THREE days after his death, the body of Paul Romanoff was reduced to
ashes in the Highgate Crematorium, a magnificent building, in the
sombre yet splendid architecture of ancient Egypt, which stood in
the midst of what had once been Highgate Cemetery, and what was now
a beautiful garden, shaded by noble trees, and in summer ablaze with
myriads of flowers.
Not a grave or a headstone was to be seen, for burial in the earth had
been abolished throughout the civilised world for nearly a century.
In the vast galleries of the central building, thousands of urns,
containing the ashes of the dead, reposed in niches inscribed with
the name and date of death, but these mostly belonged to the poorer
classes, for the wealthy as a rule devoted a chamber in their own
houses to this purpose.
The body was registered in the great Book of the Dead at the
Crematorium as that of Paul Ivanitch, and the only two mourners signed
their names, “Serge Ivanitch and Olga Ivanitch, grand-children of the
deceased.” The reason for this was, that for more than a century the
name of Romanoff had been proscribed in all the nations of Europe. It
was believed that the Vladimir Romanoff who had been executed by the
Supreme Council, for attempting to solve the forbidden problem, was the
last of his race, and Paul had taken great pains not to disturb this
belief.
Long before his son had met with his end, he had called himself Paul
Ivanitch, and settled in London and practised his profession as a
sculptor, in which he had won both fame and fortune. Olga had lived
with him since her father’s death, and Serge, who at the time the
narrative opens had just completed his studies at the Art University of
Rome, had passed as her brother.
They took the urn containing the ashes of the old man back with them
to the house, which now belonged, with all its contents, to Olga and
Serge. On the morning after his death, a notice, accompanied by an
abstract of his will, had been inserted in _The Official Gazette_, the
journal devoted exclusively to matters of law and government.
Paul Romanoff had, however, left two wills behind him, one which had to
be made public in compliance with the law, and one which was intended
only for the eyes of Olga and Serge. This second will reposed, with
the crown of Russia, in the secret recess in the wall of the octagonal
chamber; and the instructions endorsed upon it stated that it was to
be opened by Serge in the presence of Olga, after they had brought
his ashes back to the house and had been legally confirmed in their
possession of his property.
Consequently, on the evening of the 11th, the two shut themselves into
the room, and Olga, who since her grandfather’s death had worn the key
of the recess on a chain round her neck, unlocked the secret door and
gave the will to Serge. As she did so, a sudden fancy seized her. She
took the crown from its resting-place, and, standing in front of a long
mirror which occupied one of the eight sides of the room from roof to
floor, poised it above the lustrous coils of her hair with both hands,
and said, half to Serge and half to herself--
“What age could not accomplish, youth shall do! By my own right, and
with my own hands, I am crowned Tsarina, Empress of the Russias in
Europe and Asia. As the great Catherine was, so will I be--and more,
for I will be Mistress of the West and the East. I will have kings for
my vassals and senates for my servants, and I will rule as no other
woman has ruled before me since Semiramis!”
As she uttered the daring words, whose fulfilment seemed beyond the
dreams of the wildest imagination, she placed the crown upon her brow
and stood, clothed in imperial purple from head to foot, the very
incarnation of loveliness and royal majesty. Serge looked up as she
spoke, and gazed for a moment entranced upon her. Then he threw himself
upon his knees before her, and, raising the hem of her robe to his
lips, said in a voice half choked with love and passion--
“And I, who am also of the imperial blood, will be the first to salute
you Tsarina and mistress! You have taken me as your lover, let me also
be the first of your subjects. I will serve you as woman never was
served before. You shall be my mistress--my goddess, and your words
shall be my laws before all other laws. If you bid me do evil, it
shall be to me as good, and I will do it. I will kill or leave alive
according to your pleasure, and I will hold my own life as cheap as any
other in your service; for I love you, and my life is yours!”
Olga looked down upon him with the light of triumph in her eyes. No
woman ever breathed to whom such words would not have been sweet; but
to her they were doubly sweet, because they were a spontaneous tribute
to the power of her beauty and the strength of her royal nature, and an
earnest of her future sway over other men.
More than this, too, they had been won without an effort, from the lips
of the man whom she had always been taught to look upon as higher than
other men, in virtue of his descent from her own ancestry, and the
blood-right that he shared with her to that throne which it was to be
their joint life-task to re-establish.
