John Rex, gazing up at this memento of a forgotten agony, felt a sensation of the most vulgar pleasure. “There’s wood for my fire!” thought he; and mounting to the spot, he essayed to fling down the splinters of timber upon the platform. Long exposed to the sun, and flung high above the water-mark of recent storms, the timber had dried to the condition of touchwood, and would burn fiercely. It was precisely what he required. Strange accident that had for years stored, upon a desolate rock, this fragment of a vanished and long-forgotten vessel, that it might aid at last to warm the limbs of a villain escaping from justice!
Striking the disintegrated mass with his iron-shod heel, John Rex broke off convenient portions; and making a bag of his shirt by tying the sleeves and neck, he was speedily staggering into the cavern with a supply of fuel. He made two trips, flinging down the wood on the floor of the gallery that overlooked the sea, and was returning for a third, when his quick ear caught the dip of oars. He had barely time to lift the seaweed curtain that veiled the entrance to the chasm, when the Eaglehawk boat rounded the promontory. Burgess was in the stern-sheets, and seemed to be making signals to someone on the top of the cliff. Rex, grinning behind his veil, divined the manoeuvre. McNab and his party were to search above, while the Commandant examined the gulf below. The boat headed direct for the passage, and for an instant John Rex’s undaunted soul shivered at the thought that, perhaps, after all, his pursuers might be aware of the existence of the cavern. Yet that was unlikely. He kept his ground, and the boat passed within a foot of him, gliding silently into the gulf. He observed that Burgess’s usually florid face was pale, and that his left sleeve was cut open, showing a bandage on the arm. There had been some fighting, then, and it was not unlikely that all his fellow-desperadoes had been captured! He chuckled at his own ingenuity and good sense. The boat, emerging from the archway, entered the pool of the Blow-hole, and, held with the full strength of the party, remained stationary. John Rex watched Burgess scan the rocks and eddies, saw him signal to McNab, and then, with much relief, beheld the boat’s head brought round to the sea-board.
He was so intent upon watching this dangerous and difficult operation that he was oblivious of an extraordinary change which had taken place in the interior of the cavern. The water which, an hour ago, had left exposed a long reef of black hummock-rocks, was now spread in one foam-flecked sheet over the ragged bottom of the rude staircase by which he had descended. The tide had turned, and the sea, apparently sucked in through some deeper tunnel in the portion of the cliff which was below water, was being forced into the vault with a rapidity which bid fair to shortly submerge the mouth of the cave. The convict’s feet were already wetted by the incoming waves, and as he turned for one last look at the boat he saw a green billow heave up against the entrance to the chasm, and, almost blotting out the daylight, roll majestically through the arch. It was high time for Burgess to take his departure if he did not wish his whale-boat to be cracked like a nut against the roof of the tunnel. Alive to his danger, the Commandant abandoned the search after his late prisoner’s corpse, and he hastened to gain the open sea. The boat, carried backwards and upwards on the bosom of a monstrous wave, narrowly escaped destruction, and John Rex, climbing to the gallery, saw with much satisfaction the broad back of his out-witted gaoler disappear round the sheltering promontory. The last efforts of his pursuers had failed, and in another hour the only accessible entrance to the convict’s retreat was hidden under three feet of furious seawater.
His gaolers were convinced of his death, and would search for him no more. So far, so good. Now for the last desperate venture—the escape from the wonderful cavern which was at once his shelter and his prison. Piling his wood together, and succeeding after many efforts, by the aid of a flint and the ring which yet clung to his ankle, in lighting a fire, and warming his chilled limbs in its cheering blaze, he set himself to meditate upon his course of action. He was safe for the present, and the supply of food that the rock afforded was amply sufficient to sustain life in him for many days, but it was impossible that he could remain for many days concealed. He had no fresh water, and though, by reason of the soaking he had received, he had hitherto felt little inconvenience from this cause, the salt and acrid mussels speedily induced a raging thirst, which he could not alleviate. It was imperative that within forty-eight hours at farthest he should be on his way to the peninsula. He remembered the little stream into which—in his flight of the previous night—he had so nearly fallen, and hoped to be able, under cover of the darkness, to steal round the reef and reach it unobserved. His desperate scheme was then to commence. He had to run the gauntlet of the dogs and guards, gain the peninsula, and await the rescuing vessel. He confessed to himself that the chances were terribly against him. If Gabbett and the others had been recaptured—as he devoutly trusted—the coast would be comparatively clear; but if they had escaped, he knew Burgess too well to think that he would give up the chase while hope of re-taking the absconders remained to him. If indeed all fell out as he had wished, he had still to sustain life until Blunt found him—if haply Blunt had not returned, wearied with useless and dangerous waiting.
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 misshapen 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.”
“My orders are to cruise about the whaling grounds until I meet my consort,” returned Blunt sullenly, “and put you aboard her. She’ll take you back to Sydney. I’m victualled for a twelve-months’ trip.”
“Right!” cried Rex, clapping his preserver on the back. “I’m bound to get to Sydney somehow; but, as the Philistines are abroad, I may as well tarry in Jericho till my beard be grown. Don’t stare at my Scriptural quotation, Mr. Staples,” he added, inspirited by creature comforts, and secure amid his purchased friends. “I assure you that I’ve had the very best religious instruction. Indeed, it is chiefly owing to my worthy spiritual pastor and master that I am enabled to smoke this very villainous tobacco of yours at the present moment!”
CHAPTER XXVII
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH
IT was not until they had scrambled up the beach to safety that the absconders became fully aware of the loss of another of their companions. As they stood on the break of the beach, wringing the water from their clothes, Gabbett’s small eye, counting their number, missed the stroke oar.
“Where’s Cox?”
“The fool fell overboard,” said Jemmy Vetch shortly. “He never had as much sense in that skull of his as would keep it sound on his shoulders.” Gabbett scowled. “That’s three of us gone,” he said, in the tones of a man suffering some personal injury.
They summed up their means of defence against attack. Sanders and Greenhill had knives. Gabbett still retained the axe in his belt. Vetch had dropped his musket at the Neck, and Bodenham and Cornelius were unarmed.
“Let’s have a look at the tucker,” said Vetch.
There was but one bag of provisions. It contained a piece of salt pork, two loaves, and some uncooked potatoes. Signal Hill station was not rich in edibles.
“That ain’t much,” said the Crow, with rueful face. “Is it, Gabbett?”
“It must do, any way,” returned the giant carelessly.
The inspection over, the six proceeded up the shore, and encamped under the lee of a rock. Bodenham was for lighting a fire, but Vetch, who, by tacit consent, had been chosen leader of the expedition, forbade it, saying that the light might betray them. “They’ll think we’re drowned, and won’t pursue us,” he said. So all that night the miserable wretches crouched Tireless together.
Morning br
eaks clear and bright, and—free for the first time in ten years—they comprehend that their terrible journey has begun. “Where are we to go? How are we to live?” asked Bodenham, scanning the barren bush that stretches to the barren sea. “Gabbett, you’ve been out before—how’s it done?”
“We’ll make the shepherds’ huts, and live on their tucker till we get a change o’ clothes,” said Gabbett evading the main question. “We can follow the coast-line.”
“Steady, lads,” said prudent Vetch; “we must sneak round yon sandhills, and so creep into the scrub. If they’ve a good glass at the Neck, they can see us.”
For the Term of His Natural Life Page 42
