CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST CALL

In spite of much lying-in-wait about the sands and the wide French roads, Ted Urquhart didn't, for the rest of the morning, catch another glimpse of his golden Enigma. Disappointed, but nursing an increasing determination that the afternoon should be less of a blank, he went in to the _table d'hôte_ déjeuner at the Hotel de la Plage. One fish course succeeded another. Then, in the midst of a dessert of tiny black grapes (grown on the white backyard wall of the Hotel), and of little sponge biscuits which it appeared to be the custom of the country to dip into one's glass of very thin red wine and then suck, there appeared before Ted Urquhart the "Madame" of the hotel in her tight black gown and architectural hair, who smilingly informed him that these English demoiselles from the Atelier were all in the hall, desirous of speaking to the English Monsieur.

"Ah!--Good," said Ted Urquhart eagerly.

He strode out into the bare, shady, stone-paved hall, where a knot of girlish figures, in heterogeneous seaside "get-up," were clustered, like bees on a head of teazle, in one corner. A buzzing chorus of talk stopped on a staccato note as the young man appeared in the doorway. For a second he hesitated, glancing from the one black coat with furs to the coloured blouses.

Then one figure, the tallest, dressed in white, separated itself from the others, and came sedately towards him.

"Oh," she began demurely, in a voice very different from the whispering, giggling voices of the other girls, "good-afternoon, Mr.----"

And she--the girl of this morning; "his" girl!--paused. It was to give him an opportunity to slip in the name by which she must thank him.

Ted Urquhart, realising this well enough, didn't give any.

"Not yet; no, not yet!" he was saying to himself. And he forced himself away from the growing temptation to stare.

He noticed how her hair, the wonderful blonde hair that had rippled down far below her waist, and had been so hastily shaken back from her face, was well out of the way now,--plaited into a rope thicker than that which had been let down over the cliff's edge, wound round her head, and hidden away under a very wide-brimmed hat of exquisitely-woven white.

In his quick glance at the girl, Ted Urquhart did not overlook that Panama hat.

For he knew it.

"I come on behalf of these young ladies," the pretty voice was saying, half-deprecatingly, half-mischievously. "We--they all want to thank you so much for your ... well, I don't know quite what to call it----!"

"Heroism, Miss, dear!" prompted the voice of the funereally-clad Jam-Hand. "Like the Surrey," she added.

"Well," went on the girl in charge, "may we say 'heroism'--like the Surrey?"

She met the young man's eyes, and they laughed together.

"Oh, please don't say anything of the kind!" Ted Urquhart implored her, still laughing; his eyes, full of well-leashed admiration, again upon the face under the Panama hat which he had sent, weeks ago, to Eleanor.

The girl had trimmed his gift with a silken scarf, now faded to a tender browny-pink not unlike the colour of those rose-leaves in that letter which had brought him home on an impulse,--but he knew that was the hat.

He knew that he had written in the accompanying letter a description of how these fine hats were made, not of straw, but of the young fronds of spreading palm-leaves, and how they are plaited under water to keep them flexible, and how the little square piece in the crown is the feature of the more elaborate of them. All this he knew: he could almost see his own handwriting in that letter.

But what he did not know was, that Eleanor Urquhart, when she had received that packet at The Court, had said, "Oh, look what a queer sort of garden-hat Ted has sent me from South America! So kind of him, but it's much too large for me--I never wear these immense shady things. Rosamond, do you care to have it?"

"Oh, rather, my dear! Any contributions thankfully received for the pauper's wardrobe!" Rosamond Fayre had laughed; "besides, this is a lovely hat for the grounds, and I shall be able to wear it all the time when we are by the sea."

And that was how it happened that she was wearing it now.

"Please don't dream of thanking me--I'm only so glad I happened to turn up," Ted Urquhart was saying. And then the girl in charge, prompted by another murmur from the group of--"About this afternoon, Miss--you know!--you ask him!" went on sedately:

"Oh, yes! and I am deputed to ask you whether you can spare time to come this afternoon and have tea with us all? We are at the Hostel, that white house with the brilliant green shutters and the studio in the garden. It's on the right of the road to Boulogne, at the other end of the village from here, if you will come----"

If, indeed!