If she did not love him, it was rather because ambition and the
inborn lust of power engrossed her whole being, than from any lack of
worthiness on his part. Of all the men she had ever seen, none compared
with him in strength and manliness save one--and he, bitter beyond
expression as the thought was to her, was so far above her as she was
now, that he seemed to belong to another world and to another order of
beings.
As their eyes met, a thrill that was almost akin to love passed through
her soul, and, acting on the impulse of the moment, she took the crown
from her own head and held it above his as he knelt at her feet, and
said--
“Not as my subject or my servant, but as my co-ruler and helpmate, you
shall keep that oath of yours, Serge Nicholaivitch. We have exchanged
our vows, and in a few days I shall be your wife. We will wed as
equals; and so now I crown you, as it is my right to do. Rise, my lord
the Tsar, and take your crown!”
Serge put up his hands and took the crown from hers at the moment that
she placed it on his brow. He rose to his feet, holding it on his head
as he said solemnly--
“So be it, and may the God of our fathers help me to wear it worthily
with you, and to restore to it the glory that has been taken from it by
our enemies!”
Then he laid it reverently down on the table and turned to Olga, who
was still standing before the mirror looking at her own lovely image,
as though in a dream of future glory. He took her unresisting in his
arms, and kissed her passionately again and again, bringing the bright
blood to her cheeks and the light of a kindred passion to her eyes, and
murmuring between the kisses--
“But you, darling, are worth all the crowns of earth, and I am still
your slave, because your beauty and your sweetness make me so.”
“Then slave you shall be!” she said, giving him back kiss for kiss,
well knowing that with every pressure of her intoxicating lips she
riveted the chains of his bondage closer upon his soul.
To an outside observer, what had taken place would have seemed but
little better than boy-and-girl’s play, the phantasy of two young and
ardent souls dreaming a romantic and impossible dream of power and
glory that had vanished, never to be brought back again. And yet, if
such a one had been able to look forward through little more than a
single lustrum, he would have seen that, in the mysterious revolutions
of human affairs, it is usually the seemingly impossible that becomes
possible, and the most unexpected that comes to pass.
The secret will of Paul Romanoff, to the study of which the two lovers
addressed themselves when they awoke from the dream of love and empire
into which Olga’s phantasy had plunged them both, would, if it had been
made public, have given a by no means indefinite shape to such vague
dreams of world-revolution as were inspired in thoughtful minds, even
in the thirty-first year of the twenty-first century.
It was a voluminous document of many pages, embodying the result of
nearly eighty years of tireless scheming and patient research in the
field of science as well as in that of politics. Paul Romanoff had
lived his life with but one object, and that was, to prepare the way
for the accomplishment of a revolution which should culminate in the
subversion of the state of society inaugurated by the Terrorists, and
the re-establishment, at anyrate in the east of Europe, of autocratic
rule in the person of a scion of the House of Romanoff. All that he had
been able to do towards the attainment of this seemingly impossible
project was crystallised in the document bequeathed to Olga and Serge.
It was divided into three sections. The first of these was mostly
of a personal nature, and contained details which it would serve no
purpose of use or interest to reproduce here. It will therefore suffice
to say, that it contained a list of the names and addresses of four
hundred men and women scattered throughout Europe and America, each of
whom was the descendant of some prince or noble, some great landowner
or millionaire, who had suffered degradation or ruin at the hands of
the Terrorists during the reorganisation of society, after the final
triumph of the Anglo-Saxon Federation in 1904.
The second section of the will was of a purely scientific and technical
character. It was a theoretical arsenal of weapons for the arming of
those who, if they were to succeed at all, could only do so by bringing
back that which it had cost such an awful expenditure of blood and
suffering to banish from the earth in the days of the Terror. The
designs of Paul Romanoff, and the vast aspirations of those to whom he
had bequeathed the crown of the great Catherine, could have but one
result if they ever passed from the realm of fancy to that of deeds.
If the clock was to be put back, only the armed hand could do it, and
that hand must be so armed that it could strike at first secretly, and
yet with paralysing effect. The few would have to array themselves
against the many, and if they triumphed, it would have to be by the
possession of some such means of terrorism and irresistible destruction
as those who had accomplished the revolution of 1904 had wielded in
their aerial fleet.
