The Rescue: A Romance of the Shallows

  V

  What struck Mrs. Travers most, directly she set eyes on him, was theother-world aspect of Jorgenson. He had been buried out of sight so longthat his tall, gaunt body, his unhurried, mechanical movements, hisset face and his eyes with an empty gaze suggested an invincibleindifference to all the possible surprises of the earth. That appearanceof a resuscitated man who seemed to be commanded by a conjuring spellstrolled along the decks of what was even to Mrs. Travers' eyes the merecorpse of a ship and turned on her a pair of deep-sunk, expressionlesseyes with an almost unearthly detachment. Mrs. Travers had never beenlooked at before with that strange and pregnant abstraction. Yet shedidn't dislike Jorgenson. In the early morning light, white from head tofoot in a perfectly clean suit of clothes which seemed hardly to containany limbs, freshly shaven (Jorgenson's sunken cheeks with their witheredcolouring always had a sort of gloss as though he had the habit ofshaving every two hours or so), he looked as immaculate as though hehad been indeed a pure spirit superior to the soiling contacts of thematerial earth. He was disturbing but he was not repulsive. He gave nosign of greeting.

  Lingard addressed him at once.

  "You have had a regular staircase built up the side of the hulk,Jorgenson," he said. "It was very convenient for us to come aboard now,but in case of an attack don't you think . . ."

  "I did think." There was nothing so dispassionate in the world as thevoice of Captain H. C. Jorgenson, ex Barque Wild Rose, since he hadrecrossed the Waters of Oblivion to step back into the life of men. "Idid think, but since I don't want to make trouble. . . ."

  "Oh, you don't want to make trouble," interrupted Lingard.

  "No. Don't believe in it. Do you, King Tom?"

  "I may have to make trouble."

  "So you came up here in this small dinghy of yours like this to startmaking trouble, did you?"

  "What's the matter with you? Don't you know me yet, Jorgenson?"

  "I thought I knew you. How could I tell that a man like you would comealong for a fight bringing a woman with him?"

  "This lady is Mrs. Travers," said Lingard. "The wife of one of theluckless gentlemen Daman got hold of last evening. . . . This isJorgenson, the friend of whom I have been telling you, Mrs. Travers."

  Mrs. Travers smiled faintly. Her eyes roamed far and near and thestrangeness of her surroundings, the overpowering curiosity, theconflict of interest and doubt gave her the aspect of one still new tolife, presenting an innocent and naive attitude before the surprisesof experience. She looked very guileless and youthful between those twomen. Lingard gazed at her with that unconscious tenderness mingled withwonder, which some men manifest toward girlhood. There was nothing ofa conqueror of kingdoms in his bearing. Jorgenson preserved hisamazing abstraction which seemed neither to hear nor see anything. But,evidently, he kept a mysterious grip on events in the world of livingmen because he asked very naturally:

  "How did she get away?"

  "The lady wasn't on the sandbank," explained Lingard, curtly.

  "What sandbank?" muttered Jorgenson, perfunctorily. . . . "Is the yachtlooted, Tom?"

  "Nothing of the kind," said Lingard.

  "Ah, many dead?" inquired Jorgenson.

  "I tell you there was nothing of the kind," said Lingard, impatiently.

  "What? No fight!" inquired Jorgenson again without the slightest sign ofanimation.

  "No."

  "And you a fighting man."

  "Listen to me, Jorgenson. Things turned out so that before the time camefor a fight it was already too late." He turned to Mrs. Travers stilllooking about with anxious eyes and a faint smile on her lips. "While Iwas talking to you that evening from the boat it was already too late.No. There was never any time for it. I have told you all about myself,Mrs. Travers, and you know that I speak the truth when I say too late.If you had only been alone in that yacht going about the seas!"

  "Yes," she struck in, "but I was not alone."

  Lingard dropped his chin on his breast. Already a foretaste of noondayheat staled the sparkling freshness of the morning. The smile hadvanished from Edith Travers' lips and her eyes rested on Lingard's bowedhead with an expression no longer curious but which might have appearedenigmatic to Jorgenson if he had looked at her. But Jorgenson looked atnothing. He asked from the remoteness of his dead past, "What have youleft outside, Tom? What is there now?"

  "There's the yacht on the shoals, my brig at anchor, and about a hundredof the worst kind of Illanun vagabonds under three chiefs and with twowar-praus moored to the edge of the bank. Maybe Daman is with them, too,out there."

  "No," said Jorgenson, positively.

