though my heart was oppressed, I broke into admiring exclamations. My
dear, there's nothing lovelier in Italy or in England! I group those two
countries together in my comparison because Kidd's Pines has salient
features which suggest both. The general effect of the lawns and gardens
round the exquisite old house is English, or would be, if they were
better kept. The tall drooping elm trees and occasional willows are
vaguely English, too: but the grove of umbrella pine trees crowding
darkly together on a promontory like a band of conspirators might be
etched against the sky at some seaside chateau of Posilippo. I'm
beginning to find out that this combined English-ness and Italian-ness
is characteristic of Long Island, where I am even a greater stranger
than Patricia Moore. And yet the most winning charm, the charm which
seems to link all other charms together, is the American-ness of
everything--oh, an utterly different American-ness from what most people
mean when they say "how American that is!" I do wish I could explain
clearly; but to explain a thing so delicate, so illusive, would be like
taking a soap-bubble in your hand to demonstrate that it was round. It's
an effect of imagination and climate: imagination which gave graceful
lightness and simplicity to Georgian models; climate which has played
Puck-tricks with elms and other stately trees of England, turning them
into fairy trees while leaving the family resemblance. Why, there's
something different even about the paint on those dear old frame houses
in the country over here! In no other part of the world, not even in
Italy, where colour is so important, could there be a yellow like the
yellow paint on the ancient shingled house-front at Kidd's Pines. I
suppose the white window-facings and doorway and pillars, and the green
blinds, and the frame of cathedral elms, partly account for the
indescribable sweetness of that yellow. I can't liken it to anything but
primroses in a forest, seen in the level, secret light of sunrise.
My ecstasies cheered Patsey a little, and I emitted some of them in
French, for the benefit of Angele, who looked about as appreciative as a
Mexican horned toad.
We got into the house easily enough, by sacrificing a window-pane in the
kitchen and then undoing the catch. A sweet kitchen it was, or ought to
have been if the servants hadn't avenged their wrongs by leaving a lot
of dishes and dish towels unwashed. We wandered about, Patsey pretending
to remember this or that, and really half paralyzed with fright lest she
should find that Larry had committed suicide in one of the beautiful
shut-up rooms. No such horror awaited us, however, and greatly relieved
in our inmost minds, we came to rest in the dining-room, where Angele
was unpacking our luncheon with her hands and poisoning it with her
glances.
There were chicken salad and heavenly rolls, pickles which made me feel
a child again (a thoroughly American child), chocolate layer-cake, and
various other things that thrilled me with pride of the United States.
While Jack and I (starved) were trying not to eat too much for
sympathetic friendship, and Pat was trying to eat enough to please us,
we heard a door slam in the distance. We started like burglars caught at
a stolen feast. It couldn't be Angele, because she was darkening the
room with her presence. It couldn't be--but it _was_!
"Larry!" cried Pat, springing up, and making a dash for the door which
she happened to face. We others turned to face it also, and saw coming
in a delightful boy as happy as Pan--much happier than Pan would be in
modern clothes.
"She must be mistaken," I thought. "This can't be a grown girl's father.
It can't be a father of anything! Impossible it should be a ruined
bankrupt. It must be some younger brother of Larry's who looks like
him."
But no! "_Hello_, girlie!" the tall lad exclaimed, and held out his
arms. Patsey rushed into them, and was clasped. She buried her head on
the boy's shoulder, and he looked at us over the top of her head,
smiling. I assure you I never saw a more engaging smile, not even Pat's
own--or Peter Storm's. Theirs are quite different. Pat's is childlike
and winningly ignorant of life; the Stormy Petrel's is full of
unexpected gleams of humour, which lighten those mysterious eyes of an
Italian prince. This youth's smile at us over his weeping daughter's hat
was pagan--the joyous, carefree smile of Pan.
He patted the girl's back. "Awfully sorry I couldn't meet you," he said,
in a gay and charming voice, which contradicted a statement that he
could be sorry about anything: the sort of voice which you know means a
light singing tenor. "I've been busy," he went on, explaining himself
to us as much as to Pat, "busy winning back the family fortunes."
Pat drew herself from him to look him in the face, and beam through a
few tears. "You darling!" she gasped. "I might have known it! You _have_
won them back?"
"I've made a start," he modestly replied. "I'll tell you all about it.
Jove! You've grown up a dashed pretty girl. We shan't make a bad-looking
pair trotting around together--what? But introduce me to your friends."
