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

class="calibre1">“Yes, I know I do!” she admitted—“I am what old Scotswomen call ‘fey’! You know I was born away in the Hebrides,—my father was a poor herder of sheep at one time before he came over to the States. I was only a baby when I was carried away from the islands of mist and rain—but I was ‘fey’ from my birth—”

“What is fey?” interrupted Miss Herbert.

“It’s just everything that everybody else is NOT”—Morgana replied— “‘Fey’ people are magic people; they see what no one else sees,— they hear voices that no one else hears—voices that whisper secrets and tell of wonders as yet undiscovered—” She broke off suddenly. “We must not stay talking here”—she resumed-“All the folks will say we are planning the bridesmaids’ dresses and that the very day of the ceremony is fixed! But you can be sure that I am not going to marry anybody—least of all Roger Seaton!”

“You like him though! I can see you like him!”

“Of course I like him! He’s a human magnet,—he ‘draws’! You fly towards him as if he were a bit of rubbed sealing-wax and you a snippet of paper! But you soon drop off! Oh, that valse! Isn’t it entrancing!”

And, swinging herself round lightly like a bell-flower in a breeze she danced off alone and vanished in the crowd of her guests.

Lydia Herbert recalled this conversation now, as she stood looking from the vine-clad verandah of her hotel towards the sea, and again saw, as in a vision, the face and eyes of her “fey” friend,—a face by no means beautiful in feature, but full of a sparkling attraction which was almost irresistible.

“Nothing in her!” had declared New York society generally—“Except her money! And her hair—but not even that unless she lets it down!”

Lydia had seen it so “let down,” once, and only once, and the sight of such a glistening rope of gold had fairly startled her.

“All your own?” she had gasped.

And with a twinkling smile, and comic hesitation of manner Morgana had answered.

“I—I THINK it is! It seems so! I don’t believe it will come off unless you pull VERY hard!”

Lydia had not pulled hard, but she had felt the soft rippling mass falling from head to far below the knee, and had silently envied the owner its possession.

“It’s a great bother,” Morgana declared—“I never know what to do with it. I can’t dress it ‘fashionably’ one bit, and when I twist it up it’s so fine it goes into nothing and never looks the quantity it is. However, we must all have our troubles!—with some it’s teeth— with others it’s ankles—we’re never QUITE all right! The thing is to endure without complaining!”

“And this curious creature who talked “so very strangely,” possessed millions of money! Her father, who had arrived in the States from the wildest north of Scotland with practically not a penny, had so gathered and garnered every opportunity that came in his way that every investment he touched seemed to turn to five times its first value under his fingers. When his wife died very soon after his wealth began to accumulate, he was beset by women of beauty and position eager to take her place, but he was adamant against all their blandishments and remained a widower, devoting his entire care to the one child he had brought with him as an infant from the Highland hills, and to whom he gave a brilliant but desultory and uncommon education. Life seemed to swirl round him in a glittering ring of gold of which he made himself the centre,—and when he died suddenly “from overstrain” as the doctors said, people were almost frightened to name the vast fortune his daughter inherited, accustomed as they were to the counting of many millions. And now--- ?”

“California!” mused Lydia—“Sam Gwent thinks she has gone there after Roger Seaton. But what can be her object if she doesn’t care for him? It’s far more likely she’s started for Sicily—she’s having a palace built there for her small self to live in ‘all by her lonesome’! Well! She can afford it!”

And with a short sigh she let go her train of thought and left the verandah,—it was time to change her costume and prepare “effects” to dazzle and bewilder the uncertain mind of a crafty old Croesus who, having freely enjoyed himself as a bachelor up to his present age of seventy-four, was now looking about for a young strong woman to manage his house and be a nurse and attendant for him in his declining years, for which service, should she be suitable, he would concede to her the name of “wife” in order to give stability to her position. And Lydia Herbert herself was privately quite aware of his views. Moreover she was entirely willing to accommodate herself to them for the sake of riches and a luxurious life, and the “settlement” she meant to insist upon if her plans ripened to fulfilment. She had no great ambitions; few women of her social class have. To be well housed, well fed and well clothed, and enabled to do the fashionable round without hindrance—this was all she sought, and of romance, sentiment, emotion or idealism she had none. Now and again she caught the flash of a thought in her brain higher than the level of material needs, but dismissed it more quickly than it came as—“Ridiculous! Absolute nonsense! Like Morgana!”

And to be like Morgana, meant to be like what cynics designate “an impossible woman,”—independent of opinions and therefore “not understood of the people.”

CHAPTER IV

“Why do you stare at me? You have such big eyes!”

Morgana, dotted only in a white silk nightgown, sitting on the edge of her bed with her small rosy toes peeping out beneath the tiny frill of her thin garment, looked at the broad-shouldered handsome girl Manella who had just brought in her breakfast tray and now stood regarding her with an odd expression of mingled admiration and shyness.

