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As Jorgenson moved toward the deckhouse it occurred to him that perhaps now that woman Tom Lingard had taken in tow might take it into her head to refuse to leave the Emma. This did not disturb him very much. All those people moved in the dark. He himself at that particular moment was moving in the dark.
But the ghost of Jorgenson was not easily exorcised. He, too, was a mere voice in the outer darkness, inexorable, insisting that she should come out on deck and listen. At last he found the right words to say. "It is something about Tom that I want to tell you. You wish him well, don't you?"
Everything left me youth, money, strength, hope the very sleep. But she stuck by the wreck." "That says a lot for her and something for you," said Lingard, cheerily. Jorgenson shook his head. "That's the worst of all," he said with slow emphasis. "That's the end. I came to them from the other side of the earth and they took me and see what they made of me."
Detached in a sense from the life of men perhaps as much even as Jorgenson himself, he took yet a reasonable interest in the course of events and had not lost all his sense of self-preservation. Without being able to appreciate the exact values of the situation he was not one of those men who are ever completely in the dark in any given set of circumstances.
"Captain Jorgenson has always looked upon me as a nuisance. Perhaps he had made up his mind to get rid of me even against your orders. Is he quite sane?" She released her firm hold of that iron forearm which fell slowly by Lingard's side. She had regained fully the possession of her personality.
"He brought his prisoners in himself then." "Landed by torchlight," uttered precisely the shade of Captain Jorgenson, late of the Barque Wild Rose. He swung his arm pointing across the lagoon and Mrs. Travers turned about in that direction. All the scene was but a great light and a great solitude.
She heard them and let her head fall again on her bare arms thrown over the little desk before which she sat. Jorgenson, standing by the taffrail, noted the faint reddish glow in the massive blackness of the further shore. Jorgenson noted things quickly, cursorily, perfunctorily, as phenomena unrelated to his own apparitional existence of a visiting ghost.
How could I tell that a man like you would come along for a fight bringing a woman with him?" "This lady is Mrs. Travers," said Lingard. "The wife of one of the luckless gentlemen Daman got hold of last evening. . . . This is Jorgenson, the friend of whom I have been telling you, Mrs. Travers." Mrs. Travers smiled faintly.
For the second time before her expressed wish to stand by his side he bowed his head. After all, if things came to the worst, she would be as safe between him and Jorgenson as left alone on board the Emma with a few Malay spearmen for all defence.
Within three feet of them the shade of Jorgenson, very gaunt and neat, stared into space. "Yes. You are strong," said Lingard. "But a whole long night sitting in a small boat! I wonder you are not too stiff to stand." "I am not stiff in the least," she interrupted, still smiling. "I am really a very strong woman," she added, earnestly. "Whatever happens you may reckon on that fact."
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