CHAPTER XII

THE ANYTHING-BUT-JOY RIDE

To begin with, I thought that our chaperon, our respected guardian, who is supposed to be so frightfully particular about us, I thought she would be a difficulty.

But, do you know, a change has come over our Aunt Victoria? It is not the first time I have noticed it, either, since the troops have been here at Mud Flats. What with constantly entertaining masculine men in this house, and knitting khaki silk ties for the Incubus, and having coffee and bacon for breakfast, and getting champagne out of the cellar for that party--well, I don't recognise Auntie: I honour bright don't. It sometimes seems to me as if she were thoroughly disorganised. And it has been a great shock to me, I can tell you!

All this is to show you how paralysed with surprise I was to find that Aunt Victoria seemed to think absolutely nothing of Nancy's proposed expedition.

She said: "Yes, dear. Toothache must be a terrible thing. And it is far better to have the tooth out at once, and have done with it. And I am sure it is very kind of Captain Masters to run you up to the Junction----"

Imagine it! She went on:

"Yes, and you want Rattle to go with you, I expect, to hold your hand? Did you say that Mr. Lascelles said he would take her? That will be nice. What time are you going to start?"

So that was that.

As for the time when we did start, it was about eleven. Nancy, for reasons best known to herself, had decided upon eleven o'clock in the morning. Goodness knows how the two young officers managed to explain things to their C.O. or whoever it is: whether they fibbed, or told the truth, or got sick-leave, or a funeral, or an operation for appendicitis, I suppose I shall never hear. Anyhow, they'd what they called wrangled it.

So at ten minutes to eleven there we both were, waiting at the door of the Moated Grange. Both of us wore our little brown leather hats and our big emerald-green belted blanket-coats, which we had all three got alike. Of course, Nancy, the little scoundrel, had taken care to have her face well wrapped up in a big white woolly Shetland shawl to keep the draught from getting into that poor aching tooth of hers!

Mr. Lascelles had already wheeled up what he calls his "bus" and stood by it, waiting, all wrapped up and interned in that hideous belted waterproof garment, with a rug-strap about the waist of it, and the cap and the goggles, and that general get-up of a motor-cyclist that makes a man look a cross between a navvy and a diver.

When Nancy was being helped to her seat by Captain Masters, and was having about six extra rugs brought out for her by Evelyn (who really is the sweetest thing when anybody is in pain or trouble), and Aunt Victoria was impressing upon the poor sufferer to mind and not take cold in the empty place when the tooth came out, and while cook was also telling her that she would have some nice camomile tea warmed up for her when she got home--when all this quite unnecessary fuss was going on over "poor darling Nancy," the Incubus turned to me. He had brought a big scarlet rug lined with fur, and this he began, rather gingerly, to tuck about me.

I had to let him, of course. I was supposed to be in his charge, just as Nancy was in Captain Masters's. How perfectly awful! What a completely-against-the-grain sort of day it was going to be! Little Me making a sisterly sacrifice of herself for that naughty Nancy's sake--and thrown for hours, probably, into the hated society of the Incubus!

Oh, how I was going to enjoy myself! I saw it all coming.

(At least, I thought I did.

Little knowing how much more there was going to be than I had bargained for!)

Just before we started the Incubus actually did speak to me. It was the first time that he'd done this since that startling moment when I had slapped his face so hard in the dining-room.

"Quite sure you'll be warm enough, Miss Elizabeth?" he said.

And he spoke in a polite, not-quite-sure sort of voice, as if he thought probably when I spoke I should snap his head off.

I nearly did, too.

I felt fearfully inclined to speak very curtly to him.

Then I changed my mind again.

Captain Masters, looking a perfect dream in his coat and cap, but as if butter wouldn't melt in his handsome mouth, was standing close by. Quite suddenly I remembered what Nancy had told me about what Captain Masters had said the other men had thought about me and Mr. Frank Lascelles.

They actually thought that my being horrid to him meant that absurd thing, did they?--that it was all put on! Idiots! And possibly Captain Masters, the whited sepulchre, was waiting now to hear Mr. Lascelles get a snub from the youngest of the girls at his billet--a snub that he and all the rest of those idiotic young soldiers would go and interpret in exactly the opposite way!

Very well--all right, then he just shouldn't hear that.

So I turned round and said in the friendliest tone of voice that the Incubus had ever yet heard from me, "Oh, yes, thank you very much: I shall be beautifully warm under the nice red rug."

Well, anyhow, even if that tone of voice was no surprise to Captain Masters (who I don't believe heard it, he having his eyes simply glued to Nancy's every movement as if he were on a rifle-range and she were the target), it quite took aback the Incubus himself.

For he (the Incubus) opened his eyes and simply stared at me, and then, if you will believe it, he actually began to blush. What I could see of his face between the cap and collar had turned very nearly as red as that fur-lined rug that I nestled down into in the wicker carrier. Little dreaming, as I say, of the adventures I was destined to meet with before the day was over!

Well, in another minute we were off: Captain Masters and my sister clattering on ahead and the Incubus and I clattering a little way after them.

I found it awfully exhilarating. The fresh, frosty air shrieked in my ears and freshened my face and tried to find a loose lock of my hair to pull from under the little leather hat, but could not. I even enjoyed the rattle and the clatter and the speed. I quite forgot that my partner in this mad rush was not an amusing person, whom I would have liked, but my pet abomination himself! I forgot everything but the pleasure of the joy-ride itself--I couldn't help its turning out to be pleasure after all, _could_ I?

I had heard them say that it was about three-quarters of an hour's run to the Junction, but I don't think we had been tearing along those roads between those long stretches of marshland for more than half an hour before the break-down occurred.

The rush got slower and slower, and finally petered out into dead standstill.

Don't ask me what had happened, because I really cannot tell you. It was more of that machinery, those things they have "gone wrong." There the machine stopped, and couldn't be got to go on again: although Mr. Lascelles nipped off and began fiddling with things and pulling at things and tugging at things, and saying, "What the--how the----" in a mutter to them. But "forrader" we did not get!

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?"