The Rescue (29 page)

Lingard turned away from the oracle. "You have heard him, Mrs. Travers.
You may believe every word he says. There isn't a thought or a purpose
in that Settlement," he continued, pointing at the dumb solitude of the
lagoon, "that this man doesn't know as if they were his own."

"I know. Ask me," muttered Jorgenson, mechanically.

Mrs. Travers said nothing but made a slight movement and her whole rigid
figure swayed dangerously. Lingard put his arm firmly round her waist
and she did not seem aware of it till after she had turned her head and
found Lingard's face very near her own. But his eyes full of concern
looked so close into hers that she was obliged to shut them like a woman
about to faint.

The effect this produced upon Lingard was such that she felt the
tightening of his arm and as she opened her eyes again some of the
colour returned to her face. She met the deepened expression of his
solicitude with a look so steady, with a gaze that in spite of herself
was so profoundly vivid that its clearness seemed to Lingard to throw
all his past life into shade.—"I don't feel faint. It isn't that at
all," she declared in a perfectly calm voice. It seemed to Lingard as
cold as ice.

"Very well," he agreed with a resigned smile. "But you just catch hold
of that rail, please, before I let you go." She, too, forced a smile on
her lips.

"What incredulity," she remarked, and for a time made not the slightest
movement. At last, as if making a concession, she rested the tips of her
fingers on the rail. Lingard gradually removed his arm. "And pray don't
look upon me as a conventional 'weak woman' person, the delicate lady of
your own conception," she said, facing Lingard, with her arm extended to
the rail. "Make that effort please against your own conception of what
a woman like me should be. I am perhaps as strong as you are, Captain
Lingard. I mean it literally. In my body."—"Don't you think I have
seen that long ago?" she heard his deep voice protesting.—"And as to
my courage," Mrs. Travers continued, her expression charmingly undecided
between frowns and smiles; "didn't I tell you only a few hours ago, only
last evening, that I was not capable of thinking myself into a fright;
you remember, when you were begging me to try something of the kind.
Don't imagine that I would have been ashamed to try. But I couldn't have
done it. No. Not even for the sake of somebody else's kingdom. Do you
understand me?"

"God knows," said the attentive Lingard after a time, with an unexpected
sigh. "You people seem to be made of another stuff."

"What has put that absurd notion into your head?"

"I didn't mean better or worse. And I wouldn't say it isn't good stuff
either. What I meant to say is that it's different. One feels it. And
here we are."

"Yes, here we are," repeated Mrs. Travers. "And as to this moment of
emotion, what provoked it is not a concern for anybody or anything
outside myself. I felt no terror. I cannot even fix my fears upon any
distinct image. You think I am shamelessly heartless in telling you
this."

Lingard made no sign. It didn't occur to him to make a sign. He
simply hung on Mrs. Travers' words as it were only for the sake of the
sound.—"I am simply frank with you," she continued. "What do I know of
savagery, violence, murder? I have never seen a dead body in my life.
The light, the silence, the mysterious emptiness of this place have
suddenly affected my imagination, I suppose. What is the meaning of this
wonderful peace in which we stand—you and I alone?"

Lingard shook his head. He saw the narrow gleam of the woman's teeth
between the parted lips of her smile, as if all the ardour of her
conviction had been dissolved at the end of her speech into wistful
recognition of their partnership before things outside their knowledge.
And he was warmed by something a little helpless in that smile. Within
three feet of them the shade of Jorgenson, very gaunt and neat, stared
into space.

"Yes. You are strong," said Lingard. "But a whole long night sitting in
a small boat! I wonder you are not too stiff to stand."

"I am not stiff in the least," she interrupted, still smiling. "I am
really a very strong woman," she added, earnestly. "Whatever happens you
may reckon on that fact."

Lingard gave her an admiring glance. But the shade of Jorgenson, perhaps
catching in its remoteness the sound of the word woman, was suddenly
moved to begin scolding with all the liberty of a ghost, in a flow of
passionless indignation.

"Woman! That's what I say. That's just about the last touch—that you,
Tom Lingard, red-eyed Tom, King Tom, and all those fine names, that you
should leave your weapons twenty miles behind you, your men, your guns,
your brig that is your strength, and come along here with your mouth
full of fight, bare-handed and with a woman in tow.—Well—well!"

