CHAPTER VI

PLAN--AND SUPER-PLAN

Upon a morning that was bright as a diamond, bracing as a sea-dip, blue-and-white as Canterbury bells in the Hotel garden, Mr. Ted Urquhart told himself again that this golden weather was sent by a kind and match-making Providence for the special purpose of speeding his courtship.

To-day should not be wasted, as he had had to waste, through no wish of his own, yesterday and the day before.

For he had seen nothing further of "that perfectly lovely girl from the Hostel" since the evening when she had not even vouchsafed him a handshake for good-night. The day after he had caught just a glimpse of the whole party packed into some French vehicle that passed for a wagonette, leaving a wake of shrieks and chatter and laughter along the white road to Boulogne. In Boulogne itself he hadn't managed to run across them for all his search in patisseries and cinemas and the _galéries_ where you buy--or did buy in the dim ages before the War--scent and soap and silk stockings. The following day all he had seen of the party had been another fleeting glimpse, this time of a vision of _hats_--a black, feathery cart-wheel, a small petunia-coloured helmet of satin, and a shady Panama--below sandhills. A few yards further on were a white straw "shape" with a gaily flowered band, a Saxe-blue linen sun-hood, and a Salvation bonnet with its lettered ribbon. All those other young women, confound them! She was forever surrounded by them! Yet _another_ hat! a chic, Watteau shepherdess affair, massed with blush roses--close to another, a man's straw hat. A _man's_? Who the dickens--Ah! Urquhart had felt distinctly relieved when he realised that the two last hats also belonged to people he'd met; to the honeymooning Americans from his Hotel. They'd been picnicing with the Hostel party. Urquhart couldn't very well join them.... It would have looked too much like forcing himself upon those girls! Yes. The young honeymoon couple--strangers to her--were allowed to make themselves at home in that sheltered corner below the sand-hills with her. And he--who'd every right and reason to be at her side, he, her lawful _fiancé_, so to speak, he couldn't claim a look-in!

A pretty Lenten sort of engagement his had been so far!

But never mind. To-day he meant to take the bull by the horns. He meant to walk straight up to the Hostel, and, no matter who opened the door to him, demand to see Miss Eleanor Urquhart for one moment alone.

He wouldn't go until he'd achieved that moment.

And then--then he'd plunge for it without any more of this infernal beating about the bush! He would hold out his hand and look her straight in the face, that sedately-provoking, mischievously proper, flower of a face of hers. He'd say, "How do you do, Eleanor?" ("Nell" could be kept for later on.) He'd say, "I ought to have told you before. I'm Ted. Now don't pretend you can't imagine who _that_ is" (she'd be certain to make the attempt), "and don't ask '_what_ Ted?'" (This would be just like her.) "You know perfectly well.--_Your_ Ted."

Then, no doubt, his _fiancée_-in-spite-of-herself would proceed to make his life a burden by her demure gibes at his behaviour of two days ago. She would--well, never mind. The ice would be broken. There'd be an end of that insolently formal small-talk about the longest day and the weather. He would know where he was--that is, he amended, as he grasped his walking-stick as if it were the hilt of a fencing-foil, she would know who _he_ was; and here he felt, as one turns to a friend, for his tobacco.

Hereupon he realised a diurnal tragedy of Man's life; the ever-recurring catastrophe in two words--"_No matches!_" He'd long come to the end of the one box of English ones that is allowed to the traveller by an Argus-eyed Customs-house System--to the end, also, of the other six that he'd managed to smuggle over, and he hadn't brought with him out of the Hotel a box of those beastly spluttering foreign things....

This was why he turned into the little low-roofed, double-doored Debit Tabac. And here he found another customer, twirling the revolving stand of picture postcards under the hanging clusters of string-soled shoes, and endeavouring to make the French youth in charge understand by shouts and gestures her resonant Cockney English. She wore her gaudy petunia-pink coat and the small helmet hat that was itself rather like something of a picture postcard. For under the hat there beamed a welcome, the shrewd and powdered face of that pride of pantomime, Pansy.

"Hullo, N. or M.," she said, spinning round on her heel. "_Quite_ a stranger!"

"Hullo!" said Urquhart. "Good-morning."

"Nothing wrong with the morning," admitted Pansy. "Now, young man--you other one, I mean, in French! I'll have this of The Plage, and these two of the landing-stage," waving the cards in his face, "and you might get me out this one--No, no! _Not_ that. Want to get me into trouble with my pal the English Postmaster-General? This other one! Here! This with the forget-me-nots and the heart, and the hand, writing. That's it--Are you coming along?" she added to Urquhart, when the cards, enclosed in a flimsy grey envelope, were handed to her by the young Frenchman with the invariably courteous bow, which she acknowledged by carrying her hand to her satin casque in a military salute. "Coming along with me?"

