Part 32 (2/2)
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.”
n.o.body 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. She was as firm as a rock after all those emotions and all that fatigue.
Mrs. Travers directed the gla.s.s 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 n.o.body 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 gla.s.s 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 bra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+p and stayed there, not knowing what to do and wis.h.i.+ng 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. . . .”
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