CHAPTER III

THE MEETING

Of all the duties which Rosamond Fayre had so far performed in her capacity as secretary and right-hand woman to her friend Eleanor Urquhart, she most enjoyed accompanying her on that trip to the Holiday Hostel in the little fishing-village on the still so peaceful French coast.

Rosamond adored France, the land known to Sir Philip Sidney as "that sweet Enemy!" the country that even in the June before the War was friendly ground to an Englishwoman.

She loved to wake up to find people--different in look and dress from people at home--doing unusual things at unusual times. She loved that unfamiliar atmosphere of roasting coffee, combined with the smell of sun-on-seaweed. She loved the clack of a foreign tongue. She loved to feel that higher tide of gaiety and vitality which seems to sweep the other side of the Channel only. She loved the little village with its busy "door-step" life; she loved to see the fisher-women, in their little white sun-bonnets, sitting mending their nets in the cobbled yards; the children, with their burnt-straw-coloured hair cropped to the bone, shrimping for "crevettes" in the rock-pools; the smart French visitors--little girls dressed as sailor-boys, plump mammas who appeared at their hotel doors at eleven o'clock in the morning dressed in white bed-jackets, over bright satin tango-petticoats; and she particularly enjoyed all these details in the society of Eleanor's girls, upon whom they were dawning for the first time.

"Eleanor's girls," for whom the house built by an artist at the other end of the village had been converted into a Hostel, were to be brought over, six at a time, during the summer months. There were at present, however, only five of them. The sixth candidate was an English milliner's assistant who worked in a Paris hat-shop, and, as Eleanor had only heard of her by letter, and as she (who had accepted a husband by letter only) preferred to select her "girls" by a personal interview, she had judged it better to make a short trip to Paris, combining a commission of her father's with regard to some rare Rosicrucian documents with some personal enquiries as to the young shop-girl.

Thus it was that, for a whole week, Rosamond was left in charge of the Hostel and of the five girls.

Now, these girls, who were any age from nineteen to thirty, and who were treated by strict little Eleanor Urquhart as if they were children, treated her in turn as if each one of them were her devoted nurse. They admired her--immensely; but not for the qualities on which she prided herself; not for her managing powers, not because she could arrange with railway companies and steamship authorities to give them trips abroad on money which they could not have made go further than a week-end at Clacton, but because that sort of child-like, incomprehensible innocence of hers seemed to set her apart from them and above them. Instinctively they checked any "rowdiness," they "censored" conversation, expressions, risky songs, when Miss Urquhart was near. For in the three great divisions of girlhood one finds, in nine cases out of ten, the Potential Mother and the Potential Coquette alike ready to pay homage to the Potential Nun.

Yes; Miss Urquhart they revered--and obeyed. Rosamond they loved; Rosamond, who could trim hats for them, and play tango-music, and tell fortunes, and advise them with regard to that question of perennial poignancy--their young men.

"Miss Fayre knows all right," as one of the girls declared one day through a mouthful of liqueur chocolates bought at the Debit Tabac. This girl was a Jam-Hand, who worked at that Corner of Charing Cross Road that always smells of hot strawberries and pickles, and her costume, no matter how warm the weather, was always completed by a long black velvet coat, heavily trimmed with braid, a wide black hat with an ostrich-plume, and a stole of black fox. She gave the furs a toss as she continued, still munching--"Somehow you can't see any one--except p'raps Pansy, out of cheek--talking about fellows to Miss Urquhart!"

"Yet," murmured the girl who was sitting on the sands with her in the patch of shadow cast by an upturned boat, "Miss Urquhart's got off herself."

"She has and she hasn't. Her chap's always away!"

"Anyhow--here, greedy, greedy! Have you finished the lot? I never!--she ought to understand----"

"Well, she does and she doesn't, if you know what I mean," said the Jam-Hand. The other girl, pale, slender, and wearing glasses, was one of the young ladies who work a model typewriter in a big plate-glassed shop-front under the eyes of the passer-by down a crowded City thoroughfare.

For they were of all sorts and conditions, Eleanor's _protegées_! With the Jam-Hand and the Typist there stayed the Salvation Army Lassie, a scrap of big-eyed, sweet-voiced nervousness, who nevertheless took the solo in street meetings, the red-haired, rather "superior" Blouse-finisher, and, last but not least of Eleanor's responsibilities, a young woman of opulent figure and with a pair of eyes that were even saucier than her voice and manner, who had played "Principal Boy" in a provincial Christmas pantomime, and who at other times was "on with the crowd" in a sketch at the "Halls."

