CHAPTER VIII

THE FRIGHTFUL ROW

My mind was in such a whirl of feelings that I really don't know whether I was most petrified with amazement or dumb with anger. I, that had been known from childhood's hours as "Rattle," was too flabbergasted to have a single syllable to say for myself.

He spoke first. As usual, he said something that nobody else in the world would have the absolute cheek to: for he said, quite angrily, and as if he were talking to some naughty little girl: "There, now! See what you have done! You have torn my photograph!"

"Your photograph!"

I simply gasped as I said it. Then, collecting my breath and my scattered wits, I went on again: "It's my photograph, a photograph of me--you know it is. How dare you have it!"

"You--I mean--it was sent to me," said Mr. Frank Lascelles.

I felt that I had turned as red as his own horrid hair. But I stood my ground, and spoke as dignifiedly as I possibly could.

"Oh, then you admit it. You--you are the man who has been writing letters to me----"

"Yes, I am."

"Pretending," I said witheringly, "to be a lonely subaltern! Pretending that you couldn't make yourself liked!"

"Pretending?" The Incubus brazened it out. "Not much pretence about that."

"Oh! What an awful story!" I said downrightedly. "Apart from everything else, what a--what an untruther you are! You said you weren't popular."

"Well? I'm not."

"You are. All your idiots of men seem to adore you. How they can I don't know."

"Thank you," he said. "That's what I meant. It's you I'm unpopular with. You know you've had a 'down' on me----"

"Well, d'you wonder?" I snapped, glaring at him with whole Hymns of Hate in my eyes. "Haven't I an excuse?"--waving the torn photograph.

"Yes, you may have now. But that's only since this minute. You hadn't before," he went on. "And you began to have that 'down' the moment I arrived here. Why? Will you explain?"

Well, I couldn't. I couldn't say that it started the first minute that he came upon me in the kitchen, talking loudly about HIM. I couldn't explain that it was all part and parcel of my being ashamed of having played cards for him, and made plans about him, even if it was in fun, before he came! I said: "Anyhow, I shall have a much worse 'down' after this! I don't know what you have to say for yourself, Mr. Lascelles."

"A great deal," he said. Then he put on a more ingratiating sort of tone. He said: "Look here, I may be a rotter in many ways, but I'm dashed if I see how I've deserved your considering me such a--such an impossible sort of person. I'd give anything to have you like me, even a tiny bit, Miss--Elizabeth!"

He was trying to get round me. But I'm not soft-hearted like Nancy. I wasn't going to allow him to.

"I wish----" he began again.

"It's a wish you never will get, if it is that we should be friends," said I. "I--I dislike you instinctively."

"So it seems. I saw that."

"And you tried to pay me out by playing tricks on me," I said, beginning to realise more clearly what had happened, and getting angrier than ever. "You thought that if you could get me to write letters to you and send you my photograph, you'd turn round some day and show them to me, and that would be your revenge!"

"I never thought anything of the kind!" he declared, fearfully angry himself. "I only wanted to get to know you! And you've been turning me down with a loud bang every time I've spoken to you. I didn't know how to get hold of the crab. This seemed the only way."

"It is a most dishonourable and sneaky way," I said hotly. "It was not fair."

Mr. Lascelles, standing there with his torn half of the photograph still between his finger and thumb, and with the ink still trickling down over the edge of the writing-table--Mr. Lascelles said: "You know, they say all is fair in--in war! And, after all, this is war-time, you know!"

"Some people seem to think that's an excuse for absolutely everything nowadays," I told him. "But there are some things at which one has got to draw the line! I can't tell you," I said, suddenly boiling over again with rage, "what I think of you!"

Then the Pretender said another unforgivable thing. He said, "In your _letters_ you didn't seem to mind me."

"Because I didn't know it was you. I thought it was somebody----" Well, I couldn't say "nice." So I said rather lamely, "somebody lonely, who really needed my--my----"

"I _did_ need your letters," the Incubus put in. "I knew that you'd never write if you'd known it was me, that you'd got your knife into!"

"Known? If I had known, I----" Here I sort of clutched about for words and couldn't find any. I simply had to repeat myself and say, "I can't--I can't tell you what I think."

"Could you write it?" suggested Mr. Lascelles quite meekly.

