The Return of Tarzan - Edgar Rice Burroughs (read e book TXT) 📗

“You spoke, Jane!” cried Tarzan. “You are regaining consciousness!”

“Yes, Tarzan of the Apes,” she replied, and for the first time in months a smile of peace and happiness lighted her face.

“Thank God!” cried the ape-man, coming to the ground in a little grassy clearing beside the stream. “I was in time, after all.”

“In time? What do you mean?” she questioned.

“In time to save you from death upon the altar, dear,” he replied. “Do you not remember?”

“Save me from death?” she asked, in a puzzled tone. “Are we not both dead, my Tarzan?”

He had placed her upon the grass by now, her back resting against the stem of a huge tree. At her question he stepped back where he could the better see her face.

“Dead!” he repeated, and then he laughed. “You are not, Jane; and if you will return to the city of Opar and ask them who dwell there they will tell you that I was not dead a few short hours ago. No, dear, we are both very much alive.”

“But both Hazel and Monsieur Thuran told me that you had fallen into the ocean many miles from land,” she urged, as though trying to convince him that he must indeed be dead. “They said that there was no question but that it must have been you, and less that you could have survived or been picked up.”

“How can I convince you that I am no spirit?” he asked, with a laugh. “It was I whom the delightful Monsieur Thuran pushed overboard, but I did not drown⁠—I will tell you all about it after a while⁠—and here I am very much the same wild man you first knew, Jane Porter.”

The girl rose slowly to her feet and came toward him.

“I cannot even yet believe it,” she murmured. “It cannot be that such happiness can be true after all the hideous things that I have passed through these awful months since the Lady Alice went down.”

She came close to him and laid a hand, soft and trembling, upon his arm.

“It must be that I am dreaming, and that I shall awaken in a moment to see that awful knife descending toward my heart⁠—kiss me, dear, just once before I lose my dream forever.”

Tarzan of the Apes needed no second invitation. He took the girl he loved in his strong arms, and kissed her not once, but a hundred times, until she lay there panting for breath; yet when he stopped she put her arms about his neck and drew his lips down to hers once more.

“Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?” he asked.

“If you are not alive, my man,” she answered, “I pray that I may die thus before I awaken to the terrible realities of my last waking moments.”

For a while both were silent⁠—gazing into each others’ eyes as though each still questioned the reality of the wonderful happiness that had come to them. The past, with all its hideous disappointments and horrors, was forgotten⁠—the future did not belong to them; but the present⁠—ah, it was theirs; none could take it from them. It was the girl who first broke the sweet silence.

“Where are we going, dear?” she asked. “What are we going to do?”

“Where would you like best to go?” he asked. “What would you like best to do?”

“To go where you go, my man; to do whatever seems best to you,” she answered.

“But Clayton?” he asked. For a moment he had forgotten that there existed upon the earth other than they two. “We have forgotten your husband.”

“I am not married, Tarzan of the Apes,” she cried. “Nor am I longer promised in marriage. The day before those awful creatures captured me I spoke to Mr. Clayton of my love for you, and he understood then that I could not keep the wicked promise that I had made. It was after we had been miraculously saved from an attacking lion.” She paused suddenly and looked up at him, a questioning light in her eyes. “Tarzan of the Apes,” she cried, “it was you who did that thing? It could have been no other.”

He dropped his eyes, for he was ashamed.

“How could you have gone away and left me?” she cried reproachfully.

“Don’t, Jane!” he pleaded. “Please don’t! You cannot know how I have suffered since for the cruelty of that act, or how I suffered then, first in jealous rage, and then in bitter resentment against the fate that I had not deserved. I went back to the apes after that, Jane, intending never again to see a human being.” He told her then of his life since he had returned to the jungle⁠—of how he had dropped like a plummet from a civilized Parisian to a savage Waziri warrior, and from there back to the brute that he had been raised.

She asked him many questions, and at last fearfully of the things that Monsieur Thuran had told her⁠—of the woman in Paris. He narrated every detail of his civilized life to her, omitting nothing, for he felt no shame, since his heart always had been true to her. When he had finished he sat looking at her, as though waiting for her judgment, and his sentence.

“I knew that he was not speaking the truth,” she said. “Oh, what a horrible creature he is!”

“You are not angry with me, then?” he asked.

And her reply, though apparently most irrelevant, was truly feminine.

“Is Olga de Coude very beautiful?” she asked.

And Tarzan laughed and kissed her again. “Not one-tenth so beautiful as you, dear,” he said.

She gave a contented little sigh, and let her head rest against his shoulder. He knew that he was forgiven.

That night Tarzan built a snug little bower high among the swaying branches of a giant tree, and there the tired girl slept, while in a crotch beneath her the ape-man curled, ready, even in sleep, to protect her.

It took them many days to make the long journey to