The rest of the day was spent in accordance with the plans already agreed on. Olga and Serge had tea together in their private room before going to the theatre, and put the finishing touches to their plans for the momentous venture of the following day; and Alan and Alexis, all unsuspecting, accepted their invitation to supper after their return from the opera-house.
The seemingly innocent and pleasant little supper, which passed off so merrily in the private sitting-room occupied by Olga and Serge, had but one incident which calls for description here, and even that was unnoticed not only by the two guests, but by Serge himself.
Just before midnight, Olga proposed that, in accordance with the ancient custom of Russia, they should drink a glass of punch, brewed in the Russian style; and as she volunteered to brew it herself, it is needless to say that the invitation was at once accepted.
The apparatus stood upon a little table in one corner of the room. For a single minute her back was turned to the three sitting at the table in the centre; her share in the conversation was not interrupted for an instant, and no one saw a couple of drops of sparkling, blue liquid fall into each of three of the glasses from the little flask that she held concealed in the palm of her hand, and when she turned round with the little silver tray on which the glasses stood, the flask was resting at the bottom of her dress-pocket.
She handed a glass to each of them, and then took her own up from the side-table where she had left it. She went to her place, and, holding her glass up, said simply—
“Here’s to that which each of us has nearest at heart!” and drank.
All followed suit, and as the clock chimed twelve a few minutes later, the two Aerians took their leave, and left Olga and Serge alone.
“You said you would begin your share of the work to-night,” said he, as soon as they were alone. “Have you done so?”
“If you do your work to-morrow as successfully as I have done mine to-night,” replied Olga, looking steadily into his eyes as she spoke, “the Empire of the Air will no longer be theirs.”
Serge returned her glance in silence. He wanted to speak, but some superior power seemed to have laid a spell upon his will, and as long as Olga’s burning eyes were fixed on his, his tongue was paralysed, nay, more than this, his mind even refused to shape the sentences that he would have liked to speak. Olga held him mute before her for several minutes, and then she said quietly, still keeping her eyes fixed on his—
“Now speak, and tell me what you would do if I told you that I preferred Alan as a lover to you, and that I would rather a thousand times be his slave and plaything than your wife.”
“I should say that you are the mistress of my destiny, that I have no law but your will, and that it is for you to give me joy or pain, as seems good to you.”
Serge spoke the unnatural words in a calm, passionless tone, rather as though he were speaking in a sort of hypnotic trance than in full command of his senses. A strange, subtle influence had been stealing through his veins and over his nerves ever since he had drunk the liquor which Olga had prepared.
He seemed perfectly incapable of resisting any suggestion that might have been made to him. His will was paralysed, but even the consciousness of this fact was fading from his mind. All his passions were absolutely in abeyance. Even his love for Olga failed to inspire him with any jealous resentment of words which half an hour before would have goaded him to frenzy. He heard them as though they concerned someone else.
The ruin of his life’s hopes, which they implied so distinctly, had no meaning for him; so far as his volition was concerned he was an automaton, ready to obey without question the dictates of her imperious will.
“That will do,” said Olga, in the tone of a mistress addressing a servant. “Now go to bed and sleep well, and remember the work that lies before you to-morrow.”
“I will,” said Serge, and without another word, without attempting to take his customary good-night kiss, he walked out of the room, leaving her to the enjoyment of her victory and the contemplation of triumphs that now seemed almost certain to her.
Punctual to its appointed time, the air-ship appeared in mid-air over the city a few minutes before ten the next morning. It sank slowly and gracefully to within a hundred feet of the ground over the garden of the hotel in which the two Aerians and their new friends were staying.
Signals were rapidly exchanged as before between Alan and one of the crew standing on the afterpart of the deck. Then it sank down on to one of the snow-covered lawns of the garden, a door opened in the glass covering of the deck, a short, light, folding ladder with hand-rails dropped out of it to the ground, and Alan, springing up three or four of the steps, held out his hand to Olga, saying—
“Come along! we shall have a crowd round us in another minute.”
This was true, for the appearance of the air-ship had already attracted hundreds of people in the streets, and many of them had already made their way into the gardens of the hotel in order to get a closer view of her.
Olga, feeling not a little like a queen ascending a throne, ran lightly up the steps, followed by Serge and Alexis. The moment they got on to the deck the ladder was drawn up, the glass door slid noiselessly to, and Alan at once presented them to his friends on deck.
While the introductions were taking place, the wings of the air-ship began to vibrate and undulate with a wavy motion from forward aft, at first slowly, and then more and more swiftly, her propeller whirled round, and the wonderful craft rose without a jar or a tremor from the earth. Then the propellers began to revolve faster and faster, and she shot forward and upward over the trees amid the admiring murmurs of the crowds in the streets about the hotel. But little did those light-hearted sightseers dream, any more than did the captain and crew of the Ithuriel, that this aerial pleasure-cruise was destined to mark the beginning of a tragedy that would involve the whole of civilised humanity in a catastrophe so colossal that the like of it had never been seen or even dreamt of on earth before. From the wit of a woman and the weakness of a man were now to be evolved the elements of destruction that ere long should lay the world in ruins.
Chapter VIII.
The New Terror.
Five years had passed since the Ithuriel had vanished like a cloud from the sky, leaving, so far as the air-ship itself was concerned, no more trace than if she had soared into space beyond the sphere of the earth’s attraction and departed to another planet.
All the rest of the winter of 2030-1, tidings had been sought most anxiously, but in vain, by the kindred and friends of those who had formed her crew during the ill-fated voyage on which she had disappeared into the unknown. The earth had been ransacked east and west, north and south, by the aerial fleet in search of the missing Ithuriel, but without result.
She had been traced to St. Petersburg and Vorobièvŏ, but there, like the phantom craft of the Flying Dutchman, she had melted into thin air so far as any result of the search could show. But when the snows thawed on the mountains of Norway, and the bodies of eight Aerians who had formed her crew on her last fatal voyage were discovered by a couple of foresters in a melting snowdrift on the very spot on which Vladimir Romanoff had been killed with his companions by order of the Supreme Council, a thrill both of horror and excitement ran through the whole civilised world.
That their death was intimately connected with the disappearance of the air-ship was instantly plain to everyone, and the only inference which could be drawn from such a conclusion was that at last some power, silent, mysterious, and intangible, had come