Chapter IV: Part II: The Shore of Refuge (2)

“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.