Lingard leaped aside, clean away, and spun round quickly. He saw her sit up and cover her face with both hands, then he turned slowly on his heel and looked at the man. Willems held himself very straight, but was unsteady on his feet, and moved about nearly on the same spot, like a tipsy man attempting to preserve his balance. After gazing at him for a while, Lingard called, rancorous and irritable—
“What have you got to say for yourself?”
Willems began to walk towards him. He walked slowly, reeling a little before he took each step, and Lingard saw him put his hand to his face, then look at it holding it up to his eyes, as if he had there, concealed in the hollow of the palm, some small object which he wanted to examine secretly. Suddenly he drew it, with a brusque movement, down the front of his jacket and left a long smudge.
“That’s a fine thing to do,” said Willems.
He stood in front of Lingard, one of his eyes sunk deep in the increasing swelling of his cheek, still repeating mechanically the movement of feeling his damaged face; and every time he did this he pressed the palm to some clean spot on his jacket, covering the white cotton with bloody imprints as of some deformed and monstrous hand. Lingard said nothing, looking on. At last Willems left off staunching the blood and stood, his arms hanging by his side, with his face stiff and distorted under the patches of coagulated blood; and he seemed as though he had been set up there for a warning: an incomprehensible figure marked all over with some awful and symbolic signs of deadly import. Speaking with difficulty, he repeated in a reproachful tone—
“That was a fine thing to do.”
“After all,” answered Lingard, bitterly, “I had too good an opinion of you.”
“And I of you. Don’t you see that I could have had that fool over there killed and the whole thing burnt to the ground, swept off the face of the earth. You wouldn’t have found as much as a heap of ashes had I liked. I could have done all that. And I wouldn’t.”
“You—could—not. You dared not. You scoundrel!” cried Lingard.
“What’s the use of calling me names?”
“True,” retorted Lingard—”there’s no name bad enough for you.”
There was a short interval of silence. At the sound of their rapidly exchanged words, Aissa had got up from the ground where she had been sitting, in a sorrowful and dejected pose, and approached the two men. She stood on one side and looked on eagerly, in a desperate effort of her brain, with the quick and distracted eyes of a person trying for her life to penetrate the meaning of sentences uttered in a foreign tongue: the meaning portentous and fateful that lurks in the sounds of mysterious words; in the sounds surprising, unknown and strange.
Willems let the last speech of Lingard pass by; seemed by a slight movement of his hand to help it on its way to join the other shadows of the past. Then he said—
“You have struck me; you have insulted me . . .”
“Insulted you!” interrupted Lingard, passionately. “Who—what can insult you …you . . .”
He choked, advanced a step.
“Steady! steady!” said Willems calmly. “I tell you I sha’n’t fight. Is it clear enough to you that I sha’n’t? I—shall—not—lift—a—finger.”
As he spoke, slowly punctuating each word with a slight jerk of his head, he stared at Lingard, his right eye open and big, the left small and nearly closed by the swelling of one half of his face, that appeared all drawn out on one side like faces seen in a concave glass. And they stood exactly opposite each other: one tall, slight and disfigured; the other tall, heavy and severe.
Willems went on—
“If I had wanted to hurt you—if I had wanted to destroy you, it was easy. I stood in the doorway long enough to pull a trigger—and you know I shoot straight.”
“You would have missed,” said Lingard, with assurance. “There is, under heaven, such a thing as justice.”