CHAPTER XXIII
THE VISIT
Well, I went.
I mean, to see Mr. Lascelles in the Nursing Home for wounded officers at Nowhere Junction.
I thought it would be rather cat-like not to when he did want to see me, after all, even if he is engaged to somebody else—I mean, to somebody. Besides, he might want to say something about some of his things that he had left at his billet with us.
So off I went on what you can only describe as a pious errand. It was a horrible day, neither wet nor dry, but cold and piercing and depressing. I think the most depressing day I've ever spent in the whole course of my life.
Everything went wrong from the start. First I forgot one of the parcels that I'd got to take Mr. Lascelles. Then my suspender broke. And though I fastened it up with a safety-pin at the Junction waiting-room, still, you never know when a thing like that may not give, and there it is hanging over you like a pale-blue sword of Damocles the whole time that you're out.
Then I missed my way to the place and wasted about a quarter of an hour going back to the right turning.
Then, when I had got to the blessed home—a large, new, red-brick building surrounded by sprouts of laurel—there was some mistake about my having come.
They didn't seem to realise that I had been asked to visit a wounded officer.
They showed me into an awful little bleak waiting-room with nothing in it but a gas-fireplace and a framed photograph of a lot of nurses in a group, with Miss Gates in the middle with her hair done like they used to when mother was a girl.
I waited for what seemed like an hour, which, of course, made me furious. I should have been far better employed sitting at home going on embroidering Nancy's chemise-top or darning my own stockings or something really productive like that, instead of hanging on waiting until this wretched matron-fiancée person of Mr. Lascelles's chose to think that I had been there long enough.
I wondered why a woman like that with a big nursing home of her own and what they call one of the most sacred professions should choose to go and get herself engaged to be married.
And at her age, too!
Just as I was thinking this the door opened, and in came the so-called fair fiancée herself—Miss Gates—the matron.
She had a little starchy cap perched on her brown hair with lots of grey in it—I mean the hair, not the cap—and she also had on a business-like looking navy blue alpaca gown with little lawn collar and cuffs, but no apron. What a very different sort of bride she'll make from Nancy!
Well, in she came and shook hands very briskly with me and said: "Oh, yes, Mr. Lascelles does expect you; so I think I may permit you to see him for a few minutes."
Permit you, you know! That made me so annoyed that I didn't do what I intended to do—namely, ask if I might congratulate her on her engagement to our old friend.
Yes, I say old friend because when a person has been billeted on you, you get to know him better in a week or two than you would get to know in years and years some young man that you only saw at hockey matches or at Badminton or subscription dances and that sort of thing.
Well, led by this matron, I went upstairs to an upper landing that went all round the well of the staircase.
There was a sound of playing the piano and singing "When the Girls come up to Town——" from one of the rooms where I suppose a lot of them were, and a quite young youth came out in very beautiful grey mufti and only one leg, poor darling, hopping and holding on to the banisters and laughing at some one behind him.
"Now, Mr. Tracey, Mr. Tracey," the matron called, "where are your crutches?"
"Oh, Sister, I do hate the beastly things," said this young wounded officer in a very drawly sort of voice, looking hard through a monocle at me. "They simply ruin the set of one's coat, don't you know."
"Once a nut, always a nut, I suppose," said Miss Gates, and then she opened a door and said, "Here's a visitor to see you, Frankie."
Mr. Lascelles was sitting up in bed, looking, I must say, not nearly as well as he did when he left the Moated Grange. I don't believe he is one bit better for having left there, in spite of being nursed by his fiancée. He was wearing the same striped cream and pale blue pyjamas that he had on the night of the Zeppelin raid, and his red-gold hair was all rumpled under the bandage round his head, and his eyes were much brighter than they had any business to be, and his cheeks were flushed—feverishly flushed.
As for his hands, I could have cried over them! They were shrunk so very tiny, and they had got so white and transparent, with blue veins showing through the backs of them. They felt so absurdly soft, too, for a man's hands, for he took both of them to hold my hand when I put it out to him and said, "How do you do?"
Never again shall I call the young man, as I have once or twice called him, by his sort of pet name of "Lonely Subaltern"!
You see, never again will he be that, now that he is engaged to this business-like person who owns this nursing home.
I suppose she will never leave him. I thought she was never going to leave him, even this afternoon, when I came to see him, for there she sat smiling patronisingly upon me as I brought out the various little presents and parcels that I had got with me.
"Thank you, it was most awfully sweet of you, Miss Elizabeth," he said, smiling for the first time really as he touched a little white china jar of lemon-cheese that I had made for him, tied up with lemon-coloured ribbon off a chocolate box.
Then I said something about the weather being very warm for the time of year, and Miss Gates said that personally she had thought it was rather cold, and Mr. Lascelles said in a sort of duty voice that being in bed still he hadn't noticed much what the weather was like.
And then a terrible pause ensued, and nobody said anything or seemed to know what to say next.