By far the most important part of this section of the will consisted of
plans and diagrams of various descriptions of air-ships and submarine
vessels, accompanied by minute directions for building and working
them. Most of these were from the hand of Vladimir Romanoff, Olga’s
father; but of infinitely more importance even than all these was a
detailed description, on the last page but two of the section, of the
solution of a problem which had been attempted in the last decade of
the nineteenth century, but which was still unsolved so far as the
world at large was concerned.
This was the direct transformation of the solar energy locked up
in coal into electrical energy, without loss either by waste or
transference. How vast and yet easily controlled a power this would
be in the hands of those who were able to wield it, may be guessed
from the fact that, in the present day, less than ten per cent. of the
latent energy of coal is developed as electrical power even in the most
perfect systems of conversion.
All the rest is wasted between the furnace of the steam-engine and
the dynamo. It was to electrical power, obtained direct from coal and
petroleum, that Vladimir Romanoff trusted for the motive force of his
air-ships and submarine vessels, and which he had already employed
with experimental success as regards the former, when his career was
cut short by the swift and pitiless execution of the sentence of the
Supreme Council.
The remainder of this section was occupied by a list of chemical
formulæ for the most powerful explosives then known to science, and
minute instructions for their preparation. At the bottom of the page
which contained these, there was a little strip of parchment, fastened
by one end to the binding of the other sheets, and covered with very
small writing.
Olga’s eyes, wandering down over the maze of figures which crowded the
page, reached it before Serge’s did. One quick glance told her that it
was something very different to the rest. She laid one hand carelessly
over it, and with the other softly caressed Serge’s crisp, golden
curls. As he looked round in response to the caress, their eyes met,
and she said in her sweet, low, witching voice--
“Dearest, I have a favour to ask of you.”
“Not a favour to ask, but a command to give, you mean. Speak, and you
are obeyed. Have I not sworn obedience?” he replied, laying his hand
upon her shoulder and drawing her lovely face closer to his as he spoke.
“No, it is only a favour,” she said, with such a smile as Antony might
have seen on the lips of Cleopatra. “I want you to leave me alone for
a little time--for half an hour--and then come back and finish reading
this with me. You know my brain is not as strong as yours, and I feel a
little bewildered with all the wonderful things that there are in this
legacy of my father’s father.
“Before we go any further, I should like to read it all through again
by myself, so as to understand it thoroughly. So suppose you go to your
smoking-room for a little, and leave me to do so. I shall not take very
long, and then we will go over the rest together.”
“But we have only a couple more pages to read, sweet one, and then I
will go over it all again with you, and explain anything that you have
not understood.”
As he spoke, Serge’s eyes never wavered for a moment from hers. Could
he but have broken their spell, he might have seen that she was hiding
something from him under her little, white hand and shapely arm.
She brought her red, smiling lips still nearer to his as she almost
whispered in reply--
“Well, it is only a girl’s whim, after all, but still I am a girl.
Come, now, I will give you a kiss for twenty minutes’ solitude, and
when you come back, and we have finished our task, you shall have as
many more as you like.”
The sweet, tempting lips came closer still, and the witching spell of
her great dusky eyes grew stronger as she spoke. How was he to know
what was hanging in the balance in that fateful moment? He was but a
hot-blooded youth of twenty, and he worshipped this lovely, girlish
temptress, who had not yet seen seventeen summers, with an adoration
that blinded him to all else but her and her intoxicating beauty.
He drew her yielding form to him until he could feel her heart beating
against his, and as their lips met, the promised kiss came from hers
to his. He returned it threefold, and then his arm slipped from her
shoulder to her waist, and he lifted her like a child from her chair,
and carried her, half laughing and half protesting, to the door,
claimed and took another kiss before he released her, and then put her
down and left her alone without another word.
“Alas, poor Serge!” she said, as the door closed behind him; “you are
not the first man who has lost the empire of the world for a woman’s
kiss. Before, I saw that you were my equal and helpmate, now you and
all other men--yes, not even excepting he who seems so far above me
now--shall be my slaves and do my bidding, so blindly that they shall
not even know they are doing it.
“Yes, the weapons of war are worth much, but what are they in
comparison with the souls of the men who will have to use them!”
In half an hour Serge came back to finish the reading of the will
with her. The little slip of paper had been removed so skilfully that
it would have been impossible for him to have even guessed that it had
ever been attached to the parchment, or that it was now lying hidden in
the bosom of the girl who would have killed him without the slightest
scruple to gain the unsuspected possession of it.