Hotel Stardust

by Susan Barrie

  “I don't think you’ve met Miss Le Frere?” There was a restrained note in his voice, but it was not as arctic as when they had met before. “Miss Petherick is about to set up in opposition to us, Annette,” he told her grimly, “as an hotel keeper. She is the owner of Treloan Manor, and about to put it on the map, as the saying goes.”

  ’’But how exciting!” Miss Le Frere sounded as if she genuinely thought so. “How very exciting!”

  Eve flushed, and confessed that as yet they had not got very far with their plans.

  “But it seems the right place for an hotel,” she said a little awkwardly.

  Annette's enormous eyes studied her with an alert look of interest, and she shifted the position of the kitten on her shoulder, stroking it with scarlet-tipped, very thin brown hands.

  “You have perhaps a knowledge of the running of hotels?” she asked innocently. “Despite the fact that you look so young! Me, I know only what it is like to stay in them; but Rogaire here has grown rich out of starting first one and then another,” glancing up at him a little wickedly.

  “If Miss Petherick hopes to grow rich as a result of opening up Treloan to the public, she will have to be a little patient,” Commander Merlin observed rather shortly.

  Annette surveyed him with a humorous expression on her face, and then looked at Eve.

  “But Miss—Petherick”—she stumbled a little over the name—“has what I would call the look of patience in her face, and people with her color hair do not give up without a fight. Is it not so, Miss Petherick?”

  “I prefer fighting to giving up .easily,’' Eve admitted, meeting the man’s cold blue glance with her level grey one.

  “There you are, you see!” Annette appeared mildly triumphant. She smiled charmingly at Eve. “And for myself I do not see why she should not have as much success as you, Rogaire, for you do not like elderly ladies with small dogs that bark at you, and sometimes you are not—not—” searching for a word.

  “Sometimes I am supremely tactless, is that what you mean?” he inquired with an ironically raised eyebrow.

  She nodded.

  “That is it! You have not the tact.”

  He laughed, and pulled an end of her long golden hair, and at the same time his glance softened miraculously as it wandered over her. Indeed, for a moment there was almost a surprising hint of tenderness in it as it dwelt on the outline of her piquant profile. Eve did not miss the transformation, and she thought that this unusually attractive foreigner had undoubtedly aroused some feeling of affection in what she would have been prepared to wager was a not easily assailable, or very impressionable, softer side to an exceedingly masculine male.

  “And you will have to do something about your English, otherwise there will be little point in your wasting your most impressionable early years in this country!” he told her.

  She made a little face at him, but slipped a confiding hand inside his arm.

  “Is Miss Petherick coming to the dance that is to be held at the Stark Point to mark your opening of the summer season?” she asked.

  “I haven't the faintest idea.” He looked levelly at Eve. “Do you think you could spare the time, Miss Petherick? Or are your own concerns likely to absorb your every waking moment?” with smooth sarcasm. “Yours and,” he added, “the good lady who is backing you in your enterprise, the intrepid Miss Katherine Barton?”

  “My aunt is certainly very busy,” Eve replied somewhat hastily, and realizing that she would be late at the station to meet her friend she opened the door of her car. Commander Merlin closed it upon her.

  “And you?” he said. “You, naturally, take your orders from your aunt, who struck me as a person of great enthusiasms. If there are any hints she would like me to pass on to her in connection with the running of hotels, she has only to command me. Do tell her that. But possibly she has some hints which she might pass on to me . . .?”

  His eyes were laughing at her, mocking, unfriendly, deliberately challenging; eyes so blue that she had the feeling almost that she was being engulfed in ice-blue water. She fumbled with her gears, and had some difficulty in getting her self-starter to work; but as soon as she had done so Roger Merlin, with a wave of his lean brown hand, indicated to her that her way was clear. He was letting her get away with the damage to his car—he had not even bothered to answer her when she had offered to pay for it. He was arrogance, and warped, saturnine humour personified. She felt the hot color rising up in her cheeks.

