Lucy of the stars

Front matter

OR PALMER bO

BOOKS BY FREDERICK PALMER PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

WITH KUROKI IN MANCHURIA. With 24 Full-page Illustrations, iamo . . . Net, $1.50

Contents

I. The Portrait of a Lady . .

II. When Arthur Came . . .

III. "What a Boy You Are!" .

II II

HAVING at the age of twenty-nine mortgaged all the property which his father had left unattached, Henry Edward Steadley, sixth Earl of Carniston, married the daughter of an American plough manufacturer. "The amiable Carny has turned under his wild oats and sowed a crop of stocks and bonds," ran the saying of the time. Lady Carniston had died at the birth of her only child, Arthur, who had grown to manhood with the distinction of the Steadley countenance softened by her own dollish good looks.

"There are a good many mothers of marriageable daughters" — if we may quote the same lady who has given us our information about Lucy — "who would like to know how much of the plough manufacturer's fortune is left. Arthur is very nice, even if he is so shy and prefers to spend his time with professors and dreaming by the sea. The earl has leased his town-house for fifteen years and lives modestly. Some think that this dandy of a past generation has turned miser as well as hermit ; some say Monte Carlo. However, he gives his son a good allowance — possibly because it keeps him away from home and he is amazed that a Steadley should have done well at Oxford instead of illy at the card-table."

After he left the university Arthur pursued his bent for science, which brought him the acquaintance of Lord Brent and, later, of Dr. von Kar and Lucy. Upon his first appearance before a learned society the members received him with bland consideration owing to his station. They wished, besides, to encourage the example which he was setting to a class of society too much given to yachts and horses and automobiling. When he had finished his paper the earnestness of their praise was undeniable. He acknowledged their tribute with a blushing and girlish bashfulness which is not unbecoming if the recipient be erect and athletic. This characteristic, entirely contrary to all the records of the Steadley nature, was doubtless inherited from his mother, who was remembered by the few who knew her as a shy girl of twenty, a little overcome by her position.

Never had Arthur regretted so much his diffidence as on the afternoon when he stood on Dr. von Kar's doorstep, having come straight from Christiania. His plan of action had contemplated that Lucy would receive him at the tea-table. Her sudden appearance when she herself opened the door stunned him a little and changed the lines of the play without previous notice to one of the actors. Lucy's eyes still glistened with the moisture of the tears which she had wiped away; she had never looked more lively or attractive.

"Back from Norway so soon?'' she exclaimed, with a questioning pucker of her eyebrows.

"And in time for tea !" His answer sounded flippant and hopelessly inadequate to his own ears.

Ten minutes later nothing but commonplaces had passed between them, and tea had been brewed while he chatted aimlessly of his past fortnight. He realised that he was phonographic, and still he talked on. If only she would give him an opening, he kept thinking. But she had ceased to be sympathetic. She sat at the table volunteering no remarks, pretending to listen when she could not have repeated the idea, let alone the detail, of what he had been saying. As her cup in one hand came in touch with the saucer in the other, she felt them beating a little tattoo. Did he hear it? she asked herself, as she suddenly returned both to the table. Hardly. He had just caught his own cup and saucer at the same trick.

Her dream of the way the thing should happen had been as false as his. Her woman's subtlety and intuition had given him an opportunity with the first words of her greeting. A man who went away for six weeks did not return in two unless he had some definite object. Hadn't she intimated as much, with the result that he had said that he was in time for tea ? Lucy was trying to keep herself under control ; to bring herself back to earth from the soarings which had followed her receipt of his telegram.

"I am talking like a parrot!" he said abruptly. "Does all this interest you?"

"Immensely!" she said, as nonchalantly as if she were asking him whether he would have one lump or two. Her manner made him fumble again.

"It — it isn't interesting to me," he said plaintively.

"Really!" she rejoined loftily. "That makes it all the more kind of you. A little sacrifice for the entertainment of others is good for young men, I've heard say."

He rolled up his gloves and thrust them absently in his cuff, where he usually carried his handkerchief.

"Lucy !" He uttered her name as if it were the call of a wounded officer for first aid on the battlefield.

"You will have another cup?" she asked.

He shook his head vacantly. "Lucy!" he repeated, "nobody else is coming this afternoon, is there ?"

uMy teas are not R. S. V. P., as you know," she rejoined.