She was at present what she described as "resting"--but this did not mean that she was ever weary in her work of causing Miss Urquhart constant anxiety on the score of the Hostel Rules. They were few, necessary, and judicious, but to the Principal Boy they seemed to act as a spur rather than a curb.

"Pansy, my dear!" Miss Urquhart would say, quite gently, as that buxom, yawning beauty sat down to the breakfast-table with her hair, curling riotously over a dressing-jacket of flimsiest muslin and lace, down to her sumptuous hips. "I think you have forgotten your hair."

"Why! Miss Urquhart, I never get the chance! I'm never left long enough alone about it!" with a twisting of a tress that shaded from tangerine-colour at the tip to burnt-sienna at the root round two plump fingers. "Oh, if there's a thing that the boys admire, it's a nice head of hair! Now, Miss Fayre! You back me up about that, eh?"

Rosamond, primming her mouth, would look another way, while the skirmish between her employer and the Terror of the Hostel would shift ground to the subject of another regulation. No girl was to appear with powder or paint upon her face.

"But a soup song of powder, Miss Urquhart! Why, whatever's wrong with that? Why, they use it for the little babies! They do, straight! Turn 'em up after they come out of their little tubsies and powder 'em all over lovely! Haven't you seen 'em, Miss Urquhart? You know, at your mothers' meetin's?"

Then Eleanor, a little more stiffly: "That is different. That is not the same as your face----"

"Oh, come! Give us a chance! I know _that_, Miss Urquhart!" with a burst of rollicking laughter. "Still--! Oh, I do think a quite little baby is ser-sweet (sometimes). Don't you? I could eat 'em! But if you don't keep their poor little skins nice and soft--"

"I explained the--the--the rules to you before you came," Eleanor would go on manfully, to this young person, her senior by five years in age, and by a century according to other reckonings. "P-P-P-paint----"

"No paint on me, Miss Urquhart!" virtuously from the Principal Boy. "Haven't brought a stick of it with me----"

"B-But your mouth----"

The mouth in question, large and moist and curly, opened as if to sudden enlightenment.

"Oh! _Lip_-salve! Two-and-a-half-Rose! You can't call a touch of that _paint_? It's doctor's orders"--from the unabashed Pansy. "Keeps the chaps off. No, I don't mean what you mean, Miss Urquhart----"

And so on.

Before lunch-time, however, the Principal Boy would have removed the abhorred make-up, and would be having a competition for the quickest and brownest coat of sunburn with Annie the Salvation Lassie and Miss Beading the Blouse-finisher.

It says much for Eleanor's authority and influence that she kept the reins in her own hands, and caused these varying elements to live in comparative peace and charity with each other while they were under her charge. She was always the head of them--even of rebellious Pansy! while Rosamond, as she herself would have frankly told you, was one of themselves, even though they did call her "Miss, dear," and allow her to go first into a room.

"I do hope I shall be able to keep even that vestige of authority while Eleanor's away," thought Rosamond to herself, doubtfully, at half-past seven in the morning of the day after Ted Urquhart had turned up unexpectedly in search of his _fiancée_ at The Court. "Here are four whole more days of my viceregency to run; if only I manage to keep the dear, bubbling-over things out of mischief so long! Heaven send that they don't get cut off by the tide, or drowned with cramp, or that they don't make clandestine expeditions into Boulogne"--going into Boulogne unaccompanied by Eleanor or her second-in-command was contrary to Hostel rules--"as long as I'm in charge! Girls are always breaking out in some fresh place! Pansy, having promised me as a personal favour to leave off that mask of powder, takes to liquid white! One comfort about them all is, that quite a nice large slice of the day's over before they roll out of their little beds, and I have that to the good." So she finished her _café complet_ early and alone, and then strolled out of the Hostel, along the green downs where the courses of tiny rivulets were marked by meandering strips of tall mint that hid the water. She skirted a tall cliff of crumbling red earth, and passed along to the great stretches of sand bordering a greeny-blue belt of sea. Rosamond followed the creamy tide-mark of it towards Le Touquet.

As it was still so early in the morning, her hair was down, long past the belt of her white skirt, not that she shared the preference of the girls for breakfasting in uncoiffed hair, not because it was wet from bathing. Rosamond Fayre had far too much respect for her beautiful hair to ruin it with sea-water. When bathing, it was always protected by a rubber cap, the crudeness of which was concealed by the swathing of a long silk sash. But the early morning sunshine seemed to bring out all the light in that great mane, and Rosamond gave it a sun-bath as often as possible. She shook it well over her cheeks, however, so that the sun which brought lights to her hair need not bring freckles to her face.

Presently she turned, and followed the track of her own white sand-shoes back again along the water's edge. Even as she walked, she became conscious, very gradually, of a feeling of something impending, something going to happen. Whether it was a pleasant or a tragic happening she did not know; part of the feeling was that something, some one strange had been following her, even as she walked. She was going to turn round. Then something else happened which rooted her to the sand where she stood.

Her face was still shielded by that falling golden shower, but the little pink ears under the hair caught a sound which for the moment froze Rosamond's warm young blood. The sound of a scream! A shrill, girlish voice--two voices--screaming in terror.

It came from the direction of the cliff.

Flinging back her hair, Rosamond looked up.

There, half-way between the sands at the bottom and the thymy turf at the top of the cliff, she saw what seemed for an instant like one splash of dark-blue paint, and another splash of vivid cherry-colour against the dark-red wall of earth. Two figures on a ledge that was as far above her head as it was below the cliff-edge--two girls--two of Eleanor's--of her own charges!

For that brilliant-cherry-coloured frieze coat, belonged to the Principal Boy; that slender shape in blue was the Salvation Army Lassie. Yes! They had "broken out in a fresh place" after all! And this before eight in the morning!

They'd climbed up, somehow, and now they'd turned giddy and could not take another step one way or the other. Clinging like drowning insects to the side of a cistern, flattening themselves to the rock, shrinking as far as possible from that dizzy edge, they could do nothing but scream, panic-stricken, for help.

They had lost their heads completely. Catching sight of Rosamond hurrying along the sea-margin, the Salvation Army Lassie shrieked again:

"Miss, dear! _Miss!_"

Now, the correct thing for Rosamond to have done would have been to call back, composedly, for the girls to stay as they were, without moving or looking down, while she fetched help from the nearest fishermen, then set off immediately--a matter of a few minutes only. This is what she should have done.

The unfortunate and humiliating fact is, however, that at this juncture Rosamond also lost her head.

For a second more she stood rooted where she was. Then she took an aimless run forward; then another backward, like those pedestrians so dreaded by drivers of motor-buses, who complicate London's traffic by their highly nervous attempts to cross the streets. Then she cried out, as helpless with terror as the girls above her, "Oh, what shall I do? They'll fall and break their necks--I know they will-- Oh----"

Then she whirled round again, almost into the arms of some one who had come quickly up from behind a jutting-out rock, a tall some one in a blue blazer and white flannel trousers and with a rough bathing-towel cast muffler-wise about his neck.

"What, is it?" asked a quick, very pleasant masculine voice. "Can I help----!"

It was with these six words that the situation--and incidentally the life-history of Rosamond Fayre--were broken into by Ted Urquhart.

Who--what he was, she had no time to think. Here in this solitary spot, dropped down by some special dispensation of Providence upon the sands, appeared at this awful moment a man--she scarcely realised at the moment the added advantages of his being an Englishman and a gentleman--to the rescue!

"Look!" she gasped, and pointed upwards at the cliff--at the girls perched like a couple of alien birds upon that ledge.

This man took in the situation with less than a look.

Then he spoke quickly, but unhurriedly.

"It is quite all right. There's no danger. But you must-- No! Don't look up there. Look at me. Listen!" He had caught her arm, and, holding it, gave it a short, authoritative, and very heartening shake. "Now! You have to go up to the village by the short-cut. _There_. Call at the nearest cottage for a rope. You understand? A _rope_. 'Ficelle' in French, I believe. Anyhow that's near enough. Make them let it down over the top of the cliff, so that I can hang on to it while I'm getting those girls down by the way they came. Cliff; _falaise_--It's all right. But be quick."

Without a backward glance Rosamond fled stumblingly up the short-cut.

The young man in the blue blazer began making his way, with the same unhurried quickness, up the cliff that became only gradually very steep.

After the precipices to which young Urquhart was accustomed, precipices up which men crawled like black-beetles scaling a kitchen-wall, and down which mules felt their way as if they were descending the roof of a house, this cliff of crumbling French earth seemed nothing at all. But the two London girls above there--they were in terror of their lives. Their terror was the danger--for if they lost what remained to them of their heads--looked down--let go--slid--there would be at the very least a nasty fall and broken limbs.