I was just going to get up and say that Aunt Victoria was expecting me back immediately.
Just then the door opened and the nurse came in and said: "Sister, there is an officer downstairs come to ask how many patients you will be able to take in by Wednesday."
"Oh, I will come down and see him at once," said Miss Gates, getting up briskly. Then she said to me: "Excuse me a moment," and went out.
I was only too thankful to excuse her for any number of minutes. All curiosity, of course, because of what I had to ask Mr. Lascelles. I was determined not to go back without having found out something I had been bothering about ever since I had first got his message.
So no sooner had the door closed behind Miss Gates's blue alpaca back than I turned to Mr. Lascelles, and began gabbling quickly so as to get it all in. "Oh, before I go away, there is something I simply must ask you, Mr. Lascelles."
"Oh, yes, do tell me what it is," he said, in a much more natural sort of voice—his old schoolboyish one, like before he was engaged. "I say, it was most frightfully ripping of you to come."
"Oh, not at all," I said politely; "somebody had to come, and Evelyn and Nancy were busy, and Aunt Victoria can't stand these draughty trains, so, you see, I was the only one who could manage it."
"Otherwise, I suppose you would have let one of the others do it?" said Mr. Lascelles, in rather a hurt voice, though what he had to be hurt about goodness only knows!
So I began again, and said: "Look here, Mr. Lascelles. You know you wrote a letter to me the day before you were taken—I mean, the day before you came here?"
"Yes, I did," said little Mr. Lascelles, flushing up to the roots of his hair again, "and look here! I've something to say about that. I never got any answer to it, Miss Elizabeth."
"Well! I don't think," I said, "there could be any answer to it. You see, in the letter, you asked me to come up and see you because you wanted to speak to me; and I couldn't very well come up and see you when you had just been whisked off—I mean, when you had just gone away to a nursing home."
"You might have written," said Mr. Lascelles, sitting up, a little, bolt upright figure, in the bed, and speaking quite resentfully. "I thought you might have written if you wanted to know what it was all about, that is."
"Of course I wanted to know," I said, speaking as dignifiedly and calmly as I could, and gazing aloofly at the bottle of eau de Cologne on his dressing-table. "I knew there was something you wanted to ask me, even before that night. Will you tell me what it is?"
"Sure you care to hear?"
"I shouldn't ask," I said, quite angrily, "if I didn't want to know!"
"Very well, then, I had better tell you," said Mr. Lascelles, also gabbling a little, as if he wasn't quite sure that his destined bride might not come prancing in at any moment.
"You—you—that—that——"
He actually began to stammer in a most absurd way and to look more feverishly flushed than ever as he went on at last: "You remember that blessed photograph that you sent to me when I was the 'Lonely Subaltern'?"
I said, rather sharply: "I don't think you need remind me of that now."
"Why not? Why not?" asked Mr. Lascelles, quite heatedly.
Well, of course, it was obvious why not.
It was because I didn't think an engaged young man ought to rake up any bygones, however merely platonic they were, with any sort of other girl, if his fiancée could be called a girl exactly.
However, I couldn't tell him this; it sounded so absolutely silly, so I adopted my cool, dignified manner again and merely said: "Well, but I thought we had arranged to forget about that idiotic quarrel of ours."
"It was the quarrel I was remembering," said Mr. Lascelles, pushing his hair off his fevered brow at he spoke; "although you did tear it, you know you did, and that is what I have been going to ask you about that photograph. You know I have got one half and you kept the other half of it. I want to know whether I mayn't have it to join on to my half." This was unexpected. In a kind of way it was touching, his still thinking about old friends and caring to have photographs of them. But I couldn't let him see I was touched. It would seem so absurd.
So I spoke as if I had a heart as light as a feather.
"Join on? Oh, no; I don't think so," I said. "It would be too silly; it would make such an idiotic mark right across. I think those bits had better be burnt."
Mr. Lascelles said nothing for a minute. Then he shut up his mouth very tight under his baby moustache as he said, rather shortly: "Very well, since you won't let me have that, can't you let me have another photograph some time, Miss Betty?"
I was so pleased—I mean surprised—to hear that old name coming out that I nearly said in the first moment, "Yes, I will send you another copy." However, thank goodness, I refrained in time. I think I was reminded by hearing the jingling of the keys and the quick step in the passage of Miss Gates, his fiancée.
Let her give him her photograph—hers is the only woman's photograph he has got any right to want, or even to say he wants, since I don't suppose he wants mine at all, really.
So I got up from the white bedroom chair and said with a conventional sort of smile: "I am so afraid I haven't got another copy of that photograph."
"Is there no such thing as getting another copy off the negative?" demanded Mr. Lascelles, quite in his own quarrelling voice.
"No, I don't think so," I said.
Mr. Lascelles, sitting up there in his pyjamas, and looking very nearly as angry as that afternoon when I had slapped his face for him, said: "Why not? Why not?"
