The Pools of Silence Part 35

It was Leopold, King of the Belgians.

When Berselius's eyes fell upon that face, when he saw before him that man whom all thinking men abhor, a cold hand seemed laid upon his heart, as though in that person he beheld the dead self that haunted his dreams by night, as though he saw in the flesh Berselius, the murderer, who, by consent, had murdered the people of the Silent Pools; the murderer, by consent, who had crushed millions of wretched creatures to death for the sake of gold; the villain of Europe, who had spent that gold in nameless debauchery; the man whose crimes ought to have been expiated on the scaffold, and whose life ought to have been cut short by the executioner of justice, many, many years ago.

It was thus at one stroke that Berselius saw his other self, the self that haunted him in his dreams, saw it clearly, and in the light of day.

The terrible old man in the carriage pa.s.sed on his way and Berselius on his.

When he reached home, in the hall, just as he was handing his hat to a servant, Maxine appeared at the door of the library. Her beauty, innocence, and sweetness formed a strange vision contrasted with that other vision he had seen near the Madeleine. Was it possible that G.o.d's world could hold two such creatures, and that G.o.d's air should give them breath? For a week or ten days after this, Berselius remained in his own suite of apartments without leaving the house.

It was as if the sight of Leopold, so triumphantly alive, had shown him fully his own change and his weakness had demonstrated to him clearly that he was but the wraith of what he had been.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

THE REVOLT OF A SLAVE

The day after that on which Berselius had seen Leopold, Madame Berselius, moved by one of those fits of caprice common to women of her type, came back suddenly from Trouville.

She knew of her husband's return, but she knew nothing of the injury or of the alteration that had come in him until Maxine, who met her at the station, hinted at the fact. Berselius was standing at the window of his private sitting room when Madame Berselius was announced.

He turned to greet her; even as he turned she perceived the change. This was not the man who had left her a few months ago, strong, confident, impa.s.sive; the man who had been her master and before whom she had shrunk like a slave. Intuition told her that the change was not the change wrought by sickness--Berselius was not ill, he was gone, leaving another man in his place. They conversed for some time on indifferent matters, and then Madame Berselius took her departure for her own apartments.

But she left the room of Berselius a changed woman, just as he had returned to it a changed man.

The slave in her had found her freedom. Utterly without the capacity for love and without honour, without conscience and with a vague superst.i.tion to serve for religion, Madame Berselius had, up to this, been held in her place by the fear of her husband. His will up to this had been her law; she had moved in the major affairs of life under his direction, and even in the minor affairs of life everything had to be surrendered at his word.

And now she hated him.

She had never hated him before, she had admired him; indeed, as far as her power of admiration went, his strength had appealed to her as only strength can appeal to a woman of her type; but now that his strength was gone hatred of him rose up in her heart, petty yet powerful, a dwarf pa.s.sion that had been slumbering for years.

When the engine seizes the engineer in its wheels, when the slave gets power over his master, cruel things happen, and they were to happen in the case of Berselius.

Madame's rooms were so far away from the rooms of her husband that they might have been living in different houses. There was none of the intimacy of married life between this couple; they met formally at meal times, and it was at _dejeuner_ on the morning after her return that she showed openly before Adams, Maxine, and the servants her contempt for the man who had once held her in subjection. Without a rude word, simply by her manner, her tone, and her indifference to him, she humbled to the dust the stricken man and proclaimed the full measure of his disaster.

As day followed day the dominance of the woman and the subjection of the man became more marked. Madame would, if the spirit took her, countermand her husband's orders; once, with absolute rudeness, she, at table and before the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was a guest, turned to ridicule a remark which Berselius had let escape. The flush that came to his cheek told Maxine that her father's sensibilities were not dead--he was dominated.

Nothing could be stranger than this reduction of a man from greatness to insignificance. The old Berselius dying, bound in chains, would have mastered this woman with one glance of his eye. The new Berselius, free, wealthy, and with all his material powers at command, was yet her creature, an object of pity to his daughter and of derision to his servants.

