CHAPTER VIII

ALLIES

The Reservists' Wives, together with Miss Octavia Fabian, who for the first time that she had visited The Court had not been pressed to stay for dinner, had all gone by the time that Ted Urquhart, rather out of spirits and irritable, returned to his house from a day in London spent between the War Office and the outfitter's. All was in order now. He might expect to be off on the following Monday or Tuesday, ready, married, will made, everything. There were a few people to say Good-bye to. One young woman, to whom he'd thought he'd like to say a friendly Good-bye, after all had turned her back on him just as he was opening his mouth to say it. Well, the other one had agreed without demur to becoming his wife at once. And in the late afternoon sunlight this girl was waiting to meet him on the Terrace as he jumped down from the motor; she came quickly forward, and for the first time since he and she had been engaged, young Urquhart saw that Eleanor, his betrothed, seemed really glad to see him.

"You are late, aren't you?" she said in a queer breathless little voice. "I thought you were never coming back, Ted."

"Do you know, that is the nicest thing you have ever said to me, Eleanor?" said Ted, looking down upon the prim little figure, and feeling rather touched. She did care then, whether he came or went? Well, that was something, when another girl had just shown him so very plainly that she preferred him to go. Eleanor, after all, had got a scrap of ordinary womanly feeling for him tucked away under all that chilly and matter-of-fact crust of hers? That was an edge of silver to the black cloud of depression into which there seemed to be setting the sun of this day before Ted Urquhart's wedding.

He smiled quite gratefully down into the big anxious brown eyes that the bride-to-be lifted to his face.

"It isn't so very late," he suggested. "Half an hour before we dress. What about going for a stroll all round? We may not have time to-morrow. Or are you tired, Eleanor?"

"N-no. Oh, no. I'm not tired. Let's go for a walk before we go into the house. I'd like it," said Eleanor, quite eagerly. "I--I w-wanted to have a little talk with you, if I could."

"Rather," he said, brightening a little. "Come along."

He tossed his hat on to a chair in the hall, and came down the steps again. "We'll do the grand tour of our estate, shall we?" said Ted Urquhart with determined cheerfulness to the girl so soon to be his wife. They turned along the Terrace to the right, towards the park that led through the rose-garden, and to the new fish-pond.

"It's a jolly evening, isn't it?" said the bridegroom-to-be, raising his eyes to the apricot sky patterned with pink fleecy clouds. The soft air with the September nip in it was full of the scent of tall tobacco-plants that grew jungle-thick at the back of the herbaceous border on the south of the rose-garden; nearer to the path were clumps of ragged glowing double dahlias, sulphur-yellow, orange, cardinal-red; a huge blot of richest purple marked the China asters and next to these ran a long splash of shrieking scarlet, salvias. "Gorgeous weather for autumn; I've never seen this bit of the garden look so ripping," said young Urquhart, gazing at the English flowers under the English sunset. "This is my good-bye to it, Eleanor."

"Yes," said Eleanor, with that agitated little quaver in her voice that moved him and hurt him because it lacked power to move him more. At least the little thing was sorry he was off. The near parting was stirring up what feelings she had; or the near wedding.

Some girls were like this, he thought; made on such conventional lines that when they really definitely belonged to a man they were automatically "fond" of him; sad to think of his going. And when--if he came back, Eleanor would become as automatically glad to welcome her husband.

That thought brought a gleam of comfort. There was just a sporting chance that he and she, together, might find married happiness at last--at least, as much happiness as many couples.... They would be not strangers, but allies even if they never might be lovers. If only he had never seen another; if only he had never given himself up to those mad dreams of that golden-haired girl pacing this very garden at his side!

"Come and have a look at the pond," he said hastily to Eleanor, who was strangely silent as they walked along. All her usual store of trite little platitudes seemed to have forsaken her; she seemed to have nothing to say this evening. And yet she had volunteered that she'd wanted "a little talk" with him! Perhaps she only wanted to be, quite quietly, with him. Perhaps she didn't want to speak at all.

But when they reached the round pond with the grey stone border and stood looking at that smooth mirror to the sky, blotched at one side with lily-pads, Eleanor Urquhart spoke, her queerly agitated little voice breaking through the heavy country quiet.

"Ted! I want to say something to you!"

"Oh, yes?" He turned, looking down at her again.

"It--it's rather d-d-difficult!"

