CHAPTER I

"DARLING" PER PRO

Sitting there at Eleanor's desk, staring at Eleanor's blotter and biting the end of her pen, it was long before Rosamond so much as dipped that pen in the ink.

"Oh, I can't do this," was her first decision. "Can't! Anybody but that benighted little philanthropic innocent of an Eleanor would realise that it was quite impossible. She really is--'Handwritings so alike,' she said! As if that were all there was in a letter! As if the young man mightn't suspect from a dozen things that it wasn't the usual letter. He'd be hideously annoyed with her--oh, with both of us, but I don't matter, I'm just 'the pen.' Perhaps she wouldn't mind his annoyance? But she must _learn_ to mind! After all, she's going to be a very different sort of girl presently, one hopes. When the young man comes home, that will be the crisis! Then, she'll _grow_ to mind. Then she'll be precious sorry she ever deputed a mere salaried menial like me to do such a crazy thing! I shall refuse."

Her blue eyes strayed about the stately old room, from lustre chandelier to Adams fireplace, its grate hidden by a cataract of fern. They rested, scarcely seeing it, on a gilt-framed Baxter print of "The Lover's Letter-box," the picture that shows a pretty Victorian in a soap-bubble of white muslin skirts, who is slipping a sealed note into the fork of a hollow tree. How unlike Eleanor's methods!

Presently came the grim thought: "Eleanor has had secretaries who 'refused' one thing or another. They went!"

And then, "Oh, but I can't go! Not back to all those horrors that I've only, by good luck and Eleanor's job, just escaped! Orders, in Cockney accents, from men who ought by rights to be calling me 'Madam'! Compliments, from the same--and worse----

"And what about London in this heat? And the stuffiness? and the smells? and washing one's own hankies in the bath-room? and the shop eggs for breakfast? and no room to put one's things? (even supposing one had 'things' to put!), and how about losing your looks, Rosamond, my child?" she addressed herself. "How about getting 'washed-out' with tiredness and round-shouldered with work, and old and out of mischief before your time?

"No! ... I won't! ... I will, I mean!" And she drew her chair a little nearer the desk.

"I shall have to pay for the other. Pay by writing letters from Eleanor to '_her dear Ted_.' Very well!" decided the secretary-girl with a little reckless laugh. "It's not as if he or she were the 'usual' type of engaged people. It's not as if the whole engagement weren't--well! rum in the extreme!"

For Eleanor Urquhart's engagement to her cousin Ted was a thing that never failed to amuse, puzzle and even exasperate her friend, Rosamond Fayre.

In one way, it was "so business-like."

For what could be more business-like than the action of the young man? Here he was, left heir to the beautiful old Kentish estate out of which--unless some better arrangement could be made--he would have to turn the uncle and the girl-cousin who had always lived there. And his idea of a "better arrangement" had been to propose to marry the girl-cousin, who could then continue to live in the place as if she were the heiress and the mistress thereof--merely keeping house for one extra in the family, a husband as well as her father.

Satisfactory enough.

Only, how _un_-business-like in another way! That was how it appeared to Rosamond.

Fancy being prepared to marry and to spend the rest of your life with--a person _whom you have never even seen_!

For, thanks to one accident after another, the Urquhart cousins had never happened to meet. Eleanor had found it impossible to leave her College the last time that Ted Urquhart had stayed with his Uncle at Urquhart's Court, three years ago. And it was two years after this visit that General Urquhart, Ted's father, had died where he had always preferred to live, abroad. The beautiful Kentish mansion, which had always seemed to belong to the bookish, stay-at-home brother, had passed by right of entail to that rolling-stone, young Ted, then prospecting in Mexico; for he was a born traveller, adventurer, ranger, even as his soldier father had been.

It had been by letter that the curious arrangement of the Urquhart engagement had been made. And by letter--for Ted, deep in schemes that were Greek to the home-keeping Urquharts, had remained abroad from that day to this--the courtship had been carried on.

"If you can call it a courtship!" Rosamond Fayre had laughed when she had first heard of it. But Eleanor had refused to see anything "odd" about this contract.

"Why, it's the best possible solution." This was Miss Urquhart's view. "There's this Court; it's Ted's only home when he isn't wandering all over the earth. And I must have it for my drawing-room meetings and for the Working Girls' Garden Parties. And there's the library for father. He'd never get accustomed to another study. Ted couldn't turn us out! He said so."

