I see it, itmight help it."
The puzzled wonder grew in her look. All this was strange to her; shehad read of it, heard of it. All this was unexpectedly different frombooks, from college, from life until now. The old was so unexplored tothe new, embodied in its modern Diana. At twenty she had seen half thecapitals of two hemispheres, yet she was in his eyes more backward insome ways than a girl who had never left her native village.
Mrs. Cartwright could have told her that it is by "belonging" that awoman forms her individuality, and that it is only by giving that shecan either gain or keep what she has.
He went on softly talking. Presently he said, "I know now what peoplemean by being made for each other. You were, for me. Yes, but I was foryou. Oh, yes. Oh, yes!... You can't tell me you honestly don't thinkso.... You don't want to send me away; you don't want not to see meagain."
"Oh, _no_," she agreed, quickly, looking away from him as if to face asituation. She was of the type that faces, losing no time in wonderingwhat she ought to think. And this was the very first time she had everwondered _what_ she thought.
She did like him. How it had grown, that first "fascination," born froma look! But----At last she seemed to find the words that summed it up.
"This is a big thing," she said, gravely. "It might be the biggest thingthat's happened to me; but, Bird-boy, there's no hurry about it."
"No hurry?" He seemed to think that "hurry" was now the main point.
She shook her head. "We don't have to settle anything about it, righthere and right now. Now _do_ we?"
"Yes. _Yes!_" urged the boy.
"No," denied the girl's wise young voice. "See here; I'll be in London,and you will be there in a month. There's plenty of time. You'll comeover then.... Then we can think of it.... Then maybe we'll talk of itagain...."
"Oh, will we," muttered Jack Awdas in a voice of utterexpressionlessness. For the moment he was ready to say nothing more.
Silence fell between them.
Each full of thought, they ascended and descended the belt ofsoftly-rolling dunes and came to where the sand had drifted half-way upthe trunks of the growing pines.
Suddenly Golden gave a little exclamation. "Oh, look; what's this?"
"What's what?" he asked, stopping beside her.
"I thought it was a cute little flower that was growing up the tree,"said the girl with down-bent head, "but look, it's sown on to a ribbon,and it's got itself wound way round the branch----"
She was disentangling the object that had taken her eye; a couple oflengths of ribbon, faded to white by the sea breeze and stitched to alittle padded square of satin, once mauve, now pale as the sand.
"What is it?" she wondered.
Half-absently Jack Awdas caught hold of the other ribbon as he looked atthe thing.
And there was nothing to tell them what it was, the sachet of theDisturbing Charm that had hung about Mrs. Cartwright's neck just beforeshe had plunged into the waters of Biscay Bay; the Charm that the windhad caught and whirled away across the sands until at last it had beenin that pine branch from which a girl's hand unwound it.
_And there was nothing to tell them what it was, thesachet of the Disturbing Charm._ ]
"Something from a wreck?" mused Golden.
The Charm dangled between them.
He was scarcely thinking of what he was doing as he twisted that ribbonover his own fingers.
He was set, so that he would not have realized, now, that he had setbefore. This was a universe away from that. _She_ knew that, the otherone.... She'd been kind.... It wasn't that she hadn't liked him, hebelieved. She _had_ begun to like him near her, she _had_ liked it whenhe said "darling." Ah, to think that he had ever wanted to say "darling"to any woman before! Here was his darling, and she must be made to seeit, not later, not in London, but "right here and now."
As he twisted the ribbon, he spoke in the tone that had caused thatother woman to shut her eyes; for it was the note of the mating call.
"I say, darling----"
Again the girl shook her head, but--was there now the least quiver ofindecision in her gesture?
"I say, if nobody else has ever been allowed to call you that----"
"Oh, no!" she cried, sincerity itself.
> He was mechanically twisting up that ribbon between them; another inchhe took, another.
"Then if there's nobody else you liked well enough for that, there's achance for me," persisted the soft husky voice of her lover above thefaint distant crashing of those breakers behind them.
"Shall I tell you what?"
"What----?" she asked, slowly, no longer looking at him. A kind ofarrogance seemed to shine up in him. Somewhere deep down in his heart hewas cheering himself on by the reminder that he knew more than she. Heseemed vaguely conscious of some force upon his side.... He would nothave believed anyone who had told him that a woman's strongest love,poured out upon him, had lent him magnetism, charged him. He fastenedhis blue eyes upon this girl, as upon some doggedly desired objectiveseen from his battle 'plane as he drove through the blue, but he did notreply. He smiled, with all that is far-away in those searching eyes ofhis.
He had twisted up the last inch of that ribbon. Now he caught hold ofthe Charm that hung between the two ties, then came to the twin ribbonthat she held. Before she knew what he would do with it, he wound thatribbon about her fingers and palm, binding her hand to his own with theCharm in it.
Close, close and warm his pulses beat to hers.
"I've caught you," he ventured, very softly, eyes intent upon her. Hesmiled more broadly at the first faint dawning of lovely trouble in herface. "Yes! This is what they'd call marriage-by-capture, I suppose?"
She didn't speak. She didn't move as he caught hold of her free hand aswell. He held his crested head gaily as he said to her, "Of course I'mEnglish and old-fashioned, and I know American girls are independent,and I ought to see the things they could teach me! But there's somethingI could teach one of them. Let me try?"
Softly he muttered the word which was to mean everything as his own namefor her. "Girl! _Girl!_ ... I say, let's learn from each other?"
Still she didn't speak. How find words, when at a nearness, a name, atouch, some spell seems snapped and the meanings of all words thereafterseem entirely to have altered? This stranger who had become her friendso soon had even more quickly changed to----
"_What?_"
Her lover nodded, saying below his breath, "It will be all right."
Then, loosing one of her hands, he deftly unwound the ribbon that wasabout the other. As he was stuffing the Charm with its ribbons insidethe breast of his flyer's coat, words came at last to his love.
Laughing tremulously, she asked, "Why, what are you doing that for?"
"Putting it by, safely," he smiled at her as he stood just a step awayfrom her on the sand. "It'll never leave me now, not that ribbonthat--that tied our hands together for me. I say, I shall fasten it tomy 'bus later on, to bring me luck, Girl. It's started already, what?"He jerked his belt straight. "Hasn't it?"
And with the words he took that one step nearer that brought her intohis arms.
"Ah, please," he said, more softly than ever. "Please...."
He drew down to his shoulder the face so full of sweet disturbance, hefolded her close, close to the wide breast beneath the white-embroideredwings. As if swayed by a Charm, she drew a long breath, then smiled inwonder, nestled, and yielded to his kisses--the first for both ofthem....
"What about America coming in now, Girl? She will, won't she?... Yes,but say yes; you _must_! Say it!"
"No, Bird-boy! I just won't _say_ it," was her last touch of mutiny."And--and I guess we'll see about that 'belonging' later on."
"Yes," triumphed Jack Awdas. "I 'guess' so too!"
That was all those months ago.
