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

said, half aloud—“If the moon were the goddess Cynthia beloved of Endymion, as woman and goddess in an impulse of vanity she would certainly have done that for effect! As it is—”

Here he paused,—an instinctive feeling warned him that some one was looking at him, and he turned his head quickly. On the slope of the hill where Manella had lately stood, there was a figure, white as the white moonlight itself, outlined delicately against the dark background. It seemed to be poised on the earth like a bird just lightly descended; in the stirless air its garments appeared closed about it fold on fold like the petals of an unopened magnolia flower. As he looked, it came gliding towards him with the floating ease of an air bubble, and the strong radiance of the large moon showed its woman’s face, pale with the moonbeam pallor, and set in a wave of hair that swept back from the brows and fell in a loosely twisted coil like a shining snake stealthily losing itself in folds of misty drapery. He rose to meet the advancing phantom.

“Entirely for effect!” he said, “Well planned and quite worthy of you! All for effect!”

CHAPTER II

A laugh, clear and cold as a sleigh-bell on a frosty night rang out on the silence.

“Why did you run away from me?”

He replied at once, and brusquely.

“Because I was tired of you!”

She laughed again. A strange white elf as she looked In the spreading moonbeams she was woman to the core, and the disdainful movement of her small uplifted head plainly expressed her utter indifference to his answer.

“I followed you”—she said—“I knew I should find you! What are you doing up here? Shamming to be ill?”

“Precisely! ‘Sham’ is as much in my line as yours. I have to ‘pretend’ in order to be real!”

“Paradoxical as usual!” and she shrugged her shoulders—“Anyway you’ve chosen a good place to do your shamming in. It’s quite lovely up here,—much better than the Plaza. I am at the Plaza.”

“Automobile and all I suppose!” he said, sarcastically—“How many servants?—how many boxes with how many dresses?”

She laughed again.

“That’s no concern of yours!” she replied—“I am my own mistress.”

“More’s the pity!” he retorted.

They faced each other. The moon, now soaring high in clear space, shed a luminous rain of silver over all the visible breadth of wild country, and their two figures looked mere dark silhouettes half drowned in the pearly glamour.

“It’s worth travelling all the long miles to see!” she declared, stretching her arms out with an enthusiastic gesture—“Oh, beautiful big moon of California! I’m glad I came!”

He was silent.

“You are not glad!” she continued—“You are a bear-man in hiding, and the moon says nothing to you!”

“It says nothing because it IS nothing”—he answered, impatiently— “It is a dead planet without heart,—a mere shell of extinct volcanoes where fire once burned, and its light is but the reflection of the sun on its barren surface. It is like all women,— but mostly like YOU!”

She made him a sweeping curtsy so exquisitely graceful that the action resembled nothing so much as the sway of a lily in a light wind.

“Thanks, gentle Knight!—flower of chivalry!” she said—“I see you love me in spite of yourself!”

He made a quick stride towards her,—then stopped. “Love you!” he echoed,—then laughed loudly and derisively-“Great God! Love you? YOU? If I did I should be mad! When will you learn the truth of me?—that women are less in my estimation than the insects crawling on a blade of grass or spawning in a stagnant pond?—that they have no power to move me to the smallest pulse of passion or desire?—and that you, of all your sex, seem to my mind the most—”

“Hateful?” she suggested, smilingly.

“No—the most complete and unmitigated bore!”

“Dreadful!” and she made a face at him like that of a naughty child,—then she sank down on the sun-baked turf in an easy half- reclining attitude—“It’s certainly much worse to be a bore than to be hated. Hate is quite a live sentiment,—besides it always means, or HAS meant—love! You can’t hate anything that is quite indifferent to you, but of course you CAN be bored! YOU are bored by me and I am bored by YOU!—and we are absolutely indifferent to each other! What a comedy it is! Isn’t it?”

He stood still and sombre, gazing down at the figure resting on the ground at his feet, its white garments gathering about it as though they were sentiently aware that they must keep the line of classic beauty in every fold.

“Boredom is the trouble”—she went on—“No one escapes it. The very babies of to-day are bored. We all know too much. People used to be happy because they were ignorant—they had no sort of idea why they were born, or what they came into the world for. Now they’ve learned the horrid truth that they are only here just as the trees and flowers are here—to breed other trees and flowers and then go out of it—for no purpose, apparently. They are ‘disillusioned.’ They say ‘what’s the use?’ To put up with so much trouble and labour for the folks coining after us whom we shall never see,—it seems perfectly foolish and futile. They used to believe in another life after this—but that hope has been knocked out of them. Besides it’s quite open to question whether any of us would care to live again. Probably it might mean more boredom. There’s really nothing left. That’s why so many of us go reckless—it’s just to escape being bored.”

He listened in cold silence. After a pause—

“Have you done?” he said.

She looked up at him. The moonbeams set tiny frosty sparkles in her eyes.

