CHAPTER FIVE.

THE BEGINNING OF A STRANGE VOYAGE.

"Just so," remarked Sir Reginald. "And here," he continued, "it seems to me that we reach the most important point in the whole adventure.

This convict-ship will, of course, carry a small detachment of troops as a guard over the convicts; do you think that we four are sufficient to capture a ship carrying a crew of, say, thirty or forty men, with probably, a like number of soldiers?"

The professor seemed to be rather taken aback at this question.

"It has not occurred to me that there will be any difficulty in the matter," he answered. "What do our military friends say?"

"Well," responded the colonel, "the task you propose to set us seems to be, at first sight, rather a tall order. Remember, we have thus far had no experience of the capabilities of the _Flying Fish_ as a fighting ship; and, to tell you the truth, I have almost forgotten the details of her armament, and how it is worked."

"I have not," answered Mildmay. "She is fitted with a torpedo port for'ard, for firing what the professor called 'torpedo-sh.e.l.ls'; two 10-inch breech-loading rifled guns, fired through ports in the dining-saloon, and six Maxim guns, fired from the upper deck, to say nothing of small-arms. Such an armament is ample for every occasion which is at all likely to arise; and if the professor will only furnish me with the particulars of which he has spoken, as to the sailing and so on of the ship, I will undertake to find and capture her. But I presume you are all fully aware that such capture will be an act of piracy?"

"Y-e-es," replied Sir Reginald, hesitatingly; "but thus far I have been influenced by the conviction that the end justifies the means. Still, if you, Mildmay, or you, Lethbridge, have any qualms of conscience--"

"'Nary a qualm,' as our cousins, the Yankees, would say," answered Mildmay, cheerfully; "only, remember this, we must take the whole onus and responsibility of the act upon our own shoulders; we must show no colours--unless you feel disposed to sport a 'Jolly Roger' for this occasion only. What I particularly mean is, that we must take care not to betray our nationality, and so involve Great Britain in a difficulty with Russia. So long as that contingency is avoided, I shall be ready to become a pirate of as deep a dye as you please."

"We will take whatever precautions you may deem necessary in that respect," answered Sir Reginald; "in fact, I thought it was quite understood by us all that every such precaution _would_ be taken, or I would have especially mentioned the matter. And now, Professor, as to the disposal of Vasilovich--when we have caught him. Your idea, I believe, is to hand him over to the authorities aboard the convict-ship, in place of Colonel Sziszkinski; but will the authorities accept him, think you?"

"Yes," said the professor, "I believe they will. So long as they are able to account satisfactorily at Sakhalien for the full number of convicts placed in their charge, I do not think they will care whether one of them declares himself to be Count Vasilovich, or not; they will simply a.s.sign to him the number which Colonel Sziszkinski now bears, and that will end the matter. If not, we must maroon the fellow upon some spot from which it will be practically impossible for him to escape, as he is altogether too wicked a man to be permitted the opportunity to perpetrate further wrong."

"Oh, we will find a means of satisfactorily disposing of the fellow, never fear," rejoined Sir Reginald. "And now, our plan of campaign being complete, when do we start? To-night?"

"That is for you to say," answered the professor. "So far as the capture of Vasilovich is concerned, if we arrive within sight of his chateau by nightfall, or in time to berth the _Flying Fish_ in his park with the last of the daylight, we shall be quite early enough. And if the weather happens to remain calm, as it is at present, we can accomplish the run from here to Saint Petersburg in eight hours; while, with a moderately fresh breeze against us, we can do the distance in about nine and a half hours. But we must not forget that Saint Petersburg time is two hours and five minutes fast on Greenwich time, and we must make our dispositions accordingly. Taking everything into consideration, I am of opinion that if we leave here to-morrow morning about seven o'clock, it will be early enough.

"There is, however, one other point to consider: I presume you will desire to attract as little attention as possible; in which event I would suggest that a start from here should be made, say, about two hours before daylight to-morrow morning, which will afford us time to make a long circular sweep in a north-easterly direction, clearing the British Isles before dawn. After that we shall almost certainly meet with weather which will enable us to conceal our movements by remaining all day above the lower cloud level, a mode of procedure which will possess the further recommendation of being advantageous to your daughter's health by keeping her in a dry, pure, bracing atmosphere."

"Such an arrangement would mean that we must all take up our quarters on board to-night," remarked Sir Reginald. "How would that suit your convenience, dear?" he inquired of Lady Olivia.

