← catalogue

The Rescue: A Romance of the Shallows

by Joseph Conrad · English · Gutenberg #1712 · 760,643 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Rescue: A Romance of the Shallows
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Rescue: A Romance of the Shallows

Author: Joseph Conrad


        
Release date: January 9, 2006 [eBook #1712]
                Most recently updated: March 2, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1712

Credits: Produced by Judy Boss and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESCUE: A ROMANCE OF THE SHALLOWS ***




Produced by Judy Boss and David Widger





THE RESCUE

A ROMANCE OF THE SHALLOWS


By Joseph Conrad


'Allas!' quod she, 'that ever this sholde happe! For wende I never,
by possibilitee, That swich a monstre or merveille mighte be!'--THE
FRANKELEYN'S TALE


TO FREDERIC COURTLAND PENFIELD LAST AMBASSADOR OF THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA TO THE LATE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE, THIS OLD TIME TALE IS GRATEFULLY
INSCRIBED IN MEMORY OF THE RESCUE OF CERTAIN DISTRESSED TRAVELLERS
EFFECTED BY HIM IN THE WORLD'S GREAT STORM OF THE YEAR 1914




AUTHOR'S NOTE

Of the three long novels of mine which suffered an interruption, “The
Rescue” was the one that had to wait the longest for the good pleasure
of the Fates. I am betraying no secret when I state here that it had
to wait precisely for twenty years. I laid it aside at the end of the
summer of 1898 and it was about the end of the summer of 1918 that I
took it up again with the firm determination to see the end of it and
helped by the sudden feeling that I might be equal to the task.

This does not mean that I turned to it with elation. I was well aware
and perhaps even too much aware of the dangers of such an adventure.
The amazingly sympathetic kindness which men of various temperaments,
diverse views and different literary tastes have been for years
displaying towards my work has done much for me, has done all--except
giving me that over-weening self-confidence which may assist an
adventurer sometimes but in the long run ends by leading him to the
gallows.

As the characteristic I want most to impress upon these short Author's
Notes prepared for my first Collected Edition is that of absolute
frankness, I hasten to declare that I founded my hopes not on my
supposed merits but on the continued goodwill of my readers. I may say
at once that my hopes have been justified out of all proportion to my
deserts. I met with the most considerate, most delicately expressed
criticism free from all antagonism and in its conclusions showing
an insight which in itself could not fail to move me deeply, but was
associated also with enough commendation to make me feel rich beyond the
dreams of avarice--I mean an artist's avarice which seeks its treasure
in the hearts of men and women.

No! Whatever the preliminary anxieties might have been this adventure
was not to end in sorrow. Once more Fortune favoured audacity; and yet
I have never forgotten the jocular translation of _Audaces fortuna juvat_
offered to me by my tutor when I was a small boy: “The Audacious get
bitten.” However he took care to mention that there were various kinds
of audacity. Oh, there are, there are! . . . There is, for instance, the
kind of audacity almost indistinguishable from impudence. . . . I
must believe that in this case I have not been impudent for I am not
conscious of having been bitten.

The truth is that when “The Rescue” was laid aside it was not laid aside
in despair. Several reasons contributed to this abandonment and, no
doubt, the first of them was the growing sense of general difficulty in
the handling of the subject. The contents and the course of the story I
had clearly in my mind. But as to the way of presenting the facts, and
perhaps in a certain measure as to the nature of the facts themselves,
I had many doubts. I mean the telling, representative facts, helpful
to carry on the idea, and, at the same time, of such a nature as not to
demand an elaborate creation of the atmosphere to the detriment of
the action. I did not see how I could avoid becoming wearisome in the
presentation of detail and in the pursuit of clearness. I saw the action
plainly enough. What I had lost for the moment was the sense of the
proper formula of expression, the only formula that would suit. This,
of course, weakened my confidence in the intrinsic worth and in the
possible interest of the story--that is in my invention. But I suspect
that all the trouble was, in reality, the doubt of my prose, the doubt
of its adequacy, of its power to master both the colours and the shades.

It is difficult to describe, exactly as I remember it, the complex state
of my feelings; but those of my readers who take an interest in artistic
perplexities will understand me best when I point out that I dropped
“The Rescue” not to give myself up to idleness, regrets, or dreaming,
but to begin “The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'” and to go on with it
without hesitation and without a pause. A comparison of any page of
“The Rescue” with any page of “The Nigger” will furnish an ocular
demonstration of the nature and the inward meaning of this first crisis
of my writing life. For it was a crisis undoubtedly. The laying aside of
a work so far advanced was a very awful decision to take. It was
wrung from me by a sudden conviction that _there_ only was the road of
salvation, the clear way out for an uneasy conscience. The finishing
of “The Nigger” brought to my troubled mind the comforting sense of
an accomplished task, and the first consciousness of a certain sort
of mastery which could accomplish something with the aid of propitious
stars. Why I did not return to “The Rescue” at once then, was not for
the reason that I had grown afraid of it. Being able now to assume a
firm attitude I said to myself deliberately: “That thing can wait.” At
the same time I was just as certain in my mind that “Youth,” a story
which I had then, so to speak, on the tip of my pen, could _not_ wait.
Neither could “Heart of Darkness” be put off; for the practical reason
that Mr. Wm. Blackwood having requested me to write something for the
No. M of his magazine I had to stir up at once the subject of that tale
which had been long lying quiescent in my mind, because, obviously, the
venerable Maga at her patriarchal age of 1000 numbers could not be kept
waiting. Then “Lord Jim,” with about seventeen pages already written at
odd times, put in his claim which was irresistible. Thus every stroke
of the pen was taking me further away from the abandoned “Rescue,” not
without some compunction on my part but with a gradually diminishing
resistance; till at last I let myself go as if recognising a superior
influence against which it was useless to contend.

The years passed and the pages grew in number, and the long reveries of
which they were the outcome stretched wide between me and the deserted
“Rescue” like the smooth hazy spaces of a dreamy sea. Yet I never
actually lost sight of that dark speck in the misty distance. It
had grown very small but it asserted itself with the appeal of old
associations. It seemed to me that it would be a base thing for me to
slip out of the world leaving it out there all alone, waiting for its
fate--that would never come?

Sentiment, pure sentiment as you see, prompted me in the last instance
to face the pains and hazards of that return. As I moved slowly towards
the abandoned body of the tale it loomed up big amongst the glittering
shallows of the coast, lonely but not forbidding. There was nothing
about it of a grim derelict. It had an air of expectant life. One after
another I made out the familiar faces watching my approach with faint
smiles of amused recognition. They had known well enough that I was
bound to come back to them. But their eyes met mine seriously as was
only to be expected since I, myself, felt very serious as I stood
amongst them again after years of absence. At once, without wasting
words, we went to work together on our renewed life; and every moment
I felt more strongly that They Who had Waited bore no grudge to the man
who however widely he may have wandered at times had played truant only
once in his life.

1920. J. C.




CONTENTS

PART I.   THE MAN AND THE BRIG

PART II.  THE SHORE OF REFUGE

PART III. THE CAPTURE

PART IV.  THE GIFT OF THE SHALLOWS

PART V.   THE POINT OF HONOUR AND THE POINT OF PASSION

PART VI.  THE CLAIM OF LIFE AND THE TOLL OF DEATH




PART I. THE MAN AND THE BRIG

The shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand
islands, big and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been
for centuries the scene of adventurous undertakings. The vices and the
virtues of four nations have been displayed in the conquest of that
region that even to this day has not been robbed of all the mystery
and romance of its past--and the race of men who had fought against
the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English, has not been
changed by the unavoidable defeat. They have kept to this day their
love of liberty, their fanatical devotion to their chiefs, their
blind fidelity in friendship and hate--all their lawful and unlawful
instincts. Their country of land and water--for the sea was as much
their country as the earth of their islands--has fallen a prey to the
western race--the reward of superior strength if not of superior virtue.
To-morrow the advancing civilization will obliterate the marks of a long
struggle in the accomplishment of its inevitable victory.

The adventurers who began that struggle have left no descendants. The
ideas of the world changed too quickly for that. But even far into the
present century they have had successors. Almost in our own day we have
seen one of them--a true adventurer in his devotion to his impulse--a
man of high mind and of pure heart, lay the foundation of a flourishing
state on the ideas of pity and justice. He recognized chivalrously the
claims of the conquered; he was a disinterested adventurer, and the
reward of his noble instincts is in the veneration with which a strange
and faithful race cherish his memory.

Misunderstood and traduced in life, the glory of his achievement has
vindicated the purity of his motives. He belongs to history. But there
were others--obscure adventurers who had not his advantages of birth,
position, and intelligence; who had only his sympathy with the people of
forests and sea he understood and loved so well. They can not be said
to be forgotten since they have not been known at all. They were lost
in the common crowd of seamen-traders of the Archipelago, and if
they emerged from their obscurity it was only to be condemned as
law-breakers. Their lives were thrown away for a cause that had no right
to exist in the face of an irresistible and orderly progress--their
thoughtless lives guided by a simple feeling.

But the wasted lives, for the few who know, have tinged with romance the
region of shallow waters and forest-clad islands, that lies far east,
and still mysterious between the deep waters of two oceans.


I

Out of the level blue of a shallow sea Carimata raises a lofty
barrenness of grey and yellow tints, the drab eminence of its arid
heights. Separated by a narrow strip of water, Suroeton, to the west,
shows a curved and ridged outline resembling the backbone of a stooping
giant. And to the eastward a troop of insignificant islets stand
effaced, indistinct, with vague features that seem to melt into the
gathering shadows. The night following from the eastward the retreat of
the setting sun advanced slowly, swallowing the land and the sea; the
land broken, tormented and abrupt; the sea smooth and inviting with its
easy polish of continuous surface to wanderings facile and endless.

There was no wind, and a small brig that had lain all the afternoon a
few miles to the northward and westward of Carimata had hardly altered
its position half a mile during all these hours. The calm was absolute,
a dead, flat calm, the stillness of a dead sea and of a dead atmosphere.
As far as the eye could reach there was nothing but an impressive
immobility. Nothing moved on earth, on the waters, and above them in the
unbroken lustre of the sky. On the unruffled surface of the straits the
brig floated tranquil and upright as if bolted solidly, keel to keel,
with its own image reflected in the unframed and immense mirror of
the sea. To the south and east the double islands watched silently the
double ship that seemed fixed amongst them forever, a hopeless captive
of the calm, a helpless prisoner of the shallow sea.

Since midday, when the light and capricious airs of these seas had
abandoned the little brig to its lingering fate, her head had swung
slowly to the westward and the end of her slender and polished jib-boom,
projecting boldly beyond the graceful curve of the bow, pointed at the
setting sun, like a spear poised high in the hand of an enemy. Right
aft by the wheel the Malay quartermaster stood with his bare, brown feet
firmly planted on the wheel-grating, and holding the spokes at right
angles, in a solid grasp, as though the ship had been running before a
gale. He stood there perfectly motionless, as if petrified but ready
to tend the helm as soon as fate would permit the brig to gather way
through the oily sea.

The only other human being then visible on the brig's deck was the
person in charge: a white man of low stature, thick-set, with shaven
cheeks, a grizzled moustache, and a face tinted a scarlet hue by the
burning suns and by the sharp salt breezes of the seas. He had thrown
off his light jacket, and clad only in white trousers and a thin cotton
singlet, with his stout arms crossed on his breast--upon which they
showed like two thick lumps of raw flesh--he prowled about from side to
side of the half-poop. On his bare feet he wore a pair of straw sandals,
and his head was protected by an enormous pith hat--once white but now
very dirty--which gave to the whole man the aspect of a phenomenal
and animated mushroom. At times he would interrupt his uneasy shuffle
athwart the break of the poop, and stand motionless with a vague gaze
fixed on the image of the brig in the calm water. He could also see down
there his own head and shoulders leaning out over the rail and he would
stand long, as if interested by his own features, and mutter vague
curses on the calm which lay upon the ship like an immovable burden,
immense and burning.

At last, he sighed profoundly, nerved himself for a great effort, and
making a start away from the rail managed to drag his slippers as far
as the binnacle. There he stopped again, exhausted and bored. From under
the lifted glass panes of the cabin skylight near by came the feeble
chirp of a canary, which appeared to give him some satisfaction. He
listened, smiled faintly muttered “Dicky, poor Dick--” and fell back
into the immense silence of the world. His eyes closed, his head hung
low over the hot brass of the binnacle top. Suddenly he stood up with a
jerk and said sharply in a hoarse voice:

“You've been sleeping--you. Shift the helm. She has got stern way on
her.”

The Malay, without the least flinch of feature or pose, as if he had
been an inanimate object called suddenly into life by some hidden magic
of the words, spun the wheel rapidly, letting the spokes pass through
his hands; and when the motion had stopped with a grinding noise, caught
hold again and held on grimly. After a while, however, he turned his
head slowly over his shoulder, glanced at the sea, and said in an
obstinate tone:

“No catch wind--no get way.”

“No catch--no catch--that's all you know about it,” growled the
red-faced seaman. “By and by catch Ali--” he went on with sudden
condescension. “By and by catch, and then the helm will be the right
way. See?”

The stolid seacannie appeared to see, and for that matter to hear,
nothing. The white man looked at the impassive Malay with disgust,
then glanced around the horizon--then again at the helmsman and ordered
curtly:

“Shift the helm back again. Don't you feel the air from aft? You are
like a dummy standing there.”

The Malay revolved the spokes again with disdainful obedience, and the
red-faced man was moving forward grunting to himself, when through the
open skylight the hail “On deck there!” arrested him short, attentive,
and with a sudden change to amiability in the expression of his face.

“Yes, sir,” he said, bending his ear toward the opening. “What's the
matter up there?” asked a deep voice from below.

The red-faced man in a tone of surprise said:

“Sir?”

“I hear that rudder grinding hard up and hard down. What are you up to,
Shaw? Any wind?”

“Ye-es,” drawled Shaw, putting his head down the skylight and speaking
into the gloom of the cabin. “I thought there was a light air, and--but
it's gone now. Not a breath anywhere under the heavens.”

He withdrew his head and waited a while by the skylight, but heard
only the chirping of the indefatigable canary, a feeble twittering that
seemed to ooze through the drooping red blossoms of geraniums growing in
flower-pots under the glass panes. He strolled away a step or two before
the voice from down below called hurriedly:

“Hey, Shaw? Are you there?”

“Yes, Captain Lingard,” he answered, stepping back. “Have we drifted
anything this afternoon?”

“Not an inch, sir, not an inch. We might as well have been at anchor.”

“It's always so,” said the invisible Lingard. His voice changed its tone
as he moved in the cabin, and directly afterward burst out with a
clear intonation while his head appeared above the slide of the cabin
entrance:

“Always so! The currents don't begin till it's dark, when a man can't
see against what confounded thing he is being drifted, and then the
breeze will come. Dead on end, too, I don't doubt.”

Shaw moved his shoulders slightly. The Malay at the wheel, after making
a dive to see the time by the cabin clock through the skylight, rang a
double stroke on the small bell aft. Directly forward, on the main deck,
a shrill whistle arose long drawn, modulated, dying away softly. The
master of the brig stepped out of the companion upon the deck of his
vessel, glanced aloft at the yards laid dead square; then, from the
door-step, took a long, lingering look round the horizon.

He was about thirty-five, erect and supple. He moved freely, more like
a man accustomed to stride over plains and hills, than like one who from
his earliest youth had been used to counteract by sudden swayings of his
body the rise and roll of cramped decks of small craft, tossed by the
caprice of angry or playful seas.

He wore a grey flannel shirt, and his white trousers were held by a blue
silk scarf wound tightly round his narrow waist. He had come up only for
a moment, but finding the poop shaded by the main-topsail he remained
on deck bareheaded. The light chestnut hair curled close about his
well-shaped head, and the clipped beard glinted vividly when he passed
across a narrow strip of sunlight, as if every hair in it had been
a wavy and attenuated gold wire. His mouth was lost in the heavy
moustache; his nose was straight, short, slightly blunted at the end;
a broad band of deeper red stretched under the eyes, clung to the cheek
bones. The eyes gave the face its remarkable expression. The eyebrows,
darker than the hair, pencilled a straight line below the wide and
unwrinkled brow much whiter than the sunburnt face. The eyes, as if
glowing with the light of a hidden fire, had a red glint in their
greyness that gave a scrutinizing ardour to the steadiness of their
gaze.

That man, once so well known, and now so completely forgotten amongst
the charming and heartless shores of the shallow sea, had amongst his
fellows the nickname of “Red-Eyed Tom.” He was proud of his luck but not
of his good sense. He was proud of his brig, of the speed of his craft,
which was reckoned the swiftest country vessel in those seas, and proud
of what she represented.

She represented a run of luck on the Victorian goldfields; his sagacious
moderation; long days of planning, of loving care in building; the
great joy of his youth, the incomparable freedom of the seas; a perfect
because a wandering home; his independence, his love--and his anxiety.
He had often heard men say that Tom Lingard cared for nothing on earth
but for his brig--and in his thoughts he would smilingly correct the
statement by adding that he cared for nothing _living_ but the brig.

To him she was as full of life as the great world. He felt her live in
every motion, in every roll, in every sway of her tapering masts,
of those masts whose painted trucks move forever, to a seaman's
eye, against the clouds or against the stars. To him she was always
precious--like old love; always desirable--like a strange woman; always
tender--like a mother; always faithful--like the favourite daughter of a
man's heart.

For hours he would stand elbow on rail, his head in his hand and
listen--and listen in dreamy stillness to the cajoling and promising
whisper of the sea, that slipped past in vanishing bubbles along the
smooth black-painted sides of his craft. What passed in such moments
of thoughtful solitude through the mind of that child of generations of
fishermen from the coast of Devon, who like most of his class was
dead to the subtle voices, and blind to the mysterious aspects of the
world--the man ready for the obvious, no matter how startling, how
terrible or menacing, yet defenceless as a child before the shadowy
impulses of his own heart; what could have been the thoughts of such a
man, when once surrendered to a dreamy mood, it is difficult to say.

No doubt he, like most of us, would be uplifted at times by the awakened
lyrism of his heart into regions charming, empty, and dangerous. But
also, like most of us, he was unaware of his barren journeys above the
interesting cares of this earth. Yet from these, no doubt absurd and
wasted moments, there remained on the man's daily life a tinge as that
of a glowing and serene half-light. It softened the outlines of his
rugged nature; and these moments kept close the bond between him and his
brig.

He was aware that his little vessel could give him something not to be
had from anybody or anything in the world; something specially his own.
The dependence of that solid man of bone and muscle on that obedient
thing of wood and iron, acquired from that feeling the mysterious
dignity of love. She--the craft--had all the qualities of a living
thing: speed, obedience, trustworthiness, endurance, beauty, capacity
to do and to suffer--all but life. He--the man--was the inspirer of that
thing that to him seemed the most perfect of its kind. His will was
its will, his thought was its impulse, his breath was the breath of
its existence. He felt all this confusedly, without ever shaping this
feeling into the soundless formulas of thought. To him she was unique
and dear, this brig of three hundred and fourteen tons register--a
kingdom!

And now, bareheaded and burly, he walked the deck of his kingdom with a
regular stride. He stepped out from the hip, swinging his arms with
the free motion of a man starting out for a fifteen-mile walk into open
country; yet at every twelfth stride he had to turn about sharply and
pace back the distance to the taffrail.

Shaw, with his hands stuck in his waistband, had hooked himself with
both elbows to the rail, and gazed apparently at the deck between his
feet. In reality he was contemplating a little house with a tiny front
garden, lost in a maze of riverside streets in the east end of London.
The circumstance that he had not, as yet, been able to make the
acquaintance of his son--now aged eighteen months--worried him slightly,
and was the cause of that flight of his fancy into the murky atmosphere
of his home. But it was a placid flight followed by a quick return.
In less than two minutes he was back in the brig. “All there,” as his
saying was. He was proud of being always “all there.”

He was abrupt in manner and grumpy in speech with the seamen. To his
successive captains, he was outwardly as deferential as he knew how, and
as a rule inwardly hostile--so very few seemed to him of the “all there”
 kind. Of Lingard, with whom he had only been a short time--having been
picked up in Madras Roads out of a home ship, which he had to leave
after a thumping row with the master--he generally approved, although he
recognized with regret that this man, like most others, had some absurd
fads; he defined them as “bottom-upwards notions.”

He was a man--as there were many--of no particular value to anybody but
himself, and of no account but as the chief mate of the brig, and the
only white man on board of her besides the captain. He felt himself
immeasurably superior to the Malay seamen whom he had to handle, and
treated them with lofty toleration, notwithstanding his opinion that at
a pinch those chaps would be found emphatically “not there.”

As soon as his mind came back from his home leave, he detached himself
from the rail and, walking forward, stood by the break of the poop,
looking along the port side of the main deck. Lingard on his own side
stopped in his walk and also gazed absentmindedly before him. In the
waist of the brig, in the narrow spars that were lashed on each side of
the hatchway, he could see a group of men squatting in a circle around a
wooden tray piled up with rice, which stood on the just swept deck.
The dark-faced, soft-eyed silent men, squatting on their hams, fed
decorously with an earnestness that did not exclude reserve.

