THE STORY OF THE MASTER.
That evening, when the lamps were lit and the curtains drawn in the
library at Alanmere, in the same room in which Tremayne had seen the
Vision of Armageddon, Natas told the story of Israel di Murska, the
Jewish Hungarian merchant, and of Sylvia Penarth, the beautiful
English wife whom he had loved better than his own faith and people,
and how she had been taken from him to suffer a fate which had now
been avenged as no human wrongs had ever been before.
"Twenty-five years ago," he began, gazing dreamily into the great
fire of pine-logs, round the hearth of which he and his listeners
were sitting, "I, who am now an almost helpless, half-mutilated
cripple, was a strong, active man, in the early vigour of manhood,
rich, respected, happy, and prosperous even beyond the average of
earthly good fortune.
"I was a merchant in London, and I had inherited a large fortune from
my father, which I had more than doubled by successful trading. I was
married to an English wife, a woman whose grace and beauty are
faithfully reflected in her daughter"--
As Natas said this, the fierce light that had begun to shine in his
eyes softened, and the hard ring left his voice, and for a little
space he spoke in gentler tones, until sterner memories came and
hardened them again.
"I will not deny that I bought her with my gold and fair promises of
a life of ease and luxury. But that is done every day in the world in
which I then lived, and I only did as my Christian neighbours about
me did. Yet I loved my beautiful Christian wife very dearly,--more
dearly even than my people and my ancient faith,--or I should not
have married her.
"When Natasha was two years old the black pall of desolation fell
suddenly on our lives, and blasted our great happiness with a misery
so utter and complete that we, who were wont to count ourselves among
the fortunate ones of the earth, were cast down so low that the
beggar at our doors might have looked down upon us.
"It was through no fault of mine or hers, nor through any
circumstance over which either of us had any control, that we fell
from our serene estate. On the contrary, it was through a work of
pure mercy, intended for the relief of those of our people who were
groaning under the pitiless despotism of Russian officialism and
superstition, that I fell, as so many thousands of my race have
fallen, into that abyss of nameless misery and degradation that
Russian hands have dug for the innocent in the ghastly solitudes of
Siberia, and, without knowing it, dragged my sweet and loving wife
into it after me.
"It came about in this wise.
"I had a large business connection in Russia, and at a time when all
Europe was ringing with the story of the persecution of the Russian
Jews, I, at the earnest request of a committee of the leading Jews in
London, undertook a mission to St. Petersburg, to bring their
sufferings, if possible, under the direct notice of the Tsar, and to
obtain his consent to a scheme for the payment of a general
indemnity, subscribed to by all the wealthy Jews of the world, which
should secure them against persecution and official tyranny until
they could be gradually and completely removed from Russia.
"I, of course, found myself thwarted at every turn by the heartless
and corrupt officialism that stands between the Russian people and
the man whom they still regard as the vicegerent of God upon earth.
"Upon one pretext and another I was kept from the presence of the
Tsar for weeks, until he left his dominions on a visit to Denmark.
"Meanwhile I travelled about, and used my eyes as well as the
officials would permit me, to see whether the state of things was
really as bad as the accounts that had reached England had made it
out to be.
"I saw enough to convince me that no human words could describe the
awful sufferings of the sons and daughters of Israel in that hateful
land of bondage.
"Neither their lives nor their honour, their homes nor their
property, were safe from the malice and the lust and the rapacity of
the brutal ministers of Russian officialdom.
"I conversed with families from which fathers and mothers, sons and
daughters had been spirited away, either never to return, or to come
back years afterwards broken in health, ruined and dishonoured, to
the poor wrecks of the homes that had once been peaceful, pure, and
happy.
"I saw every injury, insult, and degradation heaped upon them that
patient and long-suffering humanity could bear, until my soul
sickened within me, and my spirit rose in revolt against the hateful
and inhuman tyranny that treated my people like vermin and wild
beasts, for no offence save a difference in race and creed.
"At last the shame and horror of it all got the better of my
prudence, and the righteous rage that burned within me spoke out
through my pen and my lips.
"I wrote faithful accounts of all I had seen to the committee in
England. They never reached their destination, for I was already a
marked man, and my letters were stopped and opened by the police.
