Hugh Trethowen sat motionless and helpless, enduring in silence agony indescribable. Whither they were drifting he knew not, cared not. He knew his fate was sealed.
His companion was the man who had spoken to him on that evening when he was hesitating whether he should abandon belief in an Almighty Power, and now, as he leaned beside his fellow-convict, he was wondering which of them would die first. His brain was on fire; he could not move his eyes without acute pain, for their sockets felt as if they had been filled with molten lead. The pains through his cramped limbs were excruciating, yet he was in a drowsy lethargy—conscious and alive to the fact that the bodily torture was fast sapping his life; that ere the sun went down he would be dead.
The hours of furnace heat wore on more slowly than before: hunger, thirst, and madness waxed fiercer.
With that strange faculty possessed by dying persons he seemed to live the chief incidents of his career over again, each vividly and in rapid succession. But in all his wife was the central figure. The thought that he should never see her again—that now, when within an ace of regaining freedom and returning to her, he was to be cut off—roused him. Struggling against these gloomy apprehensions, he ground his teeth and, resting his elbows on his knees, determined to conquer pain and cheat the Avenger.
Taking the handkerchief from his forehead, he dipped it into the sea and again bandaged his head.
The other man looked up and moaned. He had passed the active stage of suffering. All grew more and more like a confused dream, in which he saw nothing clearly, except, at intervals, the grave sadness of Trethowen’s face, as he sat awaiting insanity or death.
The groans of his fellow-sufferer did not escape Hugh. He groped about and found a small piece of canvas to lay under the man’s head; it was all he could do to make him comfortable.
There was but little difference in the condition of all three now. Even the madman’s fit had passed away, and he was lying back motionless, with bright, fevered eyes gazing aimlessly upward into the cloudless vault of blue.
After a long silence, broken only by the gasps and agonised groans of the suffering men, the convict by whose side Hugh was lying stirred uneasily, and turned his wide-open, glassy eyes towards his companion. “Tre—Tre—thowen!” he gasped hoarsely.
Hugh started up in surprise. All his strength came back to him in that moment. It was the first time he had been addressed by name since his transportation.