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his enemy the white man who knows not fear, or love, or mercyknows nothing
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but contempt and violence. I have been wrong! I have! Hai! Hai!"
An Outcast of the Islands
CHAPTER TWO
98
He stood for awhile with his elbow in the palm of his left hand, the fingers
of the other over his lips as if to stifle the expression of inconvenient
remorse; then, after glancing at the torch, burnt out nearly to its end, he
moved towards the wall by the chest, fumbled about there and suddenly flung
open a large shutter of attaps woven in a light framework of sticks.
Lingard swung his legs quickly round the corner of his seat.
"Hallo!" he said, surprised.
The cloud of smoke stirred, and a slow wisp curled out through the new
opening. The torch flickered, hissed, and went out, the glowing end falling
on the mat, whence Babalatchi snatched it up and tossed it outside through
the open square. It described a vanishing curve of red light, and lay
below, shining feebly in the vast darkness. Babalatchi remained with his arm
stretched out into the empty night.
"There," he said, "you can see the white man's courtyard, Tuan, and his
house."
"I can see nothing," answered Lingard, putting his head through the
shutterhole. "It's too dark."
"Wait, Tuan," urged Babalatchi. "You have been looking long at the burning
torch. You will soon see. Mind the gun, Tuan. It is loaded."
"There is no flint in it. You could not find a firestone for a hundred miles
round this spot," said Lingard, testily. "Foolish thing to load that gun."
"I have a stone. I had it from a man wise and pious that lives in Menang
Kabau. A very pious manvery good fire. He spoke words over that stone that
make its sparks good. And the gun is goodcarries straight and far. Would
carry from here to the door of the white man's house, I believe, Tuan."
"Tida apa. Never mind your gun," muttered Lingard, peering into the formless
darkness. "Is that the housethat black thing over there?" he asked.
"Yes," answered Babalatchi; "that is his house. He lives there by the will
of Abdulla, and shall live there till .
. . From where you stand, Tuan, you can look over the fence and across the
courtyard straight at the doorat the door from which he comes out every
morning, looking like a man that had seen Jehannum in his sleep."
Lingard drew his head in. Babalatchi touched his shoulder with a groping
hand.
"Wait a little, Tuan. Sit still. The morning is not far off nowa morning
without sun after a night without stars. But there will be light enough to
see the man who said not many days ago that he alone has made you less than
a child in Sambir."
He felt a slight tremor under his hand, but took it off directly and began
feeling all over the lid of the chest, behind Lingard's back, for the gun.
"What are you at?" said Lingard, impatiently. "You do worry about that rotten
gun. You had better get a light."
"A light! I tell you, Tuan, that the light of heaven is very near," said
Babalatchi, who had now obtained possession of the object of his solicitude,
and grasping it strongly by its long barrel, grounded the stock at his feet.
"Perhaps it is near," said Lingard, leaning both his elbows on the lower
crosspiece of the primitive window and looking out. "It is very black
outside yet," he remarked carelessly.
An Outcast of the Islands
CHAPTER TWO
99
Babalatchi fidgeted about.
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"It is not good for you to sit where you may be seen," he muttered.
"Why not?" asked Lingard.
"The white man sleeps, it is true," explained Babalatchi, softly; "yet he may
come out early, and he has arms."
"Ah! he has arms?" said Lingard.
"Yes; a short gun that fires many timeslike yours here. Abdulla had to give
it to him."
Lingard heard Babalatchi's words, but made no movement. To the old
adventurer the idea that fire arms could be dangerous in other hands than
his own did not occur readily, and certainly not in connection with Willems.
He was so busy with the thoughts about what he considered his own sacred
duty, that he could not give any consideration to the probable actions of the
man of whom he thoughtas one may think of an executed criminalwith
wondering indignation tempered by scornful pity. While he sat staring into
the darkness, that every minute grew thinner before his pensive eyes, like
a dispersing mist, Willems appeared to him as a figure belonging already
wholly to the pasta figure that could come in no way into his life again.
He had made up his mind, and the thing was as well as done. In his weary
thoughts he had closed this fatal, inexplicable, and horrible episode in
his life. The worst had happened. The coming days would see the
retribution.
He had removed an enemy once or twice before, out of his path; he had paid
off some very heavy scores a good many times. Captain Tom had been a good
friend to many: but it was generally understood, from
Honolulu round about to Diego Suarez, that Captain Tom's enmity was rather
more than any man singlehanded could easily manage. He would not, as he
said often, hurt a fly as long as the fly left him alone; yet a man does not
live for years beyond the pale of civilized laws without evolving for
himself some queer notions of justice. Nobody of those he knew had ever
cared to point out to him the errors of his conceptions.
It was not worth anybody's while to run counter to Lingard's ideas of the
fitness of thingsthat fact was acquired to the floating wisdom of the South
Seas, of the Eastern Archipelago, and was nowhere better understood than in
outoftheway nooks of the world; in those nooks which he filled, unresisted
and masterful, with the echoes of his noisy presence. There is not much use
in arguing with a man who boasts of never having regretted a single action
of his life, whose answer to a mild criticism is a goodnatured shout"You
know nothing about it. I would do it again. Yes, sir!" His associates and
his acquaintances accepted him, his opinions, his actions like things
preordained and unchangeable; looked upon his manysided manifestations with
passive wonder not unmixed with that admiration which is only the rightful
due of a successful man. But nobody had ever seen him in the mood he was in
now. Nobody had seen
Lingard doubtful and giving way to doubt, unable to make up his mind and
unwilling to act; Lingard timid and hesitating one minute, angry yet
inactive the next; Lingard puzzled in a word, because confronted with a
situation that discomposed him by its unprovoked malevolence, by its ghastly
injustice, that to his rough but unsophisticated palate tasted distinctly of
sulphurous fumes from the deepest hell.
The smooth darkness filling the shutterhole grew paler and became blotchy
with illdefined shapes, as if a new universe was being evolved out of sombre
chaos. Then outlines came out, defining forms without any details, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]