CHAPTER IX

THE WRONG GIRL

"How am I to get out of it? What excuse am I to make? _How on earth am I going to break off the engagement?_"

This was Ted Urquhart's first preoccupation after he had dismissed Mr. Beeton's offer of help and had begun to unpack his own traps in the lavender-scented quarters which had always been his bedroom when as a little boy he had stayed with his father at The Court. He could still hardly realise that The Court was his own property; that it would be his and that of the girl-cousin whom he had arranged to marry.

No! He couldn't marry her!

Now that he had seen her, he knew, he knew that he could never marry Eleanor Urquhart!

The small and naughty boy that lurks in every grown-up young man seemed to come out from his ambush at the back of his mind, grimacing and shrieking rebellion at the mere thought of it.--"Don't want to! Don't like it! Shan't! Won't!"

However more gently he put it, it was a rotten thing to have to tell a girl! What reason could he possibly give her? The young man pondered as he moved in his shirt-sleeves between the towering tallboys and the latticed casement darkened by ivy, unpacking and disposing his things neatly and quickly after the order of the old campaigner; the row of boots here--best light for shaving here--and here the spirit-lamp arrangement for getting himself a cup of tea in the morning at an hour before any lazy English servant was stirring!--and as he pondered, there sounded clearer and clearer in his mind the unwelcome answer to his question.

"How am I to break off this senseless engagement?"

"_It can't be broken off!_"

For he couldn't tell that matter-of-fact-looking young woman that he found he'd been mistaken in his feelings! In the whole question of their engagement, "feelings" had not been mentioned.

Why should they? Between a girl and a man who'd never met? They were engaged for quite another motive--and that motive--the sharing of The Court--remained; common sense as ever. He would, if he broke it off, be turning out the girl and the old man--after having deluded them for a whole year into making sure they were there for good! He'd be wasting a year of his cousin's chances of marrying somebody else. Somebody else might have wanted to marry her--a curate, say, or some kind of professional pal of Uncle Henry's....

So here was he--Ted Urquhart--with his whole Future mortgaged!

And only himself to thank for that! Asking for trouble! Asking!

Fool that he'd been!

Didn't it just show the insensate folly of getting one's self engaged for any but the one right reason?

Men did it, of course, and it seemed to work out all right.... There'd been a young French mechanician in Urquhart's last camp, married to a girl in Arles for whom he seemed constantly homesick--yet he'd never seen this bride to speak to, alone, until after the wedding. Those "arranged" marriages for family reasons, on the idea that one well-brought-up girl made a man the same sort of wife as another well-brought-up girl, panned out well in France, presumably. One young Englishman was finding it a fairly infernal sort of failure. To be tied for life to a girl who--Well! She was a nice little thing enough. Rather fine eyes--for dark eyes....

But--he summed up a vague set of impressions by ruefully telling himself that she didn't seem able to make you feel she _was_ a girl!--Pretty hopeless kind of start, that!

A rose without scent--that was a girl without the allurement of sex. It wasn't a matter of good looks alone, either. Some girls--not always the best-looking ones!--had something about them that could surely make a man conscious of their attraction even a mile away, even on a pitch-dark night, say. They'd this "something" that called and called--inaudibly. It beckoned and beckoned--without any visible sign that could be shown. It was the undying miracle of womanhood; the appeal of the Eternal Feminine. He, Ted, had seen it again and again in the dark eyes of South American girls, in the less languorous glance of French lassies. That theatrical girl, now Pansy Vansittart, she possessed it in every movement of her sumptuous person. And it was incarnate, and a transfigured thing, in yet another girl----

He wheeled sharply as if the thought had stung him. He told himself that men could marry, and did marry, "without much of that sort of thing." Yes, and were quite reasonably happy, too, without it! thought this Empire-maker a little defiantly.

A man needn't miss it. He mightn't ever miss it unless--Until, too late, he happened to meet the other sort of girl!

Here Urquhart sat down heavily on the edge of his bed--one of those countless mausoleums in which Queen Elizabeth is reported to have slept,--and he thumped a brown fist softly and viciously against the carved black garland of the bed-post.

As if defending himself to some one, he muttered aloud--"It would have been all right! It wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't seen Nell first!"

He knew now who it was that he had been calling "Nell" all this while in his heart.

For during a nightmare of afternoon-tea just now in the great drawing-room with his Uncle and the girl whom Ted had condemned himself to marry, Eleanor Urquhart's staid little voice had broken through her _fiancé's_ daze of consternation with questions, obviously meant to be friendly, about that anonymous, that disastrous trip of his to France.

"And so you went to my Hostel, and found that you had had a journey for nothing, after all? Oh, dear, what a pity. I should like to have shown you the place myself," Eleanor had said, pouring out tea with those little, competent, rather uncaressable-looking hands. She was doing her best, he saw, to be what she considered "nice" to this visitor who was also a prospective husband. "Sugar? Two lumps? (I must remember.) Don't you think it was a good idea to start it abroad, Ted? Such a complete change, you know----"

"Quite a change," poor Ted had absently agreed.

