CHAPTER XVI

SOMETHING QUITE UNEXPECTED

Really, our family is the rummest ever! Always breaking out in some new place, it seems to me.

I should have thought that Nancy's runaway marriage with Captain Masters would have been quite enough excitement for, say, the next two years, and that we need not have expected anything further to flutter this dovecot of a Moated Grange. I should have thought that we could now settle down to the anticipation of at least a peaceful and uneventful winter, summer and spring.

But no.

It is too much to expect. Before Nancy is so much as come back from her five days' honeymoon, before I have left off feeling absolutely thrilled about it once every five minutes of the day, before I have left off talking about "Miss" Nancy to the servants, a fresh piece of unexpectedness is burst upon me.

And who do you think it is this time?

Evelyn, if you please! Evelyn, the eldest of the family, the best-behaved, the one who is, as Aunt Victoria says, the most balanced, and the one who has always talked the least nonsense of all three of us girls. Let it be a lesson to all girls who think they're "sensible." I know Evelyn always thought she was that. Now listen to what's happened to her.

It was two days after the long talk we had had over Nancy's newly-married letter.

I think I told you that Evelyn seemed to me to be rather snappy over that or at any rate unsympathetic, making remarks about how girls seem to have softening of the brain as soon as they were in love, and how idiotic it was that a girl should think that it was her duty to become a door-mat under the young man's pontooning boots!

All this, you know, was not quite like Evelyn, the Evelyn we had always known: but then, of course, as I think we said, we had noticed she had been getting very much more prim and easily shocked ever since that first quite giddy party at the Moated Grange here, when Aunt Victoria actually had out champagne for dinner and Mr. Curtis kissed Nancy afterwards by the staircase window. Yes, I think that was when we began to realise that Evelyn was what is considered a "much nicer" girl than Nancy and me.

However, to get on with it. Ever since then Evelyn has been getting more and more difficult; she has never been jolly or laughed with us in the way she used to do: she has given up playing the piano in the Lair--that is to say, she has given up trying over the saucy revue tunes that we are all so fond of.

She can't bear any of those nowadays except what I call a droopy waltz like "Destiny" or one of those clinging nocturnes that really get you into the mood of making you wish you had never been born!

Or else it's one of the songs from one of those antediluvian old song-books with the red leather covers that we have inherited from goodness knows who, called

"_Love not, love not, ye Hapless Sons of Clay._"

But most of the time now she is wrapped up in her bandaging class or the linen fund for soldiers' babies.

Really, she began to behave like the girl in those old-fashioned books who is sick of life and worldly frivolities and who is thinking of taking the veil. She was coming in from the bandaging class this afternoon, when I put my foot into it apparently by making the most harmless remark you can imagine: at least, I thought it was harmless. You see, she was very late, at least half an hour later than the bandaging class usually bursts--I mean breaks up--and I said, "Hurry up, Evelyn, you had better look in at the kitchen on the way up and ask them to make you the little brown tea-pot full of fresh tea: we have nearly finished in the dining-room."

(I forgot to mention that we always have tea in the dining-room now, instead of the drawing-room, all on account of Mr. Lascelles, who says that he likes to spread himself and not to sit down in fear and trembling lest he should be spoiling the carpet every time he drops a crumb, which is, after all, only natural; and why shouldn't he be allowed to feel at home after a bothering afternoon of messing about with "men's applications for leave," and sick reports, and evening passes, and half-fare railway vouchers, and all those things that I think it's very clever of him to know how to manage, so there! But to get on about Evelyn, when she was late for tea.)

I went on light-heartedly, "There is only what you might describe as 'husband's tea' left in the dining-room teapot, and I know that you disapprove just now of everything to do with husbands."

Of course, I only meant to tease her a little about the attitude she has taken up with regard to Nancy and her new husband. Nothing was further from my thoughts than to wish to upset Evelyn in any way.

Yet, to my horror, this is what I seemed to do.

For Evelyn, if you please, glared at me for a moment as if I were a hair in the butter, and then broke out, positively violently, "Oh! Rattle, you talk too much nonsense! You do, indeed, and you say horrid things, and it is very unkind of you, it's hateful!"

What in the world could be the meaning of that, I asked myself. Wasn't it funny?

