on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage; but before the high and ponderous door, between the tall houses of a street as still and decorous as a well-kept sepulchre, I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever lived—a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker ‘than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to enter the house with me, the stretcher, the phantom-bearers; the wild crowd of obedient worshippers; the gloom of the forests; the glitter of the reach between the murky bends; the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart—the heart of a conquering darkness. It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful rush which, it seemed to me, I would have to keep back alone for the salvation of another soul. And the memory of what I had heard him say afar there, with the horned shapes stirring at my back, in the glow of fires, within the patient woods, those broken phrases came back to me, were heard again in their ominous and terrifying simplicity: ‘I have lived—supremely!’ ‘What do you want here? I have been dead—and damned.’ ‘Let me go—I want more of it.’ More of what? More blood, more heads on stakes, more adoration, rapine, and murder. I remembered his abject pleading, his abject threats, the colossal scale of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish of his soul. And later on his collected languid manner, when he said one day, ‘This lot of ivory now is really mine. The Company did not pay for it. I collected it myself at my personal risk. I am afraid they will claim it as theirs. It is a difficult case. What do you think I ought to do—resist? Eh? I want no more than justice.’ He wanted no more than justice. No more than justice. I rang the bell before a mahogany door on the first floor, and while I waited he seemed to stare at me out of the gleaming panel—stare with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry, ‘The horror! The horror!’
“The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty drawing-room with three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and heavy whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner, with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus. A high door opened—closed. I rose.
“She came forward, all in
