CHAPTER XV

FELLOW-CONSPIRATORS

Half-an-hour later Rosamond Fayre tried to open the subject in Miss Urquhart's office.

"Eleanor, I wanted to speak to you----"

"I'm just coming, with the letters."

"It's not about the letters. Not the _business_-letters, I mean----"

"Then I'm afraid it will have to wait, Rosamond. We must get these done first."

The impatient Rosamond "took down" and typed as if during an examination for speed, but it was twelve o'clock before the morning's correspondence was out of the way. Fortunately Miss Urquhart's _fiancé_ was also out of the way in the motor-pit with the chauffeur, strenuously busy over some hitch in the mechanism which was causing Her Ladyship (the car) to "get very sarcastic coming up the hills." Rosamond hoped the job would keep him nice and late for lunch while she had her consultation with Eleanor.

This took place on the smaller lawn beyond the gardens.

Here, on the warm turf where the Club girls had waltzed on the afternoon of the Hen-party, Eleanor had now laid down sheets and sheets of newspaper. Upon these she and her secretary were going to spread out rose-leaves to dry for pot-pourri, that would be sent up to a London depôt and sold in perforated vases for the benefit of some Guild.

The two girls walked up to the lawn together, looking the queerest contrast to one another; dark Eleanor, whose "good" coat-and-skirt of one of the more trying shades of shantung seemed specially chosen to conceal every line of her stiff, _affairée_ little figure; fair Rosamond, tall and dainty and loose-limbed, lending all her own shapeliness to one of those ready-made voile frocks, rose-sprigged, with a belted and befrilled tunic--of which a thousand duplicates had been sold in the summer sales, and which would look cheap and common enough on many of its wearers. It seemed impossible that they should have a single interest, a single occupation in common--this pair of girls whose handwritings alone were alike! Both girls now carried shallow, large wicker baskets full of the scented petals that seemed all ready to strew upon the path of a bride. They knelt down close together on the turf as they proceeded to spread the rose-leaves on the paper.

"Just like conspirators ... down to the attitude! ... On all-fours, just as if we were taking cover," thought Rosamond, ruefully amused.

Then, with a "Now-_for-it_!" expression on her face, she cleared her throat. She began to explain, hurriedly and softly and almost as if she were afraid of being overheard, that she "had been made to feel rather uneasy, this morning...."

Her difficulty, she found, was to make Eleanor Urquhart see that there could be anything to feel uneasy about.

Eleanor only said in mild surprise, "How do you mean, you 'think Mr. Ted Urquhart has got an idea that I didn't write my letters to him myself'?" She was sorting out long leaves of lemon-verbena, grey-blue heads of lavender, jagged carnation-petals to mix with the roses, as she talked. "How can he guess you wrote for me, Rosamond? It isn't very likely that he's noticed anything about our having the same sort of handwriting----"

"Ah, it's nothing at all to do with handwritings! It's not come to that yet. It hasn't come to his thinking I've anything to do with the letters. But I'm sure that he's noticing that there's something different about the letters themselves," declared Rosamond emphatically, as she smoothed that confetti of pink-and-white-and-damask petals into a thinner layer on her sheet. "I know he is."

"It must be your imagination," came Eleanor's concise little voice. "What 'something' has there been for him to notice? You wrote exactly as if you were me----"

"Can anybody write _exactly_ as if they were somebody else? I've always known they couldn't! A letter's bound to 'catch' something characteristic of the writer! Something creeps in, like the tone of one's own voice, speaking! One can't help that, Eleanor----"

"But you did. I saw!" said the other girl reassuringly. "I passed all the letters myself. Except two or three, perhaps. There was that afternoon I motored Miss Fabian back to her rooms and I couldn't get back before post-time, or something else happened. But I'm sure they would be all right--these little white roses are the sweetest of all--they were just the usual thing, weren't they? I know how careful you are with all my correspondence."

"I've tried. Yes, I have _tried_ to be careful," said the secretary-girl uneasily. "But----"

She paused. Here was something of which she had to make a clean breast. "In one of those letters to Mr. Ted Urquhart I'm afraid I _wasn't_ quite careful, Eleanor," she admitted. "I must have been in a mood----"

She stopped again. "Moods" were things Eleanor rather despised, as Rosamond knew. All this was embarrassingly difficult! It's so much easier to own up to wrong-doing than to having done something _silly_! She took another handful of petals out of her basket and began again.

"Just for fun, I suppose, I sent something ... as from you. I put----"

Eleanor's dark head turned a little impatiently.

