Hotel Stardust

by Susan Barrie

  Eve appeared surprised. Her slim eyebrows arched a little. “Commander Merlin has long since ceased to grudge us Treloan,” she pointed out. “I think he even wishes us well with our little experiment.”

  “Does he?” But Aunt Kate flicked powder, of quite a wrong shade to prove helpful to her florid complexion, with such vigor over her face that it entirely defeated its object, and grimaced doubtfully into the mirror. “Well, that’s your opinion. . . .” And then she looked up at her niece. “But about Martin Pope . . .?”

  Eve smiled at her.

  “You can think of me living here alone, an old maid devoted to the running of her hotel, when you and Dr. Craig are comfortably installed in his house at Twickenham, looking after each other's rheumatism,” she answered lightly.

  But Aunt Kate shook her head.

  “You’ll never be an old maid, my dear! You mustn’t follow in my footsteps.”

  Eve continued to smile and made for the door.

  “Well, unless I'm going to be late for the birthday dinner, I’d better hurry and get changed,” she said. “And, by the way, there are two other guests expected. Commander Merlin and Miss Le Frere.”

  “Oh!” This time it was Aunt Kate who arched her eyebrows. “Does the Wilmott woman know?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Pity,” Aunt Kate observed. “She might have worn something really spectacular. Mr. Pope she esteems for a certain reason, but I suspect that Commander Merlin attracts her even more. However, she has an apparently inexhaustible wardrobe, so I imagine we shall see something eye-opening.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  IN which prediction Aunt Kate was certainly proved correct. For Mrs. Neville Wilmott appeared in the dining- room at Treloan that evening clothed, as it were, in misty black satin, lit to beauty by a magnificent set of emerald bracelets and earrings. She looked statuesque and indescribably graceful, and even Martin Pope seemed pleased to be allowed to hand her a glass of sherry in the drawing-room before dinner. Eve also wore black, but it was cloudy black unrelieved by any ornament save a row of small pearls and her own flaming hair, and by contrast with Mrs. Wilmott’s dress it was unpretentious. But even so, when Commander Merlin was announced, he seemed to find her worth studying as she made the circle of her guests and assisted Mr. Pope to replenish their glasses.

  The dinner-table, for the occasion, looked almost superb. It was the great central dinner-table, and the flowers on it were deep red roses. The birthday-cake stood on the sideboard, and it was certainly a monument to the skill of Chris Carpenter. Instead of the usual Happy Birthday, there was a scene in icing representing a garden, which might have been the garden of Treloan, with the sides of the cake the sheer sides of the cliffs. And “Come Back to Treloan” was cut out of sparkling silver foil and bent to form an arch above the garden. There were no candles, to Annette's loudly expressed regret, because Eve had decided that Dr. Craig might not appreciate a joke of this sort when the age he had arrived at, whatever it might be, was a little above the age for such frolics, especially in the presence of the lady who attended to his complaining and took almost a maternal interest in his digestive upsets.

  After dinner the guests dispersed out of doors, for after a day when the cliff top had been wrapped in the uncanny white vapor for which the Cornish coast is famous, and which sweeps in like swirling balls of cotton-wool from the sea, the mist had cleared unexpectedly, and the gardens of Treloan were bathed in all the yellow warmth of a June evening. Mrs. Wilmott took Commander Merlin off to show him a delightful new view she had discovered from a corner of the shrubbery, and Annette—deprived of the lean arm she chose so often to hang upon, and also of Laurence Pope's attentive admiration, because his father had put his foot down and sent him off to make some attempt at least to devote himself to his studies—attached herself to Martin Pope, who would have been less than human if he had not found a golden girl in a gauzy gown, like the gauzy wings of a moth, attractive. Ann Wilmott simply disappeared with her earnest young playwright, and Mrs. Joseph Brownrigg, Dr. Craig, and Aunt Kate sat placidly in chairs on the terrace, and discussed a possible game of bridge later on if Martin Pope could be persuaded to make a fourth.

