Across the Zodiac (20 page)

"Let go!" I cried in that sharp tone of imperious anger which—with
some tempers at least—is the natural expression of the outward
impulse produced by supreme and agonizing terror. Obedience is the
hereditary lesson taught to her sex by the effects of equality in
Mars. Eveena had been personally trained in a principle long discarded
by Terrestrial women; and not half aware what she did, but yielding
instinctively to the habit of compliance with imperative command
spoken in a masculine voice, she opened her hands just as I had lost
all hope. With one desperate effort I swung her fairly on to the
platform, and, seeing her safe there, fell back myself scarcely more
sensible than she was.

The whole of this terrible scene, which it has taken so long to
relate, did not occupy more than a minute in action. I know not
whether my readers can understand the full difficulty and danger of
the situation. I know that no words of mine can convey the impression
graven into my own memory, never to be effaced or weakened while
consciousness remains. The strongest man on Earth could not have done
what I did; could not, lying half over the precipice, have swung a
girl of eighteen right out from underneath him, and to his own level.
But Eveena was of slighter, smaller frame than a healthy French girl
of twelve, while I retained the full strength of a man adapted to the
work of a world where every weight is twice as heavy as on Mars. What
I had practically to do was to lift not seven or eight stone of
European girlhood, not even the six Eveena might possibly have weighed
on Earth, but half that weight. And yet the position was such that all
the strength I had acquired through ten years of constant practice in
the field and in the chase, all the power of a frame in healthful
maturity, and of muscles whose force seemed doubled by the tension of
the nerves, hardly availed. When I recovered my own senses, and had
contrived to restore Eveena's, my unwilling assistant had disappeared.

It was an hour before Eveena seemed in a condition to be removed, and
perhaps I was not very urgent to hurry her away. I had done no more
than any man, the lowest and meanest on Earth, must have done under
the circumstances. I can scarcely enter into the feelings of the
fellow-man who, in my position, could have recognised a choice but
between saving and perishing with the helpless creature entrusted to
his charge. But hereditary disbelief in any power above the physical
forces of Nature, in any law higher than that of man's own making, has
rendered human nature in Mars something utterly different from,
perhaps, hardly intelligible to, the human nature of a planet forty
million miles nearer the Sun. Though brought up in an affectionate
home, Eveena shared the ideas of the world in which she was born; and
so far accepted its standards of opinion and action as natural if not
right, that the risk I had run, the effort I had made to save her,
seemed to her scarcely less extraordinary than it had appeared to the
Zamptâ. She rated its devotion and generosity as highly as he
appreciated its extravagance and folly; and if he counted me a madman,
she was disposed to elevate me into a hero or a demi-god. The tones
and looks of a maiden in such a temper, however perfect her maidenly
reserve, would, I fancy, be very agreeable to men older than I was,
either in constitution or even in experience. I doubt whether any man
under fifty would have been more anxious than myself to cut short our
period of repose, broken as it was, when I refused to listen to her
tearful penitence and self-reproach, by occasional words and looks of
gratitude and admiration. I did, however, remember that it was
expedient to refasten the window, and re-attach the seals, before
departing. At the end of the hour's rest I allowed my charge and
myself, I had recovered more or less completely the nervous force
which had been for a while utterly exhausted, less by the effort than
by the terror that preceded it. I was neither surprised, nor perhaps
as much grieved as I should have been, to find that Eveena could
hardly walk; and felt to the full the value of those novel conditions
which enabled me to carry her the more easily in my arms, though much
oppressed even by so slight an effort in that thin air, to the place
where we had left our carriage—no inconsiderable distance by the path
we had to pursue. Before starting on our return I had, in despite of
her most earnest entreaties, managed to recover her head-dress and
veil, at a risk which, under other circumstances, I might not have
cared to encounter. But had she been seen without it on our return,
the comments of the whole neighbourhood would have been such as might
have disturbed even her father's cool indifference. We reached her
home in safety, and with little notice, having, of course, drawn the
canopy around us as completely as possible. I was pleased to find that
only her younger sister, to whose care I at once committed her, was
there at present, the elders not having yet returned. I took care to
detach from the bird's neck the tablet which had served its purpose so
well. The creature had found his way home within half-an-hour after I
dismissed him, and had frightened Zevle
(Stella)
not a little; though
the message, which a fatal result would have made sufficiently
intelligible to Esmo, utterly escaped her comprehension.

