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.
[96]
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 the............