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A HONEYMOON IN SPACE
by
GEORGE GRIFFITH
Author of "Valdar the Oft-Born," "The Virgin of the Sun," "The Rose of
Judah," &c., &c.
Illustrated by Stanley Wood and Harold Piffard
London
C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.
Henrietta Street
1901
Arno Press
A New York Times Company
New York--1975
Reprint Edition 1974 by Arno Press Inc.
Reprinted from a copy in The Library
of the University of California, Riverside
A Honeymoon in Space
[Illustration: "_The Earth, the Earth--thank God, the Earth!_"]
Contents
PROLOGUE--The First Cruise of the _Astronef_
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
Chapter XV.
Chapter XVI.
Chapter XVII.
Chapter XVIII.
Chapter XIX.
Chapter XX.
Epilogue
List of Illustrations
"THE EARTH, THE EARTH--THANK GOD, THE EARTH!"
A HIDEOUS SHAPE ROSE OUT OF THE WATER BEHIND THEM
IT TOOK THE STRANGE-WINGED CRAFT AMIDSHIPS
SNOW PEAKS AND CLOUD SEAS
CAME FORWARD TO MEET THEM WITH BOTH HANDS OUTSTRETCHED
WHOLE MOUNTAIN RANGES OF GLOWING LAVA WERE HURLED UP MILES HIGH
WITHOUT ANY APPARENT EFFORT HE RAISED HER ABOUT FIVE FEET FROM THE FLOOR
THE HUGE PALELY LUMINOUS EYES LOOKED IN UPON THEM
PROLOGUE
THE FIRST CRUISE OF THE _ASTRONEF_
About eight o'clock on the morning of the 5th of November, 1900, those
of the passengers and crew of the American liner _St. Louis_ who
happened, whether from causes of duty or of their own pleasure, to be on
deck, had a very strange--in fact a quite unprecedented experience.
The big ship was ploughing her way through the long, smooth rollers at
her average twenty-one knots towards the rising sun, when the officer in
charge of the navigating bridge happened to turn his glasses straight
ahead. He took them down from his eyes, rubbed the two object-glasses
with the cuff of his coat, and looked again. The sun was shining through
a haze which so far dimmed the solar disc that it was possible to look
straight at it without inconvenience to the eyes.
The officer took another long squint, put his glasses down, rubbed his
eyes and took another, and murmured, "Well I'm damned!"
Just then the Fourth Officer came up on to the bridge to relieve his
senior while he went down for a cup of coffee and a biscuit. The Second
took him away to the other end of the bridge, out of hearing of the
helmsman and the quartermaster standing by, and said almost in a
whisper:
"Say, Norton, there's something ahead there that I can't make out. Just
as the sun got clear above the horizon I saw a black spot go straight
across it, right through the upper and lower limbs. I looked again, and
it was plumb in the middle of the disc. Look," he went on, speaking
louder in his growing excitement, "there it is again! I can see it
without the glasses now. See?"
The Fourth did not reply at once. He had the glasses close to his eyes,
and was moving them slowly about as though he were following some
shifting object in the sky. Then he handed them back, and said:
"If I didn't believe the thing was impossible I should say that's an
air-ship; but, for the present, I guess I'd rather wait till it gets a
bit nearer, if it's coming. Still, there _is_ something. Seems to be
getting bigger pretty fast, too. Perhaps it would be as well to notify
the old man. What do you think?"
"Guess we'd better," said the Second. "S'pose you go down. Don't say
anything except to him. We don't want any more excitement among the
people than we can help."
The Fourth nodded and went down the steps, and the Second began walking
up and down the bridge, every now and then taking another squint ahead.
Again and again the mysterious shape crossed the disc of the sun, always
vertically as though, whatever it might be, it was steering a direct
course from the sun to the ship, its apparent rising and falling being
due really to the dipping of her bows into the swells.
"Well, Mr. Charteris, what's the trouble?" said the Skipper as he
reached the bridge. "Nothing wrong, I hope? Have you sighted a derelict,
or what? Ay, what in hell's that!"
His hands went up to his eyes and he stared for a few moments at the
pale yellow oblate shape of the sun.
At this moment the _St. Louis'_ head dipped again, and the Captain saw
something like a black line swiftly drawn across the sun from bottom to
top.
