When three days afterward he left Belarab’s settlement, it was on a calm morning of unclouded peace.  All the boats of the brig came up into the lagoon armed and manned to make more impressive the solemn fact of a concluded alliance.  A staring crowd watched his imposing departure in profound silence and with an increased sense of wonder at the mystery of his apparition.  The progress of the boats was smooth and slow while they crossed the wide lagoon.  Lingard looked back once.  A great stillness had laid its hand over the earth, the sky, and the men; upon the immobility of landscape and people.  Hassim and Immada, standing out clearly by the side of the chief, raised their arms in a last salutation; and the distant gesture appeared sad, futile, lost in space, like a sign of distress made by castaways in the vain hope of an impossible help.

He departed, he returned, he went away again, and each time those two figures, lonely on some sandbank of the Shallows, made at him the same futile sign of greeting or good-bye.  Their arms at each movement seemed to draw closer around his heart the bonds of a protecting affection.  He worked prosaically, earning money to pay the cost of the romantic necessity that had invaded his life.  And the money ran like water out of his hands.  The owner of the New England voice remitted not a little of it to his people in Baltimore.  But import houses in the ports of the Far East had their share.  It paid for a fast prau which, commanded by Jaffir, sailed into unfrequented bays and up unexplored rivers, carrying secret messages, important news, generous bribes.  A good part of it went to the purchase of the Emma.

The Emma was a battered and decrepit old schooner that, in the decline of her existence, had been much ill-used by a paunchy white trader of cunning and gluttonous aspect.  This man boasted outrageously afterward of the good price he had got “for that rotten old hooker of mine—­you know.”  The Emma left port mysteriously in company with the brig and henceforth vanished from the seas forever.  Lingard had her towed up the creek and ran her aground upon that shore of the lagoon farthest from Belarab’s settlement.  There had been at that time a great rise of waters, which retiring soon after left the old craft cradled in the mud, with her bows grounded high between the trunks of two big trees, and leaning over a little as though after a hard life she had settled wearily to an everlasting rest.  There, a few months later, Jorgenson found her when, called back into the life of men, he reappeared, together with Lingard, in the Land of Refuge.

“She is better than a fort on shore,” said Lingard, as side by side they leant over the taffrail, looking across the lagoon on the houses and palm groves of the settlement.  “All the guns and powder I have got together so far are stored in her.  Good idea, wasn’t it?  There will be, perhaps, no other such flood for years, and now they can’t come alongside unless right under the counter, and only one boat at a time.  I think you are perfectly safe here; you could keep off a whole fleet of boats; she isn’t easy to set fire to; the forest in front is better than a wall.  Well?”