CHAPTER XIII

A WHITE NIGHT

"Got a sweetheart already, has she," thought Ted Urquhart grimly.

It was his first clear thought as he jerked himself at last out of the stupor into which he'd been plunged by a blow dealt in the dark.

Slowly and heavily he walked up the rest of that darkened scented corridor of an avenue into the lighted hall of his house.

And there slipped into the hall behind him the girl who was not his. The girl who'd murmured, "Oh, Cecil," in a tone as soft as the sound of that good-bye kiss which had been overheard by another man.

Ted Urquhart stood aside for her to pass. A black transparent scarf that she'd put on trailed away from her white dress. He picked it up and handed it to her.

"Oh, thanks," she said a little wearily, as she passed upstairs. "Good-night!"

"Good-night."

He had not meant to look at her. But for one instant, his eyes strayed to her face--not lighted up by any mischief now. That mouth of hers was grave. And was it a wet gleam on her eye-lashes?--Yes.

Of course.

She'd been crying because that young--that young Bray had had to go. "Oh, Cecil," she'd sighed. He called her "Miss Fayre," Urquhart had noticed, before people. For some reason or other it was not announced yet. But they were sweethearts all right.

That soft exclamation, that other soft sound, were no further business of Ted Urquhart's. For a moment he stood, however, torturing himself with the remembrance of them, and gripping the balustrade on which his hand rested.

Then he let it go with a little jerk.

Yes. That ended it. Very well.

It was a very tight-lipped young man who took his peg of whisky rather brown, Mr. Beeton noticed, before preparing to go off early to his room.

"I beg your pardon, sir, I think you overlooked this," said the butler. "This letter came for you by the last post, sir."

Ted Urquhart took that letter upstairs with him.

In his room he glanced at it. A thin foreign envelope, the address of the Court scrawled over that of his Camp. It had been forwarded from South America. Then he saw, above the hasty re-direction, his name in a clear pretty writing he knew very well.

Eleanor's. This was a letter of hers that had reached the Camp just after he'd left it, and it had been sent on to follow him here. It must be weeks old by now. And he might expect now to have these re-directed letters from her turning up every week, for she would have written her duty-letter to her _fiancé_ for three mail-days in succession, not knowing that even as she wrote he was already on his way home to take her by surprise.

A pretty collection of surprises it had turned out to be from the first moment that he'd seen, not Eleanor, but her lovely Second-in-command----

"Here! None of that." Urquhart peremptorily called off his own thoughts as if they'd been straying spaniels. He'd got, somehow or other, to keep his mind off that savagely rankling memory of what he'd just heard in the lime-walk. "Better read the letter."

He tore it open. He set it down before him on the dressing-table, beginning listlessly enough to read it while he undressed.

He began listlessly. But presently he lifted his head with a little movement that was reflected in the Sheraton mirror; he stood for a moment alert, a graceful, wide-shouldered figure of a man in shirt-sleeves, his braces dangling about his narrow loins, while he read again.

"My dear Ted----

"Of course I am not offended that your plans do not allow you to come over this year to see me, I quite understand. I am such a busy person Myself"----

Here followed the catalogue of Miss Urquhart's activities for the summer. Her _fiancé_ could imagine the little brown head conscientiously writing them all down; the dusky head bent over the paper. Then came the phrases which--he didn't know why--had arrested him.

"In fact, I must break off now to attend to the Head of one of my Clubs. (This sounds rather like golf, doesn't it? She might quite well be described as 'The Driver' too!)"

Ted Urquhart's eyes left the letter and turned towards the closed white door of his room almost as though he thought he had heard a call. Yet there had been no sound. Then they returned to that last paragraph. Then he found himself looking away again, and staring, without any reason, at the long serried row of his boots--foot-gear of every make and material and several nationalities. What was there about this part of the letter that had given him a sense of being puzzled over something? He read it again.

Then it dawned upon him.

He thought, "_How unlike Eleanor_ to write that!"

