“Sudah!  It is finished!” A movement passed along all the heads, the seated bodies swayed to and fro.  Lingard had ceased speaking.  He remained seated for a moment looking his audience all over and when he stood up together with Mrs. Travers and Jorgenson the whole assembly rose from the ground together and lost its ordered formation.  Some of Belarab’s retainers, young broad-faced fellows, wearing a sort of uniform of check-patterned sarongs, black silk jackets and crimson skull-caps set at a rakish angle, swaggered through the broken groups and ranged themselves in two rows before the motionless Daman and his Illanun chiefs in martial array.  The members of the council who had left their bench approached the white people with gentle smiles and deferential movements of the hands.  Their bearing was faintly propitiatory; only the man in the big turban remained fanatically aloof, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.

“I have done it,” murmured Lingard to Mrs. Travers.—­“Was it very difficult?” she asked.—­“No,” he said, conscious in his heart that he had strained to the fullest extent the prestige of his good name and that habit of deference to his slightest wish established by the glamour of his wealth and the fear of his personality in this great talk which after all had done nothing except put off the decisive hour.  He offered Mrs. Travers his arm ready to lead her away, but at the last moment did not move.

With an authoritative gesture Daman had parted the ranks of Belarab’s young followers with the red skullcaps and was seen advancing toward the whites striking into an astonished silence all the scattered groups in the courtyard.  But the broken ranks had closed behind him.  The Illanun chiefs, for all their truculent aspect, were much too prudent to attempt to move.  They had not needed for that the faint warning murmur from Daman.  He advanced alone.  The plain hilt of a sword protruded from the open edges of his cloak.  The parted edges disclosed also the butts of two flintlock pistols.  The Koran in a velvet case hung on his breast by a red cord of silk.  He was pious, magnificent, and warlike, with calm movements and a straight glance from under the hem of the simple piece of linen covering his head.  He carried himself rigidly and his bearing had a sort of solemn modesty.  Lingard said hurriedly to Mrs. Travers that the man had met white people before and that, should he attempt to shake hands with her, she ought to offer her own covered with the end of her scarf.—­“Why?” she asked.  “Propriety?”—­“Yes, it will be better,” said Lingard and the next moment Mrs. Travers felt her enveloped hand pressed gently by slender dark fingers and felt extremely Oriental herself when, with her face muffled to the eyes, she encountered the lustrous black stare of the sea-robbers’ leader.  It was only for an instant, because Daman turned away at once to shake hands with Lingard.  In the straight, ample folds of his robes he looked very slender facing the robust white man.