For himself, he might yet have Ethel in his power. Some very daring, dark, and incoherent thoughts flashed through his mind. He might have her, in spite of Fate and Fortune, too; and afterwards, when once on shore, she would feel herself compelled to link her future life with his.
The shore—any shore—oh, how he longed for it.
He felt himself constrained to avoid the deck, save in the night, and thus to spend the entire day below.
Secluded there like a felon, avoided like a reptile, he asked himself, was he really the man of yesterday or the day before?—the same Cramply Hawkshaw who had sat at table with the Bassets and officers of the ship, enjoying their society and companionship, as an equal and friend?
Was the past, indeed, gone for ever? He was on board the same ship (how he loathed and cursed every rope in her rigging, every plank in her hull); he still heard the same daily sounds on deck, the same voices from time to time, and more than once he had heard Rose Basset's ringing laugh; there was the same rush of water alongside; the same moaning of the wind aloft; the same bell clanging the half hours; all seemed unchanged but he alone!
He could not bring back the perfect idea of himself, or what he was.
How bitterly he felt, how impatiently he spurned the restraint imposed upon him in the circumscribed space of the ship, and longed for land, any land, as we have said—Africa, even Dahomey, were welcome—that he might escape and hide himself from all; but chiefly from the Bassets, before whom he had so successfully glozed over his secret life and real character by a network of lies, crimes, and cunning—a network which Morley's sudden appearance had torn aside.
Right well he knew the light in which all viewed him now—a swindler, impostor, and worse.
Unless it lingered in the emotions of envy and wounded self-esteem, his selfish passion for Ethel had quite evaporated, amid his shame and humiliation, or was almost merged in his vengeful hate of Morley—a sentiment rendered all the deeper by the wrongs already attempted without success.
So there, between decks, in the scene of his last attempted crime, he sat and brooded darkly on the past, or scheming out the future; a trial he did not dread, even if the vessel reached the Isle of France, and Morley Ashton urged it by an appeal to the civil authorities.