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!"