The Rescue (27 page)

"I do know him," she said, and before the reproachfully unbelieving
attitude of the other she added, speaking slowly and with emphasis:
"There is not, I verily believe, a single thought or act of his life
that I don't know."—"It's true—it's true," muttered Lingard to
himself. Carter threw up his arms with a groan. "Stand back," said a
voice that sounded to him like a growl of thunder, and he felt a grip
on his hand which seemed to crush every bone. He jerked it away.—"Mrs.
Travers! stay," he cried. They had vanished through the open door and
the sound of their footsteps had already died away. Carter turned about
bewildered as if looking for help.—"Who is he, steward? Who in the name
of all the mad devils is he?" he asked, wildly. He was confounded by the
cold and philosophical tone of the answer:—"'Tain't my place to trouble
about that, sir—nor yours I guess."—"Isn't it!" shouted Carter. "Why,
he has carried the lady off." The steward was looking critically at
the lamp and after a while screwed the light down.—"That's better," he
mumbled.—"Good God! What is a fellow to do?" continued Carter, looking
at Hassim and Immada who were whispering together and gave him only an
absent glance. He rushed on deck and was struck blind instantly by the
night that seemed to have been lying in wait for him; he stumbled over
something soft, kicked something hard, flung himself on the rail. "Come
back," he cried. "Come back. Captain! Mrs. Travers!—or let me come,
too."

He listened. The breeze blew cool against his cheek. A black bandage
seemed to lie over his eyes. "Gone," he groaned, utterly crushed.
And suddenly he heard Mrs. Travers' voice remote in the depths of
the night.—"Defend the brig," it said, and these words, pronouncing
themselves in the immensity of a lightless universe, thrilled every
fibre of his body by the commanding sadness of their tone. "Defend,
defend the brig." . . . "I am damned if I do," shouted Carter in
despair. "Unless you come back! . . . Mrs. Travers!"

". . . as though—I were—on board—myself," went on the rising
cadence of the voice, more distant now, a marvel of faint and imperious
clearness.

Carter shouted no more; he tried to make out the boat for a time, and
when, giving it up, he leaped down from the rail, the heavy obscurity
of the brig's main deck was agitated like a sombre pool by his jump,
swayed, eddied, seemed to break up. Blotches of darkness recoiled,
drifted away, bare feet shuffled hastily, confused murmurs died out.
"Lascars," he muttered, "The crew is all agog." Afterward he listened
for a moment to the faintly tumultuous snores of the white men sleeping
in rows, with their heads under the break of the poop. Somewhere
about his feet, the yacht's black dog, invisible, and chained to a
deck-ringbolt, whined, rattled the thin links, pattered with his claws
in his distress at the unfamiliar surroundings, begging for the charity
of human notice. Carter stooped impulsively, and was met by a startling
lick in the face.—"Hallo, boy!" He thumped the thick curly sides,
stroked the smooth head—"Good boy, Rover. Down. Lie down, dog. You
don't know what to make of it—do you, boy?" The dog became still as
death. "Well, neither do I," muttered Carter. But such natures are
helped by a cheerful contempt for the intricate and endless suggestions
of thought. He told himself that he would soon see what was to come of
it, and dismissed all speculation. Had he been a little older he would
have felt that the situation was beyond his grasp; but he was too
young to see it whole and in a manner detached from himself. All these
inexplicable events filled him with deep concern—but then on the other
hand he had the key of the magazine and he could not find it in his
heart to dislike Lingard. He was positive about this at last, and to
know that much after the discomfort of an inward conflict went a long
way toward a solution. When he followed Shaw into the cabin he could not
repress a sense of enjoyment or hide a faint and malicious smile.

"Gone away—did you say? And carried off the lady with him?" discoursed
Shaw very loud in the doorway. "Did he? Well, I am not surprised. What
can you expect from a man like that, who leaves his ship in an open
roadstead without—I won't say orders—but without as much as a single
word to his next in command? And at night at that! That just shows you
the kind of man. Is this the way to treat a chief mate? I apprehend he
was riled at the little al-ter-cation we had just before you came on
board. I told him a truth or two—but—never mind. There's the law and
that's enough for me. I am captain as long as he is out of the ship, and
if his address before very long is not in one of Her Majesty's jails or
other I au-tho-rize you to call me a Dutchman. You mark my words."