Of the lot, only one or two wore sarongs, the others having
submitted--at least at sea--to the indignity of European trousers. Only
two sat on the spars. One, a man with a childlike, light yellow face,
smiling with fatuous imbecility under the wisps of straight coarse hair
dyed a mahogany tint, was the tindal of the crew--a kind of boatswain's
or serang's mate. The other, sitting beside him on the booms, was a
man nearly black, not much bigger than a large ape, and wearing on
his wrinkled face that look of comical truculence which is often
characteristic of men from the southwestern coast of Sumatra.

This was the kassab or store-keeper, the holder of a position of dignity
and ease. The kassab was the only one of the crew taking their evening
meal who noticed the presence on deck of their commander. He muttered
something to the tindal who directly cocked his old hat on one
side, which senseless action invested him with an altogether foolish
appearance. The others heard, but went on somnolently feeding with
spidery movements of their lean arms.

The sun was no more than a degree or so above the horizon, and from the
heated surface of the waters a slight low mist began to rise; a mist
thin, invisible to the human eye; yet strong enough to change the sun
into a mere glowing red disc, a disc vertical and hot, rolling down to
the edge of the horizontal and cold-looking disc of the shining sea.
Then the edges touched and the circular expanse of water took on
suddenly a tint, sombre, like a frown; deep, like the brooding
meditation of evil.

The falling sun seemed to be arrested for a moment in his descent by the
sleeping waters, while from it, to the motionless brig, shot out on
the polished and dark surface of the sea a track of light, straight and
shining, resplendent and direct; a path of gold and crimson and purple,
a path that seemed to lead dazzling and terrible from the earth straight
into heaven through the portals of a glorious death. It faded slowly.
The sea vanquished the light. At last only a vestige of the sun
remained, far off, like a red spark floating on the water. It lingered,
and all at once--without warning--went out as if extinguished by a
treacherous hand.

“Gone,” cried Lingard, who had watched intently yet missed the last
moment. “Gone! Look at the cabin clock, Shaw!”

“Nearly right, I think, sir. Three minutes past six.”

The helmsman struck four bells sharply. Another barefooted seacannie
glided on the far side of the poop to relieve the wheel, and the serang
of the brig came up the ladder to take charge of the deck from Shaw. He
came up to the compass, and stood waiting silently.

“The course is south by east when you get the wind, serang,” said Shaw,
distinctly.

“Sou' by eas',” repeated the elderly Malay with grave earnestness.

“Let me know when she begins to steer,” added Lingard.

“Ya, Tuan,” answered the man, glancing rapidly at the sky. “Wind
coming,” he muttered.

“I think so, too,” whispered Lingard as if to himself.

The shadows were gathering rapidly round the brig. A mulatto put his
head out of the companion and called out:

“Ready, sir.”

“Let's get a mouthful of something to eat, Shaw,” said Lingard. “I say,
just take a look around before coming below. It will be dark when we
come up again.”

“Certainly, sir,” said Shaw, taking up a long glass and putting it to
his eyes. “Blessed thing,” he went on in snatches while he worked the
tubes in and out, “I can't--never somehow--Ah! I've got it right at
last!”

He revolved slowly on his heels, keeping the end of the tube on the
sky-line. Then he shut the instrument with a click, and said decisively:

“Nothing in sight, sir.”

He followed his captain down below rubbing his hands cheerfully.

For a good while there was no sound on the poop of the brig. Then the
seacannie at the wheel spoke dreamily:

“Did the malim say there was no one on the sea?”

“Yes,” grunted the serang without looking at the man behind him.

“Between the islands there was a boat,” pronounced the man very softly.

The serang, his hands behind his back, his feet slightly apart, stood
very straight and stiff by the side of the compass stand. His face, now
hardly visible, was as inexpressive as the door of a safe.

“Now, listen to me,” insisted the helmsman in a gentle tone.

The man in authority did not budge a hair's breadth. The seacannie bent
down a little from the height of the wheel grating.

“I saw a boat,” he murmured with something of the tender obstinacy of
a lover begging for a favour. “I saw a boat, O Haji Wasub! Ya! Haji
Wasub!”

The serang had been twice a pilgrim, and was not insensible to the sound
of his rightful title. There was a grim smile on his face.

“You saw a floating tree, O Sali,” he said, ironically.

“I am Sali, and my eyes are better than the bewitched brass thing that
pulls out to a great length,” said the pertinacious helmsman. “There was
a boat, just clear of the easternmost island. There was a boat, and
they in her could see the ship on the light of the west--unless they are
blind men lost on the sea. I have seen her. Have you seen her, too, O
Haji Wasub?”

“Am I a fat white man?” snapped the serang. “I was a man of the sea
before you were born, O Sali! The order is to keep silence and mind the
rudder, lest evil befall the ship.”

After these words he resumed his rigid aloofness. He stood, his legs
slightly apart, very stiff and straight, a little on one side of the
compass stand. His eyes travelled incessantly from the illuminated card
to the shadowy sails of the brig and back again, while his body was
motionless as if made of wood and built into the ship's frame. Thus,
with a forced and tense watchfulness, Haji Wasub, serang of the brig
Lightning, kept the captain's watch unwearied and wakeful, a slave to
duty.

In half an hour after sunset the darkness had taken complete possession
of earth and heavens. The islands had melted into the night. And on the
smooth water of the Straits, the little brig lying so still, seemed
to sleep profoundly, wrapped up in a scented mantle of star light and
silence.



II

It was half-past eight o'clock before Lingard came on deck again.
Shaw--now with a coat on--trotted up and down the poop leaving behind
him a smell of tobacco smoke. An irregularly glowing spark seemed to run
by itself in the darkness before the rounded form of his head. Above the
masts of the brig the dome of the clear heaven was full of lights that
flickered, as if some mighty breathings high up there had been swaying
about the flame of the stars. There was no sound along the brig's decks,
and the heavy shadows that lay on it had the aspect, in that silence,
of secret places concealing crouching forms that waited in perfect
stillness for some decisive event. Lingard struck a match to light his
cheroot, and his powerful face with narrowed eyes stood out for a moment
in the night and vanished suddenly. Then two shadowy forms and two red
sparks moved backward and forward on the poop. A larger, but a paler
and oval patch of light from the compass lamps lay on the brasses of
the wheel and on the breast of the Malay standing by the helm. Lingard's
voice, as if unable altogether to master the enormous silence of the
sea, sounded muffled, very calm--without the usual deep ring in it.

“Not much change, Shaw,” he said.

“No, sir, not much. I can just see the island--the big one--still in
the same place. It strikes me, sir, that, for calms, this here sea is a
devil of locality.”

He cut “locality” in two with an emphatic pause. It was a good word. He
was pleased with himself for thinking of it. He went on again:

“Now--since noon, this big island--”

“Carimata, Shaw,” interrupted Lingard.

“Aye, sir; Carimata--I mean. I must say--being a stranger hereabouts--I
haven't got the run of those--”

He was going to say “names” but checked himself and said,
“appellations,” instead, sounding every syllable lovingly.

“Having for these last fifteen years,” he continued, “sailed regularly
from London in East-Indiamen, I am more at home over there--in the Bay.”

He pointed into the night toward the northwest and stared as if he could
see from where he stood that Bay of Bengal where--as he affirmed--he
would be so much more at home.

“You'll soon get used--” muttered Lingard, swinging in his rapid walk
past his mate. Then he turned round, came back, and asked sharply.

“You said there was nothing afloat in sight before dark? Hey?”

“Not that I could see, sir. When I took the deck again at eight, I asked
that serang whether there was anything about; and I understood him to
say there was no more as when I went below at six. This is a lonely sea
at times--ain't it, sir? Now, one would think at this time of the year
the homeward-bounders from China would be pretty thick here.”

“Yes,” said Lingard, “we have met very few ships since we left Pedra
Branca over the stern. Yes; it has been a lonely sea. But for all that,
Shaw, this sea, if lonely, is not blind. Every island in it is an eye.
And now, since our squadron has left for the China waters--”

He did not finish his sentence. Shaw put his hands in his pockets, and
propped his back against the sky-light, comfortably.

“They say there is going to be a war with China,” he said in a gossiping
tone, “and the French are going along with us as they did in the Crimea
five years ago. It seems to me we're getting mighty good friends with
the French. I've not much of an opinion about that. What do you think,
Captain Lingard?”

“I have met their men-of-war in the Pacific,” said Lingard, slowly. “The
ships were fine and the fellows in them were civil enough to me--and
very curious about my business,” he added with a laugh. “However, I
wasn't there to make war on them. I had a rotten old cutter then, for
trade, Shaw,” he went on with animation.

“Had you, sir?” said Shaw without any enthusiasm. “Now give me a big
ship--a ship, I say, that one may--”

“And later on, some years ago,” interrupted Lingard, “I chummed with
a French skipper in Ampanam--being the only two white men in the whole
place. He was a good fellow, and free with his red wine. His English
was difficult to understand, but he could sing songs in his own language
about ah-moor--Ah-moor means love, in French--Shaw.”

“So it does, sir--so it does. When I was second mate of a Sunderland
barque, in forty-one, in the Mediterranean, I could pay out their lingo
as easy as you would a five-inch warp over a ship's side--”

“Yes, he was a proper man,” pursued Lingard, meditatively, as if for
himself only. “You could not find a better fellow for company ashore. He
had an affair with a Bali girl, who one evening threw a red blossom at
him from within a doorway, as we were going together to pay our respects
to the Rajah's nephew. He was a good-looking Frenchman, he was--but the
girl belonged to the Rajah's nephew, and it was a serious matter. The
old Rajah got angry and said the girl must die. I don't think the nephew
cared particularly to have her krissed; but the old fellow made a great
fuss and sent one of his own chief men to see the thing done--and the
girl had enemies--her own relations approved! We could do nothing. Mind,
Shaw, there was absolutely nothing else between them but that unlucky
flower which the Frenchman pinned to his coat--and afterward, when the
girl was dead, wore under his shirt, hung round his neck in a small box.
I suppose he had nothing else to put it into.”

“Would those savages kill a woman for that?” asked Shaw, incredulously.

“Aye! They are pretty moral there. That was the first time in my life
I nearly went to war on my own account, Shaw. We couldn't talk those
fellows over. We couldn't bribe them, though the Frenchman offered the
best he had, and I was ready to back him to the last dollar, to the last
rag of cotton, Shaw! No use--they were that blamed respectable. So, says
the Frenchman to me: 'My friend, if they won't take our gunpowder for a
gift let us burn it to give them lead.' I was armed as you see now;
six eight-pounders on the main deck and a long eighteen on the
forecastle--and I wanted to try 'em. You may believe me! However, the
Frenchman had nothing but a few old muskets; and the beggars got to
windward of us by fair words, till one morning a boat's crew from the
Frenchman's ship found the girl lying dead on the beach. That put an end
to our plans. She was out of her trouble anyhow, and no reasonable man
will fight for a dead woman. I was never vengeful, Shaw, and--after
all--she didn't throw that flower at me. But it broke the Frenchman up
altogether. He began to mope, did no business, and shortly afterward
sailed away. I cleared a good many pence out of that trip, I remember.”

With these words he seemed to come to the end of his memories of that
trip. Shaw stifled a yawn.

“Women are the cause of a lot of trouble,” he said, dispassionately.
“In the Morayshire, I remember, we had once a passenger--an old
gentleman--who was telling us a yarn about them old-time Greeks fighting
for ten years about some woman. The Turks kidnapped her, or something.
Anyway, they fought in Turkey; which I may well believe. Them Greeks and
Turks were always fighting. My father was master's mate on board one of
the three-deckers at the battle of Navarino--and that was when we went
to help those Greeks. But this affair about a woman was long before that
time.”

“I should think so,” muttered Lingard, hanging over the rail, and
watching the fleeting gleams that passed deep down in the water, along
the ship's bottom.

“Yes. Times are changed. They were unenlightened in those old days. My
grandfather was a preacher and, though my father served in the navy, I
don't hold with war. Sinful the old gentleman called it--and I think so,
too. Unless with Chinamen, or niggers, or such people as must be kept in
order and won't listen to reason; having not sense enough to know
what's good for them, when it's explained to them by their
betters--missionaries, and such like au-tho-ri-ties. But to fight ten
years. And for a woman!”

“I have read the tale in a book,” said Lingard, speaking down over the
side as if setting his words gently afloat upon the sea. “I have read
the tale. She was very beautiful.”

“That only makes it worse, sir--if anything. You may depend on it she
was no good. Those pagan times will never come back, thank God. Ten
years of murder and unrighteousness! And for a woman! Would anybody do
it now? Would you do it, sir? Would you--”

The sound of a bell struck sharply interrupted Shaw's discourse. High
aloft, some dry block sent out a screech, short and lamentable, like a
cry of pain. It pierced the quietness of the night to the very core, and
seemed to destroy the reserve which it had imposed upon the tones of the
two men, who spoke now loudly.

“Throw the cover over the binnacle,” said Lingard in his duty voice.
“The thing shines like a full moon. We mustn't show more lights than we
can help, when becalmed at night so near the land. No use in being seen
if you can't see yourself--is there? Bear that in mind, Mr. Shaw. There
may be some vagabonds prying about--”

“I thought all this was over and done for,” said Shaw, busying himself
with the cover, “since Sir Thomas Cochrane swept along the Borneo coast
with his squadron some years ago. He did a rare lot of fighting--didn't
he? We heard about it from the chaps of the sloop Diana that was
refitting in Calcutta when I was there in the Warwick Castle. They took
some king's town up a river hereabouts. The chaps were full of it.”

“Sir Thomas did good work,” answered Lingard, “but it will be a long
time before these seas are as safe as the English Channel is in peace
time. I spoke about that light more to get you in the way of things to
be attended to in these seas than for anything else. Did you notice how
few native craft we've sighted for all these days we have been drifting
about--one may say--in this sea?”

“I can't say I have attached any significance to the fact, sir.”

“It's a sign that something is up. Once set a rumour afloat in these
waters, and it will make its way from island to island, without any
breeze to drive it along.”

“Being myself a deep-water man sailing steadily out of home ports nearly
all my life,” said Shaw with great deliberation, “I cannot pretend to
see through the peculiarities of them out-of-the-way parts. But I can
keep a lookout in an ordinary way, and I have noticed that craft of any
kind seemed scarce, for the last few days: considering that we had land
aboard of us--one side or another--nearly every day.”

“You will get to know the peculiarities, as you call them, if you remain
any time with me,” remarked Lingard, negligently.

“I hope I shall give satisfaction, whether the time be long or short!”
 said Shaw, accentuating the meaning of his words by the distinctness
of his utterance. “A man who has spent thirty-two years of his life on
saltwater can say no more. If being an officer of home ships for the
last fifteen years I don't understand the heathen ways of them there
savages, in matters of seamanship and duty, you will find me all there,
Captain Lingard.”

“Except, judging from what you said a little while ago--except in the
matter of fighting,” said Lingard, with a short laugh.

“Fighting! I am not aware that anybody wants to fight me. I am a
peaceable man, Captain Lingard, but when put to it, I could fight as
well as any of them flat-nosed chaps we have to make shift with, instead
of a proper crew of decent Christians. Fighting!” he went on with
unexpected pugnacity of tone, “Fighting! If anybody comes to fight me,
he will find me all there, I swear!”

“That's all right. That's all right,” said Lingard, stretching his arms
above his head and wriggling his shoulders. “My word! I do wish a breeze
would come to let us get away from here. I am rather in a hurry, Shaw.”

“Indeed, sir! Well, I never yet met a thorough seafaring man who was not
in a hurry when a con-demned spell of calm had him by the heels. When a
breeze comes . . . just listen to this, sir!”

“I hear it,” said Lingard. “Tide-rip, Shaw.”

“So I presume, sir. But what a fuss it makes. Seldom heard such a--”

On the sea, upon the furthest limits of vision, appeared an advancing
streak of seething foam, resembling a narrow white ribbon, drawn rapidly
along the level surface of the water by its two ends, which were lost in
the darkness. It reached the brig, passed under, stretching out on each
side; and on each side the water became noisy, breaking into numerous
and tiny wavelets, a mimicry of an immense agitation. Yet the vessel in
the midst of this sudden and loud disturbance remained as motionless and
steady as if she had been securely moored between the stone walls of a
safe dock. In a few moments the line of foam and ripple running swiftly
north passed at once beyond sight and earshot, leaving no trace on the
unconquerable calm.

“Now this is very curious--” began Shaw.

Lingard made a gesture to command silence. He seemed to listen yet, as
if the wash of the ripple could have had an echo which he expected to
hear. And a man's voice that was heard forward had something of the
impersonal ring of voices thrown back from hard and lofty cliffs upon
the empty distances of the sea. It spoke in Malay--faintly.

“What?” hailed Shaw. “What is it?”

Lingard put a restraining hand for a moment on his chief officer's
shoulder, and moved forward smartly. Shaw followed, puzzled. The rapid
exchange of incomprehensible words thrown backward and forward through
the shadows of the brig's main deck from his captain to the lookout man
and back again, made him feel sadly out of it, somehow.

Lingard had called out sharply--“What do you see?” The answer direct and
quick was--“I hear, Tuan. I hear oars.”

“Whereabouts?”

“The night is all around us. I hear them near.”

“Port or starboard?”

There was a short delay in answer this time. On the quarter-deck,
under the poop, bare feet shuffled. Somebody coughed. At last the voice
forward said doubtfully:

“Kanan.”

“Call the serang, Mr. Shaw,” said Lingard, calmly, “and have the hands
turned up. They are all lying about the decks. Look sharp now. There's
something near us. It's annoying to be caught like this,” he added in a
vexed tone.

He crossed over to the starboard side, and stood listening, one hand
grasping the royal back-stay, his ear turned to the sea, but he could
hear nothing from there. The quarter-deck was filled with subdued
sounds. Suddenly, a long, shrill whistle soared, reverberated loudly
amongst the flat surfaces of motionless sails, and gradually grew faint
as if the sound had escaped and gone away, running upon the water. Haji
Wasub was on deck and ready to carry out the white man's commands. Then
silence fell again on the brig, until Shaw spoke quietly.

“I am going forward now, sir, with the tindal. We're all at stations.”

“Aye, Mr. Shaw. Very good. Mind they don't board you--but I can hear
nothing. Not a sound. It can't be much.”

“The fellow has been dreaming, no doubt. I have good ears, too, and--”

He went forward and the end of his sentence was lost in an indistinct
growl. Lingard stood attentive. One by one the three seacannies off duty
appeared on the poop and busied themselves around a big chest that stood
by the side of the cabin companion. A rattle and clink of steel weapons
turned out on the deck was heard, but the men did not even whisper.
Lingard peered steadily into the night, then shook his head.

“Serang!” he called, half aloud.

The spare old man ran up the ladder so smartly that his bony feet did
not seem to touch the steps. He stood by his commander, his hands behind
his back; a figure indistinct but straight as an arrow.

“Who was looking out?” asked Lingard.

“Badroon, the Bugis,” said Wasub, in his crisp, jerky manner.

“I can hear nothing. Badroon heard the noise in his mind.”

“The night hides the boat.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Yes, Tuan. Small boat. Before sunset. By the land. Now coming
here--near. Badroon heard him.”

“Why didn't you report it, then?” asked Lingard, sharply.

“Malim spoke. He said: 'Nothing there,' while I could see. How could I
know what was in his mind or yours, Tuan?”

“Do you hear anything now?”

“No. They stopped now. Perhaps lost the ship--who knows? Perhaps
afraid--”

“Well!” muttered Lingard, moving his feet uneasily. “I believe you lie.
What kind of boat?”

“White men's boat. A four-men boat, I think. Small. Tuan, I hear him
now! There!”

He stretched his arm straight out, pointing abeam for a time, then his
arm fell slowly.

“Coming this way,” he added with decision.

From forward Shaw called out in a startled tone:

“Something on the water, sir! Broad on this bow!”

“All right!” called back Lingard.

A lump of blacker darkness floated into his view. From it came over the
water English words--deliberate, reaching him one by one; as if each had
made its own difficult way through the profound stillness of the night.

“What--ship--is--that--pray?”

“English brig,” answered Lingard, after a short moment of hesitation.

“A brig! I thought you were something bigger,” went on the voice from
the sea with a tinge of disappointment in its deliberate tone. “I am
coming alongside--if--you--please.”

“No! you don't!” called Lingard back, sharply. The leisurely drawl of
the invisible speaker seemed to him offensive, and woke up a hostile
feeling. “No! you don't if you care for your boat. Where do you spring
from? Who are you--anyhow? How many of you are there in that boat?”

After these emphatic questions there was an interval of silence. During
that time the shape of the boat became a little more distinct. She must
have carried some way on her yet, for she loomed up bigger and nearly
abreast of where Lingard stood, before the self-possessed voice was
heard again:

“I will show you.”

