As he thought of the home he had quitted years ago, of his father's changed nature and indifference, his brother's selfishness, his stepmother's unrelenting malevolence, and Reeve Rudderhead's cruel treachery, all culminating in the present catastrophe, leaving him to perish helpless and unavenged, excitement made his wound burst out afresh, and he staunched it again with difficulty.
The southern constellations came out in all their wonderful brilliance, and under their silvery light, he sat lost in thoughts that wrung his heart. How long—even if he found food and concealment—might it be ere a ship passed that way; and if one did, how was he to attract the attention of those on board—how signal to them unseen by the savage inhabitants of the isle?
The memory of much that he had read, of men wrecked or marooned in lonely and desolate places, together with the fancies of a quick and fertile imagination, added greatly to the poignancy of his mental sufferings. For in its desperation his situation was a maddening one, and calculated to blind him with horror and despair.
Was he to perish of starvation and exposure in the groves of the island, or to find a death of torture at the hands of its inhabitants, without obtaining even a grave? for there was a detail in the future after death, that made his blood run cold to think of.
And was this unthought-of fate to be the end of all his once bright day-dreams, his hopes and aspirations! And were all his bright ambitions and little vanities—the vanities and ambitions of ardent youth—to end in less and worse than utter nothingness?
He feared to move about even in search of food, lest the track of his footsteps might be found, for he knew that the aboriginals of such places can follow as blood-hounds do—but by sight, not scent, and in a manner that seems incredible to the European—any track they find, and follow it, too, over grass and rock, even up a tree; thus he knew that were his traces found, he would inevitably be tracked and discovered, wherever he went.
So the long hours of the night went slowly past, and he longed, as a change or relief, for morning. "Poor fools that we are!" says a writer; "our hours are in time so few, and yet we forever wish them shorter, and fling them, scarcely used, behind us roughly, as a child flings his broken toys."
At last exhaustion of the mind and body brought blessed sleep, and on the dewy earth, under the shelter of some black and silver mimosa trees, he slumbered heavily till the noon of the next day was well advanced, and the sun shone in the unclouded sky.
He had a dream of the now defunct cottage at Finglecombe, as it existed when he was wont to play by his mother's knee, or watch with childish wonder his silent father, a moody and discontented man. He started and awoke, recalling an old Devonshire superstition, that to have a dream of one's childhood, when in maturity, was a sure sign that something was about to happen.
"Oh, what may that something be!" was his first despairing, rather than hopeful, mental thought, and with it came a terror of what the long and solitary hunger-stricken day might bring forth.