A Honeymoon in Space
added the milk and sugar with deliberation, and then after a preliminary
sip said, with her cup poised half-way between her dainty lips and the
table:
"Mrs. Van, I've got an idea. I suppose it's inherited, for dear old Pop
had plenty. Anyhow we may as well get back to common-sense subjects. Now
look here," she went on, switching an absolutely convincing glance
straight into her host's eyes, "my father may have been a dreamer, but
still he was a Sound Money man. He believed in honest dealings. He
didn't believe in borrowing a hundred dollars gold and paying back in
fifty dollars silver. What's your opinion, Lord Redgrave; you don't do
that sort of thing in England, do you? Uncle Russell is a Sound Money
man too. He's got too much gold locked up to want silver for it."
"My dear Zaidie," said Mrs. Van Stuyler, "what _have_ democratic and
republican politics and bimetalism got to do with----"
"With a trip in this wonderful vessel which Pop told me years ago could
go up to the stars if it ever was made? Why just this, Lord Redgrave is
an Englishman and too rich to believe in anything but sound money, so is
Uncle Russell, and there you have it, or should have."
"I think I see what you mean, Miss Rennick," said their host, leaning
back in his chair and folding his hands behind his head, as steamboat
travellers are wont to do when seas are smooth and skies are blue. "The
_Astronef_ might come down like a vision from the clouds and preach the
Gospel of Gold in electric rays of silver through the commonplace medium
of the Morse Code. How's that for poetry and practice?"
"I quite agree with his lordship as regards the practice," said Mrs. Van
Stuyler, talking somewhat rudely across him to Zaidie. "It would be an
excellent use to put this wonderful invention to. And then, I am sure
his lordship would land us in Central Park, so that we could go to your
Uncle's house right away."
"No, no, I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me there, Mrs. Van
Stuyler," said Redgrave, with a change of tone which Miss Zaidie
appreciated with a swiftly veiled glance. "You see, I have placed myself
beyond the law. I have, as you have been good enough to intimate,
abducted--to put it brutally--two ladies from the deck of an Atlantic
liner. Further, in doing so I have selfishly spoiled the prospects of
one of the ladies. But, seriously, I really must go to Washington
first----"
"I think, Lord Redgrave," interrupted Mrs. Van Stuyler, ignoring the
last unfinished sentence and assuming her best Knickerbocker dignity,
"if you will forgive me saying so, that that is scarcely a subject for
discussion here."
"And if that's so," interrupted Miss Zaidie, "the less we say about it
the better. What I wanted to say was this. We all want the Republicans
in, at least all of us that have much to lose. Now, if Lord Redgrave was
to use this wonderful air-ship of his on the right side--why there
wouldn't be any standing against it."
"I must say that until just now I had hardly contemplated turning the
_Astronef_ into an electioneering machine. Still, I admit that she might
be made use of in a good cause, only I hope----"
"That we shan't want you to paste her over with election bills, eh?--or
start handbill-snowstorms from the deck--or kidnap Croker and Bryan just
as you did us, for instance?"
"If I could, I'm quite sure that I shouldn't have as pleasant guests as
I have now on board the _Astronef_. What do you think, Mrs. Van
Stuyler?"
"My dear Lord Redgrave," she replied, "that would be quite impossible.
The idea of being shut up in a ship like this which can soar not only
from earth, but beyond the clouds, with people who would find out your
best secrets and then perhaps shoot you so as to be the only possessors
of them--well, that would be foolishness indeed."
"Why, certainly it would," said Zaidie; "the only use you could have for
people like that would be to take them up above the clouds and drop them
out. But suppose we--I mean Lord Redgrave--took the _Astronef_ down over
New York and signalled messages from the sky at night with a
searchlight----"
"Good," said their host, getting up from his deck-chair and stretching
himself up straight, looking the while at Miss Zaidie's averted profile.
"That's gorgeously good! We might even turn the election. I'm for sound
money all the time, if I may be permitted to speak American."
"English is quite good enough for us, Lord Redgrave," said Miss Zaidie a
little stiffly. "We may have improved on the old language a bit, still
we understand it, and--well, we can forgive its shortcomings. But that
isn't quite to the point."
"It seems to me," said Mrs. Van Stuyler, "that we are getting nearly as
far from the original subject as we are from the _St. Louis_. May I ask,
Zaidie, what you really propose to do?"
"_Do_ is not for us to say," said Miss Zaidie, looking straight up to
the glass roof of the deck-chamber. "You see, Mrs. Van, we're not free
agents. We are not even first-class passengers who have paid their fares
on a contract ticket which is supposed to get them there."
"If you'll pardon me saying so," said Lord Redgrave, stopping his walk
up and down the deck, "that is not quite the case. To put it in the most
brutally material form, it is quite true that I have kidnapped you two
ladies and taken you beyond the reach of earthly law. But there is
another law, one which would bind a gentleman even if he were beyond the
limits of the Solar System, and so if you wish to be landed either in
Washington or New York it shall be done. You shall be put down within a
carriage drive of your own residence, or of Mr. Russell Rennick's. I
will myself see you to his door, and there we may say goodbye, and I
will take my trip through the Solar System alone."