There was room on the narrow ledge for three. Presently Ted Urquhart was standing beside the slight form in navy-blue, which immediately clutched him as a midge will clutch at the grass that fishes it out of a picnic tea-cup.

"It's quite all right," Ted Urquhart said, again distinctly, slowly, and cheerily. "There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. You could get down quite all right by yourselves."

"Oh, no," gasped the blue-clad girl, clutching more wildly, while the young woman beyond her added in a tense voice, "I couldn't take a step down for love nor gold!--and I shall begin to scream again in a minute!"

"Why not?" said Ted Urquhart briskly, "screaming's free. Only--it doesn't help you one scrap. Still, if you want to, do."

This checked any further outcry on the part of the Principal Boy. Her eyes clung to the rescuer even as her companion's hands clutched him. He went on.

"The young lady who was down there has gone to fetch a rope; it will be let down from the top."

"Oh, I'm not going to hang on to no rope, like a spider! Rope-dancing's not my particular line!" protested the Principal Boy, hoarsely, but with a touch of bravado now that she was fortified by something of an audience. "I'd as soon come up through the star-trap--that is, if I ever get down again alive!"

"Pooh!" Urquhart laughed, encouragingly. Then, shifting his position a little, he freed one arm from the Lassie's clutch and put it out towards the theatrical girl.

"If you don't mind," he said to Pansy, "I'm going to borrow that very pretty sash-arrangement you've got round your waist. What is it, a sports-scarf? Jolly things, aren't they? Girls hadn't begun to wear those when I was last at home."

The Principal Boy shifted her scared gaze to the scarf he had drawn from about her. "Whatever d'you want it for?"

"To blindfold your friend here," explained the self-possessed stranger. And, almost before she knew what he was doing, the Salvation Army Lassie found that the woven, petunia-coloured scarf was being tied firmly about her terrified eyes, while the stranger went on without a break in that soothing tone of encouragement.

"Don't you know that firemen do this if they have to bring people down from a height where they aren't quite comfy? Or, if a steeplejack gets up to the top of a high chimney and thinks he can't come down--as they do, sometimes, you know,--very foolish, because they always can come down," said Urquhart, authoritatively.

He ran on, outwardly careless, until presently--

"Ah!--here's the rope!" he exclaimed, as there were shouts from above, and the firm rough loop dangled a couple of feet above his head. "That young lady's been jolly quick, and now I am going to be quick too. You see I take firm hold of this,"--he did so--"so that I can't possibly fall. If I slip, it doesn't matter; and if you've got firm hold of me, you can't fall either. I shall take you down first," he added quietly to the blindfolded, clutching Salvation Army Lassie, "and come back for your friend. Being a dancer, she's firm on her feet."

But the handsome face of the Principal Boy paled suddenly to the sickly, greeny-white of a guelder-rose, on which the liquid powder and the pink salve stood out in ghastly relief.

"No! for God's sake--don't leave me!" she gasped out hoarsely, shrinking back against the wall of the ledge. "Don't leave me again! I can't stay up here all by myself. I'm shaking now. I shall look down and chuck myself over. I know I shall----"

"You'll do nothing so silly!" broke in the man's voice sharply. "Stop it!"

Then, with that peculiarly reassuring laugh of his, Ted added, "My dear girl, you're too young to die, and the stage can't spare you. I'll tell you what you're going to do. Give me your hand." He took it. "Now here's this thistle growing out of a cleft. Clutch it. Pull on that as hard as you like. They're tough beggars. And here!--in your other hand, take my watch." He had drawn it out of the pocket of his broad, foreign leather waist-belt. "Keep your eyes fixed on the hands of that," he ordered, firmly and cheerfully. "By the time they've moved on five minutes I shall be back again to fetch you. Be plucky--I know you are plucky enough to stick it out for five more minutes!" He forced the conviction upon her, too, with voice and look. "Now" (he turned to the slighter, frailer girl, who, as he had rightly judged, it would have been more dangerous to leave), "if you will put both your arms round my neck I can carry you down--yes, of course I can take your weight. The rope's got mine."

And, holding on to that rope, step by step, Ted Urquhart, with his trembling burden, made his way down to a less dizzy height.

"There! Now it's only a yard or two down to the sands," he said at last, "you can do that yourself, can't you, while I fetch the other girl?"

