The Secret Power

"Come! Come!"

He hurried to her side, Gaspard following. The pool on which her eyes were fixed was shallow enough to show the pebbly bed beneath the water--and there lay apparently two corpses--one of a man, the other of a woman whose body was half flung across that of the man.

Morgana pointed to them.

"They must be brought up here!" she said, insistently--"You must lift them! We have emergency ropes and pulleys--it is easily done! Why do you hesitate?"

"Because you demand the impossible!" said Rivardi--"You send us to death to rescue the already dead!"

She turned upon him with wrath in her eyes.

"You refuse to obey me?"

What a face confronted him! White as marble, and as terrible in expression as that of a Medusa, it had a paralysing effect on his nerves, and he shrank and trembled at her glance.

"You refuse to obey me?" she repeated--"Then--if you do--I destroy this air-ship and ourselves in less than two minutes! Choose! Obey, and live!--disobey and die!"

He staggered back from her in terror at her looks, which gave her a supernatural beauty and authority. The "fey" woman was "fey" indeed!--and the powers with which superstition endows the fairy folk seemed now to invest her with irresistible influence.

"Choose!" she reiterated.

Without another word he turned to Gaspard, who in equal silence got out the ropes and pulleys of which she had spoken. The air-ship stopped dead--suspended immovably over the wild waters and almost hidden in spray; and though the strange vibration of its multitudinous discs continued in itself it was fixed as a rock. A smile sweet as sunshine after storm changed and softened Morgana's features as she saw Rivardi swing over the vessel's side to the pool below, while Gaspard unwound the gear by which he would be able to lift and support the drowned creatures he was bidden to bring.

"That's a true noble!" she exclaimed--"I knew your courage would not fail! Believe me, no harm shall come to you!"

Inspirited by her words, he flung himself down--and raising the body of the woman first, was entangled by the wet thick strands of her long dark hair which, like sea-weed, caught about his feet and hands and impeded his movements. He had time just to see a face white as marble under the hair,--then he had enough to do to fasten ropes round the body and push it upward while Gaspard pulled--both men doubting whether the weight of it would not alter the balance of the air-ship despite its extraordinary fixity of position. Morgana, bending over from the vessel, watched every action,--she showed neither alarm nor impatience nor anxiety--and when Gaspard said suddenly-"It is easier than I thought it would be!" she merely smiled as if she knew. Another few moments and the drowned woman's body was hauled into the cabin of the ship, where Morgana knelt down beside it. Parting the heavy masses of dark hair that enshrouded it she looked--and saw what she had expected to see--the face of Manella Soriso. But it was the death-mask of a face--strangely beautiful--but awful in its white rigidity. Morgana bent over it anxiously, but only for a moment, drawing a small phial from her bosom she forced a few drops of the liquid it contained between the set lips, and with a tiny syringe injected the same at the pulseless wrist and throat. While she busied herself with these restorative measures, the second body,--that of the man,--was landed almost at her feet--and she found herself gazing in a sort of blank stupefaction at what seemed to be the graven image of Roger Seaton. No effigy of stone ever looked colder, harder, greyer than this inert figure of man,--uninjured apparently, for there were no visible marks of wounds or bruises upon his features, which appeared frozen into stiff rigidity, but a man as surely dead as death could make him! Morgana heard, as in a far-off dream, the Marchese Rivardi speaking-"I have done your bidding because it was you who bade,"--he said, his voice shaking with the tremor and excitement of his daring effort--"And it was not so very difficult. But it is a vain rescue! They are past recall."