’Twas hard to frame a reply. “I been thinkin’, since,” I faltered, floundering in search of a simile, “that you’re like a—like a——”
“Like what?” he demanded.
I did not know. My eye sought everywhere, but found no happy suggestion. Then, through an opening in the hills, I caught sight of the melancholy wreck on the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils.
“I fear t’ tell,” said I.
He stopped. “But I wish to know,” he persisted. “You’ll tell me, Davy, will you not? It means so much.”
“Like a wrecked ship,” said I.
“Good God!” he exclaimed, starting from me.
At once he sent me home; nor would he have me walk with him that afternoon, because, as he said, my sister would not allow me to bear him company, did she know as much as I had in some strange way divined.
Next day, armed with my sister’s express permission, I overcame his scruples; and off we went to Red Indian Cave. Everywhere, indeed, we went together, while the wrecked folk waited the mail-boat to come—Doctor Luke and I—hand in hand—happy (for the agony of my loss came most in the night, when I lay wakeful and alone in my little bed) as the long, blue days. We roamed the hills, climbed the cliffs, clambered along shore; and once, to my unbounded astonishment and alarm, he stripped to the skin and went head first into the sea from the base of the Good Promise cliffs. Then nothing would content him but that I, too, should strip and plunge in: which I did (though you may think it extraordinary), lest he think me afraid to trust his power to save me. Thus the invigourating air, the yellow sunlight, the smiling sea beyond the rocks, the blue sky overhead, were separate delights in which our friendship ripened: so that at times I wondered what loneliness would overtake me when he had gone. I told him I wished he would not go away on the mail-boat, but would stay and live with us, that, being a doctor, as he had said, he might heal our folk when they fell sick, and no one would die, any more. He laughed at that—but not because of merriment—and gripped my hand tighter, and I began to hope that, perhaps, he would not go away; but he did not tell me whether he would or not.