A WHITE NIGHT
"Got a sweetheart already, has she," thought Ted Urquhart grimly.
It was his first clear thought as he jerked himself at last out of
the stupor into which he'd been plunged by a blow dealt in the dark.
Slowly and heavily he walked up the rest of that darkened scented
corridor of an avenue into the lighted hall of his house.
And there slipped into the hall behind him the girl who was not his.
The girl who'd murmured, "Oh, Cecil," in a tone as soft as the sound
of that good-bye kiss which had been overheard by another man.
Ted Urquhart stood aside for her to pass. A black transparent scarf
that she'd put on trailed away from her white dress. He picked it up
and handed it to her.
"Oh, thanks," she said a little wearily, as she passed upstairs.
"Good-night!"
"Good-night."
He had not meant to look at her. But for one instant, his eyes
strayed to her face--not lighted up by any mischief now. That mouth
of hers was grave. And was it a wet gleam on her eye-lashes?--Yes.
Of course.
She'd been crying because that young--that young Bray had had to go.
"Oh, Cecil," she'd sighed. He called her "Miss Fayre," Urquhart had
noticed, before people. For some reason or other it was not
announced yet. But they were sweethearts all right.
That soft exclamation, that other soft sound, were no further
business of Ted Urquhart's. For a moment he stood, however,
torturing himself with the remembrance of them, and gripping the
balustrade on which his hand rested.
Then he let it go with a little jerk.
Yes. That ended it. Very well.
It was a very tight-lipped young man who took his peg of whisky
rather brown, Mr. Beeton noticed, before preparing to go off early to
his room.
"I beg your pardon, sir, I think you overlooked this," said the
butler. "This letter came for you by the last post, sir."
Ted Urquhart took that letter upstairs with him.
In his room he glanced at it. A thin foreign envelope, the address
of the Court scrawled over that of his Camp. It had been forwarded
from South America. Then he saw, above the hasty re-direction, his
name in a clear pretty writing he knew very well.
Eleanor's. This was a letter of hers that had reached the Camp just
after he'd left it, and it had been sent on to follow him here. It
must be weeks old by now. And he might expect now to have these
re-directed letters from her turning up every week, for she would
have written her duty-letter to her _fiancé_ for three mail-days in
succession, not knowing that even as she wrote he was already on his
way home to take her by surprise.
A pretty collection of surprises it had turned out to be from the
first moment that he'd seen, not Eleanor, but her lovely
Second-in-command----
"Here! None of that." Urquhart peremptorily called off his own
thoughts as if they'd been straying spaniels. He'd got, somehow or
other, to keep his mind off that savagely rankling memory of what
he'd just heard in the lime-walk. "Better read the letter."
He tore it open. He set it down before him on the dressing-table,
beginning listlessly enough to read it while he undressed.
He began listlessly. But presently he lifted his head with a little
movement that was reflected in the Sheraton mirror; he stood for a
moment alert, a graceful, wide-shouldered figure of a man in
shirt-sleeves, his braces dangling about his narrow loins, while he
read again.
"My dear Ted----
"Of course I am not offended that your plans do not allow you to come
over this year to see me, I quite understand. I am such a busy
person Myself"----
Here followed the catalogue of Miss Urquhart's activities for the
summer. Her _fiancé_ could imagine the little brown head
conscientiously writing them all down; the dusky head bent over the
paper. Then came the phrases which--he didn't know why--had arrested
him.
"In fact, I must break off now to attend to the Head of one of my
Clubs. (This sounds rather like golf, doesn't it? She might quite
well be described as 'The Driver' too!)"
Ted Urquhart's eyes left the letter and turned towards the closed
white door of his room almost as though he thought he had heard a
call. Yet there had been no sound. Then they returned to that last
paragraph. Then he found himself looking away again, and staring,
without any reason, at the long serried row of his boots--foot-gear
of every make and material and several nationalities. What was there
about this part of the letter that had given him a sense of being
puzzled over something? He read it again.
Then it dawned upon him.
He thought, "_How unlike Eleanor_ to write that!"
