A short, squat, broad-faced young fellow having for all costume a pair of white drawers was offering the scarf thrown over both his arms, as if they had been sticks, and holding it respectfully as far as possible from his person. Lingard took it from him and Mrs. Travers claimed it at once. 'Don't forget the proprieties,' she said. 'This is also my face veil.'
She was arranging it about her head when Lingard said, 'There is no need. I am taking you to those gentlemen.'—'I will use it all the same,' said Mrs. Travers. 'This thing works both ways, as a matter of propriety or as a matter of precaution. Till I have an opportunity of looking into a mirror nothing will persuade me that there isn't some change in my face.' Lingard swung half round and gazed down at her. Veiled now she confronted him boldly. 'Tell me, Captain Lingard, how many eyes were looking at us a little while ago?'
'Do you care?' he asked.
'Not in the least,' she said. 'A million stars were looking on, too, and what did it matter? They were not of the world I know. And it's just the same with the eyes. They are not of the world I live in.'
Lingard thought: 'Nobody is.' Never before had she seemed to him more unapproachable, more different and more remote. The glow of a number of small fires lighted the ground only, and brought out the black bulk of men lying down in the thin drift of smoke. Only one of these fires, rather apart and burning in front of the house which was the quarter of the prisoners, might have been called a blaze and even that was not a great one. It didn't penetrate the dark space between the piles and the depth of the verandah above where only a couple of heads and the glint of a spearhead could be seen dimly in the play of the light. But down on the ground outside, the black shape of a man seated on a bench had an intense relief. Another intensely black shadow threw a handful of brushwood on the fire and went away. The man on the bench got up. It was d'Alcacer. He let Lingard and Mrs. Travers come quite close up to him. Extreme surprise seemed to have made him dumb.
'You didn't expect . . .' began Mrs. Travers with some embarrassment before that mute attitude.
'I doubted my eyes,' struck in d'Alcacer, who seemed embarrassed, too. Next moment he recovered his tone and confessed simply: 'At the moment I wasn't thinking of you, Mrs. Travers.' He passed his hand over his forehead. 'I hardly know what I was thinking of.'
In the light of the shooting-up flame Mrs. Travers could see d'Alcacer's face. There was no smile on it. She could not remember ever seeing him so grave and, as it were, so distant. She abandoned Lingard's arm and moved closer to the fire.
'I fancy you were very far away, Mr. d'Alcacer,' she said.
'This is the sort of freedom of which nothing can deprive us,' he observed, looking hard at the manner in which the scarf was drawn across Mrs. Travers' face. 'It's possible I was far away,' he went on, 'but I can assure you that I don't know where I was. Less than an hour ago we had a great excitement here about some rockets, but I didn't share in it. There was no one I could ask a question of. The captain here was, I understood, engaged in a most momentous conversation with the king or the governor of this place.'
He addressed Lingard, directly. 'May I ask whether you have reached any conclusion as yet? That Moor is a very dilatory person, I believe.'
'Any direct attack he would, of course, resist,' said Lingard. 'And, so far, you are protected. But I must admit that he is rather angry with me. He's tired of the whole business. He loves peace above anything in the world. But I haven't finished with him yet.'
'As far as I understood from what you told me before,' said Mr. d'Alcacer, with a quick side glance at Mrs. Travers' uncovered and attentive eyes, 'as far as I can see he may get all the peace he wants at once by driving us two, I mean Mr. Travers and myself, out of the gate on to the spears of those other enraged barbarians. And there are some of his counsellors who advise him to do that very thing no later than the break of day I understand.'
Lingard stood for a moment perfectly motionless.
'That's about it,' he said in an unemotional tone, and went away with a heavy step without giving another look at d'Alcacer and Mrs. Travers, who after a moment faced each other.
'You have heard?' said d'Alcacer. 'Of course that doesn't affect your fate in any way, and as to him he is much too prestigious to be killed light-heartedly. When all this is over you will walk triumphantly on his arm out of this stockade; for there is nothing in all this to affect his greatness, his absolute value in the eyes of those people—and indeed in any other eyes.' D'Alcacer kept his glance averted from Mrs. Travers and as soon as he had finished speaking busied himself in dragging the bench a little way further from the fire. When they sat down on it he kept his distance from Mrs. Travers. She made no sign of unveiling herself and her eyes without a face seemed to him strangely unknown and disquieting.
'The situation in a nutshell,' she said. 'You have arranged it all beautifully, even to my triumphal exit. Well, and what then? No, you needn't answer, it has no interest. I assure you I came here not with any notion of marching out in triumph, as you call it. I came here, to speak in the most vulgar way, to save your skin—and mine.'
Her voice came muffled to d'Alcacer's ears with a changed character, even to the very intonation. Above the white and embroidered scarf her eyes in the firelight transfixed him, black and so steady that even the red sparks of the reflected glare did not move in them. He concealed the strong impression she made. He bowed his head a little.
'I believe you know perfectly well what you are doing.'
'No! I don't know,' she said, more quickly than he had ever heard her speak before. 'First of all, I don't think he is so safe as you imagine. Oh, yes, he has prestige enough, I don't question that. But you are apportioning life and death with too much assurance. . . .'
'I know my portion,' murmured d'Alcacer, gently. A moment of silence fell in which Mrs. Travers' eyes ended by intimidating d'Alcacer, who looked away. The flame of the fire had sunk low. In the dark agglomeration of buildings, which might have been called Belarab's palace, there was a certain animation, a flitting of people, voices calling and answering, the passing to and fro of lights that would illuminate suddenly a heavy pile, the corner of a house, the eaves of a low-pitched roof, while in the open parts of the stockade the armed men slept by the expiring fires.
Mrs. Travers said, suddenly, 'That Jorgenson is not friendly to us.'
'Possibly.'
With clasped hands and leaning over his knees d'Alcacer had assented in a very low tone. Mrs. Travers, unobserved, pressed her hands to her breast and felt the shape of the ring, thick, heavy, set with a big stone. It was there, secret, hung against her heart, and enigmatic. What did it mean? What could it mean? What was the
