The autocrat

Chapter I

A LOG crackled sharply in the wide fireplace, fell apart with a little hissing sigh and grayed slowly at the rounded ends, while fresh flames leaped with fierce red lust at the virginal edges. A bronze clock on the mantel ticked monotonously, insistently. A chair creaked as a little lady in a lace shawl leaned forward to rest an elbow on her knees. Then again there was only the tick-tick of the bronze clock.

The girl near the long windows at the opposite end of the room turned silently and for a moment gazed specu¬ latively at the little woman before the fireplace. A faint smile lifted the corners of her lips, and her eyebrows moved slightly. Her aunt was a never failing source of amusement to Kathryn Lambert, and just now she was smiling in anticipated amusement. She was wondering if the thing which she was about to confide would shock her aunt out of her many affectations into an unfamiliar naturalness.

Mrs. Edgar Van Kemp was this minute suffering from the effect of an affectation, though never would she have admitted it. One could not be really British and at the same time have one’s house heated by anything but fireplaces. And little Mrs. Van Kemp was British, uncompromisingly British, if not by birth at least by adoption and absorption.

Grate fires versus steam heat was a topic which insured Mrs. Van Kemp’s household against dullness and the tedious silences that are not unusual even in the best of families. It was a subject that could always be introduced when one did not feel mentally fit and wished to “start something. ,, Kathryn Lambert who made her home with the Van Kemps, loathed discussions about things which contributed to one’s comfort, but she loved comfort. Aristocratic and autocratic, she scorned anything so sordid as an argument, nevertheless she was like a queen outraged when comforts were denied her.

Edgar Van Kemp on the contrary found open arguments so much more warming than open fireplaces, that not only did he find in them nothing sordid, but he courted them. His wife might be as British as she liked, he at least re¬ mained uncompromisingly and argumentatively American.

Then there were the servants—a retinue in which Eng¬ land and America were about equally represented. And there were the friends who romanced about fireplaces and the friends who—to use Van Kemp’s exact expression—“goosefleshed” at mention of any but the most adequate of heating systems. But little Mrs. Van Kemp remained mistress of her house. Than be a plebeianistic American she would rather have pneumonia in both lungs.

The Van Kemp living-room was long and low-ceilinged. Its show of splendor and “indecently new” furnishings were softened and prematurely aged by the flickering light of the log fire. There being to-night no other light in the room, the leaping flames seemed to find gleeful delight in the gro¬ tesque shadows which danced fantastically against the walls.

Mrs. Van Kemp glanced cautiously up at her niece. The girl’s face was turned once more toward the frosted window, and the little lady indulged in a long repressed shiver andl held out her hands imploringly to the logs. 4 i

The figure of the girl stirred, crossed the room to the^ fireplace and stretched a slender arm along the onyx mantel..’

“It’s rather a bad night out, and it’s not,” a faint flicker] of mischief flashed like a firelight shadow across her face,,- “what one would call a perfectly good night within. I am* afraid, Estelle dear, that you are too thinly clad for this temperature. Now flannels would-” 1

“I am quite comfortable, thank you.” The older woman frowned and a flush suffused her thin white skin. “Though it is a beastly night, isn’t it ?”

“About the beastliest of the season. It looks out there,” the younger woman indicated the window, “as if the earth were to be completely blanketed—utterly obliterated by that blinding, swirling monster that is so deceptively soft and white.”

“Ugh!” Mrs. Van Kemp shuddered. “You have the un* kindest imagination, Kathryn.”

“Have I?” The girl laughed softly. “I wonder,” her lovely head tipped speculatively to one side, “just how unkind it is going to be to me.”

Mrs. Van Kemp pursed her delicately rouged lips. Purs¬ ing one’s lips was a convincing way of simulating thought^ And Kathryn did have such a terrifying habit of talking a little beyond one. j

“I’m sure you might do well to teach your imagination to do less—less hurdling.” Little Mrs. Van Kemp glowed. Hurdling was quite an inspiration and it was so undeniably English.

