"Why don't we stay here always?"
Marjorie sighed. "Do you really want to lose yourselves in those terrible mountains?"
"They're more beautiful," Shane said simply, "than all this valley with its pink and green and its sleepy blue pools and drowsy streams. This is merely pretty. Those masses behind us are something more. Not a cloud on them, only the shadows of clouds, and every imaginable hue of purple, rose and lavender mingling softly over the sheer blue and ochre of the drags and precipices. Give me the mountains; you may take the valley."
"But I shall have the mountains too," she teased, "if I stay down here while you two are discovering how all those fairy colors recede and fade as you approach them."
"You are coming, though, aren't you?" Vartan questioned seriously.
"Of course. I was only joking."
"It may be a pretty rough trip," Shane reminded her. "You will get cold to the point of freezing one day, crisped through like fried bacon the next and – excuse me for mentioning it – you will become thoroughly dirty in a primitive, unwashable way."
"I shan't," she retorted. "If either of you men ever see me looking worse than I do now I'll pay for a banquet to the whole expedition, porters included, when we get back. We'll dine at the highest priced hotel in India, where they serve ham and eggs on gold platters."
"We're on," Vartan agreed. "If we lose, you feast for a week at our expense."
They were seated on the crumbling moss-grown parapet of an ancient courtyard surrounding the alligator tank or harem-pool of some long departed rajah. A gnarled and venerable pomegranate tree sent its twisted roots burrowing through the dilapidated wall and sprawling agedly toward the water, and an enormous almond, hoary with the lichens of age, dropped its unmelting snow upon the unrippled surface of the water, black as obsidian glass. Here surely was peace absolute and life as it should be lived. Thinking of nothing, and letting their eyes feast, they sat silently revelling in an ecstasy of pure sensation. Gradually, a faint, deep drone echoed down from a distant blue chasm in the mighty range behind the little town, and they woke from their reveries.
"The mail plane," said Marjorie. "There it is, buzzing past the gorge."
"Progress," Vartan commented ironically.
"Yes, damn it," Shane retorted.
The silver thread connecting their lives with the timeless past of the dead was broken. Once more they become modern, alive, anxious, and essentially futile.
"Well," Marjorie sighed, "shall we get to work and do what we came out here for? It is private enough, Heaven knows." She opened her handbag and extracted a small leather roll, not unlike a diminutive music case. "This is the document of which I spoke yesterday evening."
"Mr. Brassey's last will and testament, as it were?" Shane remarked jocularly. Marjorie did not respond in kind.
"It is sadder than a will," she said. "Even the saddest will usually makes some one happier – after a time. This is of a different sort. It is like the farewell of a leper before he is banished to a living death. Will you read it, Mr. Vartan?"
Vartan took the closely written roll wonderingly from her hand. He had not expected a turn like this. Still less had he anticipated Marjorie's revelation, which she had just given, of another, softer, unbusinesslike side to her character. Then, suddenly, the spectacle of the loathsome fakir they had seen in Bombay flashed across his memory. As if she had read his thoughts, Marjorie recalled the incident as he prepared to read.
"I know," she began in a low voice, "you thought me queer the other morning when I asked you to look at that bundle of rags in the gutter."
Vartan nodded; Shane loyally shook his head with vigor, and Marjorie continued.
"Perhaps you recall what I said about that pitiful creature?"
"You remarked," Shane replied at once, "that fanaticism is worse than drink, drugs, or delirium."
"You also, if I remember correctly," Vartan cut in, "followed my lead by refusing to subsidize a fraud by contributing to its support. Why?"
"Because," she murmured, "I was reminded of poor Mr. Brassey. You will see how when you read what is in your hand. He himself wrote it."
"Shall I begin?"
She nodded, and Vartan began reading aloud, in as impersonal a voice as he could master, the moving history of James Brassey, written by his younger brother Charles.
"'To those men, whoever they may be, who may undertake the search in Central Asia for living specimens of Delphinium Brasseii.
"'You who read this will have successfully passed the most exacting tests it is in my power to devise. By every means known to me, I have investigated your integrity, and I find you worthy of the trust I now place in you. It has been part of my plan from the beginning to send with you a personal representative whom I can trust implicitly, in order that his presence might constantly remind you of your obligations to Brassey House.'
"There is a pencil note here on the margin," Vartan broke off, "to the effect that no suitable man being found for the position, Mr. Brassey has relied upon his trusted and tried confidential secretary, Miss Marjorie Driscott."
There was no comment, and Vartan continued with his reading.
"'It is a serious and sometimes humiliating thing to reveal family secrets. Nevertheless it is my duty to disclose at least one of the secrets of the Brassey family and that, I assure you, the darkest, in order that the intrepid men now listening to our tragic history may enter upon their task with open eyes.
"'We are an old family. Our ancestors on both sides are recorded in the Domesday Book, and well-authenticated tradition, substantiated by heirlooms and priceless relics from Saxon times, carries back our origins to the year 410 A.D., when the last Roman garrison was withdrawn from Britain. Our history has been an honorable one. But for our misfortune, or curse, as some might call it, our family might well have ruled England in its early days and have helped to govern the British Empire in its maturity.
"'Our curse has been a taint of madness, inherited from an impure and alien stock, crossed with our own by marriage in the year 1100. Definite records attest this fact beyond any reasonable dispute.
"'It is only recently that the laws of heredity have begun to yield to science. Mendel's great discovery of 1865 lay buried for thirty-five years; the last quarter century has discovered him again and swept far beyond his tremendous advance. But this is not the place to expound what breeders of plants and animals have gleaned from their multitudes of experiments. I allude to this scientific work merely to enhance, in the minds of those familiar with it, the cold reality of the tragedy of our own history, and of our future, which we foresee with mathematical exactness, and which we are powerless to avert. Let me remind you briefly of the science.
"'Few of the laws of human inheritance have been disentangled with the same thoroughness as have those of certain minute flies, whose life span, from birth to death, is about nine days. Therefore it is impossible to say with certainty whether any type of human madness is inheritable from generation to generation according to the Mendelian law.
"'Long before Mendel published his epoch-making discovery in 1865, the painstaking analysts of my unfortunate family had observed a fatal regularity in the occurrence of madness, or at least a 'queerness', in the successive generations of our house. Our records, complete from the year 1100, and tracing thousands of human lives from birth to death, for nearly nine hundred years, will offer to future biologists, when the last of our main line is extinct, a field richer by far than that of ephemeral vinegar flies for the study of heredity, and richer even than the curiously elaborate family trees of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.
"'As early as 1300 our chroniclers made bold to predict that at least one child of certain unions would show the taint inherited from the initial pollution of 1100; by 1500, profiting from previous predictions, the chroniclers were foretelling what marriages or intermarriages among us would produce sane offspring, and what tainted. They paid particular attention to what they called the main trunk,
of which my brother and I are the last offshoots.
"'My brother James was born in 1889; I, in 1894. At the time of my brother's birth, the family records predicted an even chance that he would inherit the taint. The same odds applied of course to myself.
"'On coming of age, my brother was shown the family history. After studying it exhaustively for six months, and verifying its sombre tragedy as best he might from old legal documents and parish records, he announced his decision to remain a bachelor for life. This I learned from my father at my own coming of age in 1915. Dispassionate scrutiny of our records for the past two hundred years only convinced me that the taint inherited from 1100 still resided in our germ cells. I followed my brother's lead and renounced all thought of marriage, although at the time I was engaged to be married. The details of that broken engagement are of no concern here; suffice to say that the injured party married shortly after, and has, as far as I can ascertain, lived happily ever since. As my brother and I were the only children of our parents, we knew that the taint, so far at least as it affected the main trunk of our family, would expire with us.'"
Vartan paused, to rest his eyes on the azure and rose of the mountains.
