Carter came in and shut the cabin door carefully.  He looked with serenity at everyone in turn.

“All quiet?” asked Lingard.

“Quiet enough if you like to call it so,” he answered.  “But if you only put your head outside the door you’ll hear them all on the quarter-deck snoring against each other, as if there were no wives at home and no pirates at sea.”

“Look here,” said Lingard.  “I found out that I can’t trust my mate.”

“Can’t you?” drawled Carter.  “I am not exactly surprised.  I must say he does not snore but I believe it is because he is too crazy to sleep.  He waylaid me on the poop just now and said something about evil communications corrupting good manners.  Seems to me I’ve heard that before.  Queer thing to say.  He tried to make it out somehow that if he wasn’t corrupt it wasn’t your fault.  As if this was any concern of mine.  He’s as mad as he’s fat—­or else he puts it on.”  Carter laughed a little and leaned his shoulders against a bulkhead.

Lingard gazed at the woman who expected so much from him and in the light she seemed to shed he saw himself leading a column of armed boats to the attack of the Settlement.  He could burn the whole place to the ground and drive every soul of them into the bush.  He could!  And there was a surprise, a shock, a vague horror at the thought of the destructive power of his will.  He could give her ever so many lives.  He had seen her yesterday, and it seemed to him he had been all his life waiting for her to make a sign.  She was very still.  He pondered a plan of attack.  He saw smoke and flame—­and next moment he saw himself alone amongst shapeless ruins with the whispers, with the sigh and moan of the Shallows in his ears.  He shuddered, and shaking his hand: 

“No!  I cannot give you all those lives!” he cried.

Then, before Mrs. Travers could guess the meaning of this outburst, he declared that as the two captives must be saved he would go alone into the lagoon.  He could not think of using force.  “You understand why,” he said to Mrs. Travers and she whispered a faint “Yes.”  He would run the risk alone.  His hope was in Belarab being able to see where his true interest lay.  “If I can only get at him I would soon make him see,” he mused aloud.  “Haven’t I kept his power up for these two years past?  And he knows it, too.  He feels it.”  Whether he would be allowed to reach Belarab was another matter.  Lingard lost himself in deep thought.  “He would not dare,” he burst out.  Mrs. Travers listened with parted lips.  Carter did not move a muscle of his youthful and self-possessed face; only when Lingard, turning suddenly, came up close to him and asked with a red flash of eyes and in a lowered voice, “Could you fight this brig?” something like a smile made a stir amongst the hairs of his little fair moustache.

“’Could I?” he said.  “I could try, anyhow.”  He paused, and added hardly above his breath, “For the lady—­of course.”