“Have I done?” she echoed—“No,—not quite! I love talking—and it’s a new and amusing sensation for me to talk to a man in his shirt- sleeves on a hill in California by the light of the moon! So wild and picturesque you know! All the men I’ve ever met have been dressed to death! Have you had your dinner?”

“I never dine,” he replied.

“Really! Don’t you eat and drink at all?”

“I live simply,”—he said—“Bread and milk are enough for me, and I have these.”

She laughed and clapped her hands.

“Like a baby!” she exclaimed—“A big bearded baby! It’s too delicious! And you’re doing all this just to get away from ME! What a compliment!”

With angry impetus he bent over her reclining figure and seized her two hands.

“Get up!” he said harshly—“Don’t lie there like a fallen angel!”

She yielded to his powerful grasp as he pulled her to her feet—then looked at him still laughing.

“Plenty of muscle!” she said—“Well?”

He held her hands still and gripped them fiercely. She gave a little cry.

“Don’t! You forget my rings,—they hurt!”

At once he loosened his hold, and gazed moodily at her small fingers on which two or three superb diamond circlets glittered like drops of dew.

“Your rings!” he said—“Yes—I forgot them! Wonderful rings!— emblems of your inordinate vanity and vulgar wealth—I forgot them! How they sparkle in this wide moonlight, don’t they? Just a drifting of nature’s refuse matter, turned into jewels for women! Strange ordinance of strange elements! There!” and he let her hands go free- -“They are not injured, nor are you.”

She was silent pouting her under-lip like a spoilt child, and rubbing one finger where a ring had dinted her flesh.

“So you actually think I have coma here to get away from YOU?” he went on—“Well for once your ineffable conceit is mistaken. You think yourself a personage of importance—but you are nothing,—less than nothing to me, I never give you a thought—I have come here to study—to escape from the crazy noise of modern life—the hurtling to and fro of the masses of modern humanity,—I want to work out certain problems which may revolutionise the world and its course of living—”

“Why revolutionise it?” she interrupted—“Who wants it to be revolutionised? We are all very well as we are—it’s a breeding place and a dying place—voila tout!”

She gave a French shrug of her shoulder and waved her hands expressively. Then she pushed back her flowing hair,—the moonbeams trickled like water over it, making a network of silver on gold.

“What did you come here for?” he asked, abruptly.

“To see you!” she answered smilingly—“And to tell you that I’m ‘on the war-path’ as they say, taking scalps as I go. This means that I’m travelling about,—possibly I may go to Europe—”

“To pick up a bankrupt nobleman!” he suggested.

She laughed.

“Dear, no! Nothing quite so stupid! Neither noblemen nor bankrupts attract me. No! I’m doing a scientific ‘prowl,’ like you. I believe I’ve discovered something with which I could annihilate you—so!” and she made a round O of her curved fingers and blew through it— “One breath!—from a distance, too! and hey presto!—the bear-man on the hills of California eating bread and milk is gone!—a complete vanishing trick—no more of him anywhere!” The bear-man, as she called him, gloomed upon her with a scowl.

“You’d better leave such things alone!” he said, angrily—“Women have no business with science.”

“No, of course not!” she agreed—“Not in men’s opinion. That’s why they never mention Madame Curie without the poor Monsieur! SHE found radium and he didn’t,—but ‘he’ is always first mentioned.”

He gave an impatient gesture.

“Enough of all this!” he said—“Do you know it’s nearly ten o’clock at night?—I suppose you do know!—and the people at the Plaza—”

“THEY know!”—she interrupted, nodding sagaciously—“They know I am rich—rich—rich! It doesn’t matter what I do, because I am rich! I might stay out all night with a bear-man, and nobody would say a word against me, because I am rich! I might sit on the roof of the Plaza and swing my legs over the visitors’ windows and it would be called ‘charming’ because I am rich! I can appear at the table d’hote in a bath-wrap and eat peas with a hair-pin if I like—and my conduct will be admired, because I am rich! When I go to Europe my photo will be in all the London pictorials with the grinning chorus- girls, because I am rich! And I shall be called ‘the beautiful,’ ‘the exquisite’—‘the fascinating’ by all the unwashed penny journalists because I am rich! O-ooh!” and she gave a comic little screw of her mouth and eyes—“It’s great fun to be rich if you know what to do with your riches!”

“Do YOU?” he enquired, sarcastically.

“I think so!” here she put her head on one side like a meditative bird and her wonderful hair fell aslant like a golden wing—“I amuse myself—as much as I can. I learn all that can be done with greedy, stupid humanity for so much cash down! I would,”—here she paused, and with a sudden feline swiftness of movement came close up to him- “I would have married YOU!-if you would have had me! I would have given you all my money to play with,—you could have got everything you want for your inventions and experiments, and I would have helped you,—and then—then—you could have blown up the world and me with it, so long as you gave me time to look at the magnificent sight! And I wouldn’t have married you for love, mind you!—only for curiosity!”

He withdrew from her a couple of paces,—a glimmer of white teeth between his dark moustache and beard gave his face the expression of a snarl more than a smile.

“For curiosity!” she repeated, stretching out a