III: ARABELLA
Even as the Bishop spoke there came round the point a creature than whom George had not even dreamed of any more fair. But her garments seemed to him absurd, because they clung about her nether limbs so as to impede their action. She came with little steps toward them, crying:
“Father!”
“My child! Not dead!”
“No, dear father. I have been drying myself over there. I have been weeping for you. I thought I was the only one saved.”
“So I thought of myself. What a wonderful young woman you are! You look as if you were going district visiting, so neat you are.”
George was staring at her with all his eyes. Never had he heard more lovely sounds than those that came from her lips.
“My daughter, Arabella,” said the Bishop.
She held out her hand. George touched it fearfully as though he dreaded lest she should melt away.
“I like you,” he said.
“I’m so hungry,” cried Arabella.
“I could eat an ox,” declared the Bishop.
George produced a kind of bread that he made from seeds, and the leg of a goat, and went off to the creek near by to fetch some clams. He also caught a crab and they had a very hearty breakfast, washed down with the milk of cocoanuts. The Bishop had explained the situation to Arabella, and she said:
“And am I really the first woman you have ever seen!”
“I had a mother,” replied George simply, “But she was not beautiful like you. She dressed differently and her legs were fat and strong.”
“There, there!” said the Bishop. But Arabella laughed merrily.
The Bishop told how they had been with nineteen other Bishops and their families upon a cruise in the steam-yacht Oyster, each Bishop engaging to preach on Sundays to the lay passengers, and how the propeller had been broken and they had been carried out of their course and tossed this way and that, and finally wrecked (he thought) with the loss of all hands, though the wireless operator had stuck to his post to the last and managed to get off the tidings of the calamity with latitude and longitude into the air.
It all conveyed very little to George, but it was an acute pleasure to him to hear their voices, and as they talked he looked from one to the other with a happy, friendly smile.
He was very proud to show his island to his visitors, but distressed at the havoc wrought by the storm, and he apologised for its unusual behaviour in moving.
“It has never done it before,” he explained, and was rather hurt because Arabella laughed.
He showed them where, as far as he could remember, his father and mother lay buried, and he took them to the top of the hill, and to amuse them caught a goat and a little kind of kangaroo there was in the forest, and a turtle. He displayed his hammock in the palm tree and showed how he curled up in it and wedged himself in so as not to fall out, and promised to prepare two other trees for them. They demurred. The Bishop asked if he might have the lair, and Arabella asked George to build her a house. He did not know what a house was, but looked it up in Tittiker and could find mention only of the House of Swells and the House of Talk. Arabella made a little house of sand; he caught the idea and spent the day weaving her a cabin of palm branches and mud and pebbles. He sang whole passages from Tittiker as he worked, and when it was finished he led Arabella to the cabin and she smiled so dazzlingly that he reeled, but quickly recovered himself, remembered as in a vision how it had been with his mother, flung his arms round her neck and kissed her, saying:
“I love you.”
“I think we had better look for my father,” said Arabella.