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Peter Brent sat nervously smoking in the library of his great house, Brent Rock.
He was a man of about forty-five or -six—a typical, shrewd business man. Something, however, was evidently on his mind, for, though he tried to conceal it, he lacked the self-assurance that was habitually his before the world.
A scowl clouded his face as the door of the library was flung open and he heard voices in the hall. A tall, spare, long-haired man forced his way in, crushing his soft black hat in his hands.
"I will see Mr. Brent," insisted the new-comer, as he pushed past the butler. "Mr. Brent!" he cried, advancing with a wild light in his eyes. "I'm tired of excuses. I want justice regarding that water-motor of mine." He paused, then added, shaking his finger threateningly, "Put it on the market—or I will call in the Department of Justice!"
Brent scowled again. For years he had been amassing a fortune by a process that was scarcely within the law.
For, when inventions threaten to render useless already existing patents, necessitating the scrapping of millions of dollars' worth of machinery, vested interests must be protected.
Thus, Brent and his partner, Herbert Balcom, had evolved a simple method of protecting corporations against troublesome inventors and inventions. They had formed their own corporation, International Patents, Incorporated.
Their method was effective—though desperate. It was to suppress the inventor and his labor. They bought the sole rights from the inventor, promising him glittering royalties. The joker was that the invention was suppressed. None were ever manufactured. Hence there were no royalties and the corporations went on undisturbed while Brent and Balcom collected huge retainers for the protection they afforded them.
Thus Brent Rock had come to be hated by scores of inventors defrauded in this unequal conflict with big business.
The inventor looked about at the library, richly paneled in oak and luxuriously furnished. Through a pair of folding-doors he could see the dining-room and a conservatory beyond. All this had been paid for by himself and such as he.
"Sit down, sir," nodded Brent, suavely.
The man continued to stand, growing more and more excited. Had he been a keener observer he would have seen that under Brent's suavity there was a scarcely hidden nervousness.
Finally Brent leaned over and spoke in a whisper, looking about as though the very walls might have ears.
"My dear fellow," he confided, "for some time I have been considering your water-motor. I will return the model to you—release the patent to the world."
He drew back to watch the effect on the aged inventor. Could it be that Brent was lying? Or was it fear? Could it be that at last his seared conscience was troubling him?
At that exact moment, up-stairs, in a private laboratory in the house, sat a young man at a desk—a handsome, strong-faced, clean-cut chap. All about him were the scientific instruments which he used to test inventions offered to Brent.
A look of intent eagerness passed over his face. For Quentin Locke was not testing any of Brent's patents just now. Over his head he had the receivers of a dictagraph.
It was a strange act for one so recently employed as manager of Brent's private laboratory. Yet such a man must have had his reasons.
One who was interested might have followed the wire from the dictagraph-box in the top drawer of the desk down the leg of the desk, through the very walls to the huge chandelier in the library below, where, in the ornamented brass-work, reposed a small black disk about the size of a watch. It was the receiving-end of the dictagraph.
Suddenly the young man's face broke out into a smile and without thinking he stopped writing what the little mechanical eavesdropper was conveying him from below. He listened intently as he heard a silvery laugh over the wire.
"Oh, I didn't know you were busy. I thought these flowers—Well, never mind. I'll leave them, anyway."
It was Eva Brent, daughter of the head of the firm, who had danced in from the conservatory like a June zephyr in December.
"My dear," Locke could hear the patent magnate welcome, "it is all right. Stay a moment and talk to this gentleman while I go down to the museum."
Locke listened eagerly, glancing now and then at a photograph of Eva Brent on his own desk, while she chatted gaily with the inventor. It was evident that Eva had not the faintest idea of the hard nature of the business of her father.
Meanwhile, Brent himself had left the library and passed through the portièred door into the hall. He did not turn up the grand staircase in the center of the wide hall, but hurried, preoccupied, to a door under the stairs that opened down to the cellar.
He started to open it to pass down. As he did so he did not hear a light footstep on the stairs as his secretary, Zita Dane, came down. But he did not escape her watchful eye.
"Mr. Brent," she called, "is there anything I can do?"
Brent paused. "Wait a moment for me in the library," he directed, as he turned again to enter the cellar.
