There we stayed, no more able to move on or back than the milestone near which the blessed motorcycle had taken it into its head to come to a standstill.
"I say, this is perfectly awful: what on earth is to be done?" muttered the Incubus at last, pushing his cap back from his fevered brow, and gazing at me with a very woebegone look. "We could leave the thing here and walk on to the Junction, and find some one there to come back and patch us up, but even if I did that there wouldn't be time——"
I didn't quite know what he meant by that. Time? Why, there would be heaps of time, since Aunt Victoria had agreed that she wouldn't expect to see us back until after tea-time. We were supposed to be going to have lunch at a confectioner's, and perhaps on to the picture palace, after Nancy had finished having her tooth out!
And here was the Incubus, standing by the petrified motor-cycle and looking as if the end of all things had come, just because he couldn't be at the Junction at the same time as his friend and my sister!
And he looked most fearfully distressed.
I must say that some men show to better advantage when they are upset and troubled than when they are larking about and perfectly cheery and uppish: it was so with the Incubus. Much as I always have hated that little object, and horrid as he has been to me about the "Lonely Subaltern," I must say this for him—that he seemed almost quite nice and boyish and simple as he stood there looking really desperately anxious. I actually found myself so far forgetting that we were at daggers drawn that I smiled quite encouragingly at him.
"Cheer up," I said, "it isn't your fault. Even if my sister does have to go to the dentist and have her tooth out without me being there to hold her hand it won't really matter so deadly much: she isn't going to have gas, but she won't feel it a bit," I said. "I believe they freeze the gum or something."
This I rattled out glibly in the way that we had all been talking about Nancy's toothache at home. You see, I didn't know how much the little Incubus knew about its all being what you could only describe as a "put-up job."
He looked at me very hard; then I began to wonder if he had suspicions about the "put-uppishness" of it. He said doubtfully, "I am afraid your sister will be most fearfully fed-up with me."
Then, I thought, he couldn't know?
If he had only known he would have realised that Nancy and Captain Masters would be only too delighted if they never caught sight of us again for the rest of the day.
So I said, still sitting in the car while he stood there, a perfectly abject little figure of despair in the roadway, "My sister won't mind! I think she had too bad toothache to care very much who is with her, and that she will be quite glad not to see us turning up until the tooth is out and it's all over. You know, we can walk on, or you can walk on to the nearest farm or inn, or something, and see if you could get some sort of trap."
"Yes, that's all right. I had thought of that," said little Mr. Lascelles, still in that absolutely disconsolate voice, as if the most dire catastrophe had happened. "The only thing is——"
Here he seemed to pull himself together and take a resolution. He looked straight at me and said: "I want to ask you something: you do know, don't you?—I mean—you do know about that toothache tale of your sister being all bunkum?"
"Oh, I know all about it," I said, seeing that it was the only thing to say, and realising that he must know everything now.
"You do know all about it?" he repeated. "You're sure you do?"
"Yes," I said.
Then he said: "Well, then, you must know, of course, why we shall all be so awfully sick if you and I can't turn up in time?"
This was very mysterious.
"What do you mean, exactly?" I said.
He stared at me.
"Why, Miss Elizabeth," he said, "you said you knew?"
"I do know," I said impatiently. "I know that my sister Nancy has no more had toothache in her life than she's had spotted plague: I know that that is simply a piece of new-six-shilling-fiction from beginning to end: I know that what she wants to get to the Junction for is simply so that she can have lunch in town and go to a matinee tea and that sort of thing with your friend, Captain Masters."
"Tea? And a matinee?" exclaimed the Incubus, suddenly, at the top of his voice. "Ha, ha!"
He let loose that extraordinary loud laugh of his for two seconds. Then he was serious again. He said: "But, Lord-love-a-duck! if you thought that, you can't know what we have all come up to town for?"
What on earth could he mean?
"Tell me what you mean," I said, gazing at the Incubus. "Tell me at once." But he didn't tell me. He stood there trying to gnaw his moustache, which was rather difficult, as he hasn't got nearly as much moustache as I have eye-lashes. He muttered: "Why on earth couldn't Harry Masters have told me how much everybody knew instead of leaving it all vague and indefinite like this?"
"It is you that is leaving everything vague and indefinite," I persisted from the side-car. "For goodness' sake tell me what it was that Captain Masters ought to have told you!"
The Incubus opened his mouth.
But at that moment a motor-car swept round the curve of the road, and immediately Mr. Lascelles started up and hailed it. It was coming from the Junction, and it was driven by a woman.
She wore a cloth hat nearly down to her mouth and a big cloth coat with a fur collar buttoned nearly up to her eyes, so you couldn't see what she was really like.
Little Mr. Lascelles went up to her and saluted as she slowed down, and began: "I say, I am most awfully sorry, but——"
Here the motoring woman interrupted him by calling out in a surprised and brisk and pleasant voice: "Frankie! why, Frankie!"
"Oh! by Jove! I say, if it isn't Sister!" exclaimed Mr. Lascelles.
Then he said: "It's luck meeting you again like this." Then he said to me: "I want to introduce you to a very old friend of mine. This is Miss Elizabeth Verdeley, from where I am staying at Mud Flats," he explained to the woman in the car. "And this is Miss Gates."
"Finish it up, Frankie, and say it is your nurse," said the woman in the car with her brisk laugh, and she added to me, "I steered him through appendicitis, you know."
"And I would have gone out, too, but for her," said the Incubus, with quite a serious look on his school-boyish face. "I gave her an awful lot of trouble, but she insisted on pulling me through."
"Well, what's the trouble now, Frankie? Never mind about digging up all these tender memories, but tell me what's the matter now," said the woman in the car. "Break-down, is it?"
"Yes, worse luck!" said Mr. Lascelles ruefully. "We were going into the Junction, Miss Verdeley and I—fact is we have a most important appointment, which we didn't want to miss for anything."
"Oh, really?" said the motoring woman, glancing at me rather inquisitively over her full collar.
I gazed straight up at her, with a look of perfect candour and resignation. Meaning to convey that I knew just as much about this important appointment as she did herself, seeing that she had come up in the middle of his going to tell me what all this dark mystery was about my sister Nancy and her fiancé!
"I wish I could tow you into the Junction," then said the lady motorist. "But I have one of these important appointments myself, Frankie. I have simply to go on and meet somebody on business at the village beyond Mud Flats. You know, I have a nursing home of my own now for wounded officers at the Junction?"
"Oh, have you? Good! you will see me turning up there one day and getting you to spoil me again after the Boches have had a good shot at me," said Mr. Lascelles, adding: "Well, if you must get on, we mustn't keep you. But look here, Sister, when you pass Mud Flats send somebody to the rescue, will you? Call at the blacksmith's and tell them to send somebody—anybody will do—to tinker up a motor-cycle."
