CHAPTER VIII
CROWS TO PLUCK
Forty-eight hours after that check to his courtship, Ted Urquhart was speeding back to The Court, fetched over from France by a message of two words--
"_Eleanor here._"
It found him only too anxious to believe that it had been sent off by that enchanting tease, Nell herself.
He hadn't had another glimpse of her since the afternoon that he had planned to spend in making himself known to her--and that he'd actually spent in finding himself put further away from her than ever.
Now she'd sent for him.
Oh, the interminable homeward journey!
Centuries, it seemed to him, were spent in pacing a stone quay, waiting, waiting until that never-ending luggage and those motor-cars were got aboard. Other ages in watching, from the steamer-rail, how slowly the tall hotels of Boulogne began to slide away as the boat lifted to the Channel waves. Further æons of time in tramping a short deck cumbered with long chairs and with other passengers--who grumbled, perhaps, at the idiotic restlessness of that young fellow in the brown Burberry, striding up and down as if that could bring him any sooner to his destination, with a pipe between his teeth and that unmeaning smile coming and going on his face.
For all the way home he was thinking of her.... "Why," he wondered, "did she take it into her head to be off, when she was to have stayed at that Hostel for a month? By this time, of course, Uncle Henry will have told her that I've been there, too--when I went--and why I went. The chances are that she knows now who it was she snubbed and sent away like that. She knows it's the man she's got to meet this afternoon as her _fiancé_!"
Pictures of his waiting sweetheart rose between him and the foam-veined jade of the water sliding past the boat. He saw her--not, as before, on the plage of a foreign country, with waves at her feet and a young moon above her head--but in another setting altogether, adding her beauty to the beauty of his old home--(her home--ah, theirs). Coming slowly down the grey stone steps of the--(their) Terrace. He would make her take him round her--(and his) gardens. Then, as she stood reflected among the other lilies in the still waters of that new fish-pond of hers (and theirs) her lover, close beside her, would proceed to teach her a lesson or so about a thing or two.
These were the anticipations that kept that smile flickering on the young man's face.
"Now then! I have a crow to pluck with you--several crows, in fact. A whole row of 'em," Ted Urquhart imagined himself saying peremptorily to that girl of his. "Look here! To begin with--_Where's your engagement-ring?_ You promised you'd wear one," he'd say. "And you don't. What's become of that sapphire you said you'd chosen? (Matches your eyes, I expect.) Where is it?"
She'd have some impertinence ready. Then--
"Certainly I want you always to wear it," Urquhart would go on (if this dashed sea-slug of a boat ever got to the other side). "Yes. If you fetch it I will wish it on to your finger, and you need not take it off again. No! You needn't run away for it this minute, thanks. Presently will do," he'd say. "After I've plucked another crow with you first, please. Crow Number Two:--_What did you mean by promising to spend the whole afternoon tête-à-tête by the sea with a strange young man?_"
Here, of course (thought Urquhart), Nell would protest that he could scarcely have the assurance to call himself a strange young man?
"Yes! You didn't know, at the time, that I was anything else," he would insist. It would do her good to be bullied about it. Didn't they say that women preferred a man who could bully them? "The crime remains the same," he'd say, "as if I had been a perfect stranger. A stranger who saw no ring on your finger! An unfortunate chap who'd absolutely no idea that you were an engaged girl! Nothing to warn him! Disgraceful. Aren't you ashamed of yourself, Nell? Why, you death-trap! Think of the mischief that you might (_might_, mark you!) have been doing all the time," he'd say. "Think of the possible damage to that wretched young man. He couldn't guess that the pretty, unattached-looking young woman who said she'd come out to tea was already booked to make a marriage of convenience!" Yes, he could say it then; Nell would be perfectly aware what sort of a match theirs was turning out! And her lover would go on severely----
"Supposing this ignorant stranger had taken it into his head to fall in love with you at first sight? Some--young lunatics might be capable of that. Supposing that, in all good faith, he'd proposed to you?" he'd say. "No thanks to you, Miss, that that catastrophe happened to be out of the question. But here's Crow Number Three:--_Having given your word to the man, what made you break it? Why didn't you keep that appointment?_"
Here, he thought, he'd have Nell in a cleft stick!
For already he'd pieced out what he thought the reason for that sudden coldness of hers to the strange young man. The remembrance of one Ted Urquhart, whom she was to marry, had hinted that it wasn't wise to encourage this sort of thing--picnics and so on with young men who couldn't, perhaps, keep their admiration entirely out of their eyes. She'd have to own her duty towards her _fiancé_--which meant owning that "the strange young man" was at least important enough to _count_! She wouldn't say that, Urquhart would drive it home with----
"Crow Number Four:--_Why did you give him your letter to me to post?_ Wasn't it so that he might see you'd got a man of your own to write to--Yes, well, of course he wouldn't necessarily see that it was to a _fiancé_. Of course it might have been to a father or a brother. Leave that crow for the present, then. Still, you did stick that letter on the top of the others for him to notice the address," he'd say. "Now, didn't you? ... Didn't you, Dear?"
Here her lover pictured Nell's first gesture of hesitation. He imagined the first undecided sidewards turn of the small head (soon to be drawn down to its proper place on his shoulder), bright as a golden bud against the treillage of the old rose-temple!--their rose-temple!--to which he would be slowly strolling along beside her, a lovely girl in a lovely place!
What did the place matter, though? All that mattered was summed up in the two words of her message----
"_Eleanor here._"
Still he was not disappointed that, after a fuming wait at Folkestone and a journey through Kent in a Victorian railway-train that had, as Urquhart expressed it, "two speeds, dead-slow and stop," he found at the tiny station for The Court no Nell to meet him.
He had not wished or expected that.