"And is there no happy medium between brutally turning a young woman out of house and home, and ... marrying her?"

Not in this case, Eleanor had pointed out. How could she be the mistress of Urquhart's Court unless she were either the daughter or the wife of the owner?

And the owner himself? Rosamond had put amused, eager questions as to what he could be like?

Eleanor was not vivid in description. She'd informed Rosamond that "Father had seemed to like him as much as he ever did like young men." He had seemed to think Ted Urquhart "nice"--though all his interests were "out-of-doors" and "crude." He'd said he would have been a soldier himself but for considering that there "wasn't enough going on, nowadays," for a man in the Service. Level-headed enough, Eleanor's father had thought. Then Eleanor had fetched a letter from this Ted and read aloud:

"I don't know when you're likely to get this. You ask me how I got to this place; well, it's in a steamer from Southampton--then a three days' journey by train up-country to where the line runs out, then three more days up a river in canoes. Then mules. This last journey we couldn't even use mules, because of our machinery. We had to take the castings of it in big pieces, so somehow we managed to cart along the pieces ourselves over the roughest parts; don't ask what we wore, or looked like at this job"----

Here Rosamond had lifted her bright head.

"My dear! Do you know, he sounds rather a ripper to me. Why does this type of young man always live Abroad, where one doesn't see him? Why don't they raise a splendid great Army of them, for Home? Do read me some more, Eleanor!"

Eleanor's incongruously precise little voice had read out scraps about runaway mustangs, tornadoes, the mild excitement of an earthquake, of a ride in front of a runaway bull.

"And he always seems to be getting among people with knives and revolvers 'going for' each other. Or else nearly breaking his neck somewhere----"

Rosamond's eyes had danced over this description.

"I say, what a lovely man! Good-looking?"

"I've no photograph; I lost the snapshots he sent," Eleanor had said. "Father said not."

"Fathers are the worst possible judges of looks in young men. I do like him for hoisting about those great hulking castings! So different from anything we ever have to do!" the secretary-girl had sighed whimsically. "And his being so keen on concessions for that oil they're prospecting about! What's the oil for, Eleanor?"

"Lamps, I expect,"

"Ah! You've never written to ask! You can't be really fearfully interested in this man!"

"Rosamond, no girl would be 'fearfully interested' in a man she hadn't seen."

"Oh, wouldn't she? Not when she'd promised to marry him? Not when he was going to be all that in her life? A _fiancé_! Well, if he's nothing else, _he is at least the man who keeps the other men out_!"

Eleanor had said nothing. Extraordinary, the interest that Rosamond showed in this subject! Rosamond had continued:

"And you've all his letters to piece him together out of! To keep guessing about! _I_ could imagine a girl being perfectly thrilled over a _fiancé_ of that sort. Much more so than over an ordinary young man with a bowler and a walking-stick, say, that she had seen!"

"Yes, but you're romantic. I am not. I'm so practical," Eleanor had gravely explained. "And I think that it'll make me a very good wife for a man who will probably spend three-quarters of his time carrying those castings and things up and down precipices at the other end of the earth. He's his interests; I've mine. And when we meet, we've this place in common. I am sure we shall be quite good friends."

"Friends!" Rosamond had echoed, pityingly.

"Some married people who begin by--by adoring each other," Eleanor had remarked, "end by being n-n-n-not even friends."

"M'm. But then they've had something out of it," her friend and secretary had said, thinking--"like going to a music-hall show with one ripping 'turn' in it, and all the rest feeble. Better than sitting out a whole long dull play without one redeeming laugh!" Rosamond Fayre had decided. "I'd risk being bored for the rest of my married life, to pay for a really thrilling courtship!"

"Well, he's practical, too," Eleanor had concluded before she took up her Club accounts again. "At least from his letters. That's all I really know about him!"

The letter which Rosamond Fayre had just been given to answer was certainly "practical" enough.

It was written in the particularly small masculine handwriting which is so often guided by a particularly large masculine hand, and the crackling foreign sheet of it had arrived from some out-of-the-way No-Man's Land beyond the Andes, where Ted Urquhart with a party of other men had been sinking wells for that precious, that coveted oil. The rough, open-air camp-life, the bonfires, the tea-tins, the scraps of men's talk and laughter, the blue, up-curling cloud of tobacco-smoke, the jingling of horse's harness--a whiff of this unfamiliar atmosphere seemed brought right over the seas to that secluded English drawing-room by the few terse sentences of Urquhart's--well, it certainly could not be called a love-letter, Rosamond decided, with stars of amusement shining in her larkspur-blue eyes. It began, "My dear Eleanor," and ended, "Yours ever affectionately, T.U." Like a brother and sister!

