The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 05

by Anthology

  So convinced was he of the paramount necessity of expedition that, after he had been a fortnight in Utopia, and had seen Hartog get everything into working order, he determined to run the risk of a journey to America and Europe, in order to personally visit his agents, and push on the construction of the various parts of the air-ships to the utmost possible speed.

  It was not, however, only reasons of policy which impelled him to this decision, for Max Renault was a man who possessed all the strong passions usually associated with his masterful type of character, and of these, next to the ruling passion which had made him the implacable enemy of all organised society, the strongest was his love for the beautiful girl in whom he had recognised a soul kindred to his own, which, while admitting his superior strength as a leader and an organiser of the forces of anarchy, had tacitly asserted an authority of its own over him, an authority which she knew he was willing to bow to the moment that she gave him the permission she had hitherto coldly and consistently withheld, because in the nature of the case it must involve the surrender of herself to him.

  His attempt to carry off Violet in the air-ship from Utopia had really only been the result of a passing fancy, strengthened by a savage desire to inflict an irreparable injury upon her and her brother, and the friend who was perhaps her lover, simply because they were members of the class that he hated with the whole strength and bitterness of his perverted nature. Had the attempt been successful, if Violet had been cast in a less heroic mould, and had not chosen the peril of almost certain death to the slavery which he would have imposed upon her, he would probably have amused himself with her as long as the fancy lasted, and then killed her in cold blood to remove an obstacle to the execution of his plans.

  But with regard to Lea Cassilis, his feelings were very different. He really loved her with the love that such a man as he only gives once and to one woman, no matter how many others might claim or win the admiration of the passing moment. And now his thoughts had gone back to the challenge that she had given and he had accepted in the little upstairs room in the back street off the Caledonian Road more than four years before.

  She had tacitly admitted that if the projects of that memorable night were realised, it would be for him to take and keep that which he chose should be his -and did she not well know what that would be? Now the power to carry out those projects was finally his. He was no longer the nameless anarchist lurking in the obscurity of city slums and planning murders and outrages in the dark. He was the acknowledged and unquestioned leader of a band of desperate men who had declared open war upon the world, and had so far proved themselves invincible.

  Then they were poor; now they were wealthy, and their wealth, skilfully used, would enable them to turn the resources of civilisation against itself. They could spend money like water, and every pound would buy as much for them as it would for anyone else. There was no fear of their spending too much. The wealth of the world's commerce was theirs to draw upon as they needed. There was no answer but submission to the demands which came from the unassailable vantage-ground of the air.

  Would Lea still hold to her part of the implied bargain between them? Would she think that he had accomplished enough of his part to claim the performance of hers, or would she tell him to wait until the now inevitable struggle for the empire of the air bad been fought and won, and society lay helpless before the most formidable and implacable enemies that it had ever had?

  It was to receive an answer to these questions and others that were shaping themselves in his heart and setting his cool, evenly-flowing blood aflame, that, after a two months' voyage, during which he had visited every agent in America and England, and with his own eyes seen and inspected the progress of the work on the materials of the air-ships, that he set the Vengeur's head towards Paris, and dropped her to the earth one dark night in the forest of Fontainebleau.

  He had brought with him Raoul Taxil and six men whom he had chosen with the greatest care. Taxil had now so completely convinced him of his personal devotion, that he did not feel the slightest scruple in leaving him in charge of the air-ship. But even had his estimate been wrong, he knew that treachery was impossible, if only because everyone on board the Vengeurwas convinced it would not pay. He was the only one who was able to prepare the motor fuel which worked the Vengeur's engines. Not even Franz had been admitted to the secret. In fact, Max had told him point blank that he would put a bullet through the head of him or any one else that he even suspected of trying to share the secret with him.

  When he left the air-ship, after having given Taxil full instructions as to evading observation, and the keeping of the rendezvous he had appointed, he was so far disguised that even those who knew him most intimately would have had some difficulty in recognising him.

  A liberal use of hydrogen peroxide had bleached his hair from glossy black to the bright bronze tint which had been so popular among beauties, professional and otherwise, a few years before. His dark eyebrows had been lightened by the same means, and a neatly trimmed moustache and imperial to match had been skilfully affixed to his clean-shaven lip and chin.

  With a light valise in his hand, he made his way into the town of Fontainebleau, and caught a train there which landed him in Paris shortly before midnight. He slept in a small hotel near Lyons station, and occupied the following forenoon in fitting himself out with clothes which would be less conspicuous in Paris than the quaint, ill-fitting odds and ends that lie had been obliged to borrow from his men.

  Before doing this, however, he had despatched a telegram addressed to Madame Cora Dail, 5 Rue Vernet, Champs ElysŽes, and the consequence of this was that when at four o'clock that afternoon he sent up a card inscribed "Francois Laroche," and having an almost imperceptible pencil-mark in the top left-hand corner, to the first floor, the concierge informed him that he was expected, and touched a bell which brought a smart English footman to conduct him to Madame's presence.

