feeling it could arouse or the action it could provoke? And she thought with compunction that she ought to have given it to Lingard at once, without thinking, without hesitating. 'There! This is what I came for. To give you this.' Yes, but there had come an interval when she had been able to think of nothing, and since then she had had the time to reflect—unfortunately. To remember Jorgenson's hostile, contemptuous glance enveloping her from head to foot at the break of a day after a night of lonely anguish. And now while she sat there veiled from his keen sight there was that other man, that d'Alcacer, prophesying. O yes, triumphant. She knew already what that was. Mrs. Travers became afraid of the ring. She felt ready to pluck it from her neck and cast it away.
'I mistrust him,' she said.—'You do!' exclaimed d'Alcacer, very low.—'I mean that Jorgenson. He seems a merciless sort of creature.'—'He is indifferent to everything,' said d'Alcacer.—'It may be a mask.'—'Have you some evidence, Mrs. Travers?'
'No,' said Mrs. Travers without hesitation. 'I have my instinct.'
D'Alcacer remained silent for a while as though he were pursuing another train of thought altogether, then in a gentle, almost playful tone: 'If I were a woman,' he said, turning to Mrs. Travers, 'I would always trust my intuition.'—'If you were a woman, Mr. d'Alcacer, I would not be speaking to you in this way because then I would be suspect to you.'
The thought that before long perhaps he would be neither man nor woman but a lump of cold clay, crossed d'Alcacer's mind, which was living, alert, and unsubdued by the danger. He had welcomed the arrival of Mrs. Travers simply because he had been very lonely in that stockade, Mr. Travers having fallen into a phase of sulks complicated with shivering fits. Of Lingard d'Alcacer had seen almost nothing since they had landed, for the Man of Fate was extremely busy negotiating in the recesses of Belarab's main hut; and the thought that his life was being a matter of arduous bargaining was not agreeable to Mr. d'Alcacer. The Chief's dependents and the armed men garrisoning the stockade paid very little attention to him apparently, and this gave him the feeling of his captivity being very perfect and hopeless. During the afternoon, while pacing to and fro in the bit of shade thrown by the glorified sort of hut inside which Mr. Travers shivered and sulked misanthropically, he had been aware of the more distant verandahs becoming filled now and then by the muffled forms of women of Belarab's household taking a distant and curious view of the white man. All this was irksome. He found his menaced life extremely difficult to get through. Yes, he welcomed the arrival of Mrs. Travers who brought with her a tragic note into the empty gloom.
'Suspicion is not in my nature, Mrs. Travers, I assure you, and I hope that you on your side will never suspect either my reserve or my frankness. I respect the mysterious nature of your conviction but hasn't Jorgenson given you some occasion to. . .'
'He hates me,' said Mrs. Travers, and frowned at d'Alcacer's incipient smile. 'It isn't a delusion on my part. The worst is that he hates me not for myself. I believe he is completely indifferent to my existence. Jorgenson hates me because as it were I represent you two who are in danger, because it is you two that are the trouble and I . . . Well!'
'Yes, yes, that's certain,' said d'Alcacer, hastily. 'But Jorgenson is wrong in making you the scapegoat. For if you were not here cool reason would step in and would make Lingard pause in his passion to make a king out of an exile. If we were murdered it would certainly make some stir in the world in time and he would fall under the suspicion of complicity with those wild and inhuman Moors. Who would regard the greatness of his day-dreams, his engaged honour, his chivalrous feelings? Nothing could save him from that suspicion. And being what he is, you understand me, Mrs. Travers (but you know him much better than I do), it would morally kill him.'
'Heavens!' whispered Mrs. Travers. 'This has never occurred to me.' Those words seemed to lose themselves in the folds of the scarf without reaching d'Alcacer, who continued in his gentle tone:
''However, as it is, he will be safe enough whatever happens. He will have your testimony to clear him.'
Mrs. Travers stood up, suddenly, but still careful to keep her face covered, she threw the end of the scarf over her shoulder.
'I fear that Jorgenson,' she cried with suppressed passion. 'One can't understand what that man means to do. I think him so dangerous that if I were, for instance, entrusted with a message bearing on the situation, I would . . . suppress it.'
D'Alcacer was looking up from the seat, full of wonder. Mrs. Travers appealed to him in a calm voice through the folds of the scarf:
'Tell me, Mr. d'Alcacer, you who can look on it calmly, wouldn't I be right?'
'Why, has Jorgenson told you anything?'
'Directly—nothing, except a phrase or two which really I could not understand. They seemed to have a hidden sense and he appeared to attach some mysterious importance to them that he dared not explain to me.'
'That was a risk on his part,' exclaimed d'Alcacer. 'And he trusted you. Why you, I wonder!'
'Who can tell what notions he has in his head? Mr. d'Alcacer, I believe his only object is to call Captain Lingard away from us. I understood it only a few minutes ago. It has dawned upon me. All he wants is to call him off.'
'Call him off,' repeated d'Alcacer, a little bewildered by the aroused fire of her conviction. 'I am sure I don't want him called off any more than you do; and, frankly, I don't believe Jorgenson has any such power. But upon the whole, and if you feel that Jorgenson has the power, I would—yes, if I were in your place I think I would suppress anything I could not understand.'
Mrs. Travers listened to the very end. Her eyes—they appeared incredibly sombre to d'Alcacer—seemed to watch the fall of every deliberate word and after he had ceased they remained still for an appreciable time. Then she turned away with a gesture that seemed to say: 'So be it.'
D'Alcacer raised his voice suddenly after her. 'Stay! Don't forget that not only your husband's but my head, too, is being played at that game. My judgment is not . . .'
She stopped for a moment and freed her lips. In the profound stillness of the courtyard her clear voice made the shadows at the nearest fires stir a little with low murmurs of surprise.
'Oh, yes, I remember whose heads I have to save,' she cried. 'But in all the world who is there to save that man from himself?'
V
D'Alcacer sat down on the bench again. 'I wonder what she knows,' he thought, 'and I wonder what I have done.' He wondered also how far he had been sincere and how far affected by a very natural aversion from being murdered obscurely by ferocious Moors with all the circumstances of barbarity. It was a very naked death to come
