"I must sit down," she faltered. "It's my first appearance, and I tire directly. But I'm not too tired to listen to you--I want to."
Yet already a change had come over her, and either she was physically weaker or else softer at heart than she had been but a minute before. At all events she took his arm to the stump, which was one of several in a little clearing lit and checkered by the slanting sun. And she sat there almost meekly in his sight, while Denis planted a foot upon one of the other stumps and said what he had to say with bare arms folded across a moleskinned knee.
"In the first place," he began, "I saved your life."
Nan's smouldering spirit was in flames upon the word, and her face caught its fire.
"And you remind me of it!" she cried in red scorn. "Is it the sort of thing one forgets? Is it a thing to thank you for like any common service, and are you the one to put the words in my mouth?"
Denis did not wince.
"I am wrong," he said, quietly. "In the first place, I asked you to marry me; it was only in the second place, and before you had time to give me an answer, that I was so unfortunate as to save your life."
"Unfortunate!"
"Most unfortunate to be the one to save you, Nan, because if it had been any one else it would have made no difference between us; as it is it makes all the difference in the world."
"I don't understand," she said, trembling because she was beginning to understand so well. "I only know how brave you were--how brave!"
And she raised her sweet face without restraint, for now she was thinking of nothing but his bravery.
"Most men are that at a pinch," said Denis, with a twitch of his red shirt: "but I was luckier than most. I won't make too light of it. I can swim. But you don't suppose I was the only strong swimmer on board. And which of the rest, I should like to know, wouldn't have made as good use of my chance?"
"But it wasn't only the swimming!" the girl cried without thinking, to break off with her bent face in its besetting fever.
"If you mean the climbing," he continued equably, "there was still less merit in that, for it was absurdly unnecessary, as you probably know, besides which I was full of Spanish brandy at the time. Not that I'm ashamed of that," added Denis with the absolute candour of the dales. "I believe that brandy was the saving of us both; but it was another piece of pure luck."
Nan said nothing for a minute. She was trying to see his hands, and he showed her with a shrug the only finger that was still in rags. His wounds had not been serious; he was scarcely walking lame; the scratches had skinned over on his face. She could look in it again, steadfastly, simply; she was even beginning to like it better between a wide-awake and an open throat than in the spruce cap and collar of the voyage. Her own scarlet she had conquered in a tithe of the time it had often taken her in secret: it was not so dreadful to be with him after all. And if he loved her nothing mattered: not even her long agony in the ti-tree thicket. Yet he had hurt her by belittling himself, and by something else of which his last words reminded Nan.
"But you don't look on it as luck. You aren't a bit glad you saved my life!" And her eyes fell once more, if this time not involuntarily.
"Glad!" he cried out. "Gladness is no word for my feeling about that--for what I feel every moment of every hour."
"Yet you wish it had been some one else."
"I don't!"
"But you said you did, Denis."
"Well, and I have felt it, too, when I couldn't send you a single message--couldn't make a single sign--for fear you should think--for fear you should misunderstand!"
Nan had not raised her eyes again; his tone made it difficult now. He was leaning toward her, almost bending over her, and yet his foot clung to the pine-stump as though by conscious effort of the will, and his face was a fight between set jaw and yearning eyes. But Nan could not see his face; she could only see the sunlight and the shadows in the lavender skirts that spread about her as she sat, and a few inches of hard yellow ground beyond. She was beginning to believe in his love, to understand his position before he explained it to her, to see the end of her own doubts. His halting voice was more eloquent than many words.
And yet for words she was constrained to probe.
"So you determined to go up to the diggings?"
"I did."
"And to leave me?"
"Nan, I must."
His voice reconciled her more and more.
"Must you, Denis?"
"To make some money, Nan dear! And I will make it--I will--I will!"
She felt that he would. His voice only stirred her now.
"And then?" she asked.
"And then," he cried, "and then I sha'n't mind pressing you for an answer to what I dared to ask you on the _North Foreland_."
There was a silence in the little clearing among the young pines. Only near at hand the hum of insects, and in the distance a cloud of cockatoos shrieking the sun into the sea, and the sea itself faintly booming upon the base of the sandstone cliffs. Before either spoke there was indeed one other sound, but it fell on ears doubly deaf; for Nan had flung back her dark-gold ringlets in a way of hers, and from the bold pose of her head none could have imagined the warm bloom upon her cheeks, or the tender film that dimmed the hazel eyes.
"Suppose I prefer to give you your answer first?"
"Nan! Nan! I would have you think it over, and over, and over again!"
"But suppose I refused you after all?"
"I would sooner that than be accepted in haste and--and repented of--you know!"
It was as though he was maintaining his balance for a bet, and near the end of his endurance even so. Nan watched him with a smile touched by the last beams of the setting sun, but as she rose the red glory beat full upon her.
"Very well!" said she. "Then if you won't come to me for your answer, I must bring it to you."
Night falls like an assassin in that country, but the purple tints were only beginning when in his very ear she implored him not to leave her any more, and he held her closer, but said he must. It would not be for long. Others were growing rich in a day; he would make one more. He knew it; something told him; and again, something else told her.
Yet she was vexed with herself for her impulsive appeal against a decision to which she had felt reconciled but the moment before; and vexed with him for scarcely listening to her appeal, unpremeditated as it was, unreasonable as it might be. He might have wavered; she would not have had him yield. His resolution was fine, heroic; she only wondered whether it was quite human, and wondering, lost the thread of his defense.
"Think, think!" he urged. "Think what it would be for me to go home in this ship and marry you as I am, on my poor captain's certificate and nothing else; and then, only think, if I followed in a few months with a few thousand of my own behind me! You may say I ought to have thought of this before. But I did. I told your father so a few minutes before the wreck. I wanted you to wait for me--I was selfish enough for that from the beginning!"
The disparaging epithet pricked Nan to interrupt him and take it on herself. But Denis persisted without a smile.
"Darling, I am selfish about it still; for if I am not worth waiting for, I am not worth having; but if you can wait only a few months--not a day more than a year--I will come to you as I should come if it is to be--but come I will, rich or poor, if I am alive! Nan, darling, I have everything to gain, only these few months to lose; but I will gain all the world in them. I will, I will, I will!"
She could not but be infected with his confidence, his enthusiasm, and his ideal. There in the dusk were the eager Irish eyes glistening and burning into hers, but there also was the strong north-country jaw set for success as the needle to the pole. And yet--and yet--she was weeping on his shoulder as the purple turned to deepest blue.
"I could have helped you, dearest," came her broken whispers. "But no, not here. It's an awful country. It will break my heart to think of you in it. I thought, if you loved me ... after all we have been through ...
you would never, never leave me again! But, dearest, I do believe in you, and I will wait, for you know best."
So after all it was a brave face, bright as her will could make it, though still wet with tears, that she held away from him, for Denis to look upon it for the first time as his own. But it was a very terrible face that hovered over the same spot but a minute later, when Ralph Devenish came crashing through the young pines to curse the very ground where they had stood, and the sea that had not swallowed one or both.