“Watch well over my son, here! Soon must he grow strong again. Soon, soon! Soon, against the coming of Kamrou. For if the chief returns and my son be weak still, then woe to him, to you, to me! Woe to us all! Woe, Woe!”
The curtain fell. The patriarch was gone. Outside, Beatrice heard the click-click-click of his iron staff upon the smooth and flinty rock floor.
And to her ears, mingled with the far roaring of the flame, drifted the words:
“Woe, woe to him! Woe to us all--woe--woe!”
CHAPTER XXX
EXPLORATION
Under the ministering care of Beatrice and the patriarch, Stern's convalescence was rapid. The old man, consumed with terror lest the dreaded chief, Kamrou, return ere the stranger should have wholly recovered, spent himself in efforts to hasten the cure. And with deft skill he brewed his potions, made his salves, and concocted revivifying medicines from minerals which only he--despite his blindness--knew how to compound.
The blow that had so shrewdly clipped Stern's skull must have inevitably killed, as an ox is dropped in the slaughter-house, a man less powerfully endowed with splendid energies and full vitality.
Even Stern's wonderful physique had a hard fight to regain its finely ripened forces. But day by day he gained--we must speak of days, though there were only sleeping-times and waking-times--until at length, upon the fifth, he was able for the first time to leave his seaweed bed and sit a while weakly on the patriarch's bench, with Beatrice beside him.
Hand in hand they sat, while Stern asked many questions, and the old man, smiling, answered such as he saw fit. But of Kamrou neither he nor the girl yet breathed one syllable.
Next day and the next, and so on every day, Stern was able to creep out of the hut, then walk a little, and finally--sometimes alone, sometimes with one or both his nurses--go all among the wondering and admiring Folk, eagerly watch their labors of all kinds, try to talk with them in the few halting words he was able to pick up, and learn many things of use and deepest interest. A grave and serious Folk they were, almost without games or sports, seemingly without religious rites of any kind, and lacking festivals such as on the surface every barbarous people had always had.