He closed the door and Zita watched him with an almost uncanny interest, then turned to the library to join Eva and the new-comer.
Down the cellar steps Brent made his way, and across the cellar floor, pausing at the rocky wall of the foundation of the house blasted and hewn out of the cliff on which it towered above the river. A heavy steel door in the rock wall barred the way.
Brent whirled the combination and shot the bolts, and the door swung ponderously open, disclosing a rock-hewn cavern. Three walls of the cavern were lined with shelves containing inventions of all kinds—telegraph and telephone instruments, engine models, railroad-signaling and safety devices, racks of bottles containing dangerous chemicals and their antidotes—all conceivable manner of mechanical and scientific paraphernalia. It was literally a Graveyard of Genius—harboring the ghosts of a thousand inventors' dead hopes.
Brent entered hastily and went directly to a shelf. There he picked up a model of a motor. He blew the dust from it and examined it approvingly.
Suddenly he saw something that caused him to start. He looked down at his feet. There was a piece of paper on the floor.
He picked it up and read it, and as he did so he started back, frightened—then angry. He looked about at the rock-hewn cavern walls—then read again:
Brent—This is my last warning. If you persist in your course you will be struck down by the Madagascar madness.
Q.
Under his breath, Brent swore. Again he looked about the cavern, then turned hurriedly, picked up the motor, passed out the steel door, clanged it shut, and locked it.
No sooner had Brent shut the door, however, than it seemed as if the very face of the outer rocky wall of the cavern began to move—to tilt, as if on hinges.
If a human eye had been in the Graveyard of Genius at that instant it would have sworn that it perceived in the inky blackness of the tilting rock a passage, and in the shadows of that passage a huge, weird, grotesque figure peering in.
Then the tilting rock door closed again, as the figure disappeared down the rocky passage on the opposite side—a menace and a threat to the owner of Brent Rock, insecure even in his millions.
When Brent arrived back at the library he had quite recovered his poise, at least to the eyes of those in the library. Zita had joined Eva with the old inventor, Davis.
As Brent entered, Davis uttered an exclamation of joy at the sight of his motor. For the moment Brent almost glowed.
"Along with your invention," he beamed, as he handed the model to the old man, "I am going to release many others to the world."
All this not only Locke was noting, but Zita, too, appeared to be an almost too interested listener.
The others were chatting when Zita heard a noise in the hall and hurried out. She was just in time to see a rather hard-visaged man, with cruel, penetrating eyes. It was Herbert Balcom, vice-president of the company.
Zita whispered to him a moment and Balcom's hard face grew harder.
"Go up-stairs—watch him," he ordered, passing down the hall.
Balcom entered the library just as Davis was about to leave, hugging close to him his brain child. Davis clutched it a bit closer at sight of the other partner.
A glance would have been sufficient to show that Brent was secretly afraid of his partner, Balcom, and that Balcom dominated him.
"Go to the gate with him, my dear," whispered Brent to his daughter, who was clinging to his arm, convinced of the goodness of her father, ignorant of the very basis on which the Brent and Balcom fortune rested.
Balcom's mouth tightened as he came closer to Brent, menacing, the moment they were alone.
"How long has this double crossing been going on?" sneered Balcom, jerking his head toward the door through which Eva had just gone with the inventor, and shoving his face close to Brent's.
"It's not double crossing, Balcom," Brent attempted to conciliate, "but—"
"No 'buts,'" interrupted Balcom, with deadly coldness. "Keep on, and you'll have the government down on us for violating the anti-trust law. What's the matter? Have you lost your nerve?"
As Balcom almost hissed the question, up in the laboratory Locke was now writing furiously in his note-book, when he was interrupted by a knock at the door. He whipped the dictagraph receiver off his head and jumped to his feet, hiding all traces of the dictagraph in the desk drawer. Then he moved over to the door, unlocked it, and flung it open.
"Oh, I hope I haven't interrupted you in any important experiment," apologized Zita, innocently enough.
"Nothing important," camouflaged Locke.
Though Locke did not seem to notice it, another would have seen that Zita cared a great deal for him.
"May I come in?" she asked, wheedling.
"Certainly. I am charmed, I assure you."
While Zita was gushingly effusive, Locke was correct and formally polite as he bowed his acquiescence. Zita felt it.