"Right," said the motoring lady, gripping the wheel again. She gave a glance at me as she started the car. Her eyes were very bright and brown and shrewd-looking, I thought, and a little bit quizzical, too. She looked at me hard just before she waved her hand for good-bye. And then I began again: "You have got to tell me what all this fuss is about. You were just going to when your friend came up. Why should Nancy and Captain Masters want us to be there?"
Mr. Frank Lascelles made a funny little movement with the hands in his big brown woolly gloves: it was as if he was throwing everything to the winds. "All right, I'll tell you," he said. "They wanted us to be there because I promised to be the best man."
"What!" I exclaimed loudly. "But a best man is only a thing that they have at a wedding!"
"Yes, that's just it," said the Incubus, half laughing, half rueful. "However quiet a wedding is, people generally like to have somebody to see them off, somebody in the shape of a best man and a bridesmaid."
He added these surprising words:
"And you, Miss Rattle—Miss Elizabeth—I mean—were to have been the bridesmaid."
"But, good heavens! bridesmaid to whom?" I cried, feeling so bewildered that it would have been a relief to catch hold of the Incubus by his Burberried shoulders and shake him: he looked absurdly like a teddy bear.
"To whom do you suppose?" he said. "It has to come out sometime. To your sister and Harry Masters, of course."
"They are getting married?" I repeated in a sort of faint scream. "Married?"
"Yes, at twelve o'clock this morning," said the Incubus, shifting up his sleeve and looking at his wrist-watch. "It is twenty-five minutes to one now."
"Married!" I repeated in the faintest voice. "But they have hardly got engaged—if you can call it engaged! What did they want to get married for?"
"Oh! what does anybody want to get married for? I suppose because they are fond of each other. It seems the best kind of working reason, don't you think so?" said Mr. Frank Lascelles. "You must know that Harry was keen on your sister from the first minute, and that she liked him. He's a thundering good chap."
That seems to be about the utmost that one man can ever say of another whom he likes: "A thundering good chap"—which might mean anything or nothing. Ever since the troops came to Mud Flats I have heard one young man say that about some other young man every day. I suppose they think it's an expressive remark. To me it conveys nothing.
Besides, I didn't want to sit there in an icy sidecar talking about "thundering good chaps," when what I was pining to know was some explanation of this extraordinary thunderbolt that he had just hurled at my head.
I said, still gasping, "How long ago did they decide to get married?"
"Oh! about a fortnight, I suppose," said the Incubus. "Yes, about that."
"Why," I asked, "didn't they say anything about it?"
"Why? Because they didn't want a stopper put on it at once," explained the Incubus. "You see, Miss Elizabeth, we all know—I mean he knew about that arrangement of your relations saying that none of you girls were to think of rushing into early matrimony before you were twenty-five."
"Oh, you did know that?" I said indignantly. "You did discuss it? What a lot of gossips men are! Talk about a lot of old ladies! They are really nowhere in it with any collection of young men in a mess or a bar or a billiard-room!"
"Oh, come," said the Incubus. "We aren't as bad as that! You are severe, you know: the severest of you sisters, I think. But, anyhow, your sister Nancy and Harry Masters didn't see the point of waiting three mortal years before they settled things up, not to mention the fact that poor old Masters is due to get his orders in about a fortnight and may lose the chance of ever being able to marry her at all. Don't you see how rotten it would be for them?"
"Oh! yes, oh, yes: you needn't think I don't see their point of view," I said helplessly. "I think they are perfectly right, and it is just what I should like to do myself!"
"Would you?" said Frank Lascelles, in rather a surprised tone. I don't know whether he meant that he thought I had rather lost my own heart to that "thundering good chap" Captain Masters, but anyhow I went on hastily, "I mean if I were in Nancy's shoes. The only thing I can't understand is, why did she not tell me about it before?"
"Because she didn't want your auntie to reproach you with having known all about it and having kept it dark deceitfully," said Mr. Lascelles. "She meant to keep it from you till the last minute, she said." (And I thought it was the last minute.) "You see, we all three talked it over——"
"You talked it over with those two?" I said. "You have been deceitful all this time!"
"Oh, yes," he said, quite calmly. "I suppose I have. But this is war-time, after all. And 'all is fair in war.' What?"
A secret engagement: a runaway marriage! And here were the Incubus and I discussing the ins and outs of how it had happened in a sort of heart-to-heart way, as if we were the greatest chums, instead of at daggers drawn!
Who, I ask you, could ever have foreseen this weird situation?
With what they call in books the calm of despair, I asked the Incubus, "Do you know where these people intend to get married?"
"'Course I do. In church. St. Peter's it's called," said the Incubus, stamping his feet to try to get them warm on the iron-hard frosty road. "They've got the licence and all. That's been reposing in the pocket of Masters's woolly waistcoat for the last five days. With the wedding-ring. Thank goodness, he didn't give me that to hold, after all, as I told him he ought to," said the Incubus fervently. "They'd have been in a nice fix. Had to borrow the key of the church for a ring, or something of that sort. People did; once upon a time, didn't they?"
"Oh, never mind 'people,'" I said impatiently. "For goodness' sake tell me about Nancy and this—this eloper of hers. What were they going to do after the wedding—go off on a war-honeymoon to Brighton or something?"
"No: couldn't be done. Masters tried for leave, but couldn't get it," explained the Incubus. "Besides, I don't think the poor chap had a farthing to spare for Brighton and that sort of luxury. He's fearfully hard-up, you know. Got some millionaire relations who won't allow him a stiver. He and your sister were just going to get married, and then come back home, and say nothing whatsoever about it until just before he has to go off to France." Here he glanced again at his wrist-watch. "Quarter to one, by Jove!"
"Three-quarters of an hour late!" I chimed in. "Oh, do you think they will be waiting for us all this time?"
"Shouldn't think so," opined (good word, "opined": I've only just thought of it) the Incubus. "They'll have agreed to give the best man and bridesmaid part of it a miss by this time. Wait? Not if I know the bridegroom!"
"Oh, then, what are we to do?" I began again anxiously.
The Incubus said: "Masters said he was going to arrange for us all to have a spot of lunch together at the Royal Hotel after the ceremony. So we shall just have to go on and meet them there. That is, we shall go on if we can. I wonder if Sister will manage to get some help sent on from Mud Flats?"
I wondered too.
For what seemed like another two hours we fretted and fumed together on that icy, wind-swept bit of road, waiting, waiting, waiting....
And just as I was feeling so cold and numb that I'm sure it was as bad as being on any polar expedition, there was the welcome "pup-pup-pup" noise of another motor-cycle, and up came Greyson's man to put ours right.
He hopped off and brought out a whole heap of tools and instruments, and things that clattered and things that clinked. More "things they had," in fact, for setting right the other things that had gone wrong.
Well, he set to work, as I say, at the cycle, and presently it was all right again. Little Mr. Lascelles skipped into his seat again, and off we clattered towards the Junction.
