Schaunard’s eyes lit up as he listened.
“Ah,” said he, “that is a man!”
The remark brought Adams to a halt.
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.” Then he went on to tell of Berselius’s accident, but he said nothing of his brain injury, for a physician does not speak of his patient’s condition to strangers, except in the vaguest and most general terms.
“And how did you like the Belgians?” asked the old man, when Adams had finished.
“The Belgians!” Adams, suddenly taken off his guard, exploded; he had said nothing as yet about the Congo to anyone. He could not help himself now; the horrors rushed to his mouth and escaped—the cry of the great mournful country—the cry that he had brought to Europe with him in his heart, found vent.
Schaunard sat amazed, not at the infamies pouring from Adams’s mouth, for he was well acquainted with them, but at the man’s vehemence and energy.
“I have come to Europe to expose him,” finished Adams.
“Expose who?”