"Oh !" was all he could say to that. He pulled at his little moustache, he blushed; and he was very handsome, as she had always thought. uLucy — if you would play for me it — it would help !"

She lifted her brows in perplexity.

"I mean, won't you please play for me?" he went on.

"That is always a good plan when conversation is running low," she said, rising.

Not that he really wanted her to play. He wanted to break what seemed about to become an endless chain of mental confusion. Once her fingers were running over the keys he recovered himself. Suddenly, without warning — by prehistoric male right, perhaps — he reached down and seized her hands in his. Her hands were small and she was small, and he was tall and masculine.

"The sum of it all is, Lucy, that I love you," he said. "I have come back to you from Norway, as I would have come back to you from Peru or Thibet when the truth found me, to ask you to be my wife."

Less than an hour before, in a transport of imagination, she had seen him in the same attitude as he stood now, and she had framed an answer. But what did she actually say when the time came, this Lucy?

"Arthur, it is not becoming to you to get so red!"

Was that her triumph for his delay, or only the inborn mischief of her? Of this we are at least sure — it was like her.

He did not frown or protest at her flippancy. He only went straight on in manly fashion.

"It's my heart trying to find its way to you," he said, unconscious of any gallantry, of anything except the truth. "I love you, Lucy. All I have I give, and for all I lack I crave your forgiveness and charity and help. I ask you to be my wife."

"You love me?" she said softly.

"Adorably!" he answered.

She bowed her head a little lower. "I love you, too — adorably," she could not help saying. As he released her hands they went upward to him and his went downward to draw her into his arms.

She was the first to break the bonds of their silence, and she broke them with a little sob as she drew away and looked at him with the steady counsel of a new familiarity, her hands still clasped in his.

"I must tell you," she said, as if this were some sin to confess in order to clear her conscience, "that after your second telegram I thought that you were coming to say this. I wanted to hear you say it — oh, that has been very sweet, Arthur — and I was afraid to have you say it, after all. I am only a girl, not a goddess of wisdom. I am proud and happy that you do love me and have told me so, and, Arthur "

He could feel in her finger-tips the tremour that ran through her as she bent closer to him. Then she sprang away.

"You sit in that chair and I will sit in this I" she cried imperatively. "Our hands must not even touch. That fuses us and makes us forget that we are responsible beings. We must come down from the stars and be grave and brave and reasonable."

Such was her directness and the authority of her charm that he obeyed instinctively.

"Our error, dear Arthur/' she said, slowly and insistently, "is that we forget that we are not living in a world composed solely of you and me. If there weren't any other world — no world of ancestry, no living world around us — if I were cold enough not to have any crotchets in my head, everything would be so — so simple."

Her hand was stretched toward him in an appealing gesture. He went to her, seized it in his own, and sank half kneeling beside her.

"I have learned in this month's absence from you 18 that there is no world except that of you and me. Do the ancestors concern us? They are dead. If you need them, there are enough on my father's side for two. If you are in awe of them, why, my mother's father began life as a blacksmith. And the living world? Let that smile or weep, as it pleases. Even if I did not love you, I know of no girl so fit to be a countess as you !"

"I would be your choice as a countess as well as a wife?"

"Yes."

"You tempt me, great sir. Might I whisper in your ear that I have seen a number of grand dames who were not gifted with wit, wisdom, or the art of dress. Sometimes I thought that if I had their cards and their position I might — well, I might play the game almost as well as they."

"You shall have both cards and position," he added.

"You being the ace of trumps, with a long suit and a double ruff!" She caught the fever of the idea, and for the moment was veritably the Countess of Carniston. "I should always be busy. There is nothing I hate so much as being still. I feel like a plant, then. I need not always amuse others; sometimes others would amuse me. You could let yourself out and allow all your forces to play. A place all secure — kind to our servants, just to our tenants — not only playing, but making the game together ! That is it, making the game !"

Thus she carried herself to a pitch of excitement; and then, suddenly, the barrier which she could build as rapidly as she could tear it down rose between her and her vision of happiness. With fresh intensity her fear of the unknowable enveloped her.

uThis comes of letting you hold my hand, wicked one!" she said, drawing away from him. "You forget that we are to be grave and brave and reasonable. Now, listen — no, no holding of hands! — to the story of this Lucy from nowhere."

She told him all that her father had told her, and how her father's serenity, his strength, his art of smiling and of tearful reproach, and her own fears of spoiling the enchantment of their happy existence, had kept the rest from her.