"Better try the church first," said Mr. Lascelles. "We know they must have been there."
We tore through the town, which is a very old-fashioned one, with basement houses and bow windows and cobbled streets, and we drew up at last at the top of a hill at the entrance to a church.
Here Mr. Lascelles skipped off, and I put aside the red rug and got out of the side-car and followed him. We went up to the door. It was open. We peeped inside. I'd never been in it before: we don't go to the Junction much. It was a very dark church, with only the jewel-bright window glowing like a wonderful sunset at the east end above the altar.
A sort of awe crept over me as I looked round.
"There is nobody here," muttered Mr. Lascelles to me in a very low voice: but just as he was speaking there hobbled up a pew clerk or sexton or bell-ringer or something of that sort—a kind of shrivelled-looking man, with wispy white hair. He looked at us and whispered mysteriously: "Are you the party that the young officer and the lady was expecting here at twelve o'clock for that there wedding?"
"Yes, yes," I murmured, breathless with excitement. "What has happened? Hasn't there been any wedding yet?"
At the same time Mr. Lascelles was saying in a quick, low tone: "Yes, we're the party. Where are the others?"
CHAPTER XIII
THE SEARCH FOR THE BRIDE
"They left a message for you, sir," said the old man. "If another young orficer and a young lady was to turn up later I was to say that they had gone on to lunch at the hotel."
"Thought so: right you are, thank you very much," said Mr. Lascelles, slipping something into the old man's hand and turning out of the porch again towards the motor-cycle.
But I lingered for a moment in the porch all excitement. I said to the old clerk, or whatever he was, "Oh, but do tell me. Are they married? Were they married here? Has the wedding really happened, and is everything all over?"
The old man looked at me in distinct surprise at my excitement. Of course, he didn't know what a frightful surprise to me the whole wedding was, and that I had been dragged up to it to be a bridesmaid. Any one would think that a wedding was no more than a funeral to him! He blinked at me with his faded old eyes and said: "Oh, yes, Missy, the wedding has happened all right. The lady and gentleman were married at a quarter-past twelve. They said they couldn't wait more than a quarter of an hour before getting on with the wedding."
So the wedding had happened!
This was the thought that simply filled me as I took my seat again in the side-car that seemed to be becoming my permanent address. They were married—the first marriage happening in our family, and in such a different sort of way from anything that I had ever imagined.
A regular Gretna Green sort of romance!
Nancy married! No longer Nancy Verdeley, but "Mrs. Harry Masters." Mrs.!!
I wondered how long it would take me to get accustomed to the idea of that. Nancy, my favourite sister! Nancy, who went shares with me in everything! Why, you know, she and I (and Evelyn, too, for that matter) hadn't had a secret apart from each other all our lives until the time that the Camp of Instruction was formed at our back-of-beyond village!
That has made all the difference in the world: it has made each of us have our own private feuds and fears and prejudices and likings. I have had the affair of the "Lonely Subaltern" and my stand-up fight with the Incubus that I haven't told Nancy and Evelyn.
Evelyn has had—well, I don't know what, quite. I should say "nothing," but life is so full of surprises. I shall never think I know anything even about my sisters again. It is quite possible that even Evelyn has been through things that she hasn't told Nancy and me! And as for Nancy, she has capped the whole thing by launching out into a new life altogether.
She has taken the plunge: she is a married woman now. As for me, I suddenly felt quite shy at the idea of meeting her again for the first time after this extraordinary thing had happened. I should have to congratulate her, I suppose. And should I have to say "Harry" to Captain Masters, whom I scarcely know? How extraordinary to think that he is now quite a near relation—a brother-in-law!
We drew up at the white stucco entrance of the "Royal," a fearfully old-fashioned looking hostel with an enormous painting of King William IV. as a sign above the porch. We've passed it several times, but never been inside it, of course.
"We had better go in," said Mr. Lascelles, and in we went to a big, low, dark entrance place that seemed to be chiefly furnished by large glass cases containing stuffed white owls.
There were also a barometer, very dingy, and a lot of prints of gentlemen going fox-hunting by moonlight with nightshirts on, and in the middle of these early Victorian-looking things there was quite a modern landlady, with a very short skirt halfway up to her knees and her hair done in the very latest style.
Mr. Lascelles went up to her and asked if she could tell him whether Captain Masters was in the coffee-room, or if he had ordered lunch in a private room.
"Captain Masters, Captain Masters?" repeated the landlady; "I don't think he has been here at all this morning."
"Oh, he must be, Mrs. Ellis," said the Incubus. "He had arranged to come on here with—with a young lady, and the four of us were going to have luncheon together: they must have arrived before us."
"They are not here, I am nearly certain," said the landlady, looking most inquisitively at me.
I turned horrified eyes upon the Incubus. "What can have happened to them?" I said, but he only nodded encouragingly.
"Oh, they must be here," he insisted, then, turning to the landlady, he went on: "Are you sure you know who Captain Masters is?"
"Sure! me—why, I know him as well as I know you, Mr. Lascelles!" said the landlady, laughing in quite an amused way. Wasn't it funny that somebody miles away at the Junction should seem to know our officers from Mud Flats quite well? Any one would think they spent as much time here as there!
"Jim," called this Mrs. Ellis to a young man who was disappearing into the coffee-room, "is Captain Masters in the hotel?"
"No, ma'am," said Jim, whoever he might be. "There is only Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Brown and Captain Robinson having lunch. There is no Captain Masters at all."
"You would have been sure to see him if he had come in, Jim?" said the landlady.
"Oh, yes, ma'am. He couldn't have come in this morning without me knowing about it," said Jim.
"So, you see," said the landlady with a little nod to Mr. Lascelles.
"Oh, I do hope something awful hasn't happened," I murmured, gazing from him to the pert, powdered face of the landlady, and back again. "Oh, what do you think it can be?"
"Oh, some mistake, probably. He'll be shot at dawn about this, I expect," said Mr. Lascelles, still cheerily. "Either he or I have been idiotic, and got the name of the wrong hotel."
"Yes, he might have gone to the 'Queen's,'" suggested the landlady; "I know he often has been to the 'Queen's' has Captain Masters." Fancy his going to the "Queen's," a place I scarcely remember seeing, all the years we've lived at Mud Flats.
"Oh, thanks very much. Yes, I think we will try the 'Queen's,'" said Mr. Lascelles. "Come along, Miss Elizabeth, and, I say, don't be so upset: the 'Queen's' is only in the High Street, a few doors higher up. Good morning, Mrs. Ellis"—this was to the landlady. "We will try the 'Queen's' for our party."
So off we went and tried the "Queen's."
We drew a blank! Our party was not there. What next?