"Toss me a cigarette, someone. Thanks, Miss Driscott. Do you want to read the rest, Shane? No? All right; I'll go on till one of you feels like relieving me." Before reading the next paragraph he glanced through it. A less cautious man would have betrayed the emotions induced in him by that startingly frank avowal. Vartan showed nothing.
"'Fully warned of what might be in store for us with advancing age – the taint rarely appeared in marked form before the age of twenty-five – James and I kept strict watch on ourselves and on each other. We agreed that should either of us show any symptoms of queerness, that one should immediately leave the country and seclude himself in some place where his friends could never see him.
"'During the first World War both James and I were called to the Foreign Office, as our work at Brassey House had given us an intimate knowledge of certain conditions in the Orient. While there in 19I7 my brother broke. He was then twenty-eight years of age; I, twenty-three. His malady first manifested itself in a peculiarly subtle form. He persisted that I was spying on him and that I was unduly suspicious of all his actions. As a matter of fact it was my poor brother who had become morbidly suspicious of me. I confided the truth to our father, who agreed with me. Although it broke my heart, I seconded my father's sentence of banishment for James. I shall not record the painful scene of our leave taking, nor shall I put down the bitter humor with which James accepted his tragic fate. He sailed from England for Bombay on the eighteenth of April, 1917, vowing that we should never hear of him again until the day of his death. Needless to say he carried with him ample funds for the necessities of decent living. With reasonable thrift he might have retired to some pleasant spot, such as the Vale of Cashmere, and lived a happy, useful life collecting and studying the flowering plants he loved and understood as few men have ever understood them. James was a botanist of the first rank.'"
"This is the place," Marjorie said, when Vartan paused. "But I suppose he was too bitter to rest anywhere."
"Or too energetic," Vartan remarked enigmatically. "Shall I go on?" They nodded.
"'After James' departure, I asked and obtained my generous father's permission to devote my life to biological research. That was in 1918, almost a quarter of a century after the rediscovery of Mendel's immortal papers on heredity in peas. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, I had been attracted to biology, and had come under the stimulating influence of that great but little known teacher, John Mason, who was my private tutor. From a careful study of his minutely patient researches – never published, unfortunately – on the nuclei of plant cells, I dreamed a great dream, and I saw a great vision. To realize that dream and to attain the vision became the passion of my life. But the long, gray hand clutched me.'
"It always does," Vartan observed quietly, looking up. "The dream remains a dream, and the vision is blurred by gross reality. Only young men live; the rest of us become practical and mortify into everlasting respectability."
"You are still young," Marjorie murmured. "And you have your 'sealed orders'. Those are your own dream, are they not?"
"Mine and another man's," he admitted. "The other man preferred respectability. It remains to be seen whether I too am overtaken by it before I reach his age. However, this is by the way. To continue with Mr. Brassey's confession, or revelation, or whatever we care to call it.
"'My dream has been partly realized by others, partly changed into something more deeply hidden than I imagined in the first flush of my hopeful youth, and I have had no part in it. Grave obligations which I could only accept as part of my inheritance, forced my life into channels less pleasant than the even flow of science. To my fellow enthusiasts in London and Cambridge I appeared as merely another somewhat promising young man seduced by man's immortal lust for gold. Those who called themselves my friends reported what was said of me behind my back. Heredity, according to this idle gossip, had conquered me; my brief excursion into the fairy realm of science had been but the futile digression of a man doomed by generations of moneymakers to follow in their plodding footsteps. In the specific taunt the gossips were in error; in their general thesis they were, alas, fatally correct, although they never learned, I trust, the brutal accuracy of their random arrow. A merciless hand had reached out of the past, nine hundred years almost, to pluck up my life and cast it aside to wither when it had barely taken root. To explain my defection I must digress briefly on the history of our great establishment – for it is great, in a humble way.
