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Adams, leaning back in his deck chair, followed with his eyes the sweep of Berselius's hand, "over there"; little did he dream of what those words held in their magic. Then Berselius went below. The moon rose; lights speckled the misty wharf and a broad road of silver lay stretched across the moving water to the other bank that, under the moonlight, lay like a line of cotton-wool.
Thénard had fixed upon the white marble bathroom adjoining Berselius's sleeping chamber as his operating theatre, and after the operation the weakness of the patient was so great, and the night so hot, they determined to make up a bed for him there, as it was the coolest room in the house. It was a beautiful room.
But Adams had no time to attend to them. Having glanced in their direction, he turned to Berselius, bent over him, and started back in surprise. Berselius's eyes were open; he was breathing regularly and slowly, and he looked like a man who, just awakened from sleep, was yet too lazy to move.
He had been prepared for the change evident in Berselius's face and manner, for Maxine had told him in a few words of the accident and loss of memory, and as he took his seat by the bedside he was about to put some questions relative to the injury, when Berselius forestalled him. Berselius knew something about medicine.
Berselius's presence at the table evidently cast silence and a cloak of restraint upon the women. You could see that the servants who served him dreaded him to the very tips of their fingers, and, though he was chatting easily and in an almost paternal manner, his wife and daughter had almost the air of children, nervous, and on their very best behaviour.
The assurance and delight of Berselius as these fancied memories came to him shocked the heart. There was a horrible and sardonic humour in the whole business, a bathos that insulted the soul. The dead leading the living, the blind leading the man with sight, lunacy leading sanity to death. Yet there was nothing to be done but follow. As well take Berselius's road as any other.
Adams, after the death of Berselius, had lingered on in Paris to settle up his affairs, going back to the Rue Dijon and taking up his old life precisely at the point where he had broken it off. But he was richer by three things. Two days after Berselius's death, news came to him from America of the death of an uncle whom he had never seen and the fact that he had inherited his property.
There would, without doubt, have been severe inflammation of the brain, but for Berselius's splendid condition at the time of the accident, and the fact that Adams had bled him within an hour of the injury. Thénard had relieved the pressure by operation, but there was great weakness. It was impossible to say what the result would be yet. "Has he regained consciousness?"
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.
Instantly he put two and two together. Berselius's quick return, his changed appearance, the fact that suddenly and at one sweep he was selling his stock. All these pointed to one fact disaster.
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