  “Au revoir “Annette called, waving the kitten’s paw at her.

  Eve negotiated the somewhat difficult exit from the park without causing any further damage, and was still slightly hot under her collar, when she reached the station.

  C H A P T E R F I V E

  THAT night she and Aunt Kate and Chris Carpenter sat round a brightly burning log fire in the room they had selected to be their own sitting-room, and a retreat when the house was over-run by strangers, as they hoped it would be one day.

  It was quite a small room, compared with most of the other rooms in the house, and panelled in white, and the curtains drawn over the windows were a rich crimson damask. The fireplace was wide and white and garlanded after the Adam style, and the logs gave off an odor of burning apple orchards which was most pleasant. Outside the windows the wind had risen and was crying round the house like a lost soul, and the noise of the sea breaking on those needle-pointed rocks so far below the level of the house was like a persistent orchestral accompaniment from which no ear in Treloan Manor could have escaped even had it wished.

  But Chris Carpenter, not in the least tired after her long journey from London and vaguely excited by her surroundings, had no desire at all to miss any one of those muffled crashes. To her they spelled escape from a dull life in a vast built-up area, which had seemed to have but little use for her, and a promise of freedom and diversity in the days to come which she heartily welcomed. She put her feeling into words:

  “I’ve always thought of Cornwall as a place of storm and tempest, and now that I'm here I’m glad it’s going to be a wild night — a really wild night, I hope!”

  But Aunt Kate, not quite so enthusiastic — there were none of those orchestral accompaniments in Surrey, but it had much to recommend it! — shivered a little when the wind took on a new note, which suggested that it had suddenly became a living thing and was beginning to hurl itself against the walls of the manor with the intention of trying to gain an entrance.

  “Pity the poor sailors on a night like this!” she observed, her voice a little hushed. And noticing that there was a gap in the curtains she instructed her niece to pull them closer, and then helped herself to another cup of coffee from the tray set down cosily on the little table drawn up between their chairs. “Personally I hope this wind is going to blow itself out, preferably before midnight, otherwise I shan’t be

  able to expect a wink of sleep.”

  “I think it's exciting,” Chris declared, “especially after the rumble of London buses. And I must say I think your Uncle Hilary behaved handsomely in dying and leaving you this little lot more or less as it stands, Eve,” looking appreciatively around her and stretching her toes to the blazing logs. “If we can’t make a success of this place as an hotel, I’ll eat my hat. And if my savory omelets and special whipped-cream souffles don’t bring visitors back again and again, I’ll honestly be more than surprised. And I’m not just being conceited.”

  There was nothing about Chris Carpenter which suggested that she had any conceit in her, for she had long ago become accustomed to the fact that she was not glamorous and no amount of effort would ever make her so. But, despite her unruly dark hair and her tip-tilted nose and the freckles which entirely overspread her face in the summertime, she did look capable, and as a matter of fact, was a very capable young woman. Therefore any boast she made did not sound like a boast.

  Aunt Kate was glad to seize upon the subject of their projected hotel scheme as a means of forgetting the inclement beh
avior of the night, and Eve thought it a good opportunity to tell them about her adventure in the car-park in Truro. She gave Aunt Kate the Commander’s message, which instantly set the elderly lady bristling.

  “Unpleasant man!” she said. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met quite such an objectionable man before.”

  Chris was intrigued, and Eve explained to her the designs Roger Merlin had had on Treloan, and the hostility he had betrayed when his offer for the place was turned down. She did not labor the point of how much she disliked him personally, but Chris was quick enough in the uptake to gather that he was by no means popular and that he was apparently bereft of good manners. Aunt Kate declared that having once crossed swords with him she was prepared to go on doing so, and that in the end it was he who would be worsted. He deserved to be regarded as an enemy to all their plans, and no intercourse could ever be thought of between Treloan Manor and the Stark Point Hotel.