"'Brassey House was founded in 1776 by my grandfather's father, who was one of the first Europeans to see the unsurpassable floral glories of Sikkim; long before the immortal Hooker described the wonders of that enchanted hothouse of the world, my adventuresome ancestor recorded them in glowing detail. I need not recount the records of his explorations, undertaken on leaves of absence from the East India Company, for they are readily accessible, and are indeed one of the classics of botanical explorations. It suffices here to state that many of the treasures of Kew Gardens were first introduced to English flower lovers by him, and that out of his collections of seeds grew Brassey House, whose seeds are welcomed the world over wherever gardens grow. Not only was a great business founded by those few bags of exotic seeds in 1776, but also a great tradition.
"'That tradition, as the struggling business took root and branched out into a sturdy tree, became synonymous with the honor of our family. To maintain the tradition, no member of the family has felt that any sacrifice of personal ambition was more than might be justly demanded of him. The business, in short, Brassey House, is the family.
"'My abandonment of the career I would have chosen in happier circumstances was therefore inevitable when, in the autumn of 1922, my father first gave evidence of an unbalanced mind. His disorder began just as had my poor brother's, in a mild mania of suspicion. Six months after the first symptoms appeared, the physicians declared his case hopeless, and shortly afterward he died in a private hospital. At the end his affliction took a greviously painful turn, and he died in the delusion that I had betrayed both him and James while I, myself was the one, and the only one, who had inherited the taint. In his distress he even accused me of having poisoned the minds of his own physicians and attendants against him.
"'I set all this down without reservation in order that you men who now hear it may withdraw, if you so wish, before seriously committing yourselves to my project. In the event that you do withdraw, I trust to your honor to read no further, and to hold sacred what you have so far heard.'"
Vartan looked up. His eyes met Shane's.
"Well?"
"You are the leader," Shane replied.
"Technically, yes. But we haven't yet reached the stage where one man's word must be law. What would you do? Read the rest?"
"Yes," Shane snapped.
"You, Miss
Driscott?"
"I don't know what I would do if I were a man. But I do know what I actually did when Mr. Brassey gave me only this much of his confession – if you care to call it that – to read first. I accepted the responsibility and asked for the rest. That is why I am here."
"Would you do the like again, knowing what you now know?"
"Probably. That is, if I still remained a woman."
"The vote then is two to one, or say one and a half to one, as Miss Driscott doesn't seem quite sure of her mind. This is too serious a matter to be settled by half a vote. I'll let you know my decision in the morning."
He rolled up the manuscript and returned it to Marjorie.
"Aren't you afraid," she asked demurely, "that Mr. Shane will find out what's in the rest of this before morning?"
The question, apparently a harmless joke, startled him. He glanced at Shane. The latter was admiring Marjorie's profile. More than ever, he thought, he must use caution before coming to a decision.
"I'm not suspicious," he answered meaningly.
If Marjorie's innocent remark had startled Vartan, his seemed for a second to devastate her. Fortunately Shane had turned his attention to the incredible hues of the sunset blazing on the icy pinnacles of the mountains. She recovered instantly.
"We can be trusted," she laughed gaily. "Hadn't we better hurry back to the hotel? It will be dark before we get there."
"You and Shane go on. I want to watch the last of the sunset. Don't wait dinner for me; I may stroll back the long way."
They seemed happy enough to leave him with the dying sunset and his thoughts.
CHAPTER 5
A DUEL
Vartan could not sleep. He spent the long moonless night roaming through the scented byways of the valley, trying desperately to reach a calm, rational decision regarding his course of action. Should he go on with this expedition after Brassey's unconscious revelations? Would it not be wiser to abandon the project now, and trust to his own wits to get him, somehow, to his secret destination without the aid of Brassey's money? "You are followed," Brassey had prophesied they left the London office, and Vartan now felt the full impact of the prediction. They were being followed, not by the spies whom Brassey seemed to anticipate, but by another, whose cold persistence was less easily shaken off. The thing pursuing them was intangible but real, and it had started its unerring journey centuries before the oldest member of the expedition was born, in the year 1100.
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