"Thanks most awfully," said Urquhart promptly, turning to the group by the door and smiling again as he met the unabashed gaze of the Principal Boy. "I shall be delighted to come!"

He meant it.

His plan, his excellent plan, was continuing to work out even better than he had dreamed.

First the flying start of this morning's adventure. Now the entrée to Eleanor's hospitality--and under such favourable circumstances! Holiday-time; a jolly little holiday place without any stiffness or formality about it. A foreign village, too; that meant an added excuse for compatriots to be very friendly. Except for a couple of Americans on their honeymoon at his Hotel, there seemed to be only French people and the Hostel party in the village. Naturally the only Englishman would soon find himself attached to the Hostel party--they were genial, sympathetic souls, these Cockney girls. And soon, the "party" also would split up into the immemorial grouping. They--he and she--would grow to be friends--more than friends, as quickly here as on board ship or on a desert-island. Everything was conspiring to help on the courtship that was now about to begin.

He congratulated himself----

Meanwhile, Rosamond Fayre also was thinking: "Well, I suppose this quite pleasant but slightly unconventional young man will now proceed to introduce himself by name?"

Not he.

All he said was, "How soon--I mean when may I come?"

"Tea is at five," he was told. "Good-bye until then--er----"

Again a little pause into which Miss Fayre not unwarrantably imagined that he might have slipped his name.

Ted Urquhart merely echoed courteously, "Until then!"

The bevy of English girls, with a bobbing of small, bright hats, a swing of skirts, and a toss of one set of black furs, moved away from the Hotel in a cloud of white French dust.

Then a clatter of tongues broke out.

"Miss, dear, isn't he handsome?"

"Tall, isn't he?"

"Talk about sun-burnt!"

"Funny kind of belt he'd got on; sort of cowboy-looking, wasn't it? Isn't he like Lewis Waller in--"

"Oh, go on, Mabel Beading! It's always Lewis Waller, with her. Not a bit like an actor, to my mind. More like a soldier!"

"Well, he couldn't look like anything better," said Miss Fayre, whose motto from childhood had been, "_Ah, que j'aime les militaires_."

"I wonder what he does for a living?"

"I wonder how old he is? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight?"

"I wonder," contributed the Salvation Army Lassie, "if he's married?"

"Not him," declared the Principal Boy definitely.

"Now, Pansy, whatever's the good of saying that, when you don't _know_?" retorted the Blouse-finisher rather pettishly. "How can you possibly tell, with gentlemen? They aren't like us! _They_ don't have to give the game away with a wedding-ring----"

"And a 'Keep-off-the-grass' expression," added the Jam-Hand, "and a new name! Now, when a young girl's still single, she's----"

"Talking of names," said Pansy, quickly, "what's his? Anybody catch it?"

No; nobody seemed to have caught it.

"Miss, dear," from the Jam-Hand, "didn't he say, when he was talking to you?"

"No," said Rosamond Fayre; meditatively, perhaps. "He did not."

"Funny of him," complained the Typist. "You'd think it was the first thing he'd mention!"

"Well, I wonder what it is? Shouldn't be surprised if it was 'Captain' Something," said the Blouse-finisher, "he'd got his hair cut that way, and that little short military moustache. It'll be in the book in the Hotel, anyway--we could always find out----"

"My _dear_ Mabel! indeed we couldn't!" remonstrated the vice-Head of the Hostel, aghast. "If this--well, if he didn't choose to _tell_ it to us, we couldn't very well go looking it up as if----"

"As if we was _after_ him!" the Jam-Hand came to the rescue. "Miss is quite right. What's in a name?"

The Blouse-finisher persisted that it was queer, not knowing what name you could so much as pass him a cup of tea by.

"And besides, I do want to know it. What am I to call him," asked the Salvation Lassie simply, "in my prayers?"

"Probably he'll send in his card," suggested Miss Fayre, "when he calls this afternoon."

Ted Urquhart, needless to say, did nothing of the kind.

