"Not now, if I were you," she counselled, as one might advise a child to let the sweets alone.
"Eh?" he stammered in a daze, aware of his guests for the first time since he had started eating. "Enjoyed your dinners? How thoughtless of me not to have seen to you. But this new man William or Charles, or whatever his name is, is excellent. Much better than the clumsy lout with four thumbs who usually serves me." His hand again wandered for the forbidden flowers, and Marjorie again restrained him. "What do you do that for?" he demanded peevishly. "Why can't I smell my own flowers?"
"Wait till later," she soothed. "We want to talk to you, Mr. Vartan, and I, and Mr. Jamieson."
"Jamieson? Who's he?"
"Chief of the India Secret Police. He has come with us to take you home to your brother Charles."
"That man? He's my butler. I think, Miss – Miss whatever your name is, you've had too much wine. Hadn't you better lie down for half an hour? The maid will show you a room." James lapsed into happy silence, dreaming that he was at home again. Presently he remembered his brother's name. "You mentioned Charles. Damned hypocrite, Charles is. Wants to hound me out of England, because he's going insane, and is afraid I'll have him locked up."
"Tell us," she suggested softly. "We have come to help you. Believe me, I am your friend, and I'm not tipsy."
James' face brightened.
"Capital," he exclaimed rising. "Shall we adjourn to my study? I feel like talking."
Marjorie hung back and whispered to Vartan.
"After that heavy meat the blood will leave his head for – an hour or two, and perhaps make him more rational."
"If he doesn't go to sleep. His mind seems to be completely gone."
"Not so far as you think. His memory is affected, but he is rational enough to keep a grip on the people of this hideous place."
"A mere subconscious trick of his British instincts," Vartan replied. "Did you ever know an Englishman who couldn't make himself boss of any 'native' population? I saw perfect idiots ruling large towns of docile miners in South America. James has the knack."
They had entered a cave rather larger than the dining room and more brilliantly lighted. On a triangular table, evidently of James' own construction, in the exact centre of the room, a microscope, dirty and green with verdigris, occupied the place of honor. Around it, in utter disorder, small piles of what looked like rich black loam, and innumerable dismembered remains of strange flowers, attested James' pathetic attempts to keep his mind alive. Around the walls, several litters of dried leaves served as chairs or lounges. Waving his guests to make themselves comfortable on these, James sat down on the stool at the table, facing them.
"Would you care to see what I have been doing recently?" he asked.
Jamieson – or Arbold – was about to accept, when Marjorie adroitly captured their host's attention.
"Let us lead up to it gradually," she suggested. "You said you have written many letters to your brother?"
"Did I? You mustn't believe everything I say, especially if I say it before dinner. But, go on. I may have written. What of it?"
"Do you remember the package of tiny spores you sent him?"
James reached for the microscope and began toying with it. His perplexed frown seemed to indicate that he dimly recalled the incident, but was not sure of himself, Marjorie followed up her advantage with a brief, clear account of Charles' attempts to locate his brother in India, of the receipt of his only letter from James, of the efforts at Brassey House to propagate the plants grown from James' seeds, and of Charles' grief over his brother's supposed voluntary, living death. As she spoke, James' face gradually lost its frown and his eyes cleared. When she finished, he looked up suddenly, sane for a moment.
"I remember writing to Charles. Are you sure I sent him a package of seeds?"
"They came with your letter."
"Then I must have done it. I have often dreamed that I did, but I can never remember for certain when I wake up. It was a hellish thing to do. I must have been out of my head."
"You deliberately tried to break your brother's heart?" Vartan suggested.
"Not at all, Mr. – I forget your name." He addressed Marjorie. "You say Charles' men never made any of those plants produce seeds?"
"They were all barren. At Brassey House the men used all the precautions they knew or could invent to make the plants fertile. They never risked a specimen in the variable temperature of outdoors, but always raised the plants, from germination to maturity, under glass."
James looked up from the litter of dead flowers which he had been pulling to pieces.
"They grow in here like beastly toadstools," he remarked. "I'll show you after awhile. And as for the valley – that big dish you came through – they grow wild. If these very intelligent people didn't watch their p's and q's, pretty sharply, the whole valley would be swamped, overgrown like a jungle, with the infernal things in one season."
"It must be the light," Vartan observed. "Try to bring up an animal in a greenhouse, without ever letting it outdoors, and it will collapse of rickets."
"Indeed, Mr.–? By the way, what is your name?"
"Vartan. I was just going to say that what you have told us proves that these plants will bear seeds only if they get full sunlight or its equivalent substitute in the radioactive emanations of these caves. Glass, of course, cuts out the ultraviolet rays of the sun. If your brother had grown his seeds outdoors, they might have developed into fruitful plants."
"Thank you, Mr. Vartan. I seem to remember having heard something about ultraviolet lamps for bathrooms just before I left England. Now, Miss Driscott, you said some of the seeds had probably been stolen. Did you ever hear of any of them maturing and bearing seeds?"
Before Marjorie could reply, Jamieson answered for her.
