In a pause of silence among the cattle, he heard behind him, on the opposite shore of the channel, faint and far among the solitudes of the Islet of the Calf, a sharp, sudden sound, like the distant clash of a heavy door-bolt drawn back. Turning at once in the new direction, he strained his eyes to look for a house. The last faint rays of the waning moonlight trembled here and there on the higher rocks, and on the steeper pinnacles of ground, but great strips of darkness lay dense and black over all the land between; and in that darkness the house, if house there were, was lost to view.
“I have roused somebody at last,” Allan called out, encouragingly, to Midwinter, still walking to and fro on the deck, strangely indifferent to all that was passing above and beyond him. “Look out for the answering, hail!” And with his face set toward the islet, Allan shouted for help.
The shout was not answered, but mimicked with a shrill, shrieking derision, with wilder and wilder cries, rising out of the deep distant darkness, and mingling horribly the expression of a human voice with the sound of a brute’s. A sudden suspicion crossed Allan’s mind, which made his head swim and turned his hand cold as it held the rigging. In breathless silence he looked toward the quarter from which the first mimicry of his cry for help had come. After a moment’s pause the shrieks were renewed, and the sound of them came nearer. Suddenly a figure, which seemed the figure of a man, leaped up black on a pinnacle of rock, and capered and shrieked in the waning gleam of the moonlight. The screams of a terrified woman mingled with the cries of the capering creature on the rock. A red spark flashed out in the darkness from a light kindled in an invisible window. The hoarse shouting of a man’s voice in anger was heard through the noise. A second black figure leaped up on the rock, struggled with the first figure, and disappeared with it in the darkness. The cries grew fainter and fainter, the screams of the woman were stilled, the hoarse voice of the man was heard again for a moment, hailing the wreck in words made unintelligible by the distance, but in tones plainly expressive of rage and fear combined. Another moment, and the clang of the door-bolt was heard again, the red spark of light was quenched in darkness, and all the islet lay quiet in the shadows once more. The lowing of the cattle on the main-land ceased, rose again, stopped. Then, cold and cheerless as ever, the eternal bubbling of the broken water welled up through the great gap of silence—the one sound left, as the mysterious stillness of the hour fell like a mantle from the heavens, and closed over the wreck.
Allan descended from his place in the mizzen-top, and joined his friend again on deck.
“We must wait till the ship-breakers come off to their work,” he said, meeting Midwinter halfway in the course of his restless walk. “After what has happened, I don’t mind confessing that I’ve had enough of hailing the land. Only think of there being a madman in that house ashore, and of my waking him! Horrible, wasn’t it?”
Midwinter stood still for a moment, and looked at Allan, with the perplexed air of a man who hears circumstances familiarly mentioned to which he is himself a total stranger. He appeared, if such a thing had been possible, to have passed over entirely without notice all that had just happened on the Islet of the Calf.
“Nothing is horrible out of this ship,” he said. “Everything is horrible in it.”
Answering in those strange words, he turned away again, and went on with his walk.
Allan picked up the flask of whisky lying on the deck near him, and revived his spirits with a dram. “Here’s one thing on board that isn’t horrible,” he retorted briskly, as he screwed on the stopper of the flask; “and here’s another,” he added, as he took a cigar from his case and lit it. “Three o’clock!” he went on, looking at his watch, and settling himself comfortably on deck with his back against the bulwark. “Daybreak isn’t far off; we shall have the piping of the birds to cheer us up before long. I say, Midwinter, you seem to have quite got over that unlucky fainting fit. How you do keep walking! Come here and have a cigar, and make yourself comfortable. What’s the good of tramping backward and forward in that restless way?”
“I am waiting,” said Midwinter.