The Rescue Part 16

"What news, O Rajah?"

Ha.s.sim's eyes made the round of the schooner's decks. He had left his gun in the boat and advanced empty handed, with a tranquil a.s.surance as if bearing a welcome offering in the faint smile of his lips. Immada, half hidden behind his shoulder, followed lightly, her elbows pressed close to her side. The thick fringe of her eyelashes was dropped like a veil; she looked youthful and brooding; she had an aspect of shy resolution.

They stopped within arm's length of the whites, and for some time n.o.body said a word. Then Ha.s.sim gave Lingard a significant glance, and uttered rapidly with a slight toss of the head that indicated in a manner the whole of the yacht:

"I see no guns!"

"N--no!" said Lingard, looking suddenly confused. It had occurred to him that for the first time in two years or more he had forgotten, utterly forgotten, these people's existence.

Immada stood slight and rigid with downcast eyes. Ha.s.sim, at his ease, scrutinized the faces, as if searching for elusive points of similitude or for subtle shades of difference.

"What is this new intrusion?" asked Mr. Travers, angrily.

"These are the fisher-folk, sir," broke in the sailing-master, "we've observed these three days past flitting about in a canoe; but they never had the sense to answer our hail; and yet a bit of fish for your breakfast--" He smiled obsequiously, and all at once, without provocation, began to bellow:

"Hey! Johnnie! Hab got fish? Fis.h.!.+ One peecee fis.h.!.+ Eh? Savee? Fis.h.!.+

Fish--" He gave it up suddenly to say in a deferential tone--"Can't make them savages understand anything, sir," and withdrew as if after a clever feat.

Ha.s.sim looked at Lingard.

"Why did the little white man make that outcry?" he asked, anxiously.

"Their desire is to eat fish," said Lingard in an enraged tone.

Then before the air of extreme surprise which incontinently appeared on the other's face, he could not restrain a short and hopeless laugh.

"Eat fish," repeated Ha.s.sim, staring. "O you white people! O you white people! Eat fis.h.!.+ Good! But why make that noise? And why did you send them here without guns?" After a significant glance down upon the slope of the deck caused by the vessel being on the ground, he added with a slight nod at Lingard--"And without knowledge?"

"You should not have come here, O Ha.s.sim," said Lingard, testily. "Here no one understands. They take a rajah for a fisherman--"

"Ya-wa! A great mistake, for, truly, the chief of ten fugitives without a country is much less than the headman of a fis.h.i.+ng village," observed Ha.s.sim, composedly. Immada sighed. "But you, Tuan, at least know the truth," he went on with quiet irony; then after a pause--"We came here because you had forgotten to look toward us, who had waited, sleeping little at night, and in the day watching with hot eyes the empty water at the foot of the sky for you."

Immada murmured, without lifting her head:

"You never looked for us. Never, never once."

"There was too much trouble in my eyes," explained Lingard with that patient gentleness of tone and face which, every time he spoke to the young girl, seemed to disengage itself from his whole person, enveloping his fierceness, softening his aspect, such as the dreamy mist that in the early radiance of the morning weaves a veil of tender charm about a rugged rock in mid-ocean. "I must look now to the right and to the left as in a time of sudden danger," he added after a moment and she whispered an appalled "Why?" so low that its pain floated away in the silence of attentive men, without response, unheard, ignored, like the pain of an impalpable thought.

IV

D'Alcacer, standing back, surveyed them all with a profound and alert attention. Lingard seemed unable to tear himself away from the yacht, and remained, checked, as it were in the act of going, like a man who has stopped to think out the last thing to say; and that stillness of a body, forgotten by the labouring mind, reminded Carter of that moment in the cabin, when alone he had seen this man thus wrestling with his thought, motionless and locked in the grip of his conscience.

Mr. Travers muttered audibly through his teeth:

"How long is this performance going to last? I have desired you to go."

"Think of these poor devils," whispered Lingard, with a quick glance at the crew huddled up near by.

"You are the kind of man I would be least disposed to trust--in any case," said Mr. Travers, incisively, very low, and with an inexplicable but very apparent satisfaction. "You are only wasting your time here."

"You--You--" He stammered and stared. He chewed with growls some insulting word and at last swallowed it with an effort. "My time pays for your life," he said.

He became aware of a sudden stir, and saw that Mrs. Travers had risen from her chair.

