Then she turned her attention to the phials, measuring off quantities of their contents with the most scrupulous exactitude, mixing them two and two, and adding this mixture to a third, and so on, in a certain order which was evidently prearranged, as she constantly referred to the slip of parchment and her own calculations as she was mixing them.
By the time she finished this part of her work, she had obtained from the various coloured liquids one perfectly colourless and odourless, of a specific gravity apparently considerably in excess of that of water, although, at the same time, it was extremely mobile and refractive. She held it up to the light, looking at it with her eyelids somewhat screwed up, and with a cruel smile on her pretty lips.
“So far, so good,” she said in a voice little higher than a whisper. “The lives of fifty strong men in that couple of ounces of harmless looking fluid! If anyone could see me just now, I fancy they would take me rather for a witch or a poisoner of the fifteenth century than for a girl of the twenty-first.
“Well, my friend Alan, your mysterious power may kill more quickly, but not more surely than this; and this, too, will take a man out of the world so easily that not even he himself will know that he is going,—not even when he sinks into the sleep from which he will awake on the other side of the shadows.
“So much for the bodies of our enemies, and now for their souls! I don’t want to kill wholesale, at least, not just yet; and as for you, my Alan, you are far too splendid, too glorious a man to be killed, to say nothing of your being so much more useful alive. No, I have a very much pleasanter fate in store for you.”
Just then a little cloud as of incense smoke began to rise from the crucible in which were the mixed powders, and a faint, pleasant perfume began to diffuse itself. She stopped her soliloquy, measured off exactly half of the liquid, and patiently poured it, drop by drop, into the crucible, at the same time gradually increasing the heat.
The vapour gradually disappeared, and the perfume died away. When she had poured in the last drop, she began slowly stirring the mixture with a glass rod. It gradually assumed the consistency of thick syrup, and after stirring it for three minutes by her watch, which lay on the table beside her, she extinguished the electric lamp and waited.
In a few seconds a pale, orange-coloured flame appeared hovering over the crucible. As its ghostly light fell upon her anxious features, she caught sight of herself in a mirror let into the wall on the opposite side of the table. She started back in her chair with an irrepressible shudder. For the first time in her life she saw herself as she really was.
The weird, unearthly light of the flame changed the clear, pale olive of her skin into a sallow red, and cast what looked like a mist of vapour tinged with blood across the dark lustre of her dusky eyes. It seemed as though the light that she had called forth from the darkness had melted the beautiful mask which hid her inner self from the eyes of men, and revealed her naked soul incarnate in the evil shape that should have belonged to it.
Suddenly the flame vanished, she turned on the switch of the lamp, placed a platinum cover over the crucible with a pair of light, curved tongs, and, with a quick half-turn, screwed it hermetically down. Then she turned the heat of the furnace on to the full, rose from her chair, and stretched herself, with her linked hands above her head, till her lithe, girlish form was drawn up to its full height in front of the mirror.
She looked dreamily from under her half-closed lids at the perfect picture presented by the reflection, and then her tightly-closed lips melted into a smile, and she said softly to herself—
“Ah, that is a different sort of picture. I wonder what Alan would have thought if he could have seen that one? I don’t think I should have taken my trip in the air-ship to-morrow if he had done. Well, I have seen myself as I am—what four generations of inherited hate and longing for revenge have made me.
“In the light of that horrible flame I might have sat for the portrait of the lost soul of Lucrezia Borghia. Ah, well, if mine is lost, it shall be lost for something worth the exchange. ‘Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven,’ as old Milton said, and after all—who knows?
“Bah! that is enough of dreaming, when the time for doing is so near. I must get some sleep to-night, or my eyes will have lost some of their brightness by to-morrow.”
So saying, she busied herself putting away her phials, and powders, and apparatus. The half of the colourless liquid she had left she carefully decanted into a tiny flask, over the stopper of which she screwed a silver cap that had a little ring on the top, and this she hung on the chain round her neck. She replaced the slip of parchment in its silken bag, and carefully burnt the paper on which she had made her calculations.
By this time the bottom of the crucible was glowing red hot. She noted the time that had elapsed since she had screwed the cap down, waited five minutes longer, and then extinguished the furnace, undressed, and got into bed, and in half an hour was sleeping as quietly as a little child. She had set the chime of her repeating watch to sound at six, and hung the watch close above her head.
Calm as her sleep was at first, it was by no means dreamless, and her dreams were well fitted to be those of a guilty soul slumbering after a work of death.
She saw herself standing with Alan on the glass-domed deck of the air-ship, beneath the light of a clear, white moon sailing high in the heavens, and a host of brilliant stars glittering out of the deep-blue depths beyond it. Far below them lay an unbroken cloud-sea of dazzling whiteness, which stretched away into the infinite distance on all sides, until it seemed to blend with the moonlight and melt into the sky.
Then the scene changed, and the air-ship swept downwards in a wide, spiral curve, and plunged through the noiseless billows of the shadowy sea. As she did so, a fearful chorus of sounds rose up from the earth below.
The moonlight and starlight were gone, and in their place the lurid glare of burning cities and blazing forests cast a fearful radiance up through the great eddying waves of smoke, and reflected itself on the under surface of the clouds; now the air-ship swept hither and thither with bewildering rapidity, like the incarnation of some fearful spirit of destruction. Alan had vanished, and she was giving orders rapidly, and men were working the long, slender guns in a grim silence that contrasted weirdly with the horrible din that rose from the earth.
She saw neither smoke nor flame from the guns, nor heard any sound as they were discharged, but every time she raised her hand, the motion was followed within a few seconds by a shaking of the atmosphere, a dull roar from the earth, and the outburst of vast, dazzling masses of flame, before which the blaze of the conflagration paled.
She looked down with fierce exultation upon the scene of carnage and destruction; and as she gazed upon it, the fires died away, the roar of the explosions began to sound like echoes in the distance, and when the landscape of her dreamland took definite shape again, the air-ship was hovering over a vast, oval valley, walled in by mighty mountain masses, surmounted by towering peaks, on some of which crests of everlasting snow and ice shone undissolved in the rays of the tropical sun.
The valley itself was of such incomparable and fairy-like beauty, that it seemed to belong rather to the realm of imagination than to the world of reality. A great lake lay in the centre, its emerald shores lined with groves of palms and orange-trees, and fringed with verdant islets spangled with many coloured flowers.
On the northern shore of the lake lay a splendid city of marble palaces, surrounded by shady gardens, and divided from each other by broad, straight streets, smooth as ivory and spotless as snow, and lined with double rows of wide-spreading trees, which cast a pleasant shade along their sides.
In the midst of a vast square, in the centre of the city, rose an immense building of marble of perfect whiteness, surmounted by a great golden dome, which in turn was crowned by the silver shape of a woman with great spreading wings, which blazed and scintillated in the sunlight as though they had been fashioned of sheets of crystal, pure and translucent as diamonds.
All over the valley, villas and palaces of marble were scattered in cool ravines and on shaded, wooded slopes; and as far as her eye could reach, vast expanses of garden land,