"Quite well," answered her ladyship. "Everything that Ida or I shall require is already on board, and, so far as we are concerned, it makes no difference whether we go on board immediately, or some time to-morrow. Only, if you should decide to accept Professor von Schalckenberg's suggestion, I should like to know soon, as it is nearly Ida's bedtime; and if we are to start early to-morrow morning, I will send her and Nurse on board at once."

And so it was presently arranged, the whole party making their way to the ship together, and there and then taking possession of their quarters.

It wanted a few minutes of four o'clock the next morning, when Professor von Schalckenberg rose from his couch and, wrapping himself in a gorgeous dressing-gown, made his way quietly to one of the luxurious bathrooms with which the _Flying Fish_ was fitted, where he took his matutinal cold tub, returning, a quarter of an hour later, to his cabin, fresh and vigorous, to find that, according to orders, George, the chief steward, had already brought a cup of coffee for his delectation while dressing. And punctually at a quarter to five the professor might have been seen making his way, on slippered feet, into the pilot-house.

Arrived there, he turned on an electric light of moderate power and, with the a.s.sistance of the illumination thus furnished, peered about him as he satisfied himself that everything was in perfect order. Then he laid his hand upon the crank of a large wheel within reach, and gave the wheel three or four turns, directing his gaze, meanwhile, upon two large dials which were attached, side by side, to the wall of the pilot-house.

Each of these dials was provided with an index hand, both of which began to move almost simultaneously with the first movement of the large wheel by the professor. One of the dials was simply a very sensitive and accurate pressure gauge; the other was an instrument for registering the weight of the ship, or the pressure with which she bore upon the ground. The index hands of both dials were travelling backwards towards zero along their respective graduated arcs; and simultaneously with the registration by the pressure gauge of a pressure of six pounds--which indicated the air-pressure in the air-chambers of the ship--the other dial registered zero, thus indicating that the partial exhaustion of the air in the air-chambers had rendered the ship so buoyant that she was now deprived of weight and was upon the point of floating upward, balloon-like, in the air. Another moment, and the incredible was happening; the ship had become converted into a gigantic metallic balloon, and the professor, extinguishing the electric light which illuminated the interior of the pilot-house, peered out through one of the circular ports in the walls of the structure, to see by the starlight that the _Flying Fish_ had already left the earth, and, in the still air, was rising in a perfectly horizontal position past the tops of the trees in the park.

"Good!" muttered the lonely scientist to himself. "Everything works just as sweetly as it did that night, six years ago, when we backed out of the building-shed on the banks of the Thames, and started upon our first memorable journey!"

He reversed the great wheel controlling the valve which admitted the vapour that drove the air out of the air-chambers of the great ship, thus creating a vacuum there by the subsequent and almost instant condensation of the vapour, and, softly made his way out on deck where, walking to the rail, he looked forth upon the landscape that was dimly widening out beneath him as the _Flying Fish_ continued to float gently upward.

It was a beautifully fine, clear, starlit night, without the faintest suspicion of a cloud anywhere in the soft, velvety blue-black dome of the sky; and presently, when the professor's eyes had grown accustomed to the dim, mysterious radiance of the twinkling constellations, he was able to see the landscape steadily unfolding around him like a map, in a rapidly widening circle, as the great ship steadily attained an ever-increasing alt.i.tude in the breathless atmosphere. For some ten minutes the scientist remained thoughtfully leaning upon the rail, watching the n.o.ble expanse of park beneath him dwindle into a mere dark, insignificant blot upon the face of the country, dotted here and there with feebly twinkling lights, until the sleeping waters of the Channel came into view to the southward. Then he returned to the pilot-house, turned on the electric light once more, and glanced at the barometer.

It registered a height of nearly six thousand feet above the sea-level.

This seemed to satisfy the professor; for he opened a valve which admitted air into the hull, leaving it open until the mercury ceased to fall in the tube. Then he drew from his pocket a paper which he had obtained from Mildmay a few hours before, carefully studied for a few moments the instructions written thereon, and, refolding the paper, began to manipulate certain of the levers and valves by which he was surrounded. As he did so a gentle, scarcely perceptible thrill stirred the gigantic structure which bore him--a humming sound, low at first, but rapidly increasing in intensity, arose and came floating in through the pilot-house windows--all of which the professor thereupon closed-- and, seizing the tiller, the lone watcher thrust it gently over, fixing his gaze meanwhile upon the illuminated compa.s.s card of the binnacle.