In another minute I should have told him why, and I should have said something quite bitter, too, on the subject of the greed and grabbiness of engaged men who ask for the photographs of other girls as well as those of their own legitimate fiancées—but, of course! at that moment the door opened, and in whisked his everlasting legitimate fiancée once more.
"Now, Frankie, I think you have talked quite enough," she said, in that brisk, managing voice of hers which I should find so trying if I were her fiancé. "You will be getting a temperature, you know, and it will be ages before you are allowed out again, and as for duty—oh! no, no. Miss Verdeley," turning to me, "I am afraid that I shall have to send you away now."
But I was already at the door. I wasn't waiting to be sent away, I can tell you!
And so I told her practically, for I said: "Oh, yes, I have been longing to go for the last ten minutes. I have a really very important engagement at home that I have got to keep, only I thought I had better wait and say good-bye to you, Miss Gates."
And I shook hands with her, though I didn't want to a bit, really.
I noticed she wore a plain gold signet ring on her engagement finger.
I suppose Mr. Lascelles will choose the real engagement ring for her later when he is well enough to go out.
I didn't shake hands with him; I just didn't think he deserved it. I only nodded to him and said: "Well, good-bye again, Mr. Lascelles! I am so glad to have seen you looking so much better."
Which I hadn't, of course!
"And in such good hands."
Which, of course, I thought awful—still, of course, they were his choice!
Then I went out of the room and downstairs and out of the house and through the town again, walking so quickly that when I got to the station I found I had three-quarters of an hour to wait for the train back to Mud Flats.
CHAPTER XXIV
A MIDDLE-AGED ROMANCE
There I had to sit, feeling depressed to tears, with nothing to look at but a stack of dark grey milk-cans and an advertisement for Bovril. It seemed a century even when I found by the station clock at the Junction that I had only been there half an hour.
Fifteen more minutes to wait! There I sat, getting more cold-toed and low-spirited and angry with that woman every minute.
For, of course, it was her fault. It was she who had bundled me out of Mr. Lascelles's room ages before the time, and consequently kept me hanging about here.
Well might I tell you that this was the most depressing day I had ever had in the whole of my life.
I suppose it was another five minutes before I saw, coming through the station entrance with a lovely "swing," and a quite unconscious glad eye, and taking a Tommy's salute as if he'd been accustomed to them for generations instead of only since the War, a tall, British-Warm-clad form that I knew. In fact, Nancy's "handsome love." Her "beau'ful boy."
He turned his really very good-looking face towards me and broke out into smiles as soon as he saw who it was.
"Hullo! Rattle, my child," he exclaimed gaily, as he saluted, "you are looking rather blue."
"I should think so, indeed," I said. "Blue with cold! Sitting in this disgusting station for hours and hours and hours waiting for the revolting train. Are you coming by it, Harry?"
"Yes, I am. I had to come over and see the O.O. My motor-bike is in hospital again, and I am reduced to going by rail. We will travel on together to our charming hamlet, shall we?"
"Oh, yes, Harry, I would love to," I said, quite affectionately. "It's so nice to see somebody I know, after the truly rotten afternoon that I have been having!"
"Why, what have you been doing, Baby Juno? Shopping, and not able to get anything to match?" asked Nancy's good-looking husband. "Come and sob it all out on my shoulder, in here——" He settled me in a corner seat of a nice first-class compartment (that is to say, it is nice for our line, which is too awful!), and put a foot-warmer just in the right place for my feet, and was altogether so comforting and nice that I could quite imagine why Nancy seems so blissfully happy since her marriage!
She has got, as Mr. Lascelles would say, "some" husband!
One hears a lot of talk about people boasting of their husbands, and saying how "splendid" they are because they "never have eyes for another woman or even see when one is there!"
This, I think, must be rot!
For I should think that the nicer a man was to the others the more chance his own wife would have of getting treated as a woman likes to be treated by him. I've always thought that; long before I knew a lot about men, even.
I know that if I have a husband (which, of course, I never shall have) I shouldn't want to be the first one to teach him how a woman likes to have a foot-warmer put under her toes, or a cushion stuffed into the curve of her back! Cutting his teeth on me, so to speak; no, ta!
However, why dwell upon this painful topic of husbands? It doesn't matter what sort of a fad I should have about them, considering, as I say, that I am destined to live and die an old maid to the end of the chapter.
I shall have to content myself with feeling very happy to have one brother-in-law who can spare a little time to be nice and polite to his old-maid sister-in-law.
So I smiled gratefully at him, and said: "Oh, no, I haven't been doing anything nearly as nice as shopping. I just went up to the nursing home for wounded officers with a few things from Aunt Victoria, and to inquire after your friend, Mr. Lascelles."
"My friend, is he?" said Captain Masters, and bit his moustache, looking at me in a quizzical way under the peak of his cap. "Well, and how was old Frank?"
