He paused again, then went on:
"One day, a man entered my life and proposed to put my inventions on the market very advantageously. He was suave, polished, and apparently a gentleman. At any rate, I trusted him. You all knew him. It was Herbert Balcom.
"At the time I did not know that in order to give my inventions a clear field the inventions of hundreds of poor inventors were to be suppressed. I know now, Miss Brent, that your own father was led along in the scheme, even as I was. Balcom possessed the master mind and we were all as children in his hands."
Doctor Q stopped a moment. It was evident that he was speaking with restraint when it came to Peter Brent, perhaps glossing over what the man had done. Though he did not say so, the mere fact that at last Brent had seen the light and had planned a wholesale restitution weighed supremely in Doctor Q's mind.
"One day," he resumed, "Balcom came to me in what I know now was merely feigned excitement and fear. 'They're after us!' he cried. 'Brent and I have done our best—but the government is after you, and we can't protect you any longer.'
"Then for the first time Balcom told me of the real purposes of the company, told me that he had been drawn into it by Brent. It was all a tissue of lies—lies that drove me from my home and country. I hated your father with an undying hate, Miss Brent.
"Well, to make the sad story short, I took my wife and children and sailed secretly for the farthermost parts of the world. Off the coast of Madagascar, in the Straits, a typhoon came up. The vessel was driven on the rocks and wrecked. I was cast ashore, and I vaguely remember how, for days and weeks, I patrolled that beach, subsisting on shell-fish, imploring God, day and night, to restore my wife and children to me. Then my mind gave way.
"The natives took me in, thinking me a god. They took me many miles inland. Savages, the world over, are superstitious about the demented, and so they treated me kindly. They installed me in a thatched hut of my own and made me a leader.
"How many months, years, I stayed with them I do not know. But, true to my mechanical instinct, I rigged up a forge and improved many of the crude instruments of the natives, principally those of agriculture.
"But transcending every other feeling, I hated Brent. In my madness, I conceived the idea that I would construct an iron giant that, upon its completion, if I could only procure the brain of a man who had died of a lightning stroke or other electric agency, I could, by installing this brain in the brain cavity of the giant, give it volition, make it a superman without feeling or conscience. It was a mad idea—but I was mad.