THE sitting of the Council lasted until nightfall, and just as the
western mountains were throwing their huge shadows over the lovely
valley, two more air-ships passed between two of the southward peaks
and alighted in the great square in the centre of the city. They were
the two vessels which had been sent to the island indicated in Olga’s
letter to bring back the long-lost Alan and Alexis.
It would be vain to attempt to describe the feelings with which the
President and the father of Alexis went, as they thought, to receive
their sons, but the air-ships had returned without them, and in
their stead they brought a written message which conveyed tidings no
less strange and startling than those brought from Antarctica by the
_Ithuriel_ and her consort.
It was a letter from Alan to his father, and as soon as he received it
from the captain of one of the air-ships, who had found it nailed to a
tree on the island, he took his friend into his library, and there the
two fathers read it together.
After briefly but circumstantially recounting the capture of the
flag-ship by Olga by means of her subtle drugs, and showing how, by
using the power they gave her, she had kept them in mental slavery
for years, forcing them to employ their skill and knowledge in aiding
her to build her aerial and submarine fleets out of the spoils of
the destroyed ocean transports, from which the latter had taken an
incalculable amount of treasure, Alan’s letter concluded thus:--
I will now tell you the reason why Alexis and myself have not waited
for the air-ship which we knew you would send for us as soon as you
received the message which Olga Romanoff told us she would despatch
to you. We consider that by our weakness and folly--or, in truth, I
should rather say mine, for it was I who invited these treacherous
guests on board the _Ithuriel_--we have not only brought endless
calamities upon the world, but we have also forfeited our right to
the citizenship of Aeria.
What the judgment of the Council would be upon us I don’t know, but
we are resolved that, whatever it might have been, you and Alexis’s
father shall be spared the sorrow of pronouncing sentence upon your
own sons. Some day perhaps we may win at least the right to plead our
cause before you. At present we have none, and until we have won it
you shall not see us again unless you capture us by force.
We were sent here in the _Narwhal_, the swiftest and most powerful
vessel of the Russian submarine fleet. Only a few days ago an
accident revealed to Alexis for the first time during our long mental
slavery the means which this woman, who is as beautiful as an angel
and as merciless as a fiend, had used to keep us in subjection. We
took the utmost care to give her no suspicion of his discovery, and
although we drank no more of her poison we acted exactly as though we
were still under its influence.
In what could only have been mockery she gave us back our belts and
coronets, bidding us wear them “when we returned to our kingdom,” as
she put it. We shall never wear the winged circlets again till we
have regained the right to do so, but the belts and a couple of brace
of magazine pistols which we took before we left her stronghold in
Antarctica stood us in good stead.
We have killed the crew of the _Narwhal_, and taken possession of
her. She is far swifter and more powerful than any vessel in our
submarine navy, for she can be driven at a hundred and fifty miles an
hour through the water, and can destroy anything that floats in or
on the sea with a blow of her ram, and, more than this, she carries
a torpedo battery which has an effective range of two miles, and can
strike and destroy anything within that distance without giving the
slightest warning of her presence.
There are fifty vessels of this type in the Russian fleet, but the
_Narwhal_ is at least thirty miles an hour faster than any of them.
An attack will probably be made by the Russians on our station at
Kerguelen Island within a week by submarine vessels and a small
squadron of air-ships, and there we shall begin our operations
against the enemy. If you have any reply to make to this letter we
will wait for it at sea off Kerguelen, and then begin the campaign we
have planned. We shall never rest until we have either destroyed the
Russian fleet in detail or have died in the attempt to do so.
If we ever return it will be to restore to you the supremacy of the
sea, and then, and not till then, we will ask you to pardon our fault
and will willingly submit to such further conditions as you may see
fit to impose upon us before you give us back--if ever you do--the
rights which we have lost.
With all love and duty to yourself, and loving remembrances to the
dear ones in Aeria, your son
ALAN.
At the foot of the letter was a postscript signed by Alexis, indorsing
all that Alan had said, save with regard to his sole responsibility for
the calamity that had ensued from the admission of Olga and Serge on
board the _Ithuriel_.
The two fathers discussed the strange, and, to them, most affecting
communication for nearly an hour in private, and then another meeting
of the Council was called to consider it and pronounce authoritatively
upon it. The President read the letter aloud in a voice which betrayed
no trace of the deep emotion that moved his inmost being, and then left
the Council chamber with Maurice Masarov, so that their presence might
not embarrass their colleagues.
The simple, manly straightforwardness of Alan’s letter appealed far
more eloquently to the Council than excuses or prayers for forgiveness
would have done. It was plain, too, that after the first indiscretion
of taking the strangers on board the air-ship, no moral responsibility
or blame could be laid on Alan and Alexis for what they had done under
the influence of a drug which had paralysed their moral sense.