"Oh, he is not quite well yet, of course," I said, as at last the train began to steam out of the Junction and to thread its way over the gloomy-looking marshlands towards our village. "Still, he is being very—er—very firmly looked after. Naturally, he is getting every care and attention given him, since he is being nursed by his fiancée."
"By his what?" exclaimed Captain Masters, suddenly sitting up in his corner of the compartment and staring hard at me.
"By his fiancée—the woman—I mean the lady—that he is going to marry," I exclaimed. "Why do you look so awfully surprised? Didn't you know of his engagement?"
"Know of old Frank being engaged to somebody else—I mean, being engaged to somebody?" said my brother-in-law, still staring at me. "Who is he supposed to be engaged to?"
"Oh, I thought everybody knew; I thought it was official," I said, feeling awfully horrified that I had gone and put my foot in it again by publishing something that was meant to be a secret. "I thought that as you are a great friend of his you must have heard that he was engaged to Miss Gates."
My brother-in-law opened his handsome eyes so wide that I wondered they didn't fall out on to his moustache. "Miss Gates! Rattle," he said. "Do you mean the matron of that place where he is?"
I nodded. I couldn't help feeling a little bit cheered up by my brother-in-law's evident surprise.
For at all events it hadn't only been me that thought it was extraordinary for a quite schoolboyish and jolly sort of young man like Mr. Lascelles to go getting himself engaged to an old thing, or, at any rate, a middle-aged thing, like that woman who was nursing him!
"Why, she might be his mother!"
She would be the mother of subalterns like him if she had only managed to get herself married at a reasonable sort of age! Like my sister Nancy, for instance! instead of waiting and waiting on the shelf until she finally contrived to catch the last train home, as they call it!
Meantime, here were Harry and I sitting in our train home—the real one, I mean, and he staring his eyes out as if he had just heard the most astonishing news of his life.
He said again, "Miss Gates? Isn't she ashamed of herself?"
This cheered me up some more. I do think Harry is a sensible man. He said just exactly what I had been thinking myself.
I said: "She didn't look a bit ashamed of herself when I was at the home just now. In fact, she looked jolly bucked up and proud of herself, swanking about with his engagement ring on her finger and giving orders to him exactly what he was to eat and drink and do!"
"Ye gods! The poor little beggar! How on earth did he manage to get himself into that galley?" ejaculated Nancy's nice husband. "Poor old Frank! I always said that he is absolutely helpless in the hands of a woman! As soon as he gets away from all of us, here he is driven like a sheep to the slaughter by a blue alpaca matron! Anything in petticoats, and if it is sufficiently determined he is a lost man! It's the colour of his hair, I expect, Rattle! Red hair always is a danger signal!"
"Well, I don't know—your hair is black enough, and you were quite helpless in the hands of Nancy," I argued. "And as for Edwin Curtis, he is mud-coloured, and with him it was first Nancy and then Evelyn! So it doesn't seem as if any coloured hair could be a safeguard, Harry!"
Harry Masters shook his head bewilderingly. He was still murmuring to himself. "Miss Gates, Miss Gates. Thank goodness I am married, otherwise I know I should get swooped on and dragged to the altar by a hospital nurse the first time I got pipped. This is what I call adding fresh terrors to being wounded!"
Then he turned to me, and said, "Rattle, my dear, are you perfectly sure of the news?"
I said dolefully, "I wish I were even half as sure that the Germans are running short of food. Oh, yes! I am quite sure."
"Frank told you so himself?" asked Harry Masters, quickly.
"No! I knew it before I saw him," I said. "He wrote to Aunt Victoria to tell her, himself."
"I am blessed," said my brother-in-law, staring first at me and then out of the carriage window at the familiar landscape of Mud Flats.
For we had crawled into the station now.
I got out, and held out my hand to say good-bye to my brother-in-law.
For I expected he would make a bolt to his billet, in the opposite direction from The Grange.
Rather to my surprise he said: "Oh! I am coming with you, Rattle, if you don't mind. I expect MY WIFE" (excuse my putting it in capital letters, but that was how he pronounced it) "is having tea at The Grange to-day, as I said I might be late. I will come in and fetch her.
"Besides," he added, as we set off at a good pace down the road towards our house, "besides, I really feel that I have got to ask Aunt Victoria to explain to me in cold blood exactly what's happened about poor old Frank and his engagement. I really don't seem as if I can believe it just yet."
My goodness! it is so comforting when one has been in very low spirits to be talked to by a really sympathetic soul.
My spirits, which, as you know, had been right down in my boots all the afternoon, were quite high by the time we reached The Grange, and found ourselves in the middle of nice warm firelight and the smell of muffins and the society of my two pretty sisters—just a contrast to the bleak and blue-alpaca plainness of the woman at the nursing home! I could see they'd heard about the engagement and were almost dead with surprise, and no wonder!
