He stood there, stupefied, watching the gentle swell and ebb, and slowly the wonder in his eyes grew to the light ineffable. He moved forward. He touched her timidly.
"Girl!" he said in awed murmur, as if in the hush of a cathedral, "Girl, can it be!"
But she remained gently weeping. He took her arms and raised her slowly; and they stood before each other, their twined hands hanging loose between them, their eyes into each other's, gravely reading.
"Girl!" he said again, and this time the tone held the ecstasy of revelation.
"Boy!" she smiled back through the sacred dew of her tears.
He drew her to him, and she wept upon his shoulder in sweet abandonment, and his heart swelled within him in immense tenderness.
Delaroche told me the thing himself immediately after it had happened; and no one has been able to get a word of it from him since. At the time he was much overwrought; in fact, to an Anglo-Saxon, was somewhat of a sight (he has French blood in him, and it's apt to crop out when he least expects it); but if ever I saw Truth manifested, it was in that choking, panting, sobbing utterance of the man.
Delaroche was one of the thousand pedagogues which the American government sent to flood these benighted isles with the lime light of civilisation. His post was Cabancalan. You don't know Cabancalan, do you? Southern part of Negros, twenty miles from the mouth of the Hog. I rode through there once--God, a lonely, desolate place! A thousand tumble-down nipa shacks, a crumbling church, musty mountains to the east, not a white man within thirty miles, and the natives themselves away below the average--on the edge of savagery.
Well, Delaroche stood it for six months, then went daffy and sent for the girl he loved in the States. And she came, the ten thousand miles, and he met her in Ilo-Ilo and they were married, and he took her across on a prao to her new home--God!
And then one night, some two months after, she began to die. "She began to die." That's the way he told it to me.
As he came back from a ride to one of his barrio schools he found her weeping, with her face in her pillow. She gently refused to tell him the reason (poor little girl, he probably would not have understood!); but later she was saying small incoherent things, and then he knew she was in a fever. Then she began to groan gently with each exhaling breath, and a great fear started to gnaw at his heart.