  As the portire of the luxuriously furnished boudoir fell behind him, a slight and still almost girlish figure rose with a nearly inaudible rustle of soft draperies from a low couch in a delightful little curtained alcove formed by a deep window looking out on to the broad tree-lined avenue.

  "Welcome, Monsieur Max," said a well-remembered voice, and as he took the little, cool, soft hand that was placed in his, he looked up, and their eyes met. It was Lea, but Lea glorified; and the sight of her beauty dazzled him for the moment, and seemed to deprive his usually ready and deliberate tongue. The four years which had transformed the girl of eighteen into the woman of twenty-two had touched nothing of her girlish freshness, but they had added to it a reposeful dignity that he had never seen in the pretty little dressmaker, with whom he had fallen in love in London.

  And over and above this there was the glamour that wealth, which only emphasises the coarseness of the common human material, enables innate refinement to glorify itself with. Madame Cora Dail, the alleged widow of the millionaire slayer of hogs in Chicago, was a very different person from Lea Cassilis, the clever and precocious girl member of the Autonomie Group No. 7, and this Renault saw at a glance before she had uttered her second sentence in greeting to him.

  "You are somewhat changed, I see," she went on, meeting his glance with a steadiness that warned him, with something like a pang of jealousy, that he was not now the only man who looked at her with unconcealed love and admiration in his eyes. "I suppose the change was necessary, but honestly I can't say that it is altogether an improvement. That moustache and imperial- may I ask whether they are a natural growth, or only assumed for the occasion?"

  There was a slight suspicion of mockery both in her tone and her words that irritated him not a little, and seemed to tell him that he was likely to find the distance between them as great as ever, but he kept himself well in hand, and replied in similar tones-

  "Unfortunately, the change which has the misfortune to fail to please your ladyship was necessary, but, happily for me, it is not permanent. The mou
stache and imperial were purchased with the hair-dye, and have only been in position since last night. A pretty fair growth for the time, aren't they? But, to turn to a more interesting subject, permit me to offer my compliments in exchange for your welcome. To use the old simile of the butterfly and the chrysalis-"

  "Thanks, Monsieur Max, we will take it as spoken," she interrupted, with a half-curtsey and a smile that dazzled him afresh. "I was in hope that you had brought some more interesting conversation with you than that. Let me assure you that since I have been the widow of an American millionaire, with half Paris at my feet, my ears have been so sated with pretty sayings that I could almost thank anyone who would be absolutely rude to me.

  "But come," she went on, with a sudden, and to Max very pleasant change in her manner. "I suppose we have something better to talk about than this. Ah, there is the coffee. 1 have given instructions that I am not at home to the President himself, if he should do me the honour to make an afternoon call; and so, for the next two hours at least, we can entertain each other with all the news that we have to exchange. For instance, I am literally dying to hear all about your life on that wonderful island of Utopia, where-"

  "Utopia?" he interrupted. "How did you know that was its name?"

  "Why, from Leo Marcel, of course. When I heard that he had got back from Africa, as he did just when all Europe was ringing with your aerial exploits over the Atlantic, I sent him a telegram asking him to come over to Paris and tell me all he could about you- I mean about your adventures and the air-ship. Ah, that reminds me, tell me first, have you brought her with you to France?"

  "I am more than delighted by the knowledge that you thought me worthy of so much interest," replied Max, obeying the gesture which invited him to seat himself on the dainty silk-covered sociable on which she was reclining. "Yes, I have brought her. Last night she landed me in the forest of Fontainebleau, and by this time she should be safely hidden in some snug little ravine in the Pyrenees."

  "In the Pyrenees!" exclaimed Lea; "that is a very long way off, isn't it? Are you not afraid of your lieutenant or your crew running off with your priceless craft, and going into the general destruction business on their own account?"

  "Not in the slightest," laughed Max, with a shake of his head. "I can trust them, because they know that they can do nothing without me. I am the only one who knows how the Vengeuris driven, and when they had used up the motive power that there is on board, they would have to get out and walk, for they couldn't make her fly another yard to save them from the guillotine. As for the distance, you forget that aerial travelling is not exactly like going by train or steamboat. The Pyrenees are only a three hours' flight from Paris, and if I had her here now, you should dine in London this evening if you wished to do so."

  "Marvellous!" she replied, looking at him this time with a real interest in her eyes. "But, of course, I had forgotten for the moment what Marcel told me about your speed. And now tell me, when may I expect a trip to the clouds in this wonderful cruiser that owns you as her master?"

  "She will be back in the same spot at Fontainebleau at ten o'clock to-morrow night," said Max; "and then, if you think you can safely trust yourself with me, she shall take you, not only to the clouds, but beyond them, to the heights where the sun shines all day and the stars all night, and then she shall carry you to any spot of the world you may choose to see. If you would like to be the first woman who has ever set eyes upon the North Pole or the South, you shall see it, for the earth has no obstacles that the Vengeur cannot laugh at.