“If it isn’t kind to me—there is the Lambert pride to salve my hurt.” Mrs. Van Kemp’s inspiration had missed itg mark. “I’m afraid Fm a bit selfish, just a bit like you, auntie dear.”

Mrs. Van Kemp winced. Always she had stood a little in awe of this tall young daughter of her husband’s dead sister.

“Why the ‘auntie dear’ ?” She chose as always to ignore a jeer from the gallery. Anything that did not quite appeal to Mrs. Van Kemp was from the gallery.

The girl shrugged her shoulders, looked down into the other woman’s face with a provocative smile and answered naively, her voice which was marvelously low and sweet, contrasting delightfully with the high pitched, petulant voice of her aunt-in-law.

“You are always ‘auntie/ when I feel that one of us needs a scolding. I think we both need it to-night.”

“I was not aware that so superior a being as Kathryn Lambert ever needed scolding.”

“She doesn’t need it often and when she does,” the girl extended one slim hand and holding it against the firelight, gazed at the thin red lines which showed between the slender fingers, “fate scolds her and, astonishing as it may seem, fate appears to be immune to all her charms and artifices. Fate is such a merciless tyrant, isn’t she?”

Mrs. Van Kemp shivered.

“Kathryn, you’re positively weird. It isn’t so much what you are saying as—as what you are leaving unsaid. Why, I can see your dreadful old fate slinking about over there in that murky corner.”

There was a faint ripple of girlish laughter, not altogether skeptical.

“I had thought it was close at hand to-night. Shall I tell you what I am about to do for which fate may scold me?”

Estelle Van Kemp shrank deeper into her big arm chair.

“No!” She held up a jeweled hand imploringly. “I don’t wish you to tell me anything when you are in this devil-may-care mood. You’ve given me a chill as it is.”

“If you’ve a chill, Estelle, you’ve only your lack of civil¬ ized heating devices to blame for it, but we shall not bring forth that particular family skeleton to-night. There is some¬ thing of greater importance to be discussed.” There was a pause that was oddly like a whimsical smile, though the corners of the girl’s lips gave no evidence of lifting. “I have decided to marry.”

Estelle Van Kemp drew one foot slowly from under her and sat rigidly upright.

“Kathie dear! Really!” She reached for Kathryn’s free hand which happened to be just a few inches too far away. “Do tell me about it!”

Kathryn Lambert’s gaze left Mrs. Van Kemp’s eager face and drifted round the shadowy room. It came at last to rest on an ivory miniature that was but the length of a hand from her elbow on the onyx mantel. A pair of sea blue eyes very like her own looked back at her from the miniature, and for the space of a minute mother and daughter gazed tenderly at each other across the abyss which separates the dead from the living. '

Kathryn Lambert’s mother had been the petted idol of a large family of which she was the youngest member. With five brothers and no sisters it was but natural that she should learn to swim as far and ride as hard as any one of the five brothers who were her slaves.

The strenuous sports of the great outdoors filled her life until she came to the moment of her debut. It was then that a new game was added to her repertoire. Innocently but with no lesser degree of enthusiasm than that which she displayed in her other games, she became an amateur husband hunter, with every chance of becoming a professional in a very short while.

She hunted as hard as she rode and swam, and she did it as unconsciously and as delightfully. She could not have told you just why she liked to feel her slim young body sliding through the water nor could she have defined or described her enjoyment of riding. And so it was with the husband hunting. She did not know why men without worldly means failed to attract her. She did not know why the prospect of marriage fascinated her. She knew simply that she loved glamour—victory, and vaguely she felt that finding and marrying the right man, the man who could best supply the glamour, would be winning the game .

Of suitors there were many but either the quality or the quantity of their proffered glamour failed to please her until cynical Jack Lambert’s crossed her orbit. Jack Lambert had city houses and country houses, stables and kennels, and worlds and worlds of money. He was a Virginian and the girl tried to believe that it was his soft Southern drawl which attracted her.

