The Island of Regeneration | Page 3

it was. It
might have been poison. What mattered it? Having drunk she must also
eat. She took it. It looked edible, it was inviting to the eye, and as she
sunk her teeth into it, she found it agreeable to the taste also. He had
brought it to her. If he had meant harm, present harm, surely he would
not have given the water. She ate it confidently.
He held in his hand fruit of some kind. It might have been poison. What
mattered it?
As the man saw her partake of what he had given her, he clapped his
hands and laughed. She was grateful for that laugh. It was more human
than the babbling sounds which he had made before.
There was but little of the fruit, just what a child would have brought,
and this again was good for her, for had there been an abundance, in
her need she would have eaten until she made herself ill. When she had
eaten, she rose to her feet. Before doing this she had extended her hand
to him as if seeking assistance, but he had simply stared at her
uncomprehending and she had been forced to get to her feet unaided.
Once standing, she trembled and would have fallen but that she caught
his arm and steadied herself by holding tightly to it. The man at her
touch started back. Color came and went in his face; little shudders
swept over him; his mouth opened; he looked at her with a singular
expression of awe not unmixed with terror in his eyes, for this was the
first time in his recollection, or what would have been his recollection
if his retrospective faculties had been developed, that he had ever felt
the touch of a woman's hand, of any human hand upon him.
Noticing his peculiar demeanor in the, to her, perfectly natural situation,
the woman, summoning some of the remains of the reserve of force
which is in every human body until life is gone, released his arm and

stared about her, leaning against the trunk of the nearest palm. This
time, and for the first time, she took in that great expanse of sea, lonely
yet beautiful, upon which her eyes were to look so often. Out of the
deep and the night she had come. Into what deep and into what day had
she arrived?
She turned and surveyed the shore. The beach curved sharply to the
right and to the left, the long barrier reef following roughly is contour
until the land obscured it on either side. Back of her stretched a grove
of palms and back of that rose a hill; its crest, bare and craglike,
towered above a sea of verdure. Through a chance vista she saw the
mass of rock as a mountain peak. On one side of her high precipitous
cliffs ran down close to the shore and shut out the view. Over them
water fell to the beach.
Save in the person of the man beside her there was not an evidence of
humanity anywhere. No curl of smoke rose above the trees. No distant
call of human voices smote the fearful hollow of her car. The breeze
made music in the tall palms and in the thick verdure farther up the
hillside, birds sang softly here and there, but about her a tropic stillness
prevailed, to which one great heaving diapason on the distant barriers
was a foundation of sound upon which to build a lonely quiet. Human
beings there might be, there must be, on that island, if island it were;
but if so, they must be abiding on the farther side. She and the man
were alone.
Standing on her feet, with a slight renewal of her strength from what
she had eaten and drunk, the woman now felt less fear of the man. He
had treated her kindly. His aspect was gentle, even amiable. He looked
at her wistfully, bending his brows from time to time and ever and
again shaking his head, as a great dog looks at the master with whom
he would fain speak, whose language he would fain understand, to
whom he would fain impart his own ideas if he could.
She stared at him perplexed. She was entirely at loss what to do, until
her eyes, roving past him, detected a dark object on the water line just
where the still blueness touched the white sand. The sun light was
reflected from a surface of metal, and thinking that she recognized it,

she stepped from the shade of the palms and made her way unsteadily
toward it. The man, without a sound, followed closely at her side.
Her vision had been correct, for she drew out of the sand a leather
handbag,