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."