Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1734 page)

One of the boats was lowered into the water — under command of the second mate, who had taken the ‘bearings’ of the tabooed island by daylight. Four of the men were to go with him, and they were all to be well armed. Mr. Duncalf addressed his final instructions to the officer in the boat.

‘You will keep a look-out with a lantern in the bows. When you get a-nigh the island, you will fire a gun and sing out for the captain —
 
— ’

‘Quite needless,’ interposed a voice from the sea. ‘The captain is here!’

Without taking the slightest notice of the astonishment that he had caused, the captain paddled his canoe to the side of the ship. Instead of ascending to the deck of the ‘Fortuna,’ he stepped into the boat. ‘Lend me your pistols,’ he said quietly to the second officer, ‘and oblige me by taking your men back to their duties on board.’ He looked up at Mr. Duncalf and gave some further directions. ‘If there is any change in the weather, keep the ship standing off and on, at a safe distance from the land, and throw up a rocket from time to time to show your position. Expect me on board again by sunrise.’

‘What!’ cried the mate. ‘Do you mean to say you are going back to the island — in that boat — all by yourself?’

‘I am going back to the island,’ answered the captain, as quietly as ever; ‘in this boat — all by myself.’ He pushed off from the ship, and hoisted the sail as he spoke.

‘You’re deserting your duty!’ shouted the mate, with one of his loudest oaths.

‘Attend to my directions,’ the captain shouted back, as he drifted away into the darkness.

Mr. Duncalf — violently agitated for the first time in his life — took leave of his superior officer, with a singular mixture of solemnity and politeness, in these words:

‘The Lord have mercy on your soul! I wish you good-evening.’

VIII.

A
LONE
in the boat, the captain looked with a misgiving mind at the flashing of the volcano on the main island.

If events had favoured him, he would have removed Aimata to the shelter of the ship on the day when he saw the emptied basin on the lake. But the smoke of the Priest’s sacrifice had been discovered from the main island; and the chief had sent two canoes with instructions to make enquiries. One of the canoes had returned; the other was kept in waiting off the cape, to place a means of communicating with the main island at the disposal of the Priest. The second shock of earthquake had naturally increased the alarm of the chief. He had sent messages to the Priest, entreating him to leave the island. The Priest refused. He believed in his gods and his sacrifices — he believed they might avert the fatality that threatened his sanctuary.

Yielding to the holy man, the chief sent re-enforcements of canoes to take their turn at keeping watch off the headland. Assisted by torches, the islanders were on the alert (in superstitious terror of the demon of the prophecy) by night as well as by day. The captain would have risked certain death if he had ventured to approach the hiding-place in which he had concealed his canoe. It was only after Aimata had left him as usual, to return to her father at the close of evening, that the chances declared themselves in the captain’s favour. The fire-flashes from the mountain, visible when the night came, had struck terror into the hearts of the men in the canoes. They thought of their wives, their children, and their possessions on the main island, and they one and all deserted their Priest. The captain seized the opportunity of communicating with the ship, and of exchanging a frail canoe which he was ill able to manage, for a swift sailing-boat capable of keeping the sea in the event of stormy weather.

As he now neared the land, