With dark sail booming out the Calypso surged ahead, the mariners saw the two ladies on the shore, and waved their hands and shouted. Bevis steered her into port, and she grounded beside the Pinta. The first caress and astonishment over: “Where are your hats?” said Frances.
“Where are your collars?” said his mother. “And gracious, child! just look at his neck!”
As for hats and collars they had almost forgotten their existence, and having passed most of the time in shirt sleeves like gold-miners, with necks and chests exposed, they were as brown as if they had been in the tropics. Mark especially was tanned, completely tanned: Bevis was too fair to brown well. The sun and the wind had purified his skin almost to transparency with a rosy olive behind the whiteness. There was a gleam in his eye, the clear red of his lips—lips speak the state of the blood—the easy motion of the limbs, the ringing sound of the voice, the upright back, all showed primeval health. Both of them were often surprised at their own strength.
In those days of running, racing, leaping, exploring, swimming, the skin nude to the sun, and wind and water, they built themselves up of steel, steel that would bear the hardest wear of the world. Had they been put in an open boat and thrust forth to sea like the viking of old, it would not have hurt them.
Frances played with Bevis’s golden ringlets, but did not kiss him as she had used to do. He looked too much a man. She placed her hand on her brother’s shoulder, but did not speak to him as once she had done. Something told her that this was not the boy she ordered to and fro.
They could not believe that the two had really spent all the time on an island. This was the eleventh morn since they had left—it could not be: yet there was the raft in evidence.
“Let us row them up in the Pinta,” said Mark.
“In a minute,” said Bevis. “Get her ready; I’ll be back in a minute—half a second.” He ran along the bank to a spot whence he knew he could see the old house at home through the boughs. He wanted just to look at it—there is no house so beautiful as the one you were born in—and then he ran back.
There was a little water in the boat but not much, they hauled out some of the ballast, the ladies got in and were rowed direct to New Formosa. The stockade—so well defended, the cage before the door, the hut, the cave, their interest knew no bounds.
“But you did not really sleep on this,” said Bevis’s mother in a tone of horror, finding the bed was nothing but fir branches: she could not be reconciled to the idea.