"Well, there are more than two hotels at the Junction," said Mr. Lascelles, surprising me again. He's only been three weeks in this neighbourhood, and yet he seems to know every single hotel here! The other thing that surprised me was that he really was most awfully kind in cheering one up. I think I shall have to begin to leave off calling him the Incubus—he didn't ask to be billeted at our house after all. He was almost brotherly as he said to me: "Don't you worry. We will try the 'Sportsman.' It is at the other end of the town."
So off to the other end of the town we rattled to try the "Sportsman."
And, if you will believe me, we met with the same disappointment there! Nothing had been seen or heard of our party. In the coffee-room, where we had been making inquiries, every waiter in the place said the same thing. I turned to the Incubus again with eyes of absolute despair and said: "They are not here: they are not anywhere. What—what in the world are we to do, Mr. Lascelles?"
"Oh, a very obvious thing, Miss Elizabeth," said the Incubus quite briskly. "Before we go another step or make another inquiry we are going to have some lunch ourselves here."
"Oh, no," I said drearily. "I don't want any lunch: I simply couldn't touch a crumb of anything."
"I could," said Mr. Lascelles, heartlessly. "After the whole morning hanging about in the bitter biting blast I am pretty sharp-set, I can tell you. I bet you anything you like that wherever Masters and his young Mrs. have got to they have had something to eat already. It is nearly two o'clock now.... Waiter!"
Well! before I could say any more I found myself sitting down at a round table in the bow window of the Sportsman Hotel, with before me a plate of very hot and savoury-smelling thick ox-tail soup.
Almost before I knew what I was doing I had begun to eat it.
My goodness! how delicious it was! I don't think I had ever tasted anything so lovely in my whole life. And before I had even begun to think how funny it was that I should be hungry, after all, I found that I had wolfed down the whole plateful.
I glanced apologetically across the table at Mr. Lascelles. I was afraid he must think: "Well, this young woman can't care very much what has happened to her sister, after all, by the way she is shifting the victuals." (You needn't be shocked at this horrible expression, because I have heard him use it himself, and it is just how he would put it.) However, as I say, Mr. Lascelles didn't seem to take the slightest notice of my disgraceful appetite. He merely went on ordering cold veal and ham pie, which came embedded in the most savoury jelly that I have ever tasted, and hot roly-poly made with lots of raspberry jam, and a great brown jug full of cream.
I know I made a perfect little beast of myself over both these two things. One thing kept me in countenance, and that was that Mr. Frank Lascelles's third helpings were quite as big as my second ones. Very little conversation took place over the meal.
But at the end of it, after we had both heaved deep sighs and turned to our cups of coffee, Mr. Lascelles smiled at me and said:
"There, that's better, isn't it? You poor little girlie! You know that you were beginning to look quite faint and ill from sheer starvation and anxiety."
Such a change seemed to have come over everything since this morning that if you will believe me I didn't even feel an impulse to slap the Incubus's face for having dared to call me "a poor little girlie."
"Little," you know! Me! Considering that I tower over him.
But, never mind, he had been so very kind all the morning, and so sympathetic and helpful, that I felt one ought to make allowances for his natural afflictions.
And, anyhow, at the moment he was my only friend, my only stand-by in the search for Nancy.
So I found myself looking at him in quite a friendly way as I asked him again, "What in the world are we to do next about finding our party?"
Only, this time I didn't hear my voice quite as agonised as it was before.
I didn't feel that things were quite so absolutely desperate, even if my sister and her brand-new husband had chosen to disappear, leaving no address!
It is wonderful what a difference to one's mental outlook is made by a little hot food when one is very hungry!
"Candidly," said Mr. Lascelles, "I don't see what more we can do about hunting those two to earth. I think, myself, that we shall have to give it up, Miss Elizabeth."
"To give it up?" I repeated, rather blankly.
"Yes," he said; "we have done everything we could: we have been everywhere—except to the dentist," he added, with a twinkle, "and now I think we had better do the Little Bo-Peep stunt."
"The which?" I asked, rather puzzled.
Mr. Lascelles explained, laughing, "Leave 'em alone, and they'll come home!
"They will come home after tea," he added, "so it seems to me quite the only scheme is for us to go home without them, and turn up at your aunt's with a hard-luck tale of the old motor-bike having crocked up. Which is quite true, too, for so she did," added Mr. Lascelles sedately.
"Very well," I said, feeling ever so much comforted as I put down my empty coffee-cup and rose to my feet, buttoning up the emerald-green blanket-coat again. "I suppose we had better go on now: I am quite ready."
"Oh, no, I don't think we are," Mr. Lascelles broke in. "You see, it wouldn't do for us to turn up home again at Mud Flats before the time settled on: that would look really very odd. We can't get back there until after tea-time; not for all the Eau in Cologne! If you don't mind, Miss Elizabeth (or, even if you do)," he added, "I am afraid you will have to resign yourself to an afternoon out with me."
I said: "Oh, I don't mind at all; why should I?" I said it in quite a pleasant tone of voice. And the funny part of it was that I really did mean what I said: I really was getting over some of my dislike of the little man. It was just like one of those old-fashioned songs that we had got in one of those antediluvian bound music-books in the Lair—a song that says:
"He's all right when you know him, but you've got to know him fust."
"Very well, then," said he. "We will have tea together at that quite jolly confectioner's in the High Street: but we won't start back until half-past five, as we had settled with your aunt that we should probably be out until then. So I think we had better put in the time at a matinee."
"Oh, a matinee!" I said, nearly skipping with joy.
If you will believe me, I hadn't been to a matinee since the dear dead days beyond recall, when I was at my last term at school, and we sixth-form girls were allowed as a great treat to be taken in a body one Saturday afternoon.
"There is quite a good touring company down here now doing a revival of Floradora," said Mr. Lascelles to me as we left the Sportsman Hotel. "Dear old Has-been—you have seen it, of course, Miss Rattle—I mean Miss Elizabeth?"
"No, I haven't," I told him, quite frankly. "As a matter of fact I haven't ever seen anything, except Coriolanus once."
"Oh, great Scott! Anything for a change," said Mr. Lascelles, but without laughing at me, as I was afraid he might. "I expect you will find this at least as amusing."
Well, I should just about think I did. Never in my whole life—no, never once—have I enjoyed myself as much as I enjoyed that. I really can't explain how absolutely top-hole it all was, or how different from the other affair that I went to at school: and, mind you, I don't exactly know why it should be so utterly different: perhaps it may be because at the Coriolanus show we were all packed into the second row of the pit, where we were decidedly squashed, as well as having to put up with a view of half the toques and bonnets in the place coming between us and the legs of the Romans on the stage.
Whereas now I was high above the heads of all the assembled multitudes, in a box! Yes, if you please, in a box! all to ourselves. I do think it was most frightfully extravagant of Mr. Lascelles, and I believe that Evelyn, for instance, would have been made quite uncomfortable by his spending golden sovereigns on her in this way. But what I say is, a young man's bound to waste money on something, so why shouldn't it be on a thoroughly deserving young woman? as a girl at school told me her cousin had said to her when he took her to Drury Lane in the holidays.
