________________________________________________
_ Lingard stood the lantern on the table. Its light was very poor.
He dropped on to the sea-chest heavily. He, too, was
over-wrought. His flannel shirt was open at the neck. He had a
broad belt round his waist and was without his jacket. Before
him, Mrs. Travers, straight and tall in the gay silks, cottons,
and muslins of her outlandish dress, with the ends of the scarf
thrown over her head, hanging down in front of her, looked dimly
splendid and with a black glance out of her white face. He said:
"Do you, too, want to throw me over? I tell you you can't do that
now."
"I wasn't thinking of throwing you over, but I don't even know
what you mean. There seem to be no end of things I can't do.
Hadn't you better tell me of something that I could do? Have you
any idea yourself what you want from me?"
"You can let me look at you. You can listen to me. You can speak
to me."
"Frankly, I have never shirked doing all those things, whenever
you wanted me to. You have led me . . ."
"I led you!" cried Lingard.
"Oh! It was my fault," she said, without anger. "I must have
dreamed then that it was you who came to me in the dark with the
tale of your impossible life. Could I have sent you away?"
"I wish you had. Why didn't you?"
"Do you want me to tell you that you were irresistible? How could
I have sent you away? But you! What made you come back to me with
your very heart on your lips?"
When Lingard spoke after a time it was in jerky sentences.
"I didn't stop to think. I had been hurt. I didn't think of you
people as ladies and gentlemen. I thought of you as people whose
lives I held in my hand. How was it possible to forget you in my
trouble? It is your face that I brought back with me on board my
brig. I don't know why. I didn't look at you more than at anybody
else. It took me all my time to keep my temper down lest it
should burn you all up. I didn't want to be rude to you people,
but I found it wasn't very easy because threats were the only
argument I had. Was I very offensive, Mrs. Travers?"
She had listened tense and very attentive, almost stern. And it
was without the slightest change of expression that she said:
"I think that you bore yourself appropriately to the state of
life to which it has pleased God to call you."
"What state?" muttered Lingard to himself. "I am what I am. They
call me Rajah Laut, King Tom, and such like. I think it amused
you to hear it, but I can tell you it is no joke to have such
names fastened on one, even in fun. And those very names have in
them something which makes all this affair here no small matter
to anybody."
She stood before him with a set, severe face.--"Did you call me
out in this alarming manner only to quarrel with me?"--"No, but
why do you choose this time to tell me that my coming for help to
you was nothing but impudence in your sight? Well, I beg your
pardon for intruding on your dignity."--"You misunderstood me,"
said Mrs. Travers, without relaxing for a moment her
contemplative severity. "Such a flattering thing had never
happened to me before and it will never happen to me again. But
believe me, King Tom, you did me too much honour. Jorgenson is
perfectly right in being angry with you for having taken a woman
in tow."--"He didn't mean to be rude," protested Lingard,
earnestly. Mrs. Travers didn't even smile at this intrusion of a
point of manners into the atmosphere of anguish and suspense that
seemed always to arise between her and this man who, sitting on
the sea-chest, had raised his eyes to her with an air of extreme
candour and seemed unable to take them off again. She continued
to look at him sternly by a tremendous effort of will.
"How changed you are," he murmured.
He was lost in the depths of the simplest wonder. She appeared to
him vengeful and as if turned forever into stone before his
bewildered remorse. Forever. Suddenly Mrs. Travers looked round
and sat down in the chair. Her strength failed her but she
remained austere with her hands resting on the arms of her seat.
Lingard sighed deeply and dropped his eyes. She did not dare
relax her muscles for fear of breaking down altogether and
betraying a reckless impulse which lurked at the bottom of her
dismay, to seize the head of d'Alcacer's Man of Fate, press it to
her breast once, fling it far away, and vanish herself, vanish
out of life like a wraith. The Man of Fate sat silent and bowed,
yet with a suggestion of strength in his dejection. "If I don't
speak," Mrs. Travers said to herself, with great inward calmness,
"I shall burst into tears." She said aloud, "What could have
happened? What have you dragged me in here for? Why don't you
tell me your news?"
"I thought you didn't want to hear. I believe you really don't
want to. What is all this to you? I believe that you don't care
anything about what I feel, about what I do and how I end. I
verily believe that you don't care how you end yourself. I
believe you never cared for your own or anybody's feelings. I
don't think it is because you are hard, I think it is because you
don't know, and don't want to know, and are angry with life."
He flourished an arm recklessly, and Mrs. Travers noticed for the
first time that he held a sheet of paper in his hand.