For a moment she stood looking at a half-finished experiment on the laboratory table, then finally she turned to Locke with a calculated impulsiveness.
"Why do you treat me so coldly," she asked, "when you know I admire your wonderful work?"
"Really, Miss Dane," he apologized, "I didn't mean to be rude."
Yet there was an air of constraint in his very tone.
"Do you know," she flashed, "I can't help feeling that you are so brilliant—you must be something more than you seem."
Locke suppressed a quick look of surprise. Was she trying to worm some secret from him? He masked his face cleverly.
"Indeed, you must be imagining things," he replied, quietly, turning and strolling toward the window of his laboratory.
The moment his back was turned Zita picked up the photograph of Eva on the desk. For a moment she stood glaring at it jealously.
Out of the window Locke smiled. For, down on the gravel path, walking slowly toward the gate to the Brent Rock grounds, he could see Eva and Davis.
The smile faded into a scowl. He had seen a young man enter the gate. It was Paul Balcom, son of Herbert Balcom, and Paul was engaged to Eva—thus giving Balcom a stronger hold over Brent.
Locke knew enough about Paul to dislike him thoroughly and to distrust him. Had Locke been able to see over the hedge he would have confirmed his suspicions. For Paul had actually driven up to Brent Rock in the runabout of as notorious a woman as could have been found in the night life of the city—one known as De Luxe Dora in the unsavory half-world in which both were leaders. Had his dictagraph been extended to the hedge he would have heard her voice rasp at Paul:
"Your father may make you pay attention to this girl, Paul, but remember—you had not better double cross me."
Paul's protestations of underworld fidelity, would have added to Locke's fury.
However, Locke had not seen or heard. Still, it was unbearable that this fellow Paul should be engaged to a girl like Eva. Tall, dark, handsome though he was, Locke knew him to be a man not to be trusted.
Paul hurried up to Eva, not a bit disconcerted at the near discovery of his intimacy with Dora. And, whatever one may believe about woman's intuition, there must have been something in it, for even at a distance one could see that Eva mistrusted Paul Balcom, her fiancé. Locke scowled blackly.
Paul thrust himself almost rudely between Davis and Eva. Again Davis shrank, as he had from the young man's father, then bowed, excused himself, and hurried off, hugging his motor to him, while Paul took Eva's hand, which she was not any too willing to give him. Locke watched, motionless, as the couple turned back to the house.
Somehow Eva must have felt his gaze. She turned and looked upward at the laboratory window. As she saw Locke her face broke into a smile and she waved her hand gaily. Paul saw it and a swift flush of anger crossed his face. He pulled Eva abruptly by the arm.
"Let's go into the house," he said, almost angrily.
Seeing the action, Locke also turned from the window to encounter Zita, still watching. Without a word he left the laboratory.
While this little quadrangle of conflicting emotions of Locke, Eva, Paul, and Zita was being enacted the two partners in the library were disputing hot and heavy. As they argued, almost it seemed as if Balcom's very face limned his thoughts—that he desired Brent out of the way, as a weakling in whom he had discovered some traces of conscience which, to Balcom, meant weakness.
Balcom leaned forward excitedly. "I do not intend to let you wreck this company because your conscience, as you call it, has begun to trouble you," he hissed.
Brent's hand clutched nervously. He was afraid of Balcom—so much so that he fought back only weakly.
Locke was down in the hallway just in time to meet Eva and Paul as they entered.
"Oh—do you know, I'm so glad—I think my father is the most kind-hearted of men," Eva trilled to Locke, as she recounted what had happened in the library with Davis.
Locke listened with restrained admiration for the girl, whatever might have been his secret opinion of her father or of the story he already knew.
On his part, Paul did not relish the situation, nor did he take any pains to conceal it. He shrugged and turned away.
"Come," he said, with a tone of surly authority, "I think I hear my father in the library."
Eva looked back swiftly at Locke and smiled as Paul led her toward the library door. But that, also, made Paul more furious.
"Why do you make me ridiculous before that fellow?" he demanded.
"I'm sorry," replied Eva, in surprise. "I didn't meant to do that."