He, I mean Mr. Lascelles, also got me the most delicious box of chocolates, tied up with an enormous and lovely piece of pink satin ribbon, which will be the pride and glory of my best nightie for I don't know how long after this!
As for the play itself, well, of course, it seemed to me nothing in the world could ever be as beautiful!
The dresses! and the pretty girls! especially that simply lovely one who sang, "He insisted that she was his only love."
She was really so beautiful that she brought tears into my eyes!
Mr. Lascelles pretended to believe that she was forty if she was a day, but he needn't think that he took me in, because he didn't. A girl with hair and a complexion like that couldn't have been any older than Nancy!
By the way, all this time I was so thrilled by this unexpected orgy of theatrical delight that I am sorry to say I quite forgot about Nancy and her thrilling marriage and her disappearance, and what I was going to say to her when I met her again safe and sound under the aunt's roof, which she really honestly had no right to quit, and which she only bad quitted under false pretences, bless her!
I wish I could explain how glorious it was to hear the tunes we only knew from the Lair piano played absolutely splendidly by a real orchestra, with violins and things. At Coriolanus we had only had tiny little bits of music composed by somebody Elizabethan, played on the harpsichord or spinet or something between the acts.
What I say is, classical music is all right, but where is the tune?
And when I told him this, Mr. Lascelles quite agreed with me, too. The fact is, we have quite a number of tastes in common, really.
We were sitting in that confectioner's window in front of an enormous and lovely tea, which somehow I still managed to enjoy in spite of the more enormous lunch that I had had at two o'clock.
The most extraordinary part of the whole thing was that I should be enjoying myself so frantically in the society of some one I had hated so fervently for absolute weeks.
I was just thinking this, when I happened to catch his eye over the little round table with its pink table-cloth and pink chrysanthemums and pink and white china.
And, somehow, I don't know how, but somehow I realised just at that moment that Mr. Lascelles too was thinking of that furious quarrel we had had.
I felt the family blush coming on, so I buried my face in my teacup to hide as much of it as I could, and at that same moment Mr. Lascelles, leaning across the table, blushed too a little. I knew he wanted to say something about that ancient affair of the Lonely Subaltern. I guessed he would have liked to apologise. But he couldn't very well ask me to forgive him, could he? Not after he's just been giving me THE time of my life: it would look like bribery and corruption! It would look as if he thought I couldn't refuse, after all those chocolates with crystallised violets on the top, and all!
Those had nothing to do with it. Yesterday I should have thrown them at him!
But to-day, after the things we have been through together, after our being fellow-conspirators in a way over Nancy's khaki romance, and after that lovely matinee that he had taken me to, well, it is no use pretending that I shall ever feel so horrid about him again, because I shan't. I am really beginning to feel almost ashamed of myself!
So I thought there was only one thing to be done. I should have to apologise. In a funny little rush I said: "Mr. Lascelles, I—I—I am so sorry. Please will you forgive me?"
"Oh! Miss Elizabeth! No!"
"You mean you won't?" I said, quite chilled to the bone. "You can't forgive me for being so awful?"
"Oh you—I mean, there's nothing to forgive," blurted out Mr. Lascelles very quickly, "except what you have to forgive me!"
"Oh!" I said, awfully relieved. "Then there isn't that, because I've done it long ago, Mr. Lascelles!"
He looked at me hard over the dish of my favourite coffee cream éclairs, and said, "I think we are quits, and that it will be pax between us now, what?"
"Yes, please," I said.
And at that he put out his hand under the table-cloth and took hold of mine, squeezing it in a very warm and friendly way.
He said: "I wish you would do something for me, just to show that it really is pax."
"What?" I asked.
I wondered what on earth it was going to be.
And I should never have guessed, either. Then he said: "Will you allow me to call you by the name I was going to call you in those 'Lonely Subaltern' letters if they had ever come off? Do you remember it?"
Well, you know, I couldn't help remembering it, considering that it was a name which I had happened to rather like.
"Betty," I said.
He said again, "Let me call you 'Miss Betty,' then, will you?"
"Oh, I can't do that," I said, suddenly thinking of something. "The other girls know that I never could stand you. I mean, the other girls know that we haven't always got on together very well. And they have always been annoyed with me about it, and they would so tease me if they thought I had come round at last! You know how idiotic people are in that way? If they heard you suddenly call me by what is more or less a pet name they would laugh at me for ever," I explained.
He nodded, and smiled a little. "I see," he said. "Then it will have to be 'Miss Elizabeth' before them." He added, in a coaxing sort of tone that I had not heard from him before: "Can't it be 'Miss Betty' when we are just together out by ourselves like this?"
"We shall never be out by ourselves like this again," I said to him, and I couldn't help feeling just a trifle sad at the thought, for it had been a very jolly afternoon, in spite of my heartrending anxiety about my sister, and she was married, after all, and jour husband is supposed to look after her—you, I mean. "And really we must be getting home now," I said, picking up my gloves again.
There was no accident this time on the road, and we had a simply lovely spin home under the rising moon: with every yard I began to get more excited over the prospect of seeing Nancy again—Mrs. Harry Masters, my married sister!
For once in my life I should feel awfully grand. For, except Mr. Lascelles, I should be the only one in the house who knew anything at all about the great secret. Wouldn't I enjoy myself! But when we got back home to the Moated Grange—what do you think?
CHAPTER XIV
MOSTLY ABOUT RELATIONS
We got back to our house at about half-past six at night: the moon rising slowly but surely over the sea and silhouetting the figures of the soldiers working down by the jetty, also casting a subdued radiance on the gables of the Moated Grange, where the latticed and red-curtained windows gave the usual old-fashioned Christmas-card effect, which there is such a lot of down at Mud Flats.
I thought what a lovely picturesque sort of home it was after all for my young bride to come back to after her runaway marriage!
The clatter of Mr. Lascelles's motor-cycle is enough to warn anybody of his approach about half an hour beforehand.
So, as I anticipated, the porch door was flung open before we got to the gate: a tall, girlish figure in a blanket-coat like mine rushed towards us.
"Nancy!" I said gleefully.
But it wasn't Nancy; it was Evelyn.
In the moonlight I saw her face absolutely bewildered and distraught-looking. Any one would have thought that something perfectly terrible had happened! For a minute I did wonder whether perhaps there had been another Zeppelin raid while we were out, and whether it had hit Aunt Victoria. She's certainly the easiest target we've got.
But no—Aunt Victoria's plump, tea-cosy-like form appeared in the porch beyond, and beyond that were the figures of cook, Mary the housemaid, and the tall, rather leggy form of Mr. Curtis.
But where—where were the bride and bridegroom?