I was just finishing my muffin, and then opening my mouth to say that I had found Mr. Lascelles as well as could be expected in the circumstances, when I was interrupted before I began by a ringing at the front door.
"Who on earth is this?" said Nancy. "There isn't very much tea-cake left for him, whoever it is."
Evelyn, who was sitting drinking her tea with her left hand, as her fiancé was sitting on her right, said rather guiltily: "I expect it is a message sent round from my bandaging class to ask why I haven't been there lately. Somehow I do seem to have been so very busy."
At this moment Mary opened the dining-room door and announced "Major Lawless."
Now, I expect you have all forgotten the very name of Major Lawless?
I am sure I had, and so had the rest of us.
But Major Lawless was the first person who arrived down here at Mud Flats to make arrangements for the billeting, and he has been in and out several times since the others have been here, only somehow he isn't the kind of man who makes the slightest impression on me. He is a kind of pale, round-shouldered, khaki shadow, besides being at least forty years of age, and I have always called him to myself "The Knight of the Rueful Countenance."
That name wasn't a bit appropriate this evening.
My goodness! He was beaming all over his face. He wasn't stooping a bit, but holding himself up and smiling away under his grey sprinkled moustache, and out of his eyes, which really are rather blue and nice.
Aunt Victoria made room for him to sit close beside her behind the tea-tray, but he said, "I mustn't stop a minute, Mrs. Verdeley, really! No, thanks, I have had tea—honour bright, had an enormous one with the colonel at the 'Pearl and Oyster' just before I came along. The fact of the matter is, you have been so kind to me ever since I came to Mud Flats that I felt I ought to look in and tell you a great bit of news about myself."
Here the poor dear old dug-out drew himself up again, and looked as if he had been made at least Commander-in-Chief, with a D.S.I, and K.C.B. and all the rest of the letters of the alphabet into the bargain!
But it was Nancy, my married sister, who guessed at once what had happened.
She called out merrily across the table:
"Major Lawless! I believe you are going to be married!"
"You have guessed it in one, my dear young lady. You have guessed it in one," said the funny old thing, and then there was a general chorus of "Hearty congratulations, sir——"
"Wish you joy, sir——" "Delighted to hear it—I hope you will be as happy as my wife and I——" (this from Captain Masters).
And then in a sort of concerted burst came the question that sounds like a comic song.
"Who's the lady?"
Standing by the door just about to go out and beaming all over his face, Major Lawless said, "Ah, I was sure all you young people would be certain to ask that."
Clever of him, wasn't it, to guess?
"I think one or two of you have met her already," he said. "I believe, Masters, that you have. The lady has been a very dear friend of mine all my life; in fact, I may tell you that ten or fifteen years ago I asked her to become my wife——"
Fifteen years ago, girls, think of it. Why, I was only just three, with little white socks and bare legs and a frock like a cutlet-frill, when this lady of Major Lawless's was old enough to become his wife! Isn't it funny!
"—and she refused me."
"Oh!" cooed Nancy sympathetically, but pinching me under the table, "how could she!" (Talk about marrying and settling down, well, that's not the effect it's had on my second sister. All the mischief she didn't know already she's being taught by her husband, it seems to me.)
"She was wedded," Major Lawless went on with this Romance of the Middle Ages, "wedded to her profession at that time. Then, three weeks ago we met again, and—well!" said Major Lawless, laughing as he opened the door, "with a little persuasion I found I could bring her round to the belief that—er—love was better than a profession——"
"Good!" from Harry Masters, with his eyes glued to his wife again.
"—and that a home and husband of her own are what every woman needs."
"Hear, hear, sir," said Mr. Curtis.
By this time the Major was out in the hall.
It was Nancy who called eagerly after him, "But, Major Lawless! Wait, wait! You haven't told us her name yet!"
The delighted face of Major Lawless peeped round the door again for a minute as he replied, "Her name is Angela. Miss Angela Gates. She is in charge of that nursing home at the Junction. Good evening!"
And off he dashed.
We heard the front door closed behind him. Then we heard him prancing off down the road like a two-year-old, whistling away to himself that old Scots song,
"My Love she's but a Lassie yet."
What d'you think of that?
Inside the dining-room our party sat round the tea-table and the wreck of the large tea that we'd had, and simply gaped and goggled upon each other in various stages of dumbfounded flabbergastedness.
Aunt Victoria found her voice first. In tones of mild surprise she exclaimed, "Did the Major say Miss Gates? Can he really have said Miss Gates? Yes? You all heard him? Dear me! Then how does she come to be engaged to poor dear Mr. Lascelles and to poor dear Major Lawless as well?"
"Because she's a wicked, designing woman," cried out an indignant voice that I found was my own, shaking. I gazed round at my O-mouthed family and said, "Just think of it! She's engaged to two men at once!"
Nancy said in a more hopeful voice, "She can't marry them both!"