  "He has come in," cried Lingard. "He brought his prisoners in himselfthen."

  "Landed by torchlight," uttered precisely the shade of CaptainJorgenson, late of the Barque Wild Rose. He swung his arm pointingacross the lagoon and Mrs. Travers turned about in that direction.

  All the scene was but a great light and a great solitude. Her gazetravelled over the lustrous, dark sheet of empty water to a shorebordered by a white beach empty, too, and showing no sign of human life.The human habitations were lost in the shade of the fruit trees, maskedby the cultivated patches of Indian corn and the banana plantations.Near the shore the rigid lines of two stockaded forts could bedistinguished flanking the beach, and between them with a great openspace before it, the brown roof slope of an enormous long building thatseemed suspended in the air had a great square flag fluttering above it.Something like a small white flame in the sky was the carved white coralfinial on the gable of the mosque which had caught full the rays ofthe sun. A multitude of gay streamers, white and red, flew over thehalf-concealed roofs, over the brilliant fields and amongst the sombrepalm groves. But it might have been a deserted settlement decorated andabandoned by its departed population. Lingard pointed to the stockade onthe right.

  "That's where your husband is," he said to Mrs. Travers.

  "Who is the other?" uttered Jorgenson's voice at their backs. He alsowas turned that way with his strange sightless gaze fixed beyond theminto the void.

  "A Spanish gentleman I believe you said, Mrs Travers," observed Lingard.

  "It is extremely difficult to believe that there is anybody there,"murmured Mrs. Travers.

  "Did you see them both, Jorgenson?" asked Lingard.

  "Made out nobody. Too far. Too dark."

  As a matter of fact Jorgenson had seen nothing, about an hour beforedaybreak, but the distant glare of torches while the loud shouts of anexcited multitude had reached him across the water only like a faintand tempestuous murmur. Presently the lights went away processionallythrough the groves of trees into the armed stockades. The distant glarevanished in the fading darkness and the murmurs of the invisible crowdceased suddenly as if carried off by the retreating shadow of the night.Daylight followed swiftly, disclosing to the sleepless Jorgenson thesolitude of the shore and the ghostly outlines of the familiar forms ofgrouped trees and scattered human habitations. He had watched the variedcolours come out in the dawn, the wide cultivated Settlement ofmany shades of green, framed far away by the fine black lines of theforest-edge that was its limit and its protection.

  Mrs. Travers stood against the rail as motionless as a statue. Her facehad lost all its mobility and her cheeks were dead white as if all theblood in her body had flowed back into her heart and had remained there.Her very lips had lost their colour. Lingard caught hold of her armroughly.

  "Don't, Mrs. Travers. Why are you terrifying yourself like this? If youdon'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 hehad 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 purposein that Settlement," he continued, pointing at the dumb solitude of thelagoon, "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 rigidfigure swayed dangerously. Lingard put his arm firmly round her waistand she did not seem aware of it till after she had turned her head andfound Lingard's face very near her own. But his eyes full of concernlooked so close into hers that she was obliged to shut them like a womanabout to faint.

  The effect this produced upon Lingard was such that she felt thetightening of his arm and as she opened her eyes again some of thecolour returned to her face. She met the deepened expression of hissolicitude with a look so steady, with a gaze that in spite of herselfwas so profoundly vivid that its clearness seemed to Lingard to throwall his past life into shade.--"I don't feel faint. It isn't that atall," she declared in a perfectly calm voice. It seemed to Lingard ascold as ice.

  "Very well," he agreed with a resigned smile. "But you just catch holdof that rail, please, before I let you go." She, too, forced a smile onher lips.

  "What incredulity," she remarked, and for a time made not the slightestmovement. At last, as if making a concession, she rested the tips of herfingers on the rail. Lingard gradually removed his arm. "And pray don'tlook upon me as a conventional 'weak woman' person, the delicate lady ofyour own conception," she said, facing Lingard, with her arm extended tothe rail. "Make that effort please against your own conception of whata woman like me should be. I am perhaps as strong as you are, CaptainLingard. I mean it literally. In my body."--"Don't you think I haveseen that long ago?" she heard his deep voice protesting.--"And as tomy courage," Mrs. Travers continued, her expression charmingly undecidedbetween frowns and smiles; "didn't I tell you only a few hours ago, onlylast 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 havedone it. No. Not even for the sake of somebody else's kingdom. Do youunderstand me?"