"Er--yes," said Ted Urquhart. "I think I am walking up a bit of the way with you."

The Principal Boy, swinging along at his side up the cobbled, coffee-scented street, turned suddenly upon him and remarked, "No luck, had you?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Ow! As man to man, now!" Pansy mocked him with another toss of that hat and that tangerine-tinted hair. "You know what I mean! Didn't meet our Miss Anybody early on the beach this morning, did you?"

Ted Urquhart, surprised and amused, paused a moment to debate within himself whether to treat this remark as a joke or to pretend that he didn't know what this astute young Cockney was driving at. He glanced at her again. No. Not worth while to put up pretences against the snap of those brown eyes. Besides, presently she and the others would know that he was, definitely and officially, engaged to be married to their Miss Anybody, their young Lady Warden.

So he said, as frankly as if quite a long conversation on the subject had already passed between him and the Pantomime Boy, "Meet 'anybody'? No. I didn't."

"Had a good look, I suppose?"

He laughed.

"_Had_ you?"

"Well, as a matter of fact," admitted Ted Urquhart, still laughing, "I had."

"Good!" said the Principal Boy. "I do like anyone who'll come straight to the point. Too many fellows just _won't_. To keep _to_ the point, I dessay you're fairly bursting yourself to see her again to-day?"

"Well?" said Urquhart, defensive, but smiling.

"Well, you don't want all the others nosin' round and gaping and taking in every remark that's passed----"

"I do not," agreed Ted Urquhart fervently, with another frank glance at the face she turned up. At the back of that broad crimson-and-ivory smile he recognised a real wish to help.... Well! Why not make use of that invaluable asset to courtship, the feminine ally?

"Look here, Miss Pansy," he began. "If you'd really--I'd be jolly grateful--If you'd only----"

"Anything, Mr. Never-mention-it----"

"If you mean my wretched name," he said quickly, "give me another half-day, will you?"

"Why, if that's _part_ of it----"

"It is," said Ted Urquhart truthfully. "It is part of it."

"Right-O, mate. Then you listen to me," his new ally went on quickly as they came to the end of the street where the last cottage was an overturned fishing-boat on a patch of common ground. "This is our Leading Lady's afternoon for writing letters. She'll be in the house from two till five o'clock about. We shan't."

"Where shall you be, then?" asked Ted Urquhart, falling without further ado into this scheme for his welfare. "Which side of the beach?"

"Hardelot," planned the Pantomime Boy. "I'll cart young Annie and those other two off there, and keep 'em out for tea, even if we have to pull through on that black-currant vinegar they bring you with a fancy cake. Must have a bit o' fun sometimes. The coast then being clear, Captain Swift decides to march up to the Hostel to ask for his handsome silver-mounted walking-stick which he was _careless_ enough (ahem!) to leave behind him when he called."

"But I'm afraid I wasn't," objected Ted Urquhart, vexed that he had not remembered this good old rule, this simple plan, for himself. "Afraid I've got it here----"

"Oh, well, if you will have it!" flounced the young woman who'd addressed him as mate. "Oh, some people do take a lot of helping! You'd come off pretty badly at a stage-door, you would. Here! Oh, give it to me!"

And the plump hand of the Principal Boy snatched the walking-stick away from him, whisking it inside the cherry-coloured coat, where she carried it off as a poacher carries a short gun. Ten minutes later that silver-mounted walking-stick of yew-tree wood was reposing among the stack of umbrellas, shrimping-nets, and gay Japanese parasols in the hat-stand of that shaded convent-like hall at the Holiday Hostel; waiting to play the small, but not unimportant part for which it had been cast in the drama of an August afternoon.

Rosamond Fayre, having waved a rather envious farewell to the merry party setting off across the downs to Hardelot, sat down at the window of the little room beside the porch, and turned with a sigh to her correspondence. The morning's post had brought from Miss Urquhart in Paris a sheet of notes of instructions for her clerk. Rosamond, sitting at the bureau, looked them over again.

(1) Write back to the C.O.S. saying I cannot entertain their proposal.

(2) Find out if Nellie Clark, under-bodice hand at Shoddy and Frillings, is taking her holiday the last week in August or the first in September.

(3) Ask Lady M. about clothes for that Jumble Sale in October.

Over the fourth item Rosamond had, as usual, smiled a little.

(4) Write to Mr. T. Urquhart for me. Same address as last time. Tell him what we have been doing in France, but that he'd better write to me as usual at The Court. I shall have to be at The Court off and on, and am returning to take Father those MSS. after I bring Edith Winter to the Hostel, either to-morrow or day after. Shall come back to the Hostel again on the 16th.