"That's what I wanted to call your attention to, sir," said the Second
in a low tone. "I first noticed it crossing the sun as it rose through
the mist. I thought it was a spot of dirt on my glasses, but it has
crossed the sun several times since then, and for some minutes seemed to
remain dead in the middle of it. Later on it got quite a lot larger, and
whatever it is it's approaching us pretty rapidly. You see it's quite
plain to the naked eye now."
By this time several of the crew and of the early loungers on deck had
also caught sight of the strange thing which seemed to be hanging and
swinging between the sky and the sea. People dived below for their
glasses, knocked at their friends' state-room doors and told them to get
up because something was flying towards the ship through the air; and in
a very few minutes there were hundreds of passengers on deck in all
varieties of early morning costume, and scores of glasses, held to
anxious eyes, were being directed ahead.
The glasses, however, soon became unnecessary, for the passengers had
scarcely got up on deck before the mysterious object to the eastward at
length took definite shape, and as it did so mouths were opened as well
as eyes, for the owners of the eyes and mouths beheld just then the
strangest sight that travellers by sea or land had ever seen.
Within the distance of about a mile it swung round at right angles to
the steamer's course with a rapidity which plainly showed that it was
entirely obedient to the control of a guiding intelligence, and hundreds
of eager eyes on board the liner saw, sweeping down from the grey-blue
of the early morning sky, a vessel whose hull seemed to be constructed
of some metal which shone with a pale, steely lustre.
It was pointed at both ends, the forward end being shaped something like
a spur or ram. At the after end were two flickering, interlacing circles
of a glittering greenish-yellow colour, apparently formed by two
intersecting propellers driven at an enormous velocity. Behind these was
a vertical fan of triangular shape. The craft appeared to be
flat-bottomed, and for about a third of her length amidships the upper
half of her hull was covered with a curving, domelike roof of glass.
"She's an air-ship of some sort, there's no doubt about that," said the
Captain, "so I guess the great problem has got solved at last. And yet
it ain't a balloon, because it's coming against the wind, and it's
nothing of the æroplane sort neither, because it hasn't planes or kites
or any fixings of that kind. Still it's made of something like metal and
glass, and it must take a lot of keeping up. It's travelling at a pretty
healthy speed too. Getting on for a hundred miles an hour, I should
guess. Ah! he's going to speak us! Hope he's honest."
Everybody on board the _St. Louis_ was up on deck by this time, and the
excitement rose to fever-heat as the strange vessel swept down towards
them from the middle sky, passed them like a flash of light, swung round
the stern, and ranged up alongside to starboard some twenty feet from
the bridge rail.
She was about a hundred and twenty feet long, with some twenty feet of
depth and thirty of beam, and the Captain and many of his officers and
passengers were very much relieved to find that, as far as could be
seen, she carried no weapons of offence.
As she ranged up alongside, a sliding door opened in the glass-domed
roof amidships, just opposite to the end of the _St. Louis'_ bridge. A
tall, fair-haired, clean-featured man, of about thirty, in grey
flannels, tipped up his golf cap with his thumb, and said:
"Good morning, Captain! You remember me, I suppose? Had a fine passage,
so far? I thought I should meet you somewhere about here."
The Captain of the _St. Louis_, in common with every one else on board,
had already had his credulity stretched about as far as it would go, and
he was beginning to wonder whether he was really awake; but when he
heard the hail and recognised the speaker he stared at him in blank and,
for the moment, speechless bewilderment. Then he got hold of his voice
again and said, keeping as steady as he could:
"Good morning, my Lord! Guess I never expected to meet even you like
this in the middle of the Atlantic! So the newspaper men were right for
once in a way, and you _have_ got an air-ship that will fly?"
"And a good deal more than that, Captain, if she wants to. I am just
taking a trial trip across the Atlantic before I start on a run round
the Solar System. Sounds like a lie, doesn't it? But it's coming off.
Oh, good morning, Miss Rennick! Captain, may I come on board?"
"By all means, my Lord, only I'm afraid I daren't stop Uncle Sam's
mails, even for you."
"There's no need for that, Captain, on a smooth sea like this," was the
reply. "Just keep on as you are going and I'll come alongside."
He put his head inside the door and called something up a speaking-tube
which led to a glass-walled chamber in the forward part of the roof,
where a motionless figure stood before a little steering wheel.
