CHAPTER II

A MAN'S ANSWER

"Many thanks, my dear Eleanor, for the last three letters which have just arrived together--especially for the one all about the Blue Border, and the Roses."

"Nothing about the petals," thought Rosamond, to whom this letter had been handed as a matter of course for the Secretary to answer by Eleanor.

"By the way," the letter went on, "were you in the least little bit of a temper when you wrote? Or is that my mistake? Don't you think people's moods show in their handwriting? Your writing this time seemed to have got more dashing and determined," wrote Mr. Ted Urquhart. "Thank you for hoping I may come home next summer, but I don't know if I shall do that after all. The man I'm with has determined to--" Here followed a catalogue of the man's plans--very level-headed ones they seemed to Rosamond. Then came--

"Don't be offended, will you, about my having said that about a temper. A girl ought to have a gleam of a temper of her own, just to show a man she's not

"'Too bright and good For human nature's daily food.'

You know the rest of that ancient verse."

Rosamond did; she laughed. Then she blushed a little.

"I never read verse; one really hasn't time," Eleanor excused herself. "What is the quotation, Rosamond?"

"Oh, it's from Wordsworth. I will look it up for you--something about 'human nature's daily food--'Praise, blame, tears'--and er--those sort of things."

And she continued to herself, "Somehow one can't quote even the milkiest sort of love poetry right through to Eleanor! One can't say 'Praise, blame, tears, kisses'--'Kisses' wouldn't _ever_ be 'daily food' to her----"

She checked herself.

"But they'll have to be, some day! She _is_ engaged, and after all he _will_ come back, I presume, in the course of time, this weird young man? Then there'll be a difference, surely? For instance, she'll begin 'minding' what she puts on--instead of not seeming to _see_ what's becoming and what isn't. When she begins to want to please him, she'll drop those District-visiting blouses and those _virtuous_ little hats of hers. Oh, he'll teach her.... His last letter was comparatively personal! It seemed to be taking quite an _interest_ in her temper and her handwriting--mine, by the way. I'm glad he liked the bit about the Blue Border."

She laughed again. What did it matter to Rosamond what another girl's _fiancé_ had liked in the letter that had been written by her secretary?

"Anyhow," she reminded herself, "it didn't seem to make him want to come home and see her any sooner! Interesting sort of affair--and here am I allowed to peep at both sides of it!"

Her interest was not much more than this kind of curiosity. For the next three weeks it--and things in general--remained just the same.

Then something happened.

In the June of Nineteen Fourteen, when it still seemed as if Peace would never spread her dove's wings to fly from this country, when red English roses were ablaze on the Terrace of The Court, and bees noisy in the borders of mignonette and in the tall towers of sweet-peas, there arrived at Urquhart's Court, unheralded, a visitor; a tall, lithe, abnormally sun-burnt young man, in clothes that spoke--first of hard weather and harder wear, and next of the first-rate Bond Street outfitters that had known them new. This stranger, ignoring the new butler's pompous "What name, Sir?" strode gaily into the great hall as if the house were his by right, and called in a big, boyish voice--

"Uncle!"

The study-door opened, and Eleanor's father looked out. He was a half-dreamy, half-fretful looking old gentleman, with a silvery beard like the portraits of Lord Tennyson, to whose period Mr. Henry Urquhart belonged far more than to the present hustling Twentieth Century.

"What's happened--who's this? Why, my--my dear boy,--Ted!" he cried, incredulously, with his faded, grey scholar's eyes blinking under his white locks at the splendidly vital figure of the young man before him--"It is Ted, isn't it? Bless me--and nobody was sent to meet you! Now, how was that, how was that?" rather querulously--"Eleanor never told me you were coming. Nobody ever tells me anything. Most unfortunate! Nobody to meet---- My dear boy, if you'll believe me, I--I never even heard that you'd written to say you were coming!"

He put out a hand like a pale and chilly root, and laid it on the young man's hard shoulder.

"I never said so, Uncle Henry, I meant to turn up unannounced. I meant to take you all by surprise!" declared the traveller hurriedly. "Now, will you be very kind and excuse me for the present, Uncle? I want to introduce myself to Eleanor, and----"

The pale, chilly hand was lifted again.

"Wait a bit, wait a bit. Come into my study and sit down for a few minutes. Dear me! I was never so startled in my life. Take us by surprise---- Yes, but I wish you'd said you were going to," protested the elder Urquhart, as he led the way into his own room. It was overshadowed by those great yews at the back of The Court; and, with its four walls lined with brown books, its wide table littered with manuscript, seemed as chilly as a cellar, as sunless as a vault, as void of life and homeliness as a museum. Young Urquhart of the impatient eyes involuntarily shivered a little as he looked about it. She--Eleanor--wouldn't spend too much time in this family mausoleum, surely--He didn't want to see her, even for the first time, here!

"Won't you sit down, boy? Bless my soul, you're very like my brother Clive, your poor father. He didn't seem able to sit still for a minute...." said the old man. "It'll be luncheon in a quarter of an hour----"

The young man laughed, springing up from his chair again.

