“I was not afraid,” whispered Lingard. “It is the man coming in the dark and without warning who is in danger.”
“And did you not come to me without warning? I said 'welcome'—it was as easy for me to say 'kill him.'”
“You were within reach of my arm. We would have died together,” retorted Lingard, quietly.
The other clicked his tongue twice, and his indistinct shape seemed to sink half-way through the floor.
“It was not written thus before we were born,” he said, sitting cross-legged near the mats, and in a deadened voice. “Therefore you are my guest. Let the talk between us be straight like the shaft of a spear and shorter than the remainder of this night. What do you want?”
“First, your long life,” answered Lingard, leaning forward toward the gleam of a pair of eyes, “and then—your help.”
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.