The Seeds of Enchantment | Page 8

to the touch.
One of the compartments was empty; in the other, almost filling it, lay some twenty or thirty tiny purple beans. Bending down to inspect these, Dicky's nostrils were aware of a faint, sweet perfume, a perfume as of tuberoses only rarer, less cloying. De Gys, too, smelt that perfume: his memory leapt at it. "Melie is not dead," said memory. "Only Melie's body is dead. This is the soul of Melie; take and crush the soul of Melie between your teeth so that you may remember the body of Melie."
"The coroner will want these," cut in Beamish's voice. "There'll have to be an inquest, of course. I couldn't certify..."
"Doctor," interrupted the Frenchman, "if I pledge you my word that the contents of this box are perfectly harmless a sweetmeat a mere Oriental sweetmeat..."
"No," said Beamish, stubbornly, all the officialdom in him at bay. "No. I couldn't do it. Besides, you admitted just now that she took some drug."
There was a moment's silence, broken only by the creak and whirr of the fan as it swung on its long shafting. Then de Gys shrugged huge shoulders, a gesture Dicky remembered from old days as sign of reluctant decision, and said: "Very well. Since you do not accept my pledge, we will eat of this sweetmeat, doctor: we three, so that you may know it harmless."
He drew the box across the table, picked out one of the purple beans. "Do not swallow them. Chew with your teeth, thus." The two Englishmen watched him take the bean in his mouth, saw the sorrow-drawn lines of his face vanish as wrinkles vanish from washed linen at stroke of the iron.
"Eat," said de Gys, and fell silent, a quiet happiness dawning in his red-brown eyes.
Dicky hesitated for a second: he had all the Anglo-Saxon fear of "dope", all the peasant's distrust of strange foods.
"Because you could not help loving her; because you coveted her; because, even despite our friendship, your heart plotted to take her from me, eat!"
De Gys spoke without emotion, without haste, as men speak of what is long past. His friend's lips tightened under the flat moustache; almost, a blush suffused the white of his temples.
"You accuse me," began Dicky.
De Gys smiled. "I accuse you of nothing, dear friend. I only ask you to eat one of these little seeds." He pushed over the snuff-box; the Long'un extracted a bean, crushed it between his teeth...
De Gys spoke truth. He, Dicky, had coveted Melie; sitting at table with her, passion had enmeshed him suddenly with a thousand tentacles of desire, set every nerve in his body aching for her possession. And when he realized her dead, it had been as though desire's self perished with her... What a long time ago that must have been... The thing in his mouth tasted so cool like summer moonlight, or snow-chilled mulberries... He looked across the table at his friend's red-bearded face.
"You were quite right, de Gys, I did covet the woman," said the Honourable Dicky, and de Gys answered, "If she had lived, I would have given her to you at Moon-fade."
They began to converse; and the doctor listened to them, amazed. Whatever the drug they had taken might be ' * and drug it is," decided Beamish the physical effect seemed nil. He watched their eyes: the pupils remained normal no con- - traction, no dilation. He looked for signs of slowed or accelerated blood-pressures, found none. He even put a questing finger on Dicky's pulse it beat steadily at twenty to the quarter minute. Speech, sight, nerves, muscle all appeared to function regularly. Of hypnotic, as of excitatory influence, there was no trace: both men seemed fully conscious, in possession of all their faculties.
Yet subtly, undefinably, both men had altered. A happiness, scarcely of earth, radiated from their placid features, from their untroubled eyes. They took no notice of Beamish, spoke in a rapid French which he found difficult to understand; but the drift of it he could follow. And, following, he passed gradually from amazement to a deep sense of shock, of outrage.
It was as though these two had abandoned all restraints, relapsed into the utterest hedonism; as if they embraced some cult of pleasure beyond every conventional, every unconvential morality. "Not immoral," thought Beamish, "but a-moral. The drug has destroyed, put to sleep, somehow or other abrogated, that faculty we call personal conscience."
Apparently, they felt no sorrow for Melie's death, no jealousy of each other's passion. Indeed, mutual desire now frankly admitted seemed to bind them closer in comradeship. But, listen as he might, Beamish could hear no scabrous word; the talk was all of Beauty, of Flowers, of sweet music, of poetry and of Love: only, in the mouths of these two, Beauty and Flowers and music and