CHAPTER II

THE WHITE FEATHER

About the Court drawing-room that grey Army flannel still lay in drifts, shrouding the pinks and peaches and creams of the summery chintz, and heaping the soft dead-rose-coloured Aubusson carpet. On every chair were stacked green cardboard boxes, half-unpacked, with parcels of shirts, socks, mufflers, pyjamas, every sort of undergarment that the troops might or might not require; all ordered as patterns by Miss Urquhart.

The small, grey-gowned brunette herself was sitting in one of the window-seats with her back to the sun-bathed Terrace outside, bending those dark brows of hers over the complexities of a Balaclava helmet that she was going to knit, when her _fiancé_ came quietly in and stood before her.

"Eleanor," he said.

"Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-SIX," counted the absorbed Eleanor aloud over her knitting. "Wait a minute. Drop five and then go on--Oh, Ted, mind, please! That's the pattern for a soldier's bed-jacket that you've got your foot on."

"Sorry," said the young man, stepping back off one of the perforated plans of tissue-paper that added their litter to the other signs of toil. "If you can spare me one minute----"

"Five, six, seven," murmured Eleanor.

--"I came," he said, rather more abruptly, "to tell you something."

"Oh, yes?" said Eleanor, suddenly flurried, dismayed.

She thought to herself, "Oh dear! Is this what Rosamond said, after all? Is he going to begin about those letters?" And she made a movement as if she would put the work away from her lap. There was a frightened little catch in her voice as she went on, "What is it, Ted? I'll c-come into the office if you like, and get Miss Fayre to finish c-clearing up these b-b-b-bundles of stuff in here."

Young Urquhart reflected a little bitterly that his _fiancée_ seemed able to rely upon Miss Fayre for doing plenty of her odd jobs; from tidying up her sewing to writing letters to the man she (Miss Fayre's employer) had promised to marry. But he only hastened to say, "No; don't trouble. I can tell you in here, it won't take a minute. I might have told you before. It's practically settled now. I've asked them to make what use they can of me for Active Service."

Eleanor looked up at him wide-eyed.

"Active Service?" she echoed blankly. "What? You d-don't mean you're going out too, to this perfectly horrible War?"

"I hope so."

"But, Ted," objected his _fiancée_, "you aren't in the Army."

"I hope to be," said the young fellow.

He went on to explain to the girl, in as few words as possible, his plans.

He concluded, "I hope this won't upset Uncle Henry or--you very much."

Eleanor shook her dark head with a sigh that was partly of reassurance. After all, that about the letters seemed to be a false alarm. This other was very startling, but it was Ted's affair.

"Well, I am afraid Father will think it such a pity. He considers all this fighting is _so_ unnecessary," said Miss Urquhart, taking up her work again, "and really if you come to think of it, Ted, so it is. (Nine, ten, eleven; drop five again.) Why couldn't everything be settled by Arbitration? It seems so _absurd_, not. In the Twentieth Century and all, when we ought at least to have outgrown Brute Force, as Octavia Fabian says. She took me to such a splendid lecture about it not so long ago." The memory of that lecture restored the authoritativeness to Eleanor's sedate little voice as she concluded, "I suppose you've never read anything by a man called Normal Angell, Ted?"

"Yes, I have," said Ted.

"Well, then, you see what _I_ think about it all: wasting the wealth of nations on great hulking armies and plunging innocent people into poverty and suffering, _all for no reason_! I do think (five, six, seven) that it's so _wrong_----"

"Well, Eleanor, I'm afraid we shan't agree on that if we go on talking about it for ever," put in the young man temperately. "I think I'm going, with luck, whatever happens."

A pause, occupied by Eleanor's half-whispered, "Cast on ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen----"

Then, raising his voice a trifle, young Urquhart began again: "And when I come back---- But that'll be time enough to talk about that then, perhaps. There are a good many things that we shall have to leave standing as they are for the present, Eleanor."

He meant to speak quietly, even casually. But his tone betrayed something of what he was feeling. Eleanor, who was not usually susceptible to "tones," but whose uneasy conscience had left her rather "jumpy," took the point. She laid her work down again, and glanced quickly at him. He was looking away, over her head, across the Terrace and the lawn outside, and the expression on his face betrayed, even to her, more than his tone had done.

