It was dreadful, to plunge into those mysteriously disturbed waters, containing far below who could tell what hideous monsters?—to swim, or try to swim, where the strange eddies and whirlpools might draw the struggling wretch down! To swim, too, in profound darkness; for I felt that if the attempt were made it would be made together.
The thoughts in my breast must have been the same as those in poor Tom’s; for, looking at the faintly-discerned raft and then up at me, he said with a groan: “Mas’r Harry, I daren’t!”
“Tom,” I said, “I dare not!”
“But tell me to try it, Mas’r Harry,” he cried—“order me to swim off to it, and I’ll try. I shall be sucked down like a cork in a sink-hole, but tell me to do it—order me and make me, and I’ll try; but I daren’t go without I was made.”
“Light another piece of oakum, Tom,” I said hoarsely. “Perhaps the water on the sand is shallow and we might walk along to the other end, and then try to swim together: it would not be half so far. But stay—hold my hand while I step down and try.”
We crept down to where the sand had been bare when we left it, though loose and yielding; and, sticking the short piece of candle in a crevice, Tom seized my hand firmly and I stepped down into the water, but only to cry to Tom to draw me forth, for the sand was quick now and watery, and more dangerous to him who ventured upon it than the lake itself.
It was not without a sharp struggle that I once more stood beside Tom upon the ledge of rock, when without a word he drew out the oakum and prepared to light it, while, half beside myself with horror, I tried to calculate how far was the distance, and whether, by well marking the spot where the raft floated, we could not contrive to hit it in swimming in the dark. That we should have to swim in the dark I knew; for neither of us, I felt, could then have swum with one hand, holding a light above the troubled waters with the other.
Just then Tom’s oakum blazed up behind me, to light up the vault with its sparkling stalactitic roof, glistening sides, and strangely-agitated water. There floated the raft plainly enough just in front of the arch, and so near to our reach that in an instant Tom had thrown off cap, wallet, and jacket beside the candles stuck in the rock and the still burning oakum.
“No, Tom—no!” I cried, catching at him; “you must not risk it.”
“Let go, Mas’r Harry—I must!” he shouted. “I swore I’d stick to you.”