I stood there in the hall under the hanging-lamp, being absolutely flummoxed and flabbergasted, and Evelyn went on, still violently: "You are always horrid to me now, both of you! Have been for the last I don't know how long! You don't think anything of what I say: you only make fun of me, and laugh at me. I know you do! You and Nancy! I don't seem to have even any sisters left----"

And then she turned and dashed up the stairs and I heard her own door banging behind her.

What, indeed, could be the matter?

I went back into the dining-room with the fourth plate of muffins for Mr. Lascelles, and the little brown teapot of nice, fresh, hot tea for that extraordinary Evelyn. Somehow I had a kind of idea that she didn't mean to come down and drink it.

So in a minute or two I got a little tray, and arranged a really tempting tea for one on it.

I told Aunt Victoria and Mr. Lascelles that I thought poor Evelyn had got rather a headache.

Always a nice, safe thing to say: it commits you to nothing.

Then I went up to Evelyn's room and tapped at the door.

As I expected, there was no answer, so I went calmly in.

Evelyn was lying on her bed with her face buried in the pillow, just as Nancy had been last week when she was pretending to have such violent toothache!

But Evelyn was not pretending.

When I came in she stopped all of a sudden, but I knew that she had been sobbing as if her heart would break.

"I have brought you some tea," I said.

"I don't want any tea, thank you, Rattle," said Evelyn, in a muffled voice with all the violence gone out of it.

"Oh, you do. Just a nice cup of tea! You needn't eat anything with it if you aren't feeling very hungry," I said.

And I sat down on the bed beside her and put my arm round her and persuaded her to drink some nice hot tea, which was very sugary and milky, with a long tea-leaf floating about on the top, which meant a stranger to see her very shortly.

And a very tall stranger.

However, I didn't say any more about that sort of thing, not wishing to annoy her any more than I could help.

I just whispered to her: "Awfully sorry, old girl, if I upset you."

Evelyn gulped, and said: "It's all right, Rattle, it wasn't a bit your fault. I was a cross pig: but----"

Here she began to gulp again, and then felt for her handkerchief, which was a little, grey, sopping ball of linen by this time.

I stuffed my own quite nice dry one into her hand.

(It wasn't my own, really, being a very large white silk one with "F.L." embroidered in the corner. You know how people's wash gets mixed up when there are a lot of you in the same house, and I knew Mr. Lascelles wouldn't mind my using his hankie for just one week.)

I went on to say earnestly to Evelyn: "You know you are quite, quite wrong in thinking that Nancy and I don't think enough of you. Why, we are frightfully fond of you, if you only knew. When we begin to laugh at you for being prim----"

"Oh, Rattle, don't! 'Prim!'" mourned Evelyn. "Anybody who knew what I felt like inside would know I couldn't be called prim!"

"Well, primmer than we are," I said. "But if we do laugh at it, it means that we are so fond of you, and so pleased that there is at least one of us who makes some attempt to behave like a lady!"

I made her drink a little more tea, then eat a piece of muffin, which seemed to make her feel better, and presently she seemed well enough to confide to me: "Oh, Rattle! I am so fearfully miserable! the most miserable girl in Mud Flats!" she said.

"My dear old thing, why?" I asked, taking the tray out of her way and sitting down beside her on the bed. "Can't you tell me?"

In a choked voice poor old Evelyn said something about having to tell somebody or burst.

"Tell me, then," I encouraged her. "Was it _really_ because you thought Nancy and I weren't as fond of you as we used to be?"

Evelyn shook her head. "It's not that. It's nothing to do with that."

"Have you had a row," I asked, "with the Bandaging Class?" For I knew what a cat in mittens the doctor's sister is; she adores the curate, I think, and she was frightfully annoyed once when she heard the doctor say that the curate had said that the eldest Miss Verdeley was the sort of girl who would be a parish priest's right hand.

She's never been anything but hideously polite to Evelyn ever since, and as she is secretary to that Bandaging Class, I thought she had been getting even with the curate's idea of a right hand that way. But no. Evelyn said it was nothing to do with that either.

"Is it anything," I suggested, "that I could help you with?"

"Nobody can ever help me," mourned Evelyn. And she added in a sort of gulp something that surprised me so much that I bounced on the bed and nearly kicked over the tea-things on their tray at my feet.

"Somebody," Evelyn moaned, "somebody wants to marry me!"