"No! That's why she's going to unscrupulously jilt the first one," I explained, heatedly. "Don't you see? She won't want to marry a seared old yellow leaf like Major Lawless, when she can claw an attractive young one like Mr. Lascelles——"
Even as I said it I found myself gasping with astonishment over the extraordinary things that I was saying, and then, in a dazed voice I heard Nancy's husband bursting in with, "Aunt Victoria! If you've a spark of natural affection left for any of us, let me ask you a favour. I want to see old Frank's own letter about himself and this extraordinary harpy of a woman; the letter in which he told you of his engagement; may I?"
"Oh, yes, I think I've kept it," said Aunt Victoria, mildly. "That letter is in my knitting-basket in the drawing-room. Go, Rattle, and fetch it; be quick."
CHAPTER XXV
LOVE'S NEW NAME
This—this was the fateful note from Mr. Lascelles.
Nancy's husband, seeing that Auntie had mislaid her glasses again, read it aloud.
"The Nursing Home,
"Nowhere Junction.
"February 14th.
"MY DEAR MRS. VERDELEY,
"Thanks so much for kind inquiries. Yes, I am getting on very nicely, and I hope soon to be perfectly fit and back again at work and in my comfortable billet with you.
"However, as I shall not be out for a few days yet, would it be too much to ask if you or one of the Miss Verdeleys would be kind enough to come over and see me?
"I have no visitors, as the Junction is so far away from any people I know, and it gets a bit dull sometimes.
"Miss Gates asks to be very kindly remembered to you. She takes great care of me, in fact looks after all of us like a dragon, in spite of her engagement, in which she seems to be very happy.
"With salaams to all of you,
"Believe me,
"Dear Mrs. Verdeley,
"Yours most sincerely,
"FRANK LASCELLES."
There was a general silence of bewilderment round the table.
Then the voice of Evelyn said: "But, Aunt Victoria, is that the letter you thought was announcing Frank's engagement to Miss Gates? It is announcing nothing of the kind."
"No, so it isn't," said Aunt Victoria in her mild, soft voice. "What could have made me think so? Give me the note, Harry, my dear, will you? Ah! here are my glasses, under my lace as usual.... Now... Ah, yes! Of course. I see what it was," she went on, gazing over the top of her spectacles at the grey sheet. "Here it is. You know poor dear Mr. Lascelles's handwriting is so peculiar. Her engagement, he says. I went and read it 'our.' And of course I thought it meant their engagement—Mr. Lascelles's engagement to this Miss Gates."
Nancy's husband burst into a roar of laughter. "But, Aunt Victoria!" he cried, "did it seem likely?"
"Dear me! my dear Harry, I don't know how you can ask whether anything seems likely or unlikely, nowadays," protested Aunt Victoria in a quite injured tone of voice, looking first at Evelyn and her Mr. Curtis and then at Nancy and Harry. "There is a regular epidemic of engagements just now, what with one and another of you——"
Nancy took up, "Yes, but Auntie! It's not quite the same sort of thing. Just think! Mr. Lascelles, a mere boy, and so young for his age, even! and Miss Gates!"
"She seemed to me a very capable woman," said Aunt Victoria, rather severely. Upon which they all, even Mr. Curtis, went off into fits of laughter. All, that is to say, except me.
I was feeling far too horrified and beaten-up-eggish to indulge in any light-hearted girlish mirth.
You see what upset me! I'd snubbed him; I'd been rude to him, a wounded hero, and all, and for no reason.
You see if he were not engaged there was no earthly reason why I should not have let him have my absurd photograph and all if he had wanted it, and he did want it!
However, one can't explain that kind of thing at a tea-table before millions of aunts and brothers-in-law and people. So all that I could do was to pretend I was choking into my quite empty cup of tea, to get up and rush into the Lair.
And there, just as I thought I was going to have a minute's peace to collect my scattered thoughts in, Nancy rushed in after me!
"Rattle, darling!" she said, beaming all over herself. Then she put her arms round me. "Rattle!"
I knew exactly what she meant. Can you imagine anything more aggravating of her than for her to go imagining, if you please, that I was too overcome by joy that Mr. Lascelles wasn't engaged after all to face them? I said, bending over my skirt, "It's quite all right—it's nothing. It's only my suspender given way again. I did this up at the Junction pro tem., but I shall have to sew it now," and I reached for my work-basket on the table. "Do go back and finish your tea."
"Not any more, thanks," said Nancy, imitating the curate's voice. Then, very firmly in her own voice, "You may take in Aunt Victoria and Evelyn with your nonsense, but you won't take in me! I always knew you liked him. Didn't I tell you so, ages ago, the day before I was married, even? And Harry says that he (Frank) is simply mad about you, Rattle. He always has been. Don't be a silly girl and waste any more time about pretending that you don't care as hard as you can!"
"Go away," I said, stamping my foot and keeping my face well hidden.