The craft immediately began to edge nearer and nearer to the liner's
rail, keeping speed so exactly with her that the threshold of the door
touched the end of the bridge without a perceptible jar. Then the
flannel-clad figure jumped on to the bridge and held out his hand to the
Captain.
As they shook hands he said in a low tone, "I want a word or two in
private with you, as soon as possible."
The commander saw a very serious meaning in his eyes. Besides, even if
he had not made his appearance under such extraordinary circumstances,
it was quite impossible that one of his social position and his wealth
and influence could have made such a request without good reason for it,
so he replied:
"Certainly, my Lord. Will you come down to my room?"
Hundreds of anxious, curious eyes looked upon the tall athletic figure
and the regular-featured, bronzed, honest English face as Rollo Lenox
Smeaton Aubrey, Earl of Redgrave, Baron Smeaton in the Peerage of
England, and Viscount Aubrey in the Peerage of Ireland, followed the
Captain to his room through the parting crowd of passengers. He nodded
to one or two familiar faces in the crowd, for he was an old Atlantic
ferryman, and had crossed five times with Captain Hawkins in the _St.
Louis_.
Then he caught sight of a well and fondly remembered face which he had
not seen for over two years. It was a face which possessed at once the
fair Anglo-Saxon skin, the firm and yet delicate Anglo-Saxon features,
and the wavy wealth of the old Saxon gold-brown hair; but a pair of big,
soft, pansy eyes, fringed with long, curling, black lashes, looked out
from under dark and perhaps just a trifle heavy eyebrows. Moreover,
there was that indescribable expression in the curve of her lips and the
pose of her head; to say nothing of a lissome, vivacious grace in her
whole carriage which proclaimed her a daughter of the younger branch of
the Race that Rules.
Their eyes met for an instant, and Lord Redgrave was startled and even a
trifle angered to see that she flushed up quickly, and that the
momentary smile with which she greeted him died away as she turned her
head aside. Still, he was a man accustomed to do what he wanted: and
what he wanted to do just then was to shake hands with Lilla Zaidie
Rennick, and so he went straight towards her, raised his cap, and held
out his hand saying, first with a glance into her eyes, and then with
one upward at the _Astronef_:
"Good morning again, Miss Rennick! You see it is done."
"Good morning, Lord Redgrave!" she replied, he thought, a little
awkwardly. "Yes, I see you have kept your promise. What a pity it is too
late! But I hope you will be able to stop long enough to tell us all
about it. This is Mrs. Van Stuyler, who has taken me under her
protection on my journey to Europe."
His lordship returned the bow of a tall, somewhat hard-featured matron
who looked dignified even in the somewhat nondescript costume which most
of the ladies were wearing. But her eyes were kindly, and he said:
"Very pleased to meet, Mrs. Van Stuyler. I heard you were coming, and I
was in hopes of catching you on the other side before you left. And now,
if you will excuse me, I must go and have a chat with the Skipper." He
raised his cap again and presently vanished from the curious eyes of the
excited crowd, through the door of the Captain's apartment.
Captain Hawkins closed the door of his sitting-room as he entered, and
said:
"Now, my Lord, I'm not going to ask you any questions to begin with,
because if I once began I should never stop; and besides, perhaps you'd
like to have your own say right away."
"Perhaps that will be the shortest way," said his lordship. "The fact
is, we've not only the remains of this Boer business on our hands, but
we've had what is practically a declaration of war from France and
Russia. Briefly it's this way. A few weeks ago, while the Allies thought
they were fighting the Boxers, it came to the knowledge of my brother,
the Foreign Secretary, that the Tsung-li-Yamen had concluded a secret
treaty with Russia which practically annulled all our rights over the
Yang-tse Valley, and gave Russia the right to bring her Northern Railway
right down through China.
"As you know, we've stood a lot too much in that part of the world
already, but we couldn't stand this; so about ten days ago an ultimatum
was sent declaring that the British Government would consider any
encroachment on the Yang-tse Valley as an unfriendly act.