"What!" I exclaimed so loudly that I wonder they didn't hear me downstairs in the dining-room. Really, with all these love affairs going on in the house, I shall have to learn to modulate my voice a little more. "To marry you?"

The fact is, I nearly said "Why?" For I've never thought Evelyn, though she's so nice-looking and such a dear in many ways, is a bit the kind of girl you'd fall in love with! Nancy, yes. But Evelyn, who's out of sympathy with men! I should have thought they tumbled to that and avoided that sort of girl, at least, as a wife!

Then I pulled myself together and uttered my second thoughts. "Well, I suppose I know who it is. I suppose it's the curate?"

"It's nothing of the kind," said Evelyn, quite indignantly. "It's a young man."

(You see, the curate is at least thirty-two to begin with.)

"Oh," I said, with a long breath, for that made it quite different. "Two wantings-to-marry in our family in one week! How frightfully thrilling! What'll be the next, I wonder? But, Evelyn! for goodness' sake tell me who the young man is? And why, why are you crying about him?"

Poor Evelyn began to sob again so bitterly that she couldn't speak.

"It's a funny way to take a proposal," I said. "Does it--I say, does it mean that you've refused him?"

"Hurp--yes!" wept Evelyn.

I felt even more thrilled. You see, it was a change from Nancy's affair. Now we'd had both kinds in the house, a Yes and a No! What a lot of experience I'm getting!

"It must be very painful to have to cause a lot of unhappiness to a man, even if you don't like him well enough to marry," I said, understandingly. "Still, Evelyn, you must look on the bright side of it, you know. You'll have to remember that though he may seem to be upset just for the moment, you haven't really broken his heart for ever. Of course, he says you have, I expect? But don't you believe him, my dear girl," said I, encouragingly patting her arm. "He will get over it. Look what hundreds of men do. Think of half the novels we've read about that very thing. Think of that Somersetshire folk-song:

"'_The grass that once has been trampled underfoot, Give it time, it will rise up again: give it time, it will rise up again!_'"

I couldn't help feeling rather pleased over this quotation: it was so apt. Then I went on comforting poor Evelyn, whose head was buried in the pillow, showing only one hot little pink ear. I whispered into it: "Do you know, I was reading a book only the other day which says that hardly any man gets just the girl he has asked: most of them have been turned down by one or two before they find the woman who is meant to be their affinity. This proposer of yours would probably be quite grateful to your refusing him," I said, "in a year or two's time." She didn't answer, but I know she heard.

"For, you see, there is no scarcity of girls," I said judiciously. "Plenty of those to pick and choose from for any young man, especially after this war, when young men are going to be more of a rarity than ever! So, cheer up, Evelyn. He is bound to forget quite soon."

At this Evelyn suddenly reared her golden head up from her pillows and turned her flushed and tear-stained face to me. Then she hurled another bomb of surprise at me.

"Oh, Rattle! don't, don't!" she besought me wildly. "My dear! you think you are consoling me, don't you? But if you only knew, every word of yours about those other girls hurts. Do you suppose I want him to marry anybody else at once? I, who like him so frightfully badly myself."

Here was a facer! I said, "You like him frightfully badly and yet you aren't going to marry him?"

"I can't," wailed Evelyn.

"Why?" I asked, absolutely thrilled. This was the most unusual bit of the whole affair. "Is he married already?"

This terrible thought did seem to startle Evelyn--the only one in this family with any sense of propriety--into some sort of calm. She sat up against her pillows and sobbed again with her pretty face struggling into its normal prim expression. "Married, Rattle! Of course not! As if I should ever have spoken on such a subject if he had been married! Oh! dear no! There is nothing of that sort in it at all!"

"Then what is there?" I asked eagerly. "And, to begin with, Evelyn--tell me, do tell me, I really think you might tell me, if I promise not to say a word--I do so awfully want to know who he is?"

Buried in the pillow again, Evelyn murmured something about, "I thought you might have guessed. Do you mean you really haven't any idea, Rattle?"

I really hadn't, not the slightest. Since it wasn't the curate. Was it one of the soldier-men? She gave a tiny nod.

I then began to repeat the names of some of the officers we have got to know since the troops have been at Mud Flats. I thought first, of course, of the one we have in the house here.

I said, "It isn't Mr. Lascelles, is it?"

"Oh, Rattle! don't be absurd," said Evelyn, with a trembly laugh. "Mr. Lascelles! Why! He is only a child!"

