________________________________________________
_ What struck Mrs. Travers most, directly she set eyes on him, was
the other-world aspect of Jorgenson. He had been buried out of
sight so long that his tall, gaunt body, his unhurried,
mechanical movements, his set face and his eyes with an empty
gaze suggested an invincible indifference to all the possible
surprises of the earth. That appearance of a resuscitated man who
seemed to be commanded by a conjuring spell strolled along the
decks of what was even to Mrs. Travers' eyes the mere corpse of a
ship and turned on her a pair of deep-sunk, expressionless eyes
with an almost unearthly detachment. Mrs. Travers had never been
looked at before with that strange and pregnant abstraction. Yet
she didn't dislike Jorgenson. In the early morning light, white
from head to foot in a perfectly clean suit of clothes which
seemed hardly to contain any limbs, freshly shaven (Jorgenson's
sunken cheeks with their withered colouring always had a sort of
gloss as though he had the habit of shaving every two hours or
so), he looked as immaculate as though he had been indeed a pure
spirit superior to the soiling contacts of the material earth. He
was disturbing but he was not repulsive. He gave no sign of
greeting.
Lingard addressed him at once.
"You have had a regular staircase built up the side of the hulk,
Jorgenson," he said. "It was very convenient for us to come
aboard now, but in case of an attack don't you think . . ."
"I did think." There was nothing so dispassionate in the world as
the voice of Captain H. C. Jorgenson, ex Barque Wild Rose, since
he had recrossed the Waters of Oblivion to step back into the
life of men. "I did think, but since I don't want to make
trouble. . . ."
"Oh, you don't want to make trouble," interrupted Lingard.
"No. Don't believe in it. Do you, King Tom?"
"I may have to make trouble."
"So you came up here in this small dinghy of yours like this to
start making trouble, did you?"
"What's the matter with you? Don't you know me yet, Jorgenson?"
"I thought I knew you. How could I tell that a man like you would
come along for a fight bringing a woman with him?"
"This lady is Mrs. Travers," said Lingard. "The wife of one of
the luckless gentlemen Daman got hold of last evening. . . . This
is Jorgenson, the friend of whom I have been telling you, Mrs.
Travers."
Mrs. Travers smiled faintly. Her eyes roamed far and near and the
strangeness of her surroundings, the overpowering curiosity, the
conflict of interest and doubt gave her the aspect of one still
new to life, presenting an innocent and naive attitude before the
surprises of experience. She looked very guileless and youthful
between those two men. Lingard gazed at her with that unconscious
tenderness mingled with wonder, which some men manifest toward
girlhood. There was nothing of a conqueror of kingdoms in his
bearing. Jorgenson preserved his amazing abstraction which seemed
neither to hear nor see anything. But, evidently, he kept a
mysterious grip on events in the world of living men because he
asked very naturally:
"How did she get away?"
"The lady wasn't on the sandbank," explained Lingard, curtly.
"What sandbank?" muttered Jorgenson, perfunctorily. . . . "Is the
yacht looted, Tom?"
"Nothing of the kind," said Lingard.
"Ah, many dead?" inquired Jorgenson.
"I tell you there was nothing of the kind," said Lingard,
impatiently.
"What? No fight!" inquired Jorgenson again without the slightest
sign of animation.
"No."
"And you a fighting man."
"Listen to me, Jorgenson. Things turned out so that before the
time came for a fight it was already too late." He turned to Mrs.
Travers still looking about with anxious eyes and a faint smile
on her lips. "While I was talking to you that evening from the
boat it was already too late. No. There was never any time for
it. I have told you all about myself, Mrs. Travers, and you know
that I speak the truth when I say too late. If you had only been
alone in that yacht going about the seas!"
"Yes," she struck in, "but I was not alone."
