trustworthy men I had ever known.  The gentle light of a simple, unwearied, as it were, and intelligent good-nature illumined his long hairless face.  It had deep downward folds, and was pale as of a man who had always led a sedentary life—­which was indeed very far from being the case.  His hair was thin, and brushed back from a massive and lofty forehead.  One fancied that at twenty he must have looked very much like what he was now at threescore.  It was a student’s face; only the eyebrows nearly all white, thick and bushy, together with the resolute searching glance that came from under them, were not in accord with his, I may say, learned appearance.  He was tall and loose-jointed; his slight stoop, together with an innocent smile, made him appear benevolently ready to lend you his ear; his long arms with pale big hands had rare deliberate gestures of a pointing out, demonstrating kind.  I speak of him at length, because under this exterior, and in conjunction with an upright and indulgent nature, this man possessed an intrepidity of spirit and a physical courage that could have been called reckless had it not been like a natural function of the body—­say good digestion, for instance—­completely unconscious of itself.  It is sometimes said of a man that he carries his life in his hand.  Such a saying would have been inadequate if applied to him; during the early part of his existence in the East he had been playing ball with it.  All this was in the past, but I knew the story of his life and the origin of his fortune.  He was also a naturalist of some distinction, or perhaps I should say a learned collector.  Entomology was his special study.  His collection of Buprestidae and Longicorns—­beetles all—­horrible miniature monsters, looking malevolent in death and immobility, and his cabinet of butterflies, beautiful and hovering under the glass of cases on lifeless wings, had spread his fame far over the earth.  The name of this merchant, adventurer, sometime adviser of a Malay sultan (to whom he never alluded otherwise than as “my poor Mohammed Bonso"), had, on account of a few bushels of dead insects, become known to learned persons in Europe, who could have had no conception, and certainly would not have cared to know anything, of his life or character.  I, who knew, considered him an eminently suitable person to receive my confidences about Jim’s difficulties as well as my own.’

CHAPTER 20

’Late in the evening I entered his study, after traversing an imposing but empty dining-room very dimly lit.  The house was silent.  I was preceded by an elderly grim Javanese servant in a sort of livery of white jacket and yellow sarong, who, after throwing the door open, exclaimed low, “O master!” and stepping aside, vanished in a mysterious way as though he had been a ghost only momentarily embodied for that particular service.  Stein turned round with the chair, and in the same movement his spectacles