Hotel Stardust

by Susan Barrie

  Then she could almost have laughed at the absurdity of the situation. To be afraid of a dog — she who was a dog lover!

  “All right, old chap!” she said, edging a little nearer to the door at the same time, and her hand reached once more for the handle. “It’s quite all right.”

  But the bull-dog’s growl this time convinced her that it was not all right. So long as she remained perfectly still, nothing would happen to her, but the instant she moved . . . !

  She bit her lip in utter vexation, while around her the wild chaos of the night continued and below her men toiled on the beach. What right had Roger Merlin to imprison her like this? He was impossible! She felt that she detested him, and yet there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing save possess her soul in patience and wait until he chose to set her free.

  She lay back against the luxurious padded seat, and felt the bulldog relax beside her. It was a humiliating situation, to say the least!

  C H A P T E R S I X

  BACK at the house Aunt Kate had rejected all ideas of going to bed, and was busy lighting fires and keeping fires already lighted going. Something told her that tonight was going to be no ordinary night, and that before the dawn light invaded the sky, and the Witches’

  Sabbath that was going on without died down of its own accord, some extraordinary measures would have to be taken to meet the demands of the hours of darkness.

  Once she had got over her early fright, the fright caused by that first abruptly exploding rocket, she was all calm efficiency and able to concentrate her mind on possible needs. If a ship was in danger there would be people to be saved — human lives to be succoured, and then warmth and shelter to be provided for the rescued. Treloan Manor was the only house of any size or importance along that particular side of coast, and of Treloan Manor hospitality might be demanded. Therefore Aunt Kate saw to it that the fire in the hall simply roared in the chimney, and the swinging bronze lantern, of great size and candle-power, depending from the glass-filled dome in the centre of the ceiling, blazed away like a star under its crystal roof. Even the torch in the hands of the elegant bronze female at the foot of the graceful staircase was lighted, for Aunt Kate felt there must be no niggardliness, only an assurance of welcome.

  And by the time Tom Geake came hammering at the front door she had enough hot water in the boiler to provide a succession of hot baths, blankets piled up in the airing- cupboard, and even Thermos flasks of hot coffee waiting.

  Tom Geake looked dazzled by the radiance after the blackness outside, and the water was pouring off his oilskins. Chris Carpenter was immediately behind him, looking very much like a drowned rat, and behind her was an assortment of wild-eyed human beings, one glance at whom convinced Miss Barton that her preparations had been inspired and that, if anything, they would prove inadequate. Indeed, so horrified was she by the sight of a woman in a flame-colored evening-frock plastered to her body like a second skin, and with a man’s soaked raincoat held over her head, and an elderly gentleman in striped pyjamas, without even the benefit of a raincoat, that she did not so much as notice that her niece was not amongst the party.

  To Geake said gruffly:

  “Sorry to barge in on you like this, Miss Barton, but there wasn’t nothing else we could do. These folks has had a pretty bad time.”

  “Don’t mention it, Mr. Geake,” Aunt Kate answered hastily. “Such a dreadful night, and anything we can do. ... ” She assisted the lady with the raincoat to unwind it from about her once beautifully ordered tresses, and then thrust her into a chair close to the fire, so that within a few minutes her teeth stopped chattering, and she was able to realize that she was no longer in any immediate danger. And then, because the sight of the elderly gentleman without any coat at all offended every right instinct she possessed, Aunt Kate draped him personally with a blanket, and was rewarded by a most unexpected twinkle from level grey eyes under shaggy grey eyebrows.

  “That’s very kind of you indeed, madam,” he said. She felt that, had he been fully clothed, he would have accorded her a little bow. Even as it was he seemed remarkably unaffected by the knowledge of his unconventional appearance or by his recent experiences. “But if you’ll only concentrate on the ladies of our party you’ll be fulfilling a Christian duty. Mrs. Wilmott is suffering rather badly from shock, and her daughter, Miss Ann”—indicating a slight, bedraggled figure looking out hopelessly from under a seaman’s sou’wester, and dripping all over the rug—”over there, has also had a bad time. If you happen to have a drop of brandy handy. . .

