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?