The Pools of Silence Part 39

Maxine rose to meet him.

She read both good and bad news in his face.

"The operation has been successful, but there is great weakness." He rolled an armchair for her to sit down, and then he told her as much as she could understand.

Thenard had found a slight depression of the inner table of the skull, and some congestion and thickening of the dura mater. It all dated from the accident. 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. Thenard 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?"

"He is just recovering from the anaesthetic."

The girl was silent for a moment, then she asked where Thenard was.

"He has left. He has to operate again to-night on a case which has just called for him by telephone. He asked me to tell you that everything possible has been done. He will call in the morning, and he has left everything till then in my hands."

"I shall not go to bed," said Maxine. "I could not sleep, and should my father want to see me, I shall be ready."

"Yes," said Adams, "perhaps it will be better so. I will go up and stay with him, and I will call you if it is necessary."

He left the room, and Maxine took up the book she had dropped, but she could not read. Her eyes, travelling about the room, rested here and there on the trophies and the guns and the wild implements of destruction collected by the hunter, who was now lying upstairs, like a child dandled on the dark knees of death.

The books on philosophy, natural history, oceanography, and history, in their narrow cases contrasted strangely with the weapons of destruction and the relics of the wild. The room was like a mirror of the mind of Berselius, that strange mind in which the savage dwelt with the civilized man, and the man of valour by the side of the philosopher.

But the strangest contrast in the room was effected by Maxine herself--the creation of Berselius--his child, blossoming like a beautiful and fragile flower, amidst the ruins of the things he had destroyed.

When, after daybreak, Adams came to find her, she was asleep.

Berselius, awaking from a sleep that had followed the effects of the anaesthetic, had asked for her.

Thenard 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. Walls, pillars, floor and ceiling, of pure white Carrara marble, and in the floor, near the window, a sunk bath, which, when not in use, was covered by a grating of phosphor bronze, showing a design of sea serpents and seaweed. There were no basins or lavatory arrangements, nothing at all to break the pure and simple charm of this ideal bathing-place whose open French window showed, beyond a balcony of marble, the tops of trees waving against the blue sky of early morning.

Berselius was lying on the bed which had been arranged for him near the door; his eyes were fixed on the waving tree tops. He turned his head slightly when Maxine entered, and looked at her long and deliberately.

In that one glance Maxine saw all. He was himself again. The old, imperious expression had returned; just a trace of the half-smile was visible about his lips.

The great weakness of the man, far from veiling the returned personality, served as a background which made it more visible. One could see the will dominating the body, and the half-helpless hands lying on the coverlet presented a striking contrast to the inextinguishable fire of the eye.

Maxine sat down on the chair by the bed. She did not attempt to stroke the hand near her, and she smothered whatever emotion she felt, for she knew the man who had returned.

"Your mother?" said Berselius, who had just sufficient voice to convey interrogation as well as words.

"She has not returned yet; we telegraphed for her, she will be here to-day."

"Ah!"

The sick man turned his head again, and fixed his eyes on the tree tops.

The hot, pure, morning air came through the open window, bringing with it the chirruping and bickering of sparrows; a day of splendour and great heat was breaking over Paris. Life and the joy of life filled the world, the lovely world which men contrive to make so terrible, so full of misery, so full of tears.

Suddenly Berselius turned his head, and his eyes found Adams with a not unkindly gaze in them.

"Well, doctor," he said, in a voice stronger than the voice with which he had spoken to Maxine. "This is the end of our hunting, it seems."

Adams, instead of replying, took the hand that was lying on the coverlet, and Berselius returned the pressure, and then relinquished his hold.

Just a handshake, yet it told Adams in some majestic way, that the man on the bed knew that all was up with him, and that this was good-bye.

Berselius then spoke for a while to Maxine on indifferent things. He did not mention his wife's name, and he spoke in a cold and abstracted voice.

He seemed to Adams as though he were looking at death, perfectly serenely, and with that level gaze which never in this world had been lowered before man or brute.

Then he said he was tired, and wished to sleep.

Maxine rose, but the woman in her had to speak. She took the hand on the coverlet, and Berselius, who was just dozing off, started awake again.

"Ah!" said he, as though he had forgotten something, then he raised the little hand of Maxine and touched it with his lips.

Then he asked that his wife should be sent to him on her return.

Alone, he closed his eyes and one might have fancied that he slept, yet every now and then his eyelids would lift, and his eyes, unveiled by drowsiness, would fix themselves on some point in the room with the intent gaze of a person who is listening; so in the forest, or on the plain, or by the cane brake had he often listened at night, motionless, gun in hand and deadly, for the tiger or the water buck.

Half an hour pa.s.sed and then from the adjoining room came a footstep, the door opened gently, and Madame Berselius entered. She was dressed just as she had traveled from Vaux. She had only just arrived, to find death in the house, and as she looked at the figure on the bed she fancied she beheld it indeed.

Closing the door gently she approached the bed. No, it was not death but sleep. He was breathing evenly and rhythmically, sleeping, apparently, as peacefully as a child.

She was about to turn away when, like a bather who has ventured into some peaceful tropic rock pool wherein lurks an octopus, she found herself seized and held. Berselius's eyes were open, he was not asleep. His gaze was fixed on hers, and he held her with his eyes as the cat holds the bird or the python the man.

He had been waiting for her with the patience and the artfulness of the hunter, but no game had ever inspired such ferocity in him as this woman, vile and little, who yet had abased him to the earth.

He was dying, but what beast full of life is more dangerous than the dying tiger?

As Berselius gazed at the woman, she, with all her will urging her body to retreat, approached him. Then, her knees touching the bed, she fell on her knees beside him and his hand fell on her shoulder.

Holding her thus, he gazed on her coldly, dispa.s.sionately, and critically, as an emperor of old might have gazed on a defaulting slave. Then, as though his anger had turned to disgust, as though disdaining to waste a word on her, he struck her full in the face with the back of his right hand, a blow that caused her to cry out and sent her groveling on the marble floor, where a moment after the nurse on duty, attracted by the cry, found her.

Berselius was dead, but the mocking smile on his lips remained, almost justified by the words of the nurse imploring the woman on the floor to calm herself and restrain her grief.

Whatever his life may have been, his death affected Adams strangely. The magnetism of the man's character had taken a strong hold upon him, fascinating him with the fascination that strength alone can exercise. And the man he regretted was not the ambiguous being, the amended Berselius, so obviously a failure, but the real Berselius who had returned to meet death.

CHAPTER XLII

AMIDST THE LILIES