  “Of course!” Aunt Kate exclaimed, and darted off to the diningroom, where she had already set out all the alcoholic stimulants that were contained in the house. It amounted actually to very little, for neither she nor Eve was very much addicted to the solace which comes out of bottles.

  After that she had scarcely a moment to realize either what she was doing or why she was doing it. The storm might have subsided for all she remembered it, and she flew backwards and forwards from the kitchen to the hall, which was now full of the steam and the smell of drying garments, with cups of tea and mugs of coffee. Chris helped her, and when once they all but collided Chris asked:

  “Where’s Eve got to? Haven’t you seen her? I lost touch, with her out there in all that madness of wind and rain, but a car came along and I think it must have picked her up.”

  “What!” Miss Barton sounded utterly horrified, but the gentleman in the pyjamas (who by this time had introduced himself as a Dr. Craig) was presenting the owner of the stricken vessel to her, and she felt her hand grasped by a firm, tanned hand which belonged to a man with an equally tanned face, who might have been somewhere between forty and fifty. He had patches of snow-white hair at his temples, and a smile which quite won her heart. His name was Martin Pope, and although his yacht, Rose of Sharon, was in danger of being nothing more than a memory by morning, he could spare her a speech full of gratitude for all she was doing for his shipwrecked companions. Like Dr. Craig, he was anxious for the well-being of his feminine guests. He urged that, if possible, they should be got upstairs, to some sort of a bed, and some sort of privacy—anywhere where they could remove their still soaking garments, and slip between warm blankets until the morning, at least. After that he would, of course, make other arrangements for them.

  Aunt Kate had already made up her mind to offer her own room to Mrs. Wilmott, and decided that the daughter could be put into one of the other guest-rooms. She offered up a prayer of thankfulness for the size, and the preparedness, of Treloan.

  Then she looked up and saw Eve standing in the doorway, and although she had been absent for a considerable while, to the secret perturbation of her aunt, she was not nearly as bedraggled looking as might have been expected after nearly an hour and half’s exposure to the weather.

  But there was a curious, white, repressed look in her face, and beside her in the doorway was Commander Merlin, looking as if he had been immersed in sea-water, and with a nasty, ragged cut above one eye from which a trickle of blood descended to his cheek.

  For the first time in her life Eve was conscious of having come up against a situation which was beyond her, and for the first time in her life she had allowed such a situation to get quite out of hand. Which was perhaps not altogether surprising, for after being cooped up on the back seat of a perfectly strange car for over an hour, with a perfectly strange dog keeping watch and ward over her in the blackness, she was in such a state of mind that even anger had escaped her. Anger had consumed her during the first half-hour, while all the demons of storm and tempest worked their will about her and the dreadful feeling that she could do nothing had had her in its grip. But the second half-hour had passed with such agonizing slowness, with the bulldog making revolting snoring noises beside her on the seat, and growling ominously every time she moved so much as an inch, that a kind of inescapable lassitude had overcome her, and she had been almost asleep when Roger Merlin had returned to his car.

  Almos
t—but not quite!

  “What right had you to keep me shut up like this?” she demanded, with a kind of hiss in her voice, when he put in his head.

  It was far too dark for her to see his face, but she had a queer impression that he was smiling at her, and with the opening of the car door the wind and rain rushed in and almost whipped away the rug she had managed to drape about her knees.

  “You should worry,” he told her, shaking water from himself as a duck shakes water from its feathers. “You’ve been comfortably warm and dry, whilst I and quite a few other people are very much the reverse. And now I'll drive you back to Treloan.”

  “You needn’t trouble,” she was beginning, when somehow her words ran dry and she sank back almost limply against the seat. “It was such a silly thing to do,” she told him weakly. “I was quite capable of taking care of myself.”

  “Were you?” He was starting up the car, and the bulldog was effusively standing up on its hind paws and licking the back of his neck. “But you don’t know this part of the world as I know it, and you might very easily have gone right over the edge of the cliff. And another search- party to recover your body after coping with a yacht anxious to break itself up on the rocks would have been too much in one evening. Therefore I thought you were safer here in the car.” “Unpleasant man!” she said to herself, feeling that she disliked him intensely, but aloud she said: “What happened to the yacht? Will it founder altogether?”