Still full of the excellence of his schemes, he arrived just before five, at the latticed porch of his unsuspecting _fiancée's_ Hostel.

About the base of that porch were planted clumps of ribbon-grass and tuffets of golden-feather and straggles of canary-creeper; and the lattice was gay with the monthly roses that grew from a big plaster vase placed at one side of the entrance. The vase was held up by three laughing Cupids, which had been modelled by the artist who had owned the house. Miss Urquhart, when she transformed it into her Hostel, would have had "those not very appropriate little statuettes" removed. But Rosamond, fearing that the flowers might not bear transplanting, had pleaded that the little, unabashed Loves should stay as they were.

Urquhart's ring at the bell was answered by the old mahogany-faced, snowy-capped Frenchwoman who cooked and cleaned and did the work of three English servants about the place.

But before she could request Monsieur to enter, the slight figure of Annie, the Salvation Lassie, slipped, greatly daring, before her.

Annie also had a scheme respecting names.

"Good-afternoon, Sir. I'm parlour-maid to-day," she informed the tall visitor with a little giggle of nervousness; "so--_what name, Sir_?"

Mr. Ted Urquhart was not to be caught out thus. What? Held up at the door? Requested to stand and deliver?

He smiled down at the ingenuous little highway-woman.

"You don't remember me?" he said. "I am expected, I think."

Then he let her lead the way into what had been the artist's studio, now transformed by Eleanor into the Girls' Refectory.

The place was long and cool and coloured like a blade of the ribbon-grass outside. Green and white casement-cloth curtained the tall windows, the floor was carpeted with green straw matting, the white distempered walls were bare save for a framed copy of the Hostel Rules and an Arundel print of S. Ursula with her Eleven Thousand Virgins. (Rosamond considered that the small austere face of the S. Ursula was not unlike that of Eleanor herself, and she sometimes amused herself privately by seeking for likenesses in the Eleven Thousand, to the factory-hands or music-hall supers under Miss Urquhart's care.) A large green Brittany crock full of white Bride-lilies with streamers of ribbon-grass stood in the centre of the long table now laid for tea. At the head of it stood that supple girl in white, with the big Panama hat hiding her glorious hair.

"So this is to be our first meal together," thought the visitor. "Well, with luck! it won't be long before I shall contrive to get her to come out to tea with me, somewhere; away from all these rather alarming young women. Ah, Eleanor! Helen--Nell--Yes, that's your name--my name for you. Nell, you little think that I'm the person you'll have to be pouring out tea for every day, presently. Presently you will be sitting at a table for two, perhaps calling me by some name of your own, and----"

"Will you come and sit here," suggested his unconscious hostess, thinking "if he prefers 'you' to any other form of address for the present, so be it!"

And he sat down at her right hand, between her and the Principal Boy, who immediately took most of the burden of entertaining the guest upon her own plump shoulders. And she certainly broke the ice of a situation where a young, well-bred, and good-looking (but curiously nameless) man, the only representative of his sex, was being mutely worshipped as a hero by a bevy of rather self-conscious girls.

"_I'll_ look after him," Pansy chattered, heaping Urquhart's plate, putting the sugar into his cup of tea with her own fingers, all but guiding the cup to his lips. "Oh, doesn't it begin to feel more sort of natural with a man about the house again, instead of the ever-lastin' hen-party? Pass those little cakes along, Mabel; they're sort of tipsyfied. Babies-in-rum they called 'em, but I daresay their bark's worse than their bite. Same as mine. He'll like those.... Not at all! You never find me backward in coming forward when there's boys--er--a _gentleman_ to look after.... I don't," she concluded pointedly, "know what else to call him?"

Ted Urquhart chose to take this question as a mere statement of fact. He helped himself to a _baba-au-rhum_, smiled at his neighbour, and asked her, pleasantly, if she felt quite recovered after her little fright of this morning.

