'How brave--how strong he was!' she murmured inwardly, her lips not moving. 'How he fought with that storm--fought with Death to save me and himself! No!' she broke off, still uttering her meditations to her own heart alone--'why do him such injustice even in my thoughts? It was not to save us both, but me alone. There was but one desire in his soul--to save me!'
She turned and went to a small heap of fruit that she had gathered earlier in the day, and selected one of the great pink bananas--pink with a lustrous beauty which those who only see them when they arrive in northern climes could never believe they have once possessed--then she took a scooped-out cocoanut shell, and, going to a little babbling rill that ran through the grassy defile, filled it with water. After which she returned to where the other lay, and, kneeling by his side, gazed on him again.
'My God!' she whispered. 'I almost dreaded him once. Feared him for I knew not what. Feared him! Him! And he has been my saviour.'
He seemed to know that she was by his side and near him; for, even as she murmured these words to herself, Stephen Charke opened his eyes--a faint smile appearing in them--and gazed into hers.
'You are better?' she asked, as she gave him the shell with the water in it, which he was not too weak to be able to take and raise to his lips, while she tore off the rind of the banana. 'Your forehead,' she went on, while putting her hand upon it calmly, as a sister might, 'is cooler. Are you still in pain?'
'No,' he answered. 'No--only very weak. Are--are--any more saved from that?' and he directed his glance to where, two hundred yards off from the island, lay something protruding above the water which looked like the rounded back of a whale, but was, in truth, the torn and lacerated keel of the Emperor of the Moon. In her last struggles--in her last convulsions as the gale had hurled her on to the coral reef--she had turned almost completely over.
'No,' she replied, her face an awful picture of despair and anguish. 'None are saved but you and I. Oh!' and she buried that face in her hands and wept aloud, piteously, heartbrokenly.
'God rest their souls,' he said solemnly. 'God pity them! Why I, too, should have been spared except to save you, I do not know. I might as well have gone down with them.'
'No! no!' she cried. 'No, Mr. Charke. You must be spared for better days, for greater things. Oh,' she exclaimed, 'how bravely you battled with it all! Uncle told us,' she went on through her tears, 'when we were below and before I became insensible, that your efforts were superhuman; that, if the ship could be saved, it would be by you alone. And,' she continued, 'how you saved me I do not know. Only--only--I wish I had gone with him, with Gilbert.'
'Nay,' he said--'nay. Do not say that. And--and--I ask you to believe that, had it been possible, I would have saved him too. But it was impossible. Impossible to so much as slip a life-buoy over his shoulders. The end was at hand, the ship broken in half. It was impossible,' he repeated earnestly.