  “With any luck it won’t, but there’s no one aboard it at the moment. They’ve all been brought ashore.”

  He did not prepare her for the fact that she herself was to act hostess to them in a very short while, and she said again, realizing that he would take little notice of her: “There’s no need for you to drive me back to Treloan. The wind seems to be dropping a bit, and it’s not raining so hard. I can find my way.”

  “You don’t need to,” he answered. “We've arrived!” As he handed her out of the car she realized that, but for his assistance, her cramped limbs would have bent under her, and probably given way. She was experiencing a kind of mental exhaustion and a feeling of deflation, as if she was a pricked balloon, for, having set forth in a mood of breathless expectancy, she returned covered in humiliation.

  When the hall door of the manor was opened to them the bright lights caused her to blink foolishly, and the sight of so many people congregated beneath the star-like swinging lantern confused her. She saw Aunt Kate shepherding two oddly-attired ladies up the wide staircase, and a man with patches of snow-white hair at his temples and a soaked duffle-coat hunched round his shoulders was staring hard at her.

  “Thank goodness, Eve!” Aunt Kate paused on the stairs to call down to her. “I couldn’t think what had happened to you!”

  Roger Merlin looked up at Miss Barton, after shaking some of the blood out of his eyes, and he made her a kind of ironic little halfbow.

  “Good evening, Miss Barton! You seem to have risen splendidly to the occasion!”

  “Thank you, Commander Merlin,” she returned rather dryly; and then, after an extra keen look at him, she indicated the long refectory table in the centre of the hall. “There’s tea, coffee, sherry, and a little whisky there,” she said. “I’d recommend the whisky, if you don’t mind the absence of soda. And, Eve, I think it would be a good idea if, as soon as you’ve had some refreshment yourself, you attended to that cut over the Commander’s eye. It appears to be bleeding rather freely.”

  For the first time Eve, looking up at him automatically, became aware of the fact that he had received some sort of minor injury, and the sight of the blood upset her a little.

  “I didn’t know you were hurt!” she said.

  “I’m not,” he told her, and took her by the arm and led her over to the table. “What about a whisky-without soda for you? Or would you prefer tea or coffee? Perhaps a dash of whisky in some of that hot coffee . . . ?”

  “No, thank you,” she returned quickly. “Just tea.”

  As soon as he had handed it to her she passed him a tumbler, and insisted upon his helping himself from the rather lowered contents of the whisky bottle. Then, looking up again at the cut above his eye, which was on the opposite side of his face from the slightly saturnine scar which raked it, she demanded to know how he had received it.

  “I believe you were helping down on the beach, weren’t you? While I was sitting in the back of your car!”

  “Clever girl!” he told her,

  smiling at her out of inscrutable blue eyes. “And, as I said before, you were comfortably warm and dry, while there was nothing at all you could have done on the beach save get yourself thoroughly soaked through for nothing, and I doubt whether you could have even kept your feet. I don’t think you’ve had much experience with our spring gales, have you? They’re not at all playful, you know.”

  “And you were afraid I would get in your way—hinder your efforts, perhaps, because I’m such a landlubber?” looking at him with her cool, grey eyes. 'Men must work and women must weep?' “ she quoted.

  “Something like that,” he agreed, smiling lazily.

  “But it was a little high-handed of you, all the same. Your dog might have taken quite a dislike to me! ”

  “I don’t think so,” he replied, with the same faintly mocking sparkle in his eyes. Then he caught sight of Martin Pope looking towards them, and he moved a step or two to meet him. “Mr. Pope, let me introduce you to Miss Petherick, the owner of Treloan Manor, and your hostess for the night. But I’m afraid she would have preferred to have taken a more active part in your rescue!”

  “Which proves her a true Cornishwoman,” said Martin Pope, looking down at her most appreciatively and taking her hand. “But with a name like Petherick she couldn't possibly be anything other than a true Cornishwoman.” Eve flushed delicately under the deliberate gaze of his steel-grey eyes.