But there was a laugh in his voice. I heard it. There was a twinkle in his eye. I saw it!

Well, at that I was so angry that I know now exactly what people mean when they say "that they see red." A mist seemed to come before my eyes, a red mist of the same colour as Mr. Lascelles's locks, and then----

Well--I am almost too ashamed to write it! To use one of Aunt Victoria's old-fashioned words, it certainly was an unladylike thing to do--I had done it before I had thought--or something did it for me! Something lifted my arm and took direct aim. A sound rang out that I should think they could have heard from the Ford, clearer than the sound of rifles practising at the range.

For I slapped his face as hard as I possibly could with my open hand!

The second afterwards I was so ashamed of myself that I wished I'd never been born. I wished the dining-room floor would open and swallow me up: it often creaks as if it were going to!

But not it.

There I stood, still panting with temper, and gazing at the red mark of my own hand (not by any means a microscopic one) on the Incubus's smooth and freckled cheek.

He glared back up at me with eyes like grey-blue icicles, if you can imagine them. Then with a movement, as quick as a cat putting out a claw to scratch, he seized my hand--the one that slapped him.

I was terrified for a minute. I was so certain what would happen next. I knew that he was going to kiss me by force, as a punishment.

I had read in a book that a man who has had his face slapped by a girl has the right to kiss her in anger, and that she deserves it. (It's just "reprisals," like we ought to take on the Germans for murdering babies.)

And you know men always seem to be much stronger than we are, even if we are six foot, and they (the reprisaling men) are tiny!

I flung my head back and screwed my face as far to one side as I could. If he had kissed it, I'm sure it would have come out all over Spotted Plague, from sheer temper, and given him blood-poisoning!

However, thank goodness, the little horror didn't even try to touch my face.

Instead of that he took my hand, the one that had slapped him. He crushed it in his and then put it to his mouth, and kissed it. First the fingers and then the palm, as if he'd never had anything to kiss in his whole life before.

"There!" he said, rather breathlessly. "You needn't think----"

But what he meant that I "needn't think" I shall never know, for at that moment I heard the footsteps of Mary, our housemaid, coming along the passage to what she calls "see about the dining-room fire."

I wasn't going to let her come in and find me there. No: not with the whole atmosphere quivering with slaps and kisses, thank you: not with me and the Incubus standing facing each other like a Christmas number supplement called "The Lovers' Quarrel," by Marcus Stone, or something like that.

Not much!

So up I flung the dining-room window, and out I tore through the laurustinus bushes, with no hat, and just my blue sports coat on, and with my half of the torn photograph grasped firmly in my hand.

He shall never have that again, anyhow!

And I hope that I jolly well hurt him, even if I am ashamed that I did!

For _oh_, what a beastly thing he's done to me! Not so much by pretending to be the Lonely Subaltern, but by not _being_ it.... That sounds muddled, but if you're a girl you'll understand what I mean, and if you're a man you'll never understand anything. At least, not if you're a man like that loathsome little bank-clerk of a temporary second lieutenant.

I feel he's robbed me of a friend, for the Lonely Subaltern _would_ have been a friend, if his letters had been real letters--I mean, if it hadn't been the Incubus who'd written them. And now all that promising new interest has gone out of my life with a loud bang. I shall have nothing to console myself with now when I feel bored with life and nobody loves me. I shan't be able to take the Lonely Subaltern's letters out _now_ and purr over them to myself. Good gracious, _no_! I shall feel ill at the very sight of a letter addressed to me for the next fortnight. And, of course, I shall take the Incubus's detestable letters and do them up in a big envelope with lumps of sealing-wax over it and register it back to Frank Lascelles, Esquire, at the Moated Grange....

No: I can't do that. Mrs. Miles at the post-office would wonder what on earth was in the packet and why I was sending things through the post to the young orficer gentleman that lives in our very house, and she'd ask Mary, our housemaid, and----

Oh, anybody who's ever lived in a village will know the yards and yards that get added in this way to the "Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood."

That wouldn't do.

Besides, I can't have the little brute writing back to acknowledge the receipt.

And I'm not going to give them into his own hands, either.

I shall tear them all up into the teeniest scraps, and burn them in my bedroom grate.

No, I won't, either. I'll keep them as they are: it'll serve him right!