"Well? You put what?"

With a suspicion of bravado in her pretty voice Rosamond Fayre confessed to the ultimate folly of what she'd put. "Kisses."

"What!" ejaculated Eleanor. And she moved still kneeling, so suddenly that she upset her basket. The rest of the rose-leaves spilled softly out into a fragrant stack before her. Above it she stared with dark, incredulous eyes at her secretary. "_Kisses?_"

Rosamond Fayre, feeling more than foolish, put forward an historic excuse. "They were only very little ones!"

"But you actually wrote that I--_I_ sent kisses to----"

"No! I didn't write that!" Rosamond broke in still more quickly, bending over the overturned heap of rose-leaves as she spoke. "It was at the very end of one letter; hidden away in the twirly thing you do under your name. I think I wanted to see if you'd notice when you passed the letter; and you didn't. So Mr. Ted Urquhart probably wouldn't see them at all--unless he was looking for them. Two quite tiny ones I put; like this----"

She took up the small pencil-case she wore dangling from a silver chain, and on the margin of the newspaper-sheet before her she drew a couple of those hieroglyphics over which a sleepless young man had pored and pondered more than a week ago....

Mr. Ted Urquhart's _fiancée_ contemplated those hieroglyphics silently and as if they were noisome insects that had just crawled out of the rose-leaves.

"I know," said Rosamond Fayre, abashed. "I know I oughtn't to have put those, Eleanor. You wouldn't have."

Eleanor, in her austerest tone, answered at last. "I shouldn't have thought anybody would put anything so vulgar. Except, perhaps, g-girls like P-P-P-Pansy!"

Rosamond flushed deeply. She felt that Eleanor's reproof was just. She often felt (as girls surcharged with any warmth of temperament are so frequently forced to feel) "_I can't be a very 'nice' girl. Really nice girls are rather shocked at me._" And she regretted that she seemed sometimes more akin to Pansy than to what "a lady" should be in emotions and thoughts.... Nevertheless she longed at that instant for the presence of the Principal Boy. Pansy could have "stood up to" Miss Urquhart in a way that Miss Urquhart's secretary couldn't.

Miss Urquhart was so "difficult" these days! Far more forbidding than the Eleanor of Rosamond's school-time, the dark-eyed monitress who had always been helpful and kind, almost motherly to the younger girls!

"They say being engaged 'softens' a girl," Rosamond thought. "All I can say is that it--or something--'hardens' this one! I ought to have known how she'd take this----"

She said aloud, meekly, "I was afraid you'd think it very dreadful, Eleanor."

"A little vulgar, as I say; that is all. Still, it can't be helped now," said Eleanor Urquhart, with that line of displeasure dividing her brows. "And it doesn't matter--particularly."

"Eleanor," persisted Rosamond, still warmly flushed, "I'm afraid it--or more likely something else--must have 'mattered'--Made all the difference in your letters----"

"How? Were there any more of--those?" Miss Urquhart asked with a gesture of distaste towards the two crosses marked on the paper. "_Larger_ ones?"

"No. Oh, _no_!"

"Or anything else of the same kind?" suggested Eleanor, rising to her feet and moving along the line of spread newspapers. Her secretary said, truthfully as she thought, "No."

"Very well, then. There's nothing to make him 'suspect.' He can't."

"But--He _is_! _Look_ at him!" broke out Rosamond, rising also and giving a sweep of her long arm, as if she were indicating the young man who was at that moment engaged at the other end of the grounds; shirt-sleeved and sweating and grunting over--or rather, under--machinery that seemed to him such a simple thing compared with the motives and mind of a woman. "_Do_ you look at him? Do you _ever_ look at him?"

And she thought impatiently, "_How_ impossible it is to discuss anything with the kind of girl who's too reserved to say a _word_ about her lover! How much easier it would be if Eleanor were even the exhausting type who brought her hair-brushes into my room every night to gush over what he's like. I don't even get a hint of what he _is_ like to her!" And she persisted, urgently, aloud--"_Did_ you watch him at breakfast? He was watching you, Eleanor, as a cat watches a mouse-hole! He was waiting with all his ears to hear what you'd say when he suddenly _burst_ it upon us--upon you--that your letters were coming home to roost!"

"Have you any other reason," Eleanor enquired, "for thinking he's thought anything of the kind?"

"No, I haven't. But one can't help feeling things like that, in one's bones," persisted Rosamond. "The whole air at breakfast-time was _quivering_ with something being 'up.' I saw Mr. Ted Urquhart looking it, I tell you!"