"Meanwhile France chipped in with a notification that she was going to
occupy Morocco as a compensation for Fashoda, and added a few nasty
things about Egypt and other places. Of course we couldn't stand that
either, so there was another ultimatum, and the upshot of it all was
that I got a wire late last night from my brother telling me that war
would almost certainly be declared to-day, and asking me for the use of
this craft of mine as a sort of dispatch-boat if she was ready. She is
intended for something very much better than fighting purposes, so he
couldn't ask me to use her as a war-ship; besides, I am under a solemn
obligation to her inventor--her creator, in fact, for I've only built
her--to blow her to pieces rather than allow her to be used as a
fighting machine except, of course, in sheer personal self-defence.
"There is the telegram from my brother, so you can see there's no
mistake, and just after it came a messenger asking me, if the machine
was a success, to bring this with me across the Atlantic as fast as I
could come. It is the duplicate of an offensive and defensive alliance
between Great Britain and the United States, of which the details had
been arranged just as this complication arose. Another is coming across
by a fast cruiser, and, of course, the news will have got to Washington
by cable by this time.
"By the time you get to the entrance of the Channel you will probably
find it swarming with French cruisers and torpedo-destroyers, so if
you'll be advised by me, you'll leave Queenstown out and get as far
north as possible."
"Lord Redgrave," said the Captain, putting out his hand, "I'm
responsible for a good bit right here, and I don't know how to thank you
enough. I guess that treaty's been given away back to France by some of
our Irish statesmen by now, and it'd be mighty unhealthy for the _St.
Louis_ to fall in with a French or Russian cruiser----"
"That's all right, Captain," said Lord Redgrave, taking his hand. "I
should have warned any other British or American ship. At the same time,
I must confess that my motives in warning you were not entirely
unselfish. The fact is, there's some one on board the _St. Louis_ whom I
should decidedly object to see taken off to France as a prisoner of
war."
"And may I ask who that is?" said Captain Hawkins.
"Why not?" replied his lordship. "It's the young lady I spoke to on deck
just now, Miss Rennick. Her father was the inventor of that craft of
mine. No one would believe his theories. He was refused patents both in
England and America on the ground of lack of practical utility. I met
him about two years ago, that is to say rather more than a year before
his death, when I was stopping at Banff up in the Canadian Rockies. We
made a travellers' acquaintance, and he told me about this idea of his.
I was very much interested, but I'm afraid I must confess that I might
not have taken it up practically if the Professor hadn't happened to
possess an exceedingly beautiful daughter. However, of course I'm pretty
glad now that I did do it; though the experiments cost nearly five
thousand pounds and the craft herself close on a quarter of a million.
Still, she is worth every penny of it, and I was bringing her over to
offer to Miss Rennick as a wedding present, that is to say if she'd have
it--and me."
Captain Hawkins looked up and said rather seriously:
"Then, my Lord, I presume you don't know----"
"Don't know what?"
"That Miss Rennick is crossing in the care of Mrs. Van Stuyler, to be
married in London next month."
"The devil she is! And to whom, may I ask?" exclaimed his lordship,
pulling himself up very straight.
"To the Marquis of Byfleet, son of the Duke of Duncaster. I wonder you
didn't hear of it. The match was arranged last fall. From what people
say she's not very desperately in love with him, but--well, I fancy it's
like rather too many of these Anglo-American matches. A couple of
million dollars on one side, a title on the other, and mighty little
real love between them."
"But," said Redgrave between his teeth, "I didn't understand that Miss
Rennick ever had a fortune; in fact I'm quite certain that if her father
had been a rich man he'd have worked out his invention himself."
"Oh, the dollars aren't his. In fact they won't be hers till she
marries," replied the Captain. "They belong to her uncle, old Russell
Rennick. He got in on the ground floor of the New York and Chicago ice
trusts, and made millions. He's going to spend some of them on making
his niece a Marchioness. That's about all there is to it."
"Oh, indeed!" said Redgrave, still between his teeth. "Well, considering
that Byfleet is about as big a wastrel as ever disgraced the English
aristocracy, I don't think either Miss Rennick or her uncle will make a
very good bargain. However, of course that's no affair of mine now. I
remember that this Russell Rennick refused to finance his brother when
he really wanted the money. He made a particularly bad bargain, too,
then, though he didn't know it; for a dozen crafts like that, properly
armed, would simply smash up the navies of the world, and make sea-power
a private trust. After all, I'm not particularly sorry, because then it
wouldn't have belonged to me. Well now, Captain, I'm going to ask you to
give me a bit of breakfast when it's ready, and then I must be off. I
want to be in Washington to-night."
