A Honeymoon in Space | Page 7

terrestrial
circumstances. There was a something else too, which she didn't
altogether like to see, a sort of resignation to her fate which, in a young
lady situated as she was then, Mrs. Van Stuyler considered to be
distinctly improper.
"It is rather startling, isn't it?" she said, with hardly a trace of emotion
in her voice; "but I have no doubt that everything will be all right in the
end."
"Everything all right, my dear Zaidie! What on earth, or I might say
under heaven, do you mean?"
"I mean," replied Zaidie even more composedly than before, and also
with a little tightening of her lips, "that Lord Redgrave is the owner of
this vessel, and that therefore it is quite impossible that anything out of
the way could happen to us--I mean anything more out of the way than
this wonderful jump from the sea to the sky has been, unless, of course,
Lord Redgrave is going to take us for a voyage among the stars."
"Zaidie Rennick!" said Mrs. Van Stuyler, bridling up into her most
frigid dignity, "I am more than surprised to hear you talk in such a
strain. Perfectly safe, indeed! Has it not struck you that we are
absolutely at this man's--this Lord Redgrave's, mercy, that he can take
us where he likes, and treat us just as he pleases?"
"My dear Mrs. Van," replied Zaidie, dropping back into her familiar
form of address, but speaking even more frigidly than her chaperon had
done, "you seem to forget that, however extraordinary our situation
may be just now, we are in the care of an English gentleman. Lord
Redgrave was a friend of my father's, the only man who believed in his
ideals, the only man who realised them, the only man----"
"That you were ever in love with, eh?" said Mrs. Van Stuyler with a
snap in her voice. "Is that so? Ah, I begin to see something now."
"And I think, if you possess your soul in patience, you will see
something more before long," snapped Miss Zaidie in reply. Then she

stopped abruptly and the flush on her cheek deepened, for at that
moment Lord Redgrave came up the companion way from the lower
deck carrying a big silver tray with a coffee pot, three cups and saucers,
a rack of toast, and a couple of plates of bread and butter and cake.
Just then a sort of social miracle happened. The fact was that Mrs. Van
Stuyler had never before had her early coffee brought to her by a peer
of the British Realm. She thought it a little humiliating afterwards, but
for the moment all sorts of conventional barriers seemed to melt away.
After all she was a woman, and some years ago she had been a young
one. Lord Redgrave was an almost perfect specimen of English
manhood in its early prime. He was one of the richest peers in England,
and he was bringing her her coffee. As she said afterwards, she wilted,
and she couldn't help it.
"I'm afraid I have kept you waiting a long time for your coffee, ladies,"
said Redgrave, as he balanced the tray on one hand and drew a wicker
table towards them with the other. "You see there are only two of us on
board this craft, and as my engineer is navigating the ship, I have to
attend to the domestic arrangements."
Mrs. Van Stuyler looked at him in the silence of mental paralysis. Miss
Zaidie frowned, smiled, and then began to laugh.
"Well, of all the cold-blooded English ways of putting things----" she
began.
"I beg your pardon?" said Lord Redgrave as he put the tray down on
the table.
"What Miss Rennick means, Lord Redgrave," interrupted Mrs. Van
Stuyler, struggling out of her paralytic condition, "and what I, too,
should like to say, is that under the circumstances----"
"You think that I am not as penitent as I ought to be. Is that so?" said
Redgrave, with a glance and a smile mostly directed towards Miss
Zaidie. "Well, to tell you the truth," he went on, "I am not a bit penitent.
On the contrary, I am very glad to have been able to assist the Fates as

far as I have done."
"Assist the Fates!" gasped Mrs. Van Stuyler, helping herself shakingly
to sugar, while Miss Zaidie folded a gossamer slice of bread and butter
and began to eat it; "I think, Lord Redgrave, that if you knew all the
circumstances, you would say that you were working against them."
"My dear Mrs. Van Stuyler," he replied, as he filled his own coffee cup,
"I quite agree with you as to certain fates, but the Fates which I mean
are the ones which, with good or bad reason,