CHAPTER XV

THE CHARM ACKNOWLEDGED

"'Even he that flies shall follow for thy sake-- Shall kiss that would not kiss thee' (yea, kiss me), 'When thou wouldst not' (when I would not kiss thee!)"

Swinburne.

Olwen's bright eyes opened in real astonishment. Here was a bewildering sex!

"_Long enough_," it said. "_Hasn't this been going on long enough._" ... When----well, whose was the fault that anything had been _long_?

Or did Captain Ross mean that? Or what did he mean?

"I don't know what you mean," she confessed, standing there all at sea. Then she put out a hand to the draperies of that door. Bewilderment gave place for the moment to a stronger impulse; hospitality. The little Welshwoman must feed her guest. "Do come into the dining-room," she begged, "and have some tea first, anyhow----"

But Captain Ross stood rock-like. He had seen that rookery of black heads through the dining-room window.

"Thanks; I had tea in the train," he said curtly.

"I came to ask you something, and I'd like to know about it right now."

"But----oh----very well," murmured Olwen.

"It's this," said Captain Ross, peremptorily, "are you or are you not engaged to that----to Ellerton?"

Olwen had known her Chief sharp and abrupt before. For weeks she'd never known him anything else. This was his sharpest yet. She was intimidated.... Then suddenly that went, and she had all the boldness of the kitten turning to face the big dog.

"Engaged?" she repeated. "What do you mean?"

"What do I mean? Engaged to be married." Captain Ross explained. "May I have a straight answer to that, please?"

There was a pause. Perhaps Olwen was sorting her thoughts. She smiled, at first uncertainly. Then, also uncertainly, she said, "But surely, Captain Ross, you didn't come down from London specially to ask me that?"

With ominous patience Captain Ross nodded that sleek, black, Tom-cat head of his, almost as if to some old enemy he had expected to see cropping up at some time. "Why, of course, it's a lot to ask of a woman, a plain answer to a plain question. Right away, that is. But perhaps in haff a minute or so?" he suggested, adding, at once, "Are you engaged to him or are you not? Yes or no?"

Olwen, wondering at her own boldness, parried with, "If--if it _wasn't_ worth coming down specially for, h-have you the right to ask me?"

"Say I came down specially, then," Captain Ross conceded reluctantly. "Now are you going to tell me?"

"Who said," asked Olwen, with a glance out of the window, "that there was anything to tell?"

"He's asked you to marry him, I know that," said Captain Ross with such conviction that Olwen coloured a little with surprise. How did Captain Ross know about that? It was true, of course.... But he couldn't know quite _what_ had happened. She almost laughed at the memory of Harold Ellerton's face in the light of the torch.

She hesitated....

It doesn't always follow that because a man is obstinate he may not be quick as well. It was very quickly that Captain Ross seized upon Olwen's hesitation, declaring, "He asked you on the night of the raid."

As quickly Olwen asked, "Did he _tell_ you?"

A pause. Then "There was no nid, Miss Howel-Jones. I thought, somehow, that there'd be somebody else I'd have to be congrrrrratulating very soon," said Captain Ross, with a sort of grim triumph in his tone.

He straightened his back, giving that little forward shrug of an armless shoulder that Olwen could never see unmoved. But her eyes were on the window and on the glimpse of variegated Welsh landscape beyond.

"Since that is so," concluded Captain Ross in his most final tone, "will you allow me to offer my very best wishes to yourself and to Mr. Ell----"

"No! Please don't!" protested Olwen quickly.

She felt that this misunderstanding had gone on long enough. Long enough. She turned from the window and looked straight----not at Captain Ross, that she couldn't do! but at a water-colour drawing of Carnarvon Castle on the wall. She said, "You see, I am not engaged or anything to Mr. Ellerton!"

And even as she said it, she knew what a change her words had made.

Without looking at him, she knew that Captain Ross's dark face had lighted up like a lantern into which a candle is put. She knew what he meant by that quick movement that he gave, as if rolling aside some weight that he'd been carrying. She knew, for sure and certain, why he'd come. Would he have cared about her being engaged to Mr. Ellerton if he hadn't wanted her himself? Of course he did want her....