Then, after another short pause, the voice said, less loud but very
plain:

“Strike on the gunwale. Strike hard, John!” and suddenly a blue light
blazed out, illuminating with a livid flame a round patch in the
night. In the smoke and splutter of that ghastly halo appeared a white,
four-oared gig with five men sitting in her in a row. Their heads were
turned toward the brig with a strong expression of curiosity on their
faces, which, in this glare, brilliant and sinister, took on a deathlike
aspect and resembled the faces of interested corpses. Then the bowman
dropped into the water the light he held above his head and the
darkness, rushing back at the boat, swallowed it with a loud and angry
hiss.

“Five of us,” said the composed voice out of the night that seemed now
darker than before. “Four hands and myself. We belong to a yacht--a
British yacht--”

“Come on board!” shouted Lingard. “Why didn't you speak at once? I
thought you might have been some masquerading Dutchmen from a dodging
gunboat.”

“Do I speak like a blamed Dutchman? Pull a stroke, boys--oars! Tend bow,
John.”

The boat came alongside with a gentle knock, and a man's shape began to
climb at once up the brig's side with a kind of ponderous agility. It
poised itself for a moment on the rail to say down into the boat--“Sheer
off a little, boys,” then jumped on deck with a thud, and said to Shaw
who was coming aft: “Good evening . . . Captain, sir?”

“No. On the poop!” growled Shaw.

“Come up here. Come up,” called Lingard, impatiently.

The Malays had left their stations and stood clustered by the mainmast
in a silent group. Not a word was spoken on the brig's decks, while the
stranger made his way to the waiting captain. Lingard saw approaching
him a short, dapper man, who touched his cap and repeated his greeting
in a cool drawl:

“Good evening. . . Captain, sir?”

“Yes, I am the master--what's the matter? Adrift from your ship? Or
what?”

“Adrift? No! We left her four days ago, and have been pulling that gig
in a calm, nearly ever since. My men are done. So is the water. Lucky
thing I sighted you.”

“You sighted me!” exclaimed Lingard. “When? What time?”

“Not in the dark, you may be sure. We've been knocking about amongst
some islands to the southward, breaking our hearts tugging at the oars
in one channel, then in another--trying to get clear. We got round an
islet--a barren thing, in shape like a loaf of sugar--and I caught sight
of a vessel a long way off. I took her bearing in a hurry and we buckled
to; but another of them currents must have had hold of us, for it was a
long time before we managed to clear that islet. I steered by the
stars, and, by the Lord Harry, I began to think I had missed you
somehow--because it must have been you I saw.”

“Yes, it must have been. We had nothing in sight all day,” assented
Lingard. “Where's your vessel?” he asked, eagerly.

“Hard and fast on middling soft mud--I should think about sixty miles
from here. We are the second boat sent off for assistance. We parted
company with the other on Tuesday. She must have passed to the northward
of you to-day. The chief officer is in her with orders to make for
Singapore. I am second, and was sent off toward the Straits here on the
chance of falling in with some ship. I have a letter from the owner. Our
gentry are tired of being stuck in the mud and wish for assistance.”

“What assistance did you expect to find down here?”

“The letter will tell you that. May I ask, Captain, for a little water
for the chaps in my boat? And I myself would thank you for a drink.
We haven't had a mouthful since this afternoon. Our breaker leaked out
somehow.”

“See to it, Mr. Shaw,” said Lingard. “Come down the cabin, Mr.--”

“Carter is my name.”

“Ah! Mr. Carter. Come down, come down,” went on Lingard, leading the way
down the cabin stairs.

The steward had lighted the swinging lamp, and had put a decanter and
bottles on the table. The cuddy looked cheerful, painted white, with
gold mouldings round the panels. Opposite the curtained recess of the
stern windows there was a sideboard with a marble top, and, above it,
a looking-glass in a gilt frame. The semicircular couch round the stern
had cushions of crimson plush. The table was covered with a black
Indian tablecloth embroidered in vivid colours. Between the beams of the
poop-deck were fitted racks for muskets, the barrels of which glinted
in the light. There were twenty-four of them between the four beams. As
many sword-bayonets of an old pattern encircled the polished teakwood of
the rudder-casing with a double belt of brass and steel. All the doors
of the state-rooms had been taken off the hinges and only curtains
closed the doorways. They seemed to be made of yellow Chinese silk, and
fluttered all together, the four of them, as the two men entered the
cuddy.

Carter took in all at a glance, but his eyes were arrested by a circular
shield hung slanting above the brass hilts of the bayonets. On its
red field, in relief and brightly gilt, was represented a sheaf of
conventional thunderbolts darting down the middle between the two
capitals T. L. Lingard examined his guest curiously. He saw a young
man, but looking still more youthful, with a boyish smooth face much
sunburnt, twinkling blue eyes, fair hair and a slight moustache. He
noticed his arrested gaze.

“Ah, you're looking at that thing. It's a present from the builder of
this brig. The best man that ever launched a craft. It's supposed to be
the ship's name between my initials--flash of lightning--d'you see? The
brig's name is Lightning and mine is Lingard.”

“Very pretty thing that: shows the cabin off well,” murmured Carter,
politely.

They drank, nodding at each other, and sat down.

“Now for the letter,” said Lingard.

Carter passed it over the table and looked about, while Lingard took
the letter out of an open envelope, addressed to the commander of any
British ship in the Java Sea. The paper was thick, had an embossed
heading: “Schooner-yacht Hermit” and was dated four days before. The
message said that on a hazy night the yacht had gone ashore upon some
outlying shoals off the coast of Borneo. The land was low. The opinion
of the sailing-master was that the vessel had gone ashore at the top
of high water, spring tides. The coast was completely deserted to all
appearance. During the four days they had been stranded there they
had sighted in the distance two small native vessels, which did
not approach. The owner concluded by asking any commander of a
homeward-bound ship to report the yacht's position in Anjer on his way
through Sunda Straits--or to any British or Dutch man-of-war he might
meet. The letter ended by anticipatory thanks, the offer to pay any
expenses in connection with the sending of messages from Anjer, and the
usual polite expressions.

Folding the paper slowly in the old creases, Lingard said--“I am not
going to Anjer--nor anywhere near.”

“Any place will do, I fancy,” said Carter.

“Not the place where I am bound to,” answered Lingard, opening the
letter again and glancing at it uneasily. “He does not describe very
well the coast, and his latitude is very uncertain,” he went on. “I
am not clear in my mind where exactly you are stranded. And yet I know
every inch of that land--over there.”

Carter cleared his throat and began to talk in his slow drawl. He seemed
to dole out facts, to disclose with sparing words the features of the
coast, but every word showed the minuteness of his observation, the
clear vision of a seaman able to master quickly the aspect of a strange
land and of a strange sea. He presented, with concise lucidity, the
picture of the tangle of reefs and sandbanks, through which the yacht
had miraculously blundered in the dark before she took the ground.

“The weather seems clear enough at sea,” he observed, finally, and
stopped to drink a long draught. Lingard, bending over the table, had
been listening with eager attention. Carter went on in his curt and
deliberate manner:

“I noticed some high trees on what I take to be the mainland to the
south--and whoever has business in that bight was smart enough to
whitewash two of them: one on the point, and another farther in.
Landmarks, I guess. . . . What's the matter, Captain?”

Lingard had jumped to his feet, but Carter's exclamation caused him to
sit down again.

“Nothing, nothing . . . Tell me, how many men have you in that yacht?”

“Twenty-three, besides the gentry, the owner, his wife and a Spanish
gentleman--a friend they picked up in Manila.”

“So you were coming from Manila?”

“Aye. Bound for Batavia. The owner wishes to study the Dutch colonial
system. Wants to expose it, he says. One can't help hearing a lot when
keeping watch aft--you know how it is. Then we are going to Ceylon
to meet the mail-boat there. The owner is going home as he came out,
overland through Egypt. The yacht would return round the Cape, of
course.”

“A lady?” said Lingard. “You say there is a lady on board. Are you
armed?”

“Not much,” replied Carter, negligently. “There are a few muskets and
two sporting guns aft; that's about all--I fancy it's too much, or not
enough,” he added with a faint smile.

Lingard looked at him narrowly.

“Did you come out from home in that craft?” he asked.

“Not I! I am not one of them regular yacht hands. I came out of the
hospital in Hongkong. I've been two years on the China coast.”

He stopped, then added in an explanatory murmur:

“Opium clippers--you know. Nothing of brass buttons about me. My ship
left me behind, and I was in want of work. I took this job but I didn't
want to go home particularly. It's slow work after sailing with old
Robinson in the Ly-e-moon. That was my ship. Heard of her, Captain?”

“Yes, yes,” said Lingard, hastily. “Look here, Mr. Carter, which way was
your chief officer trying for Singapore? Through the Straits of Rhio?”

“I suppose so,” answered Carter in a slightly surprised tone; “why do
you ask?”

“Just to know . . . What is it, Mr. Shaw?”

“There's a black cloud rising to the northward, sir, and we shall get a
breeze directly,” said Shaw from the doorway.

He lingered there with his eyes fixed on the decanters.

“Will you have a glass?” said Lingard, leaving his seat. “I will go up
and have a look.”

He went on deck. Shaw approached the table and began to help himself,
handling the bottles in profound silence and with exaggerated caution,
as if he had been measuring out of fragile vessels a dose of some deadly
poison. Carter, his hands in his pockets, and leaning back, examined
him from head to foot with a cool stare. The mate of the brig raised the
glass to his lips, and glaring above the rim at the stranger, drained
the contents slowly.

“You have a fine nose for finding ships in the dark, Mister,” he said,
distinctly, putting the glass on the table with extreme gentleness.

“Eh? What's that? I sighted you just after sunset.”

“And you knew where to look, too,” said Shaw, staring hard.

“I looked to the westward where there was still some light, as any
sensible man would do,” retorted the other a little impatiently. “What
are you trying to get at?”

“And you have a ready tongue to blow about yourself--haven't you?”

“Never saw such a man in my life,” declared Carter, with a return of his
nonchalant manner. “You seem to be troubled about something.”

“I don't like boats to come sneaking up from nowhere in particular,
alongside a ship when I am in charge of the deck. I can keep a lookout
as well as any man out of home ports, but I hate to be circumvented by
muffled oars and such ungentlemanlike tricks. Yacht officer--indeed.
These seas must be full of such yachtsmen. I consider you played a mean
trick on me. I told my old man there was nothing in sight at sunset--and
no more there was. I believe you blundered upon us by chance--for all
your boasting about sunsets and bearings. Gammon! I know you came
on blindly on top of us, and with muffled oars, too. D'ye call that
decent?”

“If I did muffle the oars it was for a good reason. I wanted to slip
past a cove where some native craft were moored. That was common
prudence in such a small boat, and not armed--as I am. I saw you right
enough, but I had no intention to startle anybody. Take my word for it.”

“I wish you had gone somewhere else,” growled Shaw. “I hate to be put in
the wrong through accident and untruthfulness--there! Here's my old man
calling me--”

He left the cabin hurriedly and soon afterward Lingard came down,
and sat again facing Carter across the table. His face was grave but
resolute.

“We shall get the breeze directly,” he said.

“Then, sir,” said Carter, getting up, “if you will give me back that
letter I shall go on cruising about here to speak some other ship. I
trust you will report us wherever you are going.”

“I am going to the yacht and I shall keep the letter,” answered Lingard
with decision. “I know exactly where she is, and I must go to the rescue
of those people. It's most fortunate you've fallen in with me, Mr.
Carter. Fortunate for them and fortunate for me,” he added in a lower
tone.

“Yes,” drawled Carter, reflectively. “There may be a tidy bit of salvage
money if you should get the vessel off, but I don't think you can do
much. I had better stay out here and try to speak some gunboat--”

“You must come back to your ship with me,” said Lingard,
authoritatively. “Never mind the gunboats.”

“That wouldn't be carrying out my orders,” argued Carter. “I've got to
speak a homeward-bound ship or a man-of-war--that's plain enough. I am
not anxious to knock about for days in an open boat, but--let me fill my
fresh-water breaker, Captain, and I will be off.”

“Nonsense,” said Lingard, sharply. “You've got to come with me to show
the place and--and help. I'll take your boat in tow.”

Carter did not seem convinced. Lingard laid a heavy hand on his
shoulder.

“Look here, young fellow. I am Tom Lingard and there's not a white man
among these islands, and very few natives, that have not heard of me. My
luck brought you into my ship--and now I've got you, you must stay. You
must!”

The last “must” burst out loud and sharp like a pistol-shot. Carter
stepped back.

“Do you mean you would keep me by force?” he asked, startled.

“Force,” repeated Lingard. “It rests with you. I cannot let you speak
any vessel. Your yacht has gone ashore in a most inconvenient place--for
me; and with your boats sent off here and there, you would bring every
infernal gunboat buzzing to a spot that was as quiet and retired as the
heart of man could wish. You stranding just on that spot of the whole
coast was my bad luck. And that I could not help. You coming upon me
like this is my good luck. And that I hold!”

He dropped his clenched fist, big and muscular, in the light of the
lamp on the black cloth, amongst the glitter of glasses, with the strong
fingers closed tight upon the firm flesh of the palm. He left it there
for a moment as if showing Carter that luck he was going to hold. And he
went on:

“Do you know into what hornet's nest your stupid people have blundered?
How much d'ye think their lives are worth, just now? Not a brass
farthing if the breeze fails me for another twenty-four hours. You may
well open your eyes. It is so! And it may be too late now, while I am
arguing with you here.”

He tapped the table with his knuckles, and the glasses, waking up,
jingled a thin, plaintive finale to his speech. Carter stood leaning
against the sideboard. He was amazed by the unexpected turn of the
conversation; his jaw dropped slightly and his eyes never swerved for a
moment from Lingard's face. The silence in the cabin lasted only a few
seconds, but to Carter, who waited breathlessly, it seemed very long.
And all at once he heard in it, for the first time, the cabin clock tick
distinctly, in pulsating beats, as though a little heart of metal behind
the dial had been started into sudden palpitation.

“A gunboat!” shouted Lingard, suddenly, as if he had seen only in
that moment, by the light of some vivid flash of thought, all the
difficulties of the situation. “If you don't go back with me there will
be nothing left for you to go back to--very soon. Your gunboat won't
find a single ship's rib or a single corpse left for a landmark. That
she won't. It isn't a gunboat skipper you want. I am the man you
want. You don't know your luck when you see it, but I know mine, I
do--and--look here--”

He touched Carter's chest with his forefinger, and said with a sudden
gentleness of tone:

“I am a white man inside and out; I won't let inoffensive people--and a
woman, too--come to harm if I can help it. And if I can't help, nobody
can. You understand--nobody! There's no time for it. But I am like any
other man that is worth his salt: I won't let the end of an undertaking
go by the board while there is a chance to hold on--and it's like
this--”

His voice was persuasive--almost caressing; he had hold now of a coat
button and tugged at it slightly as he went on in a confidential manner:

“As it turns out, Mr. Carter, I would--in a manner of speaking--I would
as soon shoot you where you stand as let you go to raise an alarm
all over this sea about your confounded yacht. I have other lives to
consider--and friends--and promises--and--and myself, too. I shall keep
you,” he concluded, sharply.

Carter drew a long breath. On the deck above, the two men could
hear soft footfalls, short murmurs, indistinct words spoken near the
skylight. Shaw's voice rang out loudly in growling tones:

“Furl the royals, you tindal!”

“It's the queerest old go,” muttered Carter, looking down on to the
floor. “You are a strange man. I suppose I must believe what you
say--unless you and that fat mate of yours are a couple of escaped
lunatics that got hold of a brig by some means. Why, that chap up there
wanted to pick a quarrel with me for coming aboard, and now you threaten
to shoot me rather than let me go. Not that I care much about that; for
some time or other you would get hanged for it; and you don't look like
a man that will end that way. If what you say is only half true, I ought
to get back to the yacht as quick as ever I can. It strikes me that your
coming to them will be only a small mercy, anyhow--and I may be of some
use--But this is the queerest. . . . May I go in my boat?”

“As you like,” said Lingard. “There's a rain squall coming.”

“I am in charge and will get wet along of my chaps. Give us a good long
line, Captain.”

“It's done already,” said Lingard. “You seem a sensible sailorman and
can see that it would be useless to try and give me the slip.”

“For a man so ready to shoot, you seem very trustful,” drawled Carter.
“If I cut adrift in a squall, I stand a pretty fair chance not to see
you again.”

“You just try,” said Lingard, drily. “I have eyes in this brig, young
man, that will see your boat when you couldn't see the ship. You are of
the kind I like, but if you monkey with me I will find you--and when I
find you I will run you down as surely as I stand here.”

Carter slapped his thigh and his eyes twinkled.

“By the Lord Harry!” he cried. “If it wasn't for the men with me, I
would try for sport. You are so cocksure about the lot you can do,
Captain. You would aggravate a saint into open mutiny.”

His easy good humour had returned; but after a short burst of laughter,
he became serious.

“Never fear,” he said, “I won't slip away. If there is to be any
throat-cutting--as you seem to hint--mine will be there, too, I promise
you, and. . . .”

He stretched his arms out, glanced at them, shook them a little.

“And this pair of arms to take care of it,” he added, in his old,
careless drawl.

But the master of the brig sitting with both his elbows on the table,
his face in his hands, had fallen unexpectedly into a meditation so
concentrated and so profound that he seemed neither to hear, see, nor
breathe. The sight of that man's complete absorption in thought was to
Carter almost more surprising than any other occurrence of that night.
Had his strange host vanished suddenly from before his eyes, it could
not have made him feel more uncomfortably alone in that cabin where
the pertinacious clock kept ticking off the useless minutes of the calm
before it would, with the same steady beat, begin to measure the aimless
disturbance of the storm.



III

After waiting a moment, Carter went on deck. The sky, the sea, the
brig itself had disappeared in a darkness that had become impenetrable,
palpable, and stifling. An immense cloud had come up running over the
heavens, as if looking for the little craft, and now hung over it,
arrested. To the south there was a livid trembling gleam, faint and sad,
like a vanishing memory of destroyed starlight. To the north, as if
to prove the impossible, an incredibly blacker patch outlined on the
tremendous blackness of the sky the heart of the coming squall. The
glimmers in the water had gone out and the invisible sea all around lay
mute and still as if it had died suddenly of fright.

Carter could see nothing. He felt about him people moving; he heard
them in the darkness whispering faintly as if they had been exchanging
secrets important or infamous. The night effaced even words, and its
mystery had captured everything and every sound--had left nothing free
but the unexpected that seemed to hover about one, ready to stretch out
its stealthy hand in a touch sudden, familiar, and appalling. Even the
careless disposition of the young ex-officer of an opium-clipper was
affected by the ominous aspect of the hour. What was this vessel?
What were those people? What would happen to-morrow? To the yacht? To
himself? He felt suddenly without any additional reason but the darkness
that it was a poor show, anyhow, a dashed poor show for all hands. The
irrational conviction made him falter for a second where he stood and he
gripped the slide of the companionway hard.

Shaw's voice right close to his ear relieved and cleared his troubled
thoughts.

“Oh! it's you, Mister. Come up at last,” said the mate of the brig
slowly. “It appears we've got to give you a tow now. Of all the rum
incidents, this beats all. A boat sneaks up from nowhere and turns
out to be a long-expected friend! For you are one of them friends the
skipper was going to meet somewhere here. Ain't you now? Come! I know
more than you may think. Are we off to--you may just as well tell--off
to--h'm ha . . . you know?”

“Yes. I know. Don't you?” articulated Carter, innocently.

Shaw remained very quiet for a minute.

“Where's my skipper?” he asked at last.

“I left him down below in a kind of trance. Where's my boat?”

“Your boat is hanging astern. And my opinion is that you are as uncivil
as I've proved you to be untruthful. Egzz-actly.”

Carter stumbled toward the taffrail and in the first step he made came
full against somebody who glided away. It seemed to him that such a
night brings men to a lower level. He thought that he might have been
knocked on the head by anybody strong enough to lift a crow-bar. He felt
strangely irritated. He said loudly, aiming his words at Shaw whom he
supposed somewhere near:

“And my opinion is that you and your skipper will come to a sudden bad
end before--”

“I thought you were in your boat. Have you changed your mind?” asked
Lingard in his deep voice close to Carter's elbow.

Carter felt his way along the rail, till his hand found a line that
seemed, in the calm, to stream out of its own accord into the darkness.
He hailed his boat, and directly heard the wash of water against her
bows as she was hauled quickly under the counter. Then he loomed up
shapeless on the rail, and the next moment disappeared as if he had
fallen out of the universe. Lingard heard him say:

“Catch hold of my leg, John.” There were hollow sounds in the boat; a
voice growled, “All right.”

“Keep clear of the counter,” said Lingard, speaking in quiet warning
tones into the night. “The brig may get a lot of sternway on her should
this squall not strike her fairly.”

“Aye, aye. I will mind,” was the muttered answer from the water.

Lingard crossed over to the port side, and looked steadily at the sooty
mass of approaching vapours. After a moment he said curtly, “Brace up
for the port tack, Mr. Shaw,” and remained silent, with his face to
the sea. A sound, sorrowful and startling like the sigh of some immense
creature, travelling across the starless space, passed above the
vertical and lofty spars of the motionless brig.