"Is it?" said Ted Urquhart, encouragingly, and wondering what this might be. Perhaps she was going to ask him what he wished done about some business or other in the event of his being wiped off the slate out there? It was rather "difficult," perhaps, for a girl who was not yet a wife to ask for her instructions as a widow, he thought whimsically as he added kindly, "surely you can tell me--we're getting married to-morrow, and----"

"That's just it," gasped Eleanor. She clenched her small hands. There lingered on her palms the aromatic scent of the rosemary twigs she had clutched at for support when Pansy blurted out those revelations in the kitchen-garden. The memory of what that girl had said spurred Eleanor to bring out, with a little breathless rush, what she herself wanted to say.

"Ted! Is it true? Something I heard. S-something somebody has just t-told me. That you liked somebody ... were in love with somebody else?"

Young Urquhart's tall elastic figure seemed to stiffen all over into angry alertness.

"Who?" he demanded.

He meant "who said it?" But Eleanor mistook his question and answered without reserve.

"They said you were in love with Rosamond Fayre."

"What's this?" he took up angrily. "Who's been talking to you?"

"Pansy Vansittart--you know her----"

--"Oh, Lord," from Ted below his breath.

--"was here this afternoon. She was very angry. She said it to hurt me, I think," his _fiancée_ explained rapidly. "But I want to know, from you, whether it's really true?"

The tall young man and the small girl stood confronting each other above their own contrasted reflections in the still waters at their feet.

He spoke quietly now.

"Eleanor, will you believe me? I swear that there is nothing--absolutely nothing between me and any woman. Since I've been engaged to you I haven't said a word to any woman that you could not have heard."

"B-but that's not what I asked you!" the engaged girl took up with a helpless, repudiating gesture of her hands. "Why do m-m-men always answer one like this? Always something that's got nothing to d-do with the question! Is it true? What Pansy said! _Is_ it? I want to be told!"

"Well, but look _here_--" began the young man, cruelly embarrassed, bewildered.

He took a few steps away from the side of the lily-pond, towards the path that went up beyond the clipped, box-peacocks-and-windmill hedge, to the smaller lawn where Eleanor's girls had danced. Eleanor followed him; every movement of her small figure, the pose of her dark head one urgent, repeated demand.

"Is it _true_?"

"Look here, Eleanor," he began again. "I must tell you that she--the girl you speak of--would simply--Well! I don't know what she'd do for surprise if she heard what you said. She--why, if it ever occurred to her----"

"N-never mind her. That isn't it. Oh," Eleanor cried desperately, "c-c-can't you answer what I'm asking you? Ted!" she put out a hand and clutched his sleeve even as she had clutched that rosemary bush. "This is the first time I've ever asked you to d-do anything for me. Won't you do this?" Her voice was the voice of an appealing and frightened child. "Ted! Will you tell me?"

"All right. I will tell you," said the young man quickly and firmly. That touching, unexpected, girlish appeal had made up his mind for him. The poor child! Poor little mite, hiding that jealous affection until admission was forced from her like this! There remained only one thing for the man she cared for to do. Namely, to obey the Eleventh Commandment at Eton; to tell a lie, to tell a good 'un, and to stick to it. And so he declared, without a quiver, "It's all a mistake, Eleanor! It isn't true."

"Not true?" muttered Eleanor, and her hand dropped from his sleeve. "You're sure, Ted?"

"Quite sure," insisted Ted Urquhart briskly. "It was all rot, my dear."

The next moment the small girl at his side had made such an impulsive movement that he thought she was going to fling her arms wide to him.

But she had only taken a couple of steps backward.

There was a rustic bench beside that path, backed by the clipped hedge. Blindly, and as if pushed down by a crushing blow, Eleanor's compact little figure collapsed upon that seat. She dropped her dusky head upon both her hands and broke into uncontrollable sobs....

Poor little soul! Poor, overwrought little thing--Lord, how he wished she wouldn't! ... Even if she were crying for joy--what could be done to stop it?

Suffering acutely from this sight of a woman in tears--Eleanor, of all women!--and on his behalf, too!--Ted Urquhart plopped down hastily beside his _fiancée_ on the bench.

"Eleanor. Look here, Eleanor, _please_----"

He put his long arm about her shoulders.

He was ill-prepared for the brusque, the intense gesture with which Eleanor drew herself back.

