Impossible! The likeness had been too deeply impressed upon his memory since that awful night at Acton Chine; so he needed not to go between decks again, and, moreover, he dared not, lest Morley should awake and recognise him.
"How came he to escape death at the Chine? How to be sailing on the sea, and hereabout too?" thought Hawkshaw. "Oh, strange, and most accursed fatality! But for me, perhaps, we might have passed that piece of wreck—passed it unseen by all on board; but Fate is retributive; I was the first to descry, the first to be anxious to visit it."
For a moment, but a moment only, there came into his soul a gleam of joy, with the conviction that he was not, as he had so long remorsefully considered himself, the destroyer of a fellow-creature.
His victim—Heaven alone knew how!—had escaped, and was here alive and safe on board the Hermione. The ever-present idea of crime, with the word that had seemed ever before his eyes, on his lips, and in his heart—that shone in his dreams like those letters of flame that flashed on the vision of Belshazzar, could be a terror to him no longer.
The proverbs, that "Murder will out;" that "God's retribution will fall upon a murderer;" the law, that "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed," would haunt him no more,—for this crime at least.
Such were his ideas for a moment; but the next, cold, selfish fear resumed its sway, and reason showed him that he was yet an assassin by intent—one whom his intended victim would expose, crush, and destroy, if—what?—he was not anticipated, crushed and destroyed first.
To Hawkshaw, this waif from the ocean was worse by a thousand degrees than his rencontre with the two Barradas.
To avoid the accusations, the shame and contumely that Morley Ashton could heap upon him, by the exposure of his falsehood, cruelty, and hypocrisy, he would, happily, now have relinquished even Ethel Basset, and all he had hoped from her father's patronage in the Isle of France. He would gladly have fled; but whither could he fly—how, when, where?—encompassed as he was by the sea? Save in its depth, there was no escape from this accursed ship, as there was no eluding his own conscience, in this floating prison, the Hermione—how he loathed the name!—with her crew of foul and treacherous mutineers.
He had one hope left. Morley might die on getting food. He seemed so weak when brought on board, that the powers of digestion might be past, so that death might ensue from mere inanition.
But then his three companions would probably know his story, and were certain, if they survived, to reveal all Hawkshaw's guilt.