It grew louder, then suddenly ceased for a moment, and the taut rigging
of the brig was heard vibrating its answer in a singing note to this
threatening murmur of the winds. A long and slow undulation lifted the
level of the waters, as if the sea had drawn a deep breath of anxious
suspense. The next minute an immense disturbance leaped out of the
darkness upon the sea, kindling upon it a livid clearness of foam, and
the first gust of the squall boarded the brig in a stinging flick of
rain and spray. As if overwhelmed by the suddenness of the fierce onset,
the vessel remained for a second upright where she floated, shaking with
tremendous jerks from trucks to keel; while high up in the night the
invisible canvas was heard rattling and beating about violently.

Then, with a quick double report, as of heavy guns, both topsails filled
at once and the brig fell over swiftly on her side. Shaw was thrown
headlong against the skylight, and Lingard, who had encircled the
weather rail with his arm, felt the vessel under his feet dart forward
smoothly, and the deck become less slanting--the speed of the brig
running off a little now, easing the overturning strain of the wind upon
the distended surfaces of the sails. It was only the fineness of the
little vessel's lines and the perfect shape of her hull that saved the
canvas, and perhaps the spars, by enabling the ready craft to get way
upon herself with such lightning-like rapidity. Lingard drew a long
breath and yelled jubilantly at Shaw who was struggling up against wind
and rain to his commander's side.

“She'll do. Hold on everything.”

Shaw tried to speak. He swallowed great mouthfuls of tepid water
which the wind drove down his throat. The brig seemed to sail through
undulating waves that passed swishing between the masts and swept over
the decks with the fierce rush and noise of a cataract. From every spar
and every rope a ragged sheet of water streamed flicking to leeward. The
overpowering deluge seemed to last for an age; became unbearable--and,
all at once, stopped. In a couple of minutes the shower had run its
length over the brig and now could be seen like a straight grey wall,
going away into the night under the fierce whispering of dissolving
clouds. The wind eased. To the northward, low down in the darkness,
three stars appeared in a row, leaping in and out between the crests
of waves like the distant heads of swimmers in a running surf; and the
retreating edge of the cloud, perfectly straight from east to west,
slipped along the dome of the sky like an immense hemispheric, iron
shutter pivoting down smoothly as if operated by some mighty engine. An
inspiring and penetrating freshness flowed together with the shimmer
of light, through the augmented glory of the heaven, a glory exalted,
undimmed, and strangely startling as if a new world had been created
during the short flight of the stormy cloud. It was a return to life,
a return to space; the earth coming out from under a pall to take its
place in the renewed and immense scintillation of the universe.

The brig, her yards slightly checked in, ran with an easy motion under
the topsails, jib and driver, pushing contemptuously aside the turbulent
crowd of noisy and agitated waves. As the craft went swiftly ahead she
unrolled behind her over the uneasy darkness of the sea a broad ribbon
of seething foam shot with wispy gleams of dark discs escaping from
under the rudder. Far away astern, at the end of a line no thicker than
a black thread, which dipped now and then its long curve in the bursting
froth, a toy-like object could be made out, elongated and dark, racing
after the brig over the snowy whiteness of her wake.

Lingard walked aft, and, with both his hands on the taffrail, looked
eagerly for Carter's boat. The first glance satisfied him that the
yacht's gig was towing easily at the end of the long scope of line, and
he turned away to look ahead and to leeward with a steady gaze. It was
then half an hour past midnight and Shaw, relieved by Wasub, had gone
below. Before he went, he said to Lingard, “I will be off, sir, if
you're not going to make more sail yet.” “Not yet for a while,” had
answered Lingard in a preoccupied manner; and Shaw departed aggrieved at
such a neglect of making the best of a good breeze.

On the main deck dark-skinned men, whose clothing clung to their
shivering limbs as if they had been overboard, had finished recoiling
the braces, and clearing the gear. The kassab, after having hung the
fore-topsail halyards in the becket, strutted into the waist toward a
row of men who stood idly with their shoulders against the side of the
long boat amidships. He passed along looking up close at the stolid
faces. Room was made for him, and he took his place at the end.

“It was a great rain and a mighty wind, O men,” he said, dogmatically,
“but no wind can ever hurt this ship. That I knew while I stood minding
the sail which is under my care.”

A dull and inexpressive murmur was heard from the men. Over the high
weather rail, a topping wave flung into their eyes a handful of heavy
drops that stung like hail. There were low groans of indignation. A man
sighed. Another emitted a spasmodic laugh through his chattering teeth.
No one moved away. The little kassab wiped his face and went on in his
cracked voice, to the accompaniment of the swishing sounds made by the
seas that swept regularly astern along the ship's side.

“Have you heard him shout at the wind--louder than the wind? I have
heard, being far forward. And before, too, in the many years I served
this white man I have heard him often cry magic words that make all
safe. Ya-wa! This is truth. Ask Wasub who is a Haji, even as I am.”

“I have seen white men's ships with their masts broken--also wrecked
like our own praus,” remarked sadly a lean, lank fellow who shivered
beside the kassab, hanging his head and trying to grasp his shoulder
blades.

“True,” admitted the kassab. “They are all the children of Satan but to
some more favour is shown. To obey such men on the sea or in a fight
is good. I saw him who is master here fight with wild men who eat their
enemies--far away to the eastward--and I dealt blows by his side without
fear; for the charms he, no doubt, possesses protect his servants also.
I am a believer and the Stoned One can not touch my forehead. Yet the
reward of victory comes from the accursed. For six years have I sailed
with that white man; first as one who minds the rudder, for I am a
man of the sea, born in a prau, and am skilled in such work. And now,
because of my great knowledge of his desires, I have the care of all
things in this ship.”

Several voices muttered, “True. True.” They remained apathetic and
patient, in the rush of wind, under the repeated short flights of
sprays. The slight roll of the ship balanced them stiffly all together
where they stood propped against the big boat. The breeze humming
between the inclined masts enveloped their dark and silent figures in
the unceasing resonance of its breath.

The brig's head had been laid so as to pass a little to windward of the
small islands of the Carimata group. They had been till then hidden in
the night, but now both men on the lookout reported land ahead in one
long cry. Lingard, standing to leeward abreast of the wheel, watched
the islet first seen. When it was nearly abeam of the brig he gave his
orders, and Wasub hurried off to the main deck. The helm was put down,
the yards on the main came slowly square and the wet canvas of the
main-topsail clung suddenly to the mast after a single heavy flap. The
dazzling streak of the ship's wake vanished. The vessel lost her way
and began to dip her bows into the quick succession of the running head
seas. And at every slow plunge of the craft, the song of the wind would
swell louder amongst the waving spars, with a wild and mournful note.

Just as the brig's boat had been swung out, ready for lowering, the
yacht's gig hauled up by its line appeared tossing and splashing on
the lee quarter. Carter stood up in the stern sheets balancing himself
cleverly to the disordered motion of his cockleshell. He hailed the brig
twice to know what was the matter, not being able from below and in the
darkness to make out what that confused group of men on the poop were
about. He got no answer, though he could see the shape of a man standing
by himself aft, and apparently watching him. He was going to repeat his
hail for the third time when he heard the rattling of tackles followed
by a heavy splash, a burst of voices, scrambling hollow sounds--and a
dark mass detaching itself from the brig's side swept past him on the
crest of a passing wave. For less than a second he could see on the
shimmer of the night sky the shape of a boat, the heads of men, the
blades of oars pointing upward while being got out hurriedly. Then
all this sank out of sight, reappeared once more far off and hardly
discernible, before vanishing for good.

“Why, they've lowered a boat!” exclaimed Carter, falling back in his
seat. He remembered that he had seen only a few hours ago three native
praus lurking amongst those very islands. For a moment he had the idea
of casting off to go in chase of that boat, so as to find out. . . .
Find out what? He gave up his idea at once. What could he do?

The conviction that the yacht, and everything belonging to her, were in
some indefinite but very real danger, took afresh a strong hold of him,
and the persuasion that the master of the brig was going there to
help did not by any means assuage his alarm. The fact only served to
complicate his uneasiness with a sense of mystery.

The white man who spoke as if that sea was all his own, or as if people
intruded upon his privacy by taking the liberty of getting wrecked on a
coast where he and his friends did some queer business, seemed to him an
undesirable helper. That the boat had been lowered to communicate with
the praus seen and avoided by him in the evening he had no doubt. The
thought had flashed on him at once. It had an ugly look. Yet the best
thing to do after all was to hang on and get back to the yacht and warn
them. . . . Warn them against whom? The man had been perfectly open with
him. Warn them against what? It struck him that he hadn't the slightest
conception of what would happen, of what was even likely to happen. That
strange rescuer himself was bringing the news of danger. Danger from the
natives of course. And yet he was in communication with those natives.
That was evident. That boat going off in the night. . . . Carter swore
heartily to himself. His perplexity became positive bodily pain as he
sat, wet, uncomfortable, and still, one hand on the tiller, thrown up
and down in headlong swings of his boat. And before his eyes, towering
high, the black hull of the brig also rose and fell, setting her stern
down in the sea, now and again, with a tremendous and foaming splash.
Not a sound from her reached Carter's ears. She seemed an abandoned
craft but for the outline of a man's head and body still visible in a
watchful attitude above the taffrail.

Carter told his bowman to haul up closer and hailed:

“Brig ahoy. Anything wrong?”

He waited, listening. The shadowy man still watched. After some time a
curt “No” came back in answer.

“Are you going to keep hove-to long?” shouted Carter.

“Don't know. Not long. Drop your boat clear of the ship. Drop clear. Do
damage if you don't.”

“Slack away, John!” said Carter in a resigned tone to the elderly seaman
in the bow. “Slack away and let us ride easy to the full scope. They
don't seem very talkative on board there.”

Even while he was speaking the line ran out and the regular undulations
of the passing seas drove the boat away from the brig. Carter turned
a little in his seat to look at the land. It loomed up dead to leeward
like a lofty and irregular cone only a mile or a mile and a half
distant. The noise of the surf beating upon its base was heard against
the wind in measured detonations. The fatigue of many days spent in the
boat asserted itself above the restlessness of Carter's thoughts and,
gradually, he lost the notion of the passing time without altogether
losing the consciousness of his situation.

In the intervals of that benumbed stupor--rather than sleep--he was
aware that the interrupted noise of the surf had grown into a continuous
great rumble, swelling periodically into a loud roar; that the high
islet appeared now bigger, and that a white fringe of foam was visible
at its feet. Still there was no stir or movement of any kind on board
the brig. He noticed that the wind was moderating and the sea going down
with it, and then dozed off again for a minute. When next he opened his
eyes with a start, it was just in time to see with surprise a new star
soar noiselessly straight up from behind the land, take up its position
in a brilliant constellation--and go out suddenly. Two more followed,
ascending together, and after reaching about the same elevation, expired
side by side.

“Them's rockets, sir--ain't they?” said one of the men in a muffled
voice.

“Aye, rockets,” grunted Carter. “And now, what's the next move?” he
muttered to himself dismally.

He got his answer in the fierce swishing whirr of a slender ray of
fire that, shooting violently upward from the sombre hull of the brig,
dissolved at once into a dull red shower of falling sparks. Only one,
white and brilliant, remained alone poised high overhead, and after
glowing vividly for a second, exploded with a feeble report. Almost at
the same time he saw the brig's head fall off the wind, made out the
yards swinging round to fill the main topsail, and heard distinctly the
thud of the first wave thrown off by the advancing bows. The next minute
the tow-line got the strain and his boat started hurriedly after the
brig with a sudden jerk.

Leaning forward, wide awake and attentive, Carter steered. His men
sat one behind another with shoulders up, and arched backs, dozing,
uncomfortable but patient, upon the thwarts. The care requisite to steer
the boat properly in the track of the seething and disturbed water left
by the brig in her rapid course prevented him from reflecting much upon
the incertitude of the future and upon his own unusual situation.

Now he was only exceedingly anxious to see the yacht again, and it was
with a feeling of very real satisfaction that he saw all plain sail
being made on the brig. Through the remaining hours of the night he sat
grasping the tiller and keeping his eyes on the shadowy and high pyramid
of canvas gliding steadily ahead of his boat with a slight balancing
movement from side to side.



IV

It was noon before the brig, piloted by Lingard through the deep
channels between the outer coral reefs, rounded within pistol-shot a low
hummock of sand which marked the end of a long stretch of stony ledges
that, being mostly awash, showed a black head only, here and there
amongst the hissing brown froth of the yellow sea. As the brig drew
clear of the sandy patch there appeared, dead to windward and beyond a
maze of broken water, sandspits, and clusters of rocks, the black hull
of the yacht heeling over, high and motionless upon the great expanse of
glittering shallows. Her long, naked spars were inclined slightly as
if she had been sailing with a good breeze. There was to the lookers-on
aboard the brig something sad and disappointing in the yacht's aspect
as she lay perfectly still in an attitude that in a seaman's mind is
associated with the idea of rapid motion.

“Here she is!” said Shaw, who, clad in a spotless white suit, came just
then from forward where he had been busy with the anchors. “She is well
on, sir--isn't she? Looks like a mudflat to me from here.”

“Yes. It is a mudflat,” said Lingard, slowly, raising the long glass to
his eye. “Haul the mainsail up, Mr. Shaw,” he went on while he took a
steady look at the yacht. “We will have to work in short tacks here.”

He put the glass down and moved away from the rail. For the next hour
he handled his little vessel in the intricate and narrow channel with
careless certitude, as if every stone, every grain of sand upon the
treacherous bottom had been plainly disclosed to his sight. He handled
her in the fitful and unsteady breeze with a matter-of-fact audacity
that made Shaw, forward at his station, gasp in sheer alarm. When
heading toward the inshore shoals the brig was never put round till the
quick, loud cries of the leadsmen announced that there were no more than
three feet of water under her keel; and when standing toward the steep
inner edge of the long reef, where the lead was of no use, the helm
would be put down only when the cutwater touched the faint line of the
bordering foam. Lingard's love for his brig was a man's love, and was
so great that it could never be appeased unless he called on her to put
forth all her qualities and her power, to repay his exacting affection
by a faithfulness tried to the very utmost limit of endurance. Every
flutter of the sails flew down from aloft along the taut leeches, to
enter his heart in a sense of acute delight; and the gentle murmur of
water alongside, which, continuous and soft, showed that in all her
windings his incomparable craft had never, even for an instant, ceased
to carry her way, was to him more precious and inspiring than the soft
whisper of tender words would have been to another man. It was in such
moments that he lived intensely, in a flush of strong feeling that made
him long to press his little vessel to his breast. She was his perfect
world full of trustful joy.

The people on board the yacht, who watched eagerly the first sail they
had seen since they had been ashore on that deserted part of the coast,
soon made her out, with some disappointment, to be a small merchant brig
beating up tack for tack along the inner edge of the reef--probably with
the intention to communicate and offer assistance. The general opinion
among the seafaring portion of her crew was that little effective
assistance could be expected from a vessel of that description. Only
the sailing-master of the yacht remarked to the boatswain (who had the
advantage of being his first cousin): “This man is well acquainted here;
you can see that by the way he handles his brig. I shan't be sorry to
have somebody to stand by us. Can't tell when we will get off this mud,
George.”

A long board, sailed very close, enabled the brig to fetch the southern
limit of discoloured water over the bank on which the yacht had
stranded. On the very edge of the muddy patch she was put in stays for
the last time. As soon as she had paid off on the other tack, sail was
shortened smartly, and the brig commenced the stretch that was to bring
her to her anchorage, under her topsails, lower staysails and jib. There
was then less than a quarter of a mile of shallow water between her and
the yacht; but while that vessel had gone ashore with her head to the
eastward the brig was moving slowly in a west-northwest direction, and
consequently, sailed--so to speak--past the whole length of the yacht.
Lingard saw every soul in the schooner on deck, watching his advent in
a silence which was as unbroken and perfect as that on board his own
vessel.

A little man with a red face framed in white whiskers waved a gold-laced
cap above the rail in the waist of the yacht. Lingard raised his arm in
return. Further aft, under the white awnings, he could see two men and
a woman. One of the men and the lady were in blue. The other man,
who seemed very tall and stood with his arm entwined round an awning
stanchion above his head, was clad in white. Lingard saw them plainly.
They looked at the brig through binoculars, turned their faces to
one another, moved their lips, seemed surprised. A large dog put his
forepaws on the rail, and, lifting up his big, black head, sent out
three loud and plaintive barks, then dropped down out of sight. A sudden
stir and an appearance of excitement amongst all hands on board the
yacht was caused by their perceiving that the boat towing astern of the
stranger was their own second gig.

Arms were outstretched with pointing fingers. Someone shouted out a
long sentence of which not a word could be made out; and then the brig,
having reached the western limit of the bank, began to move diagonally
away, increasing her distance from the yacht but bringing her stern
gradually into view. The people aft, Lingard noticed, left their places
and walked over to the taffrail so as to keep him longer in sight.

When about a mile off the bank and nearly in line with the stern of the
yacht the brig's topsails fluttered and the yards came down slowly
on the caps; the fore and aft canvas ran down; and for some time she
floated quietly with folded wings upon the transparent sheet of water,
under the radiant silence of the sky. Then her anchor went to the bottom
with a rumbling noise resembling the roll of distant thunder. In a
moment her head tended to the last puffs of the northerly airs and the
ensign at the peak stirred, unfurled itself slowly, collapsed, flew out
again, and finally hung down straight and still, as if weighted with
lead.

“Dead calm, sir,” said Shaw to Lingard. “Dead calm again. We got into
this funny place in the nick of time, sir.”

They stood for a while side by side, looking round upon the coast and
the sea. The brig had been brought up in the middle of a broad belt of
clear water. To the north rocky ledges showed in black and white lines
upon the slight swell setting in from there. A small island stood out
from the broken water like the square tower of some submerged building.
It was about two miles distant from the brig. To the eastward the coast
was low; a coast of green forests fringed with dark mangroves. There was
in its sombre dullness a clearly defined opening, as if a small piece
had been cut out with a sharp knife. The water in it shone like a patch
of polished silver. Lingard pointed it out to Shaw.

“This is the entrance to the place where we are going,” he said.

Shaw stared, round-eyed.

“I thought you came here on account of this here yacht,” he stammered,
surprised.

“Ah. The yacht,” said Lingard, musingly, keeping his eyes on the break
in the coast. “The yacht--” He stamped his foot suddenly. “I would give
all I am worth and throw in a few days of life into the bargain if I
could get her off and away before to-night.”

He calmed down, and again stood gazing at the land. A little within the
entrance from behind the wall of forests an invisible fire belched out
steadily the black and heavy convolutions of thick smoke, which stood
out high, like a twisted and shivering pillar against the clear blue of
the sky.

“We must stop that game, Mr. Shaw,” said Lingard, abruptly.

“Yes, sir. What game?” asked Shaw, looking round in wonder.

“This smoke,” said Lingard, impatiently. “It's a signal.”

“Certainly, sir--though I don't see how we can do it. It seems far
inland. A signal for what, sir?”

“It was not meant for us,” said Lingard in an unexpectedly savage tone.
“Here, Shaw, make them put a blank charge into that forecastle gun. Tell
'em to ram hard the wadding and grease the mouth. We want to make a good
noise. If old Jorgenson hears it, that fire will be out before you have
time to turn round twice. . . . In a minute, Mr. Carter.”

The yacht's boat had come alongside as soon as the brig had been brought
up, and Carter had been waiting to take Lingard on board the yacht. They
both walked now to the gangway. Shaw, following his commander, stood by
to take his last orders.

“Put all the boats in the water, Mr. Shaw,” Lingard was saying, with one
foot on the rail, ready to leave his ship, “and mount the four-pounder
swivel in the longboat's bow. Cast off the sea lashings of the guns,
but don't run 'em out yet. Keep the topsails loose and the jib ready for
setting, I may want the sails in a hurry. Now, Mr. Carter, I am ready
for you.”

“Shove off, boys,” said Carter as soon as they were seated in the boat.
“Shove off, and give way for a last pull before you get a long rest.”

The men lay back on their oars, grunting. Their faces were drawn, grey
and streaked with the dried salt sprays. They had the worried expression
of men who had a long call made upon their endurance. Carter, heavy-eyed
and dull, steered for the yacht's gangway. Lingard asked as they were
crossing the brig's bows:

“Water enough alongside your craft, I suppose?”

“Yes. Eight to twelve feet,” answered Carter, hoarsely. “Say, Captain!
Where's your show of cutthroats? Why! This sea is as empty as a church
on a week-day.”

The booming report, nearly over his head, of the brig's eighteen-pounder
interrupted him. A round puff of white vapour, spreading itself lazily,
clung in fading shreds about the foreyard. Lingard, turning half round
in the stern sheets, looked at the smoke on the shore. Carter remained
silent, staring sleepily at the yacht they were approaching. Lingard
kept watching the smoke so intensely that he almost forgot where he
was, till Carter's voice pronouncing sharply at his ear the words “way
enough,” recalled him to himself.