(5) Write for that estimate for re-painting and decorating the Canning Town Crêche.

Five letters to write; actually six. For there was another letter of which the envelope was scrawled over with several addresses, the first one being to the Hotel Midas, London. It was in the cash-desk of the Midas that Rosamond had been found so providentially by her present employer. The Midas people had sent the letter on to her old lodgings, who had forwarded it on to The Court, whence Mr. Beeton, the butler, had sent it on to France. And Rosamond had recognised the handwriting inside with a not altogether unaffectionate touch of contempt.... Still? He still remembered her? "He" was the lad who had shared College rooms with her brother, who had begged her to write to him, who had afterwards implored her to marry him. Even if he had been five years older than he was, Rosamond would still as soon have thought of engaging herself to an infant out of one of Eleanor's crêches. He was rather a sweet boy, but he was of the type that remains to the end of Time some woman's unrewarded and devoted dog.

He wrote:

"My dear Miss Fayre,

"This is my second letter to you. One was sent back to me at Oxford. I heard that you were working at the Midas. You ought not to be working. I was horribly upset. I went there and they told me you had left. Will you please tell me where you are and what doing? Mayn't I come and see you? I won't bother you. I swear I won't. Please won't you let me come?

"With kindest regards, "Ever yours, "CECIL BRAY."

"Do please say I may come and how soon."

It was a pity, Rosamond thought, that men didn't seem able to strike a happy mean between opening out their whole hearts like a pedlar's wallet on the ground before you, like poor dear Cecil,--and adopting the attitude of the Male Aloof, too lofty or absorbed, or--er--something--to have anything to tell you about themselves, like----

Here the bell rang and Rosamond glanced up from her bureau, out of the window.

"Good gracious, _he's_ come back," thought Rosamond Fayre, swiftly at the sight of the figure standing on the path. "And there's Madame Topp gone to the fair at Portel, and I shall have to go to the door--in this blouse. It's always the way. Whenever one tries to be truly economical and to wear out one's old clothes in private life, somebody not entirely uninteresting is absolutely certain to call!" And bitterly resenting that blouse, she went to the door.

Upon Ted Urquhart the facts that her blouse was a very ancient "has been," with marks of iron-mould upon it, and that her skirt had been a friend of that blouse's youth, were entirely lost. He only realised that the girl framed in the doorway looked daintier in the flesh, than she had done in his dreams of two days; with a deeper rose-colour than he remembered in her soft cheeks; and that his heart seemed to take a leap forward at the sight of her.

Rosamond, for her part, frankly admitted to herself that she was very glad to see him. She hadn't really snubbed him properly the other evening--and he was the sort of uppish young man who really _calls_ for snubbing.

He had called, it seemed, about a walking-stick.

"I am always forgetting something," he told her. "Thank you, so much. Yes. That's the one, with the rather fat knob. Thanks so awfully much!"

"Not at all," said Miss Fayre, looking "Good-bye."

But apparently he had just been struck by an afterthought.

"Oh, look here; I say! I wanted very much to--er--to give some sort of a return little party," he began, "after that tea with you on Tuesday. I--you do have tea out-of-doors sometimes, don't you? Think I caught sight of you with some people from my Hotel yesterday."

A non-committal "Oh, yes?" from Rosamond.

He went on.

"So, if you wouldn't be too awfully bored. That is! Do you think you--and all the others could come and have a picnic tea of sorts with me under the rocks below le Portel this afternoon? I've got a Thermos, and sandwiches and things. And as it's such a ripping day, I--I do hope that you won't refuse me----"

"I am afraid--What a pity!" said Rosamond Fayre sedately. "All the girls are out. They went twenty minutes ago. They are having tea out."

"I say, how unfortunate!" he said. "Have they gone into Boulogne again?"

"Boulogne--without me--is out of bounds," Rosamond told him. "So they've gone to see what sort of 'pictures' there are at Hardelot." She gave him the conventional smile that is the unmistakable paraphrase of "Good-afternoon."

But Ted Urquhart had laid plans that were proof against hints and snubs and cold-shouldering on the part of this young lady. She was going to come out with him. She was going to be taken to the nearest sheltered corner under the rocks, that was out of the way of the everlasting fisher-children with their maddening demand for "un p'tit sou!" Then he was going to break it to her who it was she was going to pour out tea for that afternoon. Also to-morrow afternoon. Likewise on Sunday. Similarly on Monday. And presently for good. Then, perhaps, then she'd have the grace to look a trifle less provocatively self-possessed. He went on conversationally. "Oh, they've gone to the Cinema? Imagine spending an afternoon like this nipped in to red plush chairs in a stuffy tunnel, making one's eyes ache with staring at moving pictures of 'Fool's Head Looping the Loop,' when one might be enjoying oneself."