"Don't forget, Jorgenson, that the lady hears you," remonstrated Lingard
in a vexed tone. . . . "He doesn't mean to be rude," he remarked to Mrs.
Travers quite loud, as if indeed Jorgenson were but an immaterial and
feelingless illusion. "He has forgotten."

"The woman is not in the least offended. I ask for nothing better than
to be taken on that footing."

"Forgot nothing!" mumbled Jorgenson with a sort of ghostly assertiveness
and as it were for his own satisfaction. "What's the world coming to?"

"It was I who insisted on coming with Captain Lingard," said Mrs.
Travers, treating Jorgenson to a fascinating sweetness of tone.

"That's what I say! What is the world coming to? Hasn't King Tom a mind
of his own? What has come over him? He's mad! Leaving his brig with a
hundred and twenty born and bred pirates of the worst kind in two praus
on the other side of a sandbank. Did you insist on that, too? Has he put
himself in the hands of a strange woman?"

Jorgenson seemed to be asking those questions of himself. Mrs. Travers
observed the empty stare, the self-communing voice, his unearthly lack
of animation. Somehow it made it very easy to speak the whole truth to
him.

"No," she said, "it is I who am altogether in his hands."

Nobody would have guessed that Jorgenson had heard a single word of that
emphatic declaration if he had not addressed himself to Lingard with the
question neither more nor less abstracted than all his other speeches.

"Why then did you bring her along?"

"You don't understand. It was only right and proper. One of the
gentlemen is the lady's husband."

"Oh, yes," muttered Jorgenson. "Who's the other?"

"You have been told. A friend."

"Poor Mr. d'Alcacer," said Mrs. Travers. "What bad luck for him to have
accepted our invitation. But he is really a mere acquaintance."

"I hardly noticed him," observed Lingard, gloomily. "He was talking to
you over the back of your chair when I came aboard the yacht as if he
had been a very good friend."

"We always understood each other very well," said Mrs. Travers, picking
up from the rail the long glass that was lying there. "I always liked
him, the frankness of his mind, and his great loyalty."

"What did he do?" asked Lingard.

"He loved," said Mrs. Travers, lightly. "But that's an old story." She
raised the glass to her eyes, one arm extended fully to sustain the long
tube, and Lingard forgot d'Alcacer in admiring the firmness of her pose
and the absolute steadiness of the heavy glass. She was as firm as a
rock after all those emotions and all that fatigue.

Mrs. Travers directed the glass instinctively toward the entrance of the
lagoon. The smooth water there shone like a piece of silver in the dark
frame of the forest. A black speck swept across the field of her vision.
It was some time before she could find it again and then she saw,
apparently so near as to be within reach of the voice, a small canoe
with two people in it. She saw the wet paddles rising and dipping with
a flash in the sunlight. She made out plainly the face of Immada, who
seemed to be looking straight into the big end of the telescope. The
chief and his sister, after resting under the bank for a couple of
hours in the middle of the night, had entered the lagoon and were making
straight for the hulk. They were already near enough to be perfectly
distinguishable to the naked eye if there had been anybody on board to
glance that way. But nobody was even thinking of them. They might not
have existed except perhaps in the memory of old Jorgenson. But that was
mostly busy with all the mysterious secrets of his late tomb.

Mrs. Travers lowered the glass suddenly. Lingard came out from a sort of
trance and said:

"Mr. d'Alcacer. Loved! Why shouldn't he?"

Mrs. Travers looked frankly into Lingard's gloomy eyes. "It isn't that
alone, of course," she said. "First of all he knew how to love and then.
. . . You don't know how artificial and barren certain kinds of life
can be. But Mr. d'Alcacer's life was not that. His devotion was worth
having."

"You seem to know a lot about him,'" said Lingard, enviously. "Why do
you smile?" She continued to smile at him for a little while. The long
brass tube over her shoulder shone like gold against the pale fairness
of her bare head.—"At a thought," she answered, preserving the low tone
of the conversation into which they had fallen as if their words could
have disturbed the self-absorption of Captain H. C. Jorgenson. "At the
thought that for all my long acquaintance with Mr. d'Alcacer I don't
know half as much about him as I know about you."