They were married and several unborn Lamberts were sac¬ rificed to the young wife’s love for hard riding. Once in an open field on the Virginia estate, they had picked her up on the wrong side of a hurdle where she had fallen from her horse, and carried her, unconscious in her gay red hunt¬ ing coat and shining black boots, to the great colonial house a mile away. An hour later a tiny premature atom of humanity had made its debut into the world and had gone as suddenly out of it.

It was after this that the young wife learned to know the sterner side of her husband’s character. Perhaps it was be¬ cause she liked the novelty that she obeyed when he com¬ manded. Two years later Kathryn was born. A thin, half dead infant who seemed to catch hold of life only when Chloe, the nurse, filled the tiny lungs with air from her own black breast.

“Ah dess blowed gentle-like intuh huh mouf an’ Lor’ bress you! She done open huh eyes. Ain’t it de trufe dat de chile hab got de breaf of mah life in huh angel body?” Chloe never tired of telling this, and Kathryn Lambert had always been her old black mammy’s angel child.

When Kathryn’s father died his widow took Kathryn and a retinue of servants to Paris where, with a reckless hand she bought the glamour and the excitement she so loved. When Kathryn was eighteen they returned to America, and it was about this time that Kathryn’s share in the Lam¬ bert estate began to follow in the wake of her mother’s. Jack Lambert had made no provision for the protection of his widow and child against reckless extravagances, pits made attractive by promises of greater wealth, unprincipled lawyers and agents. There had been no restrictions in his will. And since there remained living but one of the five brothers with whom Kathryn’s mother had ridden through her youth, and he too adoring to strenuously interfere, securities and real estate holdings were converted one way and another into social triumphs. Then one day the reckless little widow ran her racing car over an embankment ... It was the sort of end everybody had always predicted for her. For months following the tragedy, her orphaned daughter seemed unable to realize that the gay little butterfly whose wings had flut¬ tered so incessantly was still at last.

Of the vast Lambert fortune there remained for Kathryn the pittance of an income and the country estate in Virginia. Edgar Van Kemp, her mother’s surviving brother, insisted that she make her home with him, and after another year abroad and a season in Virginia, she had taken up her abode with the Van Kemps. Edgar Van Kemp became very fond of her, and because Kathryn was a Lambert of Virginia, Estelle Van Kemp looked upon her as a most valuable social asset, and was no end proud of her.

Kathryn was an unusual person in that she was not afraid to look her life squarely in the face and acknowledge its defects. Poverty or near poverty was its most twisted feature, and more than once she had shocked Estelle by the cool, proud manner in which she had discussed its ugliness and the possible ways in which it might be corrected. Surgeons straightened crooked noses. Marriage might be made to perform miracles with an empty check book. Of course, there were business careers, and it was true as Estelle pointed out, that many women of the English peerage had

gone into trade, but a Lambert of Virginia - And with

a thin smile of disdain, Kathryn had banished trade.

Marriage, then, remained the most possible of all the pos¬ sible means of correcting her financial condition, and it was not to be wondered at that Estelle Van Kemp sat suddenly upright at Kathryn’s announcement that she had decided to marry. Breathlessly she caught Kathryn away from the miniature.

“Who is he, Kathryn ?”

“John Harrington.”

“Kathryn!” After a slight pause: “When did he ask you?”

The girl smiled nonchalantly down at her aunt, her eyes half closed.

“He has not asked me—yet.”

Mrs. Van Kemp gasped and sank back in her chair with a tremulous sigh.

“And to think,” she communed aloud to herself, “that I am the aunt by marriage to anything so impregnated with conceit!”

When one’s outraged sense of dignity demanded no less than a pose of pained resignation, it was most annoying to be the victim of one’s curiosity. But of course, she must know the details.

“Will you advise the gentleman as to your decision before you announce your engagement to him?”

“I think that would be the fair and proper thing. Don’t you ?”

Mrs. Van Kemp groaned.

“Fair! Proper! My dear, I-”

“Seriously, Estelle,” once more the blue eyes half closed and the long dark lashes screened them, “I must marry some day, and of course I must marry money—lots and lots of money. I have been so well trained in the science of making two dollars do the work of one.” The blue eyes lifted with tender apology to the miniature on the mantel.