Eleanor felt she could not endure any more surprises, any more suspense over this thing.

She rose and stood before him, small and sallow and nervous. With that little scared quaver in her voice again she began: "Ted! What 'things'? D-do you m-m-mean about----"

"Ah, never mind what about just now," the young man said quickly. "As I tell you, it doesn't so much matter----"

"Yes, but it does. B-b-because I've been very unc-c-comfortable about it! And I c-c-can't let you go like this. I must tell you that I think I know what you m-m-m-m-mean," protested his _fiancée_, in a flurry of stuttering. "Is it about some l-l-letters----?"

"No, no, don't let's worry about anything now."

"Yes, but I must. D-d-do let me exp-explain----" she pleaded.

The authoritativeness was melting away from her; so was that feeling of superiority which it was so easy to acquire in a lecture-hall surrounded by Octavia Fabian and her set. And as there were occasions when Miss Fayre craved for the unabashed fluency of the Principal Boy to back her up, so there were moments when Miss Urquhart longed for the moral support of a College-educated woman. It was not to hand. Helplessly Eleanor rushed upon the dangerous subject which had loomed above her ever since that morning of the conversation with her secretary over the pot-pourri. She made a little surrendering gesture with her hands as she cried:

"It _is_ about those l-last four or five l-letters you got from me, isn't it? I d-_did_ make Rosamond Fayre write them. I am so dreadfully sorry. But, Ted, I was so busy----"

"All right, all right," he said, looking away. "Never mind now."

But the small dark girl trembling before him would go on faltering out her trite, childish words of explanation:

"I n-never _can_ write letters, any letters! I'd rather do accounts, sew, anything. And I hadn't ever seen you, you know! And I didn't see why Rosamond shouldn't. She _said_ you'd find out. H-how did you?"

"Oh, by putting two and two together in one way and another, I suppose," he said listlessly. Nothing--except the Big Job--seemed worth wasting much interest over just now. Still, he asked, "Would you mind telling me how long the thing went on?"

"I'll l-look up in my notebook," returned Eleanor with a little gulp. "I've k-kept the dates of all letters sent----"

"Never mind the dates. Which was the first letter that she--that Miss Fayre wrote? D'you happen to know what was in it?"

"Yes, I do," returned the engaged girl. "The first that Rosamond wrote was the one with those rose-leaves in it. Perhaps you d-d-didn't notice?"

"I noticed them," said young Urquhart drily. "Miss Fayre send those?"

"No, no. I sent those, Ted," replied conscientious Eleanor, feeling constrained to add, "But she said I ought to! She s-seemed to think that people abroad would like anything that came from an English garden, and so I p-p-p-put in those p-p-p-petals from the rose that she was wearing at the time."

In spite of himself he felt he must take her up here.

He echoed, "'_She_' was wearing?"

"Yes; b-because I hadn't a flower on, Ted," apologised his _fiancée_. "I'm afraid it was Rosamond's rose."

"And her letters. She wrote all the letters after that. Well!" he said slowly, "Miss Fayre copies your handwriting, Eleanor, remarkably well."

He was surprised to hear Eleanor reply:

"Oh, no, she doesn't. I copy hers. I m-m-m-mean, I used to when I was at school with her," explained Miss Urquhart, looking at the moment not unlike the prim little monitress of her class who was listening to a scolding for some only just discovered fault. "And I kept it up, and it comes quite naturally to me now to write exactly like Rosamond Fayre, whenever I do write anything. That was long before there were any letters to you to write. The handwriting had n-n-nothing to do with it, except that it gave me the idea that Rosamond might write any letter for me, if I were specially busy!"

"I see," said Ted Urquhart smoothly. "And perhaps you didn't even need to see the letters."

"M-m-m-most of them I did," pleaded his _fiancée_, her little brown hands working with nervousness. "I read _n-n-nearly_ all of them, Ted----"

He was still looking blankly away from her. He said, apparently to himself, "At least it wasn't deliberate forgery, then."

