VII

The faint murmur of the words spoken on that night lingered for a long time in Lingard’s ears, more persistent than the memory of an uproar; he looked with a fixed gaze at the stars burning peacefully in the square of the doorway, while after listening in silence to all he had to say, Belarab, as if seduced by the strength and audacity of the white man, opened his heart without reserve.  He talked of his youth surrounded by the fury of fanaticism and war, of battles on the hills, of advances through the forests, of men’s unswerving piety, of their unextinguishable hate.  Not a single wandering cloud obscured the gentle splendour of the rectangular patch of starlight framed in the opaque blackness of the hut.  Belarab murmured on of a succession of reverses, of the ring of disasters narrowing round men’s fading hopes and undiminished courage.  He whispered of defeat and flight, of the days of despair, of the nights without sleep, of unending pursuit, of the bewildered horror and sombre fury, of their women and children killed in the stockade before the besieged sallied forth to die.

“I have seen all this before I was in years a man,” he cried, low.

His voice vibrated.  In the pause that succeeded they heard a light sigh of the sleeping follower who, clasping his legs above his ankles, rested his forehead on his knees.

“And there was amongst us,” began Belarab again, “one white man who remained to the end, who was faithful with his strength, with his courage, with his wisdom.  A great man.  He had great riches but a greater heart.”

The memory of Jorgenson, emaciated and grey-haired, and trying to borrow five dollars to get something to eat for the girl, passed before Lingard suddenly upon the pacific glitter of the stars.

“He resembled you,” pursued Belarab, abruptly.  “We escaped with him, and in his ship came here.  It was a solitude.  The forest came near to the sheet of water, the rank grass waved upon the heads of tall men.  Telal, my father, died of weariness; we were only a few, and we all nearly died of trouble and sadness—­here.  On this spot!  And no enemies could tell where we had gone.  It was the Shore of Refuge—­and starvation.”

He droned on in the night, with rising and falling inflections.  He told how his desperate companions wanted to go out and die fighting on the sea against the ships from the west, the ships with high sides and white sails; and how, unflinching and alone, he kept them battling with the thorny bush, with the rank grass, with the soaring and enormous trees.  Lingard, leaning on his elbow and staring through the door, recalled the image of the wide fields outside, sleeping now, in an immensity of serenity and starlight.  This quiet and almost invisible talker had done it all; in him was the origin, the creation, the fate; and in the wonder of that thought the shadowy murmuring figure acquired a gigantic greatness of significance, as if it had been the embodiment of some natural force, of a force forever masterful and undying.