“And the man?” Estelle’s voice was expressionless.

Kathryn Lambert shrugged her shoulders and ran the pink tips of her tapering fingers down the satiny surface of her slender white throat.

“Mr. Harrington will marry me for what I have to give him. Were I less beautiful, less clever, less well-born, do you think John Harrington would look with so much in¬ terest at my face or listen so attentively to my slightest word?”

From most women this would have been proof of a tre¬ mendous egotism. When Kathryn Lambert said it, it be¬ came merely a voiced fact. She was such a radiantly lovely creature and open homage had so long been hers, that her knowledge of her beauty and charm could scarcely be called vanity. She would have had to be deaf and blind from infancy to have remained unconscious of her loveliness. Had those around her been mute, their eyes would have told her what their lips could not. Then too, there was always her mirror. She knew the value of her many charms and not one of them was ever allowed to rust through lack of use. The one difference between her and most other beautiful women, lay in the fact that she was whimsically frank about the knowledge of her power, frank at least with herself.

She was past mistress of all the little artifices with which women for ages have sharpened their arrows. She knew for example just what emotion could be kindled in the mascu¬ line breast, by the challenge in the lifting of an eyebrow. And she knew just what sort of man would delight in the challenge without taking advantage of it, even as she knew the type of man who was most easily enslaved by the shy drooping of her white eyelids—the demure screening of her azure eyes. There was an odd, tremulous smile that be¬ longed to the soft music which always accompanies the sad moment of the drama. And there was the provocative, quizzical smile that set romance to jazz.

Noting that the effect of her artifices was similar to that attained by music, Kathryn had mentally dubbed these arti¬ fices “heart measures.” Rather whimsically she came to look upon herself as an instrument—well varnished, polished and in perfect tune, but without her skilled playing, of no greater interest than a beautifully finished piano when its keys are untouched, its wires silent. She watched other women prac¬ ticing their more or less innocent hokum, and wondered how many of them like herself, played their “heart measures” con¬ sciously.

Chapter II

“T)UT, Kathie,”—Mrs. Van Kemp began most of her

I) sentences with but, believing that that word would cover all that was required of an aunt-by-marriage when arguments with Kathryn seemed to be the thing in order,—“you have not said that you love Mr. Harrington. Don’t you think you ought to be er—in—love with him?” The little lady spoke very softly and with no rising inflec¬ tion. She was terribly disturbed. Between the conscience that made her argue the subject and the fear that her argu¬ ments might convince , Estelle Van Kemp was most uneasy.

Dropping her arm from the chimneypiece with a ges¬ ture of weariness, Kathryn moved slowly across the room, mechanically kicking back as she went, the upturned corner of a Persian rug.

“Love?” She paused and turned her head. In the faint light her face looked pale and cold. “What has love to do with marriage? Don’t lift your hand to silence me. You do not mean it and you know you do not. You married Edgar Van Kemp the same day he asked you. You were a clerk in his father’s office. Pardon me,” the girl’s voice softened as she saw the woman across the room wince as from a blow. “I have no wish to rattle the bones of any particular skeleton jut I should like you to look at a number of them. The first one is packed away with your marriage certificate. You were not in love with anything at the time you married my uncle, but the prospect of a luxurious future. You told me this yourself at the time you became converted to the second previous religion to the one of which you are now a devotee. I was your unwilling confessor, you remember.

ii

“That you love Edgar Van Kemp now, is proof that one such marriage, at least, was not a failure. Then there are all your friends and mine. How many of them marry be¬ cause they love the person they choose as a partner? The man wants a woman who will not cause to depreciate the value which he attaches to his name, and who will bring forth children that would not put to shame any man less exacting than George Bernard Shaw. If he finds such a woman appeals also to his flesh and to his soul, then he is doubly fortunate and happy. The women marry social po¬ sition or money.