They were in the shadow of the yacht and coming alongside her ladder.
The master of the brig looked upward into the face of a gentleman,
with long whiskers and a shaved chin, staring down at him over the side
through a single eyeglass. As he put his foot on the bottom step he
could see the shore smoke still ascending, unceasing and thick; but even
as he looked the very base of the black pillar rose above the ragged
line of tree-tops. The whole thing floated clear away from the earth,
and rolling itself into an irregularly shaped mass, drifted out to
seaward, travelling slowly over the blue heavens, like a threatening and
lonely cloud.



PART II. THE SHORE OF REFUGE

I

The coast off which the little brig, floating upright above her anchor,
seemed to guard the high hull of the yacht has no distinctive features.
It is land without form. It stretches away without cape or bluff, long
and low--indefinitely; and when the heavy gusts of the northeast monsoon
drive the thick rain slanting over the sea, it is seen faintly under the
grey sky, black and with a blurred outline like the straight edge of a
dissolving shore. In the long season of unclouded days, it presents to
view only a narrow band of earth that appears crushed flat upon the vast
level of waters by the weight of the sky, whose immense dome rests on it
in a line as fine and true as that of the sea horizon itself.

Notwithstanding its nearness to the centres of European power, this
coast has been known for ages to the armed wanderers of these seas
as “The Shore of Refuge.” It has no specific name on the charts, and
geography manuals don't mention it at all; but the wreckage of many
defeats unerringly drifts into its creeks. Its approaches are extremely
difficult for a stranger. Looked at from seaward, the innumerable islets
fringing what, on account of its vast size, may be called the mainland,
merge into a background that presents not a single landmark to point the
way through the intricate channels. It may be said that in a belt of sea
twenty miles broad along that low shore there is much more coral, mud,
sand, and stones than actual sea water. It was amongst the outlying
shoals of this stretch that the yacht had gone ashore and the events
consequent upon her stranding took place.

The diffused light of the short daybreak showed the open water to the
westward, sleeping, smooth and grey, under a faded heaven. The straight
coast threw a heavy belt of gloom along the shoals, which, in the calm
of expiring night, were unmarked by the slightest ripple. In the faint
dawn the low clumps of bushes on the sandbanks appeared immense.

Two figures, noiseless like two shadows, moved slowly over the beach of
a rocky islet, and stopped side by side on the very edge of the water.
Behind them, between the mats from which they had arisen, a small heap
of black embers smouldered quietly. They stood upright and perfectly
still, but for the slight movement of their heads from right to left and
back again as they swept their gaze through the grey emptiness of the
waters where, about two miles distant, the hull of the yacht loomed up
to seaward, black and shapeless, against the wan sky.

The two figures looked beyond without exchanging as much as a murmur.
The taller of the two grounded, at arm's length, the stock of a gun with
a long barrel; the hair of the other fell down to its waist; and, near
by, the leaves of creepers drooping from the summit of the steep rock
stirred no more than the festooned stone. The faint light, disclosing
here and there a gleam of white sandbanks and the blurred hummocks of
islets scattered within the gloom of the coast, the profound silence,
the vast stillness all round, accentuated the loneliness of the two
human beings who, urged by a sleepless hope, had risen thus, at break of
day, to look afar upon the veiled face of the sea.

“Nothing!” said the man with a sigh, and as if awakening from a long
period of musing.

He was clad in a jacket of coarse blue cotton, of the kind a poor
fisherman might own, and he wore it wide open on a muscular chest the
colour and smoothness of bronze. From the twist of threadbare sarong
wound tightly on the hips protruded outward to the left the ivory hilt,
ringed with six bands of gold, of a weapon that would not have disgraced
a ruler. Silver glittered about the flintlock and the hardwood stock
of his gun. The red and gold handkerchief folded round his head was of
costly stuff, such as is woven by high-born women in the households of
chiefs, only the gold threads were tarnished and the silk frayed in the
folds. His head was thrown back, the dropped eyelids narrowed the gleam
of his eyes. His face was hairless, the nose short with mobile nostrils,
and the smile of careless good-humour seemed to have been permanently
wrought, as if with a delicate tool, into the slight hollows about
the corners of rather full lips. His upright figure had a negligent
elegance. But in the careless face, in the easy gestures of the whole
man there was something attentive and restrained.

After giving the offing a last searching glance, he turned and, facing
the rising sun, walked bare-footed on the elastic sand. The trailed butt
of his gun made a deep furrow. The embers had ceased to smoulder. He
looked down at them pensively for a while, then called over his shoulder
to the girl who had remained behind, still scanning the sea:

“The fire is out, Immada.”

At the sound of his voice the girl moved toward the mats. Her black hair
hung like a mantle. Her sarong, the kilt-like garment which both sexes
wear, had the national check of grey and red, but she had not completed
her attire by the belt, scarves, the loose upper wrappings, and the
head-covering of a woman. A black silk jacket, like that of a man of
rank, was buttoned over her bust and fitted closely to her slender
waist. The edge of a stand-up collar, stiff with gold embroidery,
rubbed her cheek. She had no bracelets, no anklets, and although dressed
practically in man's clothes, had about her person no weapon of any
sort. Her arms hung down in exceedingly tight sleeves slit a little way
up from the wrist, gold-braided and with a row of small gold buttons.
She walked, brown and alert, all of a piece, with short steps, the eyes
lively in an impassive little face, the arched mouth closed firmly; and
her whole person breathed in its rigid grace the fiery gravity of youth
at the beginning of the task of life--at the beginning of beliefs and
hopes.

This was the day of Lingard's arrival upon the coast, but, as is known,
the brig, delayed by the calm, did not appear in sight of the shallows
till the morning was far advanced. Disappointed in their hope to see the
expected sail shining in the first rays of the rising sun, the man and
the woman, without attempting to relight the fire, lounged on their
sleeping mats. At their feet a common canoe, hauled out of the water,
was, for more security, moored by a grass rope to the shaft of a long
spear planted firmly on the white beach, and the incoming tide lapped
monotonously against its stern.

The girl, twisting up her black hair, fastened it with slender wooden
pins. The man, reclining at full length, had made room on his mat for
the gun--as one would do for a friend--and, supported on his elbow,
looked toward the yacht with eyes whose fixed dreaminess like a
transparent veil would show the slow passage of every gloomy thought by
deepening gradually into a sombre stare.

“We have seen three sunrises on this islet, and no friend came from the
sea,” he said without changing his attitude, with his back toward the
girl who sat on the other side of the cold embers.

“Yes; and the moon is waning,” she answered in a low voice. “The moon
is waning. Yet he promised to be here when the nights are light and the
water covers the sandbanks as far as the bushes.”

“The traveller knows the time of his setting out, but not the time of
his return,” observed the man, calmly.

The girl sighed.

“The nights of waiting are long,” she murmured.

“And sometimes they are vain,” said the man with the same composure.
“Perhaps he will never return.”

“Why?” exclaimed the girl.

“The road is long and the heart may grow cold,” was the answer in a
quiet voice. “If he does not return it is because he has forgotten.”

“Oh, Hassim, it is because he is dead,” cried the girl, indignantly.

The man, looking fixedly to seaward, smiled at the ardour of her tone.

They were brother and sister, and though very much alike, the family
resemblance was lost in the more general traits common to the whole
race.

They were natives of Wajo and it is a common saying amongst the Malay
race that to be a successful traveller and trader a man must have some
Wajo blood in his veins. And with those people trading, which means also
travelling afar, is a romantic and an honourable occupation. The trader
must possess an adventurous spirit and a keen understanding; he should
have the fearlessness of youth and the sagacity of age; he should be
diplomatic and courageous, so as to secure the favour of the great and
inspire fear in evil-doers.

These qualities naturally are not expected in a shopkeeper or a Chinaman
pedlar; they are considered indispensable only for a man who, of noble
birth and perhaps related to the ruler of his own country, wanders over
the seas in a craft of his own and with many followers; carries from
island to island important news as well as merchandise; who may be
trusted with secret messages and valuable goods; a man who, in short,
is as ready to intrigue and fight as to buy and sell. Such is the ideal
trader of Wajo.

Trading, thus understood, was the occupation of ambitious men who played
an occult but important part in all those national risings, religious
disturbances, and also in the organized piratical movements on a large
scale which, during the first half of the last century, affected the
fate of more than one native dynasty and, for a few years at least,
seriously endangered the Dutch rule in the East. When, at the cost of
much blood and gold, a comparative peace had been imposed on the
islands the same occupation, though shorn of its glorious possibilities,
remained attractive for the most adventurous of a restless race. The
younger sons and relations of many a native ruler traversed the seas of
the Archipelago, visited the innumerable and little-known islands, and
the then practically unknown shores of New Guinea; every spot where
European trade had not penetrated--from Aru to Atjeh, from Sumbawa to
Palawan.



II

It was in the most unknown perhaps of such spots, a small bay on the
coast of New Guinea, that young Pata Hassim, the nephew of one of the
greatest chiefs of Wajo, met Lingard for the first time.

He was a trader after the Wajo manner, and in a stout sea-going prau
armed with two guns and manned by young men who were related to his
family by blood or dependence, had come in there to buy some birds
of paradise skins for the old Sultan of Ternate; a risky expedition
undertaken not in the way of business but as a matter of courtesy toward
the aged Sultan who had entertained him sumptuously in that dismal brick
palace at Ternate for a month or more.

While lying off the village, very much on his guard, waiting for the
skins and negotiating with the treacherous coast-savages who are the
go-betweens in that trade, Hassim saw one morning Lingard's brig come
to an anchor in the bay, and shortly afterward observed a white man of
great stature with a beard that shone like gold, land from a boat and
stroll on unarmed, though followed by four Malays of the brig's crew,
toward the native village.

Hassim was struck with wonder and amazement at the cool recklessness of
such a proceeding; and, after; in true Malay fashion, discussing with
his people for an hour or so the urgency of the case, he also landed,
but well escorted and armed, with the intention of going to see what
would happen.

The affair really was very simple, “such as”--Lingard would say--“such
as might have happened to anybody.” He went ashore with the intention
to look for some stream where he could conveniently replenish his water
casks, this being really the motive which had induced him to enter the
bay.

While, with his men close by and surrounded by a mop-headed, sooty
crowd, he was showing a few cotton handkerchiefs, and trying to explain
by signs the object of his landing, a spear, lunged from behind, grazed
his neck. Probably the Papuan wanted only to ascertain whether such a
creature could be killed or hurt, and most likely firmly believed that
it could not; but one of Lingard's seamen at once retaliated by striking
at the experimenting savage with his parang--three such choppers brought
for the purpose of clearing the bush, if necessary, being all the
weapons the party from the brig possessed.

A deadly tumult ensued with such suddenness that Lingard, turning round
swiftly, saw his defender, already speared in three places, fall forward
at his feet. Wasub, who was there, and afterward told the story once a
week on an average, used to horrify his hearers by showing how the man
blinked his eyes quickly before he fell. Lingard was unarmed. To the
end of his life he remained incorrigibly reckless in that respect,
explaining that he was “much too quick tempered to carry firearms on the
chance of a row. And if put to it,” he argued, “I can make shift to kill
a man with my fist anyhow; and then--don't ye see--you know what
you're doing and are not so apt to start a trouble from sheer temper or
funk--see?”

In this case he did his best to kill a man with a blow from the shoulder
and catching up another by the middle flung him at the naked, wild
crowd. “He hurled men about as the wind hurls broken boughs. He made a
broad way through our enemies!” related Wasub in his jerky voice. It is
more probable that Lingard's quick movements and the amazing aspect of
such a strange being caused the warriors to fall back before his rush.

Taking instant advantage of their surprise and fear, Lingard, followed
by his men, dashed along the kind of ruinous jetty leading to the
village which was erected as usual over the water. They darted into one
of the miserable huts built of rotten mats and bits of decayed canoes,
and in this shelter showing daylight through all its sides, they
had time to draw breath and realize that their position was not much
improved.

The women and children screaming had cleared out into the bush, while
at the shore end of the jetty the warriors capered and yelled, preparing
for a general attack. Lingard noticed with mortification that his
boat-keeper apparently had lost his head, for, instead of swimming off
to the ship to give the alarm, as he was perfectly able to do, the
man actually struck out for a small rock a hundred yards away and was
frantically trying to climb up its perpendicular side. The tide being
out, to jump into the horrible mud under the houses would have been
almost certain death. Nothing remained therefore--since the miserable
dwelling would not have withstood a vigorous kick, let alone a
siege--but to rush back on shore and regain possession of the boat. To
this Lingard made up his mind quickly and, arming himself with a crooked
stick he found under his hand, sallied forth at the head of his three
men. As he bounded along, far in advance, he had just time to perceive
clearly the desperate nature of the undertaking, when he heard two shots
fired to his right. The solid mass of black bodies and frizzly heads in
front of him wavered and broke up. They did not run away, however.

Lingard pursued his course, but now with that thrill of exultation which
even a faint prospect of success inspires in a sanguine man. He heard a
shout of many voices far off, then there was another report of a shot,
and a musket ball fired at long range spurted a tiny jet of sand between
him and his wild enemies. His next bound would have carried him into
their midst had they awaited his onset, but his uplifted arm found
nothing to strike. Black backs were leaping high or gliding horizontally
through the grass toward the edge of the bush.

He flung his stick at the nearest pair of black shoulders and stopped
short. The tall grasses swayed themselves into a rest, a chorus of yells
and piercing shrieks died out in a dismal howl, and all at once the
wooded shores and the blue bay seemed to fall under the spell of a
luminous stillness. The change was as startling as the awakening from a
dream. The sudden silence struck Lingard as amazing.

He broke it by lifting his voice in a stentorian shout, which arrested
the pursuit of his men. They retired reluctantly, glaring back angrily
at the wall of a jungle where not a single leaf stirred. The strangers,
whose opportune appearance had decided the issue of that adventure, did
not attempt to join in the pursuit but halted in a compact body on the
ground lately occupied by the savages.

Lingard and the young leader of the Wajo traders met in the splendid
light of noonday, and amidst the attentive silence of their followers,
on the very spot where the Malay seaman had lost his life. Lingard,
striding up from one side, thrust out his open palm; Hassim responded at
once to the frank gesture and they exchanged their first hand-clasp over
the prostrate body, as if fate had already exacted the price of a death
for the most ominous of her gifts--the gift of friendship that sometimes
contains the whole good or evil of a life.

“I'll never forget this day,” cried Lingard in a hearty tone; and the
other smiled quietly.

Then after a short pause--“Will you burn the village for vengeance?”
 asked the Malay with a quick glance down at the dead Lascar who, on his
face and with stretched arms, seemed to cling desperately to that earth
of which he had known so little.

Lingard hesitated.

“No,” he said, at last. “It would do good to no one.”

“True,” said Hassim, gently, “but was this man your debtor--a slave?”

“Slave?” cried Lingard. “This is an English brig. Slave? No. A free man
like myself.”

“Hai. He is indeed free now,” muttered the Malay with another glance
downward. “But who will pay the bereaved for his life?”

“If there is anywhere a woman or child belonging to him, I--my serang
would know--I shall seek them out,” cried Lingard, remorsefully.

“You speak like a chief,” said Hassim, “only our great men do not go
to battle with naked hands. O you white men! O the valour of you white
men!”

“It was folly, pure folly,” protested Lingard, “and this poor fellow has
paid for it.”

“He could not avoid his destiny,” murmured the Malay. “It is in my mind
my trading is finished now in this place,” he added, cheerfully.

Lingard expressed his regret.

“It is no matter, it is no matter,” assured the other courteously, and
after Lingard had given a pressing invitation for Hassim and his two
companions of high rank to visit the brig, the two parties separated.

The evening was calm when the Malay craft left its berth near the shore
and was rowed slowly across the bay to Lingard's anchorage. The end of a
stout line was thrown on board, and that night the white man's brig and
the brown man's prau swung together to the same anchor.

The sun setting to seaward shot its last rays between the headlands,
when the body of the killed Lascar, wrapped up decently in a white
sheet, according to Mohammedan usage, was lowered gently below the
still waters of the bay upon which his curious glances, only a few
hours before, had rested for the first time. At the moment the dead man,
released from slip-ropes, disappeared without a ripple before the eyes
of his shipmates, the bright flash and the heavy report of the brig's
bow gun were succeeded by the muttering echoes of the encircling shores
and by the loud cries of sea birds that, wheeling in clouds, seemed
to scream after the departing seaman a wild and eternal good-bye. The
master of the brig, making his way aft with hanging head, was followed
by low murmurs of pleased surprise from his crew as well as from the
strangers who crowded the main deck. In such acts performed simply, from
conviction, what may be called the romantic side of the man's nature
came out; that responsive sensitiveness to the shadowy appeals made by
life and death, which is the groundwork of a chivalrous character.

Lingard entertained his three visitors far into the night. A sheep from
the brig's sea stock was given to the men of the prau, while in the
cabin, Hassim and his two friends, sitting in a row on the stern settee,
looked very splendid with costly metals and flawed jewels. The talk
conducted with hearty friendship on Lingard's part, and on the part of
the Malays with the well-bred air of discreet courtesy, which is natural
to the better class of that people, touched upon many subjects and, in
the end, drifted to politics.

“It is in my mind that you are a powerful man in your own country,” said
Hassim, with a circular glance at the cuddy.

“My country is upon a far-away sea where the light breezes are as strong
as the winds of the rainy weather here,” said Lingard; and there were
low exclamations of wonder. “I left it very young, and I don't know
about my power there where great men alone are as numerous as the poor
people in all your islands, Tuan Hassim. But here,” he continued, “here,
which is also my country--being an English craft and worthy of it,
too--I am powerful enough. In fact, I am Rajah here. This bit of my
country is all my own.”

The visitors were impressed, exchanged meaning glances, nodded at each
other.

“Good, good,” said Hassim at last, with a smile. “You carry your country
and your power with you over the sea. A Rajah upon the sea. Good!”

Lingard laughed thunderously while the others looked amused.

“Your country is very powerful--we know,” began again Hassim after a
pause, “but is it stronger than the country of the Dutch who steal our
land?”

“Stronger?” cried Lingard. He opened a broad palm. “Stronger? We
could take them in our hand like this--” and he closed his fingers
triumphantly.

“And do you make them pay tribute for their land?” enquired Hassim with
eagerness.

“No,” answered Lingard in a sobered tone; “this, Tuan Hassim, you see,
is not the custom of white men. We could, of course--but it is not the
custom.”

“Is it not?” said the other with a sceptical smile. “They are stronger
than we are and they want tribute from us. And sometimes they get
it--even from Wajo where every man is free and wears a kris.”

There was a period of dead silence while Lingard looked thoughtful and
the Malays gazed stonily at nothing.

“But we burn our powder amongst ourselves,” went on Hassim, gently, “and
blunt our weapons upon one another.”

He sighed, paused, and then changing to an easy tone began to urge
Lingard to visit Wajo “for trade and to see friends,” he said, laying
his hand on his breast and inclining his body slightly.

“Aye. To trade with friends,” cried Lingard with a laugh, “for such a
ship”--he waved his arm--“for such a vessel as this is like a household
where there are many behind the curtain. It is as costly as a wife and
children.”

The guests rose and took their leave.

“You fired three shots for me, Panglima Hassim,” said Lingard,
seriously, “and I have had three barrels of powder put on board your
prau; one for each shot. But we are not quits.”

The Malay's eyes glittered with pleasure.

“This is indeed a friend's gift. Come to see me in my country!”

“I promise,” said Lingard, “to see you--some day.”

The calm surface of the bay reflected the glorious night sky, and the
brig with the prau riding astern seemed to be suspended amongst the
stars in a peace that was almost unearthly in the perfection of its
unstirring silence. The last hand-shakes were exchanged on deck, and the
Malays went aboard their own craft. Next morning, when a breeze sprang
up soon after sunrise, the brig and the prau left the bay together. When
clear of the land Lingard made all sail and sheered alongside to say
good-bye before parting company--the brig, of course, sailing three feet
to the prau's one. Hassim stood on the high deck aft.

“Prosperous road,” hailed Lingard.

“Remember the promise!” shouted the other. “And come soon!” he went on,
raising his voice as the brig forged past. “Come soon--lest what perhaps
is written should come to pass!”

The brig shot ahead.

“What?” yelled Lingard in a puzzled tone, “what's written?”

He listened. And floating over the water came faintly the words:

“No one knows!”



III

“My word! I couldn't help liking the chap,” would shout Lingard when
telling the story; and looking around at the eyes that glittered at him
through the smoke of cheroots, this Brixham trawler-boy, afterward a
youth in colliers, deep-water man, gold-digger, owner and commander of
“the finest brig afloat,” knew that by his listeners--seamen, traders,
adventurers like himself--this was accepted not as the expression of a
feeling, but as the highest commendation he could give his Malay friend.

“By heavens! I shall go to Wajo!” he cried, and a semicircle of
heads nodded grave approbation while a slightly ironical voice said
deliberately--“You are a made man, Tom, if you get on the right side of
that Rajah of yours.”

“Go in--and look out for yourself,” cried another with a laugh.