"'Little fright'?" echoed Pansy, dramatically. "Oh, girls! Oh, Miss, dear! If you'd only known my feelings-not-to-mention-my-sensations, when me and young Annie was hanging there on that cliff like the two Balancinis in that Trapeze Act! 'What had we found wrong with the ground,' eh? Oh! Doesn't it show you what's the fruits of getting up early because it's such a lovely morning? Never again! 'Such a thing as early risin' I--Don't--See!'" she sang. "Getting up? Well! Just as I was thinking the 'bus-conductor would be passing some rude remark about me ankles----"

The Typist blushed; the Blouse-finisher murmured something about not the slightest use taking any notice--and the Pantomime Boy, devouring criss-cross-patterned French cream-cakes, babbled on:

"Just as I was wondering who'd break the news to Mother, up comes Lieutenant Daring the Cliffclimber, that is to say Mister----"

She broke off abruptly. There was a pause; the longest yet. Surely, thought Rosamond Fayre behind the teapot, surely this nameless knight-errant would proclaim his title now? No. The indefatigable Pansy was forced to go on.

"Mister--Who? Myster--ee, I suppose. _I_ believe he's Royalty, travelling _incog._--Alphonso! Lobengula! Oh, fancy having me life saved by a Prince! Look well on the bills, won't it? Better than having me jewels pinched! Oh, when he was grabbing on to that rope with one hand and begging me to throw my arms round him, I said, 'Can a duck swim?'"

At this revised version of what had happened on the cliff-ledge Ted Urquhart put back his brown head and laughed infectiously.

Rosamond joined in with the other girls; she laughed, but she was feeling thankful that Eleanor, safe in Paris, did not behold her theatrical _protegée_ in her present mood. Pansy, who had been budding out of the Hostel etiquette all the week, seemed about to burst into full bloom this afternoon.

It was at the second addition of hot water to the teapot that Pansy protested that all she wanted to make her perfectly happy again in this God-forsaken spot, where they seemed to make their tobacco out o' those bits of dry black seaweed that blew about the beach, was a decent cigarette!

Smoking, in the Hostel, was strictly against rules, but ignorant of this regulation of his betrothed's, Ted Urquhart, with some relief that the name-motif appeared to be dying out of the conversation, drew out his case--a thing of finely plaited straw something like that of the Panama hat--and passed it, with a quick glance of inquiry, to his hostess.

"I don't smoke, thanks," said Rosamond. Then, firmly, "Nobody smokes."

A mutinous pout from Pansy. "Miss, dear, couldn't you look the other way? Anyhow----"

With the word she took the cigarette-case and turned it upside down beside her plate. A dozen or so of "Egyptians" rolled out on to the table-cloth.

"Ow! Is that all you keep in it? Sold again!" disappointedly from the Principal Boy. "_No cards, by request!_ All right. Is there a spot more tea in the pot, Miss, dear, for his Royal Highness Prince Mumm?"

Here Urquhart began to realise that the joke of a withheld name was wearing a trifle thin. Why couldn't this rattle of a girl drop it now? It was beginning to make him almost embarrassed before his hostess, it would mean more awkwardness than he intended, when he came, say, in a couple of days or so, to announcing himself by name. He had thought one could slide more easily than that over the situation.... It was the fault of these girls! She--Nell--hadn't shown any curiosity. But all her charges--the little thing who'd opened the door, the girl in glasses, the red-haired, and the coster-y looking ones; they were asking now, with all their eyes, what that impertinent theatrical minx presently put into so many words.

"Haven't you _got_ a name, Mr. Man?"

"Come, Pansy, _Pansy_!" from the hostess.

"Well, there you are, you see! He's allowed to hear _mine_," complained the Principal Boy, loudly. "He knows I'm Pansy----"

"Yes; but Miss Pansy What?" fenced young Urquhart. "_I_ haven't been allowed to hear your surname, after all."

"Want to hear it?"' retorted the girl petulantly.

"Not," said the young man quickly, "if you don't want to tell it to me."

"Ah, that's meant for a nasty one, but our family don't take hints. _I_ don't mind telling you," the Principal Boy announced. She finished her cup of tea, glanced quickly at the disposal of the tea-leaves at the bottom, muttered to herself, "_A short journey across the sea, a quarrel, the wedding of a friend_," and then vouchsafed, defiantly, "_My_ name is Hawkins."

