PART V. THE POINT OF HONOUR AND THE POINT OF PASSION

I

“May I come in?”

“Yes,” said a voice within.  “The door is open.”  It had a wooden latch.  Mr. Travers lifted it while the voice of his wife continued as he entered.  “Did you imagine I had locked myself in?  Did you ever know me lock myself in?”

Mr. Travers closed the door behind him.  “No, it has never come to that,” he said in a tone that was not conciliatory.  In that place which was a room in a wooden hut and had a square opening without glass but with a half-closed shutter he could not distinguish his wife very well at once.  She was sitting in an armchair and what he could see best was her fair hair all loose over the back of the chair.  There was a moment of silence.  The measured footsteps of two men pacing athwart the quarter-deck of the dead ship Emma commanded by the derelict shade of Jorgenson could be heard outside.

Jorgenson, on taking up his dead command, had a house of thin boards built on the after deck for his own accommodation and that of Lingard during his flying visits to the Shore of Refuge.  A narrow passage divided it in two and Lingard’s side was furnished with a camp bedstead, a rough desk, and a rattan armchair.  On one of his visits Lingard had brought with him a black seaman’s chest and left it there.  Apart from these objects and a small looking-glass worth about half a crown and nailed to the wall there was nothing else in there whatever.  What was on Jorgenson’s side of the deckhouse no one had seen, but from external evidence one could infer the existence of a set of razors.

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.  It might have been said that he haunted rather than commanded the Emma.  His white form flitted here and there in the night or stood for hours, silent, contemplating the sombre glimmer of the lagoon.  Mr. Travers’ eyes accustomed gradually to the dusk of the place could now distinguish more of his wife’s person than the great mass of honey-coloured hair.  He saw her face, the dark eyebrows and her eyes that seemed profoundly black in the half light.  He said: 

“You couldn’t have done so here.  There is neither lock nor bolt.”

“Isn’t there?  I didn’t notice.  I would know how to protect myself without locks and bolts.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said Mr. Travers in a sullen tone and fell silent again surveying the woman in the chair.  “Indulging your taste for fancy dress,” he went on with faint irony.