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.
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