The Secret Power, Marie Corelli [good romance books to read .TXT] 📗

You cannot say you feel any sense of danger?—we are sailing with greater steadiness than any ship at sea—there is scarcely any consciousness of movement—and without looking out and down, we should not realise we are so far from earth. Indeed we are going too far now—we do not realize our speed.”

“Too far!” said Gaspard, nervously—“Madama, if we go too far we may also go too high—we may not be able to breathe!. . . ”

She laughed.

“That is a very remote possibility!” she said—“The waves of energy which bear us along are concerned in our own life-supply,—they make our air to breathe—our heat to warm. All the same it is time we returned—we are not provisioned.”

She called to Rivardi, and he, with the slightest turn of the wheel, altered the direction in which the air-ship moved, so that it travelled back again on the route by which it had commenced its flight. Soon, very soon, the dainty plot of earth, looking no more than a gay flower-bed, where Morgana’s palazzo was situated, appeared below—and then, acting on instructions, Gaspard opened the compartments at either end of the vessel. The vibrating rays within dwindled by slow degrees—their light became less and less intense— their vibration less powerful,—till very gradually with a perfectly beautiful motion expressing absolute grace and lightness the vessel descended towards the aerodrome it had lately left, and all the men who were waiting for its return gave a simultaneous shout of astonishment and admiration, as it sank slowly towards them, folding its wings as it came with the quiet ease of a nesting-bird flying home. So admirably was the distance measured between itself and the great shed of its local habitation, that it glided into place as though it had eyes to see its exact whereabouts, and came to a standstill within a few seconds of its arrival. Morgana descended, and her two companions followed. The other men stood silent, visibly inquisitive yet afraid to express their curiosity. Morgana’s eyes flashed over them all with a bright, half-laughing tolerance.

“I thank you, my friends!” she said—“You have done well the work I entrusted you to do under the guidance of the Marchese Rivardi, and you can now judge for yourselves the result It mystifies you I can see! You think it is a kind of ‘black magic’? Not so!—unless all our modern science is ‘black magic’ as well, born of the influence of those evil spirits who, as we are told in tradition, descended in rebellion from heaven and lived with the daughters of men! From these strange lovers sprang a race of giants,—symbolical I think of the birth of the sciences, which mingle in their composition the active elements of good and evil. You have built this airship of mine on lines which have never before been attempted;—you have given it wings which are plumed like the wings of a bird, not with quills, but with channels many and minute, to carry the runlets of the ‘emanation’ from the substance held in the containers at either end of the vessel,—its easy flight therefore should not surprise you. Briefly—we have filled a piece of mechanism with the composition or essence of Life!—that is the only answer I can give to your enquiring looks!—let it be enough!”

“But, Madama”—ventured Gaspard—“that composition or essence of Life!—what is it?”

There was an instant’s silence. Every man’s head craned forward eagerly to hear the reply. Morgana smiled strangely.

“That,” she said—“is MY secret!”

CHAPTER IX

“And now you have attained your object, what is the use of it?” said Don Aloysius.

The priest was pacing slowly up and down the old half-ruined cloister of an old half-ruined monastery, and beside his stately, black-robed figure moved the small aerial form of Morgana, clad in summer garments of pure white, her golden head uncovered to the strong Sicilian sunshine which came piercing in sword-like rays through the arches of the cloister, and filtered among the clustering leaves which hung in cool twining bunches from every crumbling grey pillar of stone.

“What is the use of it?” he repeated, his calm eyes resting gravely on the little creature gliding sylph-like beside him. “Suppose your invention out-reaped every limit of known possibility—suppose your air-ship to be invulnerable, and surpassing in speed and safety everything ever experienced,—suppose it could travel to heights unimaginable, what then? Suppose even that you could alight on another star—another world than this—what purpose is served?—what peace is gained?—what happens?”

Morgana stopped abruptly in her walk beside him.

“I have not worked for peace or happiness,”—she said and there was a thrill of sadness in her voice—“because to my mind neither peace nor happiness exist. From all we can see, and from the little we can learn, I think the Maker of the universe never meant us to be happy or peaceful. All Nature is at strife with itself, incessantly labouring for such attainment as can hardly be won,—all things seem to be haunted by fear and sorrow. And yet it seems to me that there are remedies for most of our evils in the very composition of the elements—if we were not ignorant and stupid enough to discourage our discoverers on the verge of discovery. My application of a certain substance, known to scientists, but scarcely understood, is an attempt to solve the problem of swift aerial motion by light and heat—light and heat being the chiefest supports of life. To use a force giving out light and heat continuously seemed to me the way to create and command equally continuous movement. I have—I think and hope—fairly succeeded, and in order to accomplish my design I have used wealth that would not have been at the service of most inventors,—wealth which my father left to me quite unconditionally,—but were I able to fly with my ‘White Eagle’ to the remotest parts of the Milky Way itself, I should not look to find peace or happiness!”