He walked in masterfully, sat down and surveyed the cabin in a leisurely
and autocratic manner; but suddenly his eyes became stony with amazement
and indignation; he pointed a fat and trembling forefinger.

"Niggers," he said, huskily. "In the cuddy! In the cuddy!" He appeared
bereft of speech for a time.

Since he entered the cabin Hassim had been watching him in thoughtful
and expectant silence. "I can't have it," he continued with genuine
feeling in his voice. "Damme! I've too much respect for myself." He rose
with heavy deliberation; his eyes bulged out in a severe and
dignified stare. "Out you go!" he bellowed; suddenly, making a step
forward.—"Great Scott! What are you up to, mister?" asked in a tone of
dispassionate surprise the steward whose head appeared in the doorway.
"These are the Captain's friends." "Show me a man's friends and . . ."
began Shaw, dogmatically, but abruptly passed into the tone of
admonition. "You take your mug out of the way, bottle-washer. They ain't
friends of mine. I ain't a vagabond. I know what's due to myself. Quit!"
he hissed, fiercely. Hassim, with an alert movement, grasped the handle
of his kris. Shaw puffed out his cheeks and frowned.—"Look out! He
will stick you like a prize pig," murmured Carter without moving
a muscle. Shaw looked round helplessly.—"And you would enjoy the
fun—wouldn't you?" he said with slow bitterness. Carter's distant
non-committal smile quite overwhelmed him by its horrid frigidity.
Extreme despondency replaced the proper feeling of racial pride in the
primitive soul of the mate. "My God! What luck! What have I done to fall
amongst that lot?" he groaned, sat down, and took his big grey head in
his hands. Carter drew aside to make room for Immada, who, in obedience
to a whisper from her brother, sought to leave the cabin. She passed
out after an instant of hesitation, during which she looked up at Carter
once. Her brother, motionless in a defensive attitude, protected her
retreat. She disappeared; Hassim's grip on his weapon relaxed; he looked
in turn at every object in the cabin as if to fix its position in
his mind forever, and following his sister, walked out with noiseless
footfalls.

They entered the same darkness which had received, enveloped, and hidden
the troubled souls of Lingard and Edith, but to these two the light from
which they had felt themselves driven away was now like the light of
forbidden hopes; it had the awful and tranquil brightness that a light
burning on the shore has for an exhausted swimmer about to give himself
up to the fateful sea. They looked back; it had disappeared; Carter had
shut the cabin door behind them to have it out with Shaw. He wanted to
arrive at some kind of working compromise with the nominal commander,
but the mate was so demoralized by the novelty of the assaults made upon
his respectability that the young defender of the brig could get nothing
from him except lamentations mingled with mild blasphemies. The brig
slept, and along her quiet deck the voices raised in her cabin—Shaw's
appeals and reproaches directed vociferously to heaven, together with
Carter's inflexible drawl mingled into one deadened, modulated, and
continuous murmur. The lockouts in the waist, motionless and peering
into obscurity, one ear turned to the sea, were aware of that strange
resonance like the ghost of a quarrel that seemed to hover at their
backs. Wasub, after seeing Hassim and Immada into their canoe, prowled
to and fro the whole length of the vessel vigilantly. There was not
a star in the sky and no gleam on the water; there was no horizon, no
outline, no shape for the eye to rest upon, nothing for the hand to
grasp. An obscurity that seemed without limit in space and time had
submerged the universe like a destroying flood.