Only he commandeered the wheel from a morose and public-school-voiced chauffeur and tore his Uncle's car along homewards at a pace that made white avenue and green lime-trees whizz past in strips of white-and-green, like blades of that ribbon-grass.
And now they'd rushed up the drive; they'd turned by the huge beech to the Terrace with the shallow-worn steps between grey Court and green lawns. Now! Here was Home! _Their_ home! He'd arrived----
One glance at the steps--No! She wasn't there----
Well, of course not----
Much more like her to withhold herself until the last minute! Possibly she thought that _he_ had to be taught a lesson? That it was she who had crows to pluck with _him_? And that he must wait on her, first? Right!
She'd be in the house----
Impetuously he dashed up those steps, out of the late afternoon sunlight, into the gloom and the cool of the old Hall, nearly knocking that officious butler into the glass case with General Urquhart's giant tarpon that stood beside the study-door.
In the study he found his Uncle, craning as ever over those books of his, difficult as ever to uproot from that printed Past and awaken to the Present--embodied in a hurrying lover.
"Ah, Ted! You have come back," the old man informed him, vaguely, pulling a lock of his own white hair back with groping fingers. "You got my telegram."
"Oh, yes, Uncle--Thanks!"
H'm. So the wire was from him? Nell wouldn't send it?
"Still, she might have dictated it," thought the younger Urquhart, his eyes turning to the door that he had left ajar.
The old man shut it carefully.
"Always a draught from that hall! The worst of an old house! Yes, I wired as soon as Eleanor came back from France. She wasn't able to secure those documents. Only the least important of them. If one wants a thing properly done, Ted, one has to be on the spot oneself. It isn't always possible, I know. But writing--sit down, sit down--writing about a thing is seldom satisfactory. The delay--the waste of time----"
"I know--I know--three years!" said Ted Urquhart.
"Ah, you've found it so, too? I verily believe that everyone says the same thing. But I thought--I thought that you always transacted whatever you had had to do yourself, my boy, in those out-of-the-way places? I suppose you've had to write home for things, though, and that you'd have managed better if you could have chosen in person----"
"Not I! I should never have chosen differently, Uncle," declared Ted Urquhart quickly, his mind gay with images of the golden-haired girl he called his. "If Eleanor----"
"Ah, yes. Perhaps you would like to see Eleanor now----"
"Perhaps!" the young man laughed, flushing a little.
The elder Urquhart rose stiffly from his desk-chair.
"She said she would come down here as soon as she heard you had arrived, my boy," he said, slowly, and put that hand like a branch of pale coral out to the bell. "She was to be in her office all the afternoon. That little room off the drawing-room: she calls it her office. She has so many people to see on business; she has to have an office of sorts, Ted----"
"Of course, of course----"
A nerve-racking pause, during which an old man and a young one sat silent in the old room with its book-lined walls, arrassed with velvety glooms. Outside a rose flattened itself against a mullioned pane. Inside brooded a church-like hush.
Young Urquhart felt that the thumping of his heart must presently be heard through it.
"Crow Number Five to pluck with her presently," he thought resentfully. "_Why did you keep me waiting on thorns when I know you must have heard the car drive up?_"
"Dear me, I think that bell cannot have rung," said Eleanor's maddening father, presently. He rang again.
After what was possibly only the usual lapse of time, the butler appeared.
"Beeton, go--go to the little morning-room, will you, and let Miss Urquhart know that Mr. Ted Urquhart has come and that he is waiting in here."
"Yes, Sir."
Another stage-wait.
Mr. Ted Urquhart, with every nerve a-fret within him, remembered that a married man he knew once told him how nearly he had "bolted" from the altar and the bride who had let him in for the ordeal of waiting there for fifteen minutes....
This was a bad quarter of an hour that Nell was giving her man....
How long? How much longer? ...
Ah! At last! Steps across the hall.
Urquhart sprang up again at the sound of them.
Light, composed-sounding steps; not loitering, not hurrying, coming steadily across to the study-door. It opened.
As it did so, young Urquhart stood tense, just ready to step forward to greet the girl who should enter....
But he did not step forward.
For, he saw, this was not Nell who came in.
She, in her dainty insolence, had _sent_ somebody.
This would mean the plucking of Crow Number Six. She had sent a small, dark, prim-faced little person, rather dowdily-dressed, a companion, a lady-secretary or something of that sort, to say that Miss Urquhart would be here presently, he supposed. Nell was keeping it up until the very last moment----
But in that moment old Mr. Urquhart's vague, soft voice was speaking; uttering incredible words.
"Ted, my dear boy," he said, "this is Eleanor."
"This----?" The startled, crude exclamation all but broke from young Urquhart's lips. All the blood that had just been surging, warm and eager, through his heart, seemed to have ebbed away, leaving him deathly cold. He was aghast as any ivy-wreathed lover of Mythology, who for a day had chased some laughing and elusive maid in hot pursuit--no more eagerly than this Twentieth Century engineer in his tweeds and brown boots and close-cut hair--and with no better luck! For at the end of the chase, what, in those old legends, was the hunter's reward? That disconcerting miracle of Metamorphosis! The glowing sweetheart vanished; transformed into a chilling splash of brook-water across his face--an armful of fleshless reeds against his breast----
Young Urquhart stared. A voice within him seemed to be clamouring furiously:--"But, look here! This isn't Nell! It can't be! This isn't the girl I'm here for, at all! This is the wrong one! _The wrong girl_, I say!"
Unconscious of all this, the strange dark girl came sedately towards him, holding out a small hand, spare and brown as the stone of a date. Upon the other she wore a noticeably fine ring.
"How do you do, Ted?" she said, composedly. And she offered to him the edge of an olive cheek--this girl upon whom he'd never set eyes before now.
This was Eleanor!