As night came on, and the firelight showed strange shadows waving from the corners of the enormous vault, while the dismal abysses beneath him murmured and muttered with uncouth and ghastly utterance, there fell upon the lonely man the terror of Solitude. Was this marvellous hiding-place that he had discovered to be his sepulchre? Was he–a monster amongst his fellow-men–to die some monstrous death, entombed in this mysterious and terrible cavern of the sea? He had tried to drive away these gloomy thoughts by sketching out for himself a plan of action– but in vain. In vain he strove to picture in its completeness that –as yet vague–design by which he promised himself to wrest from the vanished son of the wealthy ship-builder his name and heritage. His mind, filled with forebodings of shadowy horror, could not give the subject the calm consideration which it needed. In the midst of his schemes for the baffling of the jealous love of the woman who was to save him, and the getting to England, in shipwrecked and foreign guise, as the long-lost heir to the fortune of Sir Richard Devine, there arose ghastly and awesome shapes of death and horror, with whose terrible unsubstantiality he must grapple in the lonely recesses of that dismal cavern. He heaped fresh wood upon his fire, that the bright light might drive out the gruesome things that lurked above, below, and around him. He became afraid to look behind him, lest some shapeless mass of mid-sea birth–some voracious polype, with far-reaching arms and jellied mouth ever open to devour–might slide up over the edge of the dripping caves below, and fasten upon him in the darkness. His imagination–always sufficiently vivid, and spurred to an unnatural effect by the exciting scenes of the previous night–painted each patch of shadow, clinging bat-like to the humid wall, as some globular sea-spider ready to drop upon him with its viscid and clay-cold body, and drain out his chilled blood, enfolding him in rough and hairy arms. Each splash in the water beneath him, each sigh of the multitudinous and melancholy sea, seemed to prelude the laborious advent of some mis-shapen and ungainly abortion of the ooze. All the sensations induced by lapping water and regurgitating waves took material shape and surrounded him. All creatures that could be engendered by slime and salt crept forth into the firelight to stare at him. Red dabs and splashes that were living beings, having a strange phosphoric light of their own, glowed upon the floor. The livid encrustations of a hundred years of humidity slipped from off the walls and painfully heaved their mushroom surfaces to the blaze. The red glow of the unwonted fire, crimsoning the wet sides of the cavern, seemed to attract countless blisterous and transparent shapelessnesses, which elongated themselves towards him. Bloodless and bladdery things ran hither and thither noiselessly. Strange carapaces crawled from out of the rocks. All the horrible unseen life of the ocean seemed to be rising up and surrounding him. He retreated to the brink of the gulf, and the glare of the upheld brand fell upon a rounded hummock, whose coronal of silky weed out-floating in the water looked like the head of a drowned man. He rushed to the entrance of the gallery, and his shadow, thrown into the opening, took the shape of an avenging phantom, with arms upraised to warn him back. The naturalist, the explorer, or the shipwrecked seaman would have found nothing frightful in this exhibition of the harmless life of the Australian ocean. But the convict’s guilty conscience, long suppressed and derided, asserted itself in this hour when it was alone with Nature and Night. The bitter intellectual power which had so long supported him succumbed beneath imagination–the unconscious religion of the soul. If ever he was nigh repentance it was then. Phantoms of his past crimes gibbered at him, and covering his eyes with his hands, he fell shuddering upon his knees. The brand, loosening from his grasp, dropped into the gulf, and was extinguished with a hissing noise. As if the sound had called up some spirit that lurked below, a whisper ran through the cavern.
“John Rex!” The hair on the convict’s flesh stood up, and he cowered to the earth.
“John Rex?”
It was a human voice! Whether of friend or enemy he did not pause to think. His terror over-mastered all other considerations.
“Here! here!” he cried, and sprang to the opening of the vault.
Arrived at the foot of the cliff, Blunt and Staples found themselves in almost complete darkness, for the light of the mysterious fire, which had hitherto guided them, had necessarily disappeared. Calm as was the night, and still as was the ocean, the sea yet ran with silent but dangerous strength through the channel which led to the Blow-hole; and Blunt, instinctively feeling the boat drawn towards some unknown peril, held off the shelf of rocks out of reach of the current. A sudden flash of fire, as from a flourished brand, burst out above them, and floating downwards through the darkness, in erratic circles, came an atom of burning wood. Surely no one but a hunted man would lurk in such a savage retreat.
Blunt, in desperate anxiety, determined to risk all upon one venture. “John Rex!” he shouted up through his rounded hands. The light flashed again at the eye-hole of the mountain, and on the point above them appeared a wild figure, holding in its hands a burning log, whose fierce glow illumined a face so contorted by deadly fear and agony of expectation that it was scarce human.
“Here! here!”
“The poor devil seems half-crazy,” said Will Staples, under his breath; and then aloud, “We’re FRIENDS!” A few moments sufficed to explain matters. The terrors which had oppressed John Rex disappeared in human presence, and the villain’s coolness returned. Kneeling on the rock platform, he held parley.
“It is impossible for me to come down now,” he said. “The tide covers the only way out of the cavern.”
“Can’t you dive through it?” said Will Staples.
“No, nor you neither,” said Rex, shuddering at the thought of trusting himself to that horrible whirlpool.
“What’s to be done? You can’t come down that wall.” “Wait until morning,” returned Rex coolly. “It will be dead low tide at seven o’clock. You must send a boat at six, or there-abouts. It will be low enough for me to get out, I dare say, by that time.”
“But the Guard?”
” Won’t come here, my man. They’ve got their work to do in watching the Neck and exploring after my mates. They won’t come here. Besides, I’m dead.”
“Dead!”
“Thought to be so, which is as well–better for me, perhaps. If they don’t see your ship, or your boat, you’re safe enough.”
“I don’t like to risk it,” said Blunt. “It’s Life if we’re caught.”
“It’s Death if I’m caught!” returned the other, with a sinister laugh. “But there’s no danger if you are cautious. No one looks for rats in a terrier’s kennel, and there’s not a station along the beach from here to Cape Pillar. Take your vessel out of eye-shot of the Neck, bring the boat up Descent Beach, and the thing’s done.”
“Well,” says Blunt, “I’ll try it.”
“You wouldn’t like to stop here till morning? It is rather lonely,” suggested Rex, absolutely making a jest of his late terrors.
Will Staples laughed. “You’re a bold boy!” said he. “We’ll come at daybreak.”
“Have you got the clothes as I directed?”
“Yes.”
“Then good night. I’ll put my fire out, in case somebody else might see it, who wouldn’t be as kind as you are.”
“Good night.”
“Not a word for the Madam,” said Staples, when they reached the vessel.
“Not a word, the ungrateful dog,” asserted Blunt, adding, with some heat, “That’s the way with women. They’ll go through fire and water for a man that doesn’t care a snap of his fingers for ’em; but for any poor fellow who risks his neck to pleasure ’em they’ve nothing but sneers! I wish I’d never meddled in the business.”
“There are no fools like old fools,” thought Will Staples, looking back through the darkness at the place where the fire had been, but he did not utter his thoughts aloud.
At eight o’clock the next morning the Pretty Mary stood out to sea with every stitch of canvas set, alow and aloft. The skipper’s fishing had come to an end. He had caught a shipwrecked seaman, who had been brought on board at daylight, and was then at breakfast in the cabin. The crew winked at each other when the haggard mariner, attired in garments that seemed remarkably well preserved, mounted the side. But they, none of them, were in a position to controvert the skipper’s statement.
“Where are we bound for?” asked John Rex, smoking Staples’s pipe in lingering puffs of delight. “I’m entirely in your hands, Blunt.”