On Lingard's departure solitude and silence closed round Willems; the
cruel solitude of one abandoned by men; the reproachful silence which
surrounds an outcast ejected by his kind, the silence unbroken by the
slightest whisper of hope; an immense and impenetrable silence that
swallows up without echo the murmur of regret and the cry of revolt. The bitter peace of the abandoned clearings entered his heart, in which nothing could live now but the memory and hate of his past. Not remorse. In the breast of a man possessed by the masterful consciousness of his individuality with its desires and its rights; by the immovable conviction of his own importance, of an importance so indisputable and final that it clothes all his wishes, endeavours, and mistakes with the dignity of unavoidable fate, there could be no place for such a feeling as that of remorse.
The days passed. They passed unnoticed, unseen, in the rapid blaze of
glaring sunrises, in the short glow of tender sunsets, in the crushing
oppression of high noons without a cloud. How many days? Two—three—or
more? He did not know. To him, since Lingard had gone, the time seemed
to roll on in profound darkness. All was night within him. All was gone
from his sight. He walked about blindly in the deserted courtyards, amongst the empty houses that, perched high on their posts, looked down inimically on him, a white stranger, a man from other lands; seemed to look hostile and mute out of all the memories of native life that lingered between their decaying walls. His wandering feet stumbled against the blackened brands of extinct fires, kicking up a light black dust of cold ashes that flew in drifting clouds and settled to leeward on the fresh grass sprouting from the hard ground, between the shade trees. He moved on, and on; ceaseless, unresting, in widening circles, in zigzagging paths that led to no issue; he struggled on wearily with a set, distressed face behind which, in his tired brain, seethed his thoughts: restless, sombre, tangled, chilling, horrible and venomous, like a nestful of snakes.
From afar, the bleared eyes of the old serving woman, the sombre gaze
of Aissa followed the gaunt and tottering figure in its unceasing prowl
along the fences, between the houses, amongst the wild luxuriance of
riverside thickets. Those three human beings abandoned by all were
like shipwrecked people left on an insecure and slippery ledge by the
retiring tide of an angry sea—listening to its distant roar, living
anguished between the menace of its return and the hopeless horror of
their solitude—in the midst of a tempest of passion, of regret, of
disgust, of despair. The breath of the storm had cast two of them there, robbed of everything—even of resignation. The third, the decrepit witness of their struggle and their torture, accepted her own dull conception of facts; of strength and youth gone; of her useless old age; of her last servitude; of being thrown away by her chief, by her nearest, to use up the last and worthless remnant of flickering life between those two incomprehensible and sombre outcasts: a shrivelled, an unmoved, a passive companion of their disaster.