"At last I one day attended a court of law, and heard one of those
travesties of justice which the Russian officials call a trial for
conspiracy.
"There was not one tittle of anything that would have been called
evidence, or that would not have been discredited and laughed out of
court in any other country in Europe; yet two of the five prisoners,
a man and a woman, were sentenced to death, and the other three, two
young students and a girl who was to have been the bride of one of
them in a few weeks' time, were doomed to five years in the mines of
Kara, and after that, if they survived it, to ten years' exile in
Sakhalin.
"So awful and so hideous did the appalling injustice seem to me,
accustomed as I was to the open fairness of the English criminal
courts, that, overcome with rage and horror, I rose to my feet as the
judge pronounced the frightful sentence, and poured forth a flood of
passionate denunciations and wild appeals to the justice of humanity
to revoke the doom of the innocent.
"Of course I was hustled out of the court and flung into the street
by the police attendants, and I groped my way back to my hotel with
eyes blinded with tears of rage and sorrow.
"That afternoon I was requested by the proprietor of the hotel to
leave before nightfall. I expostulated in vain. He simply told me
that he dared not have in his house a man who had brought himself
into collision with the police, and that I must find other lodgings
at once. This, however, I found to be no easy matter. Wherever I went
I was met with cold looks, and was refused admittance.
"Lower and lower sank my heart within me at each refusal, and the
terrible conviction forced itself upon me that I was a marked man
amidst all-powerful and unscrupulous enemies whom no Russian dare
offend. I was a Jew and an outcast, and there was nothing left for me
but to seek for refuge such as I could get among my own persecuted
people.
"Far on into the night I found one, a modest lodging, in which I
hoped I could remain for a day or two while waiting for my passport,
and making the necessary preparations to return to England and shake
the mire of Russia off my feet for ever. It would have been a
thousand times better for me and my dear ones, and for those whose
sympathy and kindness involved them in my ruin, if, instead of going
to that ill-fated house, I had flung myself into the dark waters of
the Neva, and so ended my sorrows ere they had well begun.
"I applied for my passport the next day, and was informed that it
would not be ready for at least three days. The delay was, of course,
purposely created, and before the time had expired a police visit was
paid to the house in which I was lodging, and papers written in
cypher were found within the lining of one of my hats.
"I was arrested, and a guard was placed over the house. Without any
further ceremony I was thrown into a cell in the fortress of Peter
and Paul to await the translation of the cypher. Three days later I
was taken before the chief of police, and accused of having in my
possession papers proving that I was an emissary from the Nihilist
headquarters in London.
"I was told that my conduct had been so suspicious and of late so
disorderly, that I had been closely watched during my stay in St.
Petersburg, with the result that conclusive evidence of treason had
been found against me.
"As I was known to be wealthy, and to have powerful friends in
England, the formality of a trial was dispensed with, and after
eating my heart out for a month in my cell in the fortress, I was
transferred to Moscow to join the next convict train for Siberia.
Arrived there, I for the first time learned my sentence--ten years in
the mines, and then ten in Sakhalin.
"Thus was I doomed by the trick of some police spy to pass what bade
fair to be the remainder of a life that had been so bright and full
of fair promise in hopeless exile, torment, and degradation--and all
because I protested against injustice and made myself obnoxious to
the Russian police.
"As the chain-gang that I was attached to left Moscow, I found to my
intense grief that the good Jew and his wife who had given me shelter
were also members of it. They had been convicted of 'harbouring a
political conspirator,' and sentenced to five years' hard labour, and
then exile for life, as 'politicals,' which, as you no doubt know,
meant that, if they survived the first part of their sentence, they
would be allowed to settle in an allotted part of Southern Siberia,
free in everything but permission to leave the country.
"Were I to talk till this time to-morrow I could not properly
describe to you all the horrors of that awful journey along the Great
Siberian road, from the Pillar of Farewells that marks the boundary
between Europe and Asia across the frightful snowy wastes to Kara.
"The hideous story has been told again and again without avail to the
Christian nations of Europe, and they have permitted that awful crime
against humanity to be committed year after year without even a
protest, in obedience to the miserable principles that bade them to
place policy before religion and the etiquette of nations before the
everlasting laws of God.