A little professional jealousy was unavoidable, Wajo, on account of its
chronic state of disturbance, being closed to the white traders; but
there was no real ill-will in the banter of these men, who, rising with
handshakes, dropped off one by one. Lingard went straight aboard his
vessel and, till morning, walked the poop of the brig with measured
steps. The riding lights of ships twinkled all round him; the lights
ashore twinkled in rows, the stars twinkled above his head in a black
sky; and reflected in the black water of the roadstead twinkled far
below his feet. And all these innumerable and shining points were
utterly lost in the immense darkness. Once he heard faintly the rumbling
chain of some vessel coming to an anchor far away somewhere outside
the official limits of the harbour. A stranger to the port--thought
Lingard--one of us would have stood right in. Perhaps a ship from home?
And he felt strangely touched at the thought of that ship, weary with
months of wandering, and daring not to approach the place of rest. At
sunrise, while the big ship from the West, her sides streaked with rust
and grey with the salt of the sea, was moving slowly in to take up
a berth near the shore, Lingard left the roadstead on his way to the
eastward.

A heavy gulf thunderstorm was raging, when after a long passage and at
the end of a sultry calm day, wasted in drifting helplessly in sight
of his destination, Lingard, taking advantage of fitful gusts of wind,
approached the shores of Wajo. With characteristic audacity, he held on
his way, closing in with a coast to which he was a stranger, and on a
night that would have appalled any other man; while at every dazzling
flash, Hassim's native land seemed to leap nearer at the brig--and
disappear instantly as though it had crouched low for the next spring
out of an impenetrable darkness. During the long day of the calm, he had
obtained from the deck and from aloft, such good views of the coast,
and had noted the lay of the land and the position of the dangers so
carefully that, though at the precise moment when he gave the order to
let go the anchor, he had been for some time able to see no further
than if his head had been wrapped in a woollen blanket, yet the next
flickering bluish flash showed him the brig, anchored almost exactly
where he had judged her to be, off a narrow white beach near the mouth
of a river.

He could see on the shore a high cluster of bamboo huts perched upon
piles, a small grove of tall palms all bowed together before the blast
like stalks of grass, something that might have been a palisade
of pointed stakes near the water, and far off, a sombre background
resembling an immense wall--the forest-clad hills. Next moment, all this
vanished utterly from his sight, as if annihilated and, before he had
time to turn away, came back to view with a sudden crash, appearing
unscathed and motionless under hooked darts of flame, like some
legendary country of immortals, withstanding the wrath and fire of
Heaven.

Made uneasy by the nature of his holding ground, and fearing that in one
of the terrific off-shore gusts the brig would start her anchor, Lingard
remained on deck to watch over the safety of his vessel. With one hand
upon the lead-line which would give him instant warning of the brig
beginning to drag, he stood by the rail, most of the time deafened
and blinded, but also fascinated, by the repeated swift visions of an
unknown shore, a sight always so inspiring, as much perhaps by its vague
suggestion of danger as by the hopes of success it never fails to awaken
in the heart of a true adventurer. And its immutable aspect of profound
and still repose, seen thus under streams of fire and in the midst of a
violent uproar, made it appear inconceivably mysterious and amazing.

Between the squalls there were short moments of calm, while now and then
even the thunder would cease as if to draw breath. During one of those
intervals. Lingard, tired and sleepy, was beginning to doze where he
stood, when suddenly it occurred to him that, somewhere below, the sea
had spoken in a human voice. It had said, “Praise be to God--” and the
voice sounded small, clear, and confident, like the voice of a child
speaking in a cathedral. Lingard gave a start and thought--I've dreamed
this--and directly the sea said very close to him, “Give a rope.”

The thunder growled wickedly, and Lingard, after shouting to the men on
deck, peered down at the water, until at last he made out floating close
alongside the upturned face of a man with staring eyes that gleamed at
him and then blinked quickly to a flash of lightning. By that time all
hands in the brig were wildly active and many ropes-ends had been thrown
over. Then together with a gust of wind, and, as if blown on board, a
man tumbled over the rail and fell all in a heap upon the deck. Before
any one had the time to pick him up, he leaped to his feet, causing the
people around him to step back hurriedly. A sinister blue glare showed
the bewildered faces and the petrified attitudes of men completely
deafened by the accompanying peal of thunder. After a time, as if to
beings plunged in the abyss of eternal silence, there came to their ears
an unfamiliar thin, far-away voice saying:

“I seek the white man.”

“Here,” cried Lingard. Then, when he had the stranger, dripping and
naked but for a soaked waistcloth, under the lamp of the cabin, he said,
“I don't know you.”

“My name is Jaffir, and I come from Pata Hassim, who is my chief and
your friend. Do you know this?”

He held up a thick gold ring, set with a fairly good emerald.

“I have seen it before on the Rajah's finger,” said Lingard, looking
very grave.

“It is the witness of the truth I speak--the message from Hassim
is--'Depart and forget!'”

“I don't forget,” said Lingard, slowly. “I am not that kind of man. What
folly is this?”

It is unnecessary to give at full length the story told by Jaffir. It
appears that on his return home, after the meeting with Lingard,
Hassim found his relative dying and a strong party formed to oppose
his rightful successor. The old Rajah Tulla died late at night and--as
Jaffir put it--before the sun rose there were already blows exchanged in
the courtyard of the ruler's dalam. This was the preliminary fight of a
civil war, fostered by foreign intrigues; a war of jungle and river,
of assaulted stockades and forest ambushes. In this contest, both
parties--according to Jaffir--displayed great courage, and one of them
an unswerving devotion to what, almost from the first, was a lost cause.
Before a month elapsed Hassim, though still chief of an armed band, was
already a fugitive. He kept up the struggle, however, with some vague
notion that Lingard's arrival would turn the tide.

“For weeks we lived on wild rice; for days we fought with nothing
but water in our bellies,” declaimed Jaffir in the tone of a true
fire-eater.

And then he went on to relate, how, driven steadily down to the sea,
Hassim, with a small band of followers, had been for days holding the
stockade by the waterside.

“But every night some men disappeared,” confessed Jaffir. “They were
weary and hungry and they went to eat with their enemies. We are only
ten now--ten men and a woman with the heart of a man, who are tonight
starving, and to-morrow shall die swiftly. We saw your ship afar all
day; but you have come too late. And for fear of treachery and lest harm
should befall you--his friend--the Rajah gave me the ring and I crept
on my stomach over the sand, and I swam in the night--and I, Jaffir, the
best swimmer in Wajo, and the slave of Hassim, tell you--his message to
you is 'Depart and forget'--and this is his gift--take!”

He caught hold suddenly of Lingard's hand, thrust roughly into it the
ring, and then for the first time looked round the cabin with wondering
but fearless eyes. They lingered over the semicircle of bayonets and
rested fondly on musket-racks. He grunted in admiration.

“Ya-wa, this is strength!” he murmured as if to himself. “But it has
come too late.”

“Perhaps not,” cried Lingard.

“Too late,” said Jaffir, “we are ten only, and at sunrise we go out to
die.” He went to the cabin door and hesitated there with a puzzled air,
being unused to locks and door handles.

“What are you going to do?” asked Lingard.

“I shall swim back,” replied Jaffir. “The message is spoken and the
night can not last forever.”

“You can stop with me,” said Lingard, looking at the man searchingly.

“Hassim waits,” was the curt answer.

“Did he tell you to return?” asked Lingard.

“No! What need?” said the other in a surprised tone.

Lingard seized his hand impulsively.

“If I had ten men like you!” he cried.

“We are ten, but they are twenty to one,” said Jaffir, simply.

Lingard opened the door.

“Do you want anything that a man can give?” he asked.

The Malay had a moment of hesitation, and Lingard noticed the sunken
eyes, the prominent ribs, and the worn-out look of the man.

“Speak out,” he urged with a smile; “the bearer of a gift must have a
reward.”

“A drink of water and a handful of rice for strength to reach the
shore,” said Jaffir sturdily. “For over there”--he tossed his head--“we
had nothing to eat to-day.”

“You shall have it--give it to you with my own hands,” muttered Lingard.

He did so, and thus lowered himself in Jaffir's estimation for a time.
While the messenger, squatting on the floor, ate without haste but with
considerable earnestness, Lingard thought out a plan of action. In his
ignorance as to the true state of affairs in the country, to save
Hassim from the immediate danger of his position was all that he could
reasonably attempt. To that end Lingard proposed to swing out his
long-boat and send her close inshore to take off Hassim and his men. He
knew enough of Malays to feel sure that on such a night the besiegers,
now certain of success, and being, Jaffir said, in possession of
everything that could float, would not be very vigilant, especially on
the sea front of the stockade. The very fact of Jaffir having managed
to swim off undetected proved that much. The brig's boat could--when the
frequency of lightning abated--approach unseen close to the beach, and
the defeated party, either stealing out one by one or making a rush in a
body, would embark and be received in the brig.

This plan was explained to Jaffir, who heard it without the slightest
mark of interest, being apparently too busy eating. When the last grain
of rice was gone, he stood up, took a long pull at the water bottle,
muttered: “I hear. Good. I will tell Hassim,” and tightening the rag
round his loins, prepared to go. “Give me time to swim ashore,” he said,
“and when the boat starts, put another light beside the one that burns
now like a star above your vessel. We shall see and understand. And
don't send the boat till there is less lightning: a boat is bigger than
a man in the water. Tell the rowers to pull for the palm-grove and cease
when an oar, thrust down with a strong arm, touches the bottom. Very
soon they will hear our hail; but if no one comes they must go away
before daylight. A chief may prefer death to life, and we who are left
are all of true heart. Do you understand, O big man?”

“The chap has plenty of sense,” muttered Lingard to himself, and when
they stood side by side on the deck, he said: “But there may be enemies
on the beach, O Jaffir, and they also may shout to deceive my men. So
let your hail be Lightning! Will you remember?”

For a time Jaffir seemed to be choking.

“Lit-ing! Is that right? I say--is that right, O strong man?” Next
moment he appeared upright and shadowy on the rail.

“Yes. That's right. Go now,” said Lingard, and Jaffir leaped off,
becoming invisible long before he struck the water. Then there was a
splash; after a while a spluttering voice cried faintly, “Lit-ing! Ah,
ha!” and suddenly the next thunder-squall burst upon the coast. In the
crashing flares of light Lingard had again and again the quick vision of
a white beach, the inclined palm-trees of the grove, the stockade by
the sea, the forest far away: a vast landscape mysterious and
still--Hassim's native country sleeping unmoved under the wrath and fire
of Heaven.



IV

A Traveller visiting Wajo to-day may, if he deserves the confidence of
the common people, hear the traditional account of the last civil war,
together with the legend of a chief and his sister, whose mother had
been a great princess suspected of sorcery and on her death-bed had
communicated to these two the secrets of the art of magic. The chief's
sister especially, “with the aspect of a child and the fearlessness of a
great fighter,” became skilled in casting spells. They were defeated by
the son of their uncle, because--will explain the narrator simply--“The
courage of us Wajo people is so great that magic can do nothing against
it. I fought in that war. We had them with their backs to the sea.”
 And then he will go on to relate in an awed tone how on a certain night
“when there was such a thunderstorm as has been never heard of before
or since” a ship, resembling the ships of white men, appeared off the
coast, “as though she had sailed down from the clouds. She moved,” he
will affirm, “with her sails bellying against the wind; in size she was
like an island; the lightning played between her masts which were as
high as the summits of mountains; a star burned low through the clouds
above her. We knew it for a star at once because no flame of man's
kindling could have endured the wind and rain of that night. It was such
a night that we on the watch hardly dared look upon the sea. The heavy
rain was beating down our eyelids. And when day came, the ship was
nowhere to be seen, and in the stockade where the day before there were
a hundred or more at our mercy, there was no one. The chief, Hassim, was
gone, and the lady who was a princess in the country--and nobody knows
what became of them from that day to this. Sometimes traders from our
parts talk of having heard of them here, and heard of them there, but
these are the lies of men who go afar for gain. We who live in the
country believe that the ship sailed back into the clouds whence the
Lady's magic made her come. Did we not see the ship with our own eyes?
And as to Rajah Hassim and his sister, Mas Immada, some men say one
thing and some another, but God alone knows the truth.”

Such is the traditional account of Lingard's visit to the shores of
Boni. And the truth is he came and went the same night; for, when the
dawn broke on a cloudy sky the brig, under reefed canvas and smothered
in sprays, was storming along to the southward on her way out of the
Gulf. Lingard, watching over the rapid course of his vessel, looked
ahead with anxious eyes and more than once asked himself with wonder,
why, after all, was he thus pressing her under all the sail she could
carry. His hair was blown about by the wind, his mind was full of care
and the indistinct shapes of many new thoughts, and under his feet, the
obedient brig dashed headlong from wave to wave.

Her owner and commander did not know where he was going. That adventurer
had only a confused notion of being on the threshold of a big adventure.
There was something to be done, and he felt he would have to do it. It
was expected of him. The seas expected it; the land expected it. Men
also. The story of war and of suffering; Jaffir's display of fidelity,
the sight of Hassim and his sister, the night, the tempest, the coast
under streams of fire--all this made one inspiring manifestation of a
life calling to him distinctly for interference. But what appealed to
him most was the silent, the complete, unquestioning, and apparently
uncurious, trust of these people. They came away from death straight
into his arms as it were, and remained in them passive as though
there had been no such thing as doubt or hope or desire. This amazing
unconcern seemed to put him under a heavy load of obligation.

He argued to himself that had not these defeated men expected everything
from him they could not have been so indifferent to his action. Their
dumb quietude stirred him more than the most ardent pleading. Not a
word, not a whisper, not a questioning look even! They did not ask! It
flattered him. He was also rather glad of it, because if the unconscious
part of him was perfectly certain of its action, he, himself, did not
know what to do with those bruised and battered beings a playful fate
had delivered suddenly into his hands.

He had received the fugitives personally, had helped some over the rail;
in the darkness, slashed about by lightning, he had guessed that not one
of them was unwounded, and in the midst of tottering shapes he wondered
how on earth they had managed to reach the long-boat that had brought
them off. He caught unceremoniously in his arms the smallest of these
shapes and carried it into the cabin, then without looking at his light
burden ran up again on deck to get the brig under way. While shouting
out orders he was dimly aware of someone hovering near his elbow. It was
Hassim.

“I am not ready for war,” he explained, rapidly, over his shoulder,
“and to-morrow there may be no wind.” Afterward for a time he forgot
everybody and everything while he conned the brig through the few
outlying dangers. But in half an hour, and running off with the wind on
the quarter, he was quite clear of the coast and breathed freely. It
was only then that he approached two others on that poop where he was
accustomed in moments of difficulty to commune alone with his craft.
Hassim had called his sister out of the cabin; now and then Lingard
could see them with fierce distinctness, side by side, and with twined
arms, looking toward the mysterious country that seemed at every flash
to leap away farther from the brig--unscathed and fading.

The thought uppermost in Lingard's mind was: “What on earth am I going
to do with them?” And no one seemed to care what he would do. Jaffir
with eight others quartered on the main hatch, looked to each other's
wounds and conversed interminably in low tones, cheerful and quiet, like
well-behaved children. Each of them had saved his kris, but Lingard had
to make a distribution of cotton cloth out of his trade-goods. Whenever
he passed by them, they all looked after him gravely. Hassim and Immada
lived in the cuddy. The chief's sister took the air only in the evening
and those two could be heard every night, invisible and murmuring in the
shadows of the quarter-deck. Every Malay on board kept respectfully away
from them.

Lingard, on the poop, listened to the soft voices, rising and falling,
in a melancholy cadence; sometimes the woman cried out as if in anger or
in pain. He would stop short. The sound of a deep sigh would float up
to him on the stillness of the night. Attentive stars surrounded the
wandering brig and on all sides their light fell through a vast silence
upon a noiseless sea. Lingard would begin again to pace the deck,
muttering to himself.

“Belarab's the man for this job. His is the only place where I can look
for help, but I don't think I know enough to find it. I wish I had old
Jorgenson here--just for ten minutes.”

This Jorgenson knew things that had happened a long time ago, and lived
amongst men efficient in meeting the accidents of the day, but who did
not care what would happen to-morrow and who had no time to remember
yesterday. Strictly speaking, he did not live amongst them. He only
appeared there from time to time. He lived in the native quarter, with
a native woman, in a native house standing in the middle of a plot
of fenced ground where grew plantains, and furnished only with mats,
cooking pots, a queer fishing net on two sticks, and a small mahogany
case with a lock and a silver plate engraved with the words “Captain H.
C. Jorgenson. Barque Wild Rose.”

It was like an inscription on a tomb. The Wild Rose was dead, and so was
Captain H. C. Jorgenson, and the sextant case was all that was left
of them. Old Jorgenson, gaunt and mute, would turn up at meal times on
board any trading vessel in the Roads, and the stewards--Chinamen
or mulattos--would sulkily put on an extra plate without waiting for
orders. When the seamen traders foregathered noisily round a glittering
cluster of bottles and glasses on a lighted verandah, old Jorgenson
would emerge up the stairs as if from a dark sea, and, stepping up with
a kind of tottering jauntiness, would help himself in the first tumbler
to hand.

“I drink to you all. No--no chair.”

He would stand silent over the talking group. His taciturnity was as
eloquent as the repeated warning of the slave of the feast. His flesh
had gone the way of all flesh, his spirit had sunk in the turmoil of his
past, but his immense and bony frame survived as if made of iron. His
hands trembled but his eyes were steady. He was supposed to know details
about the end of mysterious men and of mysterious enterprises. He was an
evident failure himself, but he was believed to know secrets that would
make the fortune of any man; yet there was also a general impression
that his knowledge was not of that nature which would make it profitable
for a moderately prudent person.

This powerful skeleton, dressed in faded blue serge and without any kind
of linen, existed anyhow. Sometimes, if offered the job, he piloted
a home ship through the Straits of Rhio, after, however, assuring the
captain:

“You don't want a pilot; a man could go through with his eyes shut. But
if you want me, I'll come. Ten dollars.”

Then, after seeing his charge clear of the last island of the group he
would go back thirty miles in a canoe, with two old Malays who seemed
to be in some way his followers. To travel thirty miles at sea under
the equatorial sun and in a cranky dug-out where once down you must not
move, is an achievement that requires the endurance of a fakir and the
virtue of a salamander. Ten dollars was cheap and generally he was in
demand. When times were hard he would borrow five dollars from any of
the adventurers with the remark:

“I can't pay you back, very soon, but the girl must eat, and if you want
to know anything, I can tell you.”

It was remarkable that nobody ever smiled at that “anything.” The usual
thing was to say:

“Thank you, old man; when I am pushed for a bit of information I'll come
to you.”

Jorgenson nodded then and would say: “Remember that unless you young
chaps are like we men who ranged about here years ago, what I could tell
you would be worse than poison.”

It was from Jorgenson, who had his favourites with whom he was less
silent, that Lingard had heard of Darat-es-Salam, the “Shore of Refuge.”
 Jorgenson had, as he expressed it, “known the inside of that country
just after the high old times when the white-clad Padris preached and
fought all over Sumatra till the Dutch shook in their shoes.” Only he
did not say “shook” and “shoes” but the above paraphrase conveys well
enough his contemptuous meaning. Lingard tried now to remember and piece
together the practical bits of old Jorgenson's amazing tales; but all
that had remained with him was an approximate idea of the locality and
a very strong but confused notion of the dangerous nature of its
approaches. He hesitated, and the brig, answering in her movements to
the state of the man's mind, lingered on the road, seemed to hesitate
also, swinging this way and that on the days of calm.

It was just because of that hesitation that a big New York ship, loaded
with oil in cases for Japan, and passing through the Billiton passage,
sighted one morning a very smart brig being hove-to right in the
fair-way and a little to the east of Carimata. The lank skipper, in a
frock-coat, and the big mate with heavy moustaches, judged her almost
too pretty for a Britisher, and wondered at the man on board laying his
topsail to the mast for no reason that they could see. The big ship's
sails fanned her along, flapping in the light air, and when the brig was
last seen far astern she had still her mainyard aback as if waiting for
someone. But when, next day, a London tea-clipper passed on the same
track, she saw no pretty brig hesitating, all white and still at the
parting of the ways. All that night Lingard had talked with Hassim while
the stars streamed from east to west like an immense river of sparks
above their heads. Immada listened, sometimes exclaiming low, sometimes
holding her breath. She clapped her hands once. A faint dawn appeared.

“You shall be treated like my father in the country,” Hassim was saying.
A heavy dew dripped off the rigging and the darkened sails were black
on the pale azure of the sky. “You shall be the father who advises for
good--”

“I shall be a steady friend, and as a friend I want to be treated--no
more,” said Lingard. “Take back your ring.”

“Why do you scorn my gift?” asked Hassim, with a sad and ironic smile.

“Take it,” said Lingard. “It is still mine. How can I forget that, when
facing death, you thought of my safety? There are many dangers before
us. We shall be often separated--to work better for the same end. If
ever you and Immada need help at once and I am within reach, send me a
message with this ring and if I am alive I will not fail you.” He looked
around at the pale daybreak. “I shall talk to Belarab straight--like we
whites do. I have never seen him, but I am a strong man. Belarab must
help us to reconquer your country and when our end is attained I won't
let him eat you up.”

Hassim took the ring and inclined his head.