A couple of hours later the young man, tossing and turning between his blankets in the dark, clutched at that thought again. He would have clutched at any idea that would distract him even for a moment from the black jealousy and despair caused by that memory of a man's name murmured in a girl's voice----

"_Oh, Cecil!_"

--and the other sound ... the other death-knell to his hope.... This brooding would not do. He fixed his mind resolutely on that letter of Eleanor's.

Yes, by Jove. How oddly unlike Eleanor that last paragraph had read!

He simply couldn't imagine Eleanor writing so primly, so characteristically up to that point, and then "letting herself go" in a sentence that seemed almost to be laughing at her own solemnity. That gay little gibe! From a girl who took everything with such a deadly seriousness! All her other letters to him had been so consistently typical of her. None of them had shown a gleam of that sort----

"Stop a bit, though. There was the other letter with that unaccountable Thing in it," young Urquhart reminded himself, sitting up suddenly in bed an hour or so later. "By Jove, yes. Supposing to-night's letter proves to be a sort of sidelight upon that other one? I say! I'll have a look at it now."

He slipped out of bed and snapped on the lights. He went to the dressing-table. Here, beside pipe, pouch and matches, lay a worn and favourite pig-skin pocket-book. He picked it up and took out of it----

First, his receipted bill from that little French hotel.

Next, a little sheaf of visiting cards with addresses; home-people he'd promised to "look up" for some of his pals at the Camp.

Then, some letters. No! It wasn't this one, or this one.... Here it was, at last, in one of the well-known grey envelopes. He shook out of the envelope a handful of once-pink rose-petals, and laid them carefully aside on the open pocket-book. He scarcely looked at them now; he'd looked at them often enough already. It was the letter at which he now stared. The only other one of Eleanor's letters which was uncharacteristic of the girl as he knew her. The one he'd received to-night seemed to have a girl's laugh rippling between the lines. But this first one held something more betraying. Something which, because it was incomprehensible, Ted Urquhart had "given up." Well, here it was for him to puzzle over once again. _The letter that had brought him home!_

In his lighted room, orderly and deathly silent, it seemed for a moment as if something were holding its breath behind the shoulder of that young man in pyjamas. There was nothing specially striking in the actual contents of that letter. "And she ends up so precisely," he mused for the hundredth time, "with her

'There seems to be nothing else that would interest you'----

And then, by George, over the page"----

He turned it.

--"there's this!"

The sight of "_This_" would have been a petrifying shock to the girl who'd written it.

For Rosamond Fayre, secretary, prided herself on her neatness and accuracy. She boasted that she'd never made the mistakes that every writer of letters is said to make once in a life-time. Namely, to slip A.'s letter into an envelope addressed to B., or to tear up the fair copy of a note while sending off the rough draft.

But it was a compromisingly rough draft that Ted Urquhart held now in his hand.

He held it up to the light, as if he hadn't already held it so many a time, to examine that scribbled--

"_Darling. My darling!_"

That was on it. It was all scrawled over with a pen-drawn spiral that looked like "_the smoke from the engine_" of a child's drawing. There were one or two beginnings of it, a copper-plate "Dar--" "My darl----"

"_My darling!_"

From Eleanor, if you please. Yes, from Eleanor, who never by any chance called him anything but his name.

And so much had been packed into the time since that sunny morning in France when he'd met--_No! None of that again_--since the day he'd met Eleanor that he'd forgotten to notice the contrast between herself and that one letter of hers.

And now, in this second letter that he'd received, he seemed to trace the possibility of some clue to the mystery, of the astonishing difference between the Eleanor who wrote and the Eleanor who spoke.

He put down the letter with the "Darling" post-script, enclosing those rose-leaves. Again he took up the letter that had arrived this evening.

Perhaps he might find in it something he had overlooked? He examined it minutely, from the "_My dear Ted_" at the beginning to the little flourish under the "_Eleanor Urquhart_" at the end.

Ah! Wait a bit! There! Could it be? Was it----

Yes. Tucked away, all but hidden in the loop of the flourish, his eye, now that it was on the look-out for it, detected something. Two almost imperceptible hieroglyphics; the marks of two crosses.

Cupid, his mark! For all the world over that stands, in a letter, for one thing only.