Lingard dropped his chin on his breast. Already a foretaste of
noonday heat staled the sparkling freshness of the morning. The
smile had vanished from Edith Travers' lips and her eyes rested
on Lingard's bowed head with an expression no longer curious but
which might have appeared enigmatic to Jorgenson if he had looked
at her. But Jorgenson looked at nothing. He asked from the
remoteness of his dead past, "What have you left outside, Tom?
What is there now?"
"There's the yacht on the shoals, my brig at anchor, and about a
hundred of the worst kind of Illanun vagabonds under three chiefs
and with two war-praus moored to the edge of the bank. Maybe
Daman is with them, too, out there."
"No," said Jorgenson, positively.
"He has come in," cried Lingard. "He brought his prisoners in
himself then."
"Landed by torchlight," uttered precisely the shade of Captain
Jorgenson, late of the Barque Wild Rose. He swung his arm
pointing across the lagoon and Mrs. Travers turned about in that
direction.
All the scene was but a great light and a great solitude. Her
gaze travelled over the lustrous, dark sheet of empty water to a
shore bordered by a white beach empty, too, and showing no sign
of human life. The human habitations were lost in the shade of
the fruit trees, masked by the cultivated patches of Indian corn
and the banana plantations. Near the shore the rigid lines of two
stockaded forts could be distinguished flanking the beach, and
between them with a great open space before it, the brown roof
slope of an enormous long building that seemed suspended in the
air had a great square flag fluttering above it. Something like a
small white flame in the sky was the carved white coral finial on
the gable of the mosque which had caught full the rays of the
sun. A multitude of gay streamers, white and red, flew over the
half-concealed roofs, over the brilliant fields and amongst the
sombre palm groves. But it might have been a deserted settlement
decorated and abandoned by its departed population. Lingard
pointed to the stockade on the right.
"That's where your husband is," he said to Mrs. Travers.
"Who is the other?" uttered Jorgenson's voice at their backs. He
also was turned that way with his strange sightless gaze fixed
beyond them into the void.
"A Spanish gentleman I believe you said, Mrs Travers," observed
Lingard.
"It is extremely difficult to believe that there is anybody
there," murmured Mrs. Travers.
"Did you see them both, Jorgenson?" asked Lingard.
"Made out nobody. Too far. Too dark."
As a matter of fact Jorgenson had seen nothing, about an hour
before daybreak, but the distant glare of torches while the loud
shouts of an excited multitude had reached him across the water
only like a faint and tempestuous murmur. Presently the lights
went away processionally through the groves of trees into the
armed stockades. The distant glare vanished in the fading
darkness and the murmurs of the invisible crowd ceased suddenly
as if carried off by the retreating shadow of the night. Daylight
followed swiftly, disclosing to the sleepless Jorgenson the
solitude of the shore and the ghostly outlines of the familiar
forms of grouped trees and scattered human habitations. He had
watched the varied colours come out in the dawn, the wide
cultivated Settlement of many shades of green, framed far away by
the fine black lines of the forest-edge that was its limit and
its protection.
Mrs. Travers stood against the rail as motionless as a statue.
Her face had lost all its mobility and her cheeks were dead white
as if all the blood in her body had flowed back into her heart
and had remained there. Her very lips had lost their colour.
Lingard caught hold of her arm roughly.
"Don't, Mrs. Travers. Why are you terrifying yourself like this?
If you don't believe what I say listen to me asking Jorgenson. .
. ."
"Yes, ask me," mumbled Jorgenson in his white moustache.
"Speak straight, Jorgenson. What do you think? Are the gentlemen
alive?"
"Certainly," said Jorgenson in a sort of disappointed tone as
though he had expected a much more difficult question.
"Is their life in immediate danger?"
"Of course not," said Jorgenson.
Lingard turned away from the oracle. "You have heard him, Mrs.
Travers. You may believe every word he says. There isn't a
thought or a purpose in that Settlement," he continued, pointing
at the dumb solitude of the lagoon, "that this man doesn't know
as if they were his own."
"I know. Ask me," muttered Jorgenson, mechanically.