The Council, therefore, not only accepted the conditions of the letter,
but without a dissentient voice, agreed to confer the first and second
commands of the Aerian submarine fleets and stations for the time being
upon Alan and Alexis, with permission to call in the aid of the nearest
aerial squadron when necessary. This decision was despatched forthwith
by an air-ship to Kerguelen, and within an hour all Aeria was talking
of nothing else than the strange fate of the two youths who for five
years had been mourned as dead.
Later on that evening, when the twin snow-clad peaks which towered
high above the city of Aeria had lost the pink afterglow of the
departed sunlight, and were beginning to gleam with a whiter radiance
in the level beams of the newly-risen moon, a girl was standing on
the spacious terrace of a marble villa which stood on the summit of a
rounded eminence a couple of miles from the western verge of the city.
She had just crossed the threshold of womanhood. The next sun that
would rise would be that of her twentieth birthday. Yet for two years
she had worn the silver circle and crystal wings, for in Aeria a girl
became of legal age at eighteen, though she took no share in the civil
life of the community until she was married, an event which, as a
rule, took place not long after she was invested with the symbol of
citizenship.
It was an exceedingly rare event for an Aerian girl to reach the eve
of her twentieth year unmarried, for the sexes in the Central-African
paradise were very evenly balanced, and, as was natural in a very high
state of civilisation, where families seldom exceeded three or four
children, celibacy in either sex was looked upon as a public misfortune
and a private reproach.
But Alma Tremayne, the girl who was standing on the terrace of her
father’s house on this most eventful evening, had become an exception
to the rule through circumstances so sad and strange that her
loneliness was an honour rather than a reproach. There were many of the
wearers of the golden wings who had sought long and ardently to win her
from the allegiance which forbade her to look with favouring eyes upon
any of them.
She was beautiful in a land where all women were fair, a land where,
under the most favourable conditions that could be conceived, a race
of almost more than human strength and beauty had been evolved, and
she came of a family scarcely second in honour even to that of the
President, for she was the direct descendant in the fifth generation of
Alan Tremayne, first President of the Anglo-Saxon Federation, through
his son Cyril born two years after the daughter who had married the
first-born son of Natasha and Richard Arnold.
More than five years before she and Alan had plighted their
boy-and-girl troth on the eve of his departure on the fateful voyage
from which he had never returned, and of which no tidings had reached
Aeria until a few hours before. To the simple vow which her girlish
lips had then spoken she had remained steadfast even when, as the years
went by and still no tidings came of her lost lover, she, in common
with her own kindred, had begun to mourn him as dead.
It is true that she was in love rather with a memory than with a man,
yet with some natures such a love as this is stronger than any other,
more ideal and more lasting, and exempt from the danger of growing cold
in fruition. So strong was the hold that this ideal love had taken upon
her being that the idea of even accepting the love and homage of any
other man appeared as sacrilegious to her as the embrace of an earthly
lover would have seemed to a nun of the Middle Ages.
And so, with a single companion in her solitary state, she stood aside
and watched with patient, unregretful eyes the wedded happiness of her
more fortunate friends. This companion was Isma Arnold, Alan’s sister,
who had a double reason for doing as Alma had done.
Not only had she resolved never to marry while her brother’s fate
remained uncertain, but she, too, had also made her choice among the
youths of Aeria, and in such matters an Aerian girl seldom chose twice.
So she waited for Alexis as Alma did for Alan, hoping even against her
convictions, and keeping his memory undefiled in the sacred shrine of
her maiden soul.
No artist could have dreamed of a fairer picture than Alma standing
there on the terrace overlooking the stately city and the dark shining
lake at her feet. She was clad in soft, clinging garments of whitest
linen and finest silk of shimmering, pearly grey, edged with a dainty
embroidery of gold and silver thread.
Her dress, confined at the waist with a girdle of interlinked azurine
and gold, clothed without concealing the beauties of her perfect
form, and her hair, crowned by her crystal-winged coronet, flowed
unrestrained, after the custom of the maidens of Aeria, over her
shoulders in long and lustrous waves of dusky brown. There was a shadow
in the great deep grey eyes which looked up as though in mute appeal to
the starlight, the shadow of a sorrow which can never come to a woman
more than once.
All these years she had loved in cheerful patience and perfect faith
the man for whose memory she had lived in maiden widowhood--and now,
who could measure the depth of the darkness, darker than the shadow of
death itself, that had fallen across her life, severing the past from
the present with a chasm that seemed impassable, and leaving the future
but a barren, loveless waste to be trodden by her in weariness and
loneliness until the end!
