“Sudah! It is finished!” A movement passed along all the heads, the seated bodies swayed to and fro. Lingard had ceased speaking. He remained seated for a moment looking his audience all over and when he stood up together with Mrs. Travers and Jörgenson the whole assembly rose from the ground together and lost its ordered formation. Some of Belarab’s retainers, young broad-faced fellows, wearing a sort of uniform of check-patterned sarongs, black silk jackets and crimson skullcaps set at a rakish angle, swaggered through the broken groups and ranged themselves in two rows before the motionless Daman and his Illanun chiefs in martial array. The members of the council who had left their bench approached the white people with gentle smiles and deferential movements of the hands. Their bearing was faintly propitiatory; only the man in the big turban remained fanatically aloof, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.
“I have done it,” murmured Lingard to Mrs. Travers.—“Was it very difficult?” she asked.—“No,” he said, conscious in his heart that he had strained to the fullest extent the prestige of his good name and that habit of deference to his slightest wish established by the glamour of his wealth and the fear of his personality in this great talk which after all had done nothing except put off the decisive hour. He offered Mrs. Travers his arm ready to lead her away, but at the last moment did not move.
With an authoritative gesture Daman had parted the ranks of Belarab’s young followers with the red skullcaps and was seen advancing toward the whites striking into an astonished silence all the scattered groups in the courtyard. But the broken ranks had closed behind him. The Illanun chiefs, for all their truculent aspect, were much too prudent to attempt to move. They had not needed for that the faint warning murmur from Daman. He advanced alone. The plain hilt of a sword protruded from the open edges of his cloak. The parted edges disclosed also the butts of two flintlock pistols. The Koran in a velvet case hung on his breast by a red cord of silk. He was pious, magnificent, and warlike, with calm movements and a straight glance from under the hem of the simple piece of linen covering his head. He carried himself rigidly and his bearing had a sort of solemn modesty. Lingard said hurriedly to Mrs. Travers that the man had met white people before and that, should he attempt to shake hands with her, she ought to offer her own covered with the end of her scarf.—“Why?” she asked. “Propriety?”—“Yes, it will be better,” said Lingard and the next moment Mrs. Travers felt her enveloped hand pressed gently by slender dark fingers and felt extremely Oriental herself when, with her face muffled to the eyes, she encountered the lustrous black stare of the sea-robbers’ leader. It was only for an instant, because Daman turned away at once to shake hands with Lingard. In the straight, ample folds of his robes he looked very slender facing the robust white man.
“Great is your power,” he said, in a pleasant voice. “The white men are going to be delivered to you.”
“Yes, they pass into my keeping,” said Lingard, returning the other’s bright smile but otherwise looking grim enough with the frown which had settled on his forehead at Daman’s approach. He glanced over his shoulder at a group of spearmen escorting the two captives who had come down the steps from the hut. At the sight of Daman barring as it were Lingard’s way they had stopped at some distance and had closed round the two white men. Daman also glanced dispassionately that way.
“They were my guests,” he murmured. “Please God I shall come soon to ask you for them … as a friend,” he added after a slight pause.
“And please God you will not go away empty handed,” said Lingard, smoothing his brow. “After all you and I were not meant to meet only to quarrel. Would you have preferred to see them pass into Tengga’s keeping?”
“Tengga is fat and full of wiles,” said Daman, disdainfully, “a mere shopkeeper smitten by a desire to be a chief. He is nothing. But you and I are men that have real power. Yet there is a truth that you and I can confess to each other. Men’s hearts grow quickly discontented. Listen. The leaders of men are carried forward in the hands of their followers; and common men’s minds are unsteady, their desires changeable, and their thoughts not to be trusted. You are a great chief they say. Do not forget that I am a chief, too, and a leader of armed men.”
“I have heard of you, too,” said Lingard in a composed voice.
Daman had cast his eyes down. Suddenly he opened them very wide with an effect that startled Mrs. Travers.—“Yes. But do you see?” Mrs. Travers, her hand resting lightly on Lingard’s arm, had the sensation of acting in a gorgeously got up play on the brilliantly lighted stage of an exotic opera whose accompaniment was not music but the varied strains of the all-pervading silence.—“Yes, I see,” Lingard replied with a surprisingly confidential intonation. “But power, too, is in the hands of a great leader.”
Mrs. Travers watched the faint movements of Daman’s nostrils as though the man were suffering from some powerful emotion, while under her fingers Lingard’s forearm in its white sleeve was as steady as a limb of marble. Without looking at him she seemed to feel that with one movement he could crush that nervous figure in which lived the breath of the great desert haunted by his nomad,
