“No,” said Adams. “I have come to see your master on business. You can take him my card—yes, that one—Dr. Adams, introduced by Dr. Thénard.”
The functionary seemed perplexed; the early hour, the size of the visitor, his decided manner, all taken together, were out of routine. Only for a moment he hesitated, then leading the way across the warm and flower-scented hall, he opened a door and said, “Will monsieur take a seat?” Adams entered a big room, half library, half museum; the door closed behind him, and he found himself alone.
The four walls of the room showed a few books, but were mostly covered with arms and trophies of the chase. Japanese swords in solid ivory scabbards, swords of the old Samurai so keen that a touch of the edge would divide a suspended hair. Malay krisses, double-handed Chinese execution swords; old pepper-pot revolvers, such as may still be found on the African coast; knob-kerries, assegais, steel-spiked balls swinging from whips of raw hide; weapons wild and savage and primitive as those with which Attila drove before him the hordes of the Huns, and modern weapons of to-day and yesterday; the big elephant gun which has been supplanted by the express rifle; the deadly magazine rifle, the latest products of Schaunard of the Rue de la Paix and Westley Richards of London.
Adams forgot time as he stood examining these things; then he turned his attention to the trophies, mounted by Borchard of Berlin, that prince of taxidermists. Here stood a great ape, six feet and over—monstrum horrendum—head flung back, mouth open, shouting aloud to the imagination of the gazer in the language that was spoken ere the earliest man lifted his face to the chill mystery of the stars. In the right fist was clutched the branch of a M’bina tree, ready lifted to dash your brains out—the whole thing a miracle of the taxidermist’s art. Here crawled an alligator on a slab of granitic rock; an alligator—that is to say, the despair of the taxidermist—for you can make nothing out of an alligator; alive and not in motion he looks stuffed, stuffed, he looks just the same. 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. Tall, black-bearded and ferocious looking—that was the description of man Adams was prepared to meet. But Captain Berselius was a little man in a frock-coat, rather worn, and slippers. He had evidently been in négligé and, to meet the visitor, slipped into the frock-coat, or possibly he was careless, taken up with abstractions, dreams, business affairs, plans. He was rather stout, with an oval, egg-shaped face; his beard, sparse and pointed and tinged with gray, had originally been light of hue; he had pale blue eyes, and he had a perpetual smile.
It is to be understood by this that Captain Berselius’s smile was, so to speak, hung on a hair-trigger; there was always a trace of it on his face round the lips, and in conversation it became accentuated.
At first sight, during your first moments of meeting with Captain Berselius, you would have said, “What a happy-faced and jolly little man!”
Adams, completely taken aback by the apparition before him, bowed.
“I have the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Adams, introduced by Dr. Thénard?” said Captain Berselius, motioning the visitor to a chair. “Pray take a seat, take a seat—yes——” He took a seat opposite the American, crossed his legs in a comfortable manner, caressed his chin, and whilst chatting on general subjects stared full at the newcomer, as though Adams had been a statue, examining him, without the least insolence, but in that thorough manner with which a purchaser examines the horse he is about to buy or the physician of an insurance company a proposer.
It was now that Adams felt he had to deal with no common man in Captain Berselius.