"Oh, no. _P-please_ don't call it that. She s-s-said you would call it that! Rosamond said you'd be most frightfully angry with her and m-me and both of us," blurted out Eleanor distressfully. She glanced about the stately drawing-room that was so unspeakably useful for her gatherings; she'd meant to hold Guild of Needlework Meetings in this big room all through the Autumn. Was this the end of all those plans? Every trace of colour had left the small strained face as Eleanor said, "I sup-pup-pose it's quite natural that you should feel you couldn't forgive me for this."

"What?" he said, as if jerking himself away from thoughts that had been far enough away from this agitated little dusky-headed creature who stood there almost pathetically at his mercy; his wife-to-be whom he had never loved, could never love.

But he found it no difficulty to speak quite gently to her now.

"It's quite all right, Eleanor," he said soothingly, lightly touching her compact little shoulder. "Please don't look so worried about it. I wish you wouldn't. Really it was nothing. You hadn't seen me. What did it matter? Anyhow it doesn't matter now. Nothing does, particularly--I mean nothing does, honestly," said Ted Urquhart. "The whole secret's out now, such as it is, and--please, please don't let's have any rot about--any talk about forgiveness and so on!

"Let's talk about something else," he went on hurriedly, as Eleanor with a little gasp of relief took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. "By the way, I'm going to tell Uncle Henry now about my having applied to the R.E. Special Reserve. But I want that kept dark for the present. Don't say anything about it, if you don't mind, to--er--anybody else in the house."

"Very well, Ted," said his _fiancée_ gratefully enough, as the young man left her. "I won't say a word."

She had, however, something upon the other subject to say to her secretary.

It was said that evening, after Miss Urquhart had dressed for dinner in a Lady Mayoressy-looking gown of mauve satin, the sight of which upon a brunette afflicted Rosamond almost to remonstrance.

Rosamond herself was stitching up a rent in the over-skirt of her long-suffering old black ninon rag when Miss Urquhart tapped at her door and entered, bearing herself with more than her usual dignity.

"Been having a row with him," Rosamond guessed from the aggressive tilt of Eleanor's chin, the line of her small mouth; but Eleanor soon put her right about the origin of this added stateliness.

It was triumph.

"Rosamond, I must tell you," began her employer, "that I have spoken to my _fiancé_, and explained to him all about those letters."

She paused for effect, while Rosamond stood, struck motionless in the act of putting in a stitch. Eleanor added: "And you were quite, quite wrong about its making him so angry!"

"What?" In her surprise Rosamond dropped her thimble and her reel of black silk; and she forgot to pick them up. She stared at the other girl and exclaimed, "Wasn't he angry, then?"

"Not in the least," said Miss Urquhart impressively. She might have been less ponderous had she not felt the need of regaining her own place in her self-esteem. She had been rather badly frightened; and she had shown it. "He quite understood. He said it didn't matter at all. So that needn't worry us--you any more."

She gave a little nod and went out, still holding the dusky head in a very straight line with the back of the purple satin waist-belt.

Miss Fayre, left to herself, gasped, "Well! I never _heard_ of such an extraordinary young man as this of Eleanor's in the whole course of my life! Wasn't angry! Said it didn't matter! Oh, how differently he's turned out from what he seemed to be like, that time so long ago, in France. It just shows that one can't put any faith in anything nowadays, not even in one's first impressions of young men! I suppose all this is just of a piece with his not 'minding' staying at home and letting other people do his fighting for him. Why, he's just a----"

She dropped the mended flounce of her frock and primmed her red mouth into its most contemptuous curve. She turned to the door, thinking, "Doesn't seem to occur to him that he ought to volunteer, great, tall, sinewy waster! It's enough to make any one feel angry with him. And he isn't even man enough to be angry with _me_!"

Here again Rosamond Fayre was quite wrong.

For young Urquhart, who had found it easy enough to be forbearing to the apologetic Eleanor, felt furious beyond words with the girl whom Eleanor had employed. He found no earthly excuse for _her_; none! He would have liked to tell her so, the minx and hussy, who had been laughing at him all this while, in her sleeve--or so he thought. Of course he wouldn't be able to say a word.... Words, however, can so often be superseded by other forms of self-expression.