Vaguely Paul understood. The girl was too unsophisticated to have meant it. Somehow that made it worse. Though she did not know it, he did. Unknown to herself, there was a response in the presence of Locke which was not inspired in his own society. He hurried her into the library.
It was as though the entrance of Paul and Eva had been preconcerted. The partners, in their dispute, stopped and turned as the young people entered and moved over to a divan. Balcom lowered his voice and plucked at Brent's sleeve as he nodded toward the couple.
"I could trust you better if they were married within a week," suggested Balcom.
Brent recoiled, but Balcom affected not to notice.
"Then I will believe that you are dealing fairly with me," he emphasized.
Brent studied a moment, then nodded assent. Balcom extended a cold, commanding hand and the partners shook hands.
Outside, Locke had paused, about to enter the library. The pause had been just long enough for him to hear—and it was a blow to him. He watched, dazed, as the two older men walked over to the younger couple; then he turned away, heart sick.
"My dear," began Brent, as he patted the shoulder of the girl, the one spot of goodness that had shone in the otherwise blackness of his life, making him at last realize the depth to which lust of money had made him sink, "we were just saying that perhaps it would be advisable to—er—hasten your marriage to Paul—say—perhaps next week."
The words seemed to stick in his throat.
As for Eva, she felt a shiver pass over her. Without knowing why, she drew back from Paul, at her side, shrank even closer to her father, trying not to tremble. Did Paul realize it?
Brent felt the shudder with a pang. He leaned over. "Promise to do this—for my sake," he whispered, so low that there was no chance of the others hearing. "By to-morrow all may be changed."
There was something ominous about the very words.
Brent had no intention of keeping the promise which Balcom had extracted from him by a species of moral duress that afternoon.
In fact, already he had gone too far in his plans for restitution—or was it self-preservation?—to turn back. It was late in the night that he himself secretly admitted to the house a tall, dark-haired stranger who evidently called by appointment.
"Well, Flint," he greeted, in a hushed tone, "what was it you asked to see me about?"
Flint replied not a word, but impressively tapped a bundle which he carried under his arm and began to undo the cord which bound it.
Brent looked startled, then caught himself. He had known Flint for some time—an adventurer, more or less unscrupulous, who had been the foreign representative of International Patents.
Flint took off his coat and threw it on a chair with an air of assurance that seemed to increase Brent's anxiety, then began again to untie the bulky package.
"Just a moment, Flint," cautioned Brent, stopping him.
With an air of uneasy secrecy Brent hurried to the door that led from the dining-room to the conservatory and bolted it securely. Then he made sure that the door to the library was bolted.
As he did so he did not see his secretary, Zita, watching in the hall, for the footsteps of Locke, approaching, had caught her quick ear and she had fled.
"Locke!" called Brent, hearing his laboratory, manager. "Under no circumstances allow me to be disturbed to-night."
"Very well, sir," responded Locke.
Just then the light step of Eva was heard on the stairs.
"What's the matter, father?" she asked, still upset by the events of the afternoon. "Is there anything wrong?"
"No, my dear, nothing," hastily replied Brent. "In the morning I shall have something to say to you. Now run along like a good girl."
Dutifully Eva turned. Brent watched her out of sight. Then with a keen look at Locke he pulled out a paper from his pocket and handed it to the young scientist, who read:
Brent,—This is my last warning. If you persist in your course you will be struck down by the Madagascar madness.
Q.
Locke looked up from the scrawl in alarmed perplexity.
"What does this mean?" he queried.
Brent merely shook his head cryptically.
"Study this message. I shall have something very important to tell you in the morning."
As Brent turned back into the library he paused a moment and looked after Locke, hesitating, as if he would call him back. Then he decided not to do so, turned, and carefully locked the door from the dining-room into the hallway.
Eva was waiting at the head of the stairs as Locke, perplexed by the strange actions of his employer, came up.
"What is the trouble?" she repeated, anxiously. "Please tell me. Is there anything wrong?"
"No—nothing," reassured Locke, in spite of his own doubt. "Everything is all right."
"I hope so." Eva lingered. "Good night."
Locke bowed admiringly. But there was the same restraint in his look that had been shown in the afternoon.
"Good night," he murmured, slowly.
Eva quite understood, and there was a smile of encouragement on her face as she turned away and flitted down the hall to her room.
