My South Sea Sweetheart | Page 5

He was changing. How, I did not know. But it seemed to me that Luke and I were somehow no longer one. We had been used to speak without thinking, to talk as we breathed, to understand without talking. Now...
It came back right in the middle of our swim, as we landed together on a coral "horsehead" to rest after a vigorous bout of the misnamed "crawl." I was examining a grazed elbow with some attention, when I looked up, and saw Luke's eyes fixed on my face.
"Don't look at me like that," I snapped.
"Like what?"
"Don't look at me as if you as if you saw me!"
"You talk a great deal of nonsense," he said calmly.
"There's more sense in it than in some of your sense," I retorted (more wisely than I knew) and immediately did a sitting dive.
But I had been right. Luke was changed.
That very morning he amazed the household, already collected for prayers in the main hall, by walking in clad only in a bathing towel, and dropping the entire collection of his tunics and knickers at his grandfather's feet.
"What's the meaning of this conduct?" demanded old Ivory, looking, with the Bible in his hand, quite frightfully like an ancient Hebrew lawgiver. I do not mean that there was any Jewish ancestry about the Ivorys. I only mean that old Ivory was amazingly Michael-Angeloesque, in moments of any stress.
"Grandfather," replied Luke, with a courage that turned me cold, "you have dressed me like a girl or a child long enough. I want clothes like yours and Mr. Hamilton's. Proper clothes."
"Do you know how old you are?" demanded the prophet with the Book, in a windy voice.
"Of course. I'm fourteen and two weeks."
"And you want a set of grown-up clothes."
"Yes, sir." There was no "please" attached. I trembled. I thought old Ivory would crush him with the mighty Book.
Ivory put down the Bible without a word, went, still without a word, to my father's room, and returned with a shirt and trousers belonging to him.
"I'll square with you, Hamilton," he said briefly. "Let Lorraine take up the legs of these a bit. Mine are too big altogether."
Lorraine did take up the legs, after prayers. During prayers, Luke, holding firmly on to his point, sat and knelt, draped in the bath towel only. I whispered to him that he was just like the infant Samuel, and had the satisfaction of seeing a vexed flash in his eyes. It was pleasant, I thought, to make him feel. I would try it again in some other way. Making people feel was sport except with Lorraine.
"... Be with us all for evermore. Hamilton!"
"What is it?"
"If Dara had heard, or joined in, a single word of the prayers, I am very much mistaken."
"Is this accusation true?" asked father, pulling me to him, and pinching my ear.
Ivory looked at him, and at me, disapprovingly.
"Train up a child..." he said. "I suppose breakfast's ready."
"There's fried flying fish. And honeycake," I said, jumping up and down, and clapping my hands. "I love them both."
"You should never say you ' love ' things," chid Lorraine, sweeping on in her black dress.
"But I do," I said. "I love everything in all the world sometimes. Things to eat, and things to see, and things to feel, things to ... I wouldn't care to live if I couldn't go on loving."
"Dara, Dara!" said my father, half reproachfully, half sadly. But he did not check me; he never checked my childish running-on.
"When I go to the world," I said, scampering in front of him (we always called the projected exodus of Luke and of myself "going to the world--" I don't know why) "it will be delightful, for there will be new things to love there."
"True, for you," said my father, somewhat sarcastically. No one else took any notice at all. We were entering the dining hall now, and the smell of the good things on the table seemed to occupy all thoughts....
I must tell about our dining hall. It was the glory of Hiliwa Dara, and would have been the wonder of all that part of the Pacific, had tourists ever come within five miles of it. But no one ever did; and so its beauties were ours and ours alone.
Nowadays, when famous caves are becoming common, and when thousands of people every year go through the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky, the Jenolan Caves of New South Wales, and other show places, one need not fear to be accused of "travelers' tales" if one describes an underground miracle. And a miracle inded was the Hall of Persephone, as my scholarly father had named it. I used to think, in my earliest days, that it was the very palace hall to which Demeter's daughter had been rapt away, in the arms