"No. Oh, Ted, if you _don't_ mind, I can't bear to be touched!"

"Sorry," he said, mystified, and dropping his arm. "What have I done----?"

"Oh, nothing. I know you can't help it, but-b-b-but oh! it was so _awful_ when you said that just now," sobbed Eleanor Urquhart out of her handkerchief. "All--all the afternoon since Pansy spoke I've been thinking--and thinking--M-M-M-Making up my mind that she m-m-must be right! G-G-Going back and remembering things and thinking I'd _n-n-noticed_! F-Feeling quite c-convinced that you did c-care for Rosamond, and that it was all t-t-true! And now you say it isn't. Oh! _Oh_! After I'd _hoped_----"

"Hoped," echoed Ted Urquhart blankly. "I don't understand, Eleanor. I don't quite understand. D'you mean--? Can you mean you wanted it to be true that I cared for somebody else?"

"Yes! Of _c-course_!" sobbed the bride-to-be desperately. "Because then--then I needn't--I shouldn't be exp-pup-_pected_ to marry you to-morrow!"

"Good Heavens!" said the bridegroom-to-be, sitting up very straight and staring at her. "Is _this_ how you feel about it, Eleanor?"

"Yes! I'm sorry! I c-c-can't help it! I have tried!" declared Miss Urquhart, struggling to fight down her sobs. "I thought I could d-do it! F-For Father's sake and everybody's! I thought I could bear it all, without showing anything! I thought I could be strong and bub-brave enough----'

"Brave enough?"

"Yes, and so I was; until there s-seemed to be a _chance_ of g-getting out of it! And n-now--even if that isn't true about Rosamond--of c-course I hate p-put-ting you out and d-disappointing Father and all that! B-B-Breaking my word at the eleventh hour! Cuc-can-celling my appointments--a thing I _never_ do, really," wept Miss Urquhart, defensively, "still, I _c-can't_ do the other. Oh, don't ask me to go on with that dreadful wedding to-morrow, Ted----"

She turned to him, her small face broken up, quivering.

"L-l-_let_ me off!"

"But of course. Oh! Certainly. Rather," broke in Ted Urquhart, precipitately but mechanically, for he was almost numb with amazement over the true cause of the girl's emotion. "I say--please don't consider yourself bound in any way, please let me give you back your freedom," he concluded, "here and now!"

"Oh, you are good!" cried Eleanor, one tremble of relief. "If you're sure you don't m-mind very much----"

"It's quite all right," he said, too discomfited for further words. "Quite all right. I ought to have guessed, perhaps. If you'd said a word----"

"Oh, but I was t-trying--so _hard_--not to show how I minded----"

Ted Urquhart gave a short and very bitter laugh. "I seem to be remarkably unlucky in the way of pleasing any woman," he said. And he raised the gallant young head of which nine out of ten women would not have denied the attractiveness, and stared away above the lime-trees. He scarcely saw that quickly yellowing sky, speckled with homing rooks; what he saw was a picture of the golden knot of hair above the supple shoulders of that girl who'd also turned her back on him. "I am sorry," he muttered, half to himself, "that I manage to put you off like this----"

"Oh, it isn't _you_, Ted. I don't think that being engaged to you would be worse than being engaged to lots of other people," pleaded Eleanor deprecatingly, raising her blurred eyes to his again. "It's only that _I_ hated it so, especially when the actual D-Day was fixed! And then--it got n-n-nearer and nearer to b-being m-married! Oh! I tried to th-think of how F-Father wished it, and of how k-kind you'd been;--b-but all the time I knew how I should hate being your w-wife--_Anybody's_, I mean!" she corrected herself, hastily, picking and clutching at a wet handkerchief. "I always think a m-married woman is only _half_ an ind-d-dividual, as Miss Fabian says. She g-gives up her p-personality, her privacy! she isn't _herself_, somehow, any more; oh, I couldn't!" she pleaded, bewilderedly. "I don't know why I'm like this----

"Don't, child--don't," said young Urquhart, confused beyond words at this burst of confidence, unrestrained as are the rare confidences of the naturally self-contained. "Don't bother to explain----"

"Yes. I must ex-pup-plain," she persisted. "I don't want you to think it's only because it was you that I was so ded-dreadfully miserable when I was engaged! It would have been the same with anybub-body else. I don't know whether it's because I d-do so detest the scent of their cigarettes, or if it's because of their gruff voices, or what, but----"

Here, with a rush of unmistakable sincerity, the little philanthropic worker voiced a keynote to her own character.