  Eve went off to the kitchen to compliment Chris on the meal, and to express the disapproval she often expressed because Chris very firmly declined ever to become one of the guests at table while some capable hireling took over control in the kitchen. The idea of someone quite unused to her ways making free with all the equipment in her kitchen was something which went near to horrifying Miss Carpenter, and she could not understand why Eve continued to press her.

  “It wouldn't be any pleasure to me,” she assured Eve, “to sit there and know that out here a stranger was upsetting all my arrangements, and poking and prying into my professional secrets. Besides, I love cooking, and so long as I get plenty of praise afterwards I’m quite happy. How was the apple souffle?” she broke off to ask. “And did everyone do justice to the cheese straws?”

  “Everything was perfect,” Eve assured her. “Simply perfect.”

  “And I suppose someone proposed the doctor's health, and you all wished him Happy Birthday, and that sort of thing? I heard plenty of laughter while I was getting the coffee ready.”

  “Oh yes, it was good fun—and the cake was a triumph!”

  “Good! I’m going to have a slice myself when I’ve cleared up here, and then I’m going to steal away up to my room and put my feet up and read my latest library-book. Now do run away and cast your glamour over some of the men folk. That black dress is most becoming.”

  “But not half as becoming as Mrs. Wilmott’s. She looks like the Queen of Sheba.”

  “Only she’s a little older than the Queen of Sheba was in her prime,” Chris reminded her. “Now, do scram!” she ordered her. “You’re simply getting in my way here.” “Let me help you with the washing-up.”

  “Don’t be absurd!” Chris exclaimed. “Betty Forster is being paid time and a half for the privilege of doing that.” “Oh, well, in that case-”

  Chris waved her away, and Eve wandered back along the corridors, and through the green baize door to the portion of the house that contained all the public rooms. But for some reason, now that the excitement of the birthday dinner was over—and she was always a little anxious on these occasions lest something went wrong—she felt suddenly unusually tired, and she decided that as no one was likely to miss her for a short while at least, she would spend a little time in the room which was her favorite room in the house, and which had once been Uncle Hilary Petherick’s own special sanctum.

  To describe it as a study would have been inadequate, for although the walls were lined with books it was a graceful, airy apartment. There was nothing sombre about it or dark. Light streamed in the daytime through wide windows, and at night there were discreetly shaded lights which threw into prominence the wide white fireplace, with a portrait in oils above it. The portrait was heavily framed, and was of a young woman who must have been a beauty in her day; indeed, something more than beauty looked out of her heavily-lashed eyes, as grey as wood smoke. Her hair was like a flame wound about her head, and she had a slender, patrician neck attached to faultless shoulders. Her mouth curved upwards in an enchanting manner, and was deep and red like a petunia.

  Eve stood in the middle of the thick skin hearthrug before the fireplace and gazed up at her, as she had often gazed since coming to Treloan. Herself the mistress of the place, she wondered whether she was gazing into the pictured face of a former mistress of it, and if so whether she was any relation to herself—an ancestress, perhaps, not only of herself but of Hilary Petherick. The Pethericks had lived at Treloan for many years. They were a fine old Cornish family, and Treloan was one of Cornwall’s most gracious houses.

  Slim and straight in her black dress, with hands linked gracefully behind her back, and the crown of her burnished head attracting all the rays of light in the room, she stood there and, as alwa
ys, the peace of the room flowed round her. Without it even being necessary to seat herself she felt, in the quiet and the restful calm of this room, under the benevolent, smiling eyes in the portrait, her sudden weariness and curious dejection of spirit drop away from her, and she was beginning to smile back rather shyly at the portrait when the door behind her opened. It opened so quietly that she did not know it had opened until it clicked shut. And then she turned.

  Roger Merlin stood watching her, leaning with slight negligence against the white-painted door behind him. There was a peculiar look in his eyes—an arrested look— and a faint smile on his mouth seemed to have become petrified. He said slowly:

  “I didn't expect to find you here.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “It is my room.”

