Now began for Adams a time of trial, enough to break the nerve of any ordinary man. Day followed day and week followed week, Berselius gaining strength so slowly that his companion began to despair at last, fancying that the main fountain and source of life had been injured, and that the stream would never flow again but in a trickle, to be stopped at the least shock or obstruction.

The man was too weak to talk, he could just say “Yes” and “No” in answer to a question, and it was always “Better” when he was asked how he felt, but he never spoke a word of his own volition.

Nearly every day it rained, and it rained in a hundred different ways—from the thunderous shower-bath rush of water that threatened to beat the roof in, to the light spitting shower shone through by the sun. Sometimes the clouds would divide, roll up in snow-white billows of appalling height, and over the fuming foliage a rainbow would form, and flocks of birds, as if released by some wizard, break from the reeking trees. Adams could hear their cries as he stood at the foot wall watching them circle in the air, and his heart went out to them, for they were the only living things in the world around him that spoke in a kindly tongue or hinted at the tenderness of God.

All else was vast and of tragic proportions. The very rainbow was titanic; it seemed primeval as the land over which it stretched and the people to whom it bore no promise.

But the forest was the thing which filled Adams’s heart with a craving for freedom and escape that rose to a passion.

He had seen it silent in the dry season; he had seen it divided by the great rain-wall and answering the downpour with snow-white billows of mist and spray; he had heard it roaring in the dark; it had trapped him, beaten him with its wet, green hands, sucked him down in its quagmires, shown him its latent, slow, but unalterable ferocity, its gloom, its devilment.

The rubber collector who had helped to carry Berselius to the fort had gone back to his place and task—the forest had sucked him back. This gnome had explained without speaking what the gloom and the quagmire, and the rope-like lianas had hinted, what the Silent Pools had shouted, what the vulture and the kite had laid bare, what the heart had whispered: There is no God in the forest of M’Bonga, no law but the law of the leopard, no mercy but the mercy of Death.

The forest had become for Adams a living nightmare—his one desire in life now was to win free of it, and never did it look more sinister than when, rainbow-arched and silently fuming, it lay passive, sun-stricken, the palms bursting above the mist and the great clouds rolling away in billows, as if to expose fully the wonder of those primeval leagues of tree-tops sunlit, mist-strewn, where the feathery fingers of the palms made banners of the wrack and the baobabs held fog-banks in their foliage.

At the end of the third week Berselius showed signs of amendment. He could raise himself now in bed and speak. He said little, but it was evident that his memory had completely returned, and it was evident that he was still the changed man. The iron-hearted Berselius, the man of daring and nerve, was not here, he had been left behind in the elephant country in the immeasurable south.

The mist had departed entirely from his mind; his whole past was clear before him, and with his new mind he could reckon it up and see the bad and the good. The extraordinary fact was that in reviewing this past he did not feel terrified—it seemed a dead thing and almost as the past of some other man. All those acts seemed to Berselius to have been committed by a man who was now dead.

He could regret the acts of that man and he could seek to atone for them, but he felt no personal remorse. “He was not I,” would have reasoned the mind of Berselius; “those acts were not my acts, because now I could not commit them,” so he would have reasoned had he reasoned on the matter at all. But he did not. In that wild outburst by the Silent Pools the ego had screamed aloud, raving against itself, raving against the trick that fate had played it, by making it the slave of two personalities, and then torturing it by showing it the acts of the old personality through the eyes of the new.

When the brain fever had passed, it awoke untroubled; the junction had been effected, the new Berselius was It, and all the acts of the old Berselius were foreign to it and far away.

It is thus the man who gets religion feels when the great change comes on his brain. After the brain-storm and the agony of new birth comes the peace and the feeling that he is “another man.” He feels that all his sins are washed away; in other words, he has lost all sense of responsibility for the crimes he committed in the old life, he has cast them off like an old suit of clothes. The old man is dead. Ah, but is he? Can you atone for your vices by losing your smell and taste for vice, and slip out of your debt for crime by becoming another man?

Does the old man ever die?

The case of Berselius stirs one to ask the question, which is more especially interesting as it is prompted by a case not unique but almost typical.

The interesting point in Berselius’s case lay in the question as to whether his change of mind was initiated by the injury received in the elephant country or by the shock at the Silent Pools. In other words, was it due to some mechanical pressure on the brain produced by the accident, or was it due to “repentance” on seeing suddenly unveiled the hideous drama in which he had taken part?

This remains to be seen.

At the end of the fourth week Berselius was able to leave his bed, and every day now marked a steady improvement in strength.

Not a word about the past did he say, not a question did he ask, and what surprised Adams especially, not a question did he put about Meeus, till one day in the middle of the fifth week.