  "God knows," said the attentive Lingard after a time, with an unexpectedsigh. "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 stuffeither. What I meant to say is that it's different. One feels it. Andhere we are."

  "Yes, here we are," repeated Mrs. Travers. "And as to this moment ofemotion, what provoked it is not a concern for anybody or anythingoutside myself. I felt no terror. I cannot even fix my fears upon anydistinct image. You think I am shamelessly heartless in telling youthis."

  Lingard made no sign. It didn't occur to him to make a sign. Hesimply hung on Mrs. Travers' words as it were only for the sake of thesound.--"I am simply frank with you," she continued. "What do I know ofsavagery, violence, murder? I have never seen a dead body in my life.The light, the silence, the mysterious emptiness of this place havesuddenly affected my imagination, I suppose. What is the meaning of thiswonderful peace in which we stand--you and I alone?"

  Lingard shook his head. He saw the narrow gleam of the woman's teethbetween the parted lips of her smile, as if all the ardour of herconviction had been dissolved at the end of her speech into wistfulrecognition of their partnership before things outside their knowledge.And he was warmed by something a little helpless in that smile. Withinthree feet of them the shade of Jorgenson, very gaunt and neat, staredinto space.

  "Yes. You are strong," said Lingard. "But a whole long night sitting ina small boat! I wonder you are not too stiff to stand."

  "I am not stiff in the least," she interrupted, still smiling. "I amreally a very strong woman," she added, earnestly. "Whatever happens youmay reckon on that fact."

  Lingard gave her an admiring glance. But the shade of Jorgenson, perhapscatching in its remoteness the sound of the word woman, was suddenlymoved to begin scolding with all the liberty of a ghost, in a flow ofpassionless 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 youshould leave your weapons twenty miles behind you, your men, your guns,your brig that is your strength, and come along here with your mouthfull of fight, bare-handed and with a woman in tow.--Well--well!"

  "Don't forget, Jorgenson, that the lady hears you," remonstrated Lingardin 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 andfeelingless illusion. "He has forgotten."

  "The woman is not in the least offended. I ask for nothing better thanto be taken on that footing."

  "Forgot nothing!" mumbled Jorgenson with a sort of ghostly assertivenessand 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 mindof his own? What has come over him? He's mad! Leaving his brig with ahundred and twenty born and bred pirates of the worst kind in two prauson the other side of a sandbank. Did you insist on that, too? Has he puthimself in the hands of a strange woman?"

  Jorgenson seemed to be asking those questions of himself. Mrs. Traversobserved the empty stare, the self-communing voice, his unearthly lackof animation. Somehow it made it very easy to speak the whole truth tohim.

  "No," she said, "it is I who am altogether in his hands."

  Nobody would have guessed that Jorgenson had heard a single word of thatemphatic declaration if he had not addressed himself to Lingard with thequestion neither more nor less abstracted than all his other speeches.

  "Why then did you bring her along?"

  "You don't understand. It was only right and proper. One of thegentlemen is the lady's husband."

  "Oh, yes," muttered Jorgenson. "Who's the other?"

  "You have been told. A friend."

  "Poor Mr. d'Alcacer," said Mrs. Travers. "What bad luck for him to haveaccepted our invitation. But he is really a mere acquaintance."

  "I hardly noticed him," observed Lingard, gloomily. "He was talking toyou over the back of your chair when I came aboard the yacht as if hehad been a very good friend."

  "We always understood each other very well," said Mrs. Travers, pickingup from the rail the long glass that was lying there. "I always likedhim, the frankness of his mind, and his great loyalty."

  "What did he do?" asked Lingard.

  "He loved," said Mrs. Travers, lightly. "But that's an old story." Sheraised the glass to her eyes, one arm extended fully to sustain the longtube, and Lingard forgot d'Alcacer in admiring the firmness of her poseand the absolute steadiness of the heavy glass. She was as firm as arock after all those emotions and all that fatigue.

  Mrs. Travers directed the glass instinctively toward the entrance of thelagoon. The smooth water there shone like a piece of silver in the darkframe of the forest. A black speck swept across the field of her vision.It was some time before she could find it again and then she saw,apparently so near as to be within reach of the voice, a small canoewith two people in it. She saw the wet paddles rising and dipping witha flash in the sunlight. She made out plainly the face of Immada, whoseemed to be looking straight into the big end of the telescope. Thechief and his sister, after resting under the bank for a couple ofhours in the middle of the night, had entered the lagoon and were makingstraight for the hulk. They were already near enough to be perfectlydistinguishable to the naked eye if there had been anybody on board toglance that way. But nobody was even thinking of them. They might nothave existed except perhaps in the memory of old Jorgenson. But that wasmostly busy with all the mysterious secrets of his late tomb.