On the return of the family, my host was met at the door with such
accounts of what had happened as led him at once to see and question
his daughter. It was not, therefore, till he had heard her story that
I saw him. More agitated than I should have expected from one under
ordinary circumstances so calm and self-possessed, he entered my room
with a face whose paleness and compressed lips indicated intense
emotion; and, laying his hand on my shoulder, expressed his feeling
rather in look and tone than in his few broken and not very
significant words. After a few moments, however, he recovered his
coolness, and asked me to supply the deficiencies of Eveena's story. I
told him briefly but exactly what had passed from the moment when I
missed her to that of her rescue. He listened without the slightest
symptom of surprise or anger to the tale of the Regent's indifference,
and seemed hardly to understand the disgust and indignation with which
I dwelt upon it. When I had finished—

"You have made," he said, "an enemy, and a dangerous one; but you have
also secured friends against whose support even the anger of a greater
than the Zamptâ might break as harmlessly as waves upon a rock. He
behaved only as any one else would have done; and it is useless to be
angry with men for being what they habitually and universally are.
What you did for Eveena, one of ourselves, perhaps, but no other,
might have risked for a first bride on the first day of her marriage.
Indeed, though I am most thankful to you, I should, perhaps, have
withheld my consent to my daughter's request had I supposed that you
felt so strongly for her."

"I think," I replied with some displeasure, "that I may positively
affirm that I have spoken no word to your daughter which I should not
have spoken in your presence. I am too unfamiliar with your ideas to
know whether your remark has the same force and meaning it would have
borne among my own people; but to me it conveys a grave reproach. When
I accepted the charge of your daughter during this day's excursion, I
thought of her only as every man thinks of a young, pretty, and gentle
girl of whom he has seen and knows scarcely anything. To avail myself
of what has since happened to make a deeper impression on her feelings
than you might approve would have seemed to me unpardonable
treachery."

"You do utterly misunderstand me," he answered. "It may be that Eveena
has received an impression which will not be effaced from her mind. It
may be that this morning, could I have foreseen it, I should have
decidedly wished to avoid anything that would so impress her. But that
feeling, if it exist, has been caused by your acts and not by your
words. That you should do your utmost, at any risk to yourself, to
save her, is consistent with what I know of your habit of mind, and
ought not much to surprise me. But, from your own account of what you
said to the Zamptâ, you were not merely willing to risk life for life.
When you deemed it impossible to return without her, you spoke as few
among us would seriously speak of a favourite bride."

"I spoke and felt," I replied, "as any man trained in the hereditary
thought of my race and rank would have spoken of any woman committed
to his care. All that I said and did for Eveena, I should have said
and done, I hope, for the least attractive or least amiable maiden in
this planet who had been similarly entrusted to my charge. How could
any but the vilest coward return and say to a father, 'You trusted
your daughter to me, and she has perished by my fault or neglect'?"

"Not so," he answered, "Eveena alone was to blame—and much to blame.
She says herself that you had told her to remain where you left her
till your return; and if she had not disobeyed, neither her life nor
yours would have been imperilled."

"One hardly expects a young lady to comply exactly with such
requests," I said. "At any rate, Terrestrial feelings of honour and
even of manhood would have made it easier to leap the precipice than
to face you and the world if, no matter by whose fault, my charge had
died in such a manner under my eyes and within my reach."

Esmo's eyes brightened and his cheek flushed a little as I spoke, with
more of earnestness or passion than any incident, however exciting, is
wont to provoke among his impassive race.

