SUNBURST

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 204, 29 August 1934, Page 17

SUNBURST

BERTA RUCK.

CHAPTER XI. "Her turn now," thought Pat, -who was always fair. "I did get in some pood licks at lunch." Down she sat on tlie chintz-pinafored pouffe set close to the sofa into which madame had sunk like a barrel into a quicksand, while inadame's animated chrysanthemum of a. Poke leapt up onto his; mistress' lap.

Dutifully Pat said: "Glad you like my white frock; Aim'tie Mary said put it on for a change." •

"Ah, your dead auntie knows what suits her beautiful niece," purred Madame de Castra, with a glance towards the other end of the drawingroom. "Mrs. Rawley's looking tired. She knows it's important what you put on, even if she doesn't go in for smartness."

"Auntie told me putting in the central heating, to make Pinelands habitable for Americans, had cost exactly all the decent evening gowns she would be able to order for the rest of her life!"

"Did she, now?" ("Wouldn't Mrs. Rawley be wild if. she thought I'd heard that?") ""Well! there's the sort of calamity that's happened to quite a lot of the highest in-the land, now; isn't it? People you'd never think (from what they have to put up with, now) were our very best families, once. Which reminds me,' Patricia, you've never told mo,.about your own family? Where does all this beauty come from, eh? Who arc you supposed to be like, dear child? Your mother?"

"Not a hope! Everybody says I'm the image of daddy!" This Mrs. Rawlcy caught; she blanched. Having skated tactfully over the thin ice of her eistor's war marriage, she had imagined that the unveiling of the family skeleton might be postponed.

This must be stopped. . . . Before Mrs. Rawley could break from the lodger who was telling her about that rattling bedroom window, Patricia was announcing that she had inherited daddy's red hair.

"Come, don't call it red, dear," prolested Madame Dβ Castra, who privately considered Pat's hair the flaw in an otherwise aristocratic appearance. "I'd say 'Tishurn,' wouldn't you, papa?" (Her glance summoned her husband to park, his stoutness on the sofa arm.) '"Xever say red."

"My mother said plain rod! I remember her calling out to daddy: 'Taffy, you red-haired lunatic! . . . Pull it, Pat!' I used to hang on to his hair with both hands when I rode on his shoulder. It felt as if one were miles up in the air."

"Tall, was he? I like gentlemen to Ije tall. Well, not too tall. Not lanky. About the height of my Pedro, don't you think? I'd like to .have seen your daddy, Patricia. He must have been ever so distinguished looking."

''Supposed to be a looker," agreed Pat, whose eyes turned from shut drawing room door to open drawing room windows. Outside she saw a sudden flash; a round of brilliance illuminated stirring foliage and a patch of putty coloured raincoat. There was Rupert, with hie electric torch! Oh, dash, why couldn't she beat it? . The light flashed, disappeared.' "When daddy joined up he had to fight half the regiment for nicknaming him 'Handsome Jim.'" "Fancy. [Bui what was his real title, dear ?" 'Title?"' repeated Jim's daughter.

"Well, we know he wasn't 'Lord Roberts,' because there wae only the one, wasn't there?" took up old Mr. De Qastra. "llama, means, was he 'Sir' ■ .

'•Daddy?' , " laughed Pat, and from across the room Mrs. Rawley, quailing n* she seemed to give her attention to thill lodger, heard her niece's candid "I

don't suppose daddy would have gone on being called 'Captain' Koberts, if he hadn't been killed. You see—"

("Oh, child, shut up, shut up!" willed her aunt. In vain.)

"You see, he wasn't in the regular army like Uncle Cecil and those. My father, before he joined up, was a chauffeur."

This announcement was a stone flung into a quiet pool. It echoed from dark Tudor beams. "My father . . . chauffeur." It was out.

Everybody looked up, including the most eighty-lied of the lodgers, who (though ehe could still see to do drawnthread work) was so deaf that she never heard anything but the gong, the American lady's affirmations, and certain of Pat's loudest remarks.

One of these having now partly reached her, she dropped her miniature tambourine and asked intelligently: "Who goes farther than the chauffeur?" "Nobody! I only said my father wa3 the chauffeur!"

How many more people would she have to tell, wondered Pat, a3 she chased that rolling embroidery tam r bourine over the rug and returned it to the aged lady's lap. Pat's head being bent, ehe lost the effect of the announcement.

"A chauffeur, was he?" Mr. De Castra took up all too heartily. "Well, and why not? Very excellent thing to be. Got to have them, haven't we? Why shouldn't the young lady's pa be a chauffeur, eh, mama?" ("Why not?" came mechanically from mama De Castra, etaring at Pat with eyes a-goggle like those of the peke in her lap.) "What was that story of that wild young earl turning railway porter at Paddington, for a joke?" "My daddy didn't do it for a joke. My daddy wasn't an earl. Anything but," laughed Pat fondly. "My daddy was just the ordinary chauffeur who lives in a room over the garage and wears livery, and washes the car, and jumps down to open gates, and touches his cap, and says, 'Home now, Miss ?' " "I see," gulped Pat's potential mother-in-law, beginning to take this in. "How —how strange—" (Aside, now how is it that one's personal maid couldn't up anythin" important from the staff in a house like this? A chauffeur? Oh, but she must mean some black sheep of some grand family? Like the duke's heir who, when he came in for the title, they had to send for him off a> ranch in Canada and found him doing ever such menial work! That's it, I bet.) "Wherever did your mother meet him, Patricia, dear?' .