Mrs. Travers said nothing but made a slight movement and her
whole rigid figure swayed dangerously. Lingard put his arm firmly
round her waist and she did not seem aware of it till after she
had turned her head and found Lingard's face very near her own.
But his eyes full of concern looked so close into hers that she
was obliged to shut them like a woman about to faint.
The effect this produced upon Lingard was such that she felt the
tightening of his arm and as she opened her eyes again some of
the colour returned to her face. She met the deepened expression
of his solicitude with a look so steady, with a gaze that in
spite of herself was so profoundly vivid that its clearness
seemed to Lingard to throw all his past life into shade.--"I
don't feel faint. It isn't that at all," she declared in a
perfectly calm voice. It seemed to Lingard as cold as ice.
"Very well," he agreed with a resigned smile. "But you just catch
hold of that rail, please, before I let you go." She, too, forced
a smile on her lips.
"What incredulity," she remarked, and for a time made not the
slightest movement. At last, as if making a concession, she
rested the tips of her fingers on the rail. Lingard gradually
removed his arm. "And pray don't look upon me as a conventional
'weak woman' person, the delicate lady of your own conception,"
she said, facing Lingard, with her arm extended to the rail.
"Make that effort please against your own conception of what a
woman like me should be. I am perhaps as strong as you are,
Captain Lingard. I mean it literally. In my body."--"Don't you
think I have seen that long ago?" she heard his deep voice
protesting.--"And as to my courage," Mrs. Travers continued, her
expression charmingly undecided between frowns and smiles;
"didn't I tell you only a few hours ago, only last evening, that
I was not capable of thinking myself into a fright; you remember,
when you were begging me to try something of the kind. Don't
imagine that I would have been ashamed to try. But I couldn't
have done it. No. Not even for the sake of somebody else's
kingdom. Do you understand me?"
"God knows," said the attentive Lingard after a time, with an
unexpected sigh. "You people seem to be made of another stuff."
"What has put that absurd notion into your head?"
"I didn't mean better or worse. And I wouldn't say it isn't good
stuff either. What I meant to say is that it's different. One
feels it. And here we are."
"Yes, here we are," repeated Mrs. Travers. "And as to this moment
of emotion, what provoked it is not a concern for anybody or
anything outside myself. I felt no terror. I cannot even fix my
fears upon any distinct image. You think I am shamelessly
heartless in telling you this."
Lingard made no sign. It didn't occur to him to make a sign. He
simply hung on Mrs. Travers' words as it were only for the sake
of the sound.--"I am simply frank with you," she continued. "What
do I know of savagery, violence, murder? I have never seen a dead
body in my life. The light, the silence, the mysterious emptiness
of this place have suddenly affected my imagination, I suppose.
What is the meaning of this wonderful peace in which we
stand--you and I alone?"
Lingard shook his head. He saw the narrow gleam of the woman's
teeth between the parted lips of her smile, as if all the ardour
of her conviction had been dissolved at the end of her speech
into wistful recognition of their partnership before things
outside their knowledge. And he was warmed by something a little
helpless in that smile. Within three feet of them the shade of
Jorgenson, very gaunt and neat, stared into space.
"Yes. You are strong," said Lingard. "But a whole long night
sitting in a small boat! I wonder you are not too stiff to
stand."
"I am not stiff in the least," she interrupted, still smiling. "I
am really a very strong woman," she added, earnestly. "Whatever
happens you may reckon on that fact."
Lingard gave her an admiring glance. But the shade of Jorgenson,
perhaps catching in its remoteness the sound of the word woman,
was suddenly moved to begin scolding with all the liberty of a
ghost, in a flow of passionless indignation.
"Woman! That's what I say. That's just about the last touch--that
you, Tom Lingard, red-eyed Tom, King Tom, and all those fine
names, that you should leave your weapons twenty miles behind
you, your men, your guns, your brig that is your strength, and
come along here with your mouth full of fight, bare-handed and
with a woman in tow.--Well--well!"
