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Hartbeest, reedbuck, the maned and huge-eared roan antelope, gazelle, and bush-buck, all were here, skull or mask, dominated by the vast head of the wildebeest, with ponderous sickle-curved horns. Adams had half completed the tour of the walls when the door of the library opened and Captain Berselius came in.
On recovering from the hardships of the forest and on the voyage home, though weak enough, he had been serene, mild, amiable and rather listless, but during the last few days something was visibly troubling him. He had "gone off," to use an expressive phrase sometimes employed by physicians. A strange thing had happened to Berselius.
Even the boy who had been sent to communicate with them had not returned. "No news?" said Berselius, as he stepped from his tent-door and glanced around him. "None," replied Meeus. Adams now appeared, and the servants who had been preparing breakfast laid it on the grass.
There were no guns to carry, no trophies of the chase. Of all the army of porters only two were left. Berselius was broken down, Félix had fled, they had no guide, and the crowning horror of the thing was that they had struck off in pursuit of the herd at right angles to the straight path they had taken from the forest, and Adams did not know in the least the point where they had struck off.
They lay as they had composed themselves after that long stiff stretch which every animal takes before settling itself for eternal sleep; and Adams stood looking at the great grinning masks tipped with the murderous horns, whilst Berselius, with his gun butt resting on his boot, stood watching with a brooding eye as the porters and gun-bearers swarmed like ants around the slain animals and proceeded, under his direction, to cut them up.
Dimly, it is shaped like an hourglass; south of the constriction where the two forests join lies the elephant country for which Berselius was making, and Félix had led them so craftily and well, that they struck into the rubber district only fifty miles from the constriction. In the forest, thirty miles from the elephant ground, lies the Belgian fort M'Bassa.
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 passed 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.
Berselius had stepped out of the forest an innocent man, and behold! memory had suddenly fronted him with a hell in which he was the chief demon. He had no time to accommodate himself to the situation, no time for sophistry.
It was four hours after sun-up when they left the camp; and two hours' march brought them to that ridge which Berselius had indicated from the camp as being near the skyline. When they reached the ridge, and not before, Berselius halted and stared over the country in front of him, his face filled with triumph and hope. He seized Adams's hand and pointed away to the west.
He had become strangely bound up in Berselius; he had developed an affection for this man almost brotherly, and Schaunard's remark hit him and made him wince. For Schaunard employed the present tense. "Yes," said Adams at last, "it was very grand."
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