Like a cat he was up again to where the Principal Boy, with one plump damp hand grasping the thistle, stood desperately waiting, her brown eyes on the watch that he had slipped into the other hand. "Only four minutes, you see!" said the rescuer briskly, "so I'm before my time--a good fault, isn't it?--especially in an appointment with a lady. Now let that thing go--I hope you haven't got many prickles in your hands--and clasp them both firmly behind my neck."

"Ho! yes; that's a jolly good game, played slow, isn't it!" retorted Pansy, with an unsteady brightness. "All very fine for young Annie--she's got no one to worry her life out with his jealousy--don't matter whose neck she fastens _her_self round! Me with my--with my two dozen best boys, I've got to be careful. As for you, young man," she babbled on, "you give me your arm. I shall be right enough with that."

"Splendid!" said Ted Urquhart. "Hang on tight. Don't have the sleeve out of my blazer. There! That's better. Now. Don't look down. Look at me----"

"I s'pose you--you consider you're easy enough to look at? Not but what some girls mightn't think so-- _Ow_----" (A pebble had rattled downwards.)

"All right, all right! Feel for the niches with your feet," he ordered. "_That's_ it----"

And as they also made the journey down, he continued to speak on, brightly, complimenting the still shaking girl on her sureness of foot, questioning her about her stage-work--anything to take her thoughts off that drop below the ledge.

"Why, the other young lady," he concluded a compliment, "was much more frightened, you know, than either of you----"

"I daresay she was, bless her!" agreed the Principal Boy, laughing a little more naturally now that safety and the sands were coming so much nearer up towards her. "_She_ didn't want to have to arrange for no funerals from the Hostel, she being there in charge of us and all!"

"She was in charge, was she?" said Ted Urquhart evenly, as he let go the now unneeded rope and the Principal Boy dropped his arm. And now their feet were set on the blessedly hard sand. "In charge of you. Of course."

To himself he said, "It was she! It was she!" His pulses leapt.

"I thought so," he told himself. "I knew it, when I saw her swinging along by the water's-edge. And it was!"

Then, with a bow to the two girls, he turned quickly away; partly because he felt badly in need of a drink, partly because the Salvation Army Lassie, who had collapsed on to a seaweedy boulder, was sobbing hysterically in a way with which a Principal Boy might cope, but with which he felt he really couldn't; and, chiefly! because every fibre of his being was tensely strung with eager curiosity for another, longer, more soul-satisfying look at that girl, with the frightened perfect face under the golden rain of hair;--the girl who was "in charge" of these other girls at the Hostel--_the girl whom he took to be none other them his own fiancée_.

"She's beautiful. By Jove, she is beautiful!" was his only thought for some minutes as he strode back up the white, hedgeless road towards his Hotel. "I never imagined her so lovely---- That hair!" Then----

"Yet I always imagined her fair, the girl I would marry. Just a boy's fancy, I suppose ... she isn't much like Uncle Henry! ... What a golden mane! Of course Helen of Troy was golden, and Ninon, and Fair Rosamond. I am glad Eleanor's so fair. Eleanor.... It doesn't sound like her ... Helen ... That's nearer. I shall call her Helen, perhaps.... So now I've really seen her----"

Then, exultantly, "I couldn't have hoped for a better first meeting! Bucketed head-first into an adventure, by George! Into helping her, without her ever guessing who I am! That gives us a flying start. That's luck; incredible luck!"

He turned to glance downwards and back at the sweep of sunny, wind-swept shore set between cliffs and laughing sea; the scene of that encounter.

"And," he thought, "it might have had to happen in Uncle's musty-fusty, dark old study, full of books and the smell of mildew and the general atmosphere of a contract! A formal introduction--Uncle bringing her in, like a sheep to the slaughter, poor child! '_This is Eleanor_.' 'Ah, how do you do?' As bald as the presentation-cup speech in that old joke--'_Well, here's the jug'--'Oh, is that the mug?_' Rotten for both of us! It would have taken Heaven knows how long to wipe out a first impression like that! And, hang it all, a girl wants a touch of Romance in her courtship. I ought to have thought of that long ago. What I've been about all this time I don't know," thought Eleanor's _fiancé_. "I must make up for it now. That girl--waiting for me--sending that letter--those rose-leaves--_She's_ romantic. Or isn't she? A coquette? Unconsciously, perhaps, or--_What_ is she like, besides being lovely to look at? How soon shall I begin to find out? How soon can I decently see her again?"