“Such big eyes!” she repeated—“Like great head-lamps flaring out of that motor-brain of yours! What do you see in me?”

Manella’s brown skin flushed crimson.

“Something I have never seen before!” she answered—“You are so small and white! Not like a woman at all!”

Morgana laughed merrily.

“Not like a woman! Oh dear! What am I like then?”

Manella’s eyes grew darker than ever in the effort to explain her thought.

“I do not know”—she said, hesitatingly—“But—once—here in this garden—we found a wonderful butterfly with white wings—all white,- and it was resting on a scarlet flower. We all went out to look at it, because it was unlike any other butterfly we had ever seen,-its wings were like velvet or swansdown. You remind me of that butterfly.”

Morgana smiled.

“Did it fly away?”

“Oh, yes. Very soon! And an hour or so after it had flown, the scarlet flower where it had rested was dead.”

“Most thrilling!” And Morgana gave a little yawn. “Is that breakfast? Yes? Stay with me while I have it! Are you the head chambermaid at the Plaza?”

Manella shrugged her shoulders.

“I do not know what I am! I do everything I am asked to do as well as I can.”

“Obliging creature! And are you well paid?”

“As much as I want”—Manella answered, indifferently. “But there is no pleasure in the work.”

“Is there pleasure in ANY work?”

“If one works for a person one loves,—surely yes!” the girl murmured as if she were speaking to herself, “The days would be too short for all the work to be done!”

Morgana glanced at her, and the flash of her eyes had the grey-blue of lightning. Then she poured out the coffee and tasted it.

“Not bad!” she commented—“Did you make it?”

Manella nodded, and went on talking at random.

“I daresay it’s not as good as it ought to be”—she said—“If you had brought your own maid I should have asked HER to make it. Women of your class like their food served differently to us poor folk, and I don’t know their ways.”

Morgana laughed.

“You quaint, handsome thing! What do you know about it? What, in your opinion, IS my class?”

Manella pulled nervously at the ends of the bright coloured kerchief she wore knotted across her bosom, and hesitated a moment.

“Well, for one thing you are rich”—she said, at last—“There is no mistaking that. Your lovely clothes—you must spend a fortune on them! Then—all the people here wonder at your automobile—and your chauffeur says it is the most perfect one ever made! And all these riches make you think you ought to have everything just as you fancy it. I suppose you ought—I’m not sure! I don’t believe you have much feeling,—you couldn’t, you know! It is not as if you wanted something very badly and there was no chance of your getting it,— your money would buy all you could desire. It would even buy you a man!”

Morgana paused in the act of pouring out a second cup of coffee, and her face dimpled with amusement.

“Buy me a man!” she echoed—“You think it would?”

“Of course it would!” Manella averred—“If you wanted one, which I daresay you don’t. For all I know, you may be like the man who is living in the consumption hut on the hill,—he ought to have a woman, but he doesn’t want one.”

Morgana buttered her little breakfast roll very delicately.

“The man who lives in the consumption hut on the hill!” she repeated, slowly, and with a smile—“What man is that?”

“I don’t know—” and Manella’s large dark eyes filled with a strangely wistful perplexity. “He is a stranger—and he’s not ill at all. He is big and strong and healthy. But he has chosen to live in the ‘house of the dying,’ as it is sometimes called—where people from the Plaza go when there’s no more hope for them. He likes to be quite alone—he thinks and writes all day. I take him milk and bread,—it is all he orders from the Plaza. I would be his woman. I would work for him from morning till night. But he will not have me.”

Morgana raised her eyes, glittering with the “fey” light in them that often bewildered and rather scared her friends.

“You would be his woman? You are in love with him?” she said.

Something in her look checked Manella’s natural impulse to confide in one of her own sex.

“No, I am not!”—she answered coldly—“I have said too much.”

Morgana smiled, and stretching out her small white hand, adorned with its sparkling rings, laid it caressingly on the girl’s brown wrist.

“You are a dear!”—she murmured, lazily—“Just a dear! A big, beautiful creature with a heart! That’s the trouble—your heart! You’ve found a man living selfishly alone, scribbling what he perhaps thinks are the most wonderful things ever put on paper, when they are very likely nothing but rubbish, and it enters into your head that he wants mothering and loving! He doesn’t want anything of the sort! And YOU want to love and mother him! Oh heavens!—have you ever thought what loving and mothering mean?”

Manella drew a quick soft breath.

“All the world, surely!” she answered, with emotion—“To love!—to possess the one we love, body and soul!—and to mother a life born of such love!—THAT must be heaven!”

The smile flitted away from Morgana’s lips, and her expression became almost sorrowful.

“You are like a trusting animal!” she said—“An animal all innocent of guns and steel-traps! You poor girl! I should like you to come with me out of these mountain solitudes into the world!