Jorgenson assented in grunts.  He looked at the desolate emptiness of the decks, at the stripped spars, at the dead body of the dismantled little vessel that would know the life of the seas no more.  The gloom of the forest fell on her, mournful like a winding sheet.  The bushes of the bank tapped their twigs on the bluff of her bows, and a pendent spike of tiny brown blossoms swung to and fro over the ruins of her windlass.

Hassim’s companions garrisoned the old hulk, and Jorgenson, left in charge, prowled about from stem to stern, taciturn and anxiously faithful to his trust.  He had been received with astonishment, respect—­and awe.  Belarab visited him often.  Sometimes those whom he had known in their prime years ago, during a struggle for faith and life, would come to talk with the white man.  Their voices were like the echoes of stirring events, in the pale glamour of a youth gone by.  They nodded their old heads.  Do you remember?—­they said.  He remembered only too well!  He was like a man raised from the dead, for whom the fascinating trust in the power of life is tainted by the black scepticism of the grave.

Only at times the invincible belief in the reality of existence would come back, insidious and inspiring.  He squared his shoulders, held himself straight, and walked with a firmer step.  He felt a glow within him and the quickened beat of his heart.  Then he calculated in silent excitement Lingard’s chances of success, and he lived for a time with the life of that other man who knew nothing of the black scepticism of the grave.  The chances were good, very good.

“I should like to see it through,” Jorgenson muttered to himself ardently; and his lustreless eyes would flash for a moment.

PART III.  THE CAPTURE

I

“Some people,” said Lingard, “go about the world with their eyes shut.  You are right.  The sea is free to all of us.  Some work on it, and some play the fool on it—­and I don’t care.  Only you may take it from me that I will let no man’s play interfere with my work.  You want me to understand you are a very great man—­”

Mr. Travers smiled, coldly.

“Oh, yes,” continued Lingard, “I understand that well enough.  But remember you are very far from home, while I, here, I am where I belong.  And I belong where I am.  I am just Tom Lingard, no more, no less, wherever I happen to be, and—­you may ask—­” A sweep of his hand along the western horizon entrusted with perfect confidence the remainder of his speech to the dumb testimony of the sea.

He had been on board the yacht for more than an hour, and nothing, for him, had come of it but the birth of an unreasoning hate.  To the unconscious demand of these people’s presence, of their ignorance, of their faces, of their voices, of their eyes, he had nothing to give but a resentment that had in it a germ of reckless violence.  He could tell them nothing because he had not the means.  Their coming at this moment, when he had wandered beyond that circle which race, memories, early associations, all the essential conditions of one’s origin, trace round every man’s life, deprived him in a manner of the power of speech.  He was confounded.  It was like meeting exacting spectres in a desert.