My companion at last suggested that I should tie a tablecloth to the mast; its peculiar whiteness might attract attention. The sail was presently taken in, and the tablecloth spread in its place; but, unfortunately, it soon afterwards came on a dead calm—the breeze died away, and the cloth hung in long folds against the mast.
No notice whatever was taken of us. We now took to our oars and pulled in the direction of the ship; but after several hours’ hard rowing, our strength had so suffered from our previous fatigues, that we seemed to have made very little distance.
In a short time the sun set, and we watched the object of all our hopes with most anxious eyes, till night set in and hid her from our sight. Shortly afterwards a light breeze again sprung up; with renewed hope we gave our sail to the wind, but it bore us in a contrary direction, and when morning dawned we saw no more of the ship.
The wind had now again shifted, and bore us briskly along. But where? I had fallen asleep during the preceding night, wearied out with labour and anxiety, and I did not wake till long after daybreak. Mrs Reichardt would not disturb me. In sleep I was insensible to the miseries and dangers of my position. She could not bring herself to disturb a repose that was at once so necessary to mind and body; and I fell into a sweet dream of a new home in that dear England I had prayed so often to see; and bright faces smiled upon me, and voices welcomed me, full of tenderness and affection.
I fancied that in one of those faces I recognised my mother, of whose love I had so early been deprived, and that it was paler than all the others, but infinitely more tender and affectionate: then the countenance seemed to grow paler and paler, till it took upon itself the likeness of the fair creature I had buried in the guano, and I thought she embraced me, and her arms were cold as stone, and she pressed her lips to mine, and they gave a chill to my blood that made me shake as with an ague.
Suddenly I beheld Jackson with his sightless orbs groping towards me with a knife in his hand, muttering imprecations, and he caught hold of me, and we had a desperate struggle, and he plunged a long knife into my chest, with a loud laugh of derision and malice; and as I felt the blade enter my flesh, I gave a start and jumped up, and alarmed Mrs Reichardt by the wild cry with which I awoke.
How strongly was that dream impressed upon my mind; and the features of the different persons who figured in it—how distinctly they were brought before me! My poor mother was as fresh in my recollection as though I had seen her but yesterday, and the sweetness of her looks as she approached me—how I now tried to recall them, and feasted on their memory as though it were a lost blessing.
Then the nameless corpse that had been washed from the wreck, how strange it seemed, that after this lapse of time she should appear to me in a dream, as though we had been long attached to each other, and her affections had been through life entirely my own. Poor girl! Perhaps even now some devoted lover mourns her loss; or hopes at no distant date to be able to join her in the new colony, to attain which a cruel destiny had forced her from his arms. Little does he dream of her nameless grave under the guano. Little does he dream that the only colony in which he is likely to join her, is that settlement in the great desert of oblivion, over which Death has remained governor from the birth of the world.
But the most unpleasant part of the vision was the appearance of Jackson; and it was a long time before I could bring myself to believe that I had not beheld his well-known features—that I had not been stabbed by him, and that I was not suffering from the mortal wound he had inflicted. I however at last shook off the delusion, and to Mrs Reichardt’s anxious inquiries replied only that I had had a disagreeable dream.
In a short time I began to doubt whether the waking was more pleasant than the dreaming—the vast ocean still spread itself before me like a mighty winding-sheet, the fair sky, beautiful as it appeared in the rays of the morning sun, I could only regard as a pall—and our little bark was the coffin in which two helpless human beings, though still existing, were waiting interment.