Presently a certain point on the compa.s.s card floated round opposite the "lubber's mark," whereupon the professor pulled toward him a small lever upon which he had laid his hand, and two slender steel arms forthwith slid in through a slit in the side of the compa.s.s bowl, one on each side of a slender needle that projected up through the edge of the compa.s.s card. This ingenious piece of mechanism at once caused the ship to become self-steering. Then the professor gave three or four turns to a wheel which controlled the valve admitting vapour to the engine, throwing the valve wide open, whereupon the humming sound suddenly rose to a loud and rather high, but pleasing, note as the huge propeller whirled round at its full speed of one thousand revolutions per minute.

At the same moment the professor noted the exact time by a clock that formed a portion of the complicated furniture of the pilot-house, and then, seating himself in a comfortable deck chair, he proceeded to make certain calculations upon a leaf of a notebook which he drew from his pocket. At the expiration of a period of twenty minutes the professor threw the self-steering apparatus out of gear for a moment, altered the course a trifle to the eastward, threw the self-steering apparatus into gear again, and waited another twenty minutes, when the same process was repeated a second time, and so on, a slight alteration of the ship's course being effected at intervals of twenty minutes. The professor was causing the ship to make the long, circular sweep of which he had spoken to Sir Reginald a few hours earlier.

At length, as the lonely scientist sat there in the pilot-house, plunged in deep thought, and mechanically performing the simple operations necessary to enable him to alter the course of the ship from time to time, the mirror-like discs of the scuttles in the walls of the pilot-house gradually underwent a subtle change of colour--from deepest black, through an infinite variety of shades of grey, to a pure, rich blue which, in its turn, merged into a delicate primrose hue, while the incandescent lamp in the dome-like roof of the structure as gradually lost its radiance until it became a mere white-hot thread in the growing flood of cold morning light. Meanwhile the moment arrived for a further alteration in the course of the ship; and as the professor rose to his feet to effect it he realised that not only had the day broken, but also the sun was about to rise, for long, spoke-like shafts of clear white light were radiating upward into the blue from a point broad on the starboard bow.

As he realised this, he reached forward, turned a b.u.t.ton, and the glowing film of the electric lamp overhead dulled into blackness and disappeared.

Then, stepping to one of the scuttles, the professor looked out through the thick disc of plate-gla.s.s, and beheld a sight of beauty that is given only to the adventurous few to look upon--a sea of dense, opaque, fleecy cloud, white as the driven snow in the high lights, with its irregular surface, some sixteen hundred feet below, broken up into a thousand tender, delicate, pearly shadows that came and went, and momentarily changed their tints as the _Flying Fish_ swept over them at a speed of one hundred and twenty miles an hour.

"Ha, ha!" exclaimed the professor, as he gazed forth upon the wondrous sight. "Good! I expected as much. Now we are safe from observation so long as this cloud-bank intervenes between us and the earth; when it pa.s.ses away we must--But what am I thinking about? The sun is about to rise. I must call her ladyship, and my little friend Feodorovna--it will be far too splendid a sight for them to lose!"

So saying the worthy man turned and hurried down the staircase toward what may be termed the main, or princ.i.p.al, deck of the ship. As he descended he became aware of the sound of gay voices, male and female; and when he reached the vestibule he found one of the doors of the dining-saloon wide open. It was from this apartment that the voices proceeded, and, entering, he found the entire party--with the exception of little Ida and her nurse--seated at the table, warmly attired, and partaking of coffee.

"Hillo, Professor, good morning!" shouted Sir Reginald, as his eyes fell upon the newcomer. "You are just in the nick of time. George, a cup of coffee for Herr von Schalckenberg! So you have made a start, Professor; but you must have done it very gently, for none of us was awakened by the movement of the ship. Where are we now?"

"If it is as calm now as it was when we started, we ought to be over the mouth of the Humber, and just leaving the sh.o.r.es of England behind us,"

answered the professor. "But I cannot tell for certain," he continued, "because, as you may have noticed, there is a dense sea of cloud below us, through which we can see nothing. My object in leaving the pilot-house was to call Lady Elphinstone and my young friend, Feodorovna, to come up and see the sun rise over the clouds. But you must come up at once, or you will be too late."

"Where are we to go, Professor--out on the deck?" asked Lady Elphinstone.

"Certainly not, dear lady," answered the professor, earnestly. "You must witness the phenomenon through the closed windows of the pilot-house. If you were to go out on deck, you would be swept away in a moment by the hurricane force of the wind created by the ship as she rushes through the atmosphere. And if perchance you were fortunate enough to escape being blown overboard, you would be made seriously ill by the sudden change, from the dense air which you are now breathing, to the highly rarefied air outside. For this same reason it is also necessary that, while the ship is in flight, all ports and doors communicating with the exterior atmosphere should be kept tightly closed. But come, the sun is rising," he said, as a flash of golden light darted in through the scuttles; "you must not miss this sight."

