They stood together, crossing their glances; she suddenly
appeased, and Lingard thoughtful and uneasy under a vague sense

of defeat. And yet there was no defeat. He never intended to
kill the fellow--not after the first moment of anger, a long time

ago. The days of bitter wonder had killed anger; had left only a
bitter indignation and a bitter wish for complete justice. He

felt discontented and surprised. Unexpectedly he had come upon a
human being--a woman at that--who had made him disclose his will

before its time. She should have his life. But she must be
told, she must know, that for such men as Willems there was no

favour and no grace.
"Understand," he said slowly, "that I leave him his life not in

mercy but in punishment."
She started, watched every word on his lips, and after he

finished speaking she remained still and mute in astonished
immobility. A single big drop of rain, a drop enormous, pellucid

and heavy--like a super-human tear coming straight and rapid from
above, tearing its way through the sombre sky--struck loudly the

dry ground between them in a starred splash. She wrung her hands
in the bewilderment of the new and incomprehensible fear. The

anguish of her whisper was more piercing than the shrillest cry.
"What punishment! Will you take him away then? Away from me?

Listen to what I have done. . . . It is I who . . ."
"Ah!" exclaimed Lingard, who had been looking at the house.

"Don't you believe her, Captain Lingard," shouted Willems from
the doorway, where he appeared with swollen eyelids and bared

breast. He stood for a while, his hands grasping the lintels on
each side of the door, and writhed about, glaring wildly, as if

he had been crucified there. Then he made a sudden rush head
foremost down the plankway that responded with hollow, short

noises to every footstep.
She heard him. A slight thrill passed on her face and the words

that were on her lips fell back unspoken into her benighted
heart; fell back amongst the mud, the stones--and the flowers,

that are at the bottom of every heart.
CHAPTER FOUR

When he felt the solid ground of the courtyard under his feet,
Willems pulled himself up in his headlong rush and moved forward

with a moderate gait. He paced stiffly, looking with extreme
exactitude at Lingard's face; looking neither to the right nor to

the left but at the face only, as if there was nothing in the
world but those features familiar and dreaded; that white-haired,

rough and severe head upon which he gazed in a fixed effort of
his eyes, like a man trying to read small print at the full range

of human vision. As soon as Willems' feet had left the planks,
the silence which had been lifted up by the jerky rattle of his

footsteps fell down again upon the courtyard; the silence of the
cloudy sky and of the windless air, the sullen silence of the

earth oppressed by the aspect of coming turmoil, the silence of
the world collecting its faculties to withstand the storm.

Through this silence Willems pushed his way, and stopped about
six feet from Lingard. He stopped simply because he could go no

further. He had started from the door with the reckless purpose
of clapping the old fellow on the shoulder. He had no idea that

the man would turn out to be so tall, so big and so
unapproachable. It seemed to him that he had never, never in his

life, seen Lingard.
He tried to say--

"Do not believe . . ."
A fit of coughing checked his sentence in a faint splutter.

Directly afterwards he swallowed--as it were--a couple of
pebbles, throwing his chin up in the act; and Lingard, who looked

at him narrowly, saw a bone, sharp and triangular like the head
of a snake, dart up and down twice under the skin of his throat.

Then that, too, did not move. Nothing moved.
"Well," said Lingard, and with that word he came unexpectedly to

the end of his speech. His hand in his pocket closed firmly
round the butt of his revolver bulging his jacket on the hip, and

he thought how soon and how quickly he could terminate his
quarrel with that man who had been so anxious to deliver himself

into his hands--and how inadequate would be that ending! He
could not bear the idea of that man escaping from him by going

out of life; escaping from fear, from doubt, from remorse into
the peaceful certitude of death. He held him now. And he was

not going to let him go--to let him disappear for ever in the
faint blue smoke of a pistol shot. His anger grew within him.

He felt a touch as of a burning hand on his heart. Not on the
flesh of his breast, but a touch on his heart itself, on the

palpitating and untiring particle of matter that responds to
every emotion of the soul; that leaps with joy, with terror, or

with anger.
He drew a long breath. He could see before him the bare chest of

the man expanding and collapsing under the wide-open jacket. He
glanced aside, and saw the bosom of the woman near him rise and

fall in quick respirations that moved slightly up and down her
hand, which was pressed to her breast with all the fingers spread

out and a little curved, as if grasping something too big for its
span. And nearly a minute passed. One of those minutes when the

voice is silenced, while the thoughts flutter in the head, like
captive birds inside a cage, in rushes desperate, exhausting and

vain.
During that minute of silence Lingard's anger kept rising,

immense and towering, such as a crested wave running over the
troubled shallows of the sands. Its roar filled his cars; a roar

so powerful and distracting that, it seemed to him, his head must
burst directly with the expanding volume of that sound. He

looked at that man. That infamous figure upright on its feet,
still, rigid, with stony eyes, as if its rotten soul had departed

that moment and the carcass hadn't had the time yet to topple
over. For the fraction of a second he had the illusion and the

fear of the scoundrel having died there before the enraged glance
of his eyes. Willems' eyelids fluttered, and the unconscious and

passing tremor in that stiffly erect body exasperated Lingard
like a fresh outrage. The fellow dared to stir! Dared to wink,

to breathe, to exist; here, right before his eyes! His grip on
the revolver relaxed gradually. As the transport of his rage

increased, so also his contempt for the instruments that pierce
or stab, that interpose themselves between the hand and the

object of hate. He wanted another kind of satisfaction. Naked
hands, by heaven! No firearms. Hands that could take him by the

throat, beat down his defence, batter his face into shapeless
flesh; hands that could feel all the desperation of his

resistance and overpower it in the violent delight of a contact
lingering and furious, intimate and brutal.

He let go the revolveraltogether, stood hesitating, then
throwing his hands out, stride的过去式">strode forward--and everything passed

from his sight. He could not see the man, the woman, the earth,
the sky--saw nothing, as if in that one stride he had left the

visible world behind to step into a black and deserted space. He
heard screams round him in that obscurity, screams like the

melancholy and pitiful cries of sea-birds that dwell on the
lonely reefs of great oceans. Then suddenly a face appeared

within a few inches of his own. His face. He felt something in
his left hand. His throat . . . Ah! the thing like a snake's

head that darts up and down . . . He squeezed hard. He was back
in the world. He could see the quick beating of eyelids over a

pair of eyes that were all whites, the grin of a drawn-up lip, a
row of teeth gleaming through the drooping hair of a moustache .

. . Strong white teeth. Knock them down his lying throat . . .
He drew back his right hand, the fist up to the shoulder,

knuckles out. From under his feet rose the screams of sea-birds.
Thousands of them. Something held his legs . . . What the devil

. . . He delivered his blow straight from the shoulder, felt the
jar right up his arm, and realized suddenly that he was striking

something passive and unresisting. His heart sank within him
with disappointment, with rage, with mortification. He pushed

with his left arm, opening the hand with haste, as if he had just