Outside, Zita had hurried from the house to the nearest public telephone-booth and was frantically calling Balcom at his apartment.
"Mr. Balcom," she repeated, breathlessly, as the junior partner answered, "Flint has returned. I have seen him."
"The devil!" exclaimed Balcom, angrily, then checked himself before he said any more. "Keep me informed."
Abruptly he hung up.
It was scarcely a moment later that Paul Balcom entered the Balcom apartment, admitted by a turbaned black suggestive of the Orient.
Paul was surly and had evidently been drinking, for he shoved the servant roughly out of the way as he strode toward his father.
Apparently outside Paul had overheard and had gathered the drift of what Balcom had been saying. Or perhaps, from his own sources of information, he already knew. At any rate, as Balcom turned from the telephone, father and son faced each other angrily.
"Brent's lying," exclaimed Paul. "That marriage to me must take place to-morrow."
Talking angrily, sometimes in agreement, at others far apart, the two left the room.
Back in the dining-room by this time Brent had rejoined Flint and now watched him eagerly as he took the last wrappings from the package which he had carried so carefully.
As the last wrapping was stripped from it, on the table before them lay a small steel model, perhaps three feet high—a weird-looking thing in the miniature shape of a man, designed along lines that only a cubist could have conceived—jointed, mobile, truly a contrivance at which to marvel.
Brent gazed incredulously at the strange thing. "An automaton!" he exclaimed.
"More than that," replied Flint, calmly.
Flint unrolled a chart of the human nervous system and spread it out on the table. Pointing to the brain, he leaned over tensely, and whispered:
"This model is merely a piece of mechanism. But the real automaton possesses a human brain which has been transplanted into it and made to guide it."
For a moment Brent listened incredulously, then sat back in his chair and laughed skeptically. But even Flint recognized that there was a hollowness in the laughter.
"Do you mean to tell me," demanded Brent, "that a human brain has been made to control a thing of no use except as a terrible engine of destruction?"
"Not only possible," reiterated Flint, "but it is true."
"Oh, Flint," rallied Brent, with a sort of uneasiness, "you can't tell me that!"
"Believe it or not," insisted the adventurer, "I have been in Madagascar and I know."
For a moment Brent paused at the vehemence of Flint's answer. What had Flint to gain by misrepresentation? A thousand images of the past flitted through Brent's brain. Then slowly a look of terror came over Brent's face. Suppose it were indeed true—this Frankenstein, this conscienceless inhuman superman? Brent gripped himself and composed his features and his voice.
"But this thing," he rasped. "What does this prove?"
"Oh, this is merely automatic—a piece of mechanism—a model which I stole. It works when it is wound up—not like the real one. Look."
Flint put a pencil in the little steel hand of the model and pressed a lever as he held a piece of paper under the pencil. Brent leaned over, fascinated.
Instantly the tiny hand began to trace on the paper one letter—the simple letter "Q."
As the hand finished the tail of the "Q" Brent gripped the table for support. His eyes bulged and stared wildly.
"My God!" burst from his lips. "It is the warning—Q!"
For minutes Brent strove to regain his composure.
Nor was Flint less impressed than the man before him.
What would have been the emotions of both if they had been able to penetrate with the eye through the rocky cliffs on which the stately mansion of Brent Rock stood would have been hard to say.
For, down in a rock-hewn cavern, not many hundred yards away and below them, reached by a secret entrance from the shrubbery of the cliffs near the shore, already had congregated several rough characters. They were playing cards and drinking, now and then glancing furtively at the passage entrance, as though they were expecting the arrival of some one or something.
Suddenly came a dull metallic clank through the passage, strangely echoing. At once all leaped to their feet, at attention, not unmixed with awe and fear that sat strangely on their desperate features. What was it that they, who feared neither God nor man, feared?
They strained their eyes, looking into the passage that led darkly away into blackness.
Dimly down it now could be seen two gleaming spots of light, points in the Cimmerian darkness. They seemed to be growing larger and coming nearer as with each hollow reverberation the dull metallic thuds increased.
Faintly now could be made out in the blackness a huge, stalking figure, having the shape of a man, with gigantic, powerful shoulders, powerful arms, a thick body, hips, and thighs that spelled terrific strength, legs and feet that suggested irresistible force.
