Even the plumes of their head-dresses stirred not.
"Sudah! It is finished!" A movement passed along all the heads, the
seated bodies swayed to and fro. Lingard had ceased speaking. He
remained seated for a moment looking his audience all over and when he
stood up together with Mrs. Travers and Jorgenson the whole assembly
rose from the ground together and lost its ordered formation. Some
of Belarab's retainers, young broad-faced fellows, wearing a sort of
uniform of check-patterned sarongs, black silk jackets and crimson
skull-caps set at a rakish angle, swaggered through the broken groups
and ranged themselves in two rows before the motionless Daman and his
Illanun chiefs in martial array. The members of the council who had
left their bench approached the white people with gentle smiles
and deferential movements of the hands. Their bearing was faintly
propitiatory; only the man in the big turban remained fanatically aloof,
keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.
"I have done it," murmured Lingard to Mrs. Travers.--"Was it very
difficult?" she asked.--"No," he said, conscious in his heart that he
had strained to the fullest extent the prestige of his good name and
that habit of deference to his slightest wish established by the glamour
of his wealth and the fear of his personality in this great talk which
after all had done nothing except put off the decisive hour.
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