A couple of hours later the young man, tossing and turning between
his blankets in the dark, clutched at that thought again. He would
have clutched at any idea that would distract him even for a moment
from the black jealousy and despair caused by that memory of a man's
name murmured in a girl's voice----
"_Oh, Cecil!_"
--and the other sound ... the other death-knell to his hope.... This
brooding would not do. He fixed his mind resolutely on that letter
of Eleanor's.
Yes, by Jove. How oddly unlike Eleanor that last paragraph had read!
He simply couldn't imagine Eleanor writing so primly, so
characteristically up to that point, and then "letting herself go" in
a sentence that seemed almost to be laughing at her own solemnity.
That gay little gibe! From a girl who took everything with such a
deadly seriousness! All her other letters to him had been so
consistently typical of her. None of them had shown a gleam of that
sort----
"Stop a bit, though. There was the other letter with that
unaccountable Thing in it," young Urquhart reminded himself, sitting
up suddenly in bed an hour or so later. "By Jove, yes. Supposing
to-night's letter proves to be a sort of sidelight upon that other
one? I say! I'll have a look at it now."
He slipped out of bed and snapped on the lights. He went to the
dressing-table. Here, beside pipe, pouch and matches, lay a worn and
favourite pig-skin pocket-book. He picked it up and took out of
it----
First, his receipted bill from that little French hotel.
Next, a little sheaf of visiting cards with addresses; home-people
he'd promised to "look up" for some of his pals at the Camp.
Then, some letters. No! It wasn't this one, or this one.... Here
it was, at last, in one of the well-known grey envelopes. He shook
out of the envelope a handful of once-pink rose-petals, and laid them
carefully aside on the open pocket-book. He scarcely looked at them
now; he'd looked at them often enough already. It was the letter at
which he now stared. The only other one of Eleanor's letters which
was uncharacteristic of the girl as he knew her. The one he'd
received to-night seemed to have a girl's laugh rippling between the
lines. But this first one held something more betraying. Something
which, because it was incomprehensible, Ted Urquhart had "given up."
Well, here it was for him to puzzle over once again. _The letter
that had brought him home!_
In his lighted room, orderly and deathly silent, it seemed for a
moment as if something were holding its breath behind the shoulder of
that young man in pyjamas. There was nothing specially striking in
the actual contents of that letter. "And she ends up so precisely,"
he mused for the hundredth time, "with her
'There seems to be nothing else that would interest you'----
And then, by George, over the page"----
He turned it.
--"there's this!"
The sight of "_This_" would have been a petrifying shock to the girl
who'd written it.
For Rosamond Fayre, secretary, prided herself on her neatness and
accuracy. She boasted that she'd never made the mistakes that every
writer of letters is said to make once in a life-time. Namely, to
slip A.'s letter into an envelope addressed to B., or to tear up the
fair copy of a note while sending off the rough draft.
But it was a compromisingly rough draft that Ted Urquhart held now in
his hand.
He held it up to the light, as if he hadn't already held it so many a
time, to examine that scribbled--
"_Darling. My darling!_"
That was on it. It was all scrawled over with a pen-drawn spiral
that looked like "_the smoke from the engine_" of a child's drawing.
There were one or two beginnings of it, a copper-plate "Dar--" "My
darl----"
"_My darling!_"
From Eleanor, if you please. Yes, from Eleanor, who never by any
chance called him anything but his name.
And so much had been packed into the time since that sunny morning in
France when he'd met--_No! None of that again_--since the day he'd
met Eleanor that he'd forgotten to notice the contrast between
herself and that one letter of hers.
And now, in this second letter that he'd received, he seemed to trace
the possibility of some clue to the mystery, of the astonishing
difference between the Eleanor who wrote and the Eleanor who spoke.
He put down the letter with the "Darling" post-script, enclosing
those rose-leaves. Again he took up the letter that had arrived this
evening.
Perhaps he might find in it something he had overlooked? He examined
it minutely, from the "_My dear Ted_" at the beginning to the little
flourish under the "_Eleanor Urquhart_" at the end.
Ah! Wait a bit! There! Could it be? Was it----
Yes. Tucked away, all but hidden in the loop of the flourish, his
eye, now that it was on the look-out for it, detected something. Two
almost imperceptible hieroglyphics; the marks of two crosses.
Cupid, his mark! For all the world over that stands, in a letter,
for one thing only.
Kisses.