"Oh, you fancied it."

"I wish I had! No," said Rosamond gloomily. "Either he's caught us out, or he will soon."

"Nonsense," said Eleanor, a little uneasily, a little shortly.

More shortly Rosamond took her up. "Well, do you care to ask him if he's noticed----"

"I? Ask him anything at all about it? Certainly not."

"Very well. Then we--you won't know anything until he chooses," prophesied Rosamond, kneeling again. "I mean until he's definitely got to the bottom of the whole trick we played upon him."

"Er--Did you get me a few sp-p-p-prigs of rosemary to put in with the rest? Thank you," said the restrained little voice of Eleanor as she stood over her. It added with less restraint, "I don't like your calling that a 'trick.'"

"I'm sorry. But I think you'll find he'll call it one," returned her secretary, stripping the sprigs of rosemary with fingers that shook a little from temper, though her voice was quiet. She was thinking, "If there's any truth in the old proverb '_Where Rosemary grows the Mistress is Master_' the bush I picked this from will be withered up by next year."

She continued to speak quite quietly. "Surely, Eleanor, you see that he isn't the sort of man to stand it? I mean what man would put up with having a stranger's letters palmed off on him, under the pretence that they came from his _fiancée_? Imagine a man like Mr.--_Any_ man, I mean! When he finds out that's what's been done--well, I'm afraid of what will happen!"

"_You_ are afraid?"

"Yes. Do you think I've nothing to lose? I've my living!" said Rosamond, sitting back on her heels and looking up at her girlish employer. "The reason I gave in to you about writing to him at all was because I didn't want to lose my post here! That's what I'm afraid of now!"

"But--I haven't been thinking of your going!" said Eleanor.

"You may have to think of it!" said Rosamond relentlessly. "Supposing you can't afford to keep on a secretary any longer? Supposing you leave The Court? Supposing your engagement--suddenly ends?"

Still Eleanor didn't understand.

"Why should it suddenly end?"

"Your _fiancé_," said Rosamond, "might think that trick was reason enough!"

"_What!_"

"Well, _I_ think so--now," said Rosamond, lifting those drying rose-leaves and letting them slip through her white fingers again.

Eleanor's face, looking down at her, at last began to show a dawning anxiety. She protested, "But I was so busy!"

"Well!" The secretary-girl gave a short laugh. "Tell him that!"

"I--see," said Eleanor, slowly. She was silent for a moment as she stood, backed by the clipped box-hedge, looking down at the green turf and at the flower-strewn paper and at the easy movements of the kneeling girl at her feet. "You mean--that might seem so odd to Ted. Now I've seen him----"

"It seemed impossible enough to me before I saw him! But now _you've_ seen him," said Rosamond, tossing her petals, "you don't want him to break off the engagement, do you?"

"Oh, Rosamond! _No_! Of _course_ I don't!" agreed the other girl with a sudden fervour that made her secretary glance quickly at her. A new note of trepidation shook that little trite arranging voice of Eleanor's as she gasped, "Don't you see what it would mean to me?"

Rosamond nearly exclaimed, "Does he, then, mean so much after all?" But Ted Urquhart's _fiancée_ went on, "How could I carry on my Club-work if we didn't live at The Court? You know, Father would lose all the estate money that Ted wishes him to use; and he has very little of his own, I've only three hundred a year of my own, from my mother. As it is at present, I am able to put aside more than a hundred a year of that towards the Hostel, and I can hand over fifty to Miss Fabian's Guild. And then there's the use of The Court for----"

The ruling passion again; the good works and the girls! Rosamond Fayre listened in speechless amazement; and, humbly enough, she reflected, "Yes. Eleanor is a much better sort of girl than I am. She's marrying money--but it's all for other people! Her only fear is for those Clubs and that they might lose what she can do to help them. She's willing to sacrifice even _herself_. Oh, I'm afraid I could never sacrifice _my_self. Not even for money! It must be my Pansyishness and vulgarity that makes me think only of the kind of sweetheart I'd like!"

Then came the wonder, "What about _him_? What about Eleanor's dear Ted?"

Judging from his attention to Eleanor, he was devoted to her, Rosamond thought. He evidently didn't mind the--the aloofness of his _fiancée_. He perhaps admired her all the more for it; thought it part of her unselfishness and sincerity. But when he found out that the sincerity had failed in one particular, _towards himself_? Wasn't the devotion more than likely to fail also?