"Yes, to give those girls even a glimpse of another country, another sort of life from their own--Oh! I am sure it widens their minds," Eleanor had said earnestly. "It is sometimes _so_ disheartening, the narrowness of the outlook of those girls! Some of them seem to care for nothing but just the tiny pleasures of the moment. Or what they look like. Or what one of their dreadful 'young men' says; their Tube lift-men and tram-conductors and shop-assistants! As I sometimes try to tell them--(Won't you have some more bread-and-butter? You are eating nothing.)--as I tell them, 'These young m-m-men are, in nine cases out of ten, on a lower mental plane than you are yourselves! They haven't read as much; they haven't associated as much with another class; they haven't thought as much. Why, why be swayed by their opinions? Form your own judgments!' I tell them. 'For the honour of your sex, be yourselves, not things that just talk, and dress' (as they do, Ted), and behave in a way that they think will please their quite uncultivated young men!"

"But these young men," Urquhart had suggested, diffidently enough, "are, I suppose, all those girls have to marry."

"Why should that decide everything?" Eleanor had argued, as energetically, as unembarrassedly as if she were discussing any other subject--say half-day closing--that affected her girls. "Why should not they--instead of descending to the level of the young man's intelligence--try to raise him? I beg them to do that. Isn't that a better standard to set?"

"Oh--quite----" Urquhart had said, with an irrelevant echo of the talk of Pansy ringing in his mind as he had listened to this other young woman.

"And you saw my girls, of course? Five of them there now. They wouldn't know who you were, Ted, I suppose?"

"Er--no. They didn't know."

"Not even Miss Fayre?"

"Miss Fayre," Urquhart had repeated with a boding flash of enlightenment. "Now, which was she?"

"Rosamond Fayre; a very tall girl with a great deal of fair hair; nice-looking--my secretary. I left her in charge of the place while I went to Paris."

"Ah, your second-in-command. Yes, I saw her, of course," Eleanor's _fiancé_ had forced himself to say quietly, "but without catching her name."

"Then you will have to be properly introduced when she comes back," Eleanor had said, pleasantly precise, "on Thursday."

"She's--to come back here?" Ted Urquhart had heard himself ask. "And are you going back to France, then, yourself?"

"No. I've another most excellent person to send over to take on the Hostel until the end of this month. A Lady Miriam Settlement worker, whose holiday has fallen through in the nick of time," Eleanor had explained busily. "A Miss Wadsworth--a great-niece of The Wadsworth, you know, the Minority Report man--a most charming and cultured woman. She will be glad to take charge--especially as the more _difficult_ of the girls are due back now--and that allows me to have Rosamond Fayre free for the Amalgamated Girls' Garden Party."

"'Rosamond Fayre!' Rosamond Fayre," Ted had echoed silently. "She was more like a 'Nell'! And so she's this girl's secretary? What on earth sort of a--Rather a bad one, I should say! What's she secretarying for, at all? Is _she_ one of that 'intelligent' lot? Surely she doesn't go in for thinking a girl ought to be mugging up books all day about how to be 'herself,' instead of playing up to a mere man?"

But as he asked himself the question he knew that to that girl being "herself" and living to delight her lover would some day mean just one and the same thing....

Eleanor, putting her cup down, had chatted briskly on, so interested in this garden-party, whatever it was, that it preserved her from any self-consciousness before this stranger-_fiancé_. She had been quite ready to accept him as a matter of fact! She'd behaved as a well-brought up docile child behaves when there is ushered into her nursery "the new Nana"! She had been treating her prospective husband with the same unruffled friendliness with which she had then turned to his Uncle.

"I knew you'd resign yourself to the inevitable, Father! As soon as we heard that there was scarlatina at Park, and that the Duchess had to put the whole place into quarantine, I knew you'd say we might have the party here----"

"Very well, my dear, very well--I'll go out for the whole day," Mr. Urquhart's fatigued voice had replied. "I'll take the car over to Little Merton and have a look at that parish register I heard of the other day. No, no, I'll not stay here, Eleanor. I--I can't cope with these young ladies. I--I haven't forgotten that last reunion you had. Ladies who lost their way down the corridors--invaded my study--lectured me on the Marriage Laws. They alarmed me," the old gentleman had confessed, "with their views--They--Ah, I shall be gravely anxious, Eleanor, until they have come and gone. The pictures, Ted!--The Romney! At least we ought to have the Holbein room locked up!"

"But these are not the Suffrage-people, Father, this time," Eleanor had explained, patiently. "These are just my working girls! All the Clubs in London, amalgamated. They are bringing down----"

"Female hooligans, my dear Ted," concluded his Uncle with a deploring shake of his white head. "Mænads who hold orgies and Saturnalian gambols on these lawns----"

"Father, they only dance! Dancing is their great outlet," Eleanor had explained. "I shall have a band for them on the Terrace. I shall tell Rosamond to write to one of those ladies' orchestras----"

"More ladies!" old Mr. Urquhart had groaned. "Ted, my dear boy, you and I will be well out of it on that day. We will decamp, and leave the Bacchæ to Eleanor and Miss Fayre."

That miserable night, as Urquhart went to sleep, his last thought was that he would see Miss Fayre--since that was Nell's true name--in two days' time....

It seemed to Ted that only that thought kept him going at all during this ghastly sojourn in this house as a man engaged--to the wrong girl. It seemed to him, as he walked through those grounds and stood beside that new fish-pond, and explored the rose-temple, always with that sedate and authoritative little courier of a cousin of his--as he touched her cool olive cheek in morning or evening greeting--and listened politely to her talk of her plans and of her secretary's duties, it seemed to Ted that Life could hold nothing worse in store for him.

Here he was mistaken.

To be with the wrong girl is bad enough; but its Purgatory is peaceful enjoyment compared with what it immediately becomes with the entrance upon the scene of the right girl herself.