The Secret Power Part 10

"Simpleton! Because she wishes you to convey to me the message that she considers me your lover and that she admires my taste! Now she'll go back to New York full of the story! Subtle little devil! But I am not your lover, and never shall be,--not even for half an hour!"

Manella sprang up from the turf where she had been sitting.

"I know that!" she said, and her splendid eyes flashed proud defiance--"I know I have been a fool to let myself care for you! I do not know why I did--it was an illness! But I am well now!"

"You are well now? Good! O let us be joyful! Keep well, Manella!--and be 'quite beautiful'--as you are! To be quite beautiful is a fine thing--not so fine as it used to be in the Greek period--still, it has its advantages! I wonder what you will do with your beauty?"

As he spoke, he rose, stretching and shaking him self like a forest animal.

"What will you do with it?" he repeated--"You must give it to somebody!

You must transmit it to your offspring! That's the old law of nature--it's getting a bit monotonous, still it's the law! Now she--the wonderful white woman--she's all for upsetting the law! Fortunately she's not beautiful--"

"She IS!" exclaimed Manella--"_I_ think her so!" He looked down upon her from his superior height with a tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Really! YOU think her so! And SHE thinks you so! Quite a mutual admiration society! And both of you obsessed by the same one man! I pity that man! The only thing for him to do is to keep out of it! No, Manella!--think as you like, she is not beautiful. You ARE beautiful.

But SHE is clever, You are NOT clever. You may thank G.o.d for that! SHE is outrageously, unnaturally, cursedly clever! And her cleverness makes her see the sham of life all through; the absurdity of birth that ends in death--the freakishness of civilisation to no purpose--and she's out for something else. She wants some thing newer than s.e.x-attraction and family life. A husband would bore her to extinction--the care of children would send her into a lunatic asylum!"

Manella looked bewildered.

"I cannot understand!" she said--"A woman lives for husband and children!"

"SOME women do!" he answered--"Not all! There are a good few who don't want to stay on the animal level. Men try to keep them there--but it's a losing game nowadays. ('Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests'--but we cannot fail to see that when Mother Fox has reared her puppies she sends them off about their own business and doesn't know them any more--likewise Mother Bird does the same. Nature has no sentiment.) We have, because we cultivate artificial feelings--we imagine we 'love,' when we only want something that pleases us for the moment. To live, as you say, for husband and children would make a woman a slave--a great many women are slaves--but they are beginning to get emanc.i.p.ated--the woman with the gold hair, whom you so much admire, is emanc.i.p.ated."

Manella gave a slight disdainful movement of her head.

"That only means she is free to do as she likes"--she said--"To marry or not to marry--to love or not to love. I think if she loved at all, she would love very greatly. Why did she go so secretly in the evening to see you? I suppose she loves you!"

A sudden red flush of anger coloured his brow.

"Yes"--he answered with a kind of vindictive slowness--"I suppose she does! You, Manella, are after me as a man merely--she is after me as a Brain! You would steal my physical liberty,--she would steal my innermost thought! And you will both be disappointed! Neither my body nor my brain shall ever be dominated by any woman!"

He turned from her abruptly and began the ascent that led to his solitary retreat. Once he looked back--

"Don't let me see you for two days at least!" he called--"I've more than enough food to keep me going."

He strode on, and Manella stood watching him, her tall handsome figure silhouetted against the burning sky. Her dark eyes were moist with suppressed tears of shame and suffering,--she felt herself to be wronged and slighted undeservedly. And beneath this personal emotion came now a smarting sense of jealousy, for in spite of all he had said, she felt that there was some secret between him and "the little wonderful white woman," which she could not guess and which was probably the reason of his self-sought exile and seclusion.

"I wish now I had gone with her!" she mused--"for if I am 'quite beautiful,' as she said, she might have helped me in the world,--I might have become a lady!"

She walked slowly and dejectedly back to the Plaza, knowing in her heart that lady or no lady, her rich beauty was useless to her, inasmuch as it made no effect on the one man she had elected to care for, unwanted and unasked. Certain physiologists teach that the law of natural selection is that the female should choose her mate, but the difficulty along this line of argument is that she may choose where her choice is unwelcome and irresponsive. Manella was a splendid type of primitive womanhood,--healthy, warm-blooded and full of hymeneal pa.s.sion,--as a wife she would have been devoted,--as a mother superb in her tenderness; but, measured by modern standards of advanced and restless femininity she was a mere drudge, without the ability to think for herself or to a.n.a.lyse subtleties of emotion. Intellectuality had no part in her; most people's talk was for her meaningless, and she had not the patience to listen to any conversation that rose above the food and business of the day. She was confused and bewildered by everything the strange recluse on the hill said to her,--she could not follow him at all,--and yet, the purely physical attraction he exercised over her nature drew her to him like a magnet and kept her in a state of feverish craving for a love she knew she could never win. She would have gladly been his servant on the mere chance and hope that possibly in some moment of abandonment he might have yielded to the importunity of her tenderness; Adonis himself in all the freshness of his youth never exercised a more potent spell upon enamoured Venus than this plain, big bearded man over the lonely, untutored Californian girl with the large loveliness of a G.o.ddess and the soul of a little child. What was the singular fascination which like the "pull" of a magnetic storm on telegraph wires, forced a woman's tender heart under the careless foot of a rough creature as indifferent to it as to a flower he trampled in his path? Nature might explain it in some unguarded moment of self-betrayal,--but Nature is jealous of her secrets,--they have to be coaxed out of her in the slow course of centuries. And with all the coaxing, the subtle work of her woven threads between the Like and the Unlike remains an unsolved mystery.