"He is twenty-four! Three whole years older than you are!" I retorted. I was going on to explain how unexpectedly reliable and grown-up Mr. Lascelles had seemed at that awful moment at the Junction when we couldn't find the bridal party, but Evelyn went on:

"Well, he doesn't look like twenty-four! He looks about fourteen!"

"Yet you all seem so awfully fond of him," I reminded her, "and you all scold me because I couldn't--I mean, I can't--stand him. He was always a favourite of yours."

"Yes, in a kind of way--the sort of nice friendly way you feel towards a younger brother or a nephew, even," said Evelyn. "In that way I quite love his dear little Schoolboy face and his hideous red hair."

"I didn't think his hair was at all so hideous," I said. "At all events, it doesn't look so bad now, since he has taken to parting it at the side."

"Oh! is that what he has done? I thought I noticed it looked rather worse-looking, but I didn't know exactly what he had been doing with it. But, nice as he is, if he was the only man I ever see I shouldn't want to fall in love with the Lascelles boy. Oh, no, Rattle. It is somebody really grown-up; really clever."

"And really good-looking?" I asked. For the quotation on the calendar in the Lair to-day had been:

"_Now, though we always know that looks deceive And always have done, somehow these good looks Make more impression than the best of books._" (BYRON.)

Rather true, I thought it. And Evelyn was saying earnestly, "Oh! He's _very_ good-looking. Handsome."

"The handsomest man who's ever been here is Captain Masters (that we must get into the way of calling Harry)," I said. "But, of course, Nancy got him."

"I should never have looked at Captain Masters. He's _much_ too novelette-y. A barber's block, I should call him," declared Evelyn, quite excitedly. The last trace of sobs had gone from her voice as she spoke. "My--I mean the man I am speaking of, is worth ten of Nancy's husband for looks or anything else. Can't you guess who it is?"

Conscientiously I began to go over the names of all the good-looking men I've seen about this place.

The adjutant? No. That young officer of the Super-Filberts? No. One of the sailor-men off the cruiser in the Bay? (nearly all sailors are nice-looking. Going into the Navy seems to give them such nice blue eyes!) Commander Smith? Mr. Brown? Mr. Robinson? No; it was none of these. Much handsomer than any of them.

"Then I can't have seen him," said I.

"Oh, yes, you have, Rattle. Often."

"Can't have. Some one I've often seen about this place? Why, there is only old Penny the gardener that I haven't guessed. It isn't him, by any chance, is it, Evelyn?"

This, thank goodness, made Evelyn laugh. "Don't be so absolutely idiotic, Rattle! If you really are too stupid to guess I suppose I shall have to tell you myself."

And she told me.

She blurted it out in these three electrifying words:

"It's Mr. Curtis!"

Have you got that, dear readers? I didn't, for about three seconds after she'd said it. Then----

Well, thank goodness! I didn't lose my head and exclaim, "Mr. Curtis!" with a long-drawn shriek of idiot mirth! The shock was quite enough to make me. However, one seems to get very quickly acclimatised to shocks. After the first two or three. There are only three of us girls, but I should think in really large families, such as sevens and eights, you would have to make them think the end of the world had come before they turned a hair.

See how hardened I was getting! I didn't even begin to explain to Evelyn that I didn't think of guessing Mr. Curtis for the simple reason that that young schoolmaster who was now a soldier hadn't made the faintest impression on me. I looked upon him, when I did look upon him, as a sort of pale, washed-out, long-legged shadow, who just sat there blinking through his eyeglasses and taking up the highest chair, so that there would be room for his legs. Once or twice after that celebrated party I had wondered if he was still going on writing his articles about "Pontoon Bridging for Girls," or something of that sort, or whether he had ever soared to composing verses about "The First Kiss," or anything of that sort. Then when the Nancy-Masters romance came on I hadn't thought of anything else to do with Mr. Curtis. If I had thought I should never have dreamt of connecting him with anything like a love affair!

Yet here was Evelyn, if you please, the most particular as well as the most proper of us girls, fairly crying her eyes out because of some reason or other for wanting to marry him, and yet she wasn't going to!

I gazed upon her in astonishment. "Handsome," she'd said! _Wasn't_ it funny? I realised that the Mr. Curtis she saw must be an entirely different person from the Mr. Curtis I saw.