But here was Eleanor saying in a brightening tone, "Well, there are only two or three more letters to come now. And even if Ted did think there might have been something odd about those, the whole question of letter-writing will soon blow over----"

"Oh, _will_ it!" thought her secretary. "Not after he gets that letter I wrote at the Hostel!"

It was on the tip of her tongue to say so.

But, after all, that Hostel-letter, which loomed incessantly at the back of Rosamond's mind, had nothing to do with Eleanor. _It was not signed with Eleanor's name_. Rosamond was in no way bound to talk about it. So she merely shook her bright head and said ruefully, "I'm not counting on anything 'blowing over.' I'm only sure that we both stand to lose a good deal!"

Now Eleanor was really troubled. She fidgeted with the handle of her empty basket. She, usually so prompt with what was to be done next in all her affairs, asked quite helplessly, "What _are_ we to do if it turns out that you are right?"

"What _can_ we do?" rejoined Rosamond, looking up again. "You don't think he can be spoken to about what happened?"

"_I_ can't speak to him. N-N-No, of course I can't," decided Miss Urquhart. "Could _you_?"

"D'you mean if I were in your place?" rejoined her secretary. "But if I were, you see, I shouldn't have got myself into this particular fix. If I'd been engaged to--to anybody, I'd have written my own love-letters!"

"I d-d-don't mean that at all. I mean, could you go now and tell Ted,--you, Rosamond, yourself,--what I got you to do for me?"

"No," said Rosamond, firmly. "No."

"Then nobody will tell him," said Eleanor.

"Then we shall have to wait and see if he elects to tell us. Very well. There seems nothing else to be done."

"And then what?" demanded Rosamond, again rising from her knees. "For then--especially after we _don't_ tell him!--there's still the question whether he breaks off the engagement."

"Oh, it _can't_ come to that!" demurred Eleanor, petulant with anxiety.

"It can come to whatever he wishes. What we did was, after all, _forgery_!"

"Oh, it was n-n-nothing of the kind!"

"The penalty's the same!"

"'Penalty'? You've a most unpleasant way of putting things!" said Eleanor, facing her.

But it was not Eleanor's annoyance that made her secretary tremble for her post. Rosamond answered without hesitation, "I mean the broken engagement."

"If it is broken, it will be your fault," Eleanor retorted quite hotly. "You will have done it, with--" again she pointed down to the coded kisses on the paper--"with those two--things!"

"No; I shan't. You'll have done it yourself," Rosamond insisted, "with your whole senseless idea of dragging a third person into it at all. Always a mistake, in any engagement! Always----"

She paused. Both girls were flushed now. They looked into each other's faces with hostile eyes. Then both at once seemed to realise that hostility cannot be allowed between allies making common cause against an enemy.

Eleanor smiled deprecatingly, though still on her dignity, and began again, "Well, we need not quarrel."

Rosamond said ruefully--

"I'm sorry I called your idea 'senseless'----"

"I'm sorry I said what I did about those--about your message," admitted Eleanor. "I daresay plenty of--other girls might put that sort of thing in a letter----"

Rosamond's blue eyes fell--upon the strewn rose-petals that reminded her of something. She murmured:

"That--message wasn't very much worse, I thought, than the handful of rose-leaves you sent him, another time. You did send those!"

"Yes, but you told me to!" protested Eleanor. "Don't you remember? That was one of your ideas!"

"Oh! dear!" sighed Rosamond, "so it was----"

"Anyhow," said Eleanor, "those didn't count."

(English rose-leaves--in a South American camp! Worn at a woman's breast--carrying their message a thousand miles and more--treasured in a man's pocketbook even now--_They didn't count?_)

"The question is," repeated Eleanor, "what are we to do now? Can we settle what we are to say if Ted does ask anything?"

"If he asks, 'Why are some of your letters so different?' had you better say that you, personally, don't consider they are different----" mused Rosamond.

"Shall I have to ask to see them all (if he's kept them) and then go over them with him and _explain_ them?" suggested the engaged girl dolefully. "I don't believe I shall even remember which _are_ my own!"

"He'll soon tell you which he thinks are _not_!"

"Oh, Rosamond! Oh, why did I ever ask you to help me over the wretched letters? Oh! How I wish I hadn't even promised I'd write every mail-day! Shall I say that to _him_? Or had I better----"

The discussion prolonged itself until the two girls were even later for lunch than was the young man against whom they plotted.

And in the end, all the decision to which these fellow-conspirators came was the time-honoured decision that closes so many even weightier discussions:

--Namely, "For the present to let things drift!"