“Tell Wasub to open one of the long-cloth bales in the hold, Mr. Carter, and give the crew a cotton sheet to bury him decently according to their faith.  Let it be done to-night.  They must have the boats, too.  I suppose they will want to take him on the sandbank.”

“Yes, sir,” said Carter.

“Let them have what they want, spades, torches. . . .  Wasub will chant the right words.  Paradise is the lot of all True Believers.  Do you understand me, Mr. Carter?  Paradise!  I wonder what it will be for him!  Unless he gets messages to carry through the jungle, avoiding ambushes, swimming in storms and knowing no rest, he won’t like it.”

Carter listened with an unmoved face.  It seemed to him that the Captain had forgotten his presence.

“And all the time he will be sleeping on that sandbank,” Lingard began again, sitting in his old place under the gilt thunderbolts suspended over his head with his elbows on the table and his hands to his temples.  “If they want a board to set up at the grave let them have a piece of an oak plank.  It will stay there—­till the next monsoon.  Perhaps.”

Carter felt uncomfortable before that tense stare which just missed him and in that confined cabin seemed awful in its piercing and far-off expression.  But as he had not been dismissed he did not like to go away.

“Everything will be done as you wish it, sir,” he said.  “I suppose the yacht will be leaving the first thing to-morrow morning, sir.”

“If she doesn’t we must give her a solid shot or two to liven her up—­eh, Mr. Carter?”

Carter did not know whether to smile or to look horrified.  In the end he did both, but as to saying anything he found it impossible.  But Lingard did not expect an answer.

“I believe you are going to stay with me, Mr. Carter?”

“I told you, sir, I am your man if you want me.”

“The trouble is, Mr. Carter, that I am no longer the man to whom you spoke that night in Carimata.”

“Neither am I, sir, in a manner of speaking.”

Lingard, relaxing the tenseness of his stare, looked at the young man, thoughtfully.

“After all, it is the brig that will want you.  She will never change.  The finest craft afloat in these seas.  She will carry me about as she did before, but . . .”

He unclasped his hands, made a sweeping gesture.

Carter gave all his naive sympathy to that man who had certainly rescued the white people but seemed to have lost his own soul in the attempt.  Carter had heard something from Wasub.  He had made out enough of this story from the old serang’s pidgin English to know that the Captain’s native friends, one of them a woman, had perished in a mysterious catastrophe.  But the why of it, and how it came about, remained still quite incomprehensible to him.  Of course, a man like the Captain would feel terribly cut up. . . .

“You will be soon yourself again, sir,” he said in the kindest possible tone.