With the same simplicity Lingard shook his head.  He was thinking of the dead Jaffir with his last message delivered and untroubled now by all these matters of the earth.  He had been ordered to tell him to forget everything.  Lingard had an inward shudder.  In the dismay of his heart he might have believed his brig to lie under the very wing of the Angel of Desolation—­so oppressive, so final, and hopeless seemed the silence in which he and Carter looked at each other, wistfully.

Lingard reached for a sheet of paper amongst several lying on the table, took up a pen, hesitated a moment, and then wrote: 

“Meet me at day-break on the sandbank.”

He addressed the envelope to Mrs. Travers, Yacht Hermit, and pushed it across the table.

“Send this on board the schooner at once, Mr. Carter.  Wait a moment.  When our boats shove off for the sandbank have the forecastle gun fired.  I want to know when that dead man has left the ship.”

He sat alone, leaning his head on his hand, listening, listening endlessly, for the report of the gun.  Would it never come?  When it came at last muffled, distant, with a slight shock through the body of the brig he remained still with his head leaning on his hand but with a distinct conviction, with an almost physical certitude, that under the cotton sheet shrouding the dead man something of himself, too, had left the ship.

IX

In a roomy cabin, furnished and fitted with austere comfort, Mr. Travers reposed at ease in a low bed-place under a snowy white sheet and a light silk coverlet, his head sunk in a white pillow of extreme purity.  A faint scent of lavender hung about the fresh linen.  Though lying on his back like a person who is seriously ill Mr. Travers was conscious of nothing worse than a great fatigue.  Mr. Travers’ restfulness had something faintly triumphant in it.  To find himself again on board his yacht had soothed his vanity and had revived his sense of his own importance.  He contemplated it in a distant perspective, restored to its proper surroundings and unaffected by an adventure too extraordinary to trouble a superior mind or even to remain in one’s memory for any length of time.  He was not responsible.  Like many men ambitious of directing the affairs of a nation, Mr. Travers disliked the sense of responsibility.  He would not have been above evading it in case of need, but with perverse loftiness he really, in his heart, scorned it.  That was the reason why he was able to lie at rest and enjoy a sense of returning vigour.  But he did not care much to talk as yet, and that was why the silence in the stateroom had lasted for hours.  The bulkhead lamp had a green silk shade.  It was unnecessary to admit for a moment the existence of impudence or ruffianism.  A discreet knocking at the cabin door sounded deferential.