“Then, Felix—-the night before it comes, you will promise me, will you?”
“Muriel, Muriel, I could never dare to kill you.”
She laid her hand soothingly on his. She stroked him gently. “You are a man,” she said, looking up into his eyes with confidence. “I trust you. I believe in you. I know you will never let these savages hurt me.... Felix, in spite of everything, I’ve been happier since we came to this island together than ever I have been in my life before. I’ve had my wish. I didn’t want to miss in life the one thing that life has best worth giving. I haven’t missed it now. I know I haven’t; for I love you, and you love me. After that, I can die, and die gladly. If I die with you, that’s all I ask. These seven or eight terrible weeks have made me feel somehow unnaturally calm. When I came here first I lived all the time in an agony of terror. I’ve got over the agony of terror now. I’m quite resigned and happy. All I ask is to be saved—by you—from the cruel hands of these hateful cannibals.”
Felix raised her white hand just once to his lips. It was the first time he had ever ventured to kiss her. He kissed it fervently. She let it drop as if dead by her side.
“Now tell me all that happened,” she said. “I’m strong enough to bear it. I feel such a woman now—so wise and calm. These few weeks have made me grow from a girl into a woman all at once. There’s nothing I daren’t hear, if you’ll tell me it, Felix.”
Felix took up her hand again and held it in his, as he narrated the whole story of his visit to the Frenchman. When Muriel had heard it, she said once more, slowly, “I don’t think there’s any hope in all these wild plans of playing off superstition against superstition. To my mind there are only two chances left for us now. One is to concoct with the Frenchman some means of getting away by canoe from the island—I’d rather trust the sea than the tender mercy of these dreadful people; the other is to keep a closer lookout than ever for the merest chance of a passing steamer.”
Felix drew a deep sigh. “I’m afraid neither’s much use,” he said. “If we tried to get away, dogged as we are, day and night, by our Shadows, the natives would follow us with their war-canoes in battle array and hack us to pieces; for Peyron says that, regarding us as gods, they think the rain would vanish from their island forever if once they allowed us to get away alive and carry the luck with us. And as to the steamers, we haven’t seen a trace of one since we left the Australasian. Probably it was only by the purest accident that even she ever came so close in to Boupari.”
“At any rate,” Muriel cried, still clasping his hand tight, and letting the tears now trickle slowly down her pale white cheeks, “we can talk it all over some day with M. Peyron.”
“We can talk it over to-day,” Felix answered, “if it comes to that; for Peyron means to step round, he says, a little later in the afternoon, to pay his respects to the first white lady he has ever seen since he left New Caledonia.”