Part 31 (2/2)

No. There was never any time for it. I have told you all about myself, Mrs. Travers, and you know that I speak the truth when I say too late.

If you had only been alone in that yacht going about the seas!”

”Yes,” she struck in, ”but I was not alone.”

Lingard dropped his chin on his breast. Already a foretaste of noonday heat staled the sparkling freshness of the morning. The smile had vanished from Edith Travers' lips and her eyes rested on Lingard's bowed head with an expression no longer curious but which might have appeared enigmatic to Jorgenson if he had looked at her. But Jorgenson looked at nothing. He asked from the remoteness of his dead past, ”What have you left outside, Tom? What is there now?”

”There's the yacht on the shoals, my brig at anchor, and about a hundred of the worst kind of Illanun vagabonds under three chiefs and with two war-praus moored to the edge of the bank. Maybe Daman is with them, too, out there.”

”No,” said Jorgenson, positively.

”He has come in,” cried Lingard. ”He brought his prisoners in himself then.”

”Landed by torchlight,” uttered precisely the shade of Captain Jorgenson, late of the Barque Wild Rose. He swung his arm pointing across the lagoon and Mrs. Travers turned about in that direction.

All the scene was but a great light and a great solitude. Her gaze travelled over the l.u.s.trous, dark sheet of empty water to a sh.o.r.e bordered by a white beach empty, too, and showing no sign of human life.

The human habitations were lost in the shade of the fruit trees, masked by the cultivated patches of Indian corn and the banana plantations.

Near the sh.o.r.e the rigid lines of two stockaded forts could be distinguished flanking the beach, and between them with a great open s.p.a.ce before it, the brown roof slope of an enormous long building that seemed suspended in the air had a great square flag fluttering above it.

Something like a small white flame in the sky was the carved white coral finial on the gable of the mosque which had caught full the rays of the sun. A mult.i.tude of gay streamers, white and red, flew over the half-concealed roofs, over the brilliant fields and amongst the sombre palm groves. But it might have been a deserted settlement decorated and abandoned by its departed population. Lingard pointed to the stockade on the right.

”That's where your husband is,” he said to Mrs. Travers.

”Who is the other?” uttered Jorgenson's voice at their backs. He also was turned that way with his strange sightless gaze fixed beyond them into the void.

”A Spanish gentleman I believe you said, Mrs Travers,” observed Lingard.

”It is extremely difficult to believe that there is anybody there,”

murmured Mrs. Travers.

”Did you see them both, Jorgenson?” asked Lingard.

”Made out n.o.body. Too far. Too dark.”

As a matter of fact Jorgenson had seen nothing, about an hour before daybreak, but the distant glare of torches while the loud shouts of an excited mult.i.tude had reached him across the water only like a faint and tempestuous murmur. Presently the lights went away processionally through the groves of trees into the armed stockades. The distant glare vanished in the fading darkness and the murmurs of the invisible crowd ceased suddenly as if carried off by the retreating shadow of the night.

Daylight followed swiftly, disclosing to the sleepless Jorgenson the solitude of the sh.o.r.e and the ghostly outlines of the familiar forms of grouped trees and scattered human habitations. He had watched the varied colours come out in the dawn, the wide cultivated Settlement of many shades of green, framed far away by the fine black lines of the forest-edge that was its limit and its protection.

Mrs. Travers stood against the rail as motionless as a statue. Her face had lost all its mobility and her cheeks were dead white as if all the blood in her body had flowed back into her heart and had remained there.

Her very lips had lost their colour. Lingard caught hold of her arm roughly.

”Don't, Mrs. Travers. Why are you terrifying yourself like this? If you don't believe what I say listen to me asking Jorgenson. . . .”

”Yes, ask me,” mumbled Jorgenson in his white moustache.

”Speak straight, Jorgenson. What do you think? Are the gentlemen alive?”

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