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THE ANGEL OF THE REVOLUTION
MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Edwin S. Hope._
NATASHA]
THE ANGEL
OF THE
REVOLUTION
A Tale of the Coming Terror
BY
GEORGE GRIFFITH
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRED. T. JANE_
FIFTH EDITION
LONDON
TOWER PUBLISHING COMPANY LIMITED
91 MINORIES, E.C.
1894
_Copyrighted Abroad_] [_All Foreign Rights Reserved_
TO
CYRIL ARTHUR PEARSON
TO WHOSE SUGGESTION
THE WRITING OF THIS STORY
WAS PRIMARILY DUE
THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE INSCRIBED
BY
THE AUTHOR
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR, 1
II. AT WAR WITH SOCIETY, 8
III. A FRIENDLY CHAT, 16
IV. THE HOUSE ON CLAPHAM COMMON, 23
V. THE INNER CIRCLE, 30
VI. NEW FRIENDS, 37
VII. THE DAUGHTER OF NATAS, 46
VIII. LEARNING THE PART, 54
IX. THE BEGINNING OF SORROWS, 63
X. THE "ARIEL," 70
XI. FIRST BLOOD, 78
XII. IN THE MASTER'S NAME, 85
XIII. FOR LIFE OR DEATH, 91
XIV. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENT, 98
XV. A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY, 103
XVI. A WOOING IN MID-AIR, 110
XVII. AERIA FELIX, 119
XVIII. A NAVY OF THE FUTURE, 127
XIX. THE EVE OF BATTLE, 135
XX. BETWEEN TWO LIVES, 141
XXI. JUST IN TIME, 153
XXII. ARMED NEUTRALITY, 162
XXIII. A BATTLE IN THE NIGHT, 169
XXIV. THE NEW WARFARE, 179
XXV. THE HERALDS OF DISASTER, 188
XXVI. AN INTERLUDE, 193
XXVII. ON THE TRACK OF TREASON, 201
XXVIII. A SKIRMISH IN THE CLOUDS, 208
XXIX. AN EMBASSY FROM THE SKY, 216
XXX. AT CLOSE QUARTERS, 225
XXXI. A RUSSIAN RAID, 233
XXXII. THE END OF THE CHASE, 241
XXXIII. THE BREAKING OF THE CHARM, 247
XXXIV. THE PATH OF CONQUEST, 251
XXXV. FROM CHAOS TO ARCADIE, 258
XXXVI. LOVE AND DUTY, 267
XXXVII. THE CAPTURE OF A CONTINENT, 276
XXXVIII. THE BEGINNING OF THE END, 289
XXXIX. THE BATTLE OF DOVER, 295
XL. BELEAGUERED LONDON, 301
XLI. AN ENVOY OF DELIVERANCE, 308
XLII. THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON, 315
XLIII. THE OLD LION AT BAY, 323
XLIV. THE TURN OF THE BATTLE-TIDE, 331
XLV. ARMAGEDDON, 339
XLVI. VICTORY, 347
XLVII. THE JUDGMENT OF NATAS, 355
XLVIII. THE ORDERING OF EUROPE, 366
XLIX. THE STORY OF THE MASTER, 375
EPILOGUE.--"AND ON EARTH PEACE!" 386
THE ANGEL OF THE REVOLUTION.
CHAPTER I.
AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR.
"Victory! It flies! I am master of the Powers of the Air at last!"
They were strange words to be uttered, as they were, by a pale,
haggard, half-starved looking young fellow in a dingy, comfortless
room on the top floor of a South London tenement-house; and yet there
was a triumphant ring in his voice, and a clear, bright flush on his
thin cheeks that spoke at least for his own absolute belief in their
truth.
Let us see how far he was justified in that belief.
* * * * *
To begin at the beginning, Richard Arnold was one of those men whom
the world is wont to call dreamers and enthusiasts before they
succeed, and heaven-born geniuses and benefactors of humanity
afterwards.
He was twenty-six, and for nearly six years past he had devoted
himself, soul and body, to a single idea--to the so far unsolved
problem of aërial navigation.
This idea had haunted him ever since he had been able to think
logically at all--first dimly at school, and then more clearly at
college, where he had carried everything before him in mathematics
and natural science, until it had at last become a ruling passion
that crowded everything else out of his life, and made him,
commercially speaking, that most useless of social units--a
one-idea'd man, whose idea could not be put into working form.
He was an orphan, with hardly a blood relation in the world. He had
started with plenty of friends, mostly made at college, who thought
he had a brilliant future before him, and therefore looked upon him
as a man whom it might be useful to know.
But as time went on, and no results came, these dropped off, and he
got to be looked upon as an amiable lunatic, who was wasting his
great talents and what money he had on impracticable fancies, when he
might have been earning a handsome income if he had stuck to the
beaten track, and gone in for practical work.