There was another pause after this, a pause pregnant with the fate of
two lives. They looked at each other--Mrs. Van Stuyler at Zaidie, Zaidie
at Lord Redgrave, and he at Mrs. Van Stuyler again. It was a kind of
three-cornered duel of eyes, and the eyes said a good deal more than
common human speech could have done.
Then Lord Redgrave, in answer to the last glance from Zaidie's eyes,
said slowly and deliberately:
"I don't want to take any undue advantage, but I think I am justified in
making one condition. Of course I can take you beyond the limits of the
world that we know, and to other worlds that we know little or nothing
of. At least I could do so if I were not bound by law as strong as
gravitation itself; but now, as I said before, I just ask whether or not
my guests or, if you think it suits the circumstances better, my
prisoners, shall be released unconditionally wherever they choose to be
landed."
He paused for a moment and then, looking straight into Zaidie's eyes, he
added:
"The one condition I make is that the vote shall be unanimous."
"Under the circumstances, Lord Redgrave," said Mrs. Van Stuyler, rising
from her seat and walking towards him with all the dignity that would
have been hers in her own drawing-room, "there can only be one answer to
that. Your guests or your prisoners, as you choose to call them, must be
released unconditionally."
Lord Redgrave heard these words as a man might hear words in a dream.
Zaidie had risen too. They were looking into each other's eyes, and many
unspoken words were passing between them. There was a little silence,
and then, to Mrs. Van Stuyler's unutterable horror, Zaidie said, with
just the suspicion of a gasp in her voice:
"There's one dissentient. We are prisoners, and I guess I'd better
surrender at discretion."
The next moment her captor's arm was round her waist, and Mrs. Van
Stuyler, with her twitching fingers linked behind her back, and her nose
at an angle of sixty degrees, was staring away through the blue
immensity, dumbly wondering what on earth or under heaven was going to
happen next.
CHAPTER III
After a couple of minutes of silence which could be felt, Mrs. Van
Stuyler turned round and said angrily:
"Zaidie, you will excuse me, perhaps, if I say that your conduct is
not--I mean has not been what I should have expected--what I did,
indeed, expect from your uncle's niece when I undertook to take you to
Europe. I must say----"
"If I were you, Mrs. Van, I don't think I'd say much more about that,
because, you see, it's fixed and done. Of course, Lord Redgrave's only
an earl, and the other is a marquis, but, you see, he's a man, and I
don't quite think the other one is--and that's about all there is to
it."
Their host had just left the deck-saloon, taking the early coffee
apparatus with him, and Miss Zaidie, in the first flush of her pride and
re-found happiness, was taking a promenade of about twelve strides each
way, while Mrs. Van Stuyler, after partially relieving her feelings as
above, had seated herself stiffly in her wicker-chair, and was following
her with eyes which were critical and, if they had been twenty years
younger, might also have been envious.
"Well, at least I suppose I must congratulate you on your ability to
accommodate yourself to most extraordinary circumstances. I must say
that as far as that goes I quite envy you. I feel as though I ought to
choke or take poison, or something of that sort."
"Sakes, Mrs. Van, please don't talk like that!" said Zaidie, stopping in
her walk just in front of her chaperon's chair. "Can't you see that
there's nothing extraordinary about the circumstances except this
wonderful ship? I have told you how Pop and I met Lord Redgrave in our
tour through the Canadian Rockies two or three years ago. No, it's two
years and nine months next June; and how he took an interest in Pop's
theories and ideas about this same ship that we are on now----"
"Oh yes," said Mrs. Van Stuyler rather acidly, "and not only in the
abstract ideas, but apparently in a certain concrete reality."
"Mrs. Van," laughed Zaidie, with a cunning twist on her heel, "I know
you don't mean to be rude, but--well, now did any one ever call _you_ a
concrete reality? Of course it's correct just as a scientific
definition, perhaps--still, anyhow, I guess it's not much good going on
about that. The facts are just this way. I consented to marry that
Byfleet marquis just out of sheer spite and blank ignorance. Lord
Redgrave never actually asked me to marry him when we were in the
Rockies, but he did say when he went back to England that as soon as he
had realised my father's ideal he would come over and try and realise
one of his own. He was looking at me when he said it, and he looked a
good deal more than he said. Then he went away, and poor Pop died. Of
course I couldn't write and tell him, and I suppose he was too proud to
write before he'd done what he undertook to do, and I, like most
girl-fools in the same place would have done, thought that he'd given
the whole thing up and just looked upon the trip as a sort of interlude
in globe-trotting, and thought no more about Pop's ideas and inventions
than he did about his daughter."
"Very natural, of course," said Mrs. Van Stuyler, somewhat mollified by
the subdued passion which Zaidie had managed to put into her commonplace
words; "and so as you thought he had forgotten you and was finding a
wife in his own country, and a possible husband came over from that same
country with a coronet----"
"That'll do, Mrs. Van, thank you," interrupted Miss Zaidie, bringing her
daintily-shod foot down on the deck this time with an unmistakable
stamp. "We'll consider that incident closed if you please. It was a
miserable, mean, sordid business altogether; I am utterly, hopelessly
ashamed of it and myself too. Just to think that I could ever----"
Mrs. Van Stuyler cut short her indignant flow of words by a sudden
uplifting of her eyelids and a swift turn of her head towards the