"To-night! What, twenty-one hundred miles!"
"Why not?" said Redgrave; "I can do about a hundred and fifty an hour
through the atmosphere, and then, you see, if that isn't fast enough I
can rise outside the earth's attraction, let it spin round, and then
come down where I want to."
"Great Scott!" remarked Captain Hawkins inadequately, but with emphasis.
"Well, my Lord, I guess we'll go down to breakfast."
But breakfast was not quite ready, and so Lord Redgrave rejoined Miss
Rennick and her chaperon on deck. All eyes and a good many glasses were
still turned on the _Astronef_, which had now moved a few feet away from
the liner's side, and was running along, exactly keeping pace with her.
"It's so wonderful, that even seeing doesn't seem believing," said the
girl, when they had renewed their acquaintance of two years before.
"Well," he replied, "it would be very easy to convince you. She shall
come alongside again, and if you and Mrs. Van Stuyler will honour her by
your presence for half an hour while breakfast is getting ready, I think
I shall be able to convince you that she is not the airy fabric of a
vision, but simply the realisation in metal and glass and other things
of visions which your father saw some years ago."
There was no resisting an invitation put in such a way. Besides, the
prospect of becoming the wonder and envy of every other woman on board
was altogether too dazzling for words.
Mrs. Van Stuyler looked a little aghast at the idea at first, but she
too had something of the same feeling as Zaidie, and besides, there
could hardly be any impropriety in accepting the invitation of one of
the wealthiest and most distinguished noblemen in the British Peerage.
So, after a little demur and a slight manifestation of nervousness, she
consented.
Redgrave signalled to the man at the steering wheel. The _Astronef_
slackened pace a little, dropped a yard or so, and slid up quite close
to the bridge-rail again. Lord Redgrave got in first and ran a light
gangway down on to the bridge. Zaidie and Mrs. Van Stuyler were
carefully handed up. The next moment the gangway was drawn up again, the
sliding glass doors clashed to, the _Astronef_ leapt a couple of
thousand feet into the air, swept round to the westward in a magnificent
curve, and vanished into the gloom of the upper mists.
CHAPTER I
The situation was one which was absolutely without parallel in all the
history of courtship from the days of Mother Eve to those of Miss Lilla
Zaidie Rennick. The nearest approach to it would have been the
old-fashioned Tartar custom which made it lawful for a man to steal his
best girl, if he could get her first, fling her across his horse's
crupper and ride away with her to his tent.
But to the shocked senses of Mrs. Van Stuyler the present adventure
appeared a great deal more terrible than that. Both Zaidie and herself
had sprung to their feet as soon as the upward rush of the _Astronef_
had slackened and they were released from their seats. They looked down
through the glass walls of what may be called the hurricane deck-chamber
of the _Astronef_, and saw below them a snowy sea of clouds just
crimsoned by the rising sun.
In this cloud-sea, which spread like a wide-meshed veil between them and
the earth, there were great irregular rifts which looked as big as
continents on a map. These had a blue-grey background, or it might be
more correct to say under-ground, and in the midst of one of these they
saw a little black speck which after a moment or two took the shape of a
little toy ship, and presently they recognised it as the
eleven-thousand-ton liner which a few moments ago had been their ocean
home.
Mrs. Van Stuyler was shaking in every muscle, afflicted by a sort of St.
Vitus' dance induced by physical fear and outraged propriety. Quite
apart from these, however, she experienced a third sensation which made
for a nameless inquietude. She was a woman of the world, well versed in
most of its ways, and she fully recognised that that single bound from
the bridge-rail of the _St. Louis_ to the other side of the clouds had
already carried her and her charge beyond the pale of human law.
The same thought, mingled with other feelings, half of wonder and half
of re-awakened tenderness, was just then uppermost in Miss Zaidie's
mind. It was quite obvious that the man who could create and control
such a marvellous vehicle as this could, morally as well as physically,
lift himself beyond the reach of the conventions which civilised society
had instituted for its own protection and government.
He could do with them exactly as he pleased. They were utterly at his
mercy. He might carry them away to some unexplored spot on one of the
continents, or to some unknown island in the midst of the wide Pacific.