She walked impulsively toward the group on the quarter-deck, making straight for Immada. Ha.s.sim had stepped aside and his detached gaze of a Malay gentleman pa.s.sed by her as if she had been invisible.

She was tall, supple, moving freely. Her complexion was so dazzling in the shade that it seemed to throw out a halo round her head. Upon a smooth and wide brow an abundance of pale fair hair, fine as silk, undulating like the sea, heavy like a helmet, descended low without a trace of gloss, without a gleam in its coils, as though it had never been touched by a ray of light; and a throat white, smooth, palpitating with life, a round neck modelled with strength and delicacy, supported gloriously that radiant face and that pale ma.s.s of hair unkissed by suns.h.i.+ne.

She said with animation:

"Why, it's a girl!"

Mrs. Travers extorted from d'Alcacer a fresh tribute of curiosity. A strong puff of wind fluttered the awnings and one of the screens blowing out wide let in upon the quarter-deck the rippling glitter of the Shallows, showing to d'Alcacer the luminous vastness of the sea, with the line of the distant horizon, dark like the edge of the encompa.s.sing night, drawn at the height of Mrs. Travers' shoulder. . . . Where was it he had seen her last--a long time before, on the other side of the world? There was also the glitter of splendour around her then, and an impression of luminous vastness. The encompa.s.sing night, too, was there, the night that waits for its time to move forward upon the glitter, the splendour, the men, the women.

He could not remember for the moment, but he became convinced that of all the women he knew, she alone seemed to be made for action. Every one of her movements had firmness, ease, the meaning of a vital fact, the moral beauty of a fearless expression. Her supple figure was not dishonoured by any faltering of outlines under the plain dress of dark blue stuff moulding her form with bold simplicity.

She had only very few steps to make, but before she had stopped, confronting Immada, d'Alcacer remembered her suddenly as he had seen her last, out West, far away, impossibly different, as if in another universe, as if presented by the fantasy of a fevered memory. He saw her in a luminous perspective of palatial drawing rooms, in the restless eddy and flow of a human sea, at the foot of walls high as cliffs, under lofty ceilings that like a tropical sky flung light and heat upon the shallow glitter of uniforms, of stars, of diamonds, of eyes sparkling in the weary or impa.s.sive faces of the throng at an official reception.

Outside he had found the unavoidable darkness with its aspect of patient waiting, a cloudy sky holding back the dawn of a London morning. It was difficult to believe.

Lingard, who had been looking dangerously fierce, slapped his thigh and showed signs of agitation.

"By heavens, I had forgotten all about you!" he p.r.o.nounced in dismay.

Mrs. Travers fixed her eyes on Immada. Fairhaired and white she a.s.serted herself before the girl of olive face and raven locks with the maturity of perfection, with the superiority of the flower over the leaf, of the phrase that contains a thought over the cry that can only express an emotion. Immense s.p.a.ces and countless centuries stretched between them: and she looked at her as when one looks into one's own heart with absorbed curiosity, with still wonder, with an immense compa.s.sion.

Lingard murmured, warningly:

"Don't touch her."

Mrs. Travers looked at him.

"Do you think I could hurt her?" she asked, softly, and was so startled to hear him mutter a gloomy "Perhaps," that she hesitated before she smiled.

"Almost a child! And so pretty! What a delicate face," she said, while another deep sigh of the sea breeze lifted and let fall the screens, so that the sound, the wind, and the glitter seemed to rush in together and bear her words away into s.p.a.ce. "I had no idea of anything so charmingly gentle," she went on in a voice that without effort glowed, caressed, and had a magic power of delight to the soul. "So young! And she lives here--does she? On the sea--or where? Lives--" Then faintly, as if she had been in the act of speaking, removed instantly to a great distance, she was heard again: "How does she live?"

Lingard had hardly seen Edith Travers till then. He had seen no one really but Mr. Travers. He looked and listened with something of the stupor of a new sensation.

Then he made a distinct effort to collect his thoughts and said with a remnant of anger:

"What have you got to do with her? She knows war. Do you know anything about it? And hunger, too, and thirst, and unhappiness; things you have only heard about. She has been as near death as I am to you--and what is all that to any of you here?"

"That child!" she said in slow wonder.

Immada turned upon Mrs. Travers her eyes black as coal, sparkling and soft like a tropical night; and the glances of the two women, their dissimilar and inquiring glances met, seemed to touch, clasp, hold each other with the grip of an intimate contact. They separated.

"What are they come for? Why did you show them the way to this place?"

asked Immada, faintly.