"After two years of heartbreaking toil at the mines my health utterly
broke down. One day I fell fainting under the lash of the brutal
overseer, and as I lay on the ground he ran at me and kicked me twice
with his heavy iron-shod boots, once on the hip, breaking the bone,
and once on the lower part of the spine, crushing the spinal cord,
and paralysing my lower limbs for ever.
"As this did not rouse me from my fainting-fit, the heartless fiend
snatched a torch from the wall of the mine-gallery and thrust the
burning end in my long thick beard, setting it on fire and scorching
my flesh horribly, as you can see. I was carried out of the mine and
taken to the convict hospital, where I lay for weeks between life and
death, and only lived instead of died because of the quenchless
spirit that was within me crying out for vengeance on my tormentors.
"When I came back to consciousness, the first thing I learnt was that
I was free to return to England on condition that I did not stop on
my way through Russia.
"My friends, urged on by the tireless energy of my wife's anxious
love, had at last found out what had befallen me, and proceedings had
been instituted to establish the innocence that had been betrayed by
a common and too well-known device used by the Russian police to
secure the conviction and removal of those who have become obnoxious
to the bureaucracy.
"Whether my friends would ever have accomplished this of themselves
is doubtful, but suddenly the evidence of a pope of the Orthodox
Church, to whom the spy who had put the forged letters in my hat had
confessed the crime on his deathbed, placed the matter in such a
strong clear light that not even the officialism of Russia could
cloud it over. The case got to the ears of the Tsar, and an order was
telegraphed to the Governor of Kara to release me and send me back to
St. Petersburg on the conditions I have named.
"Think of the mockery of such a pardon as that! By the unlawful
brutality of an official, who was not even reprimanded for what he
had done, I was maimed, crippled, and disfigured for life, and now I
was free to return to the land I had left on an errand of mercy,
which tyranny and corruption had wilfully misconstrued into a mission
of crime, and punished with the ruin of a once happy and useful life.
That was bad enough, but worse was to come before the cup of my
miseries should be full."
Natas was silent for a moment, and as he gazed into the fire the
spasm of a great agony passed over his face, and two great tears
welled up in his eyes and overflowed and ran down his cheeks on to
his breast.
"On receiving the order the governor telegraphed back that I was sick
almost to death, and not able to bear the fatigue of the long,
toilsome journey, and asked for further orders. As soon as this news
reached my devoted wife she at once set out, in spite of all the
entreaties of her friends and advisers, to cross the wastes of
Siberia, and take her place at my bedside.
"It was winter time, and from Ekaterinenburg, where the rail ended in
those days, the journey would have to be performed by sledge. She,
therefore, took with her only one servant and a courier, that she
might travel as rapidly as possible.
"She reached Tiumen, and there all trace was lost of her and her
attendants. She vanished into that great white wilderness of ice and
snow as utterly as though the grave had closed upon her. I knew
nothing of her journey until I reached St. Petersburg many months
afterwards.
"All that money could do was done to trace her, but all to no avail.
The only official news that ever came back out of that dark world of
death and misery was that she had started from one of the
post-stations a few hours before a great snow-storm had come on, that
she had never reached the next station--and after that all was
mystery.
"Five years passed. I had returned to find my little daughter well
and blooming into youthful beauty, and my affairs prospering in
skilful and honest hands. I was richer in wealth than I had ever
been, and in happiness poorer than a beggar, while the shadow of that
awful uncertainty hung over me.
"I could not believe the official story, for the search along the
Siberian road had been too complete not to have revealed evidences of
the catastrophe of which it told when the snows melted, and none such
were ever found.
"At length one night, just as I was going to bed, I was told that a
man who would not give his name insisted on seeing me on business
that he would tell no one but myself. All that he would say was that
he came from Russia. That was enough. I ordered him to be admitted.
"He was a stranger, ragged and careworn, and his face was stamped
with the look of sullen, unspeakable misery that men's faces only
wear in one part of the world.
"'You are from Siberia,' I said, stretching out my hand to him.
'Welcome, fellow-sufferer! Have you news for me?'