CHAPTER VI

From California to Sicily is a long way. It used to be considered far longer than it is now but in these magical days of aerial and motor travelling, distance counts but little,--indeed as almost nothing to the mind of any man or woman brought up in America and therefore accustomed to "hustle." Morgana Royal had "hustled" the whole business, staying in Paris a few days only,--in Rome but two nights; and now here she was, as if she had been spirited over sea and land by supernatural power, seated in a perfect paradise-garden of flowers and looking out on the blue Mediterranean with dreamy eyes in which the lightning flash was nearly if not wholly subdued. About quarter of a mile distant, and seen through the waving tops of pines and branching oleander, stood the house to which the garden belonged,--a "restored" palace of ancient days, built of rose-marble on the cla.s.sic lines of Greek architecture.

Its "restoration" was not quite finished; numbers of busy workmen were employed on the facade and surrounded loggia; and now and again she turned to watch them with a touch of invisible impatience in her movement. A slight smile sweetened her mouth as she presently perceived one figure approaching her,--a lithe, dark, handsome man, who, when he drew near enough, lifted his hat with a profoundly marked reverence, and, as she extended her hand, raised it to his lips.

"A thousand welcomes, Madama!" he said, speaking in English with a scarcely noticeable foreign accent--"Last night I heard you had arrived, but could hardly believe the good fortune! You must have travelled quickly?"

"Never quickly enough for my mind!" she answered--"The whole world moves too slowly for me!"

"You must carry that complaint to the buon Dio!" he said, gaily--"Perhaps He will condescend to spin this rolling planet a little faster! But in my mind, time flies far too rapidly! I have worked--we all have worked--to get this place finished for you, yet much remains to be done--"

She interrupted him.

"The interior is quite perfect"--she said--"You have carried out my instructions more thoroughly than I imagined could be possible. It is now an abode for fairies to live in,--for poets to dream in--"

"For women to love in!" he said, with a sudden warmth in his dark eyes.

She looked at him, laughing.

"You poor Marchese!"--she said--"Still you think of love! I really believe Italians keep all the sentiment of le moyen age in their hearts,--other peoples are gradually letting it go. You are like a child believing in childish things! You imagine I could be happy with a lover--or several lovers! To moon all day and embrace all night! Oh fie! What a waste of time! And in the end nothing is so fatiguing!" She broke off a spray of flowering laurel and hit him with it playfully on the hand. "Don't moon or spoon, caro amico! What is it all about? Do I leave you nothing on which to write poetry? I find you out in Sicily--a delightful poor n.o.bleman with a family history going back to the Caesars!--handsome, clever, with beautiful ideas--and I choose and commission you to restore and rebuild for me a fairy palace out of a half-ruined ancient one, because you have taste and skill, and I know you can do everything when money is no object--and you have done, and are doing it all perfectly. Why then spoil it by falling in love with me? Fie, fie!"

She laughed again and rising, gave him her hand.

"Hold that!" she said--"And while you hold it, tell me of my other palace--the one with wings!"

He clasped her small white fingers in his own sun-browned palm and walked beside her bare-headed.

"Ah!" And he drew a deep breath--"That is a miracle! What we called your 'impossible' plan has been made possible! But who would have thought that a woman--"

"Stop there!" she interrupted--"Do not repeat the old gander-cackle of barbaric man, who, while owing his every comfort as well as the continuance of his race, to woman, denied her every intellectual initiative! 'Who would have thought that a woman'--could do anything but bend low before a man with grovelling humility saying 'My lord, here am I, the waiting vessel of your lords.h.i.+p's pleasure!--possess me or I die!' We have changed that beggarly att.i.tude!"

Her eyes flashed,--her voice rang out--the little fingers he held, stiffened resolutely in his clasp. He looked at her with a touch of anxiety.

"Pardon me!--I did not mean--" he stammered.

In a second her mood changed, and she laughed.

"No!--Of course you 'did not mean' anything, Marchese! You are naturally surprised that my 'idea' which was little more than an idea, has resolved itself into a scientific fact--but you would have been just as surprised if the conception had been that of a man instead of a woman. Only you would not have said so!"

She laughed again,--a laugh of real enjoyment,--then went on--

"Now tell me--what of my White Eagle?--what movement?--what speed?"

"Amazing!" and the Marchese lowered his voice to almost a whisper--"I hardly dare speak of it!--it is like something supernatural! We have carried out your instructions to the letter--the thing is LIVING, in all respects save life. I made the test with the fluid you gave me--I charged the cells secretly--none of the mechanics saw what I did--and when she rose in air they were terrified--"

"Brave souls!" said Morgana, and now she withdrew her hand from his grasp--"So you went up alone?"

"I did. The steering was easy--she obeyed the helm,--it was as though she were a light yacht in a sea,--wind and tide in her favour. But her speed outran every air-s.h.i.+p I have ever known--as also the height to which she ascends."

"We will take a trip in her to-morrow pour pa.s.ser le temps"--said Morgana, "You shall choose a place for us to go. Nothing can stop us--nothing on earth or in the air!--and nothing can destroy us. I can guarantee that!"

Giulio Rivardi gazed at her wonderingly,--his dark deep Southern eyes expressed admiration with a questioning doubt commingled.

"You are very sure of yourself"--he said, gently. "Of course one cannot but marvel that your brain should have grasped in so short a time what men all over the world are still trying to discover--"