He might even transport them into the midst of the awful solitudes which
surround the Poles. He could give them the choice between doing as he
wished, submitting unconditionally to his will, or committing suicide by
starvation.
They had not even the option of jumping out, for they did not know how
to open the sliding doors; and even if they had done, what feminine
nerves could have faced a leap into that awful gulf which lay below
them, a two-thousand-foot dive through the clouds into the waters of the
wintry Atlantic?
They looked at each other in speechless, dazed amazement. Far away below
them on the other side of the clouds the _St. Louis_ was steaming
eastward, and with her were going the last hopes of the coronet which
was to be the matrimonial equivalent of Miss Zaidie's beauty and Russell
Rennick's millions.
They were no longer of the world. Its laws could no longer protect them.
Anything might happen, and that anything depended absolutely on the will
of the lord and master of the extraordinary vessel which, for the
present, was their only world.
"My dearest Zaidie," Mrs. Van Stuyler gasped, when she at length
recovered the power of articulate speech, "what an entirely too awful
thing this is! Why, it's abduction and nothing less. Indeed it's worse,
for he's taken us clean off the earth, and there's no more chance of
rescue than if he took us to one of those planets he said he could go
to. If I didn't feel a great responsibility for you, dear, I believe I
should faint."
By this time Miss Zaidie had recovered a good deal of her usual
composure. The excitement of the upward rush, and what was left of the
momentary physical fear, had flushed her cheeks and lighted her eyes.
Even Mrs. Van Stuyler thought her looking, if possible, more beautiful
than she had done under the most favourable of terrestrial
circumstances. There was a something else too, which she didn't
altogether like to see, a sort of resignation to her fate which, in a
young lady situated as she was then, Mrs. Van Stuyler considered to be
distinctly improper.
"It is rather startling, isn't it?" she said, with hardly a trace of
emotion in her voice; "but I have no doubt that everything will be all
right in the end."
"Everything all right, my dear Zaidie! What on earth, or I might say
under heaven, do you mean?"
"I mean," replied Zaidie even more composedly than before, and also with
a little tightening of her lips, "that Lord Redgrave is the owner of
this vessel, and that therefore it is quite impossible that anything out
of the way could happen to us--I mean anything more out of the way than
this wonderful jump from the sea to the sky has been, unless, of course,
Lord Redgrave is going to take us for a voyage among the stars."
"Zaidie Rennick!" said Mrs. Van Stuyler, bridling up into her most
frigid dignity, "I am more than surprised to hear you talk in such a
strain. Perfectly safe, indeed! Has it not struck you that we are
absolutely at this man's--this Lord Redgrave's, mercy, that he can take
us where he likes, and treat us just as he pleases?"
"My dear Mrs. Van," replied Zaidie, dropping back into her familiar form
of address, but speaking even more frigidly than her chaperon had done,
"you seem to forget that, however extraordinary our situation may be
just now, we are in the care of an English gentleman. Lord Redgrave was
a friend of my father's, the only man who believed in his ideals, the
only man who realised them, the only man----"
"That you were ever in love with, eh?" said Mrs. Van Stuyler with a snap
in her voice. "Is that so? Ah, I begin to see something now."
"And I think, if you possess your soul in patience, you will see
something more before long," snapped Miss Zaidie in reply. Then she
stopped abruptly and the flush on her cheek deepened, for at that moment
Lord Redgrave came up the companion way from the lower deck carrying a
big silver tray with a coffee pot, three cups and saucers, a rack of
toast, and a couple of plates of bread and butter and cake.
Just then a sort of social miracle happened. The fact was that Mrs. Van
Stuyler had never before had her early coffee brought to her by a peer
of the British Realm. She thought it a little humiliating afterwards,
but for the moment all sorts of conventional barriers seemed to melt
away. After all she was a woman, and some years ago she had been a young
one. Lord Redgrave was an almost perfect specimen of English manhood in
its early prime. He was one of the richest peers in England, and he was
bringing her her coffee. As she said afterwards, she wilted, and she
couldn't help it.
"I'm afraid I have kept you waiting a long time for your coffee,
ladies," said Redgrave, as he balanced the tray on one hand and drew a
wicker table towards them with the other. "You see there are only two of
us on board this craft, and as my engineer is navigating the ship, I
have to attend to the domestic arrangements."