Hadn't Golden said so? Wasn't that serene and lovely American always right?

Hadn't Madame Leroux thought so, too?

And hadn't she, Olwen herself, always known it too, in the very depths of her heart? Yes! Hadn't she always, always suspected his curt speech and his off-hand manner and his judgment of women?

Always!

A great and glowing delight filled the girl. For if he wanted her----oh, wasn't she his! Hadn't she been his all that time ago? All her denials of him since had been fibbing to herself, they had been making the best of things, they had been the hybernating sleep from which Love awakes as a giant refreshed! It had all been camouflage, and now there was no more need of it....

But even with this sweet and thrilling knowledge warm at her heart, the woman's Will-to-Prolong was strong within her, too.

She was a human little person enough and she had her dignity, she thought. Also she had to have her laugh--oh, quite a little one! over this man.

He said, "Then----" in a voice that there was no misunderstanding. His surliness had vanished like a mist. His eyes shone. He said, happily, "Then if you aren't engaged to him----!"

He seemed to think that she could take for granted what must follow.

But Olwen was mutinous. Had he come down here to propose? Let him do it! she thought. She resolved that she would not be cheated out of a single word of it. "Then----" in itself was not going to count as a proposal. "Then----," indeed!

"_Then----!_" Oh, dear no.

Immediately Olwen put on that look which is scarcely a look, but is for all that a defence past which no man's love-making may come. Immediately Captain Ross's own look changed to one of dashed and angry surprise. He had put out his arm. It dropped to his side while he watched this girl.

She sat down, her little figure almost lost in the embrace of a chair like a cretonne-covered bed. "Won't you sit down?" she said in the voice of a hostess, pointing to an opposite chair.

He did not move.

She, feeling that never before had she been mistress of the situation, and that perhaps never again would she have the opportunity, spoke first with a composure which startled herself.

"Why," she asked, "should it be supposed to have anything to do with you whether or not I was going to marry Mr. Ellerton?"

And now Captain Ross moved so abruptly against the mantelpiece that he shifted one of the handleless china teacups out of its place and set the prisms tinkling on the candlesticks.

He opened his mouth, then shut it as if he'd thought better of the answer which he meant to make to this chit. And then, in the tone of stinging reproof which he reserved for some careless error in the reading of some letter at the Honeycomb, he said, looking down upon her, "I should have thought that a girl of your intelligence would have had the sense to guess by this time what my object was in wanting to know what your ideas were on the subject of getting married."

Olwen, with a tiny turn of her head, remained silent, watching the sunset, which could just be seen over the Rival mountains out of the other window. This last remark of Captain Ross's she was not going to take as a proposal either.

From the lack of expression on her small face no man would have guessed at the happy tumult in the heart under that ribbon-and-satin of a hidden mascot that it rocked.

"Well?" demanded Captain Ross with outward patience. "How much longer do you intend to keep me dangling around and guessing?"

"About what?"

"About whether you're going to marry _me_ or not," said Captain Ross, dourly.

Olwen stuffed a cushion behind her back and laughed quite naturally. "But, Captain Ross! You said Marriage was a thing the sensible man looked at from every angle and then decided to cut out. I never imagined----"

"Ah, cut _that_ out," Captain Ross begged her, with the unsmiling mien of one who sees himself about to be routed from his last defences. "You knew all the time; you knew."

"I didn't!"

"What?" Captain Ross thrust out his jaw. "You ought to know me well enough by this time. You've seen me plenty."

"Yes," said Olwen, with feeling, "and always being----"

"Well?"

"Perfectly horrid to me."

"'Horrid,' you think?" barked Captain Ross. "In the office? You don't understand that I'm as much on active service there behind a pen as I was when I was able to be behind a gun? 'Horrid.' Because I didn't make love to you there, and both of us on duty? If you imagine that I'm the kind of man who'd do that ever, I am afraid you are under a serious misapprehen----"

"But you weren't always in the office," protested Olwen, quickly, "and you were _always_ horrid to me!"