Eight days after her return Madame Berselius, now free and her own mistress, left Paris for Vaux on a short visit to some friends, little dreaming of the momentous event that was to cause her return.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

MAXINE

On the night of the day upon which Berselius had paid his visit to M.

Cambon, Adams, seated in the smoking room at a writing table before a broad sheet of white paper covered with words, suddenly took the paper, tore it up, and threw the pieces in a wastepaper-basket.

He had been trying to put in language the story of the Congo as it had been revealed to him.

It was all there in his mind like a tremendous dramatic poem: the great sunlit s.p.a.ces of the elephant country watched over by the vultures, the eternal and illimitable forests old as Memnon, young as Spring, unwithered and unbroken by the suns and rains and storms of the ages; the river flooding to the sea, and the people to whom this place belonged, and the story of their misery and despair.

When he contrasted what he had written with what was in his mind, he recognized the hopelessness of his attempt. He had not the power to put on paper more than the shadow of what he had seen and of what he knew.

To represent that people under the heel of that Fate was a task for an aeschylus.

Sitting thus before the picture he could not reproduce, there rose before his mind another picture he had seen that day. It was a large photograph of the Laoc.o.o.n. He had seen it in Brentano's window, and, now, with the eye of memory, he was looking at it again.

That wonderful work of art washed up to us by the ages, that epic in marble, expressed all that words refused to say: the father and the children in the toils of Fate; the hand upholding for a moment the crushing coil of the serpent, the face raised to a sky devoid of G.o.d or pity; the agony, the sweat and the cruelty, all were there; and as Adams gazed, the python-like lianas of the forest became alive in his mind, the snake-like rubber vine twined in coils, circling about and crushing a nation and its children, remote from help and from G.o.d, as Laoc.o.o.n and his sons.

Ages have pa.s.sed since the sculptor of that marble laid down his chisel and gazed at his completed work. Little dreamt he that thousands of years later it would stand as a parable, representing civilization in the form of the python which he had carved with such loathing yet such loving care.

Adams, in the grasp of this startling thought, was recalled from reverie by a sound behind him.

Someone had entered the room. It was Maxine Berselius.

They had seen very little of each other since his return. Adams, indeed, had purposely avoided her as much as it is possible for one person to avoid another when both are dwelling in the same house.

The pride of manhood warned him against this woman who was rich and the daughter of the man from whom he received a salary.

Maxine knew nothing of the pride of manhood; she only knew that he avoided her.

She was dressed entirely in white with a row of pearls for her only ornament. She had just returned from some social function, and Adams as he rose to meet her noticed that she had closed the door.

"Dr. Adams," said the girl, "forgive me for disturbing you at this hour.

For days I have wished to speak to you about my father. I have put it off, but I feel I must speak--what has happened to him?"

She took a seat in an armchair, and Adams stood before her with his back to the mantelpiece and his hands behind him.

The big man did not answer for a moment. He stood there like a statue, looking at his questioner gravely and contemplatively, as a physician looks at a patient whose case is not quite clear.

Then he said, "You notice a change in your father?"

"No," said Maxine, "it is more than a change. He is quite different--he is another man."

"When we were hunting out there," said Adams, "Captain Berselius had an accident. In trying to rescue a servant he was caught by an elephant and flung some distance; he hurt his head, and when he recovered consciousness his memory was quite gone. It slowly returned----" He paused, for it was impossible to give details, then he went on--"I noticed, myself, as the memory was returning, that he seemed changed; when he had fully recovered his memory, the fact was obvious. He was, as you say, quite different--in fact, just as you see him now."

"But can an injury change a person like that?"

"Yes; an injury to the head can change a person completely."

Maxine sighed. She had never seen the dark side of her father; she had never loved him in the true sense of the word, but she had respected him and felt a pride in his strength and dominance.