“I’ve never heard him to better advantage, sir,” said the head attendant, with a slow and proud solemnity. “He’s quite a treat, especially to a man like myself, who all my life have made a hobby of philosophy.”
“Then let us go and hear what he has to say.”
XXX
Brandon was carried in his chair along a dimly lighted corridor. At the end of it was a large room, lit more dimly still, in which, as it seemed, a number of ghostly figures were seated round the fireplace. For the most part they were old, bearded men, and they were smoking their pipes and listening with grave attention to one of their number, who was addressing them in a low, soft, persuasive voice.
Brandon was borne in very quietly by the doctor and the head attendant. He was placed at the back of the room, at the farthest point from the group around the fire. His entrance, even if observed, excited no attention. Without a moment’s interruption, the charming voice, whose every word was clear and distinct, continued as if nothing was happening.
To Brandon the whole thing was like a dream. The ghostly half-light in which the speaker and his audience was wrapped, the flicker of the distant fire, the curious stillness which the soft voice seemed to enhance, all added their touch of eeriness to the scene. Suddenly Brandon was stung to an imaginative intensity he had never felt before. The image of the spectrum altered, and he was completely possessed by a weird feeling that he had made the descent into Hades.
In a kind of entrancement he listened to the voice. It seemed a little older than the world, and yet he had heard it many times, as it seemed in many ages, for every word it used was somehow enchantingly familiar. Even the fall of the sentences, the rhythm of the phrases was like music in his ears. Whose voice could it be? It was a dream voice that swept his soul back through unnumbered ages, and yet now with full authority upon his senses in the terrestrial phase of being. He knew he was in the presence of a great mystery, and yet hearing that voice he was filled with strange joy.
“Plato,” whispered the doctor at his side.
Somehow the entranced listener felt that such a voice, touched by a divine grace, could have belonged to no one else.
“My friends”—as the words floated upon Brandon’s ear, they seemed to submerge his senses—“what is the race of men to do? The goal was in sight. Its sons were about to enter the kingdom their prayers and their fidelity to the gods had won for them, when one among them betrayed his brethren without pity and without shame. The tragedy has happened more than once in the history of an ill-starred planet, but as you have lately learned from the lips of Herodotus the circumstances of this case exceed all others in their poignancy.