"'Yes, I am from Siberia,' he replied, taking my hand; 'an escaped
Nihilist convict from the mines. I have been four years getting from
Kara to London, else you should have had my news sooner. I fear it is
sad enough, but what else could you expect from the Russian
prison-land? Here it is.'
"As he spoke, he gave me an envelope, soiled and stained with long
travel, and my heart stood still as I recognised in the blurred
address the handwriting of my long-lost wife.
"With trembling fingers I opened it, and through my tears I read a
letter that my dear one had written to me on her deathbed four years
before.
"It has lain next my heart ever since, and every word is burnt into
my brain, to stand there against the day of vengeance. But I have
never told their full tale of shame and woe to mortal ears, nor ever
can.
"Let it suffice to say that my wife was beautiful with a beauty that
is rare among the daughters of men; that a woman's honour is held as
cheaply in the wildernesses of Siberia as is the life of a man who is
a convict.
"The official story of her death was false--false as are all the ten
thousand other lies that have come out of that abode of oppression
and misery, and she whom I mourned would have been well-favoured of
heaven if she had died in the snowdrifts, as they said she did,
rather than in the shame and misery to which her brutal destroyer
brought her.
"He was an official of high rank, and he had had the power to cover
his crime from the knowledge of his superiors in St. Petersburg.
"If it was ever known, it was hushed up for fear of the trouble that
it would have brought to his masters; but two years later he visited
Paris, and was found one morning in bed with a dagger in his black
heart, and across his face the mark that told that he had died by
order of the Nihilist Executive.
"When I read those awful tidings from the grave, sorrow became
quenchless rage, and despair was swallowed up in revenge. I joined
the Brotherhood, and thenceforth placed a great portion of my wealth
at their disposal. I rose in their councils till I commanded their
whole organisation. No brain was so subtle as mine in planning
schemes of revenge upon the oppressor, or of relief for the victims
of his tyranny.
"In a word, I became the brain of the Brotherhood which men used to
call Nihilists, and then I organised another Society behind and above
this which the world has known as the Terror, and which the great
ones of the earth have for years dreaded as the most potent force
that ever was arrayed against the enemies of humanity. Of this force
I have been the controlling brain and the directing will. It was my
creature, and it has obeyed me blindly; but ever since that fatal day
in the mine at Kara I have been physically helpless, and therefore
obliged to trust to others the execution of the plans that I
conceived.
"It was for this reason that I had need of you, Alan Tremayne, and
this is why I chose you after I had watched you for years unseen as
you grew from youth to manhood, the embodiment of all that has made
the Anglo-Saxon the dominant factor in the development of present-day
humanity.
"I have employed a power which, as I firmly believe, was given to me
when eternal justice made me the instrument of its vengeance upon a
generation that had forgotten alike its God and its brother, to bend
your will unconsciously to mine, and to compel you to do my bidding.
How far I was justified in that let the result show.
"It was once my intention to have bound you still closer to the
Brotherhood by giving Natasha to you in marriage while you were yet
under the spell of my will; but the Master of Destiny willed it
otherwise, and I was saved from doing a great wrong, for the
intention to do which I have done my best to atone."
He paused for a moment and looked across the fireplace at Arnold and
Natasha, who were sitting together on a big, low lounge that had been
drawn up to the fire. Natasha raised her eyes for a moment and then
dropped them. She knew what was coming, and a bright red flush rose
up from her white throat to the roots of her dusky, lustrous hair.
"Richard Arnold, in the first communication I ever had with you, I
told you that if you used the powers you held in your hand well and
wisely, you should, in the fulness of time, attain to your heart's
desire. You have proved your faith and obedience in the hour of
trial, and your strength and discretion in the day of battle. Now it
is yours to ask and to have."
For all answer Arnold put out his hand and took hold of Natasha's,
and said quietly but clearly--
"Give me this!"
"So be it!" said Natas. "What you have worthily won you will worthily
wear. May your days be long and peaceful in the world to which you
have given peace!"
And so it came to pass that three days later, in the little private
chapel of Alanmere Castle, the two men who held the destinies of the
world in their hands, took to wife the two fairest women who ever
gave their loveliness to be the crown of strength and the reward of
loyal love.