"My only memory is of this house, and always that portrait has hung over his desk — that beautiful woman, always young while my father grows old ! To-day her features have burned themselves into my brain. Come ! I want you to look at her and help me lay my ghosts. It is not all this — this thing itself so much as the way it has worked on my imagination that hurts," she said, as they went together into the study.

"Can she be my mother?" she asked, after Arthur had bent close to the portrait and studied it sharply.

He told himself that by force of nature this woman might have been the vessel which once held Lucy, but in letting the child go her selfishness had parted with none of her own flesh and blood. Before he spoke he smiled in the manner of one who closes the incident of humouring another's vagaries.

"I don't know, dear," he said. "Furthermore, I don't care, and I am not going to think of it again. I'm glad, if she is your mother, that you don't look like her."

"Oh, Arthur, you do think that!" For, naturally, Lucy's regret had been that she was not beautiful, not realising that beauty and charm do not always go together, and of the two charm is the more enduring. "Arthur, it's nice of you to say so, and still nicer of you to believe so. Believing! That is everything, isn't it?"

As they returned to the other room he was leading, and for the time being the ghosts were laid.

"After I had wired you that I was coming I received a telegram from my father saying that he wished particularly to see me," he explained at length. "He is at Burbridge. As soon as I have seen him I shall return to town. Then for our plans!"

"We've been too full of our happiness for such little details," she rejoined, laughing.

"And we will be married soon? Shall it be soon?"

Could she, resting in his arms, say him no? Lost in the joy of the present, the living moment, which shut out all yesterdays and all to-morrows, she answered :

"Soon — very soon."

Dr. von Kar had an engagement for the evening. When Lucy learned at dinner that it was not important, she pressed him to remain with her and send a note in excuse.

"It's such a chilly evening, father, that you can imagine you have a cold," she urged.

"I would like to," he said. "I don't see much of you, Lucie dear, since you know so many people. I ought really to go, though."

"I want you to-night," she pleaded. "I'm in a mood when I must talk. You will stay?"

He lifted his brows at her strange earnestness, regarded her thoughtfully, and then consented.

She sparkled in thanking him, and quickly was the Lucy who never seemed to have a thought that was not merry. Through the meal she kept him smiling, mostly by her accounts of the people she met and her mimicry. After coffee, when he had seated himself for the evening, she dropped onto the arm of his big chair.

"Father, I've been good and patient, haven't I? When I have asked you to tell me who I am, you have answered by bringing my love into question. It did not occur to you that I might turn the tables — I might bring your love into question if you refused longer to tell me about my mother."

Her tone told him that this was a mood indeed, and a new mood, which he had long feared might come. He was quick to give her something, lest she might demand all.

"I will tell you about our ancestry," he said easily. "It is like the registry of foreign legations, my dear. My father was German and his mother was Russian. My mother was a Frenchwoman — bless her! — and her mother was English. My father died when I was young. I love France, where I spent my youth. When the Germans were at our doors I fought for France with more than the ardour of a Frenchman. There is Italian blood, too. It is aristocratic, as is the Russian and the French, while the German belongs to burghers and plodding scholars. Do you wonder that I inherited a destiny of restlessness or you a talent for languages and music? Do you wonder at your cleverness, Lucie? Few have better blood," he assured her.

Talent for languages or for music, or mere cleverness, meant nothing to her at this juncture except exasperations which had taken her into a world where other things were needed.

"But that does not tell me." She was intense, almost vehement. " Why have you kept that portrait over your desk for so many years ? Was she my mother? Your wife? A time may come — oh, I don't want it to, but it may ! — when my love will not stand secrecy."

The doctor realised that a crisis was at hand. His decision was quickly made.

"She was your mother in honourable marriage," he said; which was true.

"And where is she now?" she demanded. "Where?"

"She is dead." This was not true, as he knew. Boldly he had told the falsehood, thinking to bring himself peace and her happiness.

Lucy drew very close to her father. She had no more questions to ask, as she told him. Only a little of the mystery was solved, but enough for her. The strong current of her love ran back to him, bearing with it overflowing sympathy for that misfortune, whatever it was, that had sealed his past.

"This — this and something else makes me hap- 24 pier to-night than I have ever been before," she said.

The meaning of her words, which he dimly heard, wholly escaped him. He was enjoying the relief of a difficulty passed, and his recollection was carrying him back to the lady of the portrait.

Ill

"what a boy you are!"