  “Yes.” He moved forward until he stood beside her on the hearthrug. Together they looked up at the portrait. “It is your room, and you are remarkably like that portrait!”

  Eve felt a glow almost of pleasure begin to creep through her.

  “Am I?” she asked. “Do you—do you really think so?”

  “I don’t need to think. It’s obvious,” he answered. “If your uncle ever saw you, even if it was only when you were quite young, he must have recognized that you and the lady who sat for that painting might have been mother and daughter. You have the same eyes, hair, everything.”

  “And yet I don’t think Uncle Hilary ever did see me,” she told him. “Although, of course, perhaps I wouldn’t remember.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t bother about it,” he answered. “Your Uncle Hilary wanted you to have this house, and I think he was wise to let you have it—although I think also that he would have shown a greater degree of wisdom if he had also left you some of his accumulated wealth to make it possible for you to maintain the place without filling it with a lot of strangers. However . . . ”

  He turned away, looked towards two deep arm-chairs which stood one at each side of the fireplace, and waved her to one of them.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” he said. “You obviously came in here because you wanted to escape for a little while, and I wouldn’t like to think that it was I who had driven you away again. Icame here for a similar reason. I have been forced to relive my past, in the shape of all the things I did in Hong-Kong more years ago than I care to remember, for the benefit of Mrs. Neville Wilmott— who seems to delight in reliving her own past—and I feel a trifle exhausted. And this room has always had a soothing effect upon me.”

  “It is a very soothing room,” she admitted. “Although I didn’t know you’d been in here before. But no doubt you came and saw my uncle here sometimes?”

  “Frequently,” he answered. “And usually it was to pester him to sell the place to me. He began to be quite tired of the sight of me.”

  “I’m not altogether surprised,” she told him, with a faint smile which, however, softened her words. “If you chose the same direct methods as those which you adopted with me, he couldn’t have been exactly pleased to see you. Or, at least, not always.”

  “Thank you for that qualification,” with a smile which had some of the humor of her own. He selected a cigarette from his case and lighted it and handed it over to her, and she put it between her lips with a sudden little rush of excitement because it had actually touched his lips. Why had he done that, she wondered? He had never done it before. He had always offered her his case. “Admit that you were a little tired of the rest of us,” he said suddenly, lying back in the chair which he had taken opposite her. “Admit that you did actually flee away to this room.”

  “But that wouldn’t be polite,” she answered, feeling extraordinarily relaxed as she also lay back with the cigarette with which he had provided her between her lips. “Would it?”

  “I’m not so sure,” he replied, “as I came here myself.” He looked about him at the room. It was like a quiet pool wherein there was nothing that jarred, but only an immeasurable peace.

  “I don’t think Treloan was ever meant for guests,” he remarked rather abruptly. “Treloan was meant to dream!” “And your own house?” she asked. “What of that? Wasn’t that meant to dream as well?”

  “Not in the sense that Treloan was meant to do so. Treloan is like a lovely woman who should never be permitted to soil her hands. I think if I ever owned Treloan”— she wondered, with a secret smile, whether he actually had given up hope—“I would, whatever else I did with the rest of it, select this room for my own use, and come to it whenever life palled or when I was out of patience, with everything and everyone else. Here, in this room, if I didn’t find peace I would find serenity. Tell me, do you —or don’t you?—feel the same way about it?”

  She lay quietly in her chair, looking at him. She knew what he meant. She had felt it herself as soon as she entered Treloan. The whole place had charm, but this quiet corner of it had something more. It had faded splendor and dignity, and a sensation that vulgar haste and hurry stopped outside its walls. The world might fall, but this room would still stay secure, filled with all the memories of the proud men and women who had graced it at some time or another— women like that one over the fireplace, creatures of grace not only of body but of mind, as the serene, intelligent eyes so clearly revealed. Yes; she sighed without realizing it. This room was the hub of the house. It could be sanctuary. Uncle Hilary must have found it so or he would not have spent so much of his time within its four walls.

