CHAPTER X. STRANGE TIDINGS TO AERIA.

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[95] 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.

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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.[97] 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[98] 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,[99] 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[100] 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.

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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.