Miss Chrysie's European visit had come to an end, and she and her
father had accepted Hardress's invitation to take a trip home in the
_Nadine_. Doctor Lamson was also a guest on board, and during the
trip many of the details of the great scheme were exhaustively
discussed. Each of the three men was going on a special mission.
Clifford Vandel had definitely accepted the position of president and
general financial and business manager of the International Magnetic
Control Syndicate, as the newly-formed company had been provisionally
named. He was going to the States to do the necessary financial part
of the work, buy up rights and patents which might be necessary to the
furtherance of the scheme, and to perfect the organisation of the
great combine of which he was president--a combine whose influence was
now to extend not only over the United States, but over the whole
world.
Doctor Lamson was going to make a personal study of the electrical
machinery to be found in the States, so that he might be in a position
to design the great storage works to the best advantage and with the
greatest possible economy of time and money.
Hardress, armed with introductions from the highest official sources
in England, was going northward, after leaving his guests at New York,
to Montreal, to obtain a lease of a few square miles of the desolate,
ice-covered wilderness of Boothia Felix, which, as a glance at the map
will show you, is the most northerly portion of the mainland of the
American continent. Further, in its scanty history, you may read that
there Sir John Ross discovered the magnetic pole of the earth, and
named the wilderness after his friend Sir Felix Booth, who had
furnished most of the funds for his expedition.
His ostensible object in obtaining the lease was the foundation of an
observatory for the examination of magnetic and electrical phenomena;
one of which was the possible solution of the so far unsolved riddle
of the Northern Lights. He also stated to the Dominion authorities, by
way of giving something like a practical air to his mission, that a
remoter possibility of the scheme was the establishment of a magnetic
centre for a world-wide system of wireless telegraphy.
The few square miles of ice and snow and rock were absolutely
worthless, and so the Dominion Government had not the slightest
hesitation in accepting his offer of a thousand a year for ten years
for the exclusive use and possession of the peninsula, with right to
import materials, construct works, and do whatever might be necessary
for the development of the scheme.
If he had not been the heir to an ancient peerage and the son of one
of the wealthiest men in England, he would probably have been looked
upon as a harmless crank who was wanting to lose his money in a vain
attempt to harness the electrical energy displayed in the _Aurora
borealis_ and make thunderstorms to order out of it. As it was, he
was treated indulgently as a man who had big ideas, and who was
conducting at his own expense a great scientific experiment which he
could very well afford to pay for.
Thus, after very brief negotiations, consisting of one or two
interviews, two or three dinners, and the handing over of a cheque,
the Canadian Government in all innocence parted with what was soon to
prove the most precious piece of land, not only on the American
Continent, but in the whole world.
But this was not the only concession that Shafto Hardress took back to
England with him. For when he returned to New York and took a run up
to Buffalo on the Empire State Express, with the lease of Boothia Land
in his pocket, to talk matters over with President Vandel, he had a
brief but momentously interesting interview with Miss Chrysie, at the
close of which she said, as her hand rested in his:
"Well, Viscount, I'm not going to say 'Yes' right away. You're a
gentleman, and I like you. You're going to be a peer of England some
day, and, if this scheme of yours works out all right, one of the
masters of the world. As my father's daughter I have no natural
objection to being a peeress of England and mistress of the world, but
I am also a natural-born woman, and I want a little more than that--I
mean something that a man could not give me if he owned the Solar
System. I want to know for certain that you love me as a man should
love a woman, and that I can love you as a woman should love a man if
she is going to marry him. I like you; yes, I like you better than any
other man I've ever seen. I tell you quite honestly it hasn't been a
case of love at first sight with me, and I guess I haven't known you
quite long enough to give you something that I can never take back. Go
to your work and do it, and while you're doing it we shall get to know
each other better, and meanwhile you may consider that you have the
option of another piece of half-discovered territory."
Before releasing her hand he stooped and kissed it, saying, with a
laugh that bespoke a certain amount of satisfaction:
"That, you know, is--well, we will call it the seal on the contract.
This is my act and deed, you understand--as people say when they
conclude a contract with an option. A definition of kissing which I
once read describes it as equivalent to syllabus."
"Syllabus!" she said, releasing her hand and raising it to her brow,
pushing a fold of hair back by the motion and smiling up at him in a
somewhat disconcerted fashion. "And what might that mean in your
dictionary of kisses?"
"It was defined as kissing the hand of the girl you want very badly
instead of----"
Her red lips smiled an irresistible challenge at him, and the next
instant his arm was round her waist, and he said:
"After all, I don't think that contract was properly signed, sealed,
and delivered; at least, the seal was in the wrong place, and the
delivery was not quite complete."
"Now I call that real mean, Viscount," she said, a moment afterwards.
"I only gave you an option on the territory, and you're starting to
occupy it right away."
"Well, then," he said, taking her hand again, "suppose, instead of the
territory, we call it a reserve. How will that do?"
"Not quite," she said, drawing back a bit. "To some extent I've been
taken by assault, but I've not surrendered at discretion yet. That
sounds a bit mixed, I know--but it's pretty near the truth."
"And at that," he said, gravely smiling, "I am quite content to leave
it." And so, with the magical touch of her lips still thrilling
through his blood, he left her, more than ever determined to fulfil to
the utmost the tremendous destiny which chance had cast in his way.
To him there could have been no more delightfully satisfactory ending
to his mission. In blood he was himself half-American, and in him the
old-world aristocrat was strangely blended with the keen, far-seeing,
quick-witted, hard-headed, and perhaps, in one sense, hard-hearted man
of business. It was to this side of his nature that the physical
charms, the keen wit, and sprightly spirit of Miss Chrysie had first
appealed; but later on the aristocrat in him had recognised that she
too was a patrician of the New World, whose ancestry stretched back
into the history of the old, and so gradually interest and admiration
had grown into a love which completely satisfied all his instincts.
The very way in which she had received his proposal had increased both
his love and his respect. If she had surrendered at discretion there
might have remained the possibility of a suspicion that, after all,
she had been tempted to take hold of a magnificent opportunity, not
only for placing herself in the front rank of European society, but
also of wielding through her husband a power such as no woman had ever
exercised before. But she had given him frankly to understand that
these things were as nothing in her eyes, great and splendid as they
were, without that certainty of mutual love which could alone induce
her to give herself, body and soul, into the hands of any man, however
powerful or nobly born; for Chrysie Vandel was a woman in the best
sense of that much-meaning word, and she knew that for her there was
no choice, save between the complete independence of thought and
action which she had so far enjoyed, and an equally complete surrender
to the man to whom she could render, whole-hearted and unreserved, the
sweet service of love.
After dinner that night he had an equally satisfactory interview with
the president, who, when he had heard his story, just got up from his
chair and said:
"Viscount, we'll shake on that. My girl's free to choose where she
likes, or not to choose at all, and you are not going to have any help
from me in the way of persuasion; but if she does choose, why, I'd
sooner she chose you than any other man I know."
"I ask for nothing better, I can assure you," said Hardress. "Thank
you a thousand times."
And so they shook.
The next day by noon the _Nadine_ was steaming out past Sandy Hook.
Allowing for difference in longitude, it was almost at the same moment
that the night mail pulled out of the Petersburg station. Two of the
sleeping-compartments were occupied by Prince Xavier de Conde and his
daughter; and so, from the ends of the earth, both travelling towards
an obscure little watering-place hidden away in the depths of the
German forest land, were approaching each other the man and the woman
whose destinies had been, all unknown to themselves, so strangely
linked together by the last despairing act of the man whose country
had refused to permit him to make her the mistress of the world.