Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [55]
Just then Graemantle entered the room.
“So you are not asleep?” He said in a tone that meant more than the words.
“Would you like to see her?”
“Eva? Ah, Graemantle, think of it!” Said I. “To see her would be life!”
He smiled. “The old life, perhaps,” he remarked; “not the new. Are you sure the two will agree? However, you shall be gratified.”
“No shadows or make-believes!” I cautioned him. “No kinetoscope or vitascope. Give me the reality or nothing. But you cannot give it.”
“Wait a moment,” he interposed. “Be calm, and realize facts. You, Gerald Bemis, were not the only person vivificated at the end of the nineteenth century.”
For a moment my vanity suffered a blow. The distinction on which I prided myself, for which I had risked so much, was snatched away from me. But there came swiftly a more gracious thought. “I see, I see! You saved Eva Pryor from death also — saved her for me. How good of the society! It was nobly thoughtful and sympathetic!”
“No,” he answered gently. “Purely scientific. Our former committee did not want to risk everything on one specimen.”
“So I was a specimen?” I inquired, almost wishing that I had never entered the glass cylinder.
“Eva Pryor,” he went on, “was in such agony at your disappearance — for, of course, no one but the Society of Futurity knew what had become of you — that we were compelled to give her the secret under strict pledges and on condition that she, too, would be vivificated, with several other specimens, or candidates for futurity.”
“Then she is alive?” I asked, my pulse bounding.
“She is here!” Graemantle declared, in a resonant voice.
Instantly the room was filled with a soft, diffused electric light from unseen sources; and my mentor disappeared as though he had been a shadow. All my senses and my nerves, my heart, my eyes, seemed to thrill and to be filled with the thought of Eva. It was as though I had been with her only an hour before, gazing into her mysterious grey eyes, admiring the soft, rosy, apricot bloom on her cheeks, and wilting into abject despair at the indifference of her disdainfully smiling lips. And, as this picture of her came before me in thought, there she stood — her actual self-in the doorway, gazing at me wistfully!
We rushed together. I don’t know why; for our last conversation, thirty-six hundred months earlier, gave us no excuse for such an action. It was an instinctive rush, I suppose. I loved her, and she seemed to be possessed by a reflex supposition. We embraced, as the surviving members of our once young generation. But, alas! I realized at the critical instant, that for me it meant only this. My old love had gone with the old life and the nineteenth century.
On the other hand, there came upon me, with a tremendous shock, a perception of the fact that Eva, after this long interval, had developed towards me a genuine and ardent affection. Being a woman, she had the right to change her mind; but it had taken her three hundred years of suspended animation to do it; and, unfortunately, I at the same time had changed my mind, just the other way, which a man has no acknowledged right to do.
“Dear, dear Gerald,” she sighed, sobbed, laughed, all in one. “Isn’t it wonderful? We are united at last.”
“Yes, dear friend-dear Eva,” said I. She continued — “And I was so cruel, so heartless towards you.”
“But that is all over now,” I assured her. Then summoning my utmost fortitude, I added, “What does it matter what happened in that old century? We are in a new world. You offered to be a sister to me then. I promise to be a brother to you now — nothing more. So let us dismiss the bygones.”
Strangely enough she did not appreciate either the tragedy of the situation or the comedy of it, or the sarcasm of destiny, or the pathos involved — if for two people so far removed from their former lives, who were feeling uncommonly well and rested