She cried--

"_I don't like Men!_ I don't like any men at all. I never have. I never could! There, Ted."

Ted Urquhart regarded her; this young woman of a type not uncommon in this world, but nearly always misunderstood.

At the head of the same type stands Joan of Arc, the saint, the Saviour of her country, leader of soldiers--who was the sweetheart of no soldier, of no man. Of the same type one sees many and many a noble woman-worker, a born Nurse, a Heaven-sent tender of little children. To the Eleanor-type, Love for a man is limited to nurse-love for him at the age of Pansy's baby-boy. She can delight in the sight of that fruit of Love. But the sweetness of its blossom sickens and disgusts her. Not for her is the gay warfare between man and maid--ending in joyous surrender. The caress revolts her.

To the end, men will say of that inborn aversion, "Ah! Sour grapes! Pretends she doesn't care for men, just because she's never had the chance of a man making love to her!"

Perhaps Ted Urquhart, that Brainless Army type, was still rather more understanding than many of his sex. He actually realised that it was not out of place to say to his cousin, "I see. Will you forgive me for having made you put up with what must have been rather a beast of a time for you?"

One moment later he was holding that little spare brown hand of Eleanor's in the warmest, most affectionate grip it had ever known.

"Oh, Ted, don't apologise! I knew you didn't know how I hated it all. And you've been so nice now. I shall like you so," she admitted with a gulp, "as a cousin!"

"Well, that's something saved out of the fire," he said, with a queer mixture of ruefulness and amusement in his tone. "I hate being bad friends with any one----"

Here he had another pang, thinking of some one, a girl so different from the type of Eleanor, who was still "bad friends" with him. He went on quickly to the girl beside him. "So, in spite of this bust-up, and of the War, and what not, we two are parting friends, at all events. Aren't we?"

"Oh yes! Of course. I--I never seemed to know you before," she said. "You were just--a man, a man that I'd _got_ to put up with. It was awful! All your little ways----"

"May I ask which little ways?"

"Oh, none p-particularly. Only _everything_ you did! You would talk to me. You would look at me!" complained his ex-_fiancée_, to his dumb surprise. "However, that's all over now. _This_ makes such a difference," she said, drawing a long breath and disengaging one of the hands; her left one. "I can give you this back now----"

"This" was the famous Urquhart sapphire, set with diamonds, that Eleanor drew off as gladly as another engaged girl might have assumed her ring.

"Wear it on the other hand, then, won't you?" suggested her ex-_fiancé_ gently. "Just to show there's no ill-will--a dis-engagement present, eh? Please do. I'd like you to----"

"But when you get married," objected his cousin, "this ring is supposed to go to your wife!"

"All right, all right. Perhaps you'll send it to me," said young Urquhart, briefly, "when there's a wife to think of. You keep it, Eleanor."

He rose, as she did. They began to stroll down that path, round to the lime-tree Avenue that Ted had once paced alone, when he had wondered in what words he could most gently break to Eleanor that he wished to cancel that futile and flavourless engagement of theirs.

And now it was she who had found the words to break it off.

In the shadows under the limes her voice broke the stillness again.

"Ted! I do think it's a pity!"

"What's a pity? If you can't," he said soothingly, "you can't."

"I d-don't mean it's a pity we aren't getting married. I mean it's rather a pity that, after all, you don't care for Rosamond Fayre."

"Oh, that," he said curtly. "Rather a good thing, actually. The girl never could stand me."

"Couldn't she? Why not? She never said so."

"H'm," said Ted Urquhart, and closed his lips as he paced along by the side of the other girl who had not been able to "stand" him, at least as a prospective husband. Then there fell upon him, suddenly, a great and aching need to talk about that first girl, to some one, any one. The little cousin at his side was not (now) unsympathetic. He turned to her and said, quickly, "Besides! Supposing that had been true--what your friend Miss Pansy made up her mind about! I should have had no chance to cut that other fellow out."

"What other fellow?"

"Man she--Miss Fayre--was engaged to."

Out of the dusk Eleanor's voice sounded mildly surprised.

"I don't think Rosamond--I'm sure she wasn't engaged to be married."

"Oh, I think she was," said Ted Urquhart.