  “I’m sure my aunt has done her best to make you welcome” she said; “but I'm sorry I wasn’t here to welcome you, too, when you arrived,” wondering when he was going to remember to release her hand again. He did so at last rather abruptly, as if suddenly realizing that he was transgressing ordinary common politeness, and for quite a long time afterwards her fingers tingled from the close pressure of his hold. “I’m afraid at the moment we're a little bit short-staffed, and things here are not quite what I would like them to be—what I hope they will be one day!” She looked, without quite realizing what she was doing, in the direction of Commander Merlin, and saw a tiny smile appear on his face. “But, such as they are, I hope you can put up with them, and, believe me, you’re very welcome! I’m afraid you’ve had a dreadful experience.”

  “It could have been much worse,” he answered. “Very much worse! We might all have been at the bottom of the sea by this time. I’ll certainly hand it to your part of the Cornish coast when the weather turns rough—it’s a terror to small craft like mine!”

  “But I do hope your yacht will be saved,” she said.

  He shrugged his shoulders slightly.

  “Not at the cost of men's lives! There’s no one aboard her now, and in the morning she may be broken up. We can but hope for the best.”

  “Then I shall hope very hard.” She turned to Commander Merlin. “I would like to attend to that cut over your eye.”

  Martin Pope looked at it with concern.

  “I’m afraid you got that in the lifeboat! I don’t think I’ve properly thanked you yet for offering us so much unstinted assistance.”

  “Rubbish, man!” the Commander exclaimed. He was buttoning up his oilskin coat, and seemed on the point of departure. “I don’t think there’s any further use I can be to you tonight, anyway, and if you’ll excuse me I’ll be getting back. If you want anything, Miss Petherick—any stores or anything—just send over to the Stark Point in the morning. And now, good night.”

  “But your eye!” she protested. “You must let me see to it.”

  He gave her a smile which she felt was calculated,
in some curious way, to arouse her annoyance—mocking, undervaluing, belittling, vaguely disturbing.

  “Thank you, Miss Petherick, but it’s not in the least serious, and it can wait.”

  “All the same, I do think you---------- ”

  He cut her short by saluting her briefly—a farewell gesture which included her companion—and then turned abruptly and made for the door. Martin Pope looked after him, smiling appreciatively.

  “A good chap, that,” he said. “Like all his type, dislikes effusiveness, but sound value underneath. I’m a north-countryman myself, and in the north of England we’re not very smooth-mannered, either, but we know. how to sum up our fellow human beings.”

  “Do you?” But Eve was wondering whether it was merely rudeness, a dislike of being gracious, which had caused Roger Merlin, her nearest neighbor of any importance, to reject so determinedly her offer to attend to the slight wound he had received.

  Chris Carpenter came along at that moment, her arms full of hot-water bottles she was about to place in the beds of their unexpected guests, and she called as she

  passed:

  “Could you lend me a hand with the bed-making, Eve? It will be quicker if you can help, and Miss Barton’s upstairs looking after Mrs. 9 Wilmott and her daughter.” “Of course,” Eve answered immediately; but she turned and smiled her particularly attractive smile at Martin Pope before she left him, and he watched her with considerable interest as she walked towards the foot of the stairs with Chris.

  C H A P T E R S E V E N

  THE next morning they were all up betimes—or Eve, her aunt, and Chris Carpenter were. Chris was in the kitchen even before it was light, doing things to the stove and inspecting the contents of the larder. When Eve appeared she was feverishly whipping up eggs, and half a dozen trays were set out on the big kitchen table, each with a lace-edged tray-cloth allocated to it. The best breakfast china had received an extra polish and the silver positively shone.

  “I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind making the toast,” she said to Eve, as the latter helped herself to a cup of tea from the old-fashioned brown teapot on the hob. “I don’t imagine any of those poor wretches who escaped a watery grave last night will wish to be seen downstairs before about noon, at the very earliest. But unless they’re too exhausted to eat, they’ll want some breakfast.” “What a night!” Eve exclaimed, going to the window and watching the pearly light of a perfect dawn come creeping over the garden. “But the sea’s as calm as a full-pond this morning.”