Mrs. Van Stuyler looked at him in the silence of mental paralysis. Miss
Zaidie frowned, smiled, and then began to laugh.
"Well, of all the cold-blooded English ways of putting things----" she
began.
"I beg your pardon?" said Lord Redgrave as he put the tray down on the
table.
"What Miss Rennick means, Lord Redgrave," interrupted Mrs. Van Stuyler,
struggling out of her paralytic condition, "and what I, too, should like
to say, is that under the circumstances----"
"You think that I am not as penitent as I ought to be. Is that so?" said
Redgrave, with a glance and a smile mostly directed towards Miss Zaidie.
"Well, to tell you the truth," he went on, "I am not a bit penitent. On
the contrary, I am very glad to have been able to assist the Fates as
far as I have done."
"Assist the Fates!" gasped Mrs. Van Stuyler, helping herself shakingly
to sugar, while Miss Zaidie folded a gossamer slice of bread and butter
and began to eat it; "I think, Lord Redgrave, that if you knew _all_ the
circumstances, you would say that you were working against them."
"My dear Mrs. Van Stuyler," he replied, as he filled his own coffee cup,
"I quite agree with you as to certain fates, but the Fates which I mean
are the ones which, with good or bad reason, I think are working on my
side. Besides, I _do_ know all the circumstances, or at least the most
important of them. That knowledge is, in fact, my principal excuse for
bringing you so unceremoniously above the clouds."
As he said this he took a sideway glance at Miss Zaidie. She dropped her
eyelids and went on eating her bread and butter; but there was a little
deepening of the flush on her cheeks which was to him as the first flush
of sunrise to a benighted wanderer.
There was a rather awkward silence after this. Miss Zaidie stirred the
coffee in her cup with a dainty Queen Anne spoon, and seemed to
concentrate the whole of her attention upon the operation. Then Mrs. Van
Stuyler took a sip out of her cup and said:
"But really, Lord Redgrave, I feel that I must ask you whether you think
that what you have done during the last few minutes (which already, I
assure you, seem hours to me) is--well, quite in accordance with
the--what shall I say--ah, the rules that we have been accustomed to
live under?"
Lord Redgrave looked at Miss Zaidie again. She didn't even raise her
eyelids, only a very slight tremor of her hand as she raised her cup to
her lips told that she was even listening. He took courage from this
sign, and replied:
"My dear Mrs. Van Stuyler, the only answer that I can make to that just
now is to remind you that, by the sanction of ages, everything is
supposed to be fair under two sets of circumstances, and, whatever is
happening on the earth down yonder, we, I think, are not at war."
The next moment Miss Zaidie's eyelids lifted a little. There was a
tremor about her lips almost too faint to be perceptible, and the
slightest possible tinge of colour crept upwards towards her eyes. She
put her cup down and got up, walked towards the glass walls of the
deck-chamber, and looked out over the cloud-scape.
The shortness of her steamer skirt made it possible for Lord Redgrave
and Mrs. Van Stuyler to see that the sole of her right boot was swinging
up and down on the heel ever so slightly. They came simultaneously to
the conclusion that if she had been alone she would have stamped, and
stamped pretty hard. Possibly also she would have said things to herself
and the surrounding silence. This seemed probable from the almost
equally imperceptible motion of her shapely shoulders.
Mrs. Van Stuyler recognised in a moment that her charge was getting
angry. She knew by experience that Miss Zaidie possessed a very proper
spirit of her own, and that it was just as well not to push matters too
far. She further recognised that the circumstances were extraordinary,
not to say equivocal, and that she herself occupied a distinctly
peculiar position.
She had accepted the charge of Miss Zaidie from her Uncle Russell for a
consideration counted partly by social advantages and partly by dollars.
In the most perfect innocence she had permitted not only her charge but
herself to be abducted--for, after all, that was what it came to--from
the deck of an American liner, and carried, not only beyond the clouds,
but also beyond the reach of human law, both criminal and conventional.
Inwardly she was simply fuming with rage. As she said afterwards, she
felt just like a bottled volcano which would like to go off and daren't.
About two minutes of somewhat surcharged silence passed. Mrs. Van
Stuyler sipped her coffee in ostentatiously small sips. Lord Redgrave
took his in slower and longer ones, and helped himself to bread and
butter. Miss Zaidie appeared perfectly contented with her contemplation
of the clouds.