  Mrs. Travers lowered the glass suddenly. Lingard came out from a sort oftrance and said:
/>
  "Mr. d'Alcacer. Loved! Why shouldn't he?"

  Mrs. Travers looked frankly into Lingard's gloomy eyes. "It isn't thatalone, of course," she said. "First of all he knew how to love and then.. . . You don't know how artificial and barren certain kinds of lifecan be. But Mr. d'Alcacer's life was not that. His devotion was worthhaving."

  "You seem to know a lot about him,'" said Lingard, enviously. "Why doyou smile?" She continued to smile at him for a little while. The longbrass tube over her shoulder shone like gold against the pale fairnessof her bare head.--"At a thought," she answered, preserving the low toneof the conversation into which they had fallen as if their words couldhave disturbed the self-absorption of Captain H. C. Jorgenson. "At thethought that for all my long acquaintance with Mr. d'Alcacer I don'tknow half as much about him as I know about you."

  "Ah, that's impossible," contradicted Lingard. "Spaniard or no Spaniard,he is one of your kind."

  "Tarred with the same brush," murmured Mrs. Travers, with only ahalf-amused irony. But Lingard continued:

  "He was trying to make it up between me and your husband, wasn't he? Iwas too angry to pay much attention, but I liked him well enough. Whatpleased me most was the way in which he gave it up. That was done like agentleman. Do you understand what I mean, Mrs. Travers?"

  "I quite understand."

  "Yes, you would," he commented, simply. "But just then I was too angryto talk to anybody. And so I cleared out on board my own ship and stayedthere, not knowing what to do and wishing you all at the bottom of thesea. Don't mistake me, Mrs. Travers; it's you, the people aft, that Iwished at the bottom of the sea. I had nothing against the poor devilson board, They would have trusted me quick enough. So I fumed theretill--till. . . ."

  "Till nine o'clock or a little after," suggested Mrs. Travers,impenetrably.

  "No. Till I remembered you," said Lingard with the utmost innocence.

  "Do you mean to say that you forgot my existence so completely tillthen? You had spoken to me on board the yacht, you know."

  "Did I? I thought I did. What did I say?"

  "You told me not to touch a dusky princess," answered Mrs. Travers witha short laugh. Then with a visible change of mood as if she had suddenlyout of a light heart been recalled to the sense of the true situation:"But indeed I meant no harm to this figure of your dream. And, look overthere. She is pursuing you." Lingard glanced toward the north shore andsuppressed an exclamation of remorse. For the second time he discoveredthat he had forgotten the existence of Hassim and Immada. The canoe wasnow near enough for its occupants to distinguish plainly the heads ofthree people above the low bulwark of the Emma. Immada let her paddletrail suddenly in the water, with the exclamation, "I see the whitewoman there." Her brother looked over his shoulder and the canoefloated, arrested as if by the sudden power of a spell.--"They are nodream to me," muttered Lingard, sturdily. Mrs. Travers turned abruptlyaway to look at the further shore. It was still and empty to the nakedeye and seemed to quiver in the sunshine like an immense painted curtainlowered upon the unknown.

  "Here's Rajah Hassim coming, Jorgenson. I had an idea he would perhapsstay outside." Mrs. Travers heard Lingard's voice at her back and theanswering grunt of Jorgenson. She raised deliberately the long glass toher eye, pointing it at the shore.

  She distinguished plainly now the colours in the flutter of thestreamers above the brown roofs of the large Settlement, the stir ofpalm groves, the black shadows inland and the dazzling white beach ofcoral sand all ablaze in its formidable mystery. She swept the wholerange of the view and was going to lower the glass when from behindthe massive angle of the stockade there stepped out into the brilliantimmobility of the landscape a man in a long white gown and with anenormous black turban surmounting a dark face. Slow and grave hepaced the beach ominously in the sunshine, an enigmatical figure in anOriental tale with something weird and menacing in its sudden emergenceand lonely progress.

  With an involuntary gasp Mrs. Travers lowered the glass. All at oncebehind her back she heard a low musical voice beginning to pour outincomprehensible words in a tone of passionate pleading. Hassim andImmada had come on board and had approached Lingard. Yes! It wasintolerable to feel that this flow of soft speech which had no meaningfor her could make its way straight into that man's heart.