Perhaps that is the same way with everybody's young man or girl as the case may be? Perhaps the greatest shock that anybody ever could get would be for half an hour to borrow somebody else's eyes, just like Mr. Lascelles borrowed Mr. Curtis's eyeglasses once to see how he looked in them? And to see those other people's impression of their best friends? My word! there would be some astonishment!

The poem about seeing yourself as others see you would not be in it with seeing the other ones!

Just think of girls, for instance, that one had always considered hopeless freaks and frumps. Fancy catching sight of them transformed into a cross between Lily Elsie and Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland!

And then just think of the young men that you have always considered "It," and imagine seeing them dwindle down to the miserable nonentities that some other girls might see them as!

(I do wish a machine had been made to enable us to do it. However, I suppose it is one of those inventions that don't seem ever to be going to come off in our time, like hairpins that will stick in and silk stockings that never go into ladders.)

However, to go on with this absolutely unaccountable love affair of Evelyn and Mr. Curtis.

"You--I know you won't tell anybody," she said. "Nobody knows."

"Does he know?" I asked. "That you care for him, I mean?"

"Oh, no! Oh, NO!" cried my sister. "Because of course I told him that I didn't."

Now, that struck me as a silly sort of thing to do. Such a waste! Except, of course, in those old-fashioned novels on the top shelf in the Lair when sometimes the girl looks down (why?) and trembles (what at?) and refuses the man just so that he will ask her again.

I wondered if it was this kind of thing. I asked Evelyn.

"Ask me again? Oh, no. I made it quite clear to him that it would be absolutely no good if he did," went on that mysterious Evelyn.

"Why on earth not?" I asked.

It was quite a time before I could get that absurd Sphinx of an Evelyn to condescend to tell me the reason that stood between her and the man of her (no-accounting-for-tastes ) choice.

At last it came out. An absolutely footling reason, of course. Simply this:

Because Evelyn felt that she couldn't possibly marry a man who had been attracted to her own sister before he had proposed to her!

"It's no use! I should be too jealous," she said, sitting up and staring away blankly above the framed photograph of us three as little girls with curls over our sailor-blouses. "You don't understand, Rattle, how I should feel. Every time he kissed me I should"--here she buried her face in the pillow--"I should be reminded of that time at the staircase window when he kissed Nancy."

"My dear, good child!" I said to her, feeling quite like a maiden aunt. "Don't you remember how Mr. Curtis was a st----" Here I nearly said "standing joke," but I stopped myself, because I thought that Evelyn wouldn't like it. I said instead, "Don't you remember how Mr. Curtis was such a surprise to all those other young men just because he hadn't kissed anybody at all before? They seemed to think he was a regular white elephant--I mean, very unusual.

"So I expect that more than half the men who get engaged must have kissed other people before: or at least one other person."

"Yes, but not the girl's own sister."

"I don't see what difference that makes," I said.

"All the difference in the world," said Evelyn, obstinately. "Rattle, you don't understand how I feel about a thing like that. How could you? You're too young."

"I call that the unfairest argument in the world to use to a sister who just happens to have been born four years later than you have," I told her, reproachfully. "I'm sure I'm older than you are, in my mind."

"I'm glad," said Evelyn, looking up gloomily at me, "that you're not so miserable."

"You needn't be miserable, if you had the sense to accept the man you care for, Evelyn!"

"Yes, I need," argued Evelyn, huskily. "I should be desperately unhappy if I were going to marry Mr. Curtis, knowing that he had--oh, dear!"--down went the head into the pillow again--"knowing that he had cared for my sister first."

"But you seem to be going to be pretty unhappy as it is," I pointed out, gazing sympathetically at the rumpled back of her hair. "So I should have thought it was better to be unhappy with the people you liked, than just marooned, all by yourself!"

She only repeated that I was too young to understand.

"Mr. Curtis is years older than either of us, and you won't let him understand either," said I. "He thinks you won't marry him just because you don't like him enough?"

"Yes, that's it," said Evelyn, hopelessly.

Being in love does take people different ways, they say. Hers is the most exasperating I've ever come across in the whole course of my experience!

We can't have it. It must come right. Somebody capable of thinking things out reasonably must do something.

_I_ must do something.

In the meantime, _wasn't_ I right when I told you that my sister Evelyn was an awful warning and object-lesson to all "Sensible" girls?