Ralestone Luck | Page 7

consequences might not be very attractive."
"Are you sure you packed it this morning?" Val asked.
"But of--" Her fingers went to her mouth. "I wonder if I did? I've just got to have some. We'll drive to town tomorrow and get a bottle."
"Thirty miles or so for a ten-cent bottle of gooey stuff," Val protested.
"Good idea." Rupert stood with his back to the fireplace as if there really were a flame or two within its black emptiness. "I've some papers that LeFleur wants to see. Then there're our boxes at the freight station to arrange transportation for, and we'll have to see about getting a newspaper and--"
"Make a list," murmured his brother.
Rupert dropped down upon the wide arm of Ricky's chair and with her only too willing aid set to work. Val eyed them drowsily. Rupert and Ricky--or to give her her very formal name in full--Richanda Anne, were "Red" Ralestones, possessing the thin, three-cornered faces, the dark mahogany hair, the sharply defined cheek-bones which had been the mark of the family as far back in history as portraits or written descriptions existed. The "Red" Ralestones were marked also by height and a suppleness of body and movement. The men had been fine swordsmen, the ladies noted beauties. But they were also cursed, Val remembered vividly, with uncertain tempers.
Rupert had schooled himself to the point where his emotions were mastered by his will. But Val had seen Ricky enjoy full tantrums, and the last occasion was not so long ago that the scene had become misty in his memory. Generous to the point of self-beggary, loyal to a fault, and incurably romantic, that was a "Red" Ralestone.
Val himself was a "Black" Ralestone, which was a very different thing. They were a new growth on the family tree, a growth which appeared after the Ralestones had been exiled to colonial America. His black hair, his long, dark face of no particular beauty marked with straight, black brows set in a perpetual frown--that was the sign of a "Black" Ralestone. They were as strong-willed as the "Reds," but their anger could be controlled to icy rage.
"Now that you have spent the monthly income," Val suggested as Rupert added up a long column of minute figures scrawled across the first page of his pocket note-book, "let's really get away from economics for one evening. The surroundings suggest something more romantic than dollars and cents. After all, when did a pirate ever show a saving disposition? Would the first Roderick--"
"The Roderick who brought home the Luck?" Ricky laughed. "But he brought home a fortune, too, didn't he, Rupert?"
Her brother relit his pipe. "Yes, but a great many lords came home from the Crusades with their pockets filled. Sir Roderick de la Stone thought the Luck worth his entire estate even after he was made Baron Ralestone."
Ricky shivered delicately. "Not altogether nice people, those ancestors of ours," she observed.
"No," Val grinned. "By rights this room should be full of ghosts instead of the beat of just one. How many Ralestones died violently? Seven or eight, wasn't it?"
"But the ones who died in England should haunt Lorne," argued Ricky, half seriously.
"Well then, that sort of confines us to the crews of the ships our great-great-great-grandfather scuttled," her brother replied.
"Rupert," Ricky turned and asked impulsively, "do you really believe in the Luck?"
Rupert looked up at the empty niche. "I don't know--No, I don't. Not the way that Roderick and Richard and all the rest did. But something that has seven hundred years of history behind it--that means a lot."
"'Then did he take up ye sword fashioned by ye devilish art of ye East from two fine blades found in ye tomb,'" Val quoted from the record of Brother Anselm, the friar who had accompanied Sir Roderick on his crusading. "Do you suppose that that part's true? Could the Luck have been made from two other swords found in an old tomb?"
"Not impossible. The Saracens were master metal workers. Look at the Damascus blades."
"It all sounds like a fairy-tale," commented Ricky. "A sword with magic powers beaten out of two other swords found in a tomb. And the whole thing done under the direction of an Arab astrologer."
"You've got to admit," broke in Val, "that Sir Roderick had luck after it was given to him. He came home a wealthy man and he died a Baron. And his descendants even survived the Wars of the Roses when four-fifths of the great English families were wiped out."
"'And fortune continued to smile,'" Rupert took up the story, "'until a certain wild Miles Ralestone staked the Luck of his house on the turn of a card--and lost.'"
"O-o-oh!" Ricky squirmed forward in her chair. "Now comes the pirate. Tell us that, Rupert."
"You know the story by heart now," he objected.
"We never heard it