"When, please?"

"Well, at lunch!"

"Because I only had lunch with you once a week?"

"You didn't 'have lunch _with_ me,'" Olwen demurely reminded him. "You happened to be lunching at the same place on Fridays."

"That's hair-splitting," snapped Captain Ross.

Exactly as if he never split hairs! As if he had not been splitting hairs for the last six months. That is, the same hair. And with a hatchet.

He felt that he was burying that hatchet now----if she would only let him.

He declared, "You know I only went to that darned little eating-place to see you," and it was with the manner of one who hands over his revolver that he had said it. "I loathe fish."

(But this was not a proposal!)

Olwen, gazing not at him, but through the window at a cluster of yellow crocuses on the lawn, exclaimed softly, "As if you didn't know that this is the first hint you've ever given me of your wanting to see me at all!"

Captain Ross took a step back on the hearthrug. He gave a short and angry laugh. "The fairrrrrst hint?" he cried, as if aghast.

"Of course it is," declared Olwen.

"It's nothing of the kind," doggedly from the man. "Plenty of other ... things of that sort."

They were both wrong, and they knew it.

It is unlikely that Olwen had forgotten that Elysian evening on the lagoon when Mr. Brown had pulled and she had sat in the stern-sheets with Captain Ross. To have your hand held in the moonlight tenderly, and for an hour on end, might fairly be called "a hint."

So Captain Ross was right on that point.

But he was wrong on every other.

In the whole of their acquaintance that had been the one isolated instance in which he had failed to be as forbidding as an Army order. But at that moment (and indeed for several months afterwards) that incident in the boat was not to be referred to by either of them. For some obscure reason both of them felt more shy of that memory than any of fresh experiences.

Quickly Olwen got on with this war in the enemy's country. "Hints? I'm sure I don't know what they could have been. That box of chocolates at Les Pins. But I've had other boxes of chocolates given to me----"

"I've no doubt of that" (with grimness).

"So you can hardly call that a 'hint,' Captain Ross!"

"Ah!" he said, impatiently. "It's not what one gives or says to a woman, as you know. It's the _manner_----"

There was real merriment in Olwen's laugh at this. "The manner! The _manner_! Well, really! After the scolding and strafing and disapproving! After the way you never came near me if we were out----"

"I did. I did. I sat next you at that concert when Jack Awdas's girl was singing."

"For five minutes; yes, I remember," said Olwen, tilting her chin. "It was the one and only time."

"It was not, pardon me. I was coming to sit by you at Mrs. Cartwright's party, and I wasn't allowed a look in----"

"So you had a look _at_, most severely," Olwen countered. "At Mrs. Cartwright's was when you were the horridest of all. You just sat opposite to me and glared----"

* * * * *

In the dining-room the party of Olwen's relations sat over their last half-cups of tea in a simmer of delighted curiosity.

This was shared, openly, by the hireling colt from the mountains as she clattered in at intervals with hot water or more butter. Breathlessly she asked at last, "Will I take a tray and some fresh tea into the drawing-room for Miss S'Olwen and that t'officer?"

"You will not," ordered her mistress. Even she had been young once.

"----Yes! glared at me as if you hated the sight of me!" insisted Olwen.

He said, "And weren't you flirrrting with those two fellows, and simply out to make me wild?"

"No," said the girl, quietly and sincerely.

He could have clasped her for it. "Darling!" said his glance, but aloud he only retorted, "Maybe you were not out to do it, but you certainly pulled it off."

"As for _you_," continued Olwen, "weren't you talking at me to Mrs. Cartwright all the time at dinner?"

"No!" he retorted, flagrantly.

"You know you were! _All_ about Woman being the Plaything of Man!"

"Don't rub it in," he entreated, with another glance down at this plaything so maddeningly near, yet not, perhaps, for him. Yes! If she had had the boldness of the kitten who strikes with soft paws at the Force which could annihilate her, he had the boding patience of that big dog who waits, sitting up, with the lump of sugar on his nose.