A lull of the breeze kept for a time the small boat in the neighbourhood
of the brig. The hoisted sail, invisible, fluttered faintly,
mysteriously, and the boat rising and falling bodily to the passage of
each invisible undulation of the waters seemed to repose upon a living
breast. Lingard, his hand on the tiller, sat up erect, expectant and
silent. Mrs. Travers had drawn her cloak close around her body. Their
glances plunged infinitely deep into a lightless void, and yet they were
still so near the brig that the piteous whine of the dog, mingled with
the angry rattling of the chain, reached their ears faintly, evoking
obscure images of distress and fury. A sharp bark ending in a plaintive
howl that seemed raised by the passage of phantoms invisible to men,
rent the black stillness, as though the instinct of the brute inspired
by the soul of night had voiced in a lamentable plaint the fear of the
future, the anguish of lurking death, the terror of shadows. Not far
from the brig's boat Hassim and Immada in their canoe, letting their
paddles trail in the water, sat in a silent and invincible torpor as
if the fitful puffs of wind had carried to their hearts the breath of a
subtle poison that, very soon, would make them die.—"Have you seen
the white woman's eyes?" cried the girl. She struck her palms together
loudly and remained with her arms extended, with her hands clasped. "O
Hassim! Have you seen her eyes shining under her eyebrows like rays of
light darting under the arched boughs in a forest? They pierced me. I
shuddered at the sound of her voice! I saw her walk behind him—and
it seems to me that she does not live on earth—that all this is
witchcraft."

She lamented in the night. Hassim kept silent. He had no illusions and
in any other man but Lingard he would have thought the proceeding no
better than suicidal folly. For him Travers and d'Alcacer were two
powerful Rajahs—probably relatives of the Ruler of the land of the
English whom he knew to be a woman; but why they should come and
interfere with the recovery of his own kingdom was an obscure problem.
He was concerned for Lingard's safety. That the risk was incurred mostly
for his sake—so that the prospects of the great enterprise should not
be ruined by a quarrel over the lives of these whites—did not strike
him so much as may be imagined. There was that in him which made such
an action on Lingard's part appear all but unavoidable. Was he not Rajah
Hassim and was not the other a man of strong heart, of strong arm, of
proud courage, a man great enough to protect highborn princes—a friend?
Immada's words called out a smile which, like the words, was lost in the
darkness. "Forget your weariness," he said, gently, "lest, O Sister, we
should arrive too late." The coming day would throw its light on some
decisive event. Hassim thought of his own men who guarded the Emma and
he wished to be where they could hear his voice. He regretted Jaffir was
not there. Hassim was saddened by the absence from his side of that man
who once had carried what he thought would be his last message to his
friend. It had not been the last. He had lived to cherish new hopes and
to face new troubles and, perchance, to frame another message yet, while
death knocked with the hands of armed enemies at the gate. The breeze
steadied; the succeeding swells swung the canoe smoothly up the unbroken
ridges of water travelling apace along the land. They progressed slowly;
but Immada's heart was more weary than her arms, and Hassim, dipping the
blade of his paddle without a splash, peered right and left, trying to
make out the shadowy forms of islets. A long way ahead of the canoe and
holding the same course, the brig's dinghy ran with broad lug extended,
making for that narrow and winding passage between the coast and the
southern shoals, which led to the mouth of the creek connecting the
lagoon with the sea.

Thus on that starless night the Shallows were peopled by uneasy souls.
The thick veil of clouds stretched over them, cut them off from the
rest of the universe. At times Mrs. Travers had in the darkness the
impression of dizzy speed, and again it seemed to her that the boat was
standing still, that everything in the world was standing still and only
her fancy roamed free from all trammels. Lingard, perfectly motionless
by her side, steered, shaping his course by the feel of the wind.
Presently he perceived ahead a ghostly flicker of faint, livid light
which the earth seemed to throw up against the uniform blackness of
the sky. The dinghy was approaching the expanse of the Shallows. The
confused clamour of broken water deepened its note.

"How long are we going to sail like this?" asked Mrs. Travers, gently.
She did not recognize the voice that pronounced the word "Always" in
answer to her question. It had the impersonal ring of a voice without a
master. Her heart beat fast.

"Captain Lingard!" she cried.

"Yes. What?" he said, nervously, as if startled out of a dream.

"I asked you how long we were going to sail like this," she repeated,
distinctly.

"If the breeze holds we shall be in the lagoon soon after daybreak. That
will be the right time, too. I shall leave you on board the hulk with
Jorgenson."

"And you? What will you do?" she asked. She had to wait for a while.

"I will do what I can," she heard him say at last. There was another
pause. "All I can," he added.

The breeze dropped, the sail fluttered.

"I have perfect confidence in you," she said. "But are you certain of
success?"