The Secret Power - Marie Corelli (books to get back into reading TXT) 📗

“I think so”—answered Morgana, with a thrill of sadness in her sweet voice—“They will live—pray God their lives may be worth living!”

She watched the man-servant whom she had chosen to wait on Ardini depart on his errand—she saw him open the door of the room where Seaton lay, and shut it—then there was a silence. Oppressed by a sudden heaviness of heart she thought of Manella, and entered her apartment softly to see how she fared. The girl’s beautiful dark eyes were wide open and full of the light of life and consciousness. She smiled and stretched out her arms.

“It is my angel!” she murmured faintly—“My little white angel who came to me in the darkness! And this is Heaven!”

Swiftly and silently Morgana went to her side, and taking her outstretched arms put them round her own neck.

“Manella!” she said, tenderly—“Dear, beautiful Manella! Do you know me?”

The great loving eyes rested on her with glowing warmth and pleasure.

“Indeed I know you!” and Manella’s voice, weak as that of a sick child, sounded ever so far away—“The little white lady of my dreams! Oh, I have wanted you!—wanted you so much! Why did you not come back sooner?”

Afraid to trouble her brain by the sudden shock of too rapidly recurring memories, Morgana made no reply, but merely soothed her with tender caresses, when all at once she made a violent struggle to rise from the bed.

“I must go!” she cried—“He is calling me! I must follow him—yes, even if he kills me for it—he is in danger!”

Morgana held her close and firmly.

“Hush, hush, dear!” she murmured—“Be quite still! He is safe— believe me! He is near you—in the next room!—out of all danger.”

“Oh, no, it is not possible!” and the girl’s eyes grew wild with terror—“He cannot be safe!—he is destroying himself! I have followed him every step of the way—I have watched him,—oh!—so long!—and he came out of the hut this morning—I was hidden among the trees—he could not see me—” she broke off, and a violent trembling shook her whole body. Morgana tried to calm her into silence, but she went on rambling incoherently. “There was something he carried as though it was precious to him—something that glittered like gold,—and he went away quickly—quickly to the canyon,—I followed him like a dog, crawling through the brushwood— I followed him across the deep water—to the cave where it was all dark—black as midnight!” She paused—then suddenly flung her arms round Morgana crying—“Oh, hold me!—hold me!—I am in this darkness trying to find him!—there!—there!—he turns and sees me by the light of a lamp he carries; he knows I have followed him, and he is angry! Oh, dear God, he is angry—he raises his arm to strike me!” She uttered a smothered shriek, and clung to Morgana in a kind of frenzy. “No mercy, no pity! That thing that glitters in his hand—it frightens me—what is it? I kneel to him on the cold stones—I pray him to forgive me—to come with me—but his arm is still raised to strike—he does not care—!”

Here a pale horror blanched her features—she drew herself away from Morgana’s hold and put out her hands with the instinctive gesture of one who tries to escape falling from some great height. Morgana, alarmed at her looks, caught her again in her arms and held her tenderly, whereat a faint smile hovered on her lips and her distraught movements ceased.

“What is this?”—she asked—then murmured—“My little white lady, how did you come here? How could you cross the flood?—unless on wings? Ah!—you are a fairy and you can do all you wish to do—but you cannot save HIM!—it is too late! He will not save himself—and he does not care,—he does not care—neither for me nor you!”

She drooped her head against Morgana’s shoulder and her eyes closed in utter exhaustion. Morgana laid her back gently on her pillows, and pouring a few drops of the cordial she had used before, and of which she had the sole secret, into a wineglassful of water, held it to her lips. She drank it obediently, evidently conscious now that she was being cared for. But she was still restless, and presently she sat up in a listening attitude, one hand uplifted.

“Listen!” she said in a low, awed tone—“Thunder! Do you hear it? God speaks!”

She lay down again passively and was silent for a long time. The hours passed and the day grew into late afternoon, and Morgana, patiently watchful, thought she slept. All suddenly she sprang up, wide-eyed and alert.

“What was that?” she cried—“I heard him call!”

Morgana, startled by her swift movement, stood transfixed— listening. The deep tones of a man’s voice rang out loudly and defiantly—

“There shall be no more wars! There can be none! I say so! I am Master of the World!”

CHAPTER XXV

A brilliant morning broke over the flower-filled gardens of the Palazzo d’Oro, and the sea, stretched out in a wide radiance of purest blue shimmered with millions of tiny silver ripples brushed on its surface by a light wind as delicate as a bird’s wing. Morgana stood in her rose-marble loggia, looking with a pathetic wistfulness at the beauty of the scene, and beside her stood Marco Ardini, scientist, surgeon and physician, looking also, but scarcely seeing, his whole thought being concentrated on the “case” with which he had been dealing.

