“I have had news which you ought to know.  Let us go into the deckhouse.”

D’Alcacer saw their heads lighted up by the raised lantern surrounded by the depths of shadow with an effect of a marvellous and symbolic vision.  He heard Mrs. Travers say “I would rather not hear your news,” in a tone that made that sensitive observer purse up his lips in wonder.  He thought that she was over-wrought, that the situation had grown too much for her nerves.  But this was not the tone of a frightened person.  It flashed through his mind that she had become self-conscious, and there he stopped in his speculation.  That friend of women remained discreet even in his thoughts.  He stepped backward further into the Cage and without surprise saw Mrs. Travers follow Lingard into the deckhouse.

IV

Lingard stood the lantern on the table.  Its light was very poor.  He dropped on to the sea-chest heavily.  He, too, was over-wrought.  His flannel shirt was open at the neck.  He had a broad belt round his waist and was without his jacket.  Before him, Mrs. Travers, straight and tall in the gay silks, cottons, and muslins of her outlandish dress, with the ends of the scarf thrown over her head, hanging down in front of her, looked dimly splendid and with a black glance out of her white face.  He said: 

“Do you, too, want to throw me over?  I tell you you can’t do that now.”

“I wasn’t thinking of throwing you over, but I don’t even know what you mean.  There seem to be no end of things I can’t do.  Hadn’t you better tell me of something that I could do?  Have you any idea yourself what you want from me?”

“You can let me look at you.  You can listen to me.  You can speak to me.”

“Frankly, I have never shirked doing all those things, whenever you wanted me to.  You have led me . . .”

“I led you!” cried Lingard.

“Oh!  It was my fault,” she said, without anger.  “I must have dreamed then that it was you who came to me in the dark with the tale of your impossible life.  Could I have sent you away?”

“I wish you had.  Why didn’t you?”

“Do you want me to tell you that you were irresistible?  How could I have sent you away?  But you!  What made you come back to me with your very heart on your lips?”

When Lingard spoke after a time it was in jerky sentences.

“I didn’t stop to think.  I had been hurt.  I didn’t think of you people as ladies and gentlemen.  I thought of you as people whose lives I held in my hand.  How was it possible to forget you in my trouble?  It is your face that I brought back with me on board my brig.  I don’t know why.  I didn’t look at you more than at anybody else.  It took me all my time to keep my temper down lest it should burn you all up.  I didn’t want to be rude to you people, but I found it wasn’t very easy because threats were the only argument I had.  Was I very offensive, Mrs. Travers?”