"They are enjoying themselves," Rosamond corrected him. "People have different ideas of enjoyment."

"I know. Mine, to-day, is out-of-doors; even if the breeze does blow sand into the butter," smiled Urquhart, without troubling any longer to keep the "do-let-us-be-friends-now" tone out of his voice. "And I think we shall have the best of it."

Rosamond Fayre, speaking without meaning to do so, demanded, "Who are 'we'?"

"Why--why, you and I, since we are the only-- _What?_" took up the young man, ingenuously, as if a sudden thought had struck him with dismay. "Do you mean--You'll come and be the picnic, won't you?"

"I?" said Rosamond Fayre. "Oh, I don't think so. No."

Ted Urquhart, blunt as a boy, but in a way at which no one, she realised half-resentfully, could take offence, demanded, "Why not?"

Now there were so many obvious reasons why she should not think of going, that Rosamond Fayre could not, at that moment, remember them. So she looked up at the presumptuous young man who had coolly demanded the afternoon of her. And she protested, "I--I have too much to do before post-time. Fix or six business-letters to write!"

"Half a dozen letters won't take you two hours," he persisted. "Look here! It's only half-past two. I'm certain you can get all those business people, whoever they are, written to by four o'clock. Now, can't you?"

"Well--er----" she hesitated. "Really!"

"And my picnic was to have been at half-past four. Now, look here----"

(Here he nearly slipped out a "Nell.")

"I'll call for you again," he concluded, firmly, "at four o'clock."

Rosamond Fayre shook her bright head.

"That--wouldn't do," she said, but she smiled a little, and with each syllable resolution dropped from her. Involuntarily she glanced over his shoulder at the road to the shore. Never had sunlight and sands seemed so golden, or sea and sky so sapphire-blue, or the air so headily fresh, or she herself in such perfect tune for an outing. If her work were done, she would in the natural order of things go down afterwards to the sea's edge. Why not with this young man who had, after all, rendered an unthinkable service to the employer, in whose place she, Rosamond, now stood? Suddenly she remembered something. That predecessor to Miss Fayre, the secretary who had been dismissed because she had slipped out in the evening to meet the chauffeur in the rose-garden! But what had that to do with it? That was so entirely different. So different that it made up her mind for her. So she added, brightly and conventionally, "Four would be too early. But--if you really don't want to give up the idea of the picnic, come at a quarter past."

"Good!" said Ted Urquhart briskly, and went.

He went back to the Hotel where, in the Hall, he exchanged greetings with the little Dresden shepherdess of an American bride, who was sitting on the wooden settle busily arranging her tea-basket for two; a case of handy, expensive-looking toys, all silver tops and Bond Street leather.

"Jolly basket you've got," said Urquhart.

The little bride glanced at him over it.

"Do you want to borrow it?" she suggested with a sudden roguish twinkle under her Watteau posy of a hat, "for the afternoon?"

"Why--how do you mean?" said this bachelor, nonplussed. "Borrow it----?"

"To take ... Anybody out to tea with," she concluded with a dimple. "_We'd_ be real glad to lend it!"

"Here's another," thought the disconcerted Urquhart. "Two of 'em in one day talking about Anybody. I shall have to be more careful."

"Won't you have it? Now, do!" said the just-married girl, kindly and simply, and held the basket out to him with both hands.

"Hang it, then, I will!" he thought, and took it with a laugh and a "Well--Thanks awfully!"

The dainty American gave him a smile that was a wedding-present in itself, and fluttered off to her Lucius; while Urquhart, kicking his heels against the white-washed wall opposite the Hotel, took out his cigarette-case--and his watch. It seemed several hours before those hands crawled up to a quarter to four.

"I couldn't have stood much more of all this," he decided presently. "Now, I wonder if she's going to give me a very bad time--first? In a way, after all, I've been practically spying on her. Pretty rotten way of behaving to a girl, in any other circumstances. But she's my own sweetheart, when all's said, and she's going to know that now. I shall be thundering glad--only five minutes to four?--when it's off my chest."

He studied the handle of that very new tea-basket.

"Besides," he thought, "what about my privilege as an engaged man?"

(It was not the first time that the thought had struck him since he set eyes on Rosamond Fayre.)

Pie thought, as he started off down the road, "I shall have to beg for it and let her take her time about all that." He found himself hurrying ridiculously, and checked his pace. "Yes, I shall be all the more humble because, actually, I have the right to take that girl of mine into my arms and to kiss her as I choose!"