Patsey did so. When the young god Pan had met us halfway and was warmly
shaking hands, one saw that he wasn't quite such an ambrosial youth as
he had seemed at a distance. Instead of looking twenty, he appeared at
the outside twenty-eight, wavy bronze-brown hair; big, wide-open eyes of
yellow-brown like cigarette tobacco; low, straight brows and lashes of
the same light shade; a clever, impudent nose and a wide, laughing
mouth; a pointed, prominent chin with a cleft in it. Now, can you
imagine this as the description of a nineteen-year-old girl's recreant
parent, a ruined bankrupt returning to a house deserted by his unpaid
servants?
After his failure to meet Pat, leaving her to arrive alone and
friendless (so far as he could know), with huge duties to pay and
nothing to pay them with, I'd been prepared to loathe Larry. But to
loathe Pan would be a physical impossibility for any one who loves the
brightness of Nature. I fell a victim to the creature's charm at first
glance, and I think even Jack more or less melted at the second or
third.
Larry had come in hat in hand, and had burst upon us as such a surprise
that we didn't notice his costume till after we'd calmed down. When Pat
had pranced round him a little in a kind of votive dance, his eyes fell
upon our luncheon, and he said in French that he had the hunger of
seventy-seven wolves. He then approached the table to examine the food
with interest, and put down his hat. It dawned upon me only at this
instant that the hat was a shiny "topper"; and as he unbuttoned a smart
black overcoat and threw back a white silk muffler, lo! he was revealed
in full evening dress. This at two-thirty in the afternoon!...
"Curiouser and curiouser," as Alice remarked when she fell down the
Rabbit Hole.
"I'm clothed like this," explained Larry, "because the house where I
went last night to restore our lost fortunes was raided by the police,
and I escaped by the skin of my teeth. Most of the other chaps were
arrested, I saw in the papers this morning, but my usual luck was with
me. I happened to hide in a place where they happened not to look--or,
rather, there was a fellow who looked, but he was the right sort. A
hundred-dollar-bill fixed up a get-away for me, but not till a couple of
hours ago. Eyes turned the other way till I'd passed the danger zone.
Then I taxied down here without waiting to eat, for I thought the poor
girlie would be sure to come home to roost. All's well that ends well!
Am I or am I not the 'smart guy?' I pulled a thousand dollars out of
roulette last night at poor old Jimmie Follette's. Had only seventy-five
to start with. The wheel gave me all the rest. I backed zero and she
kept repeating. Raised my stakes whenever I won. See here, I've got the
spoils on me--all but the hundred I had to shed--and twenty-five for the
taxi. Let's gloat."
Chuckling, he emptied his pockets of gold and greenbacks. He was in his
own eyes and in Patty's the hero of a great adventure. "What did I tell
you about Larry?" she challenged us.
When he heard about the servants, he threw back his curly head and
laughed. He'd been living in town, it seemed, for more than a week.
"There's such a lot of red tape they tie you up in if you go bankrupt,"
he explained to Jack. "Never was so bored in my life! But I kept
consoling myself with the thought, 'I'm sure to bob up serenely in the
end. I always have and I always shall.' Now here's this money for
instance. If I can make a thousand out of seventy-five, what can't I
make out of a thousand? I wish I'd gone _seriously_ in for roulette
before. I might have known I'd win. We'll get some more servants and
begin again, for this house is our castle. 'God's in His heaven, all's
well with the world.'"
"But--but, Larry dear, we owe Captain Winston heaps of money for customs
duty," Pat ventured, wistfully reluctant to dash his high spirits, yet
goaded by conscience. "Of course I can sell the things, but
meanwhile----"
"Sell nothing!" exclaimed Larry. "Now you've come home and can sign
papers, we'll mortgage the place, and then we'll be on velvet."
My heart sank, because I saw Pat in her last ditch, and presently turned
out of it with nowhere else to go unless she married for money. She was
in such a state of rapture at recovering Larry after all her fears, that
I thought she would cheerfully consent to anything he advised, but there
must have been a sensible ancestor behind the girl somewhere. "Oh, I
wish we needn't mortgage Kidd's Pines!" she sighed. "It is such a dear
place. I'd almost forgotten--but such a rush of love has come over me
for it to-day. I'd hate to risk losing it--and we might, you know.
There's another plan that some kind friends from the ship thought of
this morning, when--when we heard the news--about our trouble. They're
coming to Awepesha to talk it over, at four o'clock this afternoon."