The distinctions that he had won at college, and the reputation he
had gained as a wonderfully clever chemist and mechanician, had led
to several offers of excellent positions in great engineering firms;
but to the surprise and disgust of his friends he had declined them
all. No one knew why, for he had kept his secret with the almost
passionate jealousy of the true enthusiast, and so his refusals were
put down to sheer foolishness, and he became numbered with the
geniuses who are failures because they are not practical.
When he came of age he had inherited a couple of thousand pounds,
which had been left in trust to him by his father. Had it not been
for that two thousand pounds he would have been forced to employ his
knowledge and his talents conventionally, and would probably have
made a fortune. But it was just enough to relieve him from the
necessity of earning his living for the time being, and to make it
possible for him to devote himself entirely to the realisation of his
life-dream--at any rate until the money was gone.
Of course he yielded to the temptation--nay, he never gave the other
course a moment's thought. Two thousand pounds would last him for
years; and no one could have persuaded him that with complete
leisure, freedom from all other concerns, and money for the necessary
experiments, he would not have succeeded long before his capital was
exhausted.
So he put the money into a bank whence he could draw it out as he
chose, and withdrew himself from the world to work out the ideal of
his life.
Year after year passed, and still success did not come. He found
practice very different from theory, and in a hundred details he met
with difficulties he had never seen on paper. Meanwhile his money
melted away in costly experiments which only raised hopes that ended
in bitter disappointment. His wonderful machine was a miracle of
ingenuity, and was mechanically perfect in every detail save one--it
would do no practical work.
Like every other inventor who had grappled with the problem, he had
found himself constantly faced with that fatal ratio of weight to
power. No engine that he could devise would do more than lift itself
and the machine. Again and again he had made a toy that would fly, as
others had done before him, but a machine that would navigate the air
as a steamer or an electric vessel navigated the waters, carrying
cargo and passengers, was still an impossibility while that terrible
problem of weight and power remained unsolved.
In order to eke out his money to the uttermost, he had clothed and
lodged himself meanly, and had denied himself everything but the
barest necessaries of life.
Thus he had prolonged the struggle for over five years of toil and
privation and hope deferred, and now, when his last sovereign had
been changed and nearly spent, success--real, tangible, practical
success--had come to him, and the discovery that was to be to the
twentieth century what the steam-engine had been to the nineteenth
was accomplished.
He had discovered the true motive power at last.
Two liquefied gases--which, when united, exploded spontaneously--were
admitted by a clockwork escapement in minute quantities into the
cylinders of his engine, and worked the pistons by the expansive
force of the gases generated by the explosion. There was no weight
but the engine itself and the cylinders containing the liquefied
gases. Furnaces, boilers, condensers, accumulators, dynamos--all the
ponderous apparatus of steam and electricity--were done away with,
and he had a power at command greater than either of them.
There was no doubt about it. The moment that his trembling fingers
set the escapement mechanism in motion, the model that embodied the
thought and labour of years rose into the air as gracefully as a bird
on the wing, and sailed round and round in obedience to its rudder,
straining hard at the string which prevented it from striking the
ceiling. It was weighted in strict proportion to the load that the
full-sized air-ship would have to carry. To increase this was merely
a matter of increasing the power of the engine and the size of the
floats and fans.
The room was a large one, for the house had been built for a better
fate than letting in tenements, and it ran from back to front with a
window at each end. Out of doors there was a strong breeze blowing,
and as soon as Arnold was sure that his ship was able to hold its own
in still air, he threw both the windows open and let the wind blow
straight through the room. Then he drew the air-ship down,
straightened the rudder, and set it against the breeze.
In almost agonised suspense he watched it rise from the floor, float
motionless for a moment, and then slowly forge ahead in the teeth of
the wind, gathering speed as it went. It was then that he had uttered
that triumphant cry of "Victory!" All the long years of privation and
hope deferred vanished in that one supreme moment of innocent and
bloodless conquest, and he saw himself master of a kingdom as wide as
the world itself.
He let the model fly the length of the room before he stopped the
clockwork and cut off the motive power, allowing it to sink gently to
the floor. Then came the reaction. He looked steadfastly at his
handiwork for several moments in silence, and then he turned and
threw himself on to a shabby little bed that stood in one corner of
the room and burst into a flood of tears.
Triumph had come, but had it not come too late? He knew the boundless
possibilities of his invention--but they had still to be realised. To
do this would cost thousands of pounds, and he had just one
half-crown and a few coppers. Even these were not really his own, for
he was already a week behind with his rent, and another payment fell
due the next day. That would be twelve shillings in all, and if it
was not paid he would be turned into the street.