“It's time for us to be moving,” said Lingard. He felt a slight tug at
his sleeve. He looked back and caught Immada in the act of pressing her
forehead to the grey flannel. “Don't, child!” he said, softly.

The sun rose above the faint blue line of the Shore of Refuge.

The hesitation was over. The man and the vessel, working in accord, had
found their way to the faint blue shore. Before the sun had descended
half-way to its rest the brig was anchored within a gunshot of the slimy
mangroves, in a place where for a hundred years or more no white man's
vessel had been entrusted to the hold of the bottom. The adventurers
of two centuries ago had no doubt known of that anchorage for they were
very ignorant and incomparably audacious. If it is true, as some say,
that the spirits of the dead haunt the places where the living have
sinned and toiled, then they might have seen a white long-boat, pulled
by eight oars and steered by a man sunburnt and bearded, a cabbage-leaf
hat on head, and pistols in his belt, skirting the black mud, full of
twisted roots, in search of a likely opening.

Creek after creek was passed and the boat crept on slowly like a
monstrous water-spider with a big body and eight slender legs. . . . Did
you follow with your ghostly eyes the quest of this obscure adventurer
of yesterday, you shades of forgotten adventurers who, in leather
jerkins and sweating under steel helmets, attacked with long rapiers the
palisades of the strange heathen, or, musket on shoulder and match in
cock, guarded timber blockhouses built upon the banks of rivers that
command good trade? You, who, wearied with the toil of fighting, slept
wrapped in frieze mantles on the sand of quiet beaches, dreaming of
fabulous diamonds and of a far-off home.

“Here's an opening,” said Lingard to Hassim, who sat at his side, just
as the sun was setting away to his left. “Here's an opening big enough
for a ship. It's the entrance we are looking for, I believe. We shall
pull all night up this creek if necessary and it's the very devil if we
don't come upon Belarab's lair before daylight.”

He shoved the tiller hard over and the boat, swerving sharply, vanished
from the coast.

And perhaps the ghosts of old adventurers nodded wisely their ghostly
heads and exchanged the ghost of a wistful smile.



V

“What's the matter with King Tom of late?” would ask someone when, all
the cards in a heap on the table, the traders lying back in their chairs
took a spell from a hard gamble.

“Tom has learned to hold his tongue, he must be up to some dam' good
thing,” opined another; while a man with hooked features and of German
extraction who was supposed to be agent for a Dutch crockery house--the
famous “Sphinx” mark--broke in resentfully:

“Nefer mind him, shentlemens, he's matt, matt as a Marsh Hase. Dree
monats ago I call on board his prig to talk pizness. And he says like
dis--'Glear oudt.' 'Vat for?' I say. 'Glear oudt before I shuck you
oferboard.' Gott-for-dam! Iss dat the vay to talk pizness? I vant sell
him ein liddle case first chop grockery for trade and--”

“Ha, ha, ha! I don't blame Tom,” interrupted the owner of a pearling
schooner, who had come into the Roads for stores. “Why, Mosey, there
isn't a mangy cannibal left in the whole of New Guinea that hasn't got a
cup and saucer of your providing. You've flooded the market, savee?”

Jorgenson stood by, a skeleton at the gaming table.

“Because you are a Dutch spy,” he said, suddenly, in an awful tone.

The agent of the Sphinx mark jumped up in a sudden fury.

“Vat? Vat? Shentlemens, you all know me!” Not a muscle moved in
the faces around. “Know me,” he stammered with wet lips. “Vat, funf
year--berfegtly acquaint--grockery--Verfluchte sponsher. Ich? Spy. Vat
for spy? Vordamte English pedlars!”

The door slammed. “Is that so?” asked a New England voice. “Why don't
you let daylight into him?”

“Oh, we can't do that here,” murmured one of the players. “Your deal,
Trench, let us get on.”

“Can't you?” drawled the New England voice. “You law-abiding,
get-a-summons, act-of--parliament lot of sons of Belial--can't you?
Now, look a-here, these Colt pistols I am selling--” He took the pearler
aside and could be heard talking earnestly in the corner. “See--you
load--and--see?” There were rapid clicks. “Simple, isn't it? And if
any trouble--say with your divers”--_click, click, click_--“Through and
through--like a sieve--warranted to cure the worst kind of cussedness
in any nigger. Yes, siree! A case of twenty-four or single specimens--as
you like. No? Shot-guns--rifles? No! Waal, I guess you're of no use to
me, but I could do a deal with that Tom--what d'ye call him? Where d'ye
catch him? Everywhere--eh? Waal--that's nowhere. But I shall find him
some day--yes, siree.”

Jorgenson, utterly disregarded, looked down dreamily at the falling
cards. “Spy--I tell you,” he muttered to himself. “If you want to know
anything, ask me.”

When Lingard returned from Wajo--after an uncommonly long
absence--everyone remarked a great change. He was less talkative and
not so noisy, he was still hospitable but his hospitality was less
expansive, and the man who was never so happy as when discussing
impossibly wild projects with half a dozen congenial spirits often
showed a disinclination to meet his best friends. In a word, he
returned much less of a good fellow than he went away. His visits to the
Settlements were not less frequent, but much shorter; and when there he
was always in a hurry to be gone.

During two years the brig had, in her way, as hard a life of it as the
man. Swift and trim she flitted amongst the islands of little known
groups. She could be descried afar from lonely headlands, a white
speck travelling fast over the blue sea; the apathetic keepers of rare
lighthouses dotting the great highway to the east came to know the cut
of her topsails. They saw her passing east, passing west. They had faint
glimpses of her flying with masts aslant in the mist of a rain-squall,
or could observe her at leisure, upright and with shivering sails,
forging ahead through a long day of unsteady airs. Men saw her battling
with a heavy monsoon in the Bay of Bengal, lying becalmed in the Java
Sea, or gliding out suddenly from behind a point of land, graceful and
silent in the clear moonlight. Her activity was the subject of excited
but low-toned conversations, which would be interrupted when her master
appeared.

“Here he is. Came in last night,” whispered the gossiping group.

Lingard did not see the covert glances of respect tempered by irony; he
nodded and passed on.

“Hey, Tom! No time for a drink?” would shout someone.

He would shake his head without looking back--far away already.

Florid and burly he could be seen, for a day or two, getting out of
dusty gharries, striding in sunshine from the Occidental Bank to the
Harbour Office, crossing the Esplanade, disappearing down a street of
Chinese shops, while at his elbow and as tall as himself, old Jorgenson
paced along, lean and faded, obstinate and disregarded, like a haunting
spirit from the past eager to step back into the life of men.

Lingard ignored this wreck of an adventurer, sticking to him closer than
his shadow, and the other did not try to attract attention. He waited
patiently at the doors of offices, would vanish at tiffin time, would
invariably turn up again in the evening and then he kept his place
till Lingard went aboard for the night. The police peons on duty looked
disdainfully at the phantom of Captain H. C. Jorgenson, Barque Wild
Rose, wandering on the silent quay or standing still for hours at the
edge of the sombre roadstead speckled by the anchor lights of ships--an
adventurous soul longing to recross the waters of oblivion.

The sampan-men, sculling lazily homeward past the black hull of the brig
at anchor, could hear far into the night the drawl of the New England
voice escaping through the lifted panes of the cabin skylight. Snatches
of nasal sentences floated in the stillness around the still craft.

“Yes, siree! Mexican war rifles--good as new--six in a case--my people
in Baltimore--that's so. Hundred and twenty rounds thrown in for
each specimen--marked to suit your requirements. Suppose--musical
instruments, this side up with care--how's that for your taste? No, no!
Cash down--my people in Balt--Shooting sea-gulls you say? Waal! It's
a risky business--see here--ten per cent. discount--it's out of my own
pocket--”

As time wore on, and nothing happened, at least nothing that one could
hear of, the excitement died out. Lingard's new attitude was accepted
as only “his way.” There was nothing in it, maintained some. Others
dissented. A good deal of curiosity, however, remained and the faint
rumour of something big being in preparation followed him into every
harbour he went to, from Rangoon to Hongkong.

He felt nowhere so much at home as when his brig was anchored on the
inner side of the great stretch of shoals. The centre of his life had
shifted about four hundred miles--from the Straits of Malacca to the
Shore of Refuge--and when there he felt himself within the circle of
another existence, governed by his impulse, nearer his desire. Hassim
and Immada would come down to the coast and wait for him on the islet.
He always left them with regret.

At the end of the first stage in each trip, Jorgenson waited for him
at the top of the boat-stairs and without a word fell into step at his
elbow. They seldom exchanged three words in a day; but one evening about
six months before Lingard's last trip, as they were crossing the
short bridge over the canal where native craft lie moored in clusters,
Jorgenson lengthened his stride and came abreast. It was a moonlight
night and nothing stirred on earth but the shadows of high clouds.
Lingard took off his hat and drew in a long sigh in the tepid breeze.
Jorgenson spoke suddenly in a cautious tone: “The new Rajah Tulla
smokes opium and is sometimes dangerous to speak to. There is a lot of
discontent in Wajo amongst the big people.”

“Good! Good!” whispered Lingard, excitedly, off his guard for once.
Then--“How the devil do you know anything about it?” he asked.

Jorgenson pointed at the mass of praus, coasting boats, and sampans
that, jammed up together in the canal, lay covered with mats and flooded
by the cold moonlight with here and there a dim lantern burning amongst
the confusion of high sterns, spars, masts and lowered sails.

“There!” he said, as they moved on, and their hatted and clothed shadows
fell heavily on the queer-shaped vessels that carry the fortunes of
brown men upon a shallow sea. “There! I can sit with them, I can talk
to them, I can come and go as I like. They know me now--it's
time-thirty-five years. Some of them give a plate of rice and a bit of
fish to the white man. That's all I get--after thirty-five years--given
up to them.”

He was silent for a time.

“I was like you once,” he added, and then laying his hand on Lingard's
sleeve, murmured--“Are you very deep in this thing?”

“To the very last cent,” said Lingard, quietly, and looking straight
before him.

The glitter of the roadstead went out, and the masts of anchored ships
vanished in the invading shadow of a cloud.

“Drop it,” whispered Jorgenson.

“I am in debt,” said Lingard, slowly, and stood still.

“Drop it!”

“Never dropped anything in my life.”

“Drop it!”

“By God, I won't!” cried Lingard, stamping his foot.

There was a pause.

“I was like you--once,” repeated Jorgenson. “Five and thirty
years--never dropped anything. And what you can do is only child's play
to some jobs I have had on my hands--understand that--great man as you
are, Captain Lingard of the Lightning. . . . You should have seen the
Wild Rose,” he added with a sudden break in his voice.

Lingard leaned over the guard-rail of the pier. Jorgenson came closer.

“I set fire to her with my own hands!” he said in a vibrating tone and
very low, as if making a monstrous confession.

“Poor devil,” muttered Lingard, profoundly moved by the tragic enormity
of the act. “I suppose there was no way out?”

“I wasn't going to let her rot to pieces in some Dutch port,” said
Jorgenson, gloomily. “Did you ever hear of Dawson?”

“Something--I don't remember now--” muttered Lingard, who felt a chill
down his back at the idea of his own vessel decaying slowly in some
Dutch port. “He died--didn't he?” he asked, absently, while he
wondered whether he would have the pluck to set fire to the brig--on an
emergency.

“Cut his throat on the beach below Fort Rotterdam,” said Jorgenson. His
gaunt figure wavered in the unsteady moonshine as though made of mist.
“Yes. He broke some trade regulation or other and talked big about
law-courts and legal trials to the lieutenant of the Komet. 'Certainly,'
says the hound. 'Jurisdiction of Macassar, I will take your schooner
there.' Then coming into the roads he tows her full tilt on a ledge of
rocks on the north side--smash! When she was half full of water he takes
his hat off to Dawson. 'There's the shore,' says he--'go and get your
legal trial, you--Englishman--'” He lifted a long arm and shook his fist
at the moon which dodged suddenly behind a cloud. “All was lost. Poor
Dawson walked the streets for months barefooted and in rags. Then one
day he begged a knife from some charitable soul, went down to take a
last look at the wreck, and--”

“I don't interfere with the Dutch,” interrupted Lingard, impatiently. “I
want Hassim to get back his own--”

“And suppose the Dutch want the things just so,” returned Jorgenson.
“Anyway there is a devil in such work--drop it!”

“Look here,” said Lingard, “I took these people off when they were in
their last ditch. That means something. I ought not to have meddled and
it would have been all over in a few hours. I must have meant something
when I interfered, whether I knew it or not. I meant it then--and did
not know it. Very well. I mean it now--and do know it. When you save
people from death you take a share in their life. That's how I look at
it.”

Jorgenson shook his head.

“Foolishness!” he cried, then asked softly in a voice that trembled with
curiosity--“Where did you leave them?”

“With Belarab,” breathed out Lingard. “You knew him in the old days.”

“I knew him, I knew his father,” burst out the other in an excited
whisper. “Whom did I not know? I knew Sentot when he was King of the
South Shore of Java and the Dutch offered a price for his head--enough
to make any man's fortune. He slept twice on board the Wild Rose when
things had begun to go wrong with him. I knew him, I knew all his
chiefs, the priests, the fighting men, the old regent who lost heart and
went over to the Dutch, I knew--” he stammered as if the words could not
come out, gave it up and sighed--“Belarab's father escaped with me,” he
began again, quietly, “and joined the Padris in Sumatra. He rose to be
a great leader. Belarab was a youth then. Those were the times. I ranged
the coast--and laughed at the cruisers; I saw every battle fought in the
Battak country--and I saw the Dutch run; I was at the taking of Singal
and escaped. I was the white man who advised the chiefs of Manangkabo.
There was a lot about me in the Dutch papers at the time. They said I
was a Frenchman turned Mohammedan--” he swore a great oath, and, reeling
against the guard-rail, panted, muttering curses on newspapers.

“Well, Belarab has the job in hand,” said Lingard, composedly. “He is
the chief man on the Shore of Refuge. There are others, of course. He
has sent messages north and south. We must have men.”

“All the devils unchained,” said Jorgenson. “You have done it and
now--look out--look out. . . .”

“Nothing can go wrong as far as I can see,” argued Lingard. “They all
know what's to be done. I've got them in hand. You don't think Belarab
unsafe? Do you?”

“Haven't seen him for fifteen years--but the whole thing's unsafe,”
 growled Jorgenson.

“I tell you I've fixed it so that nothing can go wrong. It would be
better if I had a white man over there to look after things generally.
There is a good lot of stores and arms--and Belarab would bear
watching--no doubt. Are you in any want?” he added, putting his hand in
his pocket.

“No, there's plenty to eat in the house,” answered Jorgenson, curtly.
“Drop it,” he burst out. “It would be better for you to jump overboard
at once. Look at me. I came out a boy of eighteen. I can speak English,
I can speak Dutch, I can speak every cursed lingo of these islands--I
remember things that would make your hair stand on end--but I have
forgotten the language of my own country. I've traded, I've fought, I
never broke my word to white or native. And, look at me. If it hadn't
been for the girl I would have died in a ditch ten years ago. Everything
left me--youth, money, strength, hope--the very sleep. But she stuck by
the wreck.”

“That says a lot for her and something for you,” said Lingard, cheerily.

Jorgenson shook his head.

“That's the worst of all,” he said with slow emphasis. “That's the
end. I came to them from the other side of the earth and they took me
and--see what they made of me.”

“What place do you belong to?” asked Lingard.

“Tromso,” groaned out Jorgenson; “I will never see snow again,” he
sobbed out, his face in his hands.

Lingard looked at him in silence.

“Would you come with me?” he said. “As I told you, I am in want of a--”

“I would see you damned first!” broke out the other, savagely. “I am
an old white loafer, but you don't get me to meddle in their infernal
affairs. They have a devil of their own--”

“The thing simply can't fail. I've calculated every move. I've guarded
against everything. I am no fool.”

“Yes--you are. Good-night.”

“Well, good-bye,” said Lingard, calmly.

He stepped into his boat, and Jorgenson walked up the jetty. Lingard,
clearing the yoke lines, heard him call out from a distance:

“Drop it!”

“I sail before sunrise,” he shouted in answer, and went on board.

When he came up from his cabin after an uneasy night, it was dark yet. A
lank figure strolled across the deck.

“Here I am,” said Jorgenson, huskily. “Die there or here--all one. But,
if I die there, remember the girl must eat.”

Lingard was one of the few who had seen Jorgenson's girl. She had a
wrinkled brown face, a lot of tangled grey hair, a few black stumps
of teeth, and had been married to him lately by an enterprising young
missionary from Bukit Timah. What her appearance might have been once
when Jorgenson gave for her three hundred dollars and several brass
guns, it was impossible to say. All that was left of her youth was a
pair of eyes, undimmed and mournful, which, when she was alone, seemed
to look stonily into the past of two lives. When Jorgenson was near
they followed his movements with anxious pertinacity. And now within the
sarong thrown over the grey head they were dropping unseen tears while
Jorgenson's girl rocked herself to and fro, squatting alone in a corner
of the dark hut.

“Don't you worry about that,” said Lingard, grasping Jorgenson's hand.
“She shall want for nothing. All I expect you to do is to look a little
after Belarab's morals when I am away. One more trip I must make, and
then we shall be ready to go ahead. I've foreseen every single thing.
Trust me!”

In this way did the restless shade of Captain H. C. Jorgenson recross
the water of oblivion to step back into the life of men.



VI

For two years, Lingard, who had thrown himself body and soul into the
great enterprise, had lived in the long intoxication of slowly preparing
success. No thought of failure had crossed his mind, and no price
appeared too heavy to pay for such a magnificent achievement. It was
nothing less than bringing Hassim triumphantly back to that country
seen once at night under the low clouds and in the incessant tumult of
thunder. When at the conclusion of some long talk with Hassim, who for
the twentieth time perhaps had related the story of his wrongs and his
struggle, he lifted his big arm and shaking his fist above his head,
shouted: “We will stir them up. We will wake up the country!” he was,
without knowing it in the least, making a complete confession of the
idealism hidden under the simplicity of his strength. He would wake up
the country! That was the fundamental and unconscious emotion on which
were engrafted his need of action, the primitive sense of what was due
to justice, to gratitude, to friendship, the sentimental pity for the
hard lot of Immada--poor child--the proud conviction that of all the
men in the world, in his world, he alone had the means and the pluck “to
lift up the big end” of such an adventure.

Money was wanted and men were wanted, and he had obtained enough of both
in two years from that day when, pistols in his belt and a cabbage-leaf
hat on head, he had unexpectedly, and at early dawn, confronted in
perfect silence that mysterious Belarab, who himself was for a moment
too astounded for speech at the sight of a white face.

The sun had not yet cleared the forests of the interior, but a sky
already full of light arched over a dark oval lagoon, over wide fields
as yet full of shadows, that seemed slowly changing into the whiteness
of the morning mist. There were huts, fences, palisades, big houses
that, erected on lofty piles, were seen above the tops of clustered
fruit trees, as if suspended in the air.

Such was the aspect of Belarab's settlement when Lingard set his eyes
on it for the first time. There were all these things, a great number
of faces at the back of the spare and muffled-up figure confronting him,
and in the swiftly increasing light a complete stillness that made the
murmur of the word “Marhaba” (welcome), pronounced at last by the chief,
perfectly audible to every one of his followers. The bodyguards who
stood about him in black skull-caps and with long-shafted lances,
preserved an impassive aspect. Across open spaces men could be seen
running to the waterside. A group of women standing on a low knoll gazed
intently, and nothing of them but the heads showed above the unstirring
stalks of a maize field. Suddenly within a cluster of empty huts near
by the voice of an invisible hag was heard scolding with shrill fury an
invisible young girl:

“Strangers! You want to see the strangers? O devoid of all decency!
Must I so lame and old husk the rice alone? May evil befall thee and the
strangers! May they never find favour! May they be pursued with swords!
I am old. I am old. There is no good in strangers! O girl! May they
burn.”

“Welcome,” repeated Belarab, gravely, and looking straight into
Lingard's eyes.

Lingard spent six days that time in Belarab's settlement. Of these,
three were passed in observing each other without a question being asked
or a hint given as to the object in view. Lingard lounged on the fine
mats with which the chief had furnished a small bamboo house outside a
fortified enclosure, where a white flag with a green border fluttered on
a high and slender pole but still below the walls of long, high-roofed
buildings, raised forty feet or more on hard-wood posts.

Far away the inland forests were tinted a shimmering blue, like the
forests of a dream. On the seaward side the belt of great trunks and
matted undergrowth came to the western shore of the oval lagoon; and in
the pure freshness of the air the groups of brown houses reflected in
the water or seen above the waving green of the fields, the clumps of
palm trees, the fenced-in plantations, the groves of fruit trees, made
up a picture of sumptuous prosperity.

Above the buildings, the men, the women, the still sheet of water and
the great plain of crops glistening with dew, stretched the exalted,
the miraculous peace of a cloudless sky. And no road seemed to lead
into this country of splendour and stillness. One could not believe the
unquiet sea was so near, with its gifts and its unending menace. Even
during the months of storms, the great clamour rising from the whitened
expanse of the Shallows dwelt high in the air in a vast murmur, now
feeble now stronger, that seemed to swing back and forth on the wind
above the earth without any one being able to tell whence it came. It
was like the solemn chant of a waterfall swelling and dying away above
the woods, the fields, above the roofs of houses and the heads of men,
above the secret peace of that hidden and flourishing settlement of
vanquished fanatics, fugitives, and outcasts.