WHEN there is no one in the big seats behind," said Lucy, "I'm always fearful that the rear of the car may fall off, and I'm always looking back to see that it's still fast."

"Your luggage is in there," Arthur observed.

"Which is myself. If I should lose that I could not appear for dinner. The older a woman grows the more she depends on it, till by and by she is only a skeleton and the luggage is the flesh. I once met an American millionairess who had a hundred and seventy-five boxes. My impression was that she would have been glad to have kept some of the flesh in the boxes and saved herself lacing. One, I believe, was for carrying her keys and another the card-index system by which the maids located her different gowns. The maids served in shifts."

This nervous chatter of Lucy's was only to carry on. When a couple have a hundred-and-thirtymile ride before them, and they have a vital secret cc

What a Boy You Are!

to discuss, they wait till they are out of the crush of the cabs, the omnibuses and the crowds.

"I like it," Lucy went on, "with this big car and only ourselves. There's a splendid luxury about it — especially this morning, Arthur."

Her eyes, her chin, her mouth smiled at him in signal of their understanding — the understanding of the two in a motor which was crossing Waterloo Bridge.

uIn a runabout you feel stuffy — as if you were living in a tiny apartment," Lucy continued. "When two are in a big car and going twenty miles an hour, with the back seats empty, they own a town and a country-house; at thirty miles an hour they have added a shooting-box ; at forty, they have added a villa on the Riviera ; at fifty, you feel like a flying ghost who owns the world and wonders if he will spin off into space at the next turning or arrive at his ancestral home in time for dinner. To my imagination it is all in those empty seats. They make you mighty. How could anything stop you when they still keep on coming behind."

He had a deal to tell her, once they were free of the traffic. The previous night she had received a telegram from the Earl of Carniston himself, asking her to spend a day and a night at Burbridge, his country seat. Her amazement measurably tempered her elation. As her father was at the house when Arthur came for her, there had been no time for explanation then. When they passed out of the suburbs into the country, and he gave the machine something under the lawful speed, she said :

"That's better than going so fast — better than vain things like villas and mansions and shooting. It's intimate and confidential. Come, it is time for the chauffeur to talk."

"You were a little surprised at such quick results, Lucy?" he asked, proudly. "There's even more and better news than you could have imagined. What will you say when I tell you that my father knows that we are engaged?"

"And he sent for me after that ! Really !" She would not allow herself fully to credit the statement while it was still unqualified.

"Yes. I don't know what it was that my father wanted to see me particularly about, I'm sure. Three or four times in the last year he has sent for me. I never knew him to do that before. On each occasion he said that we must have a talk after dinner or to-morrow morning, and somehow he never came to the point. The most that he ever said was that I was twenty-seven years old and pretty soon I would have to settle down. On Thursday we had some Americans at the house — a Miss Hodges and a Mr. and Mrs. Belmore. Miss Hodges is a stunning girl of a type. Immensely

"What a Boy You Are!"

rich; a good catch for some poor chap, I should say. I don't know just what to make of her. The Belmores are delightful — the kind of Americans who are certain of themselves, and seem to like their own way and their own country too well to think of changing, and yet not in the slightest degree aggressive. An American politician by the name of John Frane was along also. A decidedly clever man, I should say — one of those electric Americans — strong and outspoken. I liked him. He worships Miss Hodges, and Miss Hodges is learning to like castles. I'll be interested to know what comes of "

"Arthur," she interrupted in vexation, "let us pass over the discovery of America. What I am dying to know is why your father invited me."

"Yes, the Belmores and Miss Hodges don't have much to do with that."

"Not unless your father wants you to marry Miss Hodges," she put in. "Most fathers want their sons to marry rich girls."

"If he does, he's changed his mind. After they had gone yesterday he did ask me how I liked her. It was then that I found my tongue. I was full of you after being with those people for two days "

"You were, Arthur — you were, just the same?" she asked intently.

"The loneliest man in England! So I told him that I loved you and was going to marry you, quite as if the whole thing was arranged and nothing could stop me."

"Bravo!" She liked his courage. "And what did he say? I'll not break into song till I hear that."

"My father does not talk much. You can never tell his thoughts by his face. He is most impersonal. As a father he is a mate for yours, in that respect. Precisely what he did was to whistle. Then he went over to the table and lighted a cigarette and stood with his back to the grate, smiling at me as if I were something new and rather pleasing.

