“It can only be accounted for by the fact that the creese had been left on the shore earlier than the officer of the ship believed,” he said aloud, as if addressing a companion. “The light which Mr. Clark thinks he fancied must have been a reality—a signal to other vessels in the vicinity. While the ball was at its height the pirates landed, so completely surprising the merry-makers that resistance was more than useless; therefore no blood was shed, but every member of the party was made prisoner. At that moment, according to my belief, a body of apes appeared, and the pirates, in the darkness, mistaking them for human beings, fled before there was an opportunity to gather up the plunder.”
This supposition was certainly the most plausible of any yet entertained by Philip. Had the entire colony been captured while at the ball, it would account for the disorder of the dining-room, where the tables had been prepared for the banquet.
With these gloomy ideas in his mind Philip no longer dreamed of vengeance. He now believed that escape from the island was impossible. Should he succeed in holding the apes at bay it would only serve to prolong life until the pirates returned, as they undoubtedly would under the belief that there were more inhabitants on the island.
“I shall live in this building as in a tomb as long as it pleases God to preserve me,” he said to himself. “And the treasure in the cave is of no more value than if I had piled up the sands on the sea-shore. To dream of leaving here is little less than madness, surrounded and guarded as I am by those who are a thousand times more crafty and cruel than the Malay pirates.”
All hope was dead, and as does one who bids farewell to this earth, expecting his stay on it is numbered by hours, he moved about mechanically, but yet instinctively trying to preserve longer his wretched existence. As if his weapons were now useless he replaced them in the closet, but examined once more the fastenings of the doors and windows, closing the shuttered loop-holes that he might not see the sinister and menacing cordon of besiegers.
Then he descended to the floor below, determined there to spend the last few hours of this most unnatural drama. The darkness was preferable to light when even the slight consolation of hope must be denied, and he waited only for death, in what form he did not speculate, to come.