The first half-glance at Eleanor's "waster" of a Ted in the dining-room assured Rosamond that he was silently and coldly raging. Not at his _fiancée_. To Eleanor he talked, during dinner, brightly and casually enough. But at any word put into the conversation by the white-throated blonde who sat opposite to him at table, the young man became silent. And the casual way in which he averted his eyes conveyed more anger than the most furious glance above that group of plump white china-limbed Loves that held up their burden of grapes and nectarines in the centre of the table.

"Frightfully annoyed with me because I'm in the secret of how off-handedly his sweetheart treated him," translated Rosamond to herself.

Then the secretary-girl almost forgot that question of the letters she'd written, over which young Urquhart fumed and smarted at the moment. She was wondering, still wondering over the question of the War and of why this splendid-looking specimen of English manhood was still a civilian at home.

"He doesn't think much of me; but I am sure I think even less of him," reflected the girl. And if Ted Urquhart didn't at that moment realise what is the attitude of the feminine and full-blooded young woman towards the Non-combatant-from-Choice, it was certainly not Rosamond's fault, as she, in turn, averted her own blue eyes.

"Won't he go because of Eleanor?" she thought. "But lots of the men who went out were engaged and got married at the same time as they ordered their Service-kit. Won't Eleanor let him go? Pooh!--has he got other duties at home that are important enough to keep him back? What could they possibly be?"

"... another chauffeur as good, in Ransom's place; oh, yes," Ted Urquhart was saying to his uncle. "Find one easily----"

"Well, that's not enough to stay at home for, then," thought Rosamond Fayre, crumbling her dinner-roll.

"And I've gone all over the bailiff's books for you this afternoon, Uncle Henry----

"That's not so very important either!" pondered Rosamond, and waited, mocking, for the next remark. Perhaps that would be about something more important than the struggle for his country's supremacy?

"They sent over from the village to ask if we'd spare some vegetables and pears and things for Eleanor's Refugees' Convalescent Home," young Urquhart was saying. "As Marrow wasn't there to decide, I said they could come over to-morrow with hampers, and that I'd help 'em to pick----"

"Not as important as fighting to save people from becoming refugees!" commented Rosamond, silently.

But actually she said nothing further until dinner was over.

In the drawing-room Eleanor came to the chair where her secretary sat absorbed in the evening's news from those Belgian battle-fields, and held out a hank of thick, cocoa-coloured knitting-wool.

"Rosamond, I want you to help me with this if you don't mind," she said, with some of that extra dignity still lingering in her manner. "You hold it, please, while I wind."

Rosamond, dropping the _Pall Mall Gazette_, held out her supple white hands.

"But isn't this a job for Mr. Ted Urquhart?" she suggested, with a twinkle. "Some men seem to like holding wool, don't they?--of course it depends who it's for----"

"Ted is having his coffee with my father," vouchsafed Eleanor, beginning to wind her wool, "in the study."

"They seem to have plenty to talk about," commented Rosamond, mildly, turning first one pretty ringless hand and then the other as the wool slipped round them.

"Yes," agreed Eleanor, winding. "I know he had something particular to tell father."

Her small mouth tightened into its line of disapproval as she thought again of Ted's intention to volunteer for Active Service.

Probably just because all the other young men who'd been at school with him seemed to be doing the same thing! Eleanor was very much afraid that she knew what really intelligent people would call Ted--and the others. Yes, even if he hadn't been a soldier to start with, he had the--the sort of brand of it, born on him. Ted Urquhart was what was always called, "The Usual, Brainless, Army Type."

Really, as Octavia Fabian always said, these men were like sheep in the way they followed one another along conventional lines. It was "the thing" to be "keen" on the War. Instead of thinking things out for himself, and letting Eleanor tell him what those Peace Society people always proposed, advised....

She wondered what her father would say.

"Needless! Needless folly, the whole thing," her father was saying at that moment in that book-lined mausoleum of a study of his, where Ted Urquhart had once sat waiting for his first sight of the girl to whom he was pledged.

