Yet there is a truth that you and I can
confess to each other. Men's hearts grow quickly discontented. Listen.
The leaders of men are carried forward in the hands of their followers;
and common men's minds are unsteady, their desires changeable, and
their thoughts not to be trusted. You are a great chief they say. Do not
forget that I am a chief, too, and a leader of armed men."
"I have heard of you, too," said Lingard in a composed voice.
Daman had cast his eyes down. Suddenly he opened them very wide with an
effect that startled Mrs. Travers.--"Yes. But do you see?" Mrs. Travers,
her hand resting lightly on Lingard's arm, had the sensation of acting
in a gorgeously got up play on the brilliantly lighted stage of an
exotic opera whose accompaniment was not music but the varied strains
of the all-pervading silence.--"Yes, I see," Lingard replied with a
surprisingly confidential intonation. "But power, too, is in the hands
of a great leader."
Mrs. Travers watched the faint movements of Daman's nostrils as though
the man were suffering from some powerful emotion, while under her
fingers Lingard's forearm in its white sleeve was as steady as a limb of
marble. Without looking at him she seemed to feel that with one movement
he could crush that nervous figure in which lived the breath of the
great desert haunted by his nomad, camel-riding ancestors.
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