"Is that your news there?" she asked, significantly. "It's
difficult to imagine that in this wilderness writing can have any
significance. And who on earth here could send you news on paper?
Will you let me see it? Could I understand it? Is it in English?
Come, King Tom, don't look at me in this awful way."
She got up suddenly, not in indignation, but as if at the end of
her endurance. The jewelled clasps, the gold embroideries,
gleamed elusively amongst the folds of her draperies which
emitted a mysterious rustle.
"I can't stand this," she cried. "I can't stand being looked at
like this. No woman could stand it. No woman has ever been looked
at like this. What can you see? Hatred I could understand. What
is it you think me capable of?"
"You are very extraordinary," murmured Lingard, who had regained
his self-possession before that outburst.
"Very well, and you are extraordinary, too. That's
understood--here we are both under that curse and having to face
together whatever may turn up. But who on earth could have sent
you this writing?"
"Who?" repeated Lingard. "Why, that young fellow that blundered
on my brig in the dark, bringing a boatload of trouble alongside
on that quiet night in Carimata Straits. The darkest night I have
ever known. An accursed night."
Mrs. Travers bit her lip, waited a little, then asked quietly:
"What difficulty has he got into now?"
"Difficulty!" cried Lingard. "He is immensely pleased with
himself, the young fool. You know, when you sent him to talk to
me that evening you left the yacht, he came with a loaded pistol
in his pocket. And now he has gone and done it."
"Done it?" repeated Mrs. Travers blankly. "Done what?"
She snatched from Lingard's unresisting palm the sheet of paper.
While she was smoothing it Lingard moved round and stood close at
her elbow. She ran quickly over the first lines, then her eyes
steadied. At the end she drew a quick breath and looked up at
Lingard. Their faces had never been so close together before and
Mrs. Travers had a surprising second of a perfectly new
sensation. She looked away.--"Do you understand what this news
means?" he murmured. Mrs. Travers let her hand fall by her side.
"Yes," she said in a low tone. "The compact is broken."
Carter had begun his letter without any preliminaries:
You cleared out in the middle of the night and took the lady away
with you. You left me no proper orders. But as a sailorman I
looked upon myself as left in charge of two ships while within
half a mile on that sandbank there were more than a hundred
piratical cut-throats watching me as closely as so many tigers
about to leap. Days went by without a word of you or the lady. To
leave the ships outside and go inland to look for you was not to
be thought of with all those pirates within springing distance.
Put yourself in my place. Can't you imagine my anxiety, my
sleepless nights? Each night worse than the night before. And
still no word from you. I couldn't sit still and worry my head
off about things I couldn't understand. I am a sailorman. My
first duty was to the ships. I had to put an end to this
impossible situation and I hope you will agree that I have done
it in a seamanlike way. One misty morning I moved the brig nearer
the sandbank and directly the mist cleared I opened fire on the
praus of those savages which were anchored in the channel. We
aimed wide at first to give those vagabonds that were on board a
chance to clear out and join their friends camped on the sands. I
didn't want to kill people. Then we got the long gun to bear and
in about an hour we had the bottom knocked out of the two praus.
The savages on the bank howled and screamed at every shot. They
are mighty angry but I don't care for their anger now, for by
sinking their praus I have made them as harmless as a flock of
lambs. They needn't starve on their sandbank because they have
two or three dugouts hauled up on the sand and they may ferry
themselves and their women to the mainland whenever they like.
I fancy I have acted as a seaman and as a seaman I intend to go
on acting. Now I have made the ships safe I shall set about
without loss of time trying to get the yacht off the mud. When
that's done I shall arm the boats and proceed inshore to look for
you and the yacht's gentry, and shan't rest till I know whether
any or all of you are above the earth yet.
I hope these words will reach you. Just as we had done the
business of those praus the man you sent off that night in
Carimata to stop our chief officer came sailing in from the west
with our first gig in tow and the boat's crew all well. Your
serang tells me he is a most trustworthy messenger and that his
name is Jaffir. He seems only too anxious to try to get to you as
soon as possible. I repeat, ships and men have been made safe and
I don't mean to give you up dead or alive.
"You are quick in taking the point," said Lingard in a dull
voice, while Mrs. Travers, with the sheet of paper gripped in her
hand, looked into his face with anxious eyes. "He has been smart
and no mistake."
"He didn't know," murmured Mrs. Travers.
"No, he didn't know. But could I take everybody into my
confidence?" protested Lingard in the same low tone. "And yet who
else could I trust? It seemed to me that he must have understood
without being told. But he is too young. He may well be proud
according to his lights. He has done that job outside very
smartly--damn his smartness! And here we are with all our lives
depending on my word--which is broken now, Mrs. Travers. It is
broken."