To my horror this was the very question with which we were met ourselves. There was a sort of chorus in the porch of "Nancy—where is Nancy? ... What has happened to those other two? ... Where is Masters—where did you leave Captain Masters and your sister?"
"Leave them? We haven't left them at all!" I retorted in a horrified voice. "Aren't they here?"
"Here?" said Aunt Victoria, very agitated. "No! They are not here."
This was pretty terrible. I looked at Mr. Lascelles, who took up: "The machine broke down, and we lost sight of them: we haven't really seen them since we left the place this morning."
"Then it is true, and not a joke!" exclaimed Evelyn in an awestruck accent.
I said, feeling more puzzled every minute, "What is not a joke?"
"Come into the drawing-room, and I will show you," said Aunt Victoria in a very shaky sort of voice.
Well, we all crowded into the drawing-room again, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Lascelles (still in his teddy-bear motor-cycling get-up) and me in my blanket-coat and little hat blinking my eyes, because it was too bright in the lamplight after the soft moon outside, and Evelyn looking absolutely distraught.
"Read this, Rattle," said Aunt Victoria. And she picked up a telegram which was lying with its envelope on the marble mantelpiece.
It had been handed in at the Junction at a quarter to two that afternoon, and it said:
"Very sorry. Married this morning. Writing later—Nancy Masters."
"I thought that it must be some silly practical joke of these children! The modern sense of humour is so extraordinarily broad," murmured Aunt Victoria in her agitated voice. "I made sure it was all a 'take-in.'"
"Oh! no: it isn't, it isn't!" I said, shaking my head violently. "It is all quite true and official! They are married!"
"And you knew about it, Rattle? You are an accomplice in this extraordinary affair?" My Aunt Victoria suddenly turned upon me. "You, the youngest of the girls: the baby! You have been deceiving me!"
"No, I haven't. Honour bright," I was beginning, but here Mr. Lascelles (very decently) came to the rescue.
He said, earnestly, "Upon my solemn word of honour, Mrs. Verdeley, Miss Elizabeth knew absolutely nothing about the affair. It was kept absolutely dark from her, I can assure you."
"But she went with them! She was going to start off on that wild-goose chase to the Junction, when that wicked little Nancy pretended that she had to go and see the dentist," took up Aunt Victoria.
Her enormous cameo brooch, that shows the three Graces doing a sort of one-step together on a terra-cotta background in a plaited gold frame, rose and fell on her chest with her agitation, like a boat at anchor on a very stormy sea. "It was Rattle who said that she would have to go with her and hold her hand during the operation."
"Yes, but upon my sacred sam, Mrs. Verdeley, Miss Rattle—I mean Miss Elizabeth—didn't know that the operation was only going to be a marriage!" Mr. Lascelles took up again quite gravely and seriously. "I only broke that to her when we were nearly at the town, and I assure you nobody on earth could have been more utterly flabbergasted than she was."
"Yes, they could—I was," put in Evelyn in a horrified voice.
"Never again shall I believe anything a girl says," said Aunt Victoria in heartfelt accents. "You did not even get to the church to see them married, Mr. Lascelles?"
"No. We just missed them," said Mr. Lascelles, ruefully. "Then we went all over the town hunting for them and drew a blank everywhere. Goodness knows where they got to: for I don't!"
"Well, that we shall be told, I suppose, when they condescend to write, as Nancy says they are going to do," said Aunt Victoria, taking up the wire again. "Now, Mr. Lascelles! since you appear to be the only person who knows anything at all about this wretched child's escapade, I shall have to ask you some questions about this. Dear me! This unscrupulous young adventurer who has lured her into marrying him!"
"Oh! I shouldn't call him that, Mrs. Verdeley: no, I really shouldn't call him that," protested Mr. Lascelles, sitting down on the sofa as soon as Aunt Victoria had settled in her easy chair. "After all, Masters is——"
Here I waited for the usual masculine expression.
Out it came.
"A thundering good chap! Isn't he, Curtis?"
"Awfully good chap," said Mr. Curtis, nodding his head so hard that the reflection of the lamplight danced in his eyeglasses. "One of the best: make an excellent husband. Any girl would be lucky to get him!"
This surprised me a little, because I thought Mr. Curtis, who had admired Nancy so awfully himself, would have been rather sick at anybody who presumed to walk off with her and marry her! Yet, there he was giving these unsolicited testimonials to his rival. Really, men are the most inexplicable beings in the world! One thing I have learnt about them since we have had so many of them billeted in this place, and that is, that you may as well save yourself the trouble of guessing what any of them are going to say or do next, because it is not the slightest good. You will never hit it.
Mr. Curtis went on: "Masters is—er—more of a man of the world than the rest of us, perhaps, but he is sincerely devoted to your niece, Mrs. Verdeley. All his friends knew that before he had been in the place a week."
Here's another little surprise. All his friends knowing something which had so surprised me when I found it out by accident!
"Never mind about his devotion: we will take that for granted," said Aunt Victoria, in a resigned sort of voice. "Let's hear what his people are, and his prospects, and a few things like that about him."
Here Mr. Lascelles, evidently trying to look extra grown-up and reliable, began to furnish her with some of these details.
"His people—that is, his father and mother are dead," he began, "but his father was in the Army, and his mother was the daughter of Sir William Magnate, the man they used to call 'The Steel King.'"
At this Aunt Victoria pricked up her ears.
"Why, then, there ought to be a good deal of money in the family," she began, looking rather more encouraged, but Mr. Lascelles put an extinguisher on this rosy gleam of hope by saying, "No, I am afraid not. You see, the old man quarrelled so fearfully with his daughter, practically turned her out of the house for daring to get engaged to 'a gentleman butcher.'"
"A gentleman butcher?" said my Aunt Victoria, looking rather bewildered again. "But you told me that Captain Masters' father was a soldier?"
"Yes—that is what he meant, that is what the old man used to call soldiers," said little Mr. Lascelles cheerfully. "That was just his sort of pet name for them—'Hired Assassin' was another, you know, Mrs. Verdeley. There are lots of people who used to talk before the war like that. 'Brainless Army Type' was another of their phrases. Old Sir William was very fond of that expression (you must know it? I always use it myself now, 'lest they forget'). Well, he used to hate soldiers, you see, and so he absolutely barred having anything to do with the Masters after they were married. They had a very tough fight to give Harry a decent education, and even then they were afraid they never could afford the Army, so they had to send him to the City, though he was absolutely cut out for the Service, and a very smart volunteer: that is how I met him, when we were both Territorials together. This war has given him his chance: he will go far, see if he doesn't," said little Mr. Lascelles earnestly, and I couldn't help liking the simple, earnest way he spoke of his chum. You saw at once that he meant every word he said, and that he simply couldn't bear Aunt Victoria to think that her niece had thrown herself away on somebody that wasn't worthy of her.