Berselius was seated in one of the arm chairs of the sitting room when he suddenly raised his head.

“By the way,” said he, “where is the Chef de Poste?”

“He is dead,” replied Adams.

“Ah!” said Berselius; there was almost a note of relief in his voice. He said nothing more and Adams volunteered no explanation, for the affair was one entirely between Meeus, himself, and God.

A few minutes later, Berselius, who seemed deep in thought, raised his head again.

“We must get away from here. I am nearly strong enough to go now. It will be a rough journey in these rains, but it will be a much shorter road than the road we came by.”

“How so?”

“We came from Yandjali right through the forest before striking south to here; we will now make straight for the river, along the rubber road. I think the post on the river which we will reach is called M’Bina, it is a hundred miles above Yandjali; we can get a boat from there to Leopoldsville. I have been thinking it all out this morning.”

“How about a guide?”

“These soldiers here know the rubber track, for they often escort the loads.”

“Good,” said Adams. “I will have some sort of litter rigged up and we will carry you. I am not going to let you walk in your present condition.”

Berselius bowed his head.

“I am very sensible,” said he, “of the care and attention you have bestowed on me during the past weeks. I owe you a considerable debt, which I will endeavour to repay, at all events, by following your directions implicitly. Let the litter be made, and if you will send me in the corporal of those men, I will talk to him in his own language and explain what is to be done.”

“Good,” said Adams, and he went out and found the corporal and sent him in to Berselius.

“Good!” The word was not capacious enough to express what he felt. Freedom, Light, Humanity, the sight of a civilized face, for these he ached with a great longing, and they were all there at the end of the rubber road, only waiting to be met with.

He went to the fort wall and shook his fist at the forest.

“Another ten days,” said Adams.

The forest, whose spirit counted time by tens of thousands of years, waved its branches to the wind.

A spit of rain from a passing cloud hit Adams’s cheek, and in the “hush” of the trees there seemed a murmur of derision and the whisper of a threat.

“It is not well to shake your fist at the gods—in the open.”

Adams went back to the house to begin preparations, and for the next week he was busy. From some spare canvas and bamboos in the go-down he made a litter strong enough to carry Berselius—he had to do nearly all the work himself, for the soldiers were utterly useless as workmen. Then stores had to be arranged and put together in a convenient form for carrying; clothes had to be mended and patched—even his boots had to be cobbled with twine—but at last all was ready, and on the day before they started the weather improved. The sun came out strong and the clouds drew away right to the horizon, where they lay piled in white banks like ranges of snow-covered mountains.

That afternoon, an hour before sunset, Adams announced his intention of going on a little expedition of his own.

“I shall only be a few hours away,” said he, “five at most.”

“Where are you going?” asked Berselius.

“Oh, just down into the woods,” replied Adams. Then he left the room before his companion could ask any more questions and sought out the corporal.

He beckoned the savage to follow him, and struck down the slope in the direction of the Silent Pools. When they reached the forest edge he pointed before them and said, “Matabayo.”

The man understood and led the way, which was not difficult, for the feet of the rubber collectors had beaten a permanent path. There was plenty of light, too, for the moon was already in the sky, only waiting for the sun to sink before blazing out.

When they were half-way on their journey heavy dusk fell on them suddenly, and deepened almost to dark; then, nearly as suddenly, all the forest around them glowed green to the light of the moon.

The Silent Pools and the woods, when they reached them, lay in mist and moonlight, making a picture unforgettable for ever.

It recalled to Adams that picture of DorÉ’s, illustrating the scene from the “Idylls of the King,” where Arthur labouring up the pass “all in a misty moonlight,” had trodden on the skeleton of the once king, from whose head the crown rolled like a rivulet of light down to the tarn—the misty tarn, where imagination pictured Death waiting to receive it and hide it in his robe.

The skeleton of no king lay here, only the poor bones still unburied of the creatures that a far-off king had murdered. The rain had washed them about, and Adams had to search and search before he found what he had come to find.

At last he saw it. The skull of a child, looking like a white stone amidst the grass. He wrapped it in leaves torn from the trees near by, and the grim corporal stood watching him, and wondering, no doubt, for what fetish business the white man had come to find the thing.

Then Adams with the dreary bundle under his arm looked around him at the other remains and swore—swore by the God who had made him, by the mother who had borne him, and the manhood that lay in him, to rest not nor stay till he had laid before the face of Europe the skull of Papeete and the acts of the terrible scoundrel who for long years had systematically murdered for money.

Then, followed by the savage, he turned and retook his road. At the wood’s edge he looked back at the silent scene, and it seemed to look at him with the muteness and sadness of a witness who cannot speak, of a woman who cannot tell her sorrow.