Chapter VI

Miss Chrysie's European visit had come to an end, and she and her father had accepted Hardress's invitation to take a trip home in the _Nadine_. Doctor Lamson was also a guest on board, and during the trip many of the details of the great scheme were exhaustively discussed. Each of the three men was going on a special mission. Clifford Vandel had definitely accepted the position of president and general financial and business manager of the International Magnetic Control Syndicate, as the newly-formed company had been provisionally named. He was going to the States to do the necessary financial part of the work, buy up rights and patents which might be necessary to the furtherance of the scheme, and to perfect the organisation of the great combine of which he was president--a combine whose influence was now to extend not only over the United States, but over the whole world.

Doctor Lamson was going to make a personal study of the electrical machinery to be found in the States, so that he might be in a position to design the great storage works to the best advantage and with the greatest possible economy of time and money.

Hardress, armed with introductions from the highest official sources in England, was going northward, after leaving his guests at New York, to Montreal, to obtain a lease of a few square miles of the desolate, ice-covered wilderness of Boothia Felix, which, as a glance at the map will show you, is the most northerly portion of the mainland of the American continent. Further, in its scanty history, you may read that there Sir John Ross discovered the magnetic pole of the earth, and named the wilderness after his friend Sir Felix Booth, who had furnished most of the funds for his expedition.

His ostensible object in obtaining the lease was the foundation of an observatory for the examination of magnetic and electrical phenomena; one of which was the possible solution of the so far unsolved riddle of the Northern Lights. He also stated to the Dominion authorities, by way of giving something like a practical air to his mission, that a remoter possibility of the scheme was the establishment of a magnetic centre for a world-wide system of wireless telegraphy.

The few square miles of ice and snow and rock were absolutely worthless, and so the Dominion Government had not the slightest hesitation in accepting his offer of a thousand a year for ten years for the exclusive use and possession of the peninsula, with right to import materials, construct works, and do whatever might be necessary for the development of the scheme.

If he had not been the heir to an ancient peerage and the son of one of the wealthiest men in England, he would probably have been looked upon as a harmless crank who was wanting to lose his money in a vain attempt to harness the electrical energy displayed in the _Aurora borealis_ and make thunderstorms to order out of it. As it was, he was treated indulgently as a man who had big ideas, and who was conducting at his own expense a great scientific experiment which he could very well afford to pay for.

Thus, after very brief negotiations, consisting of one or two interviews, two or three dinners, and the handing over of a cheque, the Canadian Government in all innocence parted with what was soon to prove the most precious piece of land, not only on the American Continent, but in the whole world.

But this was not the only concession that Shafto Hardress took back to England with him. For when he returned to New York and took a run up to Buffalo on the Empire State Express, with the lease of Boothia Land in his pocket, to talk matters over with President Vandel, he had a brief but momentously interesting interview with Miss Chrysie, at the close of which she said, as her hand rested in his:

"Well, Viscount, I'm not going to say 'Yes' right away. You're a gentleman, and I like you. You're going to be a peer of England some day, and, if this scheme of yours works out all right, one of the masters of the world. As my father's daughter I have no natural objection to being a peeress of England and mistress of the world, but I am also a natural-born woman, and I want a little more than that--I mean something that a man could not give me if he owned the Solar System. I want to know for certain that you love me as a man should love a woman, and that I can love you as a woman should love a man if she is going to marry him. I like you; yes, I like you better than any other man I've ever seen. I tell you quite honestly it hasn't been a case of love at first sight with me, and I guess I haven't known you quite long enough to give you something that I can never take back. Go to your work and do it, and while you're doing it we shall get to know each other better, and meanwhile you may consider that you have the option of another piece of half-discovered territory."

Before releasing her hand he stooped and kissed it, saying, with a laugh that bespoke a certain amount of satisfaction:

"That, you know, is--well, we will call it the seal on the contract. This is my act and deed, you understand--as people say when they conclude a contract with an option. A definition of kissing which I once read describes it as equivalent to syllabus."

"Syllabus!" she said, releasing her hand and raising it to her brow, pushing a fold of hair back by the motion and smiling up at him in a somewhat disconcerted fashion. "And what might that mean in your dictionary of kisses?"

"It was defined as kissing the hand of the girl you want very badly instead of----"

Her red lips smiled an irresistible challenge at him, and the next instant his arm was round her waist, and he said:

"After all, I don't think that contract was properly signed, sealed, and delivered; at least, the seal was in the wrong place, and the delivery was not quite complete."

"Now I call that real mean, Viscount," she said, a moment afterwards. "I only gave you an option on the territory, and you're starting to occupy it right away."

"Well, then," he said, taking her hand again, "suppose, instead of the territory, we call it a reserve. How will that do?"

"Not quite," she said, drawing back a bit. "To some extent I've been taken by assault, but I've not surrendered at discretion yet. That sounds a bit mixed, I know--but it's pretty near the truth."

"And at that," he said, gravely smiling, "I am quite content to leave it." And so, with the magical touch of her lips still thrilling through his blood, he left her, more than ever determined to fulfil to the utmost the tremendous destiny which chance had cast in his way.

To him there could have been no more delightfully satisfactory ending to his mission. In blood he was himself half-American, and in him the old-world aristocrat was strangely blended with the keen, far-seeing, quick-witted, hard-headed, and perhaps, in one sense, hard-hearted man of business. It was to this side of his nature that the physical charms, the keen wit, and sprightly spirit of Miss Chrysie had first appealed; but later on the aristocrat in him had recognised that she too was a patrician of the New World, whose ancestry stretched back into the history of the old, and so gradually interest and admiration had grown into a love which completely satisfied all his instincts.

The very way in which she had received his proposal had increased both his love and his respect. If she had surrendered at discretion there might have remained the possibility of a suspicion that, after all, she had been tempted to take hold of a magnificent opportunity, not only for placing herself in the front rank of European society, but also of wielding through her husband a power such as no woman had ever exercised before. But she had given him frankly to understand that these things were as nothing in her eyes, great and splendid as they were, without that certainty of mutual love which could alone induce her to give herself, body and soul, into the hands of any man, however powerful or nobly born; for Chrysie Vandel was a woman in the best sense of that much-meaning word, and she knew that for her there was no choice, save between the complete independence of thought and action which she had so far enjoyed, and an equally complete surrender to the man to whom she could render, whole-hearted and unreserved, the sweet service of love.

After dinner that night he had an equally satisfactory interview with the president, who, when he had heard his story, just got up from his chair and said:

"Viscount, we'll shake on that. My girl's free to choose where she likes, or not to choose at all, and you are not going to have any help from me in the way of persuasion; but if she does choose, why, I'd sooner she chose you than any other man I know."

"I ask for nothing better, I can assure you," said Hardress. "Thank you a thousand times."

And so they shook.

The next day by noon the _Nadine_ was steaming out past Sandy Hook. Allowing for difference in longitude, it was almost at the same moment that the night mail pulled out of the Petersburg station. Two of the sleeping-compartments were occupied by Prince Xavier de Conde and his daughter; and so, from the ends of the earth, both travelling towards an obscure little watering-place hidden away in the depths of the German forest land, were approaching each other the man and the woman whose destinies had been, all unknown to themselves, so strangely linked together by the last despairing act of the man whose country had refused to permit him to make her the mistress of the world.