“Not half so much as I was last night,” growled the young seaman, without any reverence in his tone, very provoking to Mr. Travers.

“I perceive now you were totally unfit for the mission I entrusted you with,” went on the owner of the yacht.

“It’s he who got hold of me,” said Carter.  “Haven’t you heard him yourself, sir?”

“Nonsense,” whispered Mr. Travers, angrily.  “Have you any idea what his intentions may be?”

“I half believe,” answered Carter, “that his intention was to shoot me in his cabin last night if I—­”

“That’s not the point,” interrupted Mr. Travers.  “Have you any opinion as to his motives in coming here?”

Carter raised his weary, bloodshot eyes in a face scarlet and peeling as though it had been licked by a flame.  “I know no more than you do, sir.  Last night when he had me in that cabin of his, he said he would just as soon shoot me as let me go to look for any other help.  It looks as if he were desperately bent upon getting a lot of salvage money out of a stranded yacht.”

Mr. Travers turned away, and, for a moment, appeared immersed in deep thought.  This accident of stranding upon a deserted coast was annoying as a loss of time.  He tried to minimize it by putting in order the notes collected during the year’s travel in the East.  He had sent off for assistance; his sailing-master, very crestfallen, made bold to say that the yacht would most likely float at the next spring tides; d’Alcacer, a person of undoubted nobility though of inferior principles, was better than no company, in so far at least that he could play picquet.

Mr. Travers had made up his mind to wait.  Then suddenly this rough man, looking as if he had stepped out from an engraving in a book about buccaneers, broke in upon his resignation with mysterious allusions to danger, which sounded absurd yet were disturbing; with dark and warning sentences that sounded like disguised menaces.

Mr. Travers had a heavy and rather long chin which he shaved.  His eyes were blue, a chill, naive blue.  He faced Lingard untouched by travel, without a mark of weariness or exposure, with the air of having been born invulnerable.  He had a full, pale face; and his complexion was perfectly colourless, yet amazingly fresh, as if he had been reared in the shade.

He thought: 

“I must put an end to this preposterous hectoring.  I won’t be intimidated into paying for services I don’t need.”

Mr. Travers felt a strong disgust for the impudence of the attempt; and all at once, incredibly, strangely, as though the thing, like a contest with a rival or a friend, had been of profound importance to his career, he felt inexplicably elated at the thought of defeating the secret purposes of that man.

Lingard, unconscious of everything and everybody, contemplated the sea.  He had grown on it, he had lived with it; it had enticed him away from home; on it his thoughts had expanded and his hand had found work to do.  It had suggested endeavour, it had made him owner and commander of the finest brig afloat; it had lulled him into a belief in himself, in his strength, in his luck—­and suddenly, by its complicity in a fatal accident, it had brought him face to face with a difficulty that looked like the beginning of disaster.