"I have it here ready," says she, "if you can but raise your head to drink of it. Wait; let me slip my arm under your head and around your neck—so."
In this tender fashion she helped me to rise, and set the gourd to my lips, from which I drank the brew to the bottom, which was as good as any apothecaries' drugs, and full as bitter.
This potion, together with my persevering resolution, did me a world of good, so that in a couple of hours I felt strong enough to get up on my feet, if needs be; perceiving which, my lady acceded to my entreaty, and laid herself down to take some repose, which she needed sorely, for I doubt if she had closed an eye all through my sickness. For my own part, I had no longer inclination to sleep, but lay devising means for improving our cavern as my lady had suggested, for one thing resolving I would try to make a partition to my lady's chamber that would let in the light, and yet secure her privacy, which I proposed to do with a sash of canes stretched over with bladder-skin; "and thereon," thinks I, "may she paint some pretty devices with such juice-stains as we can get, that it may have all the pleasant gay look of a painted glass window."
'Twas a great pleasure to me devising all this, but the telling of it the next morning to my lady was yet greater joy, for the delight she showed in the scheme. She brought her chair up, and sitting beside me listened with sparkling eyes a whole hour to all I had to say on this trumpery; but no matter seemed paltry to her which interested me, and I do believe she would have given her serious thought to discourse on a fiddlestick's end if my mind had been bent that way, so entire was her sympathy.
"Benet," says she in the end, "I do think there is no man in the world so ingenious as you in the service of a friend, nor so unselfish neither. For while you thought I wished to quit this place, naught could exhaust your patience in seeking the means; and now that you find I would stay, your first moments of consciousness are devoted to making my life here agreeable. Nay, it seems to me that you have overcome your sickness because you saw that my happiness, my very life, depended on it."
"Why, so I have," said I; and therewith I told her how that I had taken that resolution to live when I felt myself sinking into the heaviness of death.
She looked at me with kind, wondering eyes as I spoke, and for some moments sat in silence, her hands folded on her knees, and bending towards me. Then says she, "Oh! Benet, if we all strove to live for our friends as readily as we offer to die for them, how much more should we merit their love!"
Soon after this she took her bow and arrows and went off in the canoe to seek food for our supper in the wooded slope; but the dear girl did so steer her course that I might as long as possible see her from where I lay by the mouth of the cavern.