He stammered, hesitated, and suddenly spoke, liberating the visions of two years into the night where Mrs. Travers could follow them as if outlined in words of fire.

VII

His tale was as startling as the discovery of a new world.  She was being taken along the boundary of an exciting existence, and she looked into it through the guileless enthusiasm of the narrator.  The heroic quality of the feelings concealed what was disproportionate and absurd in that gratitude, in that friendship, in that inexplicable devotion.  The headlong fierceness of purpose invested his obscure design of conquest with the proportions of a great enterprise.  It was clear that no vision of a subjugated world could have been more inspiring to the most famous adventurer of history.

From time to time he interrupted himself to ask, confidently, as if he had been speaking to an old friend, “What would you have done?” and hurried on without pausing for approval.

It struck her that there was a great passion in all this, the beauty of an implanted faculty of affection that had found itself, its immediate need of an object and the way of expansion; a tenderness expressed violently; a tenderness that could only be satisfied by backing human beings against their own destiny.  Perhaps her hatred of convention, trammelling the frankness of her own impulses, had rendered her more alert to perceive what is intrinsically great and profound within the forms of human folly, so simple and so infinitely varied according to the region of the earth and to the moment of time.

What of it that the narrator was only a roving seaman; the kingdom of the jungle, the men of the forest, the lives obscure!  That simple soul was possessed by the greatness of the idea; there was nothing sordid in its flaming impulses.  When she once understood that, the story appealed to the audacity of her thoughts, and she became so charmed with what she heard that she forgot where she was.  She forgot that she was personally close to that tale which she saw detached, far away from her, truth or fiction, presented in picturesque speech, real only by the response of her emotion.

Lingard paused.  In the cessation of the impassioned murmur she began to reflect.  And at first it was only an oppressive notion of there being some significance that really mattered in this man’s story.  That mattered to her.  For the first time the shadow of danger and death crossed her mind.  Was that the significance?  Suddenly, in a flash of acute discernment, she saw herself involved helplessly in that story, as one is involved in a natural cataclysm.