"In the car!" "Yes, ye.?; but socially? I mean, however did she come to marry him?" "Why, how do people? She sasv him every day. They fell in love. Couldn't help it."

■A sigh broke from Miss Ericsen. "They were extraordinarily in love." enlarged Pat, while everyone hung on her words. "Of course, as my people were, the only married people I'd seen much, I thought they were jufit usual!"

"How too romantic," began Madame De Castra, artificially, drowned by Mrs. Wilson D. Perry's "Nothing is too romantic! Nothing is too beautiful to last. Nothing is too wonderful to expect!"

"And nothing too unfortunate; this has dished Patricia's chance," thought the stunned matchmaker —but a loud "Mrs. Rawley! We're only waiting for you!" summoned to the card room. Bridge-fours have still to be made up even ehould cherished plans crash. Pat's aunt fled, leaving her niece to do the honours of this Bluebeard's eupboard.

"Shorty, my old governess, told me my mother told her she got even fonder of daddy because of the row when she married him!"

Shrewdly De Castra pore put in, "There was a row, then?"

"Ha, an almighty one. At first. Afterwards, of course, they all came round and were decent." (Never had Pat's young mother allowed her little girl to glean any details of that tepid, grudging coming-round. What purpose is served by letting a loved and sunny child see the fruits of repression and lack of sun?) "Ask Mr. Entwistlo!"

The melancholy invalid had emerged from his book of diplomatic memoirs to listen to this revival of the 20-year-old romance. Rightly had Rupert guessed Mr. Entwistle's secret; more than once had Mr. Entwietle pleaded his cause with the lovely, unmeltable Margaret Stone-Steadwell of those days.

"You remember my mother? You saw daddy, too?"

"Yes. Oh, yes," sighed Mr. Entwistle, leaning back with a finger in those witty memoirs, letting his chin drop on to his stiff shirt-front and looking hopelessly old, old and defeated.

Roberts' own daughter was asking Mr; Entwistle: "You remember the rumpus when my mother married daddy?"

"Er—one understood that Miss Margaret had a little flown in the face of her family."

Even Margaret's family had been less appalled then, than were the De Castra parents now, as they exchanged a look which meant: "What about Pedro? This'll never do. Oh, never!"

Not for this had Pedro been given the best education, and had all thoee sledgehammer bills paid without a murmur, and been dragged into these countryhouses in search of a wife who was the Real Thing. (To think that there was I scared out of my wits these Rawleys might find out about papa's wardrobe busineee!) A family doesn't get right away from all that to see their only son trapped! They'd set their hearts on seeing him marry into English society.

Pat, young-girlishly pleased at having secured so much attention for the family romance which was such an old etory to hereelf, turned to another chapter of it.

"Before she'd seen daddy, the year she came out, mother was asked to a house party at a big country house in Surrey, and a, little maid was unpacking for her and looked enviously at her coming-out dress from Paquin's, and my mother said: 'Are you wishing you were in my shoes, to wear frocks like that?' And the little maid eaid: 'I'd like the frocks, mise; but I wouldn't be a lady for anything!' Mother, rather etaggered, eaid: 'Why?' The maid said: 'Because, miss, in your class there's such a poor choice of young men. Whereas me, I can take my pick. There's our milkman, and the young gentleman from Bugden's, and there's ever euch a nice plumber that comes, and, oh dear, the chauffeur!' (Not my daddy; some other chauffeur.) Mother said she never forgot that phrase —'Such a poor choice of young men.'"

Vernon Entwhistle winced and blinked under these strokes of unsuspected cruelty. A poor choice. AVas that what Margaret had thought?

"Mother said whut the maid said seemed to get truer and truer. Until one day coming in from walking a puppy, ehe ran into a Real Young Man striding out of the garage, whistling between his teeth, with his shirt sleeves rolled up and carrying a spare wheel as if it were a reel of silk, and she said that settled it, for her!"

Shirt sleeves. Garage. That settled ib for Madame De Castra. Unless — oh. one must make searching , inquiries. Find out who was ; this chauffeur's father.

Madame was just going to ask, when one of the huge black and white Danish dogs paesed in stately progress to the door; then, standing 60 high that the china door knob brushed his beautiful coat, he turned hie noble heed towards Pat.

"I must let Jurgen out." Up she sprang, thankful for an excuse, at last, to speed out to the garden, to that beckoning torch, that moth-hunt with Rupert! But, upon opening the door, she encountered an , aura of expensive cigar followed by. an exquieite ehirtfront, black pearl etuds, and the emile of tho younger Do Castra. "Patricia. Exactly the woman I wanted. Listen—" .......*.. ._,......•

"Pedro! Here!" shrilled his lady mother in alarm.' Her lame-clad bulk struggled up out of the sofa corner on to feet three sizes too small for it. Site, who had encouraged this budding romance, must instantly nip it "Pedro! Something to say to you. Here, a minute!"

•'l've something to say to Patricia." Swiftly tho white drawing room door was shut between his flustered family and Pat. Upon her he turned the battery of those eyelashes, eyes, teeth, ingratiating tilt of ebony head which for the last nine hours had 'been withdrawn.

"Patricia, it's a divine night, warm as mid-day. You don't want any wrap. You've got sleeves. Let's enjoy thiu moonlight." "I was just going to I'm going out collecting moths with Rupert Gariield." "Are you. Spare me five minutes, first? Outside!"

(To be continued daily.)