Frere watched all this with dissatisfaction that amounted at times to positive hatred. Yet he could say nothing, for he could not but acknowledge that, beside Dawes, he was incapable. He even submitted to take orders from this escaped convict–it was so evident that the escaped convict knew better than he. Sylvia began to look upon Dawes as a second Bates. He was, moreover, all her own. She had an interest in him, for she had nursed and protected him. If it had not been for her, this prodigy would not have lived. He felt for her an absorbing affection that was almost a passion. She was his good angel, his protectress, his glimpse of Heaven. She had given him food when he was starving, and had believed in him when the world–the world of four– had looked coldly on him. He would have died for her, and, for love of her, hoped for the vessel which should take her back to freedom and give him again into bondage.
But the days stole on, and no vessel appeared. Each day they eagerly scanned the watery horizon; each day they longed to behold the bowsprit of the returning Ladybird glide past the jutting rock that shut out the view of the harbour–but in vain. Mrs. Vickers’s illness increased, and the stock of provisions began to run short. Dawes talked of putting himself and Frere on half allowance. It was evident that, unless succour came in a few days, they must starve.
Frere mooted all sorts of wild plans for obtaining food. He would make a journey to the settlement, and, swimming the estuary, search if haply any casks of biscuit had been left behind in the hurry of departure. He would set springes for the seagulls, and snare the pigeons at Liberty Point. But all these proved impracticable, and with blank faces they watched their bag of flour grow smaller and smaller daily. Then the notion of escape was broached. Could they construct a raft? Impossible without nails or ropes. Could they build a boat? Equally impossible for the same reason. Could they raise a fire sufficient to signal a ship? Easily; but what ship would come within reach of that doubly-desolate spot? Nothing could be done but wait for a vessel, which was sure to come for them sooner or later; and, growing weaker day by day, they waited.
One morning Sylvia was sitting in the sun reading the “English History”, which, by the accident of fright, she had brought with her on the night of the mutiny. “Mr. Frere,” said she, suddenly, “what is an alchemist?”
“A man who makes gold,” was Frere’s not very accurate definition.
“Do you know one?”
“No.”
“Do you, Mr. Dawes?”
“I knew a man once who thought himself one.”
“What! A man who made gold?”
“After a fashion.”
“But did he make gold?” persisted Sylvia.
“No, not absolutely make it. But he was, in his worship of money, an alchemist for all that.”
“What became of him?”
“I don’t know,” said Dawes, with so much constraint in his tone that the child instinctively turned the subject.
“Then, alchemy is a very old art?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Did the Ancient Britons know it?”
“No, not as old as that!”
Sylvia suddenly gave a little scream. The remembrance of the evening when she read about the Ancient Britons to poor Bates came vividly into her mind, and though she had since re-read the passage that had then attracted her attention a hundred times, it had never before presented itself to her in its full significance. Hurriedly turning the well-thumbed leaves, she read aloud the passage which had provoked remark:-
“‘The Ancient Britons were little better than Barbarians. They painted their bodies with Woad, and, seated in their light coracles of skin stretched upon slender wooden frames, must have presented a wild and savage appearance.'”
“A coracle! That’s a boat! Can’t we make a coracle, Mr. Dawes?”
Chapter XIII.
What The Seaweed Suggested
The question gave the marooned party new hopes. Maurice Frere, with his usual impetuosity, declared that the project was a most feasible one, and wondered–as such men will wonder–that it had never occurred to him before. “It’s the simplest thing in the world!” he cried. “Sylvia, you have saved us!” But upon taking the matter into more earnest consideration, it became apparent that they were as yet a long way from the realization of their hopes. To make a coracle of skins seemed sufficiently easy, but how to obtain the skins! The one miserable hide of the unlucky she-goat was utterly inadequate for the purpose. Sylvia–her face beaming with the hope of escape, and with delight at having been the means of suggesting it–watched narrowly the countenance of Rufus Dawes, but she marked no answering gleam of joy in those eyes. “Can’t it be done, Mr. Dawes?” she asked, trembling for the reply.
The convict knitted his brows gloomily.
“Come, Dawes!” cried Frere, forgetting his enmity for an instant in the flash of new hope, “can’t you suggest something?”
Rufus Dawes, thus appealed to as the acknowledged Head of the little society, felt a pleasant thrill of self-satisfaction. “I don’t know,” he said. “I must think of it. It looks easy, and yet–” He paused as something in the water caught his eye. It was a mass of bladdery seaweed that the returning tide was wafting slowly to the shore. This object, which would have passed unnoticed at any other time, suggested to Rufus Dawes a new idea. “Yes,” he added slowly, with a change of tone, “it may be done. I think I can see my way.”
The others preserved a respectful silence until he should speak again. “How far do you think it is across the bay?” he asked of Frere.
“What, to Sarah Island?”
“No, to the Pilot Station.”
“About four miles.”
The convict sighed. “Too far to swim now, though I might have done it once. But this sort of life weakens a man. It must be done after all.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Frere.
“To kill the goat.”
Sylvia uttered a little cry; she had become fond of her dumb companion. “Kill Nanny! Oh, Mr. Dawes! What for?”
“I am going to make a boat for you,” he said, “and I want hides, and thread, and tallow.”
A few weeks back Maurice Frere would have laughed at such a sentence, but he had begun now to comprehend that this escaped convict was not a man to be laughed at, and though he detested him for his superiority, he could not but admit that he was superior.
“You can’t get more than one hide off a goat, man?” he said, with an inquiring tone in his voice–as though it was just possible that such a marvellous being as Dawes could get a second hide, by virtue of some secret process known only to himself.
“I am going to catch other goats.” “Where?”
“At the Pilot Station.”
“But how are you going to get there?”
“Float across. Come, there is not time for questioning! Go and cut down some saplings, and let us begin!”
The lieutenant-master looked at the convict prisoner with astonishment, and then gave way to the power of knowledge, and did as he was ordered. Before sundown that evening the carcase of poor Nanny, broken into various most unbutcherly fragments, was hanging on the nearest tree; and Frere, returning with as many young saplings as he could drag together, found Rufus Dawes engaged in a curious occupation. He had killed the goat, and having cut off its head close under the jaws, and its legs at the knee-joint, had extracted the carcase through a slit made in the lower portion of the belly, which slit he had now sewn together with string. This proceeding gave him a rough bag, and he was busily engaged in filling this bag with such coarse grass as he could collect. Frere observed, also, that the fat of the animal was carefully preserved, and the intestines had been placed in a pool of water to soak.
The convict, however, declined to give information as to what he intended to do. “It’s my own notion,” he said. “Let me alone. I may make a failure of it.” Frere, on being pressed by Sylvia, affected to know all about the scheme, but to impose silence on himself. He was galled to think that a convict brain should contain a mystery which he might not share.
On the next day, by Rufus Dawes’s direction, Frere cut down some rushes that grew about a mile from the camping ground, and brought them in on his back. This took him nearly half a day to accomplish. Short rations were beginning to tell upon his physical powers. The convict, on the other hand, trained by a woeful experience in the Boats to endurance of hardship, was slowly recovering his original strength.
“What are they for?” asked Frere, as he flung the bundles down. His master condescended to reply. “To make a float.”