You could see he wouldn't be happy until Aunt Victoria had come round to Captain Masters.
There was silence for a while in the drawing-room. We were all sitting looking into the fire. Nobody knew what to say exactly: after all, what use is it saying anything, however one may disapprove, when somebody has absolutely been and gone and got married?
The milk is spilt by that time!
Why cry?
Evidently even Aunt Victoria saw it from that point of view.
She said slowly at last: "Well, there is nothing now to be done except wait for Nancy's letter. There is only one thing that distresses me very much still; and that is, why did the child deceive me like this? Why in the world couldn't she and Captain Masters have come to me and told me frankly how things were, and asked for my consent?"
"Because they didn't think they had an earthly chance of getting it, don't you see?" explained Mr. Frank Lascelles. "They didn't want to waste lots of time in family discussions before marriage, when it is always pretty certain that there will be plenty of them after marriage. After all, Mrs. Verdeley, think! It may be the last happiness that the poor fellow is able to snatch. For he'll be out there—out in France in a fortnight. He may not have the chance of seeing any more of her after this——"
"Don't talk to me like that. I forbid you to talk to me like that," said Aunt Victoria sharply. "Don't you know that it is very unlucky? For goodness' sake, touch wood," and here she actually took hold of the Incubus's—I mean Mr. Lascelles's—hand, and tapped hard with it on the wood of the mahogany cabinet that stands beside her chair. "Since they are married——"
Here she took out her lavender-watery handkerchief, and blew her aquiline, early Victorian nose with it as loudly as if she had a big trumpet.
"Since the dear children have got married," she went on, amazing us simply frightfully by the expression, "the least we can do is to hope that they have many, many years of happiness together when——"
Here she gave a funny little laugh, and quoted that song which we always hear from the "mud larks," and which you would really think was quite the last thing that you would ever expect from the mistress of this house.
—"When this blooming war is over!"
I don't quite know how to explain it to you, but as she said these last words her voice was quite different. It seemed just like the voice of one of us girls, for when I told Evelyn afterwards that it had reminded me of her voice, Evelyn said: "Why, Rattle, how awfully funny! Because, do you know, at the time I couldn't help noticing that Aunt Victoria when she said that sounded exactly like you speaking!"
And Aunt Victoria looked quite different too.
Perhaps it was the rosy glow of the firelight that suddenly made her cheeks so pink, and her eyes so bright and sapphire-like.
I know that the dancing flame struck lights out of the faded long-turned-to-grey hair below her old-fashioned nineteenth century lace cap with the black velvet bow.
Just for that moment it was golden hair, like Nancy's and Evelyn's and mine.
And just in that moment I saw her as she must have been years ago, before she became what we always thought her—a married old maid!
Yes, under all the old maidishness there must have been hidden away quite a lot of amusing things which we had never suspected. I suddenly felt that for years and years I had been misjudging Aunt Victoria, just as I had misjudged the Incubus for days and days. I wished there was some way of showing her that I realised this, and that I was sorry for being such a little beast to her so often, and that I saw how, long ago, she must have felt just as we felt, and that she must have been nice-looking, as nice-looking as any of us.
I don't know whether you have noticed it, but that sort of heart-to-heart remark is the kind of thing which you can say to comparative strangers, such as somebody in a railway carriage whom you had never seen before and will never see again!
But you simply can't say it to people of your own family that you have always been with.
It may sound nonsense, but there is such a thing as knowing people so well that you can't ever know them at all. Nothing can really break that barrier. Isn't it funny?
However, thank goodness! even if I couldn't manage to say something nice to Aunt Victoria at that moment, somebody else could.
Mr. Lascelles did. He gazed at our old aunt with a most touched expression in his grey-blue eyes for a second.
Then a scarlet blush (quite like our own family blush) spread itself all over his freckles and his school-boyish, tip-tilted features. And then he blurted out what you may think was absolute nonsense and blarney, but what I think must have been one of the most graceful compliments that the old lady had ever heard.
He said: "Mrs. Verdeley, I ought to have been a man when you were a young girl!"
What more graceful compliment could any woman of any age expect from any young officer? If any one said that to me when I was getting old, I should go on living to a hundred and eighty-three, out of pure bucked-upness!
He took her hand, which is stiff with wedding rings and engagement rings of bygone ancestors, and kissed it just as if she had been a girl.
Shortly after this we all went in to supper.
And I can tell you I felt I needed it after all this emotionality and excitement, even though I had had such an enormous lunch and such a splendid tea!
Nobody talked much, but I know that everybody was thinking of that great subject, "the young newly-married couple!"
And everybody was sort of quietly cheerful about it all, as if they realised that, money or no money, at last one quite promising love affair had come off now and couldn't be stopped.
Oh! but when I say everybody was cheerful, I forgot to mention that Evelyn certainly wasn't. She distinctly had the "blues," and she didn't eat anything except about a mouthful of celery soup and one crystallised fruit.
I thought perhaps she was rather offended at Nancy's having chosen me to go to the Junction instead of her? She is the eldest, after all.
But when we got upstairs, and I went into her room to talk, I found that Evelyn was not so much reproachful with Nancy for having shared the secret with me as she was disapproving of the whole affair.
She looked primmer than I have ever seen her, with her two great fair plaits hanging down on each side of her face over her long nightgown, that she doesn't put ribbons in: she thinks it's a waste in war-time.
And she said, "It's all very well, Rattle, and Aunt Victoria has taken it very well, and been much more forgiving than I ever thought she would, but right is right, and wrong is wrong! And it was wrong of Nancy to get secretly engaged, and then run away to be married. It was underhand!"
"Yes, but when she wasn't allowed to be overhand," I argued, sitting on the edge of Evelyn's white bed, and rubbing cold cream into my face, which was quite sore after the rushing through the frosty air, "what else was she to do?"
"She ought to have waited," said Evelyn, austerely. "It is our parents' wish that we should all wait until we are twenty-five."
"Wait!" I said rather scoffingly. "It isn't so jolly easy to settle down and wait for years and donkey's years when people happen to be much in love!"
"You don't know anything about being in love," said Evelyn, coldly.
"No, I may not know, but I can read, and I can imagine," I persisted. "Besides, you don't know anything about being in love yourself!"
"No, of course not," said Evelyn rather crossly. "Still, I do know that one ought not to steal one's happiness, which is what Nancy has done."
"Oh, Evelyn, what poodle-doodle!" I said. "It isn't as if Nancy were not grown up. She is twenty—she has a right to be married if she wants to be, and bother the silly old will!"
"I shouldn't be a bit surprised if no good comes of it," said Evelyn gloomily. "It looks very much as if Nancy herself realised that as soon as she had let herself in for it!"
"Nancy herself?" I said, staring at Evelyn, and not knowing what she meant.
"Yes—didn't she put it in her telegram?" said Evelyn. "Didn't she say, 'Very sorry married'?"
