“But can an injury change a person like that?”
“Yes; an injury to the head can change a person completely.”
Maxine sighed. She had never seen the dark side of her father; she had never loved him in the true sense of the word, but she had respected him and felt a pride in his strength and dominance.
The man who had returned from Africa seemed to her an inferior being; the wreck, in fact, of the man she had always known.
“And this happened to him,” said she, “when he was trying to save a servant’s life?”
“Ah,” said Adams, “if you could have seen it, you would have called it something even higher than that—it was a sublime act.”
He told her the details, even as he had told them to Schaunard, but with additions.
“I myself was paralyzed—I could only cling to the tree and watch. The fury of that storm of beasts coming down on one was like a wind—I can put it no other way—like a wind that stripped one’s mind of everything but just the power of sight. I can imagine now the last day, when the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood. It was as bad as that—well, he did not lose his mind or nerve, he found time to think of the man who was lying drugged with hemp, and he found courage enough in his heart to attempt to save him. He was fond of the man, for the man was a great hunter though an absolute savage, without heart or soul.
“Without heart or soul——” Adams paused. There was something about Maxine Berselius that made her different from the ordinary woman one meets in life—some inheritance from her father, perhaps, who knows? But through the sweetness of her nature which spoke in voice and expression, through her loveliness and her womanliness, there shone a light from within. Like the gleam from the lamp that lives in an opal, this mind-brightness of Maxine’s pierced the clouds of her beauty capriciously, now half-veiled, now shining forth. It was the light of that flame which men call originality. Maxine saw the world by the light of her own lamp. Adams, though he had seen far more of the world than she, had seen it by the light of other people’s lamps.
The Hostage House of Yandjali would have told Maxine infinitely more than it told Adams. She would have read in Meeus’s face a story that he never deciphered; she would have seen in the people of the Silent Pools a whole nation in chains, when he with his other-people-begotten ideas of niggers and labour only saw a few recalcitrant blacks. It wanted skulls and bones to bring him to a sense of the sorrow around him; the sight of these people would have told Maxine of their tears.