"Oh, hark at _her_!" burst hoarsely from the Jam-Hand. "Oh, Pansy, you're worse than awful! Where d'you think you'll go to? Hawkins! Oh!" (An explosive giggle.) "Whatever next? Miss Hawkins!"

"It's not her name at all," explained the Blouse-finisher, bridling, and the Typist added,

"Her name is Miss Vansittart."

"Yes," from the Jam-Hand. "And _that's_ only her stage-name!"

The Lassie ventured apologetically, "Her _reel_ name is very pretty, I think; Pansy Price."

"Oh, then, you've got altogether too many names, you know. I couldn't compete with you," said Ted Urquhart, smiling at the handsome rebellious face of the girl beside him, and determined, as Rosamond Fayre realised, to keep this skirmish in the enemy's own country. "Besides," he said, "a lady's name isn't the same as a man's----"

"How d'you mean, Mr.--Er----?"

"I mean that you'll all change yours very shortly, I expect. I shall stick to mine--whatever it is."

"Evident!" said the flushed Pansy. "But--straight now"--she dropped her voice to an insinuating aside--"What is it?"

"Don't tell her!" It was his hostess herself who intervened, turning, half-annoyed, half-smiling, to the guest. "No; don't tell her now. Leave it at that. They've been very rude to tease you about it. Don't tell--anybody your name."

"You see? I am forbidden to tell you!" took up the anonymous knight, with a little nod. "I'm sorry, but it's----"

"Your score. Chalk it up and I'll be round with the money in the morning, Mr. Nought-nought-double-O-Dot," retorted the Principal Boy quite good-naturedly. "Change the subject--seems to be the only change a girl can get out of _you_!" Then she began to rattle on again, this time about that bouquet of flowers on the table.

"Smell a treat, don't they? Whatever's that stripey stuff you've stuck in with them, Annie?"

"That's ribbon-grass," the Lassie timidly showed off her knowledge from the other side of the table. "At home they used to call it '_Match-Me_' and play a game with it--seeing who could get two blades striped just alike----"

"Oh, yes, we know those games!--If it isn't Match-Me it's Shy Widow (I don't think!) or Postman's Knock," from Pansy. "Always end the same way! Always finish in your finding yourself let in for a kiss to the wrong young man!"

And she concluded audaciously to the only young man present, "Is this where we start playing it now?"

"Isn't this where we all go down to the shore?" parried Urquhart, smiling pleasantly at her, "and see if there's any phosphorescence on the waves this fine evening?"

His quickness was rewarded by a quicker glance of half-amused gratitude from the blue eyes of the girl at the head of the now rifled tea-table--and then, with a pushing aside of chairs, and a babble of--"while I get my new ta-ta on"--"Miss, dear, can I come out as I am?"--"is it cowld?"--"no, you can't have my furs! Leave off!" the girls disappeared out of the Refectory, where, in spite of wide-thrown windows, the air seemed close and still vibrating with clatter, to the upper rooms of the Hostel.

Ted Urquhart was left to wait for them in the cool garden outside, where the round-limbed plaster Loves laughed under their burden of roses, to smoke his deferred cigarette and to revise his impressions of the girl who would soon, he found, be settling down very naturally and rapidly to her appropriate place in her _fiancé's_ heart.

"Mischievous, though. Just brimful of mischief," he decided. "Every bit as much so as the other hussy! Only hers--Nell's--isn't allowed to bubble over. It's all tucked away--takes cover under that hat, I suppose. Watch that mouth of hers when the girls she's shepherding say something that she's simply got to appear shocked at----"

He gave a short laugh as he turned up the path again and flicked a bit of ash off on to the broken shell that served for gravel. "Mischief! It was all part of it--her writing to me, long ago, that she hadn't a photograph, didn't bother to have herself taken, as she always came out so badly. Badly? She was hoarding up her looks, deliberately. Meant to spring a mine upon me, when I did come home, with her beauty and--and herself!"

He glanced, as he walked past, at the striped cascade of Match-Me grass beside the porch.