For a week the Lord of Alanmere kept open house and royal state, as
his ancestors had done five hundred years before him. The
conventional absurdity of the honeymoon was ignored, as such brides
and bridegrooms might have been expected to ignore it. Arnold and
Natasha took possession of a splendid suite of rooms in the eastern
wing of the Castle, and the two new-wedded couples passed the first
days of their new happiness under one roof without the slightest
constraint; for the Castle was vast enough for solitude when they
desired it, and yet the solitude was not isolation or self-centred
seclusion.
Tremayne's private wire kept them hourly informed of what was going
on in London, and when necessary the _Ithuriel_ was ready to traverse
the space between Alanmere and the capital in an hour, as it did more
than once to the great delight and wonderment of Tremayne's bride, to
whom the marvellous vessel seemed a miracle of something more than
merely human skill and genius.
So the days passed swiftly and happily until the Christmas bells of
1904 rang out over the length and breadth of Christendom, for the
first time proclaiming in very truth and fact, so far as the Western
world was concerned, "Peace on earth, Goodwill to Man."
[Illustration: "Into the vast, white, silent wilderness, out of which
none save the guards were destined ever to emerge again."
_See page 385._]
* * * * *
On the 8th of January a swift warship, attended by two dynamite
cruisers, left Portsmouth, bound for Odessa. She had on board the
last of the Tsars of Russia, and those of his generals and Ministers
who had been taken prisoners with him on Muswell Hill. A thousand
feet overhead floated the _Ariel_, under the command of Alexis
Mazanoff.
From Odessa the prisoners were taken by train to Moscow. There, in
the Central Convict Depot, they met their families and the officials
whose share in their crimes made it necessary to bring them under the
sentence pronounced by Natas. They were chained together in squads,
Tsar and prince, noble and official, exactly as their own countless
victims had been in the past, and so they were taken with their wives
and children by train to Ekaterinenburg.
Although the railway extended as far as Tomsk, Mazanoff made them
disembark here, and marched them by the Great Siberian road to the
Pillar of Farewells on the Asiatic frontier. There, as so many
thousands of heart-broken, despairing men and women had done before
them, they looked their last on Russian soil.
From here they were marched on to the first Siberian _etapé_, one of
a long series of foul and pestilential prisons which were to be the
only halting-places on their long and awful journey. The next
morning, as soon as the chill grey light of the winter's dawn broke
over the snow-covered plains, the men were formed up in line, with
the sleighs carrying the women and children in the rear. When all was
ready Mazanoff gave the word: "Forward!" the whips of the Cossacks
cracked, and the mournful procession moved slowly onward into the
vast, white, silent wilderness, out of which none save the guards
were destined ever to emerge again.
EPILOGUE.
"AND ON EARTH PEACE!"
The winter and summer of 1905 passed in unbroken tranquillity all
over Europe and the English-speaking world. The nations, at last
utterly sickened of bloodshed by the brief but awful experience of
the last six months of 1904, earnestly and gladly accepted the new
order of things. From first to last of the war the slaughter had
averaged more than a million of fighting men a month, and fully five
millions of non-combatants, men, women, and children, had fallen
victims to famine and disease, or had been killed during the
wholesale destruction of fortified towns by the war-balloons of the
League. At the lowest calculation the invasion of England had cost
four million lives.
It was an awful butcher's bill, and when the peoples of Europe awoke
from the delirium of war to look back upon the frightful carnival of
death and destruction, and realise that all this desolation and ruin
had come to pass in little more than seven months, so deep a horror
of war and all its abominations possessed them that they hailed with
delight the safeguards provided against it by the new European
Constitution which was made public at the end of March.
It was a singularly short and simple document considering the immense
changes which it introduced. It contained only five clauses. Of these
the first proclaimed the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon Federation in
all matters of international policy, and set forth the penalties to
be incurred by any State that made war upon another.
The second constituted an International Board of Arbitration and
Control, composed of all the Sovereigns of Europe and their Prime
Ministers for the time being, with the new President of the United
States, the Governor-General of Canada, and the President of the now
federated Australasian Colonies. This Board was to meet in sections
every year in the various capitals of Europe, and collectively every
five years in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, and New York in
rotation. There was no appeal from its decision save to the Supreme
Council of the Federation, and this appeal could only be made with
the consent of the President of that Council, given after the facts
of the matter in dispute had been laid before him in writing.
