III

“Impossible!” cried Lord Culvers, rubbing his forehead as if to waken his brain to something it refused to take in.

“Incredible!” echoed Lady Culvers, throwing up her hands, and standing in an attitude of amazement in the middle of the room.

“Did not return, did you say?” exclaimed Juliet, with wide-open eyes, advancing slowly, step by step, towards her cousin.

And then Captain Culvers had to tell his story all over again. It was to the effect that after waiting patiently for three-quarters of an hour for Ida’s return from her mother’s grave, he had grown slightly uneasy as to what might be detaining her, and had gone in search of her; but that, although he had found the bridal bouquet lying on the marble slab which marked the first Lady Culvers’s resting-place, Ida was nowhere to be seen. There was not a soul in sight of whom he could make enquiries, so, after scouring every corner of the churchyard in vain, he had thought it best to return, to consult with her father and friends before he took farther steps in the matter.

Assuredly a strange story this! Captain Culvers told it with more of coherence than might have been expected of a man in the circumstances. But then Captain Culvers had something of a reputation for coolness at a crisis when most other men would have lost self-control. Some ten years back news of the sudden death of his father had been brought to him as he was in the very act of taking aim at a partridge, and he had carefully brought down his bird before he had turned to the messenger for farther tidings.

But for all his calmness, his face looked white and anxious, and it was difficult to believe that he was the man who had stood, only a few hours before, in that selfsame room, receiving with triumphant pride the congratulations of his friends.

When he had finished his tale, for a moment everyone looked in everyone else’s face, saying never a word.

Clive was the first to break the silence.

All this time he had been standing a little apart from the rest, with his back to the light. Now he came forward, speaking hurriedly nervously, one might say.

“Something must have happened to her. There is no time to be lost. Search must be made in all directions before night. If you’ll allow me, Lord Culvers, I’ll go at once to the local police office.”

Perhaps Captain Culvers thought that the expression “If you’ll allow me,” ought to have been addressed to him. The frown on his face deepened.

“If there is a hue and cry to be made, it will be my business,” he said, curtly. “But it occurs to me that there may be another explanation to the affair. It is possible that Ida, with her love of fun and sensation, may be playing off some trick on me. Do you remember”⁠—here he turned to Juliet⁠—“what happened a month ago when you and she promised to meet me at the St. Maurs’, to join a party to Henley, and you took it into your heads to make a fool of me, and instead spent the day attending a succession of services at Westminster Abbey?”

Juliet’s reply was prevented by the entrance of a servant, with a note which he presented to Lord Culvers⁠—an odd little twist of paper with ragged edges, that appeared to have been torn out of a pocketbook.

Lord Culvers’s hand trembled as he opened it.

“Ida’s writing!” cried Juliet, looking over her father’s shoulder.

There fell a moment of silence, and then Lord Culvers read aloud in a quaking voice:

“Do not be uneasy about me. I am with friends. I will write shortly.⁠—Ida.”

“Thank Heaven!” exclaimed a voice, so charged with deep feeling it was scarcely possible to recognise it as the voice of Clive Redway.

Captain Culvers started, and looked at him.

Clive did not trouble to acknowledge the look. In hot haste he followed the servant out of the room, to enquire by whom the note had been brought, and getting the reply, “an Italian organ-boy,” he had set off at once, as with seven-league boots, in pursuit of the messenger.

Captain Culvers turned sharply to Juliet.

“You know something of this,” he said, his suavity of manner for the moment entirely gone.

Lord Culvers came forward in great agitation.

“Is it possible that you and Ida together can have planned this piece of folly?” he exclaimed.

Lady Culvers came forward, ostensibly in even greater agitation.

“It is all of a piece with what has been going on for the past two years,” she said, forgetting her usual dulcet tones. “Whenever one has taken a foolish idea into her head, the other, instead of helping me to reason her out of it, has joined in league against me.”

“You! you! you!” exclaimed Juliet, turning her head from one to the other, and arching her brows at each in turn. “How can you imagine such nonsense! What fun should I get out of frightening you all into fits, with Ida not here to enjoy it with me?”

The argument on her lips seemed an unanswerable one.

“No,” said Captain Culvers, slowly, “I can’t fancy you helping to organise such a piece of folly unless you expected something in the shape of fun by way of payment.”

“With friends,” said Lord Culvers, looking down on the scrap of paper which he still held in his hand; “who can those friends be, I wonder?”

“Ah,” said Lady Culvers, in a soft, sad voice, “the girls have many friends that I should not have chosen for them.”

“That goes without saying,” said Juliet, promptly and sarcastically.

Then, in succession they ran over the names of those on their visiting list whom it seemed probable Ida might have selected as her colleagues.

But it was all the wildest conjecture, and no definite conclusion could be arrived at.

“Well,” said Captain Culvers, “all I can say is, whoever has arranged or connived at this piece of absurdity, shall not have the pleasure of seeing me raising a hue and cry over it.”

His face was very white. He set his teeth over his last words.

“That’s right, Sefton, that’s right,” said Lord Culvers, eagerly, “there must be no hubbub, and a hundred thousand tongues set going over this affair. No, no, it mustn’t get into the papers, and my little girl be made the talk of the town.”

In a flash of fancy the unlucky father saw a long string of carriages outside his house in Belgrave Square, and heard an uninterrupted succession of knocks, rings, and enquiries for the missing bride.

“It would be terrible! We should all have to take flight somewhere,” he went on, answering as it were his own thoughts. “It’s disturbing, very. I’m altogether bewildered. I can’t see what I ought to do.” Then he turned suddenly to Sefton. “Tell me, what do you intend doing?” he asked, with great energy.