From Eleanor? From the unawakened girl whose only notion of a caress
seemed to be that twice-daily cousinly peck on the cheek? She had
sent half-concealed love-messages to the man to whom she was, by
contract, engaged?
Of course it might amuse a girl to do that, reflected Ted Urquhart,
lighting his pipe. But surely not that girl? Wasn't she as chilly
and youthfully hard as the unripest of the green apples in the Court
Orchard? Or--here he knit his brows and stared into the puff of
smoke--_had he been mistaken_ from the very beginning in his
_fiancée_ Eleanor?
The clocks all over the house chimed One and Two and Half-past Two
while Ted Urquhart, tramping barefoot up and down his bedroom and
smoking hard, went on wondering (still resolutely) over this question.
A moth flew in, with a whirr and drone as of a tiny biplane, and
circled about under the ceiling. His own were the only lights on, of
course. Everybody else fast asleep hours ago. He wondered if She
had cried any more over the departure of "_Cecil_" after she'd gone
up-- _Stop there! Think of something else_.
Was Eleanor, whom he thought he got "summed up," a girl he'd never
really understood?
The rising wind outside dashed a cold spatter of drops against the
young man's cheek as he passed the open casement. He looked out.
Those farmer-fellows had been wise to get in their corn while they
could. Out there in the indigo darkness it was coming on to rain
like blazes; the light from his room gleamed on the lines of it as on
the strings of a harp. He half closed the window and took up those
letters once more. And he was conscious of the oddest feeling about
them; this young man who'd never "bothered" much about feelings
until--fairly recently.
But it was with a little, sudden, warm thrill of positive tenderness
that he handled these messages from a girl for whom he'd never had
any tenderness ... so far.
But supposing that came? Supposing Eleanor did turn out to be this
utterly unknown quantity?
He'd heard of people who could be delightful, charming, and warmly
friendly while they talked to you, but who, on paper, seemed cold and
repellently stiff. Simply, they couldn't write letters. Perhaps,
then, there were other people who could express themselves in
letters, but who simply couldn't talk? Became cold, self-conscious,
too shy to be themselves? Perhaps Eleanor's real self was the
bashful, passionate little soul who, greatly daring, sent furtive
"darlings" and kisses and rose-leaves to the lover she'd never seen?
If that were Eleanor, he must meet her. He must know her. He must
get her to declare herself. The very thought of the quest seemed to
bring hope with it....
He heard the clocks striking Three, and stretched himself wearily....
Then suddenly checked himself, with long sinewy arms above his head.
Ah! Another idea had just occurred to him.
There were those other belated letters already written by Eleanor
that would be coming on, forwarded from the Camp. He might expect to
receive these here, one at a time! They were already on their way to
"Edward Urquhart, Esqre.," at this moment. One just sent on from the
Camp; probably, one at the port of embarkation; one crossing the
South Atlantic....
Would any of them throw fresh light upon the subject of their writer?
Would they be entirely formal and flavourless? Mere Club reports?
Minutes of meeting?
Or might they hold just a dash of the other thing? The dab of jam in
the otherwise so very doughy nut? That remained to be seen. How
soon, though? Each week he'd get one....
He dropped his arms. He turned to the ivory-leaved calendar that
stood on the writing-table beside the leather-framed, faded
photograph of his father in the uniform of a Woolwich cadet; he ran
his finger down until it reached a date.
What an infernal while to wait until he got another letter from this
new Eleanor!
Her letters were all he had to help him to find her.
A regular paper-chase!
Find her he must; would----
Here at last he found himself yawning.
He turned off the lights, and the velvet darkness of the
window-square was transformed to weeping grey as he rolled over in
his blankets again.
He was dog-tired. Rain pattered loudly on the lime-trees of that
Avenue where, half a life-time ago, he'd heard ... what left him
still aching with misery, frustration, hopelessness.
No. _No_! Not that. He was not going to think of it. He'd got
something to think of. The hope of this new Eleanor. Getting on to
the track of the girl who'd slipped hints of such a different
personality into two of her letters.
Eleanor had thought of sending him those petals; had smuggled in
crosses for him to find....
Rose-leaves....
And kisses, of all things....
Here Ted Urquhart rolled over for the last time and slept.