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A multitude of hands went up to shade the eager eyes, and exclamations of wonder burst out from many men at the sight of a crowd of canoes of various sizes and kinds lying close together with the effect as of an enormous raft, a little way off the side of the Emma. The excited voices rose higher and higher. There was no doubt about Tengga's being on the lagoon. But what was Jorgenson about?
"I mistrust him," she said. "You do!" exclaimed d'Alcacer, very low. "I mean that Jorgenson. He seems a merciless sort of creature." "He is indifferent to everything," said d'Alcacer. "It may be a mask." "Have you some evidence, Mrs. Travers?" "No," said Mrs. Travers without hesitation. "I have my instinct."
It was certainly a shock to him. But d'Alcacer advanced smiling, as if the beach were a drawing room. With a very few paddlers the heavy old European-built boat moved slowly over the water that seemed as pale and blazing as the sky above. Jorgenson had perched himself in the bow. The other four white people sat in the stern sheets, the ex-prisoners side by side in the middle.
With those words she disappeared inside the deckhouse and presently threads of light appeared in the interstices of the boards. Mrs. Travers had lighted a candle in there. She was busy hanging that ring round her neck. She was going. Yes taking the risk for Tom's sake. "Nobody can resist that man," Jorgenson muttered to himself with increasing moroseness. "I couldn't."
Jorgenson added as merciless, as irrepressible, and sincere as though he were the embodiment of that inner voice that speaks in all of us at times and, like Jorgenson, is offensive and difficult to answer. "Remember that I am not a shadow but a living woman still, Captain Jorgenson. I can live and I can die. Send me over to share their fate."
He would know nothing about anybody outside Belarab's stockade till the end came, whatever the end might be, for all those people that lived the life of men. Whether to know or not to know would be good for Lingard Jorgenson could not tell. He admitted to himself that here there was something that he, Jorgenson, could not tell.
She stepped forward compelling, commanding, trying to concentrate in her glance all her will power, the sense of her own right to dispose of herself and her claim to be served to the last moment of her life. It was as if she had done nothing. Jorgenson didn't flinch. "Which of them are you after?" asked his blank, unringing voice.
"You have done it and now look out look out. . . ." "Nothing can go wrong as far as I can see," argued Lingard. "They all know what's to be done. I've got them in hand. You don't think Belarab unsafe? Do you?" "Haven't seen him for fifteen years but the whole thing's unsafe," growled Jorgenson. "I tell you I've fixed it so that nothing can go wrong.
It was still and empty to the naked eye and seemed to quiver in the sunshine like an immense painted curtain lowered upon the unknown. "Here's Rajah Hassim coming, Jorgenson. I had an idea he would perhaps stay outside." Mrs. Travers heard Lingard's voice at her back and the answering grunt of Jorgenson. She raised deliberately the long glass to her eye, pointing it at the shore.
He lived in the native quarter, with a native woman, in a native house standing in the middle of a plot of fenced ground where grew plantains, and furnished only with mats, cooking pots, a queer fishing net on two sticks, and a small mahogany case with a lock and a silver plate engraved with the words "Captain H. C. Jorgenson. Barque Wild Rose." It was like an inscription on a tomb.
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