"And her little prunes-and-primsy letters! Jove? The first one of all--'_My dear Ted--Father and I both think that it will be the best thing for me to accept your kind offer_' (of marriage, forsooth), and then the others, the seedsman's catalogue and the list of fixtures at The Court, and the--she _must_ have been laughing to herself as she wrote that letter! Now, I wonder what on earth sort of a young-man-not-in-a-hurry she thought she was writing to? I wonder what she thinks--whether she thinks anything at all yet, that is, of _me_?"

Rosamond Fayre was at that moment in her bedroom, changing her house-slippers (always to be worn indoors at the Hostel, Rule 8) for her white canvas beach-shoes, and thinking quite busily about the guest of the afternoon.

And her first impression of him was, frankly, that she liked him very much indeed. Yes. For a number of reasons she considered him (in the bald, but comprehensive summing-up of girlhood) "nice."

To begin with, of course, his looks. His build and make, his alert movements, his graceful height, the breadth of his flat shoulders and the way his rather small head was set upon them--these things pleased Rosamond's eyes, and through them, her sense of what a man should be as well as look. He was active and fit and hard as nails. Now _he_ looked the sort of young man, she thought, to rush up and down the Andes, making no more of the castings upon his shoulder than a porter carting a kit-bag upstairs, like that weird sort of a _fiancé_ of Eleanor's--to whom, by the way, another letter would have to be sent off in a couple of days. Only, keen as he seemed over his engineering and his camp-life, Eleanor's _fiancé_ was obviously a laggard in love. This young man, Rosamond decided, would not be that. She liked the quick grey glance of his impatient eyes--patience in a man being one of the quite numerous virtues which Woman respects and loathes. She liked the "Service crop" of his brown hair and the tan of his face and the short moustache that was scarcely darker than that tan, and that hid nothing of the firm line of his lips. Decidedly good to look at. Such a nice voice, too, thought Rosamond, tying the white strings of her shoe.

The right sort of clothes, too. As old as the hills, but _built_. He'd changed the blue blazer and waist-belt and white flannel bags of this morning for grey tweed things with an unstiffened white collar fastened by a plain gold safety-pin under a tie of deep-blue knitted silk.

"I wonder if ... anybody ... knitted it?" she broke off.

And she liked the way he wore the clothes, also that leather strap about his wrist, and the very old silk handkerchief that had faded to the brown of an autumn leaf, and--several more of the little details, the omission or achievement of which young women were noticing at the time that young men fondly dreamt that they--the girls--were being profoundly interested in what happened at the seventh hole, or in Ulster; what a man like Lloyd George was actually driving at, or what had been the policy of their particular firm, up to now--

If the youth had but known!

It doesn't matter now, of course, since there is now always the one topic, the War, for maid and man....

This young man, besides being agreeable to look at and to listen to, possessed that Something to which girls who are sisters pay tribute. (In a two-edged remark which sometimes also means that they, personally, find a young man hopelessly uninspiring!)

"The boys would like him."

Rosamond Fayre, remembering the brother dead in his early twenties, thought, "Yes. My dear old boy would have liked him!"

How nice he--the visitor--had been at tea! Some young men might have "taken advantage" in some tiny, imperceptible way of Pansy, who was _rather_ appalling when she let her high spirits run away with her like that. Rosamond was almost as grateful to him for his behaviour this afternoon as for that of this morning.

How ripping and "on the spot" and dependable he'd been this morning!

Rosamond found that she utterly approved of everything she'd noticed, so far, about--his name? What about that name of his? M--m, _well_!

Well, he'd missed his opportunity of getting it in at once, of course. Afterwards, of _course_ he wasn't going to give away the name at which such a dead set had been made by the girls! Serve them right that he'd faced round and begun to tease them!

Rosamond was glad she'd interrupted, when he was just going to give in. She was glad she'd said "_Don't_ tell anybody your name!"

"Because he'll know," she reflected, as she closed her bedroom door, and ran downstairs to join the group in the porch, "he'll know that when I said 'anybody' I meant 'anybody except me.' He'll have to tell _me_ when we get down to the shore, of course!"