Chapter Thirty One.
The Wreck of the Brig.
“Himmel!” exclaimed Fritz, rising up from the bench on which he was sitting and clutching on to the side of the hut for support, being still very feeble and hardly able to stand upright. “There must be a ship out there approaching the island. If she should get too close inshore, she is doomed!”
But, Eric did not answer him. The lad had already rushed down to the beach; and, climbing on to a projecting boulder, was peering into the offing, endeavouring to make out the vessel whose signal gun had been heard in the distance.
The darkness, however, was too great. The heavens were overcast with thick, drifting clouds, while the sea below was as black as ink—except where the breakers at the base of the cliffs broke in masses of foam that gave out a sort of phosphorescent light for the moment, lighting up the outlines of the headlands during the brief interval, only for them to be swallowed up the next instant in the sombre gloom that enwrapped the bay and surrounding scene. Eric, consequently, could see nothing beyond the wall of heaving water which the rollers presented as they thundered on the shingle, dragging back the pebbles in their back-wash with a rattling noise, as if the spirits of the deep were playing with dice in the depths below under the waves!
At his back, the lad could see the bonfire still blazing, casting the foreground in all the deeper shadow from its flickering light; and, never did he regret anything more in his life than the sudden impulse which had led him into so dangerous a freak, as that of lighting the bonfire.
Who knew what further terrible peril that treacherous fire might not lead to, besides the mischief it had already done?
Bye-and-bye, there came the sound of another gun from the sea. The report sounded nearer this time; still, Eric could see nothing in sight on the horizon when some break in the clouds allowed him a momentary glimpse of the angry ocean—nothing but the huge billows chasing each other in towards the land and the seething foam at the base of the crags, on which they broke themselves in impotent fury when they found their further course arrested by the rocky ramparts of the island.