“It sounds rather ugly when it’s put into words, doesn’t it? But you know, Estelle, that it is true. Of course there is always the exception to the rule, but how many of those exceptions can you name offhand?” The girl looked defi¬ antly at her aunt. But that little lady’s only answer was a sigh of hopelessness which was meant to convey to her niece her sorrowful abandonment of the argument. She con¬ sidered as shameful and revolting, the challenge thus tossed at her. This niece of her husband was very trying at times.

“Mr. Harrington loses no opportunity to be with me,” went on the girl. “He has been on the point of declaring himself several times and I have averted the issue. I needed time to weigh the pros and cons of a marriage with him. My dear, don’t look so shocked!”

“Of course, Mr. Harrington is unbelievably rich,” con¬ ceded the mistress of the house, pretending to labor under slow conviction. “He is very rich and is going to be even richer according to Edgar. He has no family and no his¬ tory, so far as the most curious have been able to discover, but these mushroom men with their mushroom fortunes will spring up amongst us and occasionally one of them carries off a fair debutante whose family is proud and old and whose immediate or personal history has been carefully supervised in the making, by governesses, family and friends.”

Kathryn Lambert’s supple young figure stiffened.

*3

John Harrington had neither family nor history so far as she or anyone else knew. Her aunt was right. It was but a few years ago that John Harrington had first been heard from. She recalled the story distinctly. He had plunged into a fight with the sugar trust. Everybody had laughed, everybody except the sugar trust. The members of that organization might have laughed too, had they known just who their antagonist was and what weapons he would use. When weapons are not kept hidden until the last mo¬ ment, there is alwaj^s the chance to blunt the points or to replace loaded cartridges with blank ones, thus insuring a shower of ridicule for the antagonist when his weapons mis¬ carry.

Somehow, diligent as had been the sleuths of the sugar trust, John Harrington and his weapons remained equally mysterious. True, they discovered that he owned and oper¬ ated a toy factory, which he had bought during the last year of the World War, but this discovery told them less than nothing. It added, in fact, to the man’s aura of mystery. A toy factory and Harrington were not compatible. A toy fac¬ tory, indeed! The thing was incongruous! In all proba¬ bility it was a part of the man’s strategy. It was meant to lead them astray. How could a toy factory give the slightest clue to the history or the resources of the man who would fight a trust.

That John Harrington did have resources and powerful weapons was proved by the outcome of that fight. For months after his victory, newspapers that had laughed with the world at the gnat attacking the elephant, printed his name in large black headlines, whenever there happened to be a dearth of sensational news. Then suddenly the busy press discovered that society was lionizing him. All society, that is, except the part made up of ex-sugar-trust men and their dependents. The press was delighted. John Harrington was and would always be a magnet for the press. It was not so much the power of the man which excited interest, but rather the intriguing mystery that veiled him. He nevei* refused to be interviewed, but reporters told their chiefs that it was like interviewing the sphinx. He would make no single statement that could be used as a germ for even a column and a half by the most efficient and imaginative space writer. Perhaps it was the things he did not say that piqued the worthy men of the press and kept them working like beavers to get a story out of John Harrington. They interviewed him upon every pretext and always with the same futility.

Just what was the reason that John Harrington sent these news seeking men away from his office with nothing gained was another of the mysteries that attracted them. That it was not a pose they knew. There was a simplicity about the man that forbade the most suspicious to call him a poseur. That his objection to expressing himself was not altogether a matter of diplomacy was assured by the fact that he worked untiringly though quietly for the people and what he considered their rights with not a care for the men he fought. Inadvertently he had once said: “I believe we should talk less and do more. Less deduction and more production.” The press had made much of that. In fact it had worn the latter phrase threadbare. It had sufficed for whole pages in the Sunday issues, with pictures of the man, bis houses—city and country—his motors, and a long rehash of how he had “smashed single-handed, the most powerful trust in the country.”

