"Foolish! Why did you not tell me before?"

"I could not. Until I knew.... Placed as we are, you see, it felt like forcing you.... You might not have felt free to say no.... It might have put an end to all our comradeship...."

"You don't know me. I'd have said no quickly enough if I hadn't wanted you. But I do, and you make me very happy."

He led her into the house and held her there at arm's length in the firelight, as though he could hardly believe it all true, and looked deep into the dark eyes and rosy face and kissed it rosier still.

And the blue and yellow and green and crimson flames danced their merriest, as these two sat hand in hand watching them, and talking softly by s.n.a.t.c.hes with long sweet silences in between.

LIII

"I was so afraid there might be some other to whom you were bound," she said, as she lay there in the firelight, with her head against his arm and his right hand smoothing her hair, that wonderful hair which had been to him as the aureole of a saint and was more to him now than all the gold in all the world.

"There is no other, my dear one. Not a soul on earth has any claim on me except that of friendship.... It was inevitable that we should both have that fear. Four months ago we did not know of one another's existence----"

"Isn't it wonderful?" she murmured. "I wonder if we had never met if you would have found someone else----"

"Never anyone to fill my heart as you do. I cannot even imagine it."

"And if I should have found someone else?"

"That is possible, but no one who could feel for you all that I do, or could want you as much as I do. You are to me the one supreme good,"

and the clasp of his arm told her even more than his words.

"You do not ask me if I had any ties in the old life," she began.

"You would not be lying in my arm like this if there were. I know you too well."

"That is true and I thank you. It is good to be taken on trust. But indeed there were none. The men one met there--faugh!--they were masquers, puppets, dandies;--some had brains, but few had hearts, and they were most dreadful liars. Such talents as they possessed were devoted to finesse and intrigue, and the turning of everything to their own satisfaction and advantage."

"Thank G.o.d you are out of it all."

"Yes, I do thank G.o.d,--for the shipwreck and everything else, but chiefly that He sent you here to meet me and took that other one away."

The weather held still for a few days, and he spent them in providing for her future comfort in every way he could think of.

He chopped logs enough to last them through the winter, and piled them in stacks about the house. He got over from the ship supplies in abundance. As the result of much labour and many failures he constructed a primitive lamp out of the silver mug from which Macro used to swill his rum. He distorted a beak out of one side of it, and contrived a wick which pa.s.sed through a hole in a piece of beaten copper, and if the light was not brilliant it was at all events steadier to read by than the dancing flames.

He had lighted quite by accident on Macro's hidden h.o.a.rd in the hold of the 'Jane and Mary.' He was rooting in a corner there for his knife, which had worked out of its sheath at his back as he hoisted out provisions, and found it sticking point downwards in a plank. As he pulled it out, the plank gave slightly, and lifting it he found, underneath, the useless treasure.

He wanted none of it, was indeed loth to touch it, but, on consideration, took out two more silver mugs for their daily service and half a dozen gold pins and brooches for Avice's use, since she was always needing such things and regretting her lack of them.

The long spell of mild soft weather--which had come at last to have in it a sense of sickness and decay--broke up in the wildest storm they had yet seen.

The birds came whirling in in a shrieking cloud, but the wind out-shrieked them. It shrilled above their heads in a ceaseless strident scream like the yelling of souls in torment. It shook their protecting sandhills and made their house shiver right down to the buried cross-pieces of its pillars. It picked up the smaller hummocks outside and set them waltzing along the sh.o.r.e. It heaped a foot of new sand on their roof and sent a cartload of it down the chimney.

But their position had been well chosen. The more the sand piled on their house and against it, the tighter it became. Then the rain came down in sheets and torrents, but no drop came through, except down the chimney, and that Wulf presently plugged with a blanket and let the smoke find its way out through an inch of opened door, which he had purposely placed to leeward, as all their great storms came from the south and south-west.

But the change of atmosphere was bracing, and with solid sand under their feet, and a.s.sured of the safety of their house, they welcomed it and felt the better for it.

After the first day's confinement he must out to see, and she would not stay behind. So they rigged themselves in oldest garments and fewest possible and started out.

They were drenched to the skin in a second and whirled away like leaves the instant they forsook the cover of their hollow.