The third clause dealt with the rearrangement of the European
frontiers. The Rhine from Karlsruhe to Basle was made the political
as well as the natural boundary between France and Germany. The
ancient kingdom of Poland was restored, with the frontiers it had
possessed before the First Partition in 1773, and a descendant of
Kosciusko, elected by the votes of the adult citizens of the
reconstituted kingdom, was placed upon the throne. Turkey in Europe
ceased to exist as a political power. Constantinople was garrisoned
by British and Federation troops, and the country was administered
for the time being by a Provisional Government under the presidency
of Lord Cromer, who was responsible only to the Supreme Council. The
other States were left undisturbed.
The fourth and fifth clauses dealt with land, property, and law. All
tenures of land existing before the war were cancelled at a stroke,
and the soil of each country was declared to be the sole and
inalienable property of the State. No occupiers were disturbed who
were turning the land to profitable account, or who were making use
of a reasonable area as a residential estate; but the great
landowners in the country and the ground landlords in the towns
ceased to exist as such, and all private incomes derived from the
rent of land were declared illegal and so forfeited.
All incomes unearned by productive work of hand or brain were
subjected to a progressive tax, which reached fifty per cent. when
the income amounted to £10,000 a year. It is almost needless to say
that these clauses raised a tremendous outcry among the limited
classes they affected; but the only reply made to it by the President
of the Supreme Council was "that honestly earned incomes paid no tax,
and that the idle and useless classes ought to be thankful to be
permitted to exist at any price. The alternative of the tax would be
compulsory labour paid for at its actual value by the State." Without
one exception the grumblers preferred to pay the tax.
All rents, revised according to the actual value of the produce or
property, were to be paid direct to the State. As long as he paid
this rent-tax no man could be disturbed in the possession of his
holding. If he did not pay it the non-payment was to be held as
presumptive evidence that he was not making a proper use of it, and
he was to receive a year's notice to quit; but if at the end of that
time he had amended his ways the notice was to be revoked.
In all countries the Civil and Criminal Codes of Law were to be
amalgamated and simplified by a committee of judges appointed
directly by the Parliament with the assent of the Sovereign. The
fifth clause of the Constitution plainly stated that no man was to be
expected to obey a law that he could not understand, and that the
Supreme Council would uphold no law which was so complicated that it
needed a legal expert to explain it.
It is almost needless to say that this clause swept away at a blow
that pernicious class of hired advocates who had for ages grown rich
on the weakness and the dishonesty of their fellow-men. In after
years it was found that the abolition of the professional lawyer had
furthered the cause of peace and progress quite as efficiently as the
prohibition of standing armies had done.
On the conclusion of the war the aërial fleet was increased to
twenty-five vessels exclusive of the flagship. The number of
war-balloons was raised to fifty, and three millions of Federation
soldiers were held ready for active service until the conclusion of
the war in the East between the Moslems and Buddhists. By November
the Moslems were victors all along the line, and during the last week
of that month the last battle between Christian and Moslem was fought
on the Southern shore of the Bosphorus.
All communications with the Asiatic and African shores of the
Mediterranean were cut as soon as it became certain that Sultan
Mohammed Reshad, at the head of a million and a half of victorious
Moslems, and supported by Prince Abbas of Egypt at the head of seven
hundred thousand more, was marching to the reconquest of Turkey. The
most elaborate precautions were taken to prevent any detailed
information as to the true state of things in Europe reaching the
Sultan, as Tremayne and Arnold had come to the conclusion that it
would be better, if he persisted in courting inevitable defeat, that
it should fall upon him with crushing force and stupefying
suddenness, so that he might be the more inclined to listen to reason
afterwards.
The Mediterranean was patrolled from end to end by air-ships and
dynamite cruisers, and aërial scouts marked every movement of the
victorious Sultan until it became absolutely certain that his
objective point was Scutari. Meanwhile, two millions of men had been
concentrated between Galata and Constantinople, while another million
occupied the northern shore of the Dardanelles. An immense force of
warships and dynamite cruisers swarmed between Gallipoli and the
Golden Horn. Twenty air-ships and forty-five war-balloons lay outside
Constantinople, ready to take the air at a moment's notice.
