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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.
When they were all assembled for the evening meal Jorgenson strolled up from nowhere in particular as his habit was, and speaking through the muslin announced that Captain Lingard begged to be excused from joining the company that evening. Then he strolled away.
The erection of that primitive deckhouse was a matter of propriety rather than of necessity. It was proper that the white men should have a place to themselves on board, but Lingard was perfectly accurate when he told Mrs. Travers that he had never slept there once. His practice was to sleep on deck. As to Jorgenson, if he did sleep at all he slept very little.
"You were always laughing at people's crazes," was what he said, "and now you have a craze of your own. But we won't discuss that." D'Alcacer passed on, raising his cap to Mrs. Travers, and went down the ship's side into the boat. Jorgenson had vanished in his own manner like an exorcised ghost, and Lingard, stepping back, left husband and wife face to face.
That's how I look at it." Jorgenson shook his head. "Foolishness!" he cried, then asked softly in a voice that trembled with curiosity "Where did you leave them?" "With Belarab," breathed out Lingard. "You knew him in the old days." "I knew him, I knew his father," burst out the other in an excited whisper. "Whom did I not know?
The fog began to blow away and presently everything was disclosed to the sight. Jorgenson was on his feet, he was holding a lighted cigar between his fingers. Tengga was sitting in front of him on one of the chairs the white people had used. His followers were pressing round him, with Daman and Sentot, who were muttering incantations; and even the Pangerans had moved closer to the hatchway.
Travers' loud, "Martin!" made Lingard wince, caused d'Alcacer to lift his head down there in the boat, and even Jorgenson, forward somewhere out of sight, ceased mumbling in his moustache. The only person who seemed not to have heard that exclamation was Mr. Travers himself, who continued smoothly: ". . . at the aberration of your mind, you who seemed so superior to common credulities.
They have a devil of their own " "The thing simply can't fail. I've calculated every move. I've guarded against everything. I am no fool." "Yes you are. Good-night." "Well, good-bye," said Lingard, calmly. He stepped into his boat, and Jorgenson walked up the jetty. Lingard, clearing the yoke lines, heard him call out from a distance: "Drop it!"
For a moment Lingard thought of picking up the pistols he had taken out of his belt preparatory to joining Jorgenson in the boat, thinking it would be better to go to a big talk completely unarmed. They were lying on the rail but he didn't pick them up. Four shots didn't matter. They could not matter if the world of his creation were to go to pieces. He said nothing of that to Mrs.
Her state had been more like an imperfect, half-conscious, quivering death. She shuddered at the recollection. "What an awful night," she murmured, drearily. There was nothing to hope for from Jorgenson. She expected him to vanish, indifferent, like a phantom of the dead carrying off the appropriately dead watch in his hand for some unearthly purpose. Jorgenson didn't move.
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