All these years she had loved an ideal man, one of her own splendid
race, the very chosen of the earth, as pure in his unblemished manhood
as she was in the stainless maidenhood that she had held so sacred
for his sake even while she thought him dead--and, lo! the years had
passed, and he had come back to life, but how? Hers was not the false
innocence of ignorance. She knew the evil and the good, and because she
knew both shrank from contamination with the horror born of knowledge.
She had seen both Olga’s letter and Alan’s, and those two terrible
sentences, “They have served my turn, and I have done with them,” and
“She is as beautiful as an angel and as merciless as a fiend,” kept
ringing their fatal changes through her brain in pitiless succession,
forcing all the revolting possibilities of their meaning into her
tortured soul till her reason seemed to reel under their insupportable
stress.
Mocking voices spoke to her out of the night, and told her of the
unholy love that such a woman would, in the plenitude of her unnatural
power, have for such a man; how she would subdue him, and make him
not only her lover but her slave; how she would humble his splendid
manhood, and play with him until her evil fancy was sated, and then
cast him aside--as she had done--like a toy of which she had tired.
Better a thousand times that he had died as his murdered comrades had
died--in the northern snowdrift into which this Syren of the Skies had
cast them, to sleep the sleep that knew neither dreams nor waking!
Better for him and her that he had gone before her into the shadows,
and had remained her ideal love until, hand in hand, they could begin
their lives anew upon a higher plane of existence.
As these thoughts passed and repassed through her mind with pitiless
persistence, her lovely face grew rigid and white under the starlight,
and, but for the nervous twining and untwining of her fingers as her
hands clasped and unclasped behind her, her motionless form might have
been carved out of stone. For the first time since peace had been
proclaimed on earth, a hundred and thirty-two years ago, the flames of
war had burst forth again, and for the first time in the story of her
race the snake had entered the now no longer enchanted Eden of Aeria.
It was hers to suffer the first real agony of soul that any woman of
her people had passed through since Natasha, in the palm-grove down
yonder by the lake, had told Richard Arnold of her love on the night
that he had received the Master’s command to take her to another man to
be his wife.
There were no tears in the fixed, wide-open eyes that stared almost
sightlessly up to the skies, in which the stars were now paling in the
growing light of the moon. The torment of her torturing thoughts was
too great for that.
She was growing blind and dizzy under the merciless stress of them,
when--it might have been just in time to save her from the madness that
seemed the only outcome of her misery--the sweet, silvery tones of a
girl’s voice floated through the still, scented air uttering her name--
“Alma!”
The sound mercifully recalled her wandering senses in an instant. It
was the voice of her friend, of the sister of her now doubly-lost
lover, and it reproved the selfishness of her great sorrow by reminding
her that she was not suffering alone. As the sound of her name reached
her ear the rigidity of her form relaxed, the light came back to her
eyes, and turning her head she looked in the direction whence it came.
There was a soft whirring of wings in the still air of the tropic
night, and out of the half-darkness floated a shape that looked like a
realisation of one of the Old-World fairy-tales. It was a vessel some
twenty-five feet long by five wide, built of white, polished metal, and
shaped something like an old Norse galley, with its high, arching prow
fashioned like the breast and neck of a swan.
From the sides projected a pair of wide, rapidly-undulating wings, and
in the open space between these stood on the floor of the boat the
figure of a girl whose loose, golden hair floated out behind her with
the rapid motion of her fairy craft.
There was no need for words of greeting between the two girl friends.
Alma knew the kindly errand on which Isma had come, and as she stepped
out she went towards her with hands outstretched in silent welcome.
As their hands met, and the two girls stood face to face, motionless
for a moment, they made an exquisite contrast of opposite types of
womanly beauty--Alma tall and stately, with a proudly-carried head,
clear, pale skin, grey eyes, and perfectly regular features, and Isma,
a year younger and a good inch shorter, slender of form yet strong and
lithe of limb, with golden, silky hair and sunny-blue eyes, fresh, rosy
skin, and mobile features which scarcely ever seemed to wear the same
expression for a couple of minutes together--as sweet a daughter of
delight as ever man could look upon with eyes of love and longing.
But she was grave enough now, for her friend’s sorrow was hers too, and
its shadow lay with equal darkness upon her. The ready tears welled
up under her dark lashes as she looked upon Alma’s white, drawn face
and dry, burning eyes, and her low, sweet voice was broken by a sob
as, passing her arm round her waist, she drew her towards the boat and
said--
“Come, dear, this sorrow belongs to me as well as you and we must help
each other to bear it. I have brought my new boat so that we can take
a flight round the valley and talk about it quietly. If two heads are
better than one, so are two hearts.”
Alma’s only reply to the invitation was a sad, sweet smile, and a
gentle caress, but the welcome, loving sympathy had come when it was
most sorely needed, and so she got into the aerial boat with Isma, and
a few moments later the beautiful craft was bearing them at an easy
speed southward down the valley.