She turned an imploring glance on Jack, who thereupon felt forced to
help her out with explanations. He stumbled a little, for fear of
hurting Mr. Moore's pride; but he needn't have worried. Larry regarded
the idea as the joke of the century.
"Great Scott, what a lark!" he shouted. "I can see the advertisements!
'Hiding place of Captain Kidd's Treasure in the Grounds.' What do you
know about _that_? Jove, we'll have digging parties, with me for the
leader!"
"You must make them _pay_ for the privilege of digging," I suggested.
"Yes! We'll call it the 'Only Extra.' I like the idea of that
man--Storm, did you say his name is?--of charging some high, almost
prohibitive price which limits the scope of operation to millionaires,
then letting them have everything they want, as if they were guests:
champagne or water, the same charge. We ought to get some fun out of
this--what?"
I thanked Billiken, the God of Things as They Ought to Be, that he took
it that way, for, if only Larry didn't insist on managing the business
himself, I saw hope of Pat's being saved.
Our chauffeur, looking more like Hyde than Jekyll after his long wait,
took us all back to Awepesha in the car, after Larry had changed his
telltale clothes to tweeds, and the ruined bankrupt was the life of the
party. His remarks about the expression of Angele's back (she sat in
front) and his friend the Marquise's taste in female beauty were most
witty and amusing, if not in the best of taste.
I forgot to tell you that Ed Caspian brought his car down to the docks
to take Mrs. Shuster wherever she wanted to go--a resplendent car of the
most expensive make in the world, such a car as he would have called
"Moloch" in the days when his hand was against Capital. Before we'd been
back very long at Awepesha it arrived, bearing the lady and her host,
but not Mr. Storm. He had preferred to travel independently, it seemed,
and I rather liked him for it. No sooner were the introductions and
first politenesses over between the newcomers and Larry, however, than
Storm appeared. I had rather expected that he would "doll himself
up"--as they say in this dear land of ours--for the visit in high
society; but he had made no change, not even a tall collar.
Mrs. Shuster, enraptured with Larry and in an ecstasy between these
three men she could think of as "in her train," presented "Mr. Peter
Storm to Mr. Moore." "A hero of the _Lusitania_ and _Arabic_," she
added, "and going to be my secretary."
Larry held out his hand, and, as he shook the Stormy Petrel's, stared at
him. "I seem to know your face," he said. "And yet--I can't place it. Do
you know mine?"
"I think if I'd ever seen it I shouldn't have forgotten," returned our
Ship's Mystery. I noticed that he did not say he hadn't seen it or that
he had forgotten. And I vividly recalled how Pat, too, had had the
impression that Storm's eyes were familiar--associated with some memory
of long ago. Neither she nor her father, however, appeared to find any
double meaning in his reply.
Well, to make a long story less long, Mrs. Shuster and Mr. Caspian had
put their heads together over the hotel idea. Both had taken advantage
of Peter Storm's brief absence to forget that it had originated in his
brain. They spoke of "our plan," and for the moment he claimed no
credit, as I should have been tempted to do. It was only when they began
to develop the said plan upon lines evidently different from those
agreed upon with him that he roused himself.
"In thinking it over," Ed Caspian explained to Larry, "Mrs. Shuster and
I have decided that the simplest thing would be for me to advance any
capital necessary to start the hotel enterprise: advertising and a lot
of things like that. All in a business way of course. Miss Moore can
give me a mortgage----"
"I beg your pardon," the S. M. cut him off in a voice quite low but keen
as a knife. "The hotel suggestion was mine, wasn't it, Miss Moore?"
"Yes," Pat assented, "it certainly was." She looked from one man to the
other, puzzled and interested.
"I shouldn't have made the suggestion if I weren't more or less of an
expert in such matters." Storm said this with almost aggressive
self-confidence. One had to believe that he knew what he was talking
about; that his apparently mysterious past included the management of
hotels, and this instinctive if reluctant credence was a tribute to the
man's magnetic power. He did look the last person on earth to be a
hotel-keeper! Believing that he might have been one ought to have
destroyed the romance attached to him, but somehow it made the flame of
curiosity burn brighter.
"Don't you all think," he went on, "that the suggestor ought to have a
voice in the working out of the scheme--that is, if he has anything to
say worth hearing?"
"Seems to me this is a case for acts, not arguments," remarked Caspian.
"It isn't good advice but money that's needed at this stage."
