“The Rajah wished to hold your hand once more,” whispered Jaffir so faintly that Lingard had to guess the words rather than hear them. “I was to tell you,” he went on—and stopped suddenly.
“What were you to tell me?”
“To forget everything,” said Jaffir with a loud effort as if beginning a long speech. After that he said nothing more till Lingard murmured, “And the lady Immada?”
Jaffir collected all his strength. “She hoped no more,” he uttered, distinctly. “The order came to her while she mourned, veiled, apart. I didn’t even see her face.”
Lingard swayed over the dying man so heavily that Wasub, standing near by, hastened to catch him by the shoulder. Jaffir seemed unaware of anything, and went on staring at the beam.
“Can you hear me, O Jaffir?” asked Lingard.
“I hear.”
“I never had the ring. Who could bring it to me?”
“We gave it to the white woman—may Jehannum be her lot!”
“No! It shall be my lot,” said Lingard with despairing force, while Wasub raised both his hands in dismay. “For, listen, Jaffir, if she had given the ring to me it would have been to one that was dumb, deaf, and robbed of all courage.”
It was impossible to say whether Jaffir had heard. He made no sound, there was no change in his awful stare, but his prone body moved under the cotton sheet as if to get further away from the white man. Lingard got up slowly and making a sign to Wasub to remain where he was, went up on deck without giving another glance to the dying man. Again it seemed to him that he was pacing the quarterdeck of a deserted ship. The mulatto steward, watching through the crack of the pantry door, saw the Captain stagger into the cuddy and fling-to the door behind him with a crash. For more than an hour nobody approached that closed door till Carter coming down the companion stairs spoke without attempting to open it.
“Are you there, sir?” The answer, “You may come in,” comforted the young man by its strong resonance. He went in.
“Well?”
“Jaffir is dead. This moment. I thought you would want to know.”
Lingard looked persistently at Carter, thinking that now Jaffir was dead there was no one left on the empty earth to speak to him a word of reproach; no one to know the greatness of his intentions, the bond of fidelity between him and Hassim and Immada, the depth of his affection for those people, the earnestness of his visions, and the unbounded trust that was his reward. By the mad scorn of Jörgenson flaming up against the life of men, all this was as if it had never been. It had become a secret locked up in his own breast forever.
“Tell Wasub to open one of the long-cloth bales in the hold, Mr. Carter, and give the crew a cotton sheet to bury him decently according to their faith. Let it be done tonight. They must have the boats, too. I suppose they will want to take him on the sandbank.”
“Yes, sir,” said Carter.
“Let them have what they want, spades, torches. … Wasub will chant the right words. Paradise is the lot of all True Believers. Do you understand me, Mr. Carter? Paradise! I wonder what it will be for him! Unless he gets messages to carry through the jungle, avoiding ambushes, swimming in storms and knowing no rest, he won’t like it.”
Carter listened with an unmoved face. It seemed to him that the Captain had forgotten his presence.
“And all the time he will be sleeping on that sandbank,” Lingard began again, sitting in his old place under the gilt thunderbolts suspended over his head with his elbows on the table and his hands to his temples. “If they want a board to set up at the grave let them have a piece of an oak plank. It will stay there—till the next monsoon. Perhaps.”
Carter felt uncomfortable before that tense stare which just missed him and in that confined cabin seemed awful in its piercing and far-off expression. But as he had not been dismissed he did not like to go away.
“Everything will be done as you wish it, sir,” he said. “I suppose the yacht will be leaving the first thing tomorrow morning, sir.”
“If she doesn’t we must give her a solid shot or two to liven her up—eh, Mr. Carter?”
Carter did not know whether to smile or to look horrified. In the end he did both, but as to saying anything he found it impossible. But Lingard did not expect an answer.
“I believe you are going to stay with me, Mr. Carter?”
“I told you, sir, I am your man if you want me.”
“The trouble is, Mr. Carter, that I am no longer the man to whom you spoke that night in Carimata.”
“Neither am I, sir, in a manner of speaking.”
Lingard, relaxing the tenseness of his stare, looked at the young man, thoughtfully.
“After all, it is the brig that will want you. She will never change. The finest craft afloat in these seas. She will carry me about as she did before, but …”
He unclasped his hands, made a sweeping gesture.
Carter gave all his naive sympathy to that man who had certainly rescued the white people but seemed to have lost his own soul in the attempt. Carter had heard something from Wasub. He had made out enough of this story from the old serang’s pidgin English to know that the Captain’s native friends, one of them a woman, had perished in a mysterious catastrophe. But the why of it, and how it came about, remained still quite incomprehensible to him. Of course, a man like the Captain would feel terribly cut up. …
“You will be soon yourself again, sir,” he said in the kindest possible tone.
With the same simplicity Lingard shook his head. He was thinking of