As he raised himself from the bed he looked despairingly round the
bare, shabby room. No; there was nothing there that he could pawn or
sell. Everything saleable had gone already to keep up the struggle of
hope against despair. The bed and wash-stand, the plain deal table,
and the one chair that comprised the furniture of the room were not
his. A little carpenter's bench, a few worn tools and odds and ends
of scientific apparatus, and a dozen well-used books--these were all
that he possessed in the world now, save the clothes on his back, and
a plain painted sea-chest in which he was wont to lock up his
precious model when he had to go out.
His model! No, he could not sell that. At best it would fetch but the
price of an ingenious toy, and without the secret of the two gases it
was useless. But was not that worth something? Yes, if he did not
starve to death before he could persuade any one that there was money
in it. Besides, the chest and its priceless contents would be seized
for the rent next day, and then--
"God help me! What _am_ I to do?"
The words broke from him like a cry of physical pain, and ended in a
sob, and for all answer there was the silence of the room and the
inarticulate murmur of the streets below coming up through the open
windows.
He was weak with hunger and sick with excitement, for he had lived
for days on bread and cheese, and that day he had eaten nothing since
the crust that had served him for breakfast. His nerves, too, were
shattered by the intense strain of his final trial and triumph, and
his head was getting light.
With a desperate effort he recovered himself, and the heroic
resolution that had sustained him through his long struggle came to
his aid again. He got up and poured some water from the ewer into a
cracked cup and drank it. It refreshed him for the moment, and he
poured the rest of the water over his head. That steadied his nerves
and cleared his brain. He took up the model from the floor, laid it
tenderly and lovingly in its usual resting-place in the chest. Then
he locked the chest and sat down upon it to think the situation over.
Ten minutes later he rose to his feet and said aloud--
"It's no use. I can't think on an empty stomach. I'll go out and have
one more good meal if it's the last I ever have in the world, and
then perhaps some ideas will come."
So saying, he took down his hat, buttoned his shabby velveteen coat
to conceal his lack of a waistcoat, and went out, locking the door
behind him as he went.
Five minutes' walk brought him to the Blackfriars Road, and then he
turned towards the river and crossed the bridge just as the motley
stream of city workers was crossing it in the opposite direction on
their homeward journey.
At Ludgate Circus he went into an eating-house and fared sumptuously
on a plate of beef, some bread and butter, and a pint mug of coffee.
As he was eating a paper-boy came in and laid an _Echo_ on the table
at which he was sitting. He took it up mechanically, and ran his eye
carelessly over the columns. He was in no humour to be interested by
the tattle of an evening paper, but in a paragraph under the heading
of Foreign News a once familiar name caught his eye, and he read the
paragraph through. It ran as follows:--
RAILWAY OUTRAGE IN RUSSIA.
When the Berlin-Petersburg express stopped last night at Kovno,
the first stop after passing the Russian frontier, a shocking
discovery was made in the smoking compartment of the palace car
which has been on the train for the last few months. Colonel
Dornovitch, of the Imperial Police, who is understood to have
been on his return journey from a secret mission to Paris, was
found stabbed to the heart and quite dead. In the centre of the
forehead were two short straight cuts in the form of a *T*
reaching to the bone. Not long ago Colonel Dornovitch was
instrumental in unearthing a formidable Nihilist conspiracy, in
connection with which over fifty men and women of various social
ranks were exiled for life to Siberia. The whole affair is
wrapped in the deepest mystery, the only clue in the hands of the
police being the fact that the cross cut on the forehead of the
victim indicates that the crime is the work, not of the Nihilists
proper, but of that unknown and mysterious society usually
alluded to as the Terrorists, not one of whom has ever been seen
save in his crimes. How the assassin managed to enter and leave
the car unperceived while the train was going at full speed is an
apparently insoluble riddle. Saving the victim and the
attendants, the only passengers in the car who had not retired to
rest were another officer in the Russian service and Lord
Alanmere, who was travelling to St. Petersburg to resume, after
leave of absence, the duties of the Secretaryship to the British
Embassy, to which he was appointed some two years ago.
"Why, that must be the Lord Alanmere who was at Trinity in my time,
or rather Viscount Tremayne, as he was then," mused Arnold, as he
laid the paper down. "We were very good friends in those days. I
wonder if he'd know me now, and lend me a ten-pound note to get me
out of the infernal fix I'm in? I believe he would, for he was one of
the few really good-hearted men I have so far met with.
"If he were in London I really think I should take courage from my
desperation, and put my case before him and ask his help. However,
he's not in London, and so it's no use wishing. Well, I feel more of
a man for that shillingsworth of food and drink, and I'll go and wind
up my dissipation with a pipe and a quiet think on the Embankment."