It was she who kept him so.... She was--oh, she was getting her own back now!

She broke off as if by the way, to ask him, "Let me see, what was the first thing--almost the first I ever heard you say.... _What_ sort of a judge of women are you?"

It is not true that the Scot is inevitably without a sense of humour. At that moment Fergus Ross saw even the joke against himself, since he thought it would appeal to her. He responded, "What was that about women? Something I've hairred in a drim?"

Relentless, Olwen repeated her demand. "What sort of a judge of women are you?"

He looked at her, threw up and shook his head with the action of a boxer who drops his hands as well.

"I guess I'm about as fine a judge of women as a baby is a judge of mothers," he told her, frankly and ruefully. "One he knows; his own. And herrrr he's got to have!"

But she put it aside. _This_ wasn't enough of a proposal! She harked back to that party at Mrs. Cartwright's which had witnessed the last losing fight of this prisoner of hers, taken now with horse, foot and guns.

"'What's Love? An amusement,'" she quoted, mischievously, his words upon that occasion. "That's what you said, four--no! only three days ago," she insisted, now feeling that she had got well into her stride and could keep this well-merited strafing of the young man for an hour yet. "Yes! Just to be horrid to _me_! How you talked! All about how bored a man got 'when some woman started in to Love' him----"

Here Olwen stopped, abruptly but too late. She coloured to the deep pink of the little coral brooch at her throat. She saw what she'd said.

So did he.

Very quickly the soldier took advantage of this break in the line of her defence.

"Ah!" His voice lifted. "Well, what of that? What has _that_ got to do with my being 'horrid' to you? What----connection is there between you, and any woman starting in to love _me_?"

"Oh, _none_! I didn't mean _that_," Olwen assured him, laughing flippantly, but dropping her eyes to gaze so hard at the carpet that only the top of the head was to be seen. Glossily black and shapely enough was the little head upon which Captain Ross had heaped, in his mind, every anathema as well as every endearment that he knew, but he was dashed if he was expected to read what she meant out of the mere top of it. So----

If, a month ago, some one had informed Captain Ross of the Honeycomb that he would ever be reduced for any possible reason, to go down on his knees on the floor at a woman's feet, he would not have considered the idiotic prophecy was worth a laugh.

But his number was up.

Here he found himself kneeling on the carpet at Olwen's feet just because there seemed no other way at that moment of getting a really satisfactory glimpse of Olwen's face.

"Now! my lady," he began, firmly.

But just as he'd thought he meet her eyes squarely she turned her head sidewards and directed that bright gaze of hers, as she'd often done before, over his shoulder and away. She was ready to glance at the blaze of the log fire, at the wall-paper, at the oval china frame all garlands and Loves of the standing mirror, at the large portrait of Professor Howel-Jones in his robes, at anything, yes! anything rather than at the (late) finest judge of women in Europe, at her feet. It was too much.

The pent-up, exasperated longing of months broke out in six words.

"Look at me, you little demon! _look_ at me----"

But even now she did not look; how could she, when she had shut her eyes before the change that had come into his own?

He caught her to him. With his one arm slung about her, he put a scorching kiss upon her throat, under her ear. Then he took her chin in his hand and turned her face round; he kissed the childishly red mouth until little Olwen, all shy and aflame, felt that the shape of his own would be moulded upon her lips.

For all his theorizings, his protestations, his boastings about Love, he was yet a lover ... or perhaps it would be truer to say a lover at last.

As for her.... The whole of her girl's nature seemed to stretch out gleeful hands to the gift that he made to her--of herself. Till now she had resembled--what? The sea-anemone that for weary hours of low-tide has waited self-contained and folded into itself upon its rock, an inert lump.... At last the warm waves rise, and lo! the rosy fingers spread to welcome its own element have turned it to a lovely thing, a star-shaped flower of flesh.

Into her sigh of delight he heard her murmur, "No! I _mustn't_----"

"Mustn't what?" muttered the strange voice of him who was no longer the Captain Ross of this story, but the Fergus of their love-tale that was beginning.