The young man sat now in the chair he had occupied then. His impatient eyes were fixed on the polished floor as he listened quietly to his uncle's view of the case.

"Disarmament.... We must abolish these national antagonisms, so childish, my dear Ted! ... Any one would think we were still not far advanced from the stage of the savage with the club! ... Deplorable, to me, these.... You remind me of your father.... I can only say you remind me of my poor dear brother Clive.... He'd be here with us at this moment had it not been for that old wound in which he took that chill----"

"And if he were here," put in young Ted, as the remembered, smiling, adventurer's face of General Urquhart rose before him, "he wouldn't try to dissuade me, Sir. He'd be trying to get them to take him too."

"Ah! It wouldn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me.... Poor dear fellow.... He was good for another twenty years ... might have died peaceably in his bed at home here," murmured the old scholar, as one who quotes the whole duty of man. "Incurably wrong-headed ideas he had, though. He was one of those people who think that, without War, heroism would decay. The qualities of unselfishness and sacrifice and strenuousness would rust away, he used to say. He said a War went through a country like a fume of disinfectant through a rose-tree with green fly on it. 'A beautiful Cleanser,' he called it ... poor dear Clive!"

The son of this deluded Urquhart crossed one long leg over another, cleared his throat, and raising his close-cropped head, said, "Well, Uncle Henry, one can't help what one inherits----"

"Inherit--Yes! And just as I was so pleased to see you back here, my dear boy, settling down in your inheritance----'

"Lord! I didn't mean that! I----"

"I did," persisted the elder Urquhart. "It was the greatest relief to me, Ted. I felt ... no further responsibilities ... Eleanor and I, provided for, ... while depriving you of none of your rights ... she and you ... getting on so well together. An ideal arrangement! I had hoped to see you and the child married this autumn, perhaps. And now----" He shook his grey locks. "Suppose anything happened to you----"

"I have arranged for that contingency," said Eleanor's _fiancé_. "She will have The Court and everything."

But again the grey elf locks were shaken. "I guessed so. But it will not be the same to me, Ted. I had always liked the idea that she would be mistress here--as your wife. I ... You know I didn't always get on too well with your poor dear father," old Mr. Urquhart murmured on. "All strife is childish, of course, and--it always seemed to me as if it would put an end to its having ever been, if Clive's son and my child were to marry. But if you go----"

Here he suddenly raised the grey head. He spoke more quickly and decisively. He said something that gave young Urquhart a shock of surprise mingled with dismay.

"My boy, would it not be possible to marry Eleanor before you go?"

There was a moment's silence.

Then Ted Urquhart said quietly, "You mean almost at once?"

"If you expect to go so soon. Could it be managed? I see constantly, in these dreadful newspapers," put in the elder man, wistfully, "notices of officers' weddings being hurried on, 'on account of the War.' If you and Eleanor could be quietly married before you left--it would set my mind at rest, Ted----"

Ted, after another moment's pause, said,

"Certainly. That is, of course, I'll consult Eleanor. If she consents----"

"It would be a weight off my mind, my dear boy."

"Then I will see her about it," said Ted Urquhart.

He rose and went out to the drawing-room with a half-conscious urge to get this thing settled at once.

But, he soon saw, it could not be to-night.

Eleanor's usual excuse, it seemed, must hold. A glance told him that she was again "so busy!"

She was winding wool off the hands of that other girl, into fat, cocoa-coloured balls.

Ted Urquhart, standing above them for a moment, saw the secretary-girl's face suddenly quiver and glow; she broke into a low but distinct and whole-heartedly amused girlish chuckle.

Eleanor said, "What are you laughing at, Rosamond?"

Rosamond murmured demurely, "Oh, nothing; only something quite silly that I'd just remembered out of some book."

She guessed that the young man who walked sharply to the other end of the room would have given his ears to hear what this quotation might be.

But she did not mean to tell Eleanor.

It was an extract from Artemus Ward:

"I met a young man who said he'd be damned if he'd go to the War. He was sitting on a barrel, and was indeed a loathsome object."

Mr. Ted Urquhart hadn't even the grace to look a "loathsome object!"