"Ah, that's impossible," contradicted Lingard. "Spaniard or no Spaniard,
he is one of your kind."

"Tarred with the same brush," murmured Mrs. Travers, with only a
half-amused irony. But Lingard continued:

"He was trying to make it up between me and your husband, wasn't he? I
was too angry to pay much attention, but I liked him well enough. What
pleased me most was the way in which he gave it up. That was done like a
gentleman. Do you understand what I mean, Mrs. Travers?"

"I quite understand."

"Yes, you would," he commented, simply. "But just then I was too angry
to talk to anybody. And so I cleared out on board my own ship and stayed
there, not knowing what to do and wishing you all at the bottom of the
sea. Don't mistake me, Mrs. Travers; it's you, the people aft, that I
wished at the bottom of the sea. I had nothing against the poor devils
on board, They would have trusted me quick enough. So I fumed there
till—till. . . ."

"Till nine o'clock or a little after," suggested Mrs. Travers,
impenetrably.

"No. Till I remembered you," said Lingard with the utmost innocence.

"Do you mean to say that you forgot my existence so completely till
then? You had spoken to me on board the yacht, you know."

"Did I? I thought I did. What did I say?"

"You told me not to touch a dusky princess," answered Mrs. Travers with
a short laugh. Then with a visible change of mood as if she had suddenly
out of a light heart been recalled to the sense of the true situation:
"But indeed I meant no harm to this figure of your dream. And, look over
there. She is pursuing you." Lingard glanced toward the north shore and
suppressed an exclamation of remorse. For the second time he discovered
that he had forgotten the existence of Hassim and Immada. The canoe was
now near enough for its occupants to distinguish plainly the heads of
three people above the low bulwark of the Emma. Immada let her paddle
trail suddenly in the water, with the exclamation, "I see the white
woman there." Her brother looked over his shoulder and the canoe
floated, arrested as if by the sudden power of a spell.—"They are no
dream to me," muttered Lingard, sturdily. Mrs. Travers turned abruptly
away to look at the further shore. It was still and empty to the naked
eye and seemed to quiver in the sunshine like an immense painted curtain
lowered upon the unknown.

"Here's Rajah Hassim coming, Jorgenson. I had an idea he would perhaps
stay outside." Mrs. Travers heard Lingard's voice at her back and the
answering grunt of Jorgenson. She raised deliberately the long glass to
her eye, pointing it at the shore.

She distinguished plainly now the colours in the flutter of the
streamers above the brown roofs of the large Settlement, the stir of
palm groves, the black shadows inland and the dazzling white beach of
coral sand all ablaze in its formidable mystery. She swept the whole
range of the view and was going to lower the glass when from behind
the massive angle of the stockade there stepped out into the brilliant
immobility of the landscape a man in a long white gown and with an
enormous black turban surmounting a dark face. Slow and grave he
paced the beach ominously in the sunshine, an enigmatical figure in an
Oriental tale with something weird and menacing in its sudden emergence
and lonely progress.

With an involuntary gasp Mrs. Travers lowered the glass. All at once
behind her back she heard a low musical voice beginning to pour out
incomprehensible words in a tone of passionate pleading. Hassim and
Immada had come on board and had approached Lingard. Yes! It was
intolerable to feel that this flow of soft speech which had no meaning
for her could make its way straight into that man's heart.

"May I come in?"

"Yes," said a voice within. "The door is open." It had a wooden latch.
Mr. Travers lifted it while the voice of his wife continued as he
entered. "Did you imagine I had locked myself in? Did you ever know me
lock myself in?"

Mr. Travers closed the door behind him. "No, it has never come to that,"
he said in a tone that was not conciliatory. In that place which was a
room in a wooden hut and had a square opening without glass but with a
half-closed shutter he could not distinguish his wife very well at once.
She was sitting in an armchair and what he could see best was her
fair hair all loose over the back of the chair. There was a moment
of silence. The measured footsteps of two men pacing athwart the
quarter-deck of the dead ship Emma commanded by the derelict shade of
Jorgenson could be heard outside.