Sefton’s reply was one word.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

Lord Culvers stared at him a moment, and then began slowly to walk up and down the room with his hands behind his back.

“After all, perhaps that will be the wisest course,” he said, at one end of the room; “things must come right if we let them alone. She is with friends; she will write, she says. Yes, yes, better be patient, and let things alone to take their course,” he finished, at the other end of the room.

It had ever been the habit of his life thus to attempt a compromise between himself and life’s difficulties.

“You won’t even make an effort to find out where she is staying?” asked Juliet.

“My dear, she says she is with friends. I wish certainly she had chosen another time for her visit; but⁠—but don’t you remember once before she did something of the sort⁠—started off to stay with the Murrays at Deeside without saying a word to anybody?”

“And don’t you remember, dear love, how she and Juliet once packed up their boxes, and said they were going to keep house together in the village, and sent off the gardener’s boy to look out for a cottage for them?” said Lady Culvers, sweetly and sadly.

“Ah, yes, yes, and they both went off to town alone, one day, and arranged for a week’s lessons in elocution and acting so that they might both go on the stage the week after!” said Lord Culvers, his memory, jogged by his wife, suddenly becoming lively.

Captain Culvers cut the reminiscences short by a sudden question.

“Had Ida much money with her, do you know?⁠—on that will very much depend the length of time her whim will last,” he asked, curtly.

“I paid her her three months’ dividends in notes last night,” answered Lord Culvers, “and told her to put them away carefully. I dare say, however, she stuffed them into her pocket after the manner of girls, and pulled them out with her pocket-handkerchief five minutes after.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Juliet, feeling herself called upon to take up the cudgels on Ida’s behalf, “I saw her put the whole of the notes most carefully into a letter-case which I gave her last week, and then put that also most carefully⁠—into her pocket when she changed her dress.”

“That means,” said Sefton, “that Ida, if she is so disposed, can carry on her whim, or whatever you please to call it, for another six months.”

Juliet narrowed her eyes and looked at him. It seemed to her that the deserted bridegroom was scarcely exhibiting the alternate fury and despair that might have been expected of a bridegroom in the circumstances.

He certainly had a white, beaten, crestfallen look on his face; but otherwise he was clearheaded and prosaic to a degree.

“No, no, my boy,” interposed Lord Culvers, “don’t take such a gloomy view of things. She isn’t likely to do that. Take my word for it, she’ll write tomorrow, and come back the day after. Yes, depend upon it she will.”

He recommenced his slow walk up and down the room, then suddenly paused in front of Sefton.

“An idea has come to me,” he said, in a tone that might almost be called cheerful. “I’m sure you’ll fall in with it, every one of you.” And then he stated his idea in as few words as possible.

It was that Sefton should start at once for “anywhere”⁠—that is to say, some place where he could live quietly and unnoticed for a time, and thus give the impression to “society” that he and his bride were on their wedding tour. So soon as news was received from Ida, Lord Culvers would himself go to her, and at once insist on her joining her husband.

The scheme approved itself to the family party, who grew prosaic in the discussion of its details.

“The ‘anywhere’ will be Paris; it is easier to hide in a crowd than in a wilderness,” said Sefton, readily.

And once more Juliet narrowed her eyes and looked at him.

Outside the twilight was rapidly changing to night. A servant coming in to light the lamps was peremptorily dismissed. It seemed to the disturbed family conclave easier to discuss their difficulties in the semi-gloom than with the glare of lamps lighting up their troubled faces.

But the entrance of the servant turned their thoughts to a necessary detail of Lord Culvers’s scheme⁠—what reason should be circulated in the household to account for Captain Culvers’s sudden return to the house without his bride.

Here Lady Culvers came to the rescue, and proved herself a mistress of the art of glib fibbing to an extent that surprised even Juliet, who had been in the habit of saying to her girl friends what a mercy it was that apostles no longer walked the earth, or “Peggy” would assuredly have been wound up and carried out like Sapphira.

The story which Lady Culvers said she would herself put into circulation among the domestics was to the effect that Ida, overdone with the day’s fatigues, had fainted on her mother’s grave; had been thus found by the verger of the church, who had escorted her to his cottage at the back of the churchyard, there to rest and recover herself. There Captain Culvers had found her, and there he had left her while he had gone back at her request to tell her father that she did not feel equal to undertaking the proposed wedding tour, but instead would, after a day’s rest in Hastings, go down to Devon on a visit to Captain Culvers’s mother.

Thither Ida’s maid, who was at that moment waiting at Saint Leonard’s railway-station with trunks and boxes innumerable, was to be at once sent, and there she was to be told to remain awaiting farther orders.

“Of course,” said Captain Culvers, “such a story won’t bear criticism, and there isn’t a servant in the house who’ll be fool enough to believe it. But I can’t concoct a better, so I suppose it must do. Now I’ll ring for the cart to be brought round.”

“One thing is certain,” said Lady Culvers, her aptitude for fibbing far from exhausted, “the story will grow into something quite different long before it reaches town, and then we can correct and modify it according to circumstances. But it seems to me to suit our present disgraceful necessity.”

Captain Culvers had a word to say to Juliet as he bid her goodbye.

“It was an immense relief to me to hear your energetic disclaimer of connivance with Ida in her folly,” he said, looking at her steadily.

She gave him look for look.

“I made no energetic disclaimer, as you call it,” she replied. “I would not condescend to such a thing.”

For a moment they looked each other full in the face; but no more was said.

As Captain Culvers drove out through the lodge gates, Clive, weary-footed and dispirited, was coming in. His tramp along the high-road had been an unsuccessful one. The little organ-boy had disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened to receive him.