'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