Kisses.

From Eleanor? From the unawakened girl whose only notion of a caress seemed to be that twice-daily cousinly peck on the cheek? She had sent half-concealed love-messages to the man to whom she was, by contract, engaged?

Of course it might amuse a girl to do that, reflected Ted Urquhart, lighting his pipe. But surely not that girl? Wasn't she as chilly and youthfully hard as the unripest of the green apples in the Court Orchard? Or--here he knit his brows and stared into the puff of smoke--_had he been mistaken_ from the very beginning in his _fiancée_ Eleanor?

The clocks all over the house chimed One and Two and Half-past Two while Ted Urquhart, tramping barefoot up and down his bedroom and smoking hard, went on wondering (still resolutely) over this question.

A moth flew in, with a whirr and drone as of a tiny biplane, and circled about under the ceiling. His own were the only lights on, of course. Everybody else fast asleep hours ago. He wondered if She had cried any more over the departure of "_Cecil_" after she'd gone up-- _Stop there! Think of something else_.

Was Eleanor, whom he thought he got "summed up," a girl he'd never really understood?

The rising wind outside dashed a cold spatter of drops against the young man's cheek as he passed the open casement. He looked out. Those farmer-fellows had been wise to get in their corn while they could. Out there in the indigo darkness it was coming on to rain like blazes; the light from his room gleamed on the lines of it as on the strings of a harp. He half closed the window and took up those letters once more. And he was conscious of the oddest feeling about them; this young man who'd never "bothered" much about feelings until--fairly recently.

But it was with a little, sudden, warm thrill of positive tenderness that he handled these messages from a girl for whom he'd never had any tenderness ... so far.

But supposing that came? Supposing Eleanor did turn out to be this utterly unknown quantity?

He'd heard of people who could be delightful, charming, and warmly friendly while they talked to you, but who, on paper, seemed cold and repellently stiff. Simply, they couldn't write letters. Perhaps, then, there were other people who could express themselves in letters, but who simply couldn't talk? Became cold, self-conscious, too shy to be themselves? Perhaps Eleanor's real self was the bashful, passionate little soul who, greatly daring, sent furtive "darlings" and kisses and rose-leaves to the lover she'd never seen?

If that were Eleanor, he must meet her. He must know her. He must get her to declare herself. The very thought of the quest seemed to bring hope with it....

He heard the clocks striking Three, and stretched himself wearily....

Then suddenly checked himself, with long sinewy arms above his head. Ah! Another idea had just occurred to him.

There were those other belated letters already written by Eleanor that would be coming on, forwarded from the Camp. He might expect to receive these here, one at a time! They were already on their way to "Edward Urquhart, Esqre.," at this moment. One just sent on from the Camp; probably, one at the port of embarkation; one crossing the South Atlantic....

Would any of them throw fresh light upon the subject of their writer?

Would they be entirely formal and flavourless? Mere Club reports? Minutes of meeting?

Or might they hold just a dash of the other thing? The dab of jam in the otherwise so very doughy nut? That remained to be seen. How soon, though? Each week he'd get one....

He dropped his arms. He turned to the ivory-leaved calendar that stood on the writing-table beside the leather-framed, faded photograph of his father in the uniform of a Woolwich cadet; he ran his finger down until it reached a date.

What an infernal while to wait until he got another letter from this new Eleanor!

Her letters were all he had to help him to find her.

A regular paper-chase!

Find her he must; would----

Here at last he found himself yawning.

He turned off the lights, and the velvet darkness of the window-square was transformed to weeping grey as he rolled over in his blankets again.

He was dog-tired. Rain pattered loudly on the lime-trees of that Avenue where, half a life-time ago, he'd heard ... what left him still aching with misery, frustration, hopelessness.

No. _No_! Not that. He was not going to think of it. He'd got something to think of. The hope of this new Eleanor. Getting on to the track of the girl who'd slipped hints of such a different personality into two of her letters.

Eleanor had thought of sending him those petals; had smuggled in crosses for him to find....

Rose-leaves....

And kisses, of all things....

Here Ted Urquhart rolled over for the last time and slept.