  “Him and His Grand Opening Dance!” she exclaimed. “Wait until we’re really launched and gaining in popularity, and then well have a dance! We'll have something more exciting than a dance! Leave it to me, and I’ll think up something that will surprise everybody.”

  Eve could not refrain from smiling a little.

  “If you want any hints,” she said, “Commander Merlin is willing to pass some on to you! And, after all, you did suggest getting

  together and pooling your ideas, didn’t you?”

  Aunt Kate smiled too — rather impishly.

  “It would probably be a good plan,” she said. “His experience and my sheer genius! Not that I've proved my genius yet, but I will in time. I've got a feeling that I've been wasting my life. I ought to have taken up something practical like this before.”

  “So long as taking it up now won't lose you every penny you possess,” Eve remarked more cautiously. “I should hate to think that I’d been the cause of bringing you to ruin.”

  “Tush!” Aunt Kate exclaimed. “And even if we do fail, we’ve always got the house. You can always sell it and pay me back that way.”

  But the thought of selling Treloan, even with the wind shuddering round it outside and growing wilder every second so that even Chris’s bright eyes kept turning towards the windows as if expectantly, caused such a hollow feeling in the depths of Eve’s being that she hoped most earnestly it would never come to that.

  Suddenly Aunt Kate decided that she would be happier in bed with the blankets pulled well up over her ears, and Eve said she would get her hot-water bottle. Chris went with her to the kitchen, and helped her attend to the boiler and do the various odd chores she had to do before retiring for the night, for as yet they had no indoor staff — only a girl who came up daily from the village, as well as the gardener’s wife, who lived in the lodge.

  Chris opened the kitchen door, and the wind and the rain burst in so wildly that she shut it hastily. She stood with her back against the door, her cheeks flushed and her eyes quite bright with excitement.

  “It’s terrific, isn’t it? she said. “On such a night almost anything could happen!”

  “So long as the house isn’t blown into the sea or anything like that, I don’t mind,” Eve answered her. “But this is our first experience of an Atlantic gale — full strength!”

  “I’d love to walk out in it,” Chris declared, “and see the sea boiling at the foot of the cliffs.” .

  “You wouldn’t be able to keep your feet. You’d be blown into the sea. Listen! What’s that?”

  It was a noise like a gun being fired abruptly; a heavy and powerful gun, almost on top of the house. They all heard it, above the shriek of the wind, and they all three jumped and looked startled; Aunt Kate standing before the window of her bedroom on the first floor, and trying not to obey an insistent urge to look out of the window and endeavor to force her eyes to pierce the blackness without; Chris and Eve in the middle of the kitchen floor, all eyes and blanched cheeks, and mouths parted in questioning, round, and slightly fearful O’s.

  “What was that?” Eve asked.

  “It sounded like a maroon,” Chris answered. “The sort of thing they fire when a ship's in danger.”

  They stared at one another. Then Eve became conscious of the hot-water bottle she was hugging up against her, and she said:

  “I’ll take this up to Aunt Kate, and after that we’ll get our macs on. I’ve a kind of feeling your arrival is about to be celebrated by something catastrophic. I hope you've got cat’s eyes and can see in the dark, and I hope you don’t mind getting drenched, because that’s what’s going to happen to us. And I hope you've brought some stout Wellington boots.”

  “I have,” Chris assured her. “Don’t worry.”

  Miss Barton met her niece at the head of the beautiful, fan-shaped staircase. She had Sarah tucked beneath her arm, and she looked worried.

  “What was that — that loud bang just now? she asked in a quavering voice. Surrey and her cosy cottage seemed so very far away, and she had a feeling she was going to be brought up against harsh realities.

  “I don't know, Aunt,” Eve told her gently; “but Chris and I are going to find out, and if I were you I’d just hop into bed and forget everything until the morning.”