"Oh, you silly!" I said, laughing. "That was only a kind of apology to Aunt Victoria for having kept her in the dark up till now! That didn't mean she was very sorry she was married!"
"I am not at all so sure," said Evelyn darkly. "You know it always says, 'Marry in haste, repent at leisure.' This might be the beginning of the repentance."
"Not it!" I said firmly. "Marry in haste and go on feeling awfully bucked about it, is far more Nancy's style, I can assure you: but I am really much too sleepy to argue," I said, breaking off the argument at the best point (which is when one can't think of what to say next). "Good-night," I said, and I went to bed, and slept like the dead until Mary knocked for the fourth time at my bedroom door this morning.
I think we had all expected to find that Aunt Victoria had received the note from Nancy by the first post, but nothing of the kind. The entire mail consisted of a bootmaker's bill for Mr. Lascelles, a catalogue addressed to "Miss Nancy Verdeley," little dreaming that there was not such a person left any more on this earth, and a letter for me.
There was something rather queer about the envelope of this letter. The stamp seemed to have been cut off another letter, and then fixed to this with Stick-phast.
Also the postmark was awfully funny. It looked as if it had been done with a charcoal pencil.
As for the handwriting, I knew it. I had a presentiment what it was all about before I opened it.
I deciphered it in the Lair.
It was from my old enemy and new friend—the Incubus—Mr. Lascelles.
It was dated last night, about twelve o'clock, so I suppose he couldn't have posted it—he must have given it to the old postman to bring in with the others.
And it said:
"My dear Miss Betty,—You may think it awful cheek of me to write to you, and also frightful rot my writing when I have seen you all day to-day, but somehow I feel I must write and tell you how fearfully pleased I am with life now that you are going to be real friends. I think you are a little brick and lots more things that I suppose I had better not put. As Kipling says in one of his best poems:
"'Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he dare not say.'
"Perhaps some day I may be allowed to trot a few of them out. Till then,
"I remain, dear Miss Betty,
"Yours very gratefully,
"FRANK LASCELLES.
"P.S.—I nearly put 'Lonely Subaltern,' because, however many people I was friends with, I still should feel lonely if you wouldn't speak to me."
Second postscript:
"I was so frightfully pleased that you enjoyed yourself at that matinée. I am sure I did."
Third postscript:
"I do hope you won't be offended with me again for writing."
Of course, I am not offended: I think it was very nice of him to write.
Quite a pretty letter, too, but not really as good as the ones that he wrote to me before I knew who he was. I wonder why?
However, the great excitement to-day will be, when is that other letter coming—the letter from Nancy, and what is she going to say in it?
CHAPTER XV
THE BRIDE WRITES HOME
Well, at last, two whole days after she had been married, our sister Nancy (now Mrs. Harry Masters) has condescended to write and tell us all about it!
Two long letters she has written! One is to Aunt Victoria, rather stilted and full of the most lovely words and phrases, and with "My husband" coming in about every second line.
"Just as if nobody had ever had a husband before," said Evelyn.
I said, "Well, she hasn't, which is the same thing as far as she is concerned."
The second letter is addressed to "The Misses Evelyn and Elizabeth Verdeley."
And it begins, "My dear Kids."
Well, that rather put us off at first. Considering that I am only three years younger than she is, and that Evelyn is actually a whole year older!
"Kids!" When for about twenty years we have done absolutely everything together—never been separated! "Kids!" Just because she is a married woman of forty-eight hours' standing!
However, it was a long letter, and quite jolly when you got past the beginning.
She says:
"To begin with, I absolutely must apologise and grovel for what you must think my perfectly unspeakable behaviour in getting married and all that sort of thing without having let you into the secret. But, Evelyn and Rattle, it really was impossible to do it any other way.
"You see, Harry and I knew that we couldn't possibly tell Aunt Victoria, because we imagined that what she immediately would do would be to put her foot down firmly, instantly, and never let us see each other for centuries, not until I was twenty-five. We made quite sure that since she could not turn Harry out of the place until he has got to go to France, she would pack me off to be paying guest in some fearful spot as far removed from Mud Flats as you can get it on the map, such as the Orkney Islands.
"And, you know, Evelyn and Rattle, if she had done that we should simply have died!
"At least, Harry wouldn't have died, perhaps, because men are so much better able to bear things than we are, and, besides, he has got his King and country to go on serving: but I know I should have died: I simply couldn't have existed without him. I could not have been dragged away from him, just at the very moment when we found we were simply made for each other, which we are.
"And then, as I couldn't possibly tell Aunt Victoria, I couldn't tell you kids——"
"Kids" again!
"I couldn't tell you kids, because it would seem so awful afterwards, when Aunt Victoria found out that I had dragged you two into my fearful deceit and wickedness. It was quite bad enough having to involve Mr. Lascelles in that. I am afraid he will be in fearful disgrace with Aunt Victoria for ever and ever after this."
If Nancy only knew! Aunt Victoria seems to have taken a greater fancy to Mr. Lascelles than ever before! Really, he does seem to know how to make himself popular, for Nancy goes on now to sing his praises.
"He has been the most awful brick all through this affair. I always told you girls it was exactly like having a delightful grown-up brother ready made for us when he came to be billeted at the Moated Grange, and even I didn't realise what a little ripper he was until he began tacking on to the best man business for Harry.
"Evelyn, I believe, does know he is nice, but I suppose it is no use appealing to Rattle, since she always did hate him, and is much too obstinate to leave off hating him still, even though he has been so nice to her sister and her brother-in-law."
This is very awkward, you know, for I don't know how I am ever going to break it to the girls after this that the ex-Incubus and I shook hands and declared peace on Nancy's wedding-day!
But to go on with Nancy's letter. She says:
"As for you, Rattle darling, I feel more apologetic about you than about anything else, after having dragged you out under false pretences to be bridesmaid to your eloping sister, and then getting married without waiting for you, and then disappearing without even letting you see me to wish luck to the bride!
"I will explain why that was.
"I have already explained it so hard to Aunt Victoria that I should think I must have writer's cramp, but never mind, dear old thing, I will tell you how it was.
"When we got to the church and found the clergyman all ready, and had waited for a quarter of an hour and you didn't turn up, Harry said he was perfectly certain that something had happened to that old tinker's cart of a motor-cycle of Frank's, and that when that went wrong it was not a question of time: it was a question of eternity!
"And he thought we had better push on and get married, for supposing we had waited there until it was so late that the marriage wasn't legal, well, then we should be in a worse fix than ever, and didn't know what in the world we were going to do about it or how we should get married at all, so married we got then and there.
"And I do wish you had been there, Rattle and Evelyn, to hear how beautifully I said my responses and my 'I wills.' I wasn't one bit nervous or hoarse, like I have always imagined I should be when I was a bride and would have to promise all those things about 'love, honour and obey.'