And the dreariness of his tone struck through even the calm absorption of the girl who had just regained her freedom, and who said, quickly, "Why are you so sure about Rosamond?"

Again he laughed that short and bitter laugh, pausing for a moment under the limes just at the spot where, weeks before in the dusk, he had caught that soft sound of a kiss that had been his torture ever since. But he only said briefly, "Well, Eleanor, you saw them too. You saw the fellow when he came down to call on her."

"Nobody came to call on Rosamond here, though," objected Eleanor, "except that young Mr. Bray whom Father took such a fancy to."

"Well, that's what I meant."

"Oh, but, Ted," protested Eleanor, quite eagerly, "I am sure Rosamond doesn't want to marry _him_!"

"Are you?" said Urquhart. Hope, last of all feeling to die, seemed to stir for a second within him, as he added quickly, "Is that just what you _think_? Or have you any special reason for saying this?"

Eleanor, bright and matter-of-fact as if no crucial words were passing her lips, uttered the sentence that caused that stirring Hope to leap to life in her cousin's heart.

"Yes, I have a special reason, Ted."

What was this?

"What is it?" he demanded brusquely. He took her by the arm. "I say, Eleanor! If there's anything in this, for God's sake tell me what you know!"

"You do care, then? How frightfully queer men are! I should never understand them. How is one to tell _what_ they mean?" reflected Eleanor aloud. And she went on to say, "Well! Only a week or two ago I asked Rosamond if she would give me Mr. Cecil Bray's address. You know he got on so well with Father about those genealogical charts and all that, I thought he'd cheer Father up, and that it would be nice to ask him down for the week-end, as he couldn't stay last time. But Rosamond said--was that the dressing-gong?"

"What," demanded Urquhart, "did she say?"

"She said, '_Oh, do you mind not asking him while I'm in the house?_'"

"She said that?" took up Ted Urquhart in an expressionless voice. "Perhaps it was because she didn't want the affair given away."

"No, it wasn't," insisted Eleanor, "because I said, '_But, Rosamond, don't you want him here with you? I thought he was such an old friend of yours?_' And she s-s-s-"

It seemed to Eleanor's listener that he waited for an hour while Eleanor got the better of that little stutter of hers and went on.

"Rosamond said, '_He is an old friend, but he's always asking to be something more. And I don't wish it._"

"She said she 'didn't wish it?' You're certain of that, Eleanor?" her cousin said breathlessly. "What do you suppose she meant by it?"

"I thought she meant what she said, at the time. But really it's so difficult to tell, it seems to me," complained Miss Urquhart. "First people say one thing--and then another. Like you, when you said----"

"I know," interrupted the dazed Ted feverishly. "That is, I don't know what I said, or what I'm going to say. I only know I've got to say something, and as soon as I can manage it, to Her----"

"To Rosamond Fayre, d'you mean?" took up Eleanor; even Eleanor's instinct could recognise and apply that capital H in the young man's voice.

"Yes."

"Very w-well; then I'll give you her address and you can motor yourself back to town this evening while I talk to Father," planned his cousin swiftly. "I broke off the engagement, you know. I have to explain that----"

"Will you also explain that I shall never come down to the Court again except as a guest--your guest?" put in young Urquhart. "I say, though--perhaps I'd better stay," ruefully, "and tell that to Uncle Henry myself----'

"You can tell him anything l-later. You'd better go now, m-my dear boy. I know you w-want to. And g-give my love to Rosamond," she added quite diffidently. "Ask her if she'll come down. If not, I'll come and see her. I--I--I----You know, being engaged made me all _so upset and cross_," declared his cousin, "that I was rude to her, I'm afraid, before she w-went. I've been horrid----"

"Eleanor, you've been a little trump!"

"You've been so good to me, Ted," declared his new ally affectionately.

He took both her hands again as they reached the house.

"Eleanor," he began again, unsteadily laughing a little, for his head was still in a whirl, "I say, I haven't been smoking. D'you think you could bring yourself to let me have a kiss, Dear?"

Apparently Eleanor could; quite promptly.

But as her ex-_fiancé_ strode off towards the garage and she turned into the house, she thought to herself, "Thank goodness he never said those sort of things to me while we were engaged! It would have been nearly as bad as what Pansy said. Oh, I could never have stood it," decided the girl who was destined to remain Miss Urquhart, and to be happy in her lot, "if there had been much _more_ love-making like that!"