"I will when I have just begged you once more not to waste any more time," said my married sister. "Look at Harry and me; we had the sense to be engaged the third time we met, yet we shall never stop regretting that it wasn't the first time, the night of the party——"
"What? When you kissed Mr. Curtis?"
"Oh, yes, that time," said the shameless Nancy. "Harry and I were married a fortnight after that. Why wasn't it a week? Nothing will give us back those days that we missed before we told each other so. In war-time, too, when they may—they might be the last.... And, Rattle! My baby sister!" She put her nice cuddley arm about my neck again and whispered, "I don't want you to have any more days to grudge!"
"Thanks," said I as dignifiedly as I could, still busy with the suspender-clip, "but I don't think I should ever feel like that myself——"
"Oh, you would! Oh, yes, you would. I can tell!" said that odd Nancy, smoothing her hair with that new scent on it against my cheek. "It's all very well for Evelyn to have a sensibly long engagement and a good 'start' and all that sort of thing. I'm sure she'll be quite happy, but——" Here Nancy laughed, and wound up, firmly, "I don't suppose she'll ever really know anything much about Love!"
This was a weird sort of thing to say, with Evelyn's new engagement ring actually on Evelyn's finger at that minute. Wasn't it funny?
"Of course they're fond, and devoted, and tastes in common, and I know that she cried buckets over it all.... There's more in things than that," declared young Mrs. Masters. "You're like me, Rattle, I think.... And you'll just see if I'm not right!"
(Later.)
I have been wondering—oh, I have been wondering whether Nancy knows what she is talking about....
It's an unsettling sort of day. The Early Spring weather, Aunt Victoria says it is. One doesn't feel like settling down to anything definite; isn't it funny? All this morning—the morning after the day I went to the Junction, I've just been wandering about doing sundry little odd jobs that there are to do about the place, washing my hair and polishing my nails.
Also I have fished out that torn half of the picture postcard of me that Mr. Lascelles wanted, and that has been hidden away in the pocket of my sports coat ever since the day of that dreadful quarrel of ours! Shall I send it to him?
He did beg for it. He really did seem as if he would like it better than a new copy. I have a good mind.... Or would it be a little too much as if I wanted to be nice to him?
I wish I knew what to do!
I think I will.
I shall put it into an envelope—the photograph, I mean—and send it off to Mr. Lascelles at that gloomy, gloomy home for wounded officers. I shan't write a letter, though. I don't feel I know what to say. He can write. Goodness knows he used to write long enough letters to me in the old days. This first one, that's all getting torn at the creases, took eight pages. Yes; let him write....
(Later still.)
I had just put that torn and crumpled photograph into an envelope, and while I was addressing it to Frank Lascelles, Esquire, I heard the hoot of a motor horn outside.
I looked out and there I saw the big brown car that had pulled up beside Mr. Lascelles and me on the road on the fateful day of Nancy's wedding.
And in it, who do you think? Miss Gates, driving, and beside her, looking like a Knight of Very Cheerful Countenance indeed, Major Lawless.
Behind them in the car, with his face peeping out of a mass of wraps, and his whole self looking like a teddy-bear with three coats on, sat—the man whose name I'd just been writing down.
I didn't know what to do.
I suddenly felt far too nervous to go and open the door. How perfectly terrible that I should have to see these people!
For Aunt Victoria was upstairs, and Evelyn was out as usual at that time in the afternoon watching her Mr. Curtis instructing his class of sappers! Petrified, I sat there at the writing-table in the drawing-room, waiting for Mary to announce the party. To my astonishment, after I had heard the bell ring and Mary go to the door, I saw the car drive off again, with Major Lawless and his fiancée talking and laughing together like a boy and girl.
They weren't coming in, those two! Only Him!
And here there's another of those hiatuses in the family history of us. For I don't believe I shall ever be told what my brother-in-law Harry must have said to Major Lawless after he left the Grange last night, nor what Major Lawless thought about it all, nor how he'd managed to induce his fiancée to allow "her" patient to get up from his bed and come careering away to his own billet for the first outing since he'd left it!
Still, it had all happened.
Well, Mary (all smiles) showed him, Mr. Lascelles (all smiles also), into the drawing-room and we sat him down in Aunt Victoria's big chintz-covered armchair.
Well, I stood there looking at him in khaki that seemed suddenly to have stretched too big for him. I couldn't think what to say. About a hundred sentences seemed buzzing in my head at once.
All I could say was: "Were you really fit enough to come over here to-day?"
"I should jolly well have had to be at death's door if I hadn't come," said Mr. Lascelles, very quickly and decidedly. "What do you think?"
No answer to that sort of question, is there?
Then he asked another unexpected question. Pointing with his wasted scrap of a hand to that envelope that I'd not yet fastened up, and that I was still holding, he asked suddenly, "What have you got there, Miss Betty?"
Now, it is an absurd thing, and I can't explain it a bit, but though I had addressed it to him, though I had made up my mind to send it to him, I suddenly felt horribly shy of his seeing it now.
