'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?'
'Certainly,' said Jorgenson in a sort of disappointed tone as though he had expected a much more difficult question.
'Is their life in immediate danger?'
'Of course not,' said Jorgenson.
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?'