  “Don’t be silly!” Aunt Kate retorted with some spirit. “If you two are going out, I shall just sit and wait for you to come back. But whatever you do, be careful! For heaven’s sake, Eve, be careful!”

  Eve could almost have laughed — only the wind would have whipped her breath away — once she and Chris were outside and away from the protection of the house, at the thought of Aunt Kate’s admonition to “be careful”. As well expect someone sitting on top of a hot fire not to get toasted!

  What the force of the wind that was blowing that night was she would probably never know, but she did know that it roared in her ears like the flapping of giant sails. Her voice, when she tried to shout to Chris, was carried away in the opposite direction, and it was as much as she could do to breathe as she fought her way forward. The rain lashed at her, stinging her face like a flail, and above all the tumult she could hear the tremendous roaring voice of the sea beating itself against the granite coast. The darkness was inky and practically impenetrable, and only the feel of soft turf under her feet told her that they were still in the grounds of Treloan Manor and not on the open cliff top.

  Chris, whose eyesight must have been better than her own, suddenly caught hold of her arm and gripped it hard, and shouted close to Eve’s ear:

  “Better keep away from the edge of the cliff!”

  A cluster or red flowers burst high up in the sky, scattering widely over the frightening void which was the sea, and their appearance was followed by a dull boom which was almost instantly swallowed up in the wild cacophony of other sounds. Both girls halted as if at the behest of an invisible barrier placed across their path, and then Chris shouted again:

  “A rocket! It is a ship in distress!”

  They were out on the exposed cliff-top now, and that burst of light had shown them how perilously close to the edge they had ventured. They veered away from it, clinging to one another, and all at once as they reached the road another light came pouring over it, and a large and powerful car swept past them in the night. Eve looked over her shoulder and saw the red tail-light and a flash of light-colored paintwork, and she knew that it was Commander Merlin’s car which had passed them on the road. By pausing she lost contact with Chris, and then she saw that the red tail-light was stationary, and Roger Merlin had thrust his head out of his open car door.

  Eve tried to turn and fight her way back to him, but the force of the wind was like the force of a maniac. When she did eventually reach him she could not even attempt to speak, and his hand dragged her into the shelter of the open door.

  “What are you doing out here on a night like this?” He wore a drenched oilskin, and the rain was pouring down from his black hair and running in rivers down his cheeks. Strangely she noticed how his white teeth flashed by
contrast with all the darkness surrounding him. “You ought to be indoors! What is your aunt thinking about to let you out like this?”

  Eve's breath was coming back to her, and she gasped: “The wreck! Is there a ship in distress? Where is it?” “Down there!” He pointed to the beach below the portion of cliff on which they were standing. “It’s a yacht, and it’s being driven on to the rocks. Tom Geake and his crowd are down there, and the lifeboat’s going to put out to them. But whether they’ll be able to prevent them breaking up, I don’t know. It’s a fiend of a night!” He was still grasping her shoulder, and his fingers bruised her flesh. “But you can’t go back alone. Get in here,” and she was unceremoniously bundled, before she could even think of a protest, on to the back seat of his car, and the door was slammed upon her.

  After the turmoil without, the sudden almost uncanny silence within the luxuriously upholstered and expensively appointed vehicle was almost enough to unnerve her. And the owner of the car having vanished after switching off all but his side-lights and left her alone at the side of the road, she began to feel vaguely resentful. After all, she was a free agent, and Chris would be wondering what had become of her, and Aunt Kate would be panic-stricken if Chris returned to the house without her. Then there was the yacht being driven on to the rocks below, and if a rescue was effected other kinds of help would be needed. She could not just sit here on the back seat of a car.

  She bent forward to open the car door, and instantly a low growl brought her up with a jolt, for it was a growl within a bare few inches of her. A queer sensation, like the hair rising on the back of her neck, affected her, and she drew a little away from the noise of heavy breathing which all at once she recognized. It was the bulldog

  — and he was sitting right beside her!