And then, to Dr. Clay’s amazement, his companion broke out into a violent exposition of his own particular belief.  It was the first time he had ever heard Kettle open his lips on the subject of religion, and the man’s vehemence almost scared him.  Throughout the time they had been acquainted, he had taken him to be like all other lay white men on the Congo, quite careless on the subject, and an abhorrer of missions and all their output; and, lo! here was an enthusiast, with a violent creed of his very own, and with ranting thunders to heave at all who differed from him by so much as a hairs-breadth.  Here was a devotee who suddenly, across a great ocean of absence, remembered the small chapel in South Shields, where during shore days he worshipped beside his wife and children.  Here was a prophet, jerked by circumstances into being, trumpeting the tenets of an obscure sect with something very near to inspiration.

He preached and preached on till the tropical day burned itself out, and the velvety night came down, and with it the mists from the river.  The negroes of the village, with their heads wrapped up to keep off the ghosts, shivered as they listened to “dem small whiteman make ju-ju” across the clearing.  Clay listened because he could not get away.  He knew the man well, yes, intimately; he was constantly dealing him out unpalatable flippancies; but in this new, this exalted mood, he did not care to do less than give attention.

The man seemed to have changed; his eyes were bright and feverish; his face was drawn; his voice had lost its shipmaster’s brusqueness, and had acquired the drone of the seaman’s shore conventicle.  There was no doubt about his earnestness; in Clay’s mind, there was no doubt about the complications which would ensue from it.

When Dr. Clay lay down on his bed that night, his mind was big with foreboding.  Ever since that entanglement with the woman occurred, which ruined forever his chance of practicing in England, he had gone his way with a fine recklessness as to consequences.  He had lived for the day, and the day only; he had got to the lowest peg on the medical scale; and any change would be an improvement.  He carried with him an incomplete case of instruments, a wire-strung banjo, and a fine taste in liquor and merriment as stock-in-trade, and if any of the many shapes which Death assumes in the Congo region came his way, why there he was ready to journey on.

But during these last weeks a chance had appeared of returning to England with a decent competency, and he jumped at it with an eagerness which only those who have at one time or other “gone under” themselves can appreciate.  In effect he had entered into a partnership with Captain Owen Kettle over a filibustering expedition—­although they gave the thing different names—­and from the first their ivory raiding had been extraordinarily successful.  If only they could collect on undisturbed for another six months at the same rate, and then get their spoils down to the coast and shipped, the pair of them stepped into a snug competence at once.  But this latest vagary of his partner’s seemed to promise disruption of the whole enterprise.  He did not see how Kettle could possibly carry out this evangelizing scheme, on which he had so suddenly gone crazed, without quite neglecting his other commercial duties.