And in Love, after all, all's well that begins well. (Even though there was no real "proposal" after all.)

He coaxed, "Mustn't what, Honey?"

"Mustn't like you any _more_, or you won't like me as _much_!"

It was Woman's dearly-bought wisdom----but he laughed at it until his teeth gleamed across his vivid face.

She? Do anything he would not like? Even if she loved him and showed it, even that could not cool this man off, now he knew. The chit had got him going sure enough. Whatever she did or said only added to her attraction, to her long-contested, her triumphant, her Disturbing Charm!

POSTSCRIPT

THE CHARM CONFESSED

With regard to the three words with which the last chapter closed:

The Disturbing Charm....

What was its story, after all, apart from the tangled stories of those people into whose lives it twined its thread of rose colour?

Perhaps it was all summed up in a letter that came, one February morning of Nineteen-Eighteen, to Professor Howel-Jones.

The old botanist was sitting in his study. It was a wide, cleared room with a table as chaotic as that had been at Les Pins, set, as at Les Pins, before a window; but the view here was not of a lagoon with a belt of dunes and a lighthouse. It showed the roofs of Liverpool.

Professor Howel-Jones had just returned, after various wanderings, to find a big mail awaiting him. He sighed, as he opened the letters, for his little niece and secretary. (Olwen had not been replaced.)

Then he knit his brows over the letter in his hand.

It said:

"DEAR SIR,

"The writer of this letter has reproached himself more than once over the rather stupid practical joke that he elected to play upon a man of your attainments by sending to you what was alleged to be the discovery of a love-germ, or Disturbing Charm----"

"Dear me! What and when was that?" pondered the Professor. "Ah, yes. I have it. Some lunatic that wrote to me in France. Something about '_half the trouble in the world arising from people falling in Love--with the wrong people_.' Yes, yes. And what was this 'Charm' supposed to do?... Ah, it says now that the Charm was spoof...." He went on reading the letter; the belated apology of some pupil at some University where he had once lectured....

He took it in, half thinking of the next letter as he read....

Fern seed, it appeared, was all that the "magic" packet had contained....

The Professor scarcely remembered that there had been a packet! What had he done with it now, and with the letter? Burnt them, he thought, before that little Olwen got hold of that nonsense....

It would have been just like a very young, imaginative girl like that to have believed in it!

Well, this last letter would have to shatter that belief! thought her Uncle, as he crumpled the practical joker's apology into a ball and tossed it on to the fire.

At the moment when her Uncle's thoughts were turning to her, his niece, young Mrs. Ross, was watching rather a pretty scene.

She stood at the window of her husband's rooms in Victoria Street, his old bachelor rooms into which she had brought the new element of her girlish belongings, her love, herself....

Behind her on the table, above a pile of his books on "Reconstruction," there trailed a dainty litter of her sewing: the lacy whiteness of a garment that was being reconstructed, feminine-fashion, into some other garment.

Beside her stood another war-bride of but a few more weeks' standing, young Mrs. Awdas.

Both of them were looking down into the street, where a crowd lined the pavement to right and left, waiting, watching to see a company of American soldiers march past on their way to Victoria Station.

Ah! Here it was, the stream of clean khaki cleaving the motley of the crowd. Here they came, the boys, tall, fit, and splendid, drilled to the minute; the pick and cream of the new belligerent country.... Here they came, spare and useful looking and ah, how faultless in kit and accoutrements, from straight-brimmed hats to spotlessly-polished boots. And as they swung past with the unison of a machine in which every part is perfect, there hove into sight, straggling, slouching towards them out of the station, a knot of British just back from the firing line. An officer walked along beside the men.

Over these there brooded the spectre of three years and more of War. Their eyes were heavy with lack of sleep as they lurched heavily along, blinking around them at London once again; they were dirty and loaded down with gear, they were strung about with mess-tins and water-bottles and boots and brown-paper parcels and battered shrapnel helmets. One or two of them had Hun helmets tied to their knapsacks. They wore greasy remnants of caps, disreputable goatskin coats. All over them was thickly caked the foul mud of the trenches.