The conqueror of Northern Africa and Southern Asia had only a very
general idea as to what had really happened in Europe. His march of
conquest had not been interrupted by any European expedition. The
Moslems of India had exterminated the British garrisons, and there
had been no attempt at retaliation or vengeance, as there had been in
the days of the Mutiny. England, he knew, had been invaded, but
according to the reports which had reached him, none of the invaders
had ever got out of the island alive, and then the English had come
out and conquered Europe. Of the wonderful doings of the aërial
fleets only the vaguest rumours had come to his ears, and these had
been so exaggerated and distorted, that he had but a very confused
idea of the real state of affairs.
The Moslem forces were permitted to advance without the slightest
molestation to Scutari and Lamsaki, and on the evening of the 28th of
November the Sultan took up his quarters in Scutari. That night he
received a letter from the President of the Federation, setting forth
succinctly, and yet very clearly, what had actually taken place in
Europe, and calling upon him to give his allegiance to the Supreme
Council, as the other sovereigns had done, and to accept the
overlordship of Northern Africa and Southern Asia in exchange for
Turkey in Europe. The letter concluded by saying that the immediate
result of refusal to accept these terms would be the destruction of
the Moslem armies on the following day. Before midnight, Tremayne
received the Sultan's reply. It ran thus--
In the name of the Most Merciful God.
From MOHAMMED RESHAD, Commander of the Faithful, to ALAN
TREMAYNE, Leader of the English.
I have come to retake the throne of my fathers, and I am not to
be turned back by vain and boastful threats. What I have won with
the sword I will keep with the sword, and I will own allegiance
to none save God and His holy Prophet who have given me the
victory. Give me back Stamboul and my ancient dominions, and we
will divide the world between us. If not we must fight. Let the
reply to this come before daybreak.
MOHAMMED.
No reply came back; but during the night the dynamite cruisers were
drawn up within half a mile of the Asiatic shore with their guns
pointing southward over Scutari, while other warships patrolled the
coast to detect and frustrate any attempt to transport guns or troops
across the narrow strip of water. With the first glimmer of light,
the two aërial fleets took the air, the war-balloons in a long line
over the van of the Moslem army, and the air-ships spread out in a
semicircle to the southward. The hour of prayer was allowed to pass
in peace, and then the work of death began. The war-balloons moved
slowly forward in a straight line at an elevation of four thousand
feet, sweeping the Moslem host from van to rear with a ceaseless hail
of melinite and cyanogen bombs. Great projectiles soared silently up
from the water to the north, and where they fell buildings were torn
to fragments, great holes were blasted into the earth, and every
human being within the radius of the explosion was blown to pieces,
or hurled stunned to the ground. But more mysterious and terrible
than all were the effects of the assault delivered by the air-ships,
which divided into squadrons and swept hither and thither in wide
curves, with the sunlight shining on their silvery hulls and their
long slender guns, smokeless and flameless, hurling the most awful
missiles of all far and wide, over a scene of butchery and horror
that beggared all description.
In vain the gallant Moslems looked for enemies in the flesh to
confront them. None appeared save a few sentinels across the
Bosphorus. And still the work of slaughter went on, pitiless and
passionless as the earthquake or the thunderstorm. Millions of shots
were fired into the air without result, and by the time the rain of
death had been falling without intermission for two hours, an
irresistible panic fell upon the Moslem soldiery. They had never met
enemies like these before, and, brave as lions and yet simple as
children, they looked upon them as something more than human, and
with one accord they flung away their weapons and raised their hands
in supplication to the sky. Instantly the aërial bombardment ceased,
and within an hour East and West had shaken hands, Sultan Mohammed
had accepted the terms of the Federation, and the long warfare of
Cross and Crescent had ceased, as men hoped, for ever.
Then the proclamation was issued disbanding the armies of Britain and
the Federation and the forces of the Sultan. The warships steamed
away westward on their last voyage to the South Atlantic, beneath
whose waves they were soon to sink with all their guns and armaments
for ever. The war-balloons were to be kept for purposes of
transportation of heavy articles to Aeria, while the fleet of
air-ships was to remain the sole effective fighting force in the
world.
