The Rescue

why Daman had welcomed Hassim, and let him hear the decision and had allowed him to leave the camp on the sandbank. There could be only one object in this; to let him, Lingard, know that the prisoners had been put out of his reach as long as he remained in his brig. Now this brig was his strength. To make him leave his brig was like removing his hand from his sword.

'Do you understand what I mean, Mrs. Travers?' he asked. 'They are afraid of me because I know how to fight this brig. They fear the brig because when I am on board her, the brig and I are one. An armed man—don't you see? Without the brig I am disarmed, without me she can't strike. So Daman thinks. He does not know everything but he is not far off the truth. He says to himself that if I man the boats to go after these whites into the lagoon then his Illanuns will get the yacht for sure—and perhaps the brig as well. If I stop here with my brig he holds the two white men and can talk as big as he pleases. Belarab believes in me no doubt, but Daman trusts no man on earth. He simply does not know how to trust any one, because he is always plotting himself. He came to help me and as soon as he found I was not there he began to plot with Tengga. Now he has made a move—a clever move; a cleverer move than he thinks. Why? I'll tell you why. Because I, Tom Lingard, haven't a single white man aboard this brig I can trust. Not one. I only just discovered my mate's got the notion I am some kind of pirate. And all your yacht people think the same. It is as though you had brought a curse on me in your yacht. Nobody believes me. Good God! What have I come to! Even those two—look at them—I say look at them! By all the stars they doubt me! Me! . . .'

He pointed at Hassim and Immada. The girl seemed frightened. Hassim looked on calm and intelligent with inexhaustible patience. Lingard's voice fell suddenly.

'And by heavens they may be right. Who knows? You? Do you know? They have waited for years. Look. They are waiting with heavy hearts. Do you think that I don't care? Ought I to have kept it all in—told no one—no one— not even you? Are they waiting for what will never come now?'

Mrs. Travers rose and moved quickly round the table. 'Can we give anything to this—this Daman or these other men? We could give them more than they could think of asking. I—my husband. . . .'

'Don't talk to me of your husband,' he said, roughly. 'You don't know what you are doing.' She confronted the sombre anger of his eyes—'But I must,' she asserted with heat.—'Must,' he mused, noticing that she was only half a head less tall than himself. 'Must! Oh, yes. Of course, you must. Must! Yes. But I don't want to hear. Give! What can you give? You may have all the treasures of the world for all I know. No! You can't give anything. . . .'

'I was thinking of your difficulty when I spoke,' she interrupted. His eyes wandered downward following the line of her shoulder.—'Of me—of me!' he repeated.

All this was said almost in whispers. The sound of slow footsteps was heard on deck above their heads. Lingard turned his face to the open skylight.

'On deck there! Any wind?'

All was still for a moment. Somebody above answered in a leisurely tone:

'A steady little draught from the northward.'

Then after a pause added in a mutter:

'Pitch dark.'

'Aye, dark enough,' murmured Lingard. He must do something. Now. At once. The world was waiting. The world full of hopes and fear. What should he do? Instead of answering that question he traced the ungleaming coils of her twisted hair and became fascinated by a stray lock at her neck. What should he do? No one to leave his brig to. The voice that had answered his question was Carter's voice. 'He is hanging about keeping his eye on me,' he said to Mrs. Travers. She shook her head and tried to smile. The man above coughed discreetly. 'No,' said Lingard, 'you must understand that you have nothing to give.'

The man on deck who seemed to have lingered by the skylight was heard saying quietly, 'I am at hand if you want me, Mrs. Travers.' Hassim and Immada looked up. 'You see,' exclaimed Lingard. 'What did I tell you? He's keeping his eye on me! On board my own ship. Am I dreaming? Am I in a fever? Tell him to come down,' he said after a pause. Mrs. Travers did so and Lingard thought her voice very commanding and very sweet. 'There's nothing in the world I love so much as this brig,' he went on. 'Nothing in the world. If I lost her I would have no standing room on the earth for my feet. You don't understand this. You can't.'

Carter came in and shut the cabin door carefully. He looked with serenity at everyone in turn.

'All quiet?' asked Lingard.

'Quiet enough if you like to call it so,' he answered. 'But if you only put your head outside the door you'll hear them all on the quarter-deck snoring against each other, as if there were no wives at home and no pirates at sea.'

'Look here,' said Lingard. 'I found out that I can't trust my mate.'

'Can't you?' drawled Carter. 'I am not exactly surprised. I must say he does not snore but I believe it is because he is too crazy to sleep. He waylaid me on the poop just now and said something about evil communications corrupting good manners. Seems to me I've heard that before. Queer thing to say. He tried to make it out somehow that if he wasn't corrupt it wasn't your fault. As if this was any concern of mine. He's as mad as he's fat—or else he puts it on.' Carter laughed a little and leaned his shoulders against a bulkhead.

Lingard gazed at the woman who expected so much from him and in the light she seemed to shed he saw himself leading a column of armed boats to the attack of the Settlement. He could burn the whole place to the ground and drive every soul of them into the bush. He could! And there was a surprise, a shock, a vague horror at the thought of the destructive power of his will. He could give her ever so many lives. He had seen her yesterday, and it seemed to him he had been all his life waiting for her to make a sign. She was very still. He pondered a plan of attack. He saw smoke and flame—and next moment he saw himself alone amongst shapeless ruins with the whispers, with the sigh and moan of the Shallows in his ears. He shuddered, and shaking his hand:

'No! I cannot give you all those lives!' he cried.

Then, before Mrs. Travers could guess the meaning of this outburst, he declared that as the two captives must be saved he would go alone into the lagoon. He could not think of using force. 'You understand why,' he said to Mrs. Travers and she whispered a faint 'Yes.' He would run the risk alone. His hope was in Belarab being able to see where his true interest lay. 'If I can only get at him I would soon make him see,' he mused aloud. 'Haven't I kept his power up for these two years past? And he knows it, too. He feels it.' Whether he would be allowed to reach Belarab was another matter. Lingard lost himself in deep thought. 'He would not dare,' he burst out. Mrs. Travers listened with parted lips. Carter did not move a muscle of his youthful and self-possessed face; only when Lingard, turning suddenly, came up close to him and asked with a red flash of eyes and in a lowered voice, 'Could you fight this brig?' something like a smile made a stir amongst the hairs of his little fair moustache.