"Don't forget, Jorgenson, that the lady hears you," remonstrated
Lingard in a vexed tone. . . . "He doesn't mean to be rude," he
remarked to Mrs. Travers quite loud, as if indeed Jorgenson were
but an immaterial and feelingless illusion. "He has forgotten."
"The woman is not in the least offended. I ask for nothing better
than to be taken on that footing."
"Forgot nothing!" mumbled Jorgenson with a sort of ghostly
assertiveness and as it were for his own satisfaction. "What's
the world coming to?"
"It was I who insisted on coming with Captain Lingard," said Mrs.
Travers, treating Jorgenson to a fascinating sweetness of tone.
"That's what I say! What is the world coming to? Hasn't King Tom
a mind of his own? What has come over him? He's mad! Leaving his
brig with a hundred and twenty born and bred pirates of the worst
kind in two praus on the other side of a sandbank. Did you insist
on that, too? Has he put himself in the hands of a strange
woman?"
Jorgenson seemed to be asking those questions of himself. Mrs.
Travers observed the empty stare, the self-communing voice, his
unearthly lack of animation. Somehow it made it very easy to
speak the whole truth to him.
"No," she said, "it is I who am altogether in his hands."
Nobody would have guessed that Jorgenson had heard a single word
of that emphatic declaration if he had not addressed himself to
Lingard with the question neither more nor less abstracted than
all his other speeches.
"Why then did you bring her along?"
"You don't understand. It was only right and proper. One of the
gentlemen is the lady's husband."
"Oh, yes," muttered Jorgenson. "Who's the other?"
"You have been told. A friend."
"Poor Mr. d'Alcacer," said Mrs. Travers. "What bad luck for him
to have accepted our invitation. But he is really a mere
acquaintance."
"I hardly noticed him," observed Lingard, gloomily. "He was
talking to you over the back of your chair when I came aboard the
yacht as if he had been a very good friend."
"We always understood each other very well," said Mrs. Travers,
picking up from the rail the long glass that was lying there. "I
always liked him, the frankness of his mind, and his great
loyalty."
"What did he do?" asked Lingard.
"He loved," said Mrs. Travers, lightly. "But that's an old
story." She raised the glass to her eyes, one arm extended fully
to sustain the long tube, and Lingard forgot d'Alcacer in
admiring the firmness of her pose and the absolute steadiness of
the heavy glass. She was as firm as a rock after all those
emotions and all that fatigue.
Mrs. Travers directed the glass instinctively toward the entrance
of the lagoon. The smooth water there shone like a piece of
silver in the dark frame of the forest. A black speck swept
across the field of her vision. It was some time before she could
find it again and then she saw, apparently so near as to be
within reach of the voice, a small canoe with two people in it.
She saw the wet paddles rising and dipping with a flash in the
sunlight. She made out plainly the face of Immada, who seemed to
be looking straight into the big end of the telescope. The chief
and his sister, after resting under the bank for a couple of
hours in the middle of the night, had entered the lagoon and were
making straight for the hulk. They were already near enough to be
perfectly distinguishable to the naked eye if there had been
anybody on board to glance that way. But nobody was even thinking
of them. They might not have existed except perhaps in the memory
of old Jorgenson. But that was mostly busy with all the
mysterious secrets of his late tomb.
Mrs. Travers lowered the glass suddenly. Lingard came out from a
sort of trance and said:
"Mr. d'Alcacer. Loved! Why shouldn't he?"
Mrs. Travers looked frankly into Lingard's gloomy eyes. "It isn't
that alone, of course," she said. "First of all he knew how to
love and then. . . . You don't know how artificial and barren
certain kinds of life can be. But Mr. d'Alcacer's life was not
that. His devotion was worth having."
"You seem to know a lot about him,'" said Lingard, enviously.
