“At last Brown threw himself down full length and watched Jim out of the corners of his eyes. Jim on his side of the creek stood thinking and switching his leg. The houses in view were silent, as if a pestilence had swept them clean of every breath of life; but many invisible eyes were turned, from within, upon the two men with the creek between them, a stranded white boat, and the body of the third man half sunk in the mud. On the river canoes were moving again, for Patusan was recovering its belief in the stability of earthly institutions since the return of the white lord. The right bank, the platforms of the houses, the rafts moored along the shores, even the roofs of bathing-huts, were covered with people that, far away out of earshot and almost out of sight, were straining their eyes towards the knoll beyond the Rajah’s stockade. Within the wide irregular ring of forests broken in two places by the sheen of the river there was a silence. ‘Will you promise to leave the coast?’ Jim asked. Brown lifted and let fall his hand, giving everything up as it were—accepting the inevitable. ‘And surrender your arms?’ Jim went on. Brown sat up and glared across ‘Surrender our arms! Not till you come to take them out of our stiff hands. You think I am gone crazy with funk? Oh, no! That and the rags I stand in is all I have got in the world, besides a few more breechloaders on board; and I expect to sell the lot in Madagascar, if I ever get so far—begging my way from ship to ship.
“Jim said nothing to this. At last, throwing away the switch he held in his hand, he said, as if speaking to himself, ‘I don’t know whether I have the power.’…’You don’t know! And you wanted me just now to give up my arms! That’s good, too,’ cried Brown. ‘Suppose they say one thing to you, and do the other thing to me.’ He calmed down markedly. ‘I daresay you have the power, or what’s the meaning of all this talk?’ he continued. ‘What did you come down here for? To pass the time of day?’
“‘Very well,’ said Jim, lifting his head suddenly after a long silence. ‘You shall have a clear road or else a clear fight.’ He turned on his heel and walked away.
“Brown got up at once, but he did not go up the hill till he had seen Jim disappear between the first houses. He never set his eyes on him again. On his way back he met Cornelius slouching down with his bead between his shoulders. He stopped before Brown. ‘Why didn’t you kill him?’ he demanded in a sour, discontented voice. ‘Because I could do better than that,’ Brown said with an amused smile. ‘Never! never!’ protested Cornelius with energy. ‘Couldn’t. I have lived here for many years.’ Brown looked up at him curiously. There were many sides to the life of that place in arms against him; things he would never find out. Cornelius slunk past dejectedly in the direction of the river. He was now leaving his new friends; he accepted the disappointing course of events with a sulky obstinacy which seemed to draw more together his little yellow old face; and as he went down he glanced askant here and there, never giving up his fixed idea.
“Henceforth events move fast without a check, flowing from the very hearts of men like a stream from a dark source, and we see Jim amongst them, mostly through Tamb’ Itam’s eyes. The girl’s eyes had watched him, too, but her life is too much entwined with his: there is her passion, her wonder, her anger, and, above all, her fear and her unforgiving love. Of the faithful servant, uncomprehending as the rest of them, it is the fidelity alone that comes into play; a fidelity and a belief in his lord so strong that even amazement is subdued to a sort of saddened acceptance of a mysterious failure. He has eyes only for one figure, and through all the mazes of bewilderment he preserves his air of guardianship, of obedience, of care.