What a contrast....

The mob of straggling scarecrows turned to give a friendly stare, a "Cheerio" to their smart American comrades as they swung past in their immaculate fours.

"See you in ten days!" shouted a Tommy.

Olwen Ross, up at the window, thrust out her little black head to watch the Americans.

"Oh, they are magnificent," she breathed excitedly. "Aren't you proud of them, Golden?"

"Am I _proud_ of them!" laughed her friend.

But while the Welsh girl was all eyes for these new troops, the American girl's wide gaze turned upon the others with whom they must soon be standing shoulder to shoulder; the war-worn soldiers, muddy, tattered, scarred, exhausted, cheery still....

"_They_ are magnificent, Olwen, I guess," said she.

And her opinion seemed to be shared by a countryman. A quick and graceful thought struck the officer in charge of those Americans.

Suddenly and clearly, above the buzz of the street, the rhythmic tramp of feet, there snapped out his order:

"Company----eyes----RIGHT!"

Every head under the straight-brimmed hat turned sharply towards those heroic scallywags their allies.

Perhaps that young American company officer would have explained, diplomatically, that the word of command had been for his men to give the Eyes Right to that British subaltern who was passing with the leave-men; a white-faced, hollow-eyed stripling with two gold stripes on his cuff and the black "flash" of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers fluttering at his nape. But if it were ostensibly for him, it was also for his men. The new Allies, equipped for Victory, saluted the old, all but broken, but carrying on....

And the bright eyes of the two girls at the windows above shone suddenly, mistily brighter at the sight.

As they watched the two bodies of men disappear----those marching towards Victoria and the boat-train, these straggling towards a soldiers' hostel in Buckingham Palace Road, Golden said softly, "My people, Olwen, honouring yours."

Olwen said, "Yes; but mine are yours now, and yours are mine."

She turned from the window and into the little sitting-room with her guest's arm in hers.

"What's the time?" asked young Mrs. Awdas. "I'm due to sing at the hospital at four. We'll have to hurry----"

She lifted, on Olwen's blouse, the tiny pin-on watch which was one of her friend's wedding presents. Then she exclaimed, "What have you got tied around here?"

Golden did not recognize any similarity between this sachet of pink-and-mauve and the sun-faded ribbon trifle she had picked up on Biscay beach. But Olwen smiled as she tucked into the place the mascot that she wore and always would wear, even had she read that letter which her Uncle held would shatter any belief in that "magic." The old scientist summed her up as faultily as if he, too, had set out to be the finest judge, etc....

"Golden," she said, "if I tell you about this, will you promise not to laugh?"

And as they walked along to the hospital, she gave to her friend the outlines of the story which you have just read ... so far as she knew them herself.

Golden, listening, smiled above her leopard-skins. "Do you think all these things would not have happened just as they did happen without the wearing of a Charm?"

Olwen, with happy dreams in her eyes, did not reply.

After a pause her friend went on, softly, "When I look at you," she said, "and when I look at your Fergus, and at my Jack, and at any one else who is lovely and loving ... why, of course I believe there's a Charm really, though it just can't be anything you could make up out of a pinch of powder and a bit of ribbon. A Charm? Why, the world's full of it! Didn't it send me over the sea to my Bird-boy? Didn't it bring your men from Canada and France to you? Didn't it let us all meet in a country that was sweet and friendly, though none of ours? Didn't it work----why, all the time?"

"Sometimes----Often--Half the time," suggested Olwen, "it is supposed to make such mistakes. It takes the wrong people...."

"We hear of those, just because they're the exceptions, I guess," smiled her buoyant friend. "We aren't so talked about, we with the happy love stories, that the Charm has worked!... Olwen, it's making stories now for each of those splendid boys we saw go marching by, and for each of the pretty girls who wishes them Luck. It never stops!... But you can't see it. You can't hold it. You can only feel it is----"

"But then what is it?" Olwen asked. "What is it in itself?"

"Who knows?" Golden replied. "Does it matter if we _never_ know?"

THE END