“It is exactly as I at first told you,”—he said—“The man is strong in muscle and sinew,—but his brain is ruined. It can no longer control or command the body’s mechanism,—therefore the body is practically useless. Power of volition is gone,—the poor fellow will never be able to walk again or to lift a hand. A certain faculty of speech is left,—but even this is limited to a few words which are evidently the result of the last prevailing thoughts impressed on the brain-cells. It is possible he will repeat those words thousands of times!—the oftener he repeats them the more he will like to say them.”

“What are they?” Morgana asked in a tone of sorrow and compassion.

“Strange enough for a man in his condition”—replied Ardini—“And always the same. ‘THERE SHALL BE NO MORE WARS! THERE CAN BE NONE! I SAY IT!—_I_ ONLY! IT IS MY GREAT SECRET! I AM MASTER OF THE WORLD!’ Poor devil! What a ‘master of the world’ is there!”

Morgana shuddered as with cold, shading her eyes from the radiant sunshine.

“Does he say nothing else?” she murmured—“Is there no name—no place—that he seems to remember?”

“He remembers nothing—he knows nothing”—answered Ardini—“He does not even realize me as a man—I might be a fish or a serpent for all his comprehension. One glance at his moveless eyes is enough to prove that. They are like pebbles in his head—without cognisance or expression. He mutters the words ‘Great Secret’ over and over again, and tacks it on to the other phrase of ‘No more wars’ in a semi- conscious sort of gabble,—this is, of course, the disordered action of the brain working to catch up and join together hopelessly severed fragments.”

Morgana lifted her sea-blue eyes and looked with grave appeal into the severely intellectual, half-frowning face of the great Professor.

“Is there no hope of an ultimate recovery?” she asked—“With time and rest and the best of unceasing care, might not this poor brain right itself?”

“Medically and scientifically speaking, there is no hope,—none whatever”—he replied—“Though of course we all know that Nature’s remedial methods are inexhaustible, and often, to the wisest of us, seem miraculous, because as yet we do not understand one tithe of her processes. But—in this case,—this strange and terrible case”— and he uttered the words with marked gravity,—“It is Nature’s own force that has wrought the damage,—some powerful influence which the man has been testing has proved too much for him—and it has taken its own vengeance.”

Morgana heard this with strained interest and attention.

“Tell me just what you mean,”—she said—“There is something you do not quite express—or else I am too slow to understand—”

Ardini took a few paces up and down the loggia and then halted, facing her in the attitude of a teacher preparing to instruct a pupil.

“Signora,”—he said—“When you began to correspond with me some years ago from America, I realised that I was in touch with a highly intelligent and cultivated mind. I took you to be many years older than you are, with a ripe scientific experience. I find you young, beautiful, and pathetic in the pure womanliness of your nature, which must be perpetually contending with an indomitable power of intellectuality and of spirituality,—spirituality is the strongest force of your being. You are not made like other women. This being so I can say to you what other women would not understand. Science is my life-subject, as it is yours,—it is a window set open in the universe admitting great light. But many of us foolishly imagine that this light emanates from ourselves as a result of our own cleverness, whereas it comes from that Divine Source of all things, which we call God. We refuse to believe this,—it wounds our pride. And we use the discoveries of science recklessly and selfishly— without gratitude, humbleness or reverence. So it happens that the first tendency of godless men is to destroy. The love of destruction and torture shows itself in the boy who tears off the wing of an insect, or kills a bird for the pleasure of killing. The boy is father of the man. And we come, after much ignorant denial and obstinacy, back to the inexorable truth that ‘they who take the sword shall perish with the sword.’ If we consider the ‘sword’ as a metaphor for every instrument of destruction, we shall see the force of its application—the submarine, for example, built for the most treacherous kind of sea-warfare—how often they that undertake its work are slain themselves! And so it is through the whole gamut of scientific discovery when it is used for inhuman and unlawful purposes. But when this same ‘sword’ is lifted to put an end to torture, disease, and the manifold miseries of life, then the Power that has entrusted it to mankind endows it with blessing and there are no evil results. I say this to you by way of explaining the view I am forced to take of this man whose strange case you ask me to deal with,—my opinion is that through chance or intention he has been playing recklessly with a great natural force, which he has not entirely understood, for some destructive purpose, and that it has recoiled on himself.”

Morgana looked him steadily in the eyes.

“You may be right,”—she said—“He is—or was—one of the most brilliant of our younger scientists. You know his name—I have sent you from New York some accounts of his work—He is Roger Seaton, whose experiments in the condensation of radioactivity startled America some four or five years ago—”

“Roger Seaton!” he exclaimed—“What! The man who professed to have found a new power which would change the face of the world? . . . He,—this wreck?—this blind, deaf lump of breathing clay? Surely he has not fallen on so horrible a destiny!”

Tears rushed to Morgana’s eyes,—she could not answer. She could only bend her head in assent.

Profoundly moved, Ardini took her hand, and kissed it with sympathetic reverence.

“Signora,” he said—“This is indeed a tragedy! You have saved this life at I know not what risk to yourself—and as I am aware what a life of great attainment it promised to be, you may be sure I will spare no pains to bring it back to normal conditions. But frankly