  "I tell you, Lea, that the conquest of the air means more than you have ever dreamed of; and if you will come with me to-morrow night, I will show you the wonders and glories of a kingdom such as no man ever ruled over before, and which is only waiting for the fairest woman on earth to come and be its queen."

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  TRAPPED.

  N0 woman, and least of all women, Lea Cassilis, could have mistaken the meaning either of the words or of the low, passion-thrilled tone in which they were spoken. She looked at him as he sat there, leaning slightly towards her, and possessing an unlikeness to himself that was almost grotesque. And as she looked, she thought of the scene in the little club-room, when she had snatched her hand away from under his, and told him that it would be time enough to ask when he had the power to take.

  Since then many things had happened. She had reigned for a season as the belle of Paris, spending money as she pleased with both hands, worming her way into intrigues which laid bare before her eyes the inner workings of the vast machine that is called Society. Before her radiant beauty and lavishly-spent wealth, all doors had flown open. She had mingled with the great ones of the earth; she had learned their secrets and won their homage; and she had seen that the management of nations was carried on by means of just the same petty trickery and sordid selfishness as she had witnessed in the conduct of the business of the fashionable dressmaker who had once been her mistress.

  The further she had seen into society, the less she liked anything save that gay, brilliant, idle aspect of it which was already beginning to bore her. Since she had come to Paris, fortunes, titles, and vast estates had been laid one after another at her feet, only to be rejected with a smiling, tolerant disdain that had made some of the wits of Paris remark that la belle Americaine would be contented with nothing less than a crown.

  Perhaps, after all, it was a crown that she was waiting for; and, if so, the hour and the man had come, and the crown would be hers for the taking, if she would but put out her hand for it. True, it would be no tiara of gold and jewels, such as the queens of the earth wore, yet it would be such that the proudest of them might well envy her its possession. It would be the diadem of an empire without frontiers, of a realm that included the whole earth, and from whose throne she could hurl her lightnings alike upon palace and prison, striking down the mightiest and the meanest with a more than royal impartiality, and all this would be hers if only-

  "Monsieur Max," she said, with a new light in her eyes, and a brighter flush on her cheeks, when her thoughts had run thus far, "I know what you mean. You are thinking of what we said at the club that night. Well, I have been thinking of it too. I remember what I said and what you said, as distinctly, perhaps, as you do. Tell me now truly, for the sake of our common hatred of society, have you literally and actually the power to do what you said you would do then, and therefore to take what you- well, what you led me then to believe that you wanted?"

  "I have," said Max, laying his hand on hers just as he had done that night; "I have the power and I have the will, and yet-"

  "And yet what?" she asked, dropping her eyes for a moment before the steady gaze of his passion-lit eyes.

  "Yet, though I have the will, there is something else that prevents me permitting it to put the power into action- something that makes me, virtual master of the world though I shall be in a few weeks from now, yet not master of myself."

  "And that is-?"

  His grip tightened upon her hand as he answered-

  "There is no need for me to tell you what you know already, Lea. A man does not love a woman like you and remain his own master long, and it is just because I love you that I cannot use the power which would force you to choose between surrender and destruction. If I loved you less than I do, it would be easy for me to wait my opportunity and carry you off in the Vengeur-"

  "As you tried to carry off Violet Milton, eh?" interrupted Lea, looking into his eyes with a cold, searching glance, and speaking in the even tones of the merest commonplace.

  Such an unexpected facer would have disconcerted ninety-nine men out of a hundred, but Max Renault was the hundredth.

  Inwardly, the shock of Lea's words seemed to him to drive every drop of blood out of his heart; but, outwardly; his iron nerves gave no sign of discomfiture. Like a flash, he saw that Lea's keen, subtle wit had, with the single question, purposely created what might be the crisis of his life.

  On his answer
to it would depend her answer to the supreme question that he had put to her by implication in his last speech. His splendid nerves responded instantly to the call. Without the quiver of an eyelid, or a quaver in his voice, he replied-

  "Ah! so you have heard of that little romance, have you? and that means that you have made the acquaintance of some of the Utopians or their visitors. May I ask who?"

  If she had obeyed her first impulse, she would have struck him across the face, and ordered him out of the room, at whatever risk to herself. But the mood passed as quickly as it came. A glance at the strong, stern face and the steady eyes before her told her that in this stronger nature than her own she had met her master, and, as she was a woman, she liked him none the less for it.

  As the sudden anger passed out of her heart, it was replaced by something that had never been there before, and her voice had just the least perceptible tremor in it as she answered his question.

  "Sir Harry Milton brought his sister over to Paris nearly two months ago, to put her under the care of Roulier, the great nerve specialist, and I met him while he was here. You didn't kill her, you know, when you threw her out of the air-ship- or, I forget, did she throw herself out?"