"You must pardon me, Mr. Brassey, for taking the words out of Miss Driscott's mouth. She was only six years at Brassey House, while I was there ten. I think it is no reflection on her to say that I probably know more about the facts than she can. So far as we were able to learn at Scotland Yard, none of those stolen seeds produced plants that seeded. For, if they had, we should certainly have heard of them. Our competitors, you see, would have at once put the new varieties on the market."
James regarded him with amused curiosity. For the first time since they had met him, and perhaps for the first time in years, he burst into a roar of laughter. The laugh seemed to clear his poisoned brain like a gust of clean wind.
"My dear sir," he gasped, subsiding, "do you know what would have happened? Your competitors would have put the new varieties on the market, would they? Ha! Ha! Wait till you see where these beautiful flowers put their competitors – the human race. I'll show you later, if I'm able. Have a pinch of snuff?" he invited, fumbling for his pill box.
"You left it in your other clothes," Marjorie reminded him. "Please," she begged, "tell us about these plants, and how your people cultivate them. It's all very interesting to us you know. Remember, although it may be commonplace to you, it is like a fairy tale to us."
"I'll tell you all about it. Haven't told a fairy story to a lot of kids since that last Christmas at home. Charles and I were both bachelors, you know. But I'm forgetting my story. Let me see. Oh. yes. I've got it. You know what wild parsnips are?"
"Certainly, Vartan interjected. "The only difference between them and decent parsnips, unless you look pretty carefully, is that they are rank poison. We have plenty of them in the Western States."
"We have more than wild parsnips here, Mr. Vartan. Nearly every one of our pretty wild flowers, our fruits and our vegetables come in a dozen different varieties that all look alike till they seed. Some are deadly, others harmless. Others again are good to eat, while their first cousins will worse than kill you. There's one gorgeous larkspur for instance, that would make Charles' mouth water. It comes in about eighteen varieties so much alike that even the natives can't tell them apart till just before the seed capsules break. One kind yie
lds a juice that the women use as a medicine. The people lay great store by it. What the others bear, the devil only knows. Or," he added with a sly chuckle, "only the devil and his instructed pupils.
"You see how it is. The farmers here have to wait till the last moment before the seeds actually ripen until they feel justified in rooting up a plant. And when they do pull one up, they burn it on the spot. Oh, they are civilized. They can make fire without matches. But that's a detail. Occasionally, of course, one plant gets away from them. Then there is the devil to pay. For months at a time, half the population is grubbing on its hands and knees, looking for the first sign of a green spot in the dirt. As I said, one plant gone wild would take the. valley in six months or a year.
The decent kind, like all things worth having in this life, grow slowly and sparingly."
"You speak of a blue larkspur," Marjorie said, when James paused. "Your brother made one blossom, but only indoors. We saw another by the river, when the guards were bringing us here. They wouldn't let us have it. By the way, to show you how much your brother thinks of you, he named the London flower Delphinium Brasseii, hoping it would be fertile, in your honor."
"I hope to God he doesn't plant it where it can bear seeds," James ejaculated.
"He won't," Jamieson assured him. "Charles is too careful of it, as he was of all the others. It has probably died in its tub long before this."
"It was the last, I think you said?" James asked Marjorie.
"The last."
"Then I can die in peace," James sighed. "Up till this moment I have been afraid to die. One can never tell, you know, whether death is a dreamless sleep. That's what bothered Hamlet, wasn't it? If I thought I should have such nightmares all eternity as I've had since I sent Charles that package of seeds, I should commit suicide. No; that wouldn't do. It would be the opposite thing, whatever that is, and there isn't any. I'm glad you came."
"What is the matter with these flowers?" Vartan asked curiously. Was their alleged evil but one of James' fantasies, or was there some fact at its root?
"That," James asserted with an air of great profundity, "is precisely what I am endeavoring to discover, Mr. Vartan. I've been at it now for years and years. Perhaps you will be able to help me. I'll let you have the microscope when I'm not busy. You seem to be a man of intelligence, and you will be here all your life, you know."
Something in James' tone made their blood freeze. He had spoken with a quiet, unarguable conviction of the madman who knows his mind.
"Nonsense, Mr. Brassey," Jamieson spoke up sharply. "If you won't show us an easier path out, we shall find our way up those cliffs. We came down, and I don't see what's to stop us from going up if we have to. Mr. Vartan and I know something about climbing, he especially, and we can take care of Miss Driscott."
"You can't climb up," James asserted with quiet finality, "because the natives won't let you. When I first came here, they resented me. They thought their valley was Heaven, or at least the Garden of Eden. Strangers not welcome. As they don't eat meat – there are no animals except human beings here, I suppose you observed – they have not the sporting instinct. I doubt whether they would have had the courage to kill me if they had wanted to. They had no morals till I taught them."
"Pardon me," Vartan interrupted, "but I don't see the connection. "
"No? It is very simple. "When I saw some of the things in these caves, I regretted having sent Charles that silly present. I did it in anger, in a spirit of revenge, for what the world had done to me. You see, I was not quite right at the time. Thank God, Charles never had brains enough to stumble onto the way of making those plants propagate. When I sent the spores I knew no better myself."
"Still I don't follow," Vartan objected.