"The Automaton!" escaped involuntarily from all lips.
Slowly, irresistibly, the horrendous figure stalked forth into the dim light. There it paused for a moment—a figure of steel, larger than most men, yet not so large but that it might have incased a man. And yet its motions, its every action, were like nothing mortal. Even these hardened denizens of the underworld shuddered.
In its hand the Automaton carried a five-branched candlestick, for what purpose none seemed to know. Yet all bowed and quaked at every pantomime motion of the figure, ready to do the bidding of the least motion of their inhuman master.
Still holding the candlestick with its five huge yellow candles before him, the Automaton stalked forward to the table and impressively deposited the candlestick on it, then stepped back a pace and waved his ponderous hand at the assembled emissaries, who scarcely repressed their own abject terror.
At a motion from the Automaton a dark-skinned Madagascan stepped forward and lighted the five candles. At once a dense smoke began drifting from the candles.
The men looked at one another, showing an uncomfortable fear of what the negro and the Automaton were doing. Even the negro edged away fearfully and all crouched back, afraid of the fumes.
A moment later the Automaton, with a mighty blast of air, snuffed all the candles at once, then, without a word, picked up the candlestick and stalked off through the passage on the opposite side of the den from the entrance, the passage that led to the Graveyard of Genius.
A few moments later the secret rock door from this passage into the Graveyard swung open and the Automaton stalked in, going carefully, noiselessly, now. Across the floor he walked to the steel door, which he swung open, then on out into the cellar of Brent Rock and up the steps to the door under the stairs that led to the hallway of the great house.
In the hall the Automaton halted beside a small stand on which stood a candlestick exactly like the one he carried. Quickly he picked up the original candlestick and replaced it by the one he carried. Then he set the original back of the portières, and with a glance at the library door turned back to the cellar, closing the door noiselessly behind him.
Down the steps he went, toward the open door of the Graveyard of Genius. Beside the door was the fuse-box of the lighting system of the house.
The Automaton reached out and began rubbing sharply at the insulation of the feed wires.
Up-stairs, in the dining-room, Brent had by this time flung off his coat and was examining with Flint the curious model the adventurer had brought from Madagascar. Brent was very excited and questioned Flint eagerly.
"I tell you, Flint," cried Brent, at length, huskily, as he seized a pen and dipped in into the ink, "the time has come for me to do what I have long intended. I am going to do now what I should have done years ago."
Brent started to write feverishly:
Quentin Locke,—I have done you a great injury about which you know nothing, but I am willing to—
His hand had scarcely traced the last word when the room was plunged into absolute darkness.
Down in the cellar the Automaton had succeeded in rubbing off the insulation of the feed wires. There was a flash of light as he laid his steel hand over the two feed wires—then darkness.
In the dining-room Brent and Flint, already keyed to the highest pitch, leaped to their feet with an exclamation of terror.
Late as it was, Locke was working in his laboratory on the second floor of the house when the lights winked out. Surprised for the moment, he ran out into the hall.
Already there was the butler, groping about with a candle.
"What's the matter, Quentin?" asked a breathless voice behind them.
It was Eva in a filmy dressing-gown. Locke turned to vision a creation of loveliness in the candle-light which set his heart thumping.
"Nothing," he reassured. "Just the lights short-circuited, that's all. I'll see."
Just then the dining-room door opened and Eva saw her father, disheveled and preoccupied, stride out and take the five-branched candlestick from the hall table. Nervously he began to light the candles. They sputtered a bit and he turned quickly, still holding the candlestick, as the smoke drifted away from them all.
"Fix the fuses in the cellar," he directed the butler.
"Is anything—really the matter—father?" implored Eva.
"No, no, my child," he answered, hastily. "Go back to bed. And, Locke, please don't let us be disturbed."
He was about to say more, then decided not to do so, and turned back into the dining-room.
Again Brent carefully locked the door to the dining-room and rejoined Flint.
He had placed the candles on the table, not noticing in the half-light that the smoke from them was growing denser as they burned down.
The smoke drifted over as the draught carried it. Flint coughed and moved a bit, his hand at his throat.