I longed to put it behind me.
But he said: "Has it got anything to do with this?"
He fumbled in the breast of his jacket.
I knew what he was going to pull out before he did it—the other half of that photograph!
He laid it down face upwards, just as if he had been playing cards on Aunt Victoria's little square, green cloth-covered table.
I couldn't help being reminded of ages ago in the Lair, when we three girls had played that absurd game of cards over the unknown young officer who was coming to be billeted on us!
I had won that game!—the Queen of Hearts——
And, of course, at the remembrance of it the family blush must needs come on and cover me from head to foot. At least, that is what it felt like.
I also felt Mr. Lascelles looking hard at me. He said coaxingly, peremptorily at the same time, "You to play, Betty."
So I saw there was nothing else for it.
I took the top half of that torn photograph, and I threw it down on the table beside his.
He gathered them together as if they had been his trick.
(Exactly what they were, of course.)
Then he fitted them together.
And, holding them so in his left hand, he drew me down with his right hand—the wounded one—to sit on the arm of his chair.
Perhaps you will now think that he was going to propose to me?
I don't mind telling you that it was what I thought myself!
But, oh, no! Nothing so conventional! I may as well let you into the secret of something very odd and unprecedented about this affair of mine. I always knew I was an unusual sort of girl, with everything happening to me in an unusual way. Listen to what happened—at least, didn't happen. There was no proper "proposal" at all!!! Perhaps there are no such things as definite proposals nowadays. I wish I could get some data about them out of Nancy or Evelyn; but, oh, no! Not a word will they say. Mean, mean I call it.
Of course, it makes no difference, because we are all getting married just the same, in spite of our parents' will that told Aunt Victoria they didn't wish their girls to go rushing into the evils of early matrimony before they were twenty-five.
And, talking about that—here's a surprise!
What do you think? Aunt Victoria has just opened a note that was left at the lawyer's at the same time as that will.
And what it goes to prove is that that will was all a put-up job.
It says that they (father and mother) who, as you know, got married the instant father was of age, had been so happy in their early marriage, and thought it such a pity that so many girls seemed taking to the habit of postponing marriage until they were all sorts of ages.
They—father and mother—were determined that their own children should follow their own good example.
And as they knew the contrary nature of girls, as they knew that nothing was so attractive as that which was supposed to be forbidden—they had arranged this plan between them of pretending they would be against our marrying just so as to drive us into it all the more certainly and quickly!
A curious scheme, wasn't it?
And yet it has come off!
But to go back to Mr. Lascelles and me in the drawing-room. (Though, mind you, I shan't dream of saying a single word about it to Nancy or Evelyn.)
He gathered up the photographs with one hand and me the other, and said quite as coolly as if we had been on these terms for weeks: "I say, darling! it's a pity you tore that photograph like that in your naughty little temper—even when I get it mended and framed there will always be a great mark showing just here."
But when he said "just here," it wasn't the photograph that he touched at all. He put his hand under my chin and kissed me full on the mouth!
And then I knew—oh! Then I knew that it must be true what Nancy had said. I must have always liked him dreadfully. That was what let me behave so hatefully to him. That was why I'd have wanted to die if he had. That was what made me fit to murder poor dear Miss Gates—I'd have killed anybody that I thought he was going to marry instead of me.
Yes; then I knew that if it hadn't been me he cared for, there wouldn't have been any point in my having been born.
Books don't give you the leastest idea of what I feel!
And which of those young idiots of girls was it that said there wouldn't be room for anybody on his knee? There's miles of room. Oceans.
I said presently: "Really, you take a great deal for granted, Mr. Lascelles."
He said: "I say, you will have to call me by my right name now, you know."
I let him beg a little, and then I said, "Frank."
He said: "Yes, that will do for when Auntie and the girls are there; you will have your own name for me when we are alone."
"Oh, will I?" I said. "Very well, then—'Lonely Subaltern'!"
He laughed, but he said: "Not now—it isn't appropriate any more."
So then I laughed and said teasingly: "Incubus!"
He said: "You will pay for that, too! Thanks.... Wait for the change, please. But you know perfectly well what I want you to call me, Betty. I haven't heard it since the first day I came here and met you all in the kitchen. What was it you were saying you would call me then? 'Now, Bil——'"
"Ah, no, don't, don't!" I begged, with my cheek against his. "Don't, please, tease me about that time in the kitchen. I honour bright felt awful. I can't say it."
"Write it, then," he said.
Men always seem to have things to write with planted all over their persons. Before you could say "knife" he had brought out a stump of pencil and a tiny leather-covered note-book, and turned over to a blank page. He put it and the pencil into my hand.
"Write it down, Betty, darling," he said tenderly into my ear.
And with our heads close together over the notebook I wrote down, with a long kiss for where the hyphen comes:
"Billet-Boy!"