Part 2 (1/2)
”Great G.o.d, this is too much,” gasped the Chancellor. ”The man is impregnable. It is too much, your Majesty. I fought through the war of '70 and '71, but I surrender to this; this is not human.”
”I beg your pardon, Excellency,” said Castellan, getting up from the machine, and picking the two swords from the floor, ”it is quite human, only a little science that the majority of humanity does not happen to know. Your swords, gentlemen,” and he presented the hilts to them.
”Bravo!” exclaimed the Kaiser, ”well done! You have beaten the two best soldiers in the German Empire, and you have done it like a gentleman.
But you are not altogether an Irishman, are you, Mr Castellan?”
”No, sir, I am a Spaniard as well. The earliest ancestor that I know commanded the _Santiago_, wrecked on Achill Island, when the Armada came south from the Pentland Firth. The rest of me is Irish. I need hardly say more. That is why I am here now.”
The Kaiser looked at the Chancellor and the Field Marshal, and they looked back at him, and in a moment the situation--the crisis upon which the fate of the world might depend--was decided. It was not a time when men who are men talk. A few moments of silence pa.s.sed; the four men looking at each other with eyes that had the destinies of nations in the brains behind them. Then the Kaiser took three swift strides towards Castellan, held out his hand, and said in a voice which had an unwonted note of respect in it:
”Sir, you have convinced me. Henceforth you are Director of the Naval and Military operations of the German Empire, subject, of course, to the conditions which will be arranged by myself and those who are entrusted with the tactical and strategical developments of such plan of campaign as I may decide to carry out on sea and land. And now, to put it rudely--brutally, if you like, your price?”
Castellan took the Kaiser's hand in a strong, nervous grip, and said:
”I shall not state my price in money, your Majesty. I am not working for money, but you will understand that I cannot convert what I have shown you to-day into the fighting reality. Only a nation can do that. It will cost ten millions of marks, at least, to--well, to so far develop this experiment that no fleet save your Majesty's shall sail the seas, and that no armies save yours shall without your consent march over the battlefields of the world's Armageddon.”
”Make it twenty millions, fifty millions,” laughed the Kaiser, ”and it will be cheap at the price. What do you think, Herr Kantzler and Feldherr?”
”Under the present circ.u.mstances of the other monarchies of Europe, your Majesty,” replied the Chancellor, ”it would be cheap at a hundred millions, especially with reference to a certain fleet, which appears to be making the ocean its own country.”
”Quite so,” said the Field Marshal. ”If what we have seen to-day can be realised it would not be necessary to pump out the North Sea in order to invade England.”
”Or to get back again,” laughed the Kaiser. ”I think that is what your grandfather said, didn't he?”
”Yes, your Majesty. He found eight ways of getting into England, but he hadn't thought of one of getting out again.”
Since the days of the Prophets no man had ever uttered more prophetic words than Friedrich Helmuth von Moltke spoke then, all unconsciously.
But in the days to come they were fulfilled in such fas.h.i.+on that only one man in all the world had ever dreamed of, and that was the man who had beaten John Castellan by a yard in the swimming race for the rescue of that American girl from drowning.
CHAPTER II
NORAH'S GOOD-BYE
The scene had s.h.i.+fted back from the royal city of Potsdam to the little coast town in Connemara. John Castellan was sitting on a corner of his big writing-table swinging his legs to and fro, and looking a little uncomfortable. Leaning against the wall opposite the windows, with her hands folded behind her back, was a girl of about nineteen, an almost perfect incarnation of the Irish girl at her best. Tall, black-haired, black-browed, grey-eyed, perfectly-shaped, and with that indescribable charm of feature which neither the pen nor the camera can do justice to--Norah Castellan was facing him, her eyes gleaming and almost black with anger, and her whole body instinct with intense vitality.
”And so Ireland hasn't troubles enough of her own, John, that you must bring new ones upon her, and what for? To realise a dream that was never anything else but a dream, and to satisfy a revenge that is three hundred years old! If that theory of yours about re-incarnation is true, you may have been a Spaniard once, but remember that you're an Irishman now; and you're no good Irishman if you sell yourself to these foreigners to do a thing like that, and it's your sister that's telling you.”
”And it's your brother, Norah,” he replied, his black brows meeting almost in a straight line across his forehead, ”who tells you that Ireland is going to have her independence; that the shackles of the Saxon shall be shaken off once and for ever, even if all Europe blazes up with war in the doing of it. I have the power and I will use it.
Spaniard or Irishman, what does it matter? I hate England and everything English.”
”Hate England, John!” said the girl. ”Are you quite sure that it isn't an Englishman that you hate?”
”Well, and what if I do? I hate all Englishmen, and I'm the first Irishman who has ever had the power to put his hatred into acts instead of words--and you, an Irish girl, with six generations of Irish blood in your veins, you, to talk to me like this. What are you thinking about, Norah? Is that what you call patriotism?”
”Patriotism!” she echoed, unclasping her hands, and holding her right hand out towards him. ”I'm as Irish as you are, and as Spanish, too, for the matter of that, for the same blood is in the veins of both of us.
You're a scholar and a genius, and all the rest of it, I grant you; but haven't you learned history enough to know that Ireland never was independent, and never could be? What brought the English here first?
Four miserable provinces that called themselves kingdoms, and all fighting against each other, and the king of one of them stole the wife of the king of another of them, and that's how the English came.