"Hold on. I'll tell you the whole story. These people disliked my intrusion for selfish reasons. They wished to keep their Eden to themselves. Ask any of them – you'll learn their language in a year or two, or you can talk to the ones I've taught – and they will tell you that this is the happiest spot on earth. They will doubt that there are millions upon millions of monstrosities like you and me and Miss Driscott on this earth. Even now they don't know where I came from. They have never seen another human being like any of us. My native guides were left a flood thirty miles from the 'gate' by which I entered this Eden. My first visit lasted two weeks. I saw enough to know that the vague rumors of old stories I had heard from holy fakirs in the hills were not all lies, and that I had rediscovered the flowery paradise of their muddy legends. I needn't go into all that. My mind is clear now, and I must hurry on before it goes black again. It took me two years to find this hell after I got the first clear clue. As you may know, several Brasseys have been great explorers. Their blood was in my veins.
"In those two weeks, I say, I learned enough of what these people are, to know that I had last found the one perfect revenge on the Society that had cast me out. Don't interrupt. I left England by an agreement with my brother Charles. But it was he, not I, who should have been banished. To have resisted would have been worse than useless. Charles could have sworn me into the madhouse in a month.
"I was not mad, I tell you, when I left England. I was not mad when I landed in Bombay. I was not mad when I first entered this hell. Nor am I mad every hour that I am in this place. In proof, consider what I am telling you now. I know as well as you do that his evening dress is the ridiculous whim of a madman. Why do I not destroy it while I have my sanity? Because tomorrow, or perhaps in half an hour, I shall be a maniac again. Then it will comfort me, and delude me with dreams of the England, my home, that Charles banished me from to save his own lying, hypocritical face.
"My perfect revenge, I say, was in my hand. I took it. Would I have taken it if I had waited four weeks, instead of two, before returning to my camp, thirty miles away, and handing over the letter to Charles with the seeds, to be delivered for mailing at the first government outpost on the way back to India? I would not. Believe me, I would not. Two weeks after my folly, I repented of it. My sane moments in all these years since – God knows how many, I have long lost count – have been torments to which madness has come as a blessed relief.
"I had taken no chance of discovery. The letter with the seeds would be delivered to a runner at the last outpost of civilization in the mountains, hundred of miles from a postoffice or telegraph. My men knew only a word or two of English. Long before the runner reached the nearest mail station, and handed over my letter with the silver to buy stamps, my men would have dispersed to their tiny villages in the hills. They were not professional caravan men. The chances of their being drafted again for such service were nil. Not one of them knew my objective in the mountains, and not one of them dreamed where I had been, thirty miles away, in the fourteen days of my absence. No ordinary explorer would have attempted the way I took, because, without previous knowledge, he would justifiably have concluded that it was impassable. The river of the legends I had gathered sank into a lava waste, roughly as the traditions described. The landslide of those old stories was still visible on the weathered scarp of an unscalable precipice. But thousands of years of erosion and of the incessant impact of water can break a way through a mountain chain, or, failing that, under it. I found the way, and I knew that only accident, or research beyond the patience and credulity of most explorers, would ever again discover the way I had taken.
"In my letter to Charles, I had fabricated a fiction which I knew would cause him pain. Charles, like all hypocrites, is afflicted with a conscience; I told him that I was about to be voluntarily immured because I had seen the great truth of Nirvana. This, I knew, would torture him into a belief that I finally had gone insane through the persecutions of him and our father, and I hoped that it would spoil his sleep. For Charles always had a sensitive nature.
"What I wrote was a lie. And when I wrote it, I did not dream that before long it was to become the awful truth. I am immured, and so are you, Mr. Vartan, Mr. Jamieson, and Miss Driscott. There is no
escape from this place but death. You also will go insane, as I have, and you also will have your brief interludes of sanity. Then you will remember cities and human faces, clean linen and decent food. I do not know why you have come, or how you found your way to this hell. All that I know, or care to know, is that we shall be here till we die.
"One of you asked a moment ago what bearing morals have on all this. Morals, perhaps is not the right word. As I told you, the people here resented my presence for selfish reasons. They did not want to share their paradise with strangers or deformities like me. I encouraged them in their selfishness, and made it ethical from the higher point of view of a greater selfishness – that of the whole human race, except this selfish handful. I trained them to keep constant watch on the precipices of the valley, lest the seemingly impossible should happen, and other undesirables find their way into this Eden of hell. It was I who induced them to toil like slaves for eighteen months, until their united labor had started an avalanche of stone which toppled over a huge buttress of solid rock to stop up, from the inside, the old river channel by which I myself had entered. Exit or entrance, except by the way you came, down the precipices, is blocked. You will not be allowed to attempt to climb out, and any who are foolish enough to follow the way you took, will be immured as we are.
"I have made these peoples' laws. It was easy; their own selfishness makes them obedient. They respect me because I pander to their selfishness, and they will enforce my laws when I am dead because it is to their own interest to do so. Why did I immure myself? Because, to seal this hell off from the outside world, I had to supervise the simple engineering from the inside. Not one of these selfish people would have ventured outside his paradise to assist me.
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