There was a post-script which merely said, "It will be nearly June, I suppose, by the time this letter gets to the dear old Court. Write and tell me what is out in the garden, and if those last roses which Uncle Henry was so keen on have turned out any good. The place ought to be looking lovely."

"The place looking lovely!" commented Rosamond. "Not even one question about how the _girl_ is looking! I wonder if he doesn't even want to know? How sick I shall be if the man I marry--when that fortunate individual turns up--ever writes like this! He won't, though. Rosamond's lover won't be 'level-headed'--at any rate, not as far as anything to do with Rosamond is concerned," decided that young woman, with a toss of her own beautiful head. "But to work!"

She dipped her pen in the ink and primmed her rather large red begonia of a mouth into an imitation of Eleanor's small one as she wrote:--

"My dear Ted,

"Thank you for your letter of April the First. I was very glad to hear that you were quite well, and that you had arrived safely at your destination."

("Not that she--Eleanor--really cares a capital Dee how you are, or where you've arrived," interpolated Eleanor's new secretary, aside. "It's a matter of life and death to her that five hundred factory girls should have a rise of a shilling a week in wages, but as to what happens to a mere prospective husband--Well, but what ought she to say to him? It's always 'ought' with her. I wonder if she'll get any better--worse, I mean--when Ted comes home and tries to teach her--other things, I do hope so. Well----")

She took up her pen again.

"Yes!--The place----"

("Better put a capital P there to show how all-important.")

--"The Place looks delightful. It's a great pity that you can't see it, since you've missed every June here for so many years. I hope that you may contrive to come home, as you suggest some time next summer----"

("That's not too eager and forward, I trust," thought Rosamond.)

--"and that you will not be disappointed in----"

("your reception as a lover.--No, I mean, of course----")

--"the alterations that there are--such as the new fish-pond, and the continuation of the hedge beyond the cherry-orchard at The Court."

She leant back.

("_Now_ what had I better put? He's not wildly interested in her crêches and clubs and girls, I can tell. I'll just sum it up vaguely.")

"I have been very busy lately. We had a garden-party here last week. Need I add that there was a thunderstorm in the middle of it? The purple dahlias in Mrs. Bishop's toque got drenched and dripped in mauve streaks down her face. It looked as if her complexion had run very badly."

("Steady! Eleanor wouldn't have written that. She never makes fun of people," said Rosamond. "I shall have to make a fair copy--a Rosamond Fayre copy--of all this. I'll begin again from 'thunder-storm.'")

"and on Wednesday we had a dinner-party. A friend of mine is staying here now. She has trained as a clerk, and I am keeping her to help me with my business correspondence----"

("This very letter, for example.")

--"and her name is Rosamond Fayre."

("Hope you think it's a pretty one, Sir.")

--"Father is quite well now, and sends his love. The roses that you ask after have done splendidly----"

("Flowers are safe, so I suppose I can say what I like here.")

--"They will trail in heavenly, scenty garlands and festoons of pink and white round the grey stone balustrades of the Terrace, just like decorations for a visit from Royalty. Also the 'Blue Border' is planned out. At the back stand the tallest larkspurs and delphiniums, then the clumps of deep blue borage; then come the blue Canterbury bells, then the corn-flowers; then blue pansies, then forget-me-nots, and lastly a thick blue row of lobelia, 'underlining' it, I think this is all. So believe me, dear Ted," wrote the girl, demurely, in the handwriting that was as like her school-friend's as the voices of some twins are alike,

"Yours ever affectionately, "R----"

"Oh, how silly," she broke off impatiently, to scribble a thick "E" over the "R" which she had inadvertently written. Very nearly she had signed, in spite of everything, her own name. But it didn't show. No; it read quite evenly and naturally

"_Yours ever affectionately, "Eleanor Urquhart._"

She must practise that signature. She began to do so on a loose sheet of paper. Then she must make that fair copy of this epistle. But there was no particular hurry.... "To think that another girl--not Eleanor--might, instead of deputing the job to a paid clerk, be getting quite a lot of fun out of writing love-letters to a _fiancé_ who'd never set eyes on her!" she reflected as her pen traced curly "E's" and "U's."