"Yes, I know that, Uncle. That's why I wanted to pay my respects to her--to Eleanor at once."

"Dear me!--the unrest--the hurry of this generation----"

"Hurry? I'm afraid I've scarcely hurried as much as I might," said Ted Urquhart, with a flash of very white teeth in that very brown face. "I've waited three years before...."

The old man blinked at him. Years did not convey much to him. But he said, "Then I don't quite understand why you've rushed back without any warning now?"

"Er--no; it seems queer," said Eleanor's _fiancé_, who didn't quite understand it himself. Why _had_ the interest he'd felt about the nice little girl at home whom he was, for such excellent reasons, to marry--all in good time, and when more important things had been attended to--why had this very mild interest flamed up all of a sudden, and for the first time, into a blazing curiosity to see, after all, what she was like? Why had there seemed some subtle hint of the girl's atmosphere, her charm, her lure, conveyed for the very first time between the even lines of her very last letter to him? Why had he felt that a handful of once pink, still sweet rose-petals, pressed in the envelope, had brought with them the message--"_Come home and seek me. Come and court in person the girl who picked this rose_"? It was irrational--fantastic. Still--there it was--Yes! This was what had happened to him!

"I had to come over sometime!" he laughed, fidgeting. "So now I'm here, the sooner the better. Will you do me a favour, Uncle? Don't send for Eleanor, let me go to her myself. Where am I likely to find her? Where will she be? In the lily-garden, near that new fish-pond she tells me of, or----"

He was at the door, ready to search the grounds, before his uncle put in----

"My dear boy, I am very sorry, but really, you have only yourself to blame. Why didn't you give us due warning? For your own sake you ought to have written--or even if you'd sent a wire! The fact is--most unfortunate!--that you won't find Eleanor anywhere about," announced Eleanor's father, fussily regretful, "she isn't here."

The sun-burnt face fell.

"Not here!" echoed Eleanor's _fiancé_, very blankly. "Why, where is she, then?"

"She's in France. It's a little fishing-village near Boulogne, where she has one of her undertakings. She's up to her eyes in work over it, inaugurating this Holiday Hostel for her 'girls.' You know her girls, Ted; she cares for them more than for anything else in the world," said the old man, "always will, I'm afraid."

Ted Urquhart smiled again. He was not "afraid." If it had been not just fifty girls, but one young man who occupied all Eleanor's time and thought, things would have looked black. But a couple of hundred other girls. Well! The thought, of them weighed lighter than a dozen dry rose-petals.

"Yes; she's over there now, with her friend, Miss Fayre," her father was explaining, "and it's very little I hear from them beyond a line or so on a postcard with a view of the harbour or a girl in a Boulogne fish-wife's cap on it. They were to stay a month. However, as you are here, Eleanor shall be sent for----"

"No, no, she shan't," said young Ted, impetuously. "I shall go on over there to her, at once."

"You will? Bless me, how you fly about, you young fellows, nowadays!" murmured Mr. Urquhart. "It's a long way to France, Clive--Ted, I mean."

Ted laughed. From Urquhart's Court, _via_ the South-Eastern Railway, Charing Cross, and Boulogne, across to this little village where Eleanor was putting in her time before marriage, seemed no more of a "trek" to him after his journeyings, than a stroll across the mint-sauce lawn at the Court.

"At least you'll write and tell her that you are coming? We'll both write, Ted," said the old man, turning to that littered table.

"If you don't mind, Sir, we'll do nothing of the sort," put in the young man. "I've just been struck by an idea."

He had. It was one of those ideas which seem at first so eminently satisfactory--and sane. Afterwards they appear so fatuously silly. And, later still, what would one not give to recall them, these tragically ill-fated "ideas"?

"I shall go over there and see if I can't get to know her without letting her guess who I am!" declared the young man who was engaged to Eleanor Urquhart. "If, after all these years, we have a sort of prepared meeting, each of us trying to say and do the correct thing and to make it pleasant and easy for the other party, it'll be--quite simply--a frost! We shall be desperately self-conscious, and hard-boiled stiff with shyness. At least that's how it would take me, Sir! Enough to put any girl off at once. I want her to see me first without her having any idea that I'm the man she's pledged herself to marry."

"I don't see," said old Mr. Urquhart, mildly, "what difference this idea of yours will make."

"It'll make all the difference in the world," said Ted Urquhart, speaking more truly than he knew.

And so it was that he would only stay at the Court for luncheon, and then left that rose-garlanded earthly paradise, which somehow seemed more desirable to him now even than in his dreams as a wanderer, for the express up to Charing Cross, the boat-train to Folkestone, the boat across to Boulogne, and the cart that took him a jolting ten miles further to the sleepy village that was then just a cluster of fishermen's cottages, two hotels, a post-office and Debit Tabac and--Eleanor's Hostel.

Ted, carrying a walking-stick and a kit-bag patterned with a score of different coloured luggage-labels, made the whole journey in under eleven hours from the moment that he had set foot in the hall of the Court.

Such was his hurry, after a dilatory year, to face his Fate at last.

And the very next morning he did meet his Fate--with a vengeance.