Avice was being carried bodily towards their nearest sh.o.r.e. He feared she would go headlong into the sea and started wildly after her. He saw her throw herself flat and grip at the sand, but she was broadside on to the merciless wind and it bowled her over and over, and rolled her along like a ball. It carried him along in ten-feet leaps. He flung himself down beside her, put his arm round her, wrenched her head to the gale, and they lay there breathless, she choking hysterically with paroxysms of laughter.

It took them an hour, crawling like moles, to get back to the shelter of the hills. He would have had her go in, but she would not hear of it. They could hear the booming thunder of the great waves on the spit even above the wind, and she must see them.

So they set off once more, flat to the sand, and worked round in time to the breast of the great hill near the fresh-water pools, and lay in it, safe from dislodgment unless the hill went too.

They could only peer through pinched eyes, and then only with their hands over them, into the teeth of that wind, but, even so, the sight was magnificent and appalling. The grim gray sky and the grim gray sea met just beyond the spit, and out of that close sky the huge gray waves burst, high as houses,--whole streets of houses rushing headlong to destruction. They curved gloriously to their fall with a glint of muddy green below and all their crests abristle with white foam-fury.

Right out of the sky they came, right up to the sky they seemed to reach, flinging up at it great white spouts of spray like flouting curses, towering high above the land, crashing down upon it with a thunderous roar which thinned the voice of the wind to no more than a shrill piping.

Their own land-locked lake was lashed into fury also. The flying crests of the outer waves came rocketing over in wild white splashes.

He was not sure that some of the waves themselves did not cover the spit and come roaring into it. The 'Jane and Mary' danced wildly to her cable. He wondered if it would hold. The 'Martha,' more than ever on her beam-ends, was being pounded like a drum.

"Did you feel that?" he shouted in her ear, and she nodded, with a touch of fear in her wind-blown face. For, under the impact of one vast mountainous avalanche, the very ground on which they lay seemed to shake like a jelly, and the whole island shuddered.

"It cannot wash it all away, can it?" she gasped, when they had wormed their way back to shelter.

"It never has done yet anyway," he said cheerfully, as he squeezed windy tears out of his smarting eyes. "Now, dear, change all your things at once. We are wet through to the bone."

"It was very wonderful. I wouldn't have missed it for anything. But I'm glad we're ash.o.r.e," and she slipped away into her own room.

That was the first of the winter storms, and there were many like it.

But they bore them equably. They were in splendid health, the weather at its worst was never very cold, indeed the gales were more to their taste than the smothering chill of the frequent fogs. They had all they needed,--food and fire, and light and books, a weather-tight house, and one another.

If they lacked much of what their former life had taught them to consider necessary, they had more than all that former life had given them, and they were happy.

LIV

Between the storms and fog-spells, they tramped to and fro discovering the changes wrought in their island, and many a strange thing their wanderings showed them.

One great gale which lasted a full week strewed the south-west Point with wreckage as thickly almost as the great pile beyond. Their hearts ached at thought of the still greater loss it represented, of which the proofs were never lacking. The chaotic bristle was studded with the bodies of the drowned, and the sight sent them home sorrowfully, yet marvelling the more at their own deliverance, and still more grateful for it.

"We are miracles, without a doubt," said Wulf gravely, as they went back home. "No one else gets here alive, you see.... I was the first miracle. Macro was the second," and he told her what she had not known before, how he had contrived to save the mate, and of his regret that it had not been old Jock Steele the carpenter, who would have been a blessing to them instead of a curse. "And you are the third and best miracle of all," he said, clasping her arm more tightly under his own.

"G.o.d! what a difference it has made!" he said fervently. "Alone here one might go mad. In time one most certainly would. See how good a work you are accomplishing by simply remaining alive. Instead of being a melancholy madman you make me the happiest man on earth. Oh, the G.o.d-given wonder of a woman! Truly you are the greatest miracle of all, and He has been good to me."

"And to me. If you had not been here I should have been dead and we would never have met. Perhaps He sent us to one another."

"I'm sure He did, and all our lives we'll thank Him for it," and so the sight of the dead but put a keener edge on their grat.i.tude for life and their joy in one another.

The next big storm washed the point clean again. All had gone, wreckage, bodies, everything, and the great pile beyond bristled higher than ever.