Mrs. Travers nodded at him slightly.
"They would sooner have expected to see the sun and the moon fall
out of the sky," Lingard continued with repressed fire. Next
moment it seemed to have gone out of him and Mrs. Travers heard
him mutter a disconnected phrase. . . . "The world down about my
ears."
"What will you do?" she whispered.
"What will I do?" repeated Lingard, gently. "Oh, yes--do. Mrs.
Travers, do you see that I am nothing now? Just nothing."
He had lost himself in the contemplation of her face turned to
him with an expression of awed curiosity. The shock of the world
coming down about his ears in consequence of Carter's smartness
was so terrific that it had dulled his sensibilities in the
manner of a great pain or of a great catastrophe. What was there
to look at but that woman's face, in a world which had lost its
consistency, its shape, and its promises in a moment?
Mrs. Travers looked away. She understood that she had put to
Lingard an impossible question. What was presenting itself to her
as a problem was to that man a crisis of feeling. Obviously
Carter's action had broken the compact entered into with Daman,
and she was intelligent enough to understand that it was the sort
of thing that could not be explained away. It wasn't horror that
she felt, but a sort of consternation, something like the
discomfiture of people who have just missed their train. It was
only more intense. The real dismay had yet to make its way into
her comprehension. To Lingard it was a blow struck straight at
his heart.
He was not angry with Carter. The fellow had acted like a seaman.
Carter's concern was for the ships. In this fatality Carter was a
mere incident. The real cause of the disaster was somewhere else,
was other, and more remote. And at the same time Lingard could
not defend himself from a feeling that it was in himself, too,
somewhere in the unexplored depths of his nature, something fatal
and unavoidable. He muttered to himself:
"No. I am not a lucky man."
This was but a feeble expression of the discovery of the truth
that suddenly had come home to him as if driven into his breast
by a revealing power which had decided that this was to be the
end of his fling. But he was not the man to give himself up to
the examination of his own sensations. His natural impulse was to
grapple with the circumstances and that was what he was trying to
do; but he missed now that sense of mastery which is half the
battle. Conflict of some sort was the very essence of his life.
But this was something he had never known before. This was a
conflict within himself. He had to face unsuspected powers, foes
that he could not go out to meet at the gate. They were within,
as though he had been betrayed by somebody, by some secret enemy.
He was ready to look round for that subtle traitor. A sort of
blankness fell on his mind and he suddenly thought: "Why! It's
myself."
Immediately afterward he had a clear, merciless recollection of
Hassim and Immada. He saw them far off beyond the forests. Oh,
yes, they existed--within his breast!
"That was a night!" he muttered, looking straight at Mrs.
Travers. He had been looking at her all the time. His glance had
held her under a spell, but for a whole interminable minute he
had not been aware of her at all. At the murmur of his words she
made a slight movement and he saw her again.--"What night?" she
whispered, timidly, like an intruder. She was astonished to see
him smile.--"Not like this one," he said. "You made me notice how
quiet and still it was. Yes. Listen how still it is."
Both moved their heads slightly and seemed to lend an ear. There
was not a murmur, sigh, rustle, splash, or footfall. No whispers,
no tremors, not a sound of any kind. They might have been alone
on board the Emma, abandoned even by the ghost of Captain
Jorgenson departed to rejoin the Barque Wild Rose on the shore of
the Cimmerian sea.--"It's like the stillness of the end," said
Mrs. Travers in a low, equable voice.--"Yes, but that, too, is
false," said Lingard in the same tone.--"I don't understand,"
Mrs. Travers began, hurriedly, after a short silence. "But don't
use that word. Don't use it, King Tom! It frightens me by its
mere sound."
Lingard made no sign. His thoughts were back with Hassim and
Immada. The young chief and his sister had gone up country on a
voluntary mission to persuade Belarab to return to his stockade
and to take up again the direction of affairs. They carried
urgent messages from Lingard, who for Belarab was the very
embodiment of truth and force, that unquestioned force which had
permitted Belarab to indulge in all his melancholy hesitations.
But those two young people had also some personal prestige. They
were Lingard's heart's friends. They were like his children. But
beside that, their high birth, their warlike story, their
wanderings, adventures, and prospects had given them a glamour of
their own. _
Read next: PART V. THE POINT OF HONOUR AND THE POINT OF PASSION: CHAPTER V
Read previous: PART V. THE POINT OF HONOUR AND THE POINT OF PASSION: CHAPTER III
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