Every afternoon Belarab, followed by an escort that stopped outside
the door, entered alone the house of his guest. He gave the salutation,
inquired after his health, conversed about insignificant things with an
inscrutable mien. But all the time the steadfast gaze of his thoughtful
eyes seemed to seek the truth within that white face. In the cool of
the evening, before the sun had set, they talked together, passing and
repassing between the rugged pillars of the grove near the gate of the
stockade. The escort away in the oblique sunlight, followed with their
eyes the strolling figures appearing and vanishing behind the trees.
Many words were pronounced, but nothing was said that would disclose
the thoughts of the two men. They clasped hands demonstratively before
separating, and the heavy slam of the gate was followed by the triple
thud of the wooden bars dropped into iron clamps.

On the third night, Lingard was awakened from a light sleep by the sound
of whispering outside. A black shadow obscured the stars in the doorway,
and a man entering suddenly, stood above his couch while another could
be seen squatting--a dark lump on the threshold of the hut.

“Fear not. I am Belarab,” said a cautious voice.

“I was not afraid,” whispered Lingard. “It is the man coming in the dark
and without warning who is in danger.”

“And did you not come to me without warning? I said 'welcome'--it was as
easy for me to say 'kill him.'”

“You were within reach of my arm. We would have died together,” retorted
Lingard, quietly.

The other clicked his tongue twice, and his indistinct shape seemed to
sink half-way through the floor.

“It was not written thus before we were born,” he said, sitting
cross-legged near the mats, and in a deadened voice. “Therefore you are
my guest. Let the talk between us be straight like the shaft of a spear
and shorter than the remainder of this night. What do you want?”

“First, your long life,” answered Lingard, leaning forward toward the
gleam of a pair of eyes, “and then--your help.”



VII

The faint murmur of the words spoken on that night lingered for a long
time in Lingard's ears, more persistent than the memory of an uproar; he
looked with a fixed gaze at the stars burning peacefully in the square
of the doorway, while after listening in silence to all he had to say,
Belarab, as if seduced by the strength and audacity of the white man,
opened his heart without reserve. He talked of his youth surrounded by
the fury of fanaticism and war, of battles on the hills, of
advances through the forests, of men's unswerving piety, of their
unextinguishable hate. Not a single wandering cloud obscured the gentle
splendour of the rectangular patch of starlight framed in the opaque
blackness of the hut. Belarab murmured on of a succession of reverses,
of the ring of disasters narrowing round men's fading hopes and
undiminished courage. He whispered of defeat and flight, of the days
of despair, of the nights without sleep, of unending pursuit, of the
bewildered horror and sombre fury, of their women and children killed in
the stockade before the besieged sallied forth to die.

“I have seen all this before I was in years a man,” he cried, low.

His voice vibrated. In the pause that succeeded they heard a light sigh
of the sleeping follower who, clasping his legs above his ankles, rested
his forehead on his knees.

“And there was amongst us,” began Belarab again, “one white man who
remained to the end, who was faithful with his strength, with his
courage, with his wisdom. A great man. He had great riches but a greater
heart.”

The memory of Jorgenson, emaciated and grey-haired, and trying to borrow
five dollars to get something to eat for the girl, passed before Lingard
suddenly upon the pacific glitter of the stars.

“He resembled you,” pursued Belarab, abruptly. “We escaped with him, and
in his ship came here. It was a solitude. The forest came near to the
sheet of water, the rank grass waved upon the heads of tall men. Telal,
my father, died of weariness; we were only a few, and we all nearly died
of trouble and sadness--here. On this spot! And no enemies could tell
where we had gone. It was the Shore of Refuge--and starvation.”

He droned on in the night, with rising and falling inflections. He told
how his desperate companions wanted to go out and die fighting on the
sea against the ships from the west, the ships with high sides and white
sails; and how, unflinching and alone, he kept them battling with the
thorny bush, with the rank grass, with the soaring and enormous trees.
Lingard, leaning on his elbow and staring through the door, recalled
the image of the wide fields outside, sleeping now, in an immensity of
serenity and starlight. This quiet and almost invisible talker had done
it all; in him was the origin, the creation, the fate; and in the
wonder of that thought the shadowy murmuring figure acquired a gigantic
greatness of significance, as if it had been the embodiment of some
natural force, of a force forever masterful and undying.

“And even now my life is unsafe as if I were their enemy,” said Belarab,
mournfully. “Eyes do not kill, nor angry words; and curses have no
power, else the Dutch would not grow fat living on our land, and I would
not be alive to-night. Do you understand? Have you seen the men who
fought in the old days? They have not forgotten the times of war. I have
given them homes and quiet hearts and full bellies. I alone. And they
curse my name in the dark, in each other's ears--because they can never
forget.”

This man, whose talk had been of war and violence, discovered
unexpectedly a passionate craving for security and peace. No one would
understand him. Some of those who would not understand had died. His
white teeth gleamed cruelly in the dark. But there were others he could
not kill. The fools. He wanted the land and the people in it to be
forgotten as if they had been swallowed by the sea. But they had neither
wisdom nor patience. Could they not wait? They chanted prayers five
times every day, but they had not the faith.

“Death comes to all--and to the believers the end of trouble. But you
white men who are too strong for us, you also die. You die. And there
is a Paradise as great as all earth and all Heaven together, but not for
you--not for you!”

Lingard, amazed, listened without a sound. The sleeper snored faintly.
Belarab continued very calm after this almost involuntary outburst of
a consoling belief. He explained that he wanted somebody at his back,
somebody strong and whom he could trust, some outside force that would
awe the unruly, that would inspire their ignorance with fear, and make
his rule secure. He groped in the dark and seizing Lingard's arm above
the elbow pressed it with force--then let go. And Lingard understood why
his temerity had been so successful.

Then and there, in return for Lingard's open support, a few guns and a
little money, Belarab promised his help for the conquest of Wajo. There
was no doubt he could find men who would fight. He could send messages
to friends at a distance and there were also many unquiet spirits in his
own district ready for any adventure. He spoke of these men with
fierce contempt and an angry tenderness, in mingled accents of envy and
disdain. He was wearied by their folly, by their recklessness, by their
impatience--and he seemed to resent these as if they had been gifts of
which he himself had been deprived by the fatality of his wisdom. They
would fight. When the time came Lingard had only to speak, and a sign
from him would send them to a vain death--those men who could not wait
for an opportunity on this earth or for the eternal revenge of Heaven.

He ceased, and towered upright in the gloom.

“Awake!” he exclaimed, low, bending over the sleeping man.

Their black shapes, passing in turn, eclipsed for two successive moments
the glitter of the stars, and Lingard, who had not stirred, remained
alone. He lay back full length with an arm thrown across his eyes.

When three days afterward he left Belarab's settlement, it was on a calm
morning of unclouded peace. All the boats of the brig came up into the
lagoon armed and manned to make more impressive the solemn fact of a
concluded alliance. A staring crowd watched his imposing departure in
profound silence and with an increased sense of wonder at the mystery of
his apparition. The progress of the boats was smooth and slow while they
crossed the wide lagoon. Lingard looked back once. A great stillness had
laid its hand over the earth, the sky, and the men; upon the immobility
of landscape and people. Hassim and Immada, standing out clearly by
the side of the chief, raised their arms in a last salutation; and the
distant gesture appeared sad, futile, lost in space, like a sign of
distress made by castaways in the vain hope of an impossible help.

He departed, he returned, he went away again, and each time those two
figures, lonely on some sandbank of the Shallows, made at him the same
futile sign of greeting or good-bye. Their arms at each movement seemed
to draw closer around his heart the bonds of a protecting affection.
He worked prosaically, earning money to pay the cost of the romantic
necessity that had invaded his life. And the money ran like water out of
his hands. The owner of the New England voice remitted not a little of
it to his people in Baltimore. But import houses in the ports of the
Far East had their share. It paid for a fast prau which, commanded by
Jaffir, sailed into unfrequented bays and up unexplored rivers, carrying
secret messages, important news, generous bribes. A good part of it went
to the purchase of the Emma.

The Emma was a battered and decrepit old schooner that, in the decline
of her existence, had been much ill-used by a paunchy white trader of
cunning and gluttonous aspect. This man boasted outrageously afterward
of the good price he had got “for that rotten old hooker of mine--you
know.” The Emma left port mysteriously in company with the brig and
henceforth vanished from the seas forever. Lingard had her towed up the
creek and ran her aground upon that shore of the lagoon farthest from
Belarab's settlement. There had been at that time a great rise of
waters, which retiring soon after left the old craft cradled in the mud,
with her bows grounded high between the trunks of two big trees, and
leaning over a little as though after a hard life she had settled
wearily to an everlasting rest. There, a few months later, Jorgenson
found her when, called back into the life of men, he reappeared,
together with Lingard, in the Land of Refuge.

“She is better than a fort on shore,” said Lingard, as side by side they
leant over the taffrail, looking across the lagoon on the houses and
palm groves of the settlement. “All the guns and powder I have got
together so far are stored in her. Good idea, wasn't it? There will
be, perhaps, no other such flood for years, and now they can't come
alongside unless right under the counter, and only one boat at a time.
I think you are perfectly safe here; you could keep off a whole fleet of
boats; she isn't easy to set fire to; the forest in front is better than
a wall. Well?”

Jorgenson assented in grunts. He looked at the desolate emptiness of the
decks, at the stripped spars, at the dead body of the dismantled little
vessel that would know the life of the seas no more. The gloom of the
forest fell on her, mournful like a winding sheet. The bushes of the
bank tapped their twigs on the bluff of her bows, and a pendent spike of
tiny brown blossoms swung to and fro over the ruins of her windlass.

Hassim's companions garrisoned the old hulk, and Jorgenson, left
in charge, prowled about from stem to stern, taciturn and anxiously
faithful to his trust. He had been received with astonishment,
respect--and awe. Belarab visited him often. Sometimes those whom he had
known in their prime years ago, during a struggle for faith and life,
would come to talk with the white man. Their voices were like the echoes
of stirring events, in the pale glamour of a youth gone by. They nodded
their old heads. Do you remember?--they said. He remembered only too
well! He was like a man raised from the dead, for whom the fascinating
trust in the power of life is tainted by the black scepticism of the
grave.

Only at times the invincible belief in the reality of existence would
come back, insidious and inspiring. He squared his shoulders, held
himself straight, and walked with a firmer step. He felt a glow within
him and the quickened beat of his heart. Then he calculated in silent
excitement Lingard's chances of success, and he lived for a time with
the life of that other man who knew nothing of the black scepticism of
the grave. The chances were good, very good.

“I should like to see it through,” Jorgenson muttered to himself
ardently; and his lustreless eyes would flash for a moment.



PART III. THE CAPTURE

I

“Some people,” said Lingard, “go about the world with their eyes shut.
You are right. The sea is free to all of us. Some work on it, and some
play the fool on it--and I don't care. Only you may take it from me
that I will let no man's play interfere with my work. You want me to
understand you are a very great man--”

Mr. Travers smiled, coldly.

“Oh, yes,” continued Lingard, “I understand that well enough. But
remember you are very far from home, while I, here, I am where I belong.
And I belong where I am. I am just Tom Lingard, no more, no less,
wherever I happen to be, and--you may ask--” A sweep of his hand along
the western horizon entrusted with perfect confidence the remainder of
his speech to the dumb testimony of the sea.

He had been on board the yacht for more than an hour, and nothing,
for him, had come of it but the birth of an unreasoning hate. To the
unconscious demand of these people's presence, of their ignorance, of
their faces, of their voices, of their eyes, he had nothing to give but
a resentment that had in it a germ of reckless violence. He could tell
them nothing because he had not the means. Their coming at this moment,
when he had wandered beyond that circle which race, memories, early
associations, all the essential conditions of one's origin, trace round
every man's life, deprived him in a manner of the power of speech. He
was confounded. It was like meeting exacting spectres in a desert.

He stared at the open sea, his arms crossed, with a reflective
fierceness. His very appearance made him utterly different from everyone
on board that vessel. The grey shirt, the blue sash, one rolled-up
sleeve baring a sculptural forearm, the negligent masterfulness of his
tone and pose were very distasteful to Mr. Travers, who, having made
up his mind to wait for some kind of official assistance, regarded
the intrusion of that inexplicable man with suspicion. From the moment
Lingard came on board the yacht, every eye in that vessel had been fixed
upon him. Only Carter, within earshot and leaning with his elbow upon
the rail, stared down at the deck as if overcome with drowsiness or lost
in thought.

Of the three other persons aft, Mr. Travers kept his hands in the side
pockets of his jacket and did not conceal his growing disgust.

On the other side of the deck, a lady, in a long chair, had a passive
attitude that to Mr. d'Alcacer, standing near her, seemed characteristic
of the manner in which she accepted the necessities of existence. Years
before, as an attache of his Embassy in London, he had found her an
interesting hostess. She was even more interesting now, since a chance
meeting and Mr. Travers' offer of a passage to Batavia had given him an
opportunity of studying the various shades of scorn which he suspected
to be the secret of her acquiescence in the shallowness of events and
the monotony of a worldly existence.

There were things that from the first he had not been able to
understand; for instance, why she should have married Mr. Travers. It
must have been from ambition. He could not help feeling that such a
successful mistake would explain completely her scorn and also her
acquiescence. The meeting in Manila had been utterly unexpected to
him, and he accounted for it to his uncle, the Governor-General of the
colony, by pointing out that Englishmen, when worsted in the struggle
of love or politics, travel extensively, as if by encompassing a large
portion of earth's surface they hoped to gather fresh strength for a
renewed contest. As to himself, he judged--but did not say--that his
contest with fate was ended, though he also travelled, leaving behind
him in the capitals of Europe a story in which there was nothing
scandalous but the publicity of an excessive feeling, and nothing more
tragic than the early death of a woman whose brilliant perfections were
no better known to the great world than the discreet and passionate
devotion she had innocently inspired.

The invitation to join the yacht was the culminating point of many
exchanged civilities, and was mainly prompted by Mr. Travers' desire
to have somebody to talk to. D'Alcacer had accepted with the reckless
indifference of a man to whom one method of flight from a relentless
enemy is as good as another. Certainly the prospect of listening to long
monologues on commerce, administration, and politics did not promise
much alleviation to his sorrow; and he could not expect much else from
Mr. Travers, whose life and thought, ignorant of human passion, were
devoted to extracting the greatest possible amount of personal advantage
from human institutions. D'Alcacer found, however, that he could attain
a measure of forgetfulness--the most precious thing for him now--in the
society of Edith Travers.

She had awakened his curiosity, which he thought nothing and nobody on
earth could do any more.

These two talked of things indifferent and interesting, certainly not
connected with human institutions, and only very slightly with human
passions; but d'Alcacer could not help being made aware of her latent
capacity for sympathy developed in those who are disenchanted with life
or death. How far she was disenchanted he did not know, and did
not attempt to find out. This restraint was imposed upon him by the
chivalrous respect he had for the secrets of women and by a conviction
that deep feeling is often impenetrably obscure, even to those it
masters for their inspiration or their ruin. He believed that even she
herself would never know; but his grave curiosity was satisfied by the
observation of her mental state, and he was not sorry that the stranding
of the yacht prolonged his opportunity.

Time passed on that mudbank as well as anywhere else, and it was not
from a multiplicity of events, but from the lapse of time alone, that
he expected relief. Yet in the sameness of days upon the Shallows, time
flowing ceaselessly, flowed imperceptibly; and, since every man clings
to his own, be it joy, be it grief, he was pleased after the unrest
of his wanderings to be able to fancy the whole universe and even time
itself apparently come to a standstill; as if unwilling to take him away
further from his sorrow, which was fading indeed but undiminished, as
things fade, not in the distance but in the mist.


II

D'Alcacer was a man of nearly forty, lean and sallow, with hollow eyes
and a drooping brown moustache. His gaze was penetrating and direct, his
smile frequent and fleeting. He observed Lingard with great interest.
He was attracted by that elusive something--a line, a fold, perhaps
the form of the eye, the droop of an eyelid, the curve of a cheek, that
trifling trait which on no two faces on earth is alike, that in each
face is the very foundation of expression, as if, all the rest being
heredity, mystery, or accident, it alone had been shaped consciously by
the soul within.

Now and then he bent slightly over the slow beat of a red fan in the
curve of the deck chair to say a few words to Mrs. Travers, who answered
him without looking up, without a modulation of tone or a play of
feature, as if she had spoken from behind the veil of an immense
indifference stretched between her and all men, between her heart and
the meaning of events, between her eyes and the shallow sea which, like
her gaze, appeared profound, forever stilled, and seemed, far off in the
distance of a faint horizon, beyond the reach of eye, beyond the power
of hand or voice, to lose itself in the sky.

Mr. Travers stepped aside, and speaking to Carter, overwhelmed him with
reproaches.

“You misunderstood your instructions,” murmured Mr. Travers rapidly.
“Why did you bring this man here? I am surprised--”

“Not half so much as I was last night,” growled the young seaman,
without any reverence in his tone, very provoking to Mr. Travers.

“I perceive now you were totally unfit for the mission I entrusted you
with,” went on the owner of the yacht.

“It's he who got hold of me,” said Carter. “Haven't you heard him
yourself, sir?”

“Nonsense,” whispered Mr. Travers, angrily. “Have you any idea what his
intentions may be?”

“I half believe,” answered Carter, “that his intention was to shoot me
in his cabin last night if I--”

“That's not the point,” interrupted Mr. Travers. “Have you any opinion
as to his motives in coming here?”

Carter raised his weary, bloodshot eyes in a face scarlet and peeling as
though it had been licked by a flame. “I know no more than you do, sir.
Last night when he had me in that cabin of his, he said he would just as
soon shoot me as let me go to look for any other help. It looks as if
he were desperately bent upon getting a lot of salvage money out of a
stranded yacht.”

Mr. Travers turned away, and, for a moment, appeared immersed in deep
thought. This accident of stranding upon a deserted coast was annoying
as a loss of time. He tried to minimize it by putting in order the notes
collected during the year's travel in the East. He had sent off for
assistance; his sailing-master, very crestfallen, made bold to say that
the yacht would most likely float at the next spring tides; d'Alcacer,
a person of undoubted nobility though of inferior principles, was better
than no company, in so far at least that he could play picquet.

Mr. Travers had made up his mind to wait. Then suddenly this rough
man, looking as if he had stepped out from an engraving in a book about
buccaneers, broke in upon his resignation with mysterious allusions to
danger, which sounded absurd yet were disturbing; with dark and warning
sentences that sounded like disguised menaces.

Mr. Travers had a heavy and rather long chin which he shaved. His eyes
were blue, a chill, naive blue. He faced Lingard untouched by travel,
without a mark of weariness or exposure, with the air of having been
born invulnerable. He had a full, pale face; and his complexion was
perfectly colourless, yet amazingly fresh, as if he had been reared in
the shade.

He thought:

“I must put an end to this preposterous hectoring. I won't be
intimidated into paying for services I don't need.”

Mr. Travers felt a strong disgust for the impudence of the attempt; and
all at once, incredibly, strangely, as though the thing, like a contest
with a rival or a friend, had been of profound importance to his career,
he felt inexplicably elated at the thought of defeating the secret
purposes of that man.

Lingard, unconscious of everything and everybody, contemplated the sea.
He had grown on it, he had lived with it; it had enticed him away from
home; on it his thoughts had expanded and his hand had found work to do.
It had suggested endeavour, it had made him owner and commander of the
finest brig afloat; it had lulled him into a belief in himself, in
his strength, in his luck--and suddenly, by its complicity in a fatal
accident, it had brought him face to face with a difficulty that looked
like the beginning of disaster.

He had said all he dared to say--and he perceived that he was not
believed. This had not happened to him for years. It had never happened.
It bewildered him as if he had suddenly discovered that he was no longer
himself. He had come to them and had said: “I mean well by you. I am
Tom Lingard--” and they did not believe! Before such scepticism he was
helpless, because he had never imagined it possible. He had said: “You
are in the way of my work. You are in the way of what I can not give up
for any one; but I will see you through all safe if you will only
trust me--me, Tom Lingard.” And they would not believe him! It was
intolerable. He imagined himself sweeping their disbelief out of his
way. And why not? He did not know them, he did not care for them, he
did not even need to lift his hand against them! All he had to do was to
shut his eyes now for a day or two, and afterward he could forget that
he had ever seen them. It would be easy. Let their disbelief vanish,
their folly disappear, their bodies perish. . . . It was that--or ruin!



III

Lingard's gaze, detaching itself from the silent sea, travelled slowly
over the silent figures clustering forward, over the faces of the seamen
attentive and surprised, over the faces never seen before yet suggesting
old days--his youth--other seas--the distant shores of early memories.
Mr. Travers gave a start also, and the hand which had been busy with
his left whisker went into the pocket of his jacket, as 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/1712