"Of one thing," he said, "you have assured me—that the proposal I was
about to make rather invites honour than confers it. I have been
obliged, in speaking of the manners and ideas of my countrymen, to let
you perceive not only that I differ from them, but that there are
others who think and act as I do. We have for ages formed a society
bound together by our peculiar tenets. That we individually differ in
conduct, and, therefore, probably in ideas, from our countrymen, they
necessarily know; that we form a body apart with laws and tenets of
our own, is at least suspected. But our organisation, its powers, its
methods, its rules of membership, and its doctrines are, and have
always been, a secret, and no man's connection with it is avowed or
provable. Our chief distinctive and essential doctrines you hold as
strongly as we do—the All-perfect Existence, the immortal human soul.
From these necessarily follow conceptions of life and principles of
conduct alien to those that have as necessarily grown up among a race
which repudiates, ignores, and hates our two fundamental premises.
After what has happened, I can promise you immediate and eager
acceptance among those invested with the fullest privileges of our
order. They will all admire your action and applaud your motives,
though, frankly speaking, I doubt whether any of us would carry your
views so far as you have done. The best among us would have flinched,
unless under the influence of the very strongest personal affection,
from the double peril of which you seemed to think so lightly. They
might indeed have defied the Regent but it would have been in reliance
on the protection of, a power superior to his of which you knew
nothing."

"Then," I said, "I suppose your engagement of to-day was a meeting of
this society?"

"Yes," he answered, "a meeting of the Chamber to which I and the elder
members of my household, including my son and his wife, belong."
"But," I said, "if you are more powerful than the rulers of your
people, what need of such careful secrecy?"

"You will understand the reason," he answered, "when you learn the
nature of our powers. Hundreds among millions, we are no match for the
fighting force of our unbelieving countrymen. Our safety lies in the
terror inspired by a tradition, verified by repeated and invariable
experience, that no one who injures one of us but has reason to rue
it, that no mortal enemy of
the Star
has ever escaped signal
punishment, more terrible for the mystery attending it. Were we known,
were our organisation avowed, we might be hunted down and
exterminated, and should certainly suffer frightful havoc, even if in
the end we were able to frighten or overcome our enemies. But if you
are disposed to accept my offer—and enrolment among us gives you at
once your natural place in this planet and your best security against
the enmity you have incurred and will incur here—I should prefer to
make the rest of the explanation that must precede your admission in
presence of my family. The first step, the preliminary instruction in
our creed and our simpler mysteries, which is the work of the
Novitiate, is a solemn epoch in the lives of our children. They are
not trusted with our secret till we can rely on the maturity of their
intelligence and loyalty of their nature. Eveena would in any case
have been received as a novice within some dozen days. It will now be
easy for me, considering her education and intelligence and my own
position in the Order, to obtain, for her as for you, exemption from
the usual probation on proof that you both know all that is usually
taught therein, and admission on the same occasion; and it will add
solemnity and interest to her first initiation, that this chief lesson
of her life should be shared this evening with him to whom she owes it
that she lives to enter the society, to which her ancestors have
belonged since its institution."

We passed into the peristyle, where the ladies were as usual
assembled; but the children had been dismissed, and of the maidens
Eveena only was present. Fatigue and agitation had left her very pale,
and she was resting at full length on the cushions with her head
pillowed on her mother's knee. As we approached, however, they all
rose, the other ladies greeting me eagerly and warmly, Eveena rising
with difficulty and faltering the welcome which the rest had spoken
with enthusiastic earnestness. Forgetting for the moment the prudence
which ignorance of Martial customs had hitherto dictated, I lifted to
my lips the hand that she, following the example of the rest, but
shyly and half reluctantly, laid on my shoulder—a form very different
to the distant greeting I had heretofore received, and marking that I
was no longer to be treated as a stranger to the family. My unusual
salute brought the colour back to her cheeks, but no one else took
notice of it. I observed, however, that on this occasion, instead of
interposing himself between me and the ladies as usual, her father
left vacant the place next to her; and I seated myself at her feet.
She would have exchanged her reclining posture for that of the others,
but her mother gently drew her down to her former position.