Brent seized the pen again and was about to write, when the smoke from the candles drifted into his own face. He, too, coughed.
Uneasy, Brent glanced over at Flint. Flint laughed, a bit hysterically.
"What the devil's the matter?" demanded Brent, with lowered brows, a strange dryness in his throat.
Flint was now leaning forward on his elbows and laughing foolishly, stupidly. It was a queer laugh, and struck terror into Brent as he himself coughed and clutched involuntarily at his throat. Brent stared at Flint.
"What is it?" he repeated, anxiously. "Have you suddenly gone mad, man?"
But there was no reply. Instead, Flint laughed all the more madly.
Brent was more than startled. If he could have seen himself in a glass he would have seen that he was already wide-mouthed and disheveled. Suddenly the smoke again blew in his face. He coughed again. His head reeled.
Then, in a flash, it all dawned on him.
He shielded himself from the candles. But it was too late.
"My God!" he exclaimed, starting up. "The Madagascar madness!"
Brent looked about wildly. He rushed to Flint and shook him. But Flint only laughed. He turned and moved toward the candles, reaching out for them. But even as he did so his hand faltered.
He stopped and passed his hand across his tightening forehead. Slowly over his face came a stupid expression. He felt himself going, without power of retraining himself. His lips twitched and he swayed.
Then he began to laugh uncontrollably.
Flint rose and clapped him on the shoulder. Then both laughed foolishly, loudly.
They were beyond help. It was the laughing madness.
Outside, in the hall, Eva and Locke had been standing, talking for a moment, when suddenly, below, they heard a terrific noise in the cellar. Involuntarily Eva's hand clutched Locke's arm. Locke drew a revolver and, in spite of Eva's fearsome caution, hastened down the cellar stairs.
About in the blackness of the cellar he groped until his foot touched something soft, a mass on the floor. He bent over. It was the butler, in a heap, unconscious, but still breathing.
There was not a sound, not another being in the cellar.
Together Eva and Locke helped the now half-conscious man to his feet and pushed and pulled him up the stairs; as slowly he recovered his power of speech.
"What was it—tell us?" urged Locke.
"I—I went down to fix the fuses—as the master ordered," muttered the butler, incoherently. "A huge figure—steel hand—it flung me across the floor—the last I remember."
He passed his hand over his head as though recollection even was too horrible for description.
Locke listened a bit doubtfully, then sent the butler on his way to bed, while Eva could scarcely restrain her fears.
Over to the dining-room door Locke strode and listened. There was nothing but the sound of merriment inside, of uncontrollable laughter. Could it be that Brent and Flint were drinking? He dared not betray a fear to Eva. Instead he knocked.
At that moment he could hear the sound of some heavy body falling; then more laughter as Brent in his hysteria struck the model of the automaton to the floor.
With the model, unnoticed by Brent, now fluttered to the floor the letter he had been writing. But the madman paid no attention to that now as it sifted through the air and fluttered under the sideboard.
"Mr. Brent," called Locke, "please open the door."
Instead of an answer came a loud and insulting laugh, followed by an incoherent mouthing of words. Eva looked startled, blanched. It was so unlike her father. For the moment Locke was piqued. But he tried not to show it as he turned away from the door.
"I am your father's employe," he said, sadly, "and it is his privilege, I suppose, to laugh at me." He hesitated.
"Oh, but, Quentin—Mr. Locke—I'm—I'm so sorry. Surely he could not have meant it."
At the head of the stairs Locke tried to smile.
"Don't worry," he said, repressing his feelings. "It will make no difference between us. Good night."
They parted, Eva closing her door for a sleepless night, Locke to work far into the night in his laboratory until sheer exhaustion overcame his feelings.
Meanwhile, in the dining-room, the two men kept terrible vigil, hour after hour, oblivious of time, in wild and wanton laughter—maniacal abandon.
A terrible blow had been struck and Reason was tottering on her throne.
Two men had been stricken by an unknown hand—stark, stark mad.
"Father—please—open the door!"
It was early the following morning that the butler with frightened face had called Eva Brent to tell her that her father and Flint had been locked in the dining-room all night and were still laughing madly.
Eva had hurried down-stairs, encountering Zita as she ran. It was true. She could hear the voices inside. Nor could she get any answer from the two men.