While these events were taking place in Europe, those who had been
banished as outcasts from the society of civilised men by the
terrible justice of Natas had been plodding their weary way, in the
tracks of the thousands they had themselves sent to a living grave,
along the Great Siberian Road to the hideous wilderness, in the midst
of which lie the mines of Kara. From the Pillar of Farewells to
Tiumen, from thence to Tomsk,--where they met the first of the
released political exiles returning in a joyous band to their beloved
Russia,--and thence to Irkutsk, and then over the ice of Lake Baikal,
and through the awful frozen desert of the Trans-Baikal Provinces,
they had been driven like cattle until the remnant that had survived
the horrors of the awful journey reached the desolate valley of the
Kara and were finally halted at the Lower Diggings.
Of nearly three hundred strong and well-fed men who had said good-bye
to liberty at the Pillar of Farewells, only a hundred and twenty
pallid and emaciated wretches stood shivering in their rags and
chains when the muster was called on the morning after their arrival
at Kara. Mazanoff and his escort had carried out their part of the
sentence of Natas to the letter. The arctic blasts from the Tundras,
the forced march, the chain and the scourge had done their work, and
more than half the exile-convicts had found in nameless graves along
the road respite from the long horrors of the fate which awaited the
survivors.
The first name called in the last muster was Alexander Romanoff.
"Here," came in a deep hollow tone from the gaunt and ragged wreck of
the giant who twelve months before had been the stateliest figure in
the brilliant galaxy of European Royalty.
"Your sentence is hard labour in the mines for"--The last word was
never spoken, for ere it was uttered the tall and still erect form of
the dethroned Autocrat suddenly shrank together, lurched forward, and
fell with a choking gasp and a clash of chains upon the hard-trampled
snow. A stream of blood rushed from his white, half-open lips, and
when they went to raise him he was dead.
If ever son of woman died of a broken heart it was Alexander
Romanoff, last of the tyrants of Russia. Never had the avenging hand
of Nemesis, though long-delayed, fallen with more precise and
terrible justice. On the very spot on which thousands of his subjects
and fellow-creatures, innocent of all crime save a desire for
progress, had worn out their lives in torturing toil to provide the
gold that had gilded his luxury, he fell as the Idol fell of old in
the temple of Dagon.
He had seen the blasting of his highest hopes in the hour of their
apparent fruition. He had beheld the destruction of his army and the
ruin of his dynasty. He had seen kindred and friends and faithful
servants sink under the nameless horrors of a fate he could do
nothing to alleviate, and with the knowledge that nothing but death
could release them from it, and now at the last moment death had
snatched from him even the poor consolation of sharing the sufferings
of those nearest and dearest to him on earth.
This happened on the 1st of December 1905, at nine o'clock in the
morning. At the same hour Arnold leapt the _Ithuriel_ over the Ridge,
passed down the valley of Aeria like a flash of silver light, and
dropped to earth on the shores of the lake. In the same grove of
palms which had witnessed their despairing betrothal he found Natasha
swinging in a hammock, with a black-eyed six-weeks'-old baby nestling
in her bosom, and her own loveliness softened and etherealised by the
sacred grace of motherhood.
"Welcome, my lord!" she said, with a bright flush of pleasure and the
sweetest smile even he had ever seen transfiguring her beauty, as she
stretched out her hand in welcome at his approach. "Does the King
come in peace?"
"Yes, Angel mine! the empire that you asked for is yours. There is
not a regiment of men under arms in all the civilised world. The last
battle has been fought and won, and so there is peace on earth at
last!"
THE END
MORRISON AND GIBB PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
* * * * *
Now Ready, Third Edition.
_308 pages, demy 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s._,
THE CAPTAIN OF THE MARY ROSE.
_A TALE OF TO-MORROW._
By W. LAIRD CLOWES,
U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE.
With 60 Illustrations by the Chevalier de Martino and Fred. T. Jane.
_A most graphic and enthralling description of the next Naval War
between France and Great Britain._
* * * * *
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the naval warfare of the future may be."--_Glasgow Herald._
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"It is well told and magnificently illustrated."--_United Service
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"Full of absorbing interest."--_Engineer's Gazette._
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Angel of the Revolution, by George Griffith