"How was it found out then?" Pedder asked.
"Years and years afterward by the ravings in liquor of one of the crew, and by certain things that I'd like to tell you if you'd be interested."
"The important thing," said Gardiner, "is that the pair were deserted--not why they were deserted, or how it was found out that they had been. And one thing--speaking of lightning and Providence--is very important. If the pair hadn't been blind, if the asylum hadn't been burned, if the _Nerissa_ hadn't been wrecked, and if the crew hadn't deserted them--they would never in this world have had an opportunity to lift to their lips the cup of human happiness and drink it off.
"The man did not know that he had been deserted. He vaguely understood that there had been a shipwreck and that he had been washed ashore--alone, he thought. When he got hungry he began to crawl round and round with his hands in front of his face feeling for something to eat, trying and approving of one handful of leaves and spitting out another. But thirst began to torment him, and then, all of a sudden, he went souse into the creek that there emptied into the sea. That way of life went on for several days. And all the while, the woman, just as she had come ashore, was keeping life going similarly--crawling about, always near the creek, crossing the beach at low tide to the mud flats and rooting among the mollusks, and stuffing herself with any kind of sea-growth that tasted good enough. The two were probably often within a few feet of each other; and they might have lived out their lives that way without either of them ever having the least idea that he or she was not the only human being in that part of the world. But something--pure accident or some subtle instinct--brought them together. The man was out crawling with one hand before his face--so was the woman. Their hands met, and clinched. They remained thus, and trembling, for a long time. From that time until the day of their death, years and years later, they never for so much as one moment lost contact with each other.
"Daily they crawled or walked with infinite slowness, hand in hand, or the arm of one about the waist of the other--neither knowing the look, the age, the religion or even the color of the other. But I know, from the only person fitted to judge, that they loved each other tremendously and spotlessly--these two poor souls alone in that continuous, soundless, sightless, expressionless night. I know because their baby, when he grew up, and got away from that place, and learned white man's talk--told me.