"Why do you smile?" She continued to smile at him for a little
while. The long brass tube over her shoulder shone like gold
against the pale fairness of her bare head.--"At a thought," she
answered, preserving the low tone of the conversation into which
they had fallen as if their words could have disturbed the
self-absorption of Captain H. C. Jorgenson. "At the thought that
for all my long acquaintance with Mr. d'Alcacer I don't know half
as much about him as I know about you."
"Ah, that's impossible," contradicted Lingard. "Spaniard or no
Spaniard, he is one of your kind."
"Tarred with the same brush," murmured Mrs. Travers, with only a
half-amused irony. But Lingard continued:
"He was trying to make it up between me and your husband, wasn't
he? I was too angry to pay much attention, but I liked him well
enough. What pleased me most was the way in which he gave it up.
That was done like a gentleman. Do you understand what I mean,
Mrs. Travers?"
"I quite understand."
"Yes, you would," he commented, simply. "But just then I was too
angry to talk to anybody. And so I cleared out on board my own
ship and stayed there, not knowing what to do and wishing you all
at the bottom of the sea. Don't mistake me, Mrs. Travers; it's
you, the people aft, that I wished at the bottom of the sea. I
had nothing against the poor devils on board, They would have
trusted me quick enough. So I fumed there till--till. . . . "
"Till nine o'clock or a little after," suggested Mrs. Travers,
impenetrably.
"No. Till I remembered you," said Lingard with the utmost
innocence.
"Do you mean to say that you forgot my existence so completely
till then? You had spoken to me on board the yacht, you know."
"Did I? I thought I did. What did I say?"
"You told me not to touch a dusky princess," answered Mrs.
Travers with a short laugh. Then with a visible change of mood as
if she had suddenly out of a light heart been recalled to the
sense of the true situation: "But indeed I meant no harm to this
figure of your dream. And, look over there. She is pursuing you."
Lingard glanced toward the north shore and suppressed an
exclamation of remorse. For the second time he discovered that he
had forgotten the existence of Hassim and Immada. The canoe was
now near enough for its occupants to distinguish plainly the
heads of three people above the low bulwark of the Emma. Immada
let her paddle trail suddenly in the water, with the exclamation,
"I see the white woman there." Her brother looked over his
shoulder and the canoe floated, arrested as if by the sudden
power of a spell.--"They are no dream to me," muttered Lingard,
sturdily. Mrs. Travers turned abruptly away to look at the
further shore. It was still and empty to the naked eye and seemed
to quiver in the sunshine like an immense painted curtain lowered
upon the unknown.
"Here's Rajah Hassim coming, Jorgenson. I had an idea he would
perhaps stay outside." Mrs. Travers heard Lingard's voice at her
back and the answering grunt of Jorgenson. She raised
deliberately the long glass to her eye, pointing it at the shore.
She distinguished plainly now the colours in the flutter of the
streamers above the brown roofs of the large Settlement, the stir
of palm groves, the black shadows inland and the dazzling white
beach of coral sand all ablaze in its formidable mystery. She
swept the whole range of the view and was going to lower the
glass when from behind the massive angle of the stockade there
stepped out into the brilliant immobility of the landscape a man
in a long white gown and with an enormous black turban
surmounting a dark face. Slow and grave he paced the beach
ominously in the sunshine, an enigmatical figure in an Oriental
tale with something weird and menacing in its sudden emergence
and lonely progress.
With an involuntary gasp Mrs. Travers lowered the glass. All at
once behind her back she heard a low musical voice beginning to
pour out incomprehensible words in a tone of passionate pleading.
Hassim and Immada had come on board and had approached Lingard.
Yes! It was intolerable to feel that this flow of soft speech
which had no meaning for her could make its way straight into
that man's heart. _
Read next: PART V. THE POINT OF HONOUR AND THE POINT OF PASSION: CHAPTER I
Read previous: PART IV. THE GIFT OF THE SHALLOWS: CHAPTER IV
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