With one accord the whole party rose and followed the professor, as he eagerly led the way up the double flight of steps into the upper storey of the pilot-house; and in another moment the two ladies were advantageously placed at two contiguous scuttles whence they could obtain the best possible view of the phenomenon, while the men grouped themselves elsewhere.

It was a magnificent spectacle upon which the party looked out. Beneath them, and as far as the eye could reach on every hand, stretched the vast, unbroken sea of cloud, heaped together in gigantic ma.s.ses of the most extraordinary shapes, as though some giant hand had strewn a boundless plain with great, carelessly heaped piles of light, soft, fleecy, snow-white cotton wool, over the eastern edge of which the sun was just rising into view, while his brilliant, lance-like beams darted and played over and through the piles of vapour in a glory of prismatic colour that beggared description. The beauty and glory of the scene consisted indeed solely in the shimmering and shifting play of every conceivable shade and tone of richest and purest and most brilliant colour; and its most charming effect lasted only a brief minute or two, when the colours gradually became lost in an all-pervading white of dazzling purity.

"It was lovely, Professor; the most beautiful sight I have ever beheld,"

exclaimed Lady Elphinstone, as she presently turned away from the ice-cold gla.s.s of the scuttle. "What did you think of it, dear?" to Feodorovna.

"I can only say, with you, dear Lady Elphinstone, that it was the most beautiful sight I have ever beheld," answered Feodorovna. "It was as wonderful, too, as it was beautiful, but an even greater wonder, to me, is the undoubted fact that this huge--ship, I suppose I must call it--is actually floating in the air at a greater alt.i.tude than the clouds themselves. Although I know it to be the case, from the evidence of my own senses, my imagination is scarcely powerful enough to realise the circ.u.mstance as a sober fact. And I am lost in wonder, too, at the magnificence of everything around me. The ship is literally a palace; and everything is so solid and substantial that, although I know myself to be hundreds--perhaps thousands--of feet above the earth, I have not a particle of fear!"

"Fear?" exclaimed the professor, with a laugh. "You would not be Colonel Sziszkinski's daughter if you were afraid. But in very truth there is nothing to be afraid of, here; this ship is as safe as any ship that ever rode the sea; and for precisely the same reason. In the case of an ocean ship, she will float upon the sea so long as the water is excluded from her hull; and, in the same way, _this_ ship will float in the air so long as the air is excluded from her vacuum chambers. The same natural law applies in both cases."

CHAPTER SIX.

THE CHATEAU VASILOVICH.

"How long do you think we have been flying over this sea of cloud, Professor?" demanded Mildmay, as the party turned to leave the pilot-house.

"I am ashamed to say that I cannot reply to that question," answered the professor. "The fact is," he continued, "that I have been so busily thinking about our adventure of to-night, and endeavouring to arrange for every possible contingency, that I failed to notice when we first encountered the cloud. Why do you ask?"

"Well, I heard you tell Sir Reginald, when you came down into the dining-saloon a little while ago, that, according to your reckoning, we ought to be somewhere off the mouth of the Humber. Now, don't you think it would be a good plan for us to dip below this cloud-bank for a minute or two, just to verify our position?"

"Certainly; we will do so, if you wish," answered the professor, with the utmost readiness. And therewith he manipulated a lever and a valve, and turned to the ladies, who were now in the act of descending the pilot-house staircase.

"If you care to wait a minute or two, ladies," said he, "you will have an opportunity to go out on deck and take a look round, while the Captain, here, is making his observations. I have stopped the engines, so that there will be no danger of your being blown overboard; and we are now sinking rapidly, so that presently we shall be low enough to enable you to breathe without difficulty."

Even as von Schalckenberg spoke it became evident that the _Flying Fish_ was descending, for she now plunged suddenly into the very heart of the sea of cloud, where she was in a moment enveloped in a dense mist through which nothing could be seen, not even the two ends of the promenade deck. For nearly a minute the airship remained wrapped in the fleecy whiteness of the cloud stratum, then she emerged as suddenly as she had plunged into it. At the same moment the professor manipulated another valve, intently watching the barometer-tube meanwhile; and presently it became apparent that the descending movement had ceased, and that the _Flying Fish_ was hanging suspended in mid-air, about a thousand feet below the vast cloud-veil that now obscured the heavens.

"Now," he remarked, as he joined the party, who were standing at the foot of the pilot-house staircase, "we may venture outside; we are only three thousand feet above the sea-level, and the ship is almost motionless. Permit me."

So saying, the professor threw open the door giving egress to the deck, and the whole party pa.s.sed outside into the raw, nipping morning air.