"For instance, _I_--if I were Eleanor--should make quite a good game out of interesting the man, making him keener to see me every letter I wrote. (She crosses the 't' in Urquhart more like _this_.) One or two should be as brief and brisk and business-like as if they came from the Manager of his Bank. The next should ask him what colours he liked a girl--_his_ girl--to wear? Then I'd write rather a piteous one, as if I were begging, between the lines, to be set free from an arrangement that was spoiling my life, standing in the way of my possible happiness with somebody else!"

Rosamond, taking out a fresh sheet of paper to make her fair copy, laughed enjoyingly over this immemorial scheme.

"That would be a good one! But the same mail should bring him another note asking him whether he did not think that it might not sometimes seem a tiny bit dull for a girl all alone in this great Convent of a Court? I should wait until he replied to that, I think."

She tucked the rose she wore into greater security at her breast.

"_Then_," she told herself, "I'd begin to flirt a little; on paper. There might even be a pet name or so tucked into a postscript--so----"

She began scribbling idly on the rough draft.

--"and crossed out again--not that a man couldn't read it, if he tried. So!"

She made a charming picture as she sat there, this royally built, golden-haired girl smiling at the desk, playing this "game" with a phantom-lover of her own, for at the moment Eleanor and Eleanor's _fiancé_--probably a milk-sop, and surely a stick!--were forgotten. Rosamond Fayre, lost in a very silly, very common, and very natural form of day-dream, was away with the Prince Charming whose elusive face smiles back into every girlish face that has ever bent over a wishing-well.

"Of all the over-worked words in the English language, the strangest seems to be '_Darling_,'" Rosamond Fayre told herself and her dream-sweetheart of the moment. "You say it to a girl, but it wouldn't sound silly and out of place to a man--provided it were the right man. '_My darling!_' Everybody uses it--yet it isn't hackneyed. Jokes and comic-paper stories and music-hall songs are cram-full of it--and still it's never, never vulgar----"

Her thoughts broke off, as from the tall white mantel-piece the clock, held up between two gilded nymphs, chimed twice.

"Half-past four!" she exclaimed. "Mercy! I must take this up for Eleanor to pass.... H'm. I suppose Eleanor has never written to her young man in that way in her life. Well, you can't very well dash off 'darlings' _per pro_. I'll copy this tidily."

She did so. She tore up one letter; then she carried the other to the big, airy lavender-breathing linen-room where Miss Urquhart, among the imposing piles of sheets, looked small and dark and busy as an ant in a snow-drift.

"Eleanor, do you mind looking over this? Will it do?"

"'Do'--oh, yes, dear, I am sure it will do beautifully," said Eleanor, with the merest perfunctory glance above an armful of pillow-cases marked URQUHART. HOSTEL. 1914. "Thanks so much, Rosamond. Will you see that it goes off?"

"What!--As it is?" suggested Rosamond, mischievously. "No postscripts?"

"Postscripts? What about?" said Eleanor the practical.

"Oh, I don't know," murmured Rosamond.

She herself could have thought of half a dozen tiny written messages that would have been as a hand waved, a glance thrown, to any young man who had received them.

"It's really a _waste_ that I haven't any one to write to on my own account! Except Cecil--No, I'm not going to write to him or to any one unless it's for the one and only real right reason," decided Rosamond, even while her employer, holding back that note to her secretary, decreed, "This says all that's needed."

Rosamond took back that note with a small, half-humourous shrug.

The gesture shook the rose that Rosamond wore in the breast of her white crêpe shirt into shedding a shower of pink petals upon the open sheet.

"Ah, I tell you what," said Rosamond, upon one of her sudden impulses. "_Those_ had better be sent in the letter! Won't you?"

"What? Those loose petals?" said Eleanor over her shoulder. "Why? Those aren't from the new roses Ted was asking about, are they?"

"Never mind. They're English rose-leaves from an English garden--ah, think of that, in a foreign country! Don't _you_ think they'd please any Englishman, far from his home? I know they would," pleaded Rosamond, in a voice still soft from that day-dream of hers. "Put them in, Eleanor!"

"Very well, if you like." And the other girl, kind and untouched as any child, slipped into the crisp grey foreign envelope a dozen sweetly scented pink petals.

"Those," said Rosamond Fayre, with a smile, "will do instead of a postscript!"

She did not think again of the saying that the post-script is the part which contains all that is most interesting in a woman's letter.