" 'I remember her,' he said. 'She plays billiards well for a woman, and she mimicked old Gracey perfectly. What a boy you are! How long has this been going on?'

"Then I told him everything, and why I had come back. He listened attentively, his features working in a strange way.

" 'It's your affair, not mine, I see,' he said, still smiling beatifically. 'I have never believed that marriages made in heaven were exempt from catastrophes; nor has my scepticism on that point ever affected my opinion of those which are strictly earthy. She would make a very charming count-

"What a Boy You Are!"

ess, I am sure. While we don't want to boil, of course, still we need the effervescence of an occasional clever woman among the peeresses. It's a sacrifice one should make for the good of the caste, I suppose.

" 'What a boy you are !" he said again, after a pause. 'To think of you twenty-seven years old — and a Steadley, too ! It's beautiful, I must say.' "

"Those were his exact words?" Lucy asked keenly.

"Yes."

"You say he smiled when he said it?"

"All the while, after that first whistle."

Lucy made a grimace of perplexity.

"What is your father's method ? Is he cynical ?" she asked.

"No, I can't say that he is. To tell the truth, now you've put it that way, it doesn't seem to me as if I knew my father, except he's always amiable — 'the amiable Carniston,' they call him." Arthur hastened on with his story. "Then he suggested that he ought to know you better, and himself wrote the telegram which you received. That is all. Hasn't it worked out wonderfully?"

"Yes," Lucy admitted. Where he saw clearly she was in doubt. She was going to an uncertainty which seemed worse to such a nature as hers than the anticipation of downright opposition.

"Lucy, you are sad and it's a triumph. I don't understand."

"No, I'm trying to take it all in. It seems as if we were in fairyland and I was waiting to wake up," she said dubiously.

"I understand. It's because you don't appreciate yourself. He has seen you once and felt your charm. That has opened the door of opportunity. All you have to do is to make him captive as you have me, which you will do to-night. You must be in your best form."

"Which means that I must be the play-actress."

"No, not at all."

"I myself being a play-actress — is that it?" she said, with a moue.

He frowned slightly. "You don't mean," he said, "that you don't want to appear at your best — not for me — not for our cause?"

"I do ! I will ! I'm only awed at the prospect of such a test. It's the test of my life, Arthur."

Though she smiled, it was as one who muses. At the inn where they made a long hour for luncheon, she asked him many questions about his father's nature and habits.

"Studying my part!" she interjected. "It's going to be an ordeal for me, Arthur, and you must help. Let's arrive a little late, so I shall have no time to talk to him before dinner."

"What a Boy You Are!"

Accordingly, he regulated the speed of the machine to that end, and it was dusk when they reached Burbridge, where she was met on the landing by Mrs. Ormley, an elder sister of the earl, who was visiting her brother. Mrs. Ormley was a partial invalid, who made a good deal of the fact. On the plea of indisposition she asked Lucy to excuse her from going to dinner.

When Lucy came downstairs half an hour later, Arthur met her in the hall.

"If there are rocks ahead or the current is swift, look across the table and encourage me," she begged. "It's much more difficult than appearing in a play, you know. There you have to feel your part ; here I am the part. And, Arthur, how do I look?"

"Divine!"

"You are staring straight into my eyes. I don't mean my face; I mean my gown."

"Divine!" he repeated, with a sweeping glance at the gown and a longer look into her eyes again. "You'll carry it through. If you are on the wrong tack I'll put some salt on my plate. You'll carry it through, though; you won't have stage fright. You're always splendid." He caught her hands in his and the kiss was sweet to her; for she was not certain that after the interview with his father she might, with propriety, have another.

"I haven't forgotten that game of billiards," were the earl's first words, "or the way you imitated old Gracey when he missed a shot. On my word, he is the most stupendous bore I ever played with."

"I'll try you another game after dinner," she rejoined brightly, "if you will give me forty."

"As I remember your playing, that is rather biggish odds. However, I will take you on."

Carniston had not meant to be quite so affable. Lucy's slightness, her grace, the memory of her charm on another occasion, had inevitably made her appearance pleasant to him.

"From my window upstairs I saw you arrive," he said. "I didn't come to the door because I know how stiff and sticky one feels when he gets out of the motor-car. He does not want to parley at all, but to go straight to the tub."

"That's why we were late. I mean, I thought I would like to meet you first at dinner," Lucy said impulsively; and then she looked at Arthur's salt, but he was not taking any.