  “You do feel what I feel,” Roger Merlin said almost triumphantly. “And, furthermore, you sighed. Why, Miss Petherick, did you sigh?” “Oh, I don’t know,” she confessed. “Unless it was because I couldn’t help feeling regretful that the leisurely days when my forebears lived here will never return, and life today is such a different thing. So hectic, and—and futile, somehow.”

  “It need not be futile,” he assured her. “It can be full, and satisfactory, and complete—especially for you, if you wish.”

  “How do you mean?” she asked, looking faintly astonished.

  “If you marry Pope, shall we say!”

  Her straight-gazing grey eyes gave away nothing as she stared back at him.

  “But supposing he doesn't want to marry me?”

  “He does.” He was about to add: “Any man would!” but stopped himself. He stood up suddenly, leaning his squared shoulders against the graceful mantelshelf. “Look at you,” he said. “Look at you in that dress, and with that hair! the chatelaine of Treloan!”

  “Running the place as a guest-house to make ends meet,” a little dryly.

  “But not once you've married Pope! All that sort of thing will come to an end.”

  “Will it?” she asked, looking at him with an indescribable expression on her face. It was so odd, she thought, that both he and her aunt had chosen the same day to drive home to her the advantages of marrying a man who had not yet asked her to marry him. But for the fact that Commander Merlin's obvious desire for her to marry him filled her with a kind of spreading feeling of loneliness and hollow emptiness, she could almost have laughed, and felt amused. But the fact that he did want her to marry someone else could never genuinely amuse her. “Well, you may be right,” she murmured carelessly. “You may be very right.”

  “Do you intend to marry him?” he asked, forcing her to stare right back into her eyes.

  “I haven’t given the matter serious thought.”

  “But you will, won't you? Won’t you?” After staring at her for a moment longer, during which time she felt as if hypnotized by the staring eyes of a tiger—only instead of being tawny eyes they were blue, and hard, and brilliant—he moved abruptly over to her and, bending forward, took her hands, lying limply in her lap. Without any resistance from her he drew her to her feet.

  “Since you almost certainly will, and since I'd like you to remember me by something apart from our conversation in this room tonight, here is a souvenir of the evening!” And before she could prevent him he had drawn her swiftly into his arms, and bent his dark head o
ver her bright one and claimed her soft mouth with his lips.

  It was a kiss which, quite literally, took her breath away. She had been kissed once or twice before in her life, by young men who had escorted her to a dance or some other social function, and returned her in safety to her own front door. They had exacted what they thought was a legitimate reward. But here was no question of reward or even any question of pleasure. It was not even an experiment, to discover whether she might like the kiss. It was cool, deliberate, and yet it scorched her almost to the core of her being. She could never forget it or the hard feel of his lips against her own; the sudden claiming of his arms when he drew her into them. And he let her go just as suddenly as he had adopted his surprise tactics. His eyes gleamed at her strangely. It might have been by contrast with his dark dinner-jacket, but he looked a little pale.

  “There!” he said. “That was something to remember me by, wasn't it?”

  Eve stood quite still. She felt burningly angry with him —not because he had kissed her, not because he had done so without asking her permission, not because he had chosen to do so in her own house, as a guest at her dinner party, when the gaily colored young woman who claimed his more serious interest was outside flirting in the moonlight with Martin Pope amongst the remnants of the azaleas. Oh, none of these things upset her. But what did upset her was the knowledge that he had quite calmly accepted the fact that she was to marry a man who could guarantee security for her future, if nothing else; a man with whom he must know she was not in love—for how many times had she unwittingly given away, by her unguarded look, her sudden feeling of pleasure, her delight in his own nearness, the fact that she was in love with him? In love with Roger Merlin, who obviously was not the least little bit in love with her or otherwise he would tell her so!