“Why?”

The priest’s simple query had a note of tender pity in it. Morgana looked up at him with a little smile, but her eyes were tearful.

“Dear Don Aloysius, how can I tell ‘why’? Nobody is really happy, and I cannot expect to have what is denied to the whole world!”

Aloysius resumed his slow walk to and fro, and she kept quiet pace with him.

“Have you ever thought what happiness is?” he asked, then—“Have you ever felt it for a passing moment?”

“Yes”—she answered quickly—“But only at rare intervals—oh so rare! . . .”

“Poor little rich child!” he said, kindly—“Tell me some of those ‘intervals’! Cannot they be repeated? Let us sit here”—and he moved towards a stone bench which fronted an ancient disused well in the middle square of the cloistered court,—a well round which a crimson passion-flower twined in a perfect arch of blossom—“What was the first ‘interval’?”

He sat down, and the sunshine sent a dazzling ray on the silver crucifix he wore, giving it the gleam of a great jewel. Morgana took her seat beside him.

“Interval one!” he said, playfully—“What was this little lady’s first experience of happiness? When she played with her dolls?”

“No, oh no!” cried Morgana, with sudden energy—“That was anything but happiness! I hated dolls!—abominable little effigies!”

Don Aloysius raised his eyebrows in surprise and amusement.

“Horrid little stuffed things of wood and wax and saw-dust!” continued Morgana, emphatically—“With great beads for eyes—or eyes made to look like beads—and red cheeks,—and red lips with a silly smile on them! Of course they are given to girl-children to encourage the ‘maternal instinct’ as it is called—to make them think of babies,—but I never had any ‘maternal instinct’!—and real babies have always seemed to me as uninteresting as sham ones!”

“Dear child, you were a baby yourself once!”—said Aloysius gently.

A shadow swept over her face.

“Do you think I was?” she queried meditatively—“I cannot imagine it! I suppose I must have been, but I never remember being a child at all. I had no children to play with me—my father suspected all children of either disease or wickedness, and imagined I would catch infection of body or of soul by association with them. I was always alone—alone!—yet not lonely!” She broke off a moment, and her eyes grew dark with the intensity of her thought “No—never lonely! And the very earliest ‘interval’ of happiness I can recall was when I first saw the inside of a sun-ray!”

Don Aloysius turned to look at her, but said nothing. She laughed.

“Dear Father Aloysius, what a wise priest you are! Not a word falls from those beautifully set lips of yours! If you were a fool—(so many men are!) you would have repeated my phrase, ‘the inside of a sun-ray,’ with an accent of scornful incredulity, and you would have stared at me with all a fool’s contempt! But you are not a fool,— you know or you perceive instinctively exactly what I mean. The inside of a sun-ray!—it was disclosed to me suddenly—a veritable miracle! I have seen it many times since, but not with all the wonder and ecstasy of the first revelation. I was so young, too! I told a renowned professor at one of the American colleges just what I saw, and he was so amazed and confounded at my description of rays that had taken the best scientists years to discover, that he begged to be allowed to examine my eyes! He thought there must be something unusual about them. In fact there IS!—and after his examination he seemed more puzzled than ever. He said something about ‘an exceptionally strong power of vision,’ but frankly admitted that power of vision alone would not account for it. Anyhow I plainly saw all the rays within one ray—there were seven. The ray itself was— or so I fancied—the octave of colour. I was little more than a child when this ‘interval’ of happiness—PERFECT happiness!—was granted to me—I felt as if a window had been opened for me to look through it into heaven!”

“Do you believe in heaven?” asked Aloysius, suddenly.

She hesitated.

“I used to,—in those days. As I have just said I was only a child, and heaven was a real place to me,—even the angels were real presences—”

“And you have lost them now?”

She gave a little gesture of resignation.

“They left me”—she answered—“I did not lose them. They simply went.”

He was silent. His fine, calm features expressed a certain grave patience, but nothing more.

She resumed—

“That was my first experience of real ‘happiness.’ Till then I had lived the usual monotonous life of childhood, doing what I was told, and going whither I was taken, but the disclosure of the sun-ray was a key to individuality, and seemed to unlock my prison doors. I began to think for myself, and to find my own character as a creature apart from others. My second experience was years after,— just when I left school and when my father took me to see the place where I was born, in the north of Scotland. Oh, it is such a wild corner of the world! Beautiful craggy hills and dark, deep lakes— rough moorlands purple with heather and such wonderful skies at sunset! The cottage where my father had lived as a boy when he herded sheep is still there—I have bought it for myself now,—it is a little stone hut of three rooms,—and another one about a mile off where he took my mother to live, and where I came into the world!—I have bought that too. Yes—I felt a great thrill of happiness when I stood there knee-deep among the heather, my father clasping my hand, and looking, with me, on those early scenes of his boyhood when he had scarcely a penny