The press accentuated and enlarged upon the mysteriousness of the man, though it did it most delicately —sometimes by the clever use of an interrogation mark, sometimes by a series of dashes. To a girl of Kathryn Lambert’s character all this was extremely distasteful. A series of interrogation points and little black lines swam round Mrs. Van Kemp’s niece now as she stood there in the center of the former’s drawing-room. Her lips smiled, but then Kathryn Lambert’s

IS

lips were obedient and could always smile when she so bade them.

“Granted,” she said at last, “that the man’s past and the social status of his family are unknown to us. Still, don’t you think any man is a gentleman about whom the most curious have been able to find nothing that would reflect discredit on his unpretentious name?” The velvety blue eyes were turned toward the fire as she spoke and it was as though she were trying to convince herself of the merit in her theory, for her aunt had risen with a little sound of protest, and she had taken no notice.

“As for lineage—Mr. Harrington might follow, if he liked, the example set by some of the very smartest of our smart set. For a few of his many dollars he can have a genealogy as long and as interesting as the longest and most inter¬ esting.”

Mrs. Van Kemp glanced at the face turned toward the fire and, since the blue eyes could not see, she permitted a spark of her happiness to light up her own features. She was intensely relieved. She had hoped big things for her husband’s niece but nothing as big as John Harrington. That John Harrington would fall in with the plan, the lady never for a moment doubted.

“I suppose you believe in eugenics?”

Kathryn started and looked round at the speaker as if she had forgotten her presence.

“Eugenics ? Yes. I—I think I do. At least, I have read Shaw. It has something”— she hesitated and her clear eyes wavered—“something to do with children, hasn’t it?”

Mrs. Van Kemp was not sure just what the subject cov¬ ered but she had heard it discussed by some women at her club and she felt quite safe in acknowledging that eugenics had something to do with children.

“Don’t you think there is plenty of time to—consider this eugenic question after-” the girl did not finish but looked i6 THE AUTOCRAT

“back into the fire, her poise more shaken than ever her aunt bad seen it.

“I understand that it is a subject requiring consideration before -” Estelle Van Kemp tactfully left her own sen¬

tence unfinished. “But of course it is only another fad of the moment and I dare say that any consideration would flatter it.” She had been most unwise to introduce into the -discussion a subject such as eugenics. The girl might take the rot seriously, and Mrs. Van Kemp was not at all sure on which side of the fence that would put her clever young niece. She patted back a yawn and moved toward the door.

“Good night, my dear. I’m beastly fatigued.”

The girl lifted her head and smiled her good night.

Her aunt soliloquized: “Well, I did my duty but girls are headstrong and if she wants to marry John Harrington no protest of mine could alter her determination.” The little mistress of the house made her way slowly up the broad stairs. At the top she paused and gazed thoughtfully back at the living-room door.

“Dear! Dear! I do hope she forgets about eugenics. I must look up the subject. John Harrington! Fancy!”

Kathryn Lambert stood a long time in the center of the room, her eyes fixed on the embers of the dying fire. The logs had burned through and were disintegrating, the fire needed replenishing, but the blue eyes saw something else -—something that had nothing to do with this room and this fireplace.

The embers sputtered and were silent. Hissed and were silent. They crackled and crumbled—turned gray, then white, then of a sudden they glowed, red as the heart of a ruby. A chill crept into the air. The mercury in the small silver mounted thermometer on the mantel (the mistress of the house kept it there because it was the only spot in the room where it ever made a creditable showing) dropped slowly down toward the bulb at its base. Unconsciously the girl drew her lacy shawl closer about her bare shoulders.

*7

It was just as the last faint glow had died leaving the remains of a once sprightly fire wrapped in a soft white ash, that Kathryn became conscious of the sounds to which her subjective mind had long been attentive. She bent her head a little to one side, listening.

There was a gentle, almost inaudible tapping at the big front windows. It was faint and irregular but nevertheless insistent like the tapping of tiny fingers.

Kathryn Lambert shivered and drew her shawl still closer about her. Involuntarily she turned to the end of the room —that end facing the river—where the two windows looked back at her—like a pair of accusing eyes. Fascinatedly she moved toward them, and a bit nervously she drew back the filet curtains. Then she laughed.