"Exactly," said Storm. "The question is, how is it to be obtained? I
think it would be more advantageous to Mr. Moore and his daughter for a
small syndicate to be formed than for them to get the capital on a
mortgage. They are amateurs. They don't know how to run a hotel. They
might make a failure, and the mortgage could be called in----"
"I wouldn't do such a thing!" Caspian angrily cut him short. "That's why
I came forward--so they could have a friend rather than a business
man----"
"It turns out awkwardly sometimes, doing business with friends," said
Storm, giving the other a level look straight from eye to eye. So may a
cat look at a king. So may a steerage passenger look at a millionaire if
he isn't afraid. And apparently this one wasn't afraid, having only
other people's axes to grind, not his own. "Forming a company or
syndicate, Mr. and Miss Moore would have shares in the business, given
them for what they could put into it: their historic place and beautiful
house. Mrs. Shuster would take up a large group of shares, and would, I
understand, become one of the first guests of the hotel, to show her
confidence in the scheme. Isn't that the case, Mrs. Shuster?"
"Oh, _yes_!" she agreed. All the man's magnetic influence--temporarily
dimmed by her old friend Ed in the motor car--seemed to rush over her
again in a warm wave.
"Mr. Caspian is of course free to join the syndicate," continued the S.
M. "But he, too, is an amateur. He may know how to live well in hotels,
he doesn't know how to run them well."
"I'm not a hotel-keeper, thank heaven, if that's what you mean!" said
Caspian. "But I happen to have money."
"Yes, you happen to have money," thoughtfully repeated Storm.
"Which--I suppose we may take for granted--you haven't."
"You may take that for granted, Mr. Caspian."
It was now quite evidently a duel between the two men, strangers to each
other and as far apart as one pole from another, yet for some reason
(perhaps unknown, only _felt_, by themselves) instinctively
antagonistic. Jack and I were lost in joy of the encounter, and a glance
at Pat showed me that, schoolgirl as she is, she caught the electric
thrill in the atmosphere. Larry, too, was visibly interested. He'd
opened a box of games on the table where rested his elbow, and taking
out some packs of cards he had mechanically begun to play "Patience"--a
characteristic protest of the spirit against dull discussions of
business, even his own. He would like things to be nicely arranged for
him, I suspected, but he couldn't be bothered with petty details. He
seemed just to take it happily for granted that people ought to be
_glad_ to straighten matters out for a charming "play-boy" like him. The
tone of the two men, however, had suddenly snatched his attention from
the intricacies of Patience (a fascinating new Patience, I noticed). He
was captured, but not, I felt, because of any personal concern he had in
the battle. I did wonder what was passing behind the bright hazel eyes
which moved from Storm's face to Caspian's, and back again.
"Well, then, if I'm to take it for granted that you've no money, where
do you come in?" the late socialist was sharply demanding while my
thoughts wandered.
"I don't come in," said Storm. "I act as Mrs. Shuster's secretary, and
her spokesman. It seems she has no business manager, so my duties may
carry me occasionally in that direction, I begin to see. If she's to
have interests in this affair, I must protect them according to my
judgment. My judgment tells me that they could best be protected by
having an expert for a large shareholder--perhaps the largest. Such a
man would have every incentive to work for the scheme's success. And I
know the right man."
"You do?" Contemptuous incredulity rang in Caspian's emphasis. "Name
him!" This was a challenge.
"Marcel Moncourt."
Ed Caspian laughed a short, hard laugh.
"Marcel Moncourt! Why, that man wouldn't give up his ease to manage a
gilt-edged boarding-house in the country--no, not to please an emperor!"
"Maybe not," said Storm coolly. "There aren't many emperors just now a
Frenchman wants to please."
"You think he'd give the preference to you!"
"Not to me. But to Mr. and Miss Moore. And"--the man glanced at his
employer--"Mrs. Shuster." She flushed at the immense, the inconceivable
compliment, for Marcel Moncourt, I suppose (don't you?), is as grand a
_chef_ as there is in the world, almost a classic figure of his kind,
and a gentleman by birth, they say. Even Mrs. Shuster, who doesn't know
much outside her own immediate circle of interests, had managed to catch
some vague echo of the great Moncourt's fame. As for Larry, he became
suddenly alert as a schoolboy who learns that the best "tuck box" ever
packed is destined for him.
"Good lord!" he exclaimed. "You don't mean you can get the one and only
Marcel to take charge at Kidd's Pines?"
"I know--or used to know--a person who can certainly persuade him to do
so, and on very short notice," said the S. M.
"That _settles_ it, then!" cried Larry. "Can you guess what I was doing?
'Ruling passion strong in death'--and that sort of thing! I was betting
with myself which of you two would come out ahead in the argument and
gain his point over the other. I thought--I must say--the odds were with
Mr. Caspian, for gold weighs down the scales. But Marcel is worth his
weight in gold. Put him in the balance, and the argument's ended. I
didn't mean to take a hand in the game! I felt so confident it would
work out all right either way. But with Marcel and Mr. Storm on one
side, and Mr. Caspian with a gold-mine on the other, we choose
Marcel--don't we, girlie?"
"Who is Marcel?" inquired girlie, thus appealed to.
Larry laughed. "She's just out of a convent," he apologized for his
child's abysmal ignorance. "Marcel Moncourt, my dear," he enlightened
her, "was the _making_ of a millionaire, who would never have been
anybody without him. Once upon a time there was an old man named
Stanislaws, not particularly interesting nor intelligent except as a
money grubber--oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Caspian, I forgot he was
related to you!--but he was lucky, and the best bit of luck he ever had
was getting hold of this Marcel as _chef_ and general manager of his
establishment. No one had bothered about Mr. Stanislaws before, rich as
he was, but with Marcel at the helm, he could have any one he liked as
his guest, from a foreign prince or an American President to a Pierpont
Morgan. Of course they all tried to get Marcel away; but he was like
iron to the magnet--none of us could ever understand why. It looked
almost like a mystery! When there were no more Stanislaws on earth,
then, and not till then, Marcel considered himself free. He had the
world to choose from; and he chose to rest. He is now a gentleman of
leisure. Any one starting a hotel who could secure Marcel would be
made--made! But I should have said no hope, short of a Fifth Avenue
palace, if that. No more hope for us than of getting the Angel Gabriel
to stand blowing his trumpet in front of the door."
"There is no hope. I'd stake my life on that," said Caspian
emphatically. "When I came into my cousin's money, after the poor old
man's murder and all the other tragedies, I offered Marcel a salary of
fifteen thousand dollars a year to come to me. By Jove, I'd have built a
house to fit him. But he wouldn't listen. Tired of work was his only
excuse."
"Tired of making millionaires popular, perhaps," murmured Mr. Storm to a
picture of Cousin John Randolph Payton on the wall.
Caspian's heavenly blue eyes snapped with another kind of blue fire. "I
should say that no power except that of _blackmail_ could induce Marcel
Moncourt to take any interest, active or financial, in our scheme down
here. Perhaps that is your secret?"
If I hadn't seen the steerage passenger smile when Mrs. Shuster accused
him of being a gentleman and offered him cast-off clothes, I should have
expected violence. He smiled much in the same way now, to Pat's relief
and Larry's disappointment. "Perhaps it is," he said. "I've always
thought it must be exciting to be a blackmailer. Anyhow, it _is_ my
secret. If I can get--or, rather, if my friend can get--Marcel to put
money and gray matter into Kidd's Pines as a hotel, Mr. Moore--Miss
Moore, will you have him--and the Syndicate?"
"We would have him and the devil!" cried Larry.
Ed Caspian looked as if he suspected that having Marcel and Peter Storm
might turn out much the same thing. But he was the only "No," and the
"Ayes" had it.
Afterward Mrs. Shuster told me that Ed Caspian vowed to find out all
about our Ship's Mystery if it took his last penny. So we may "see some
fun," as Larry says.
But perhaps you've had enough of our scheme and schemers for the moment,
Mercedes mia!
Ever your loving MOLLY.
P. S. I suppose he _can't_ be a blackmailer? He might be _anything_!
IV
PATRICIA MOORE TO ADRIENNE DE MONCOURT, HER BEST FRIEND IN THE CONVENT
SCHOOL AT NEUILLY
_Kidd's Pines, Long Island,_
_April 3d._
MA CHERIE:
_J'ai beaucoup de choses a dire_--oh no, I forgot--you asked me to write
in English, because it would help your spelling. That was a large
compliment, _mon petit choux_, but _do_ look up the most difficult words
in the dictionary. It would be more safe. I am trying to think in
English, but I find I think faster in French still; and I need to think
extremely fast now, as fast as heat lightning. _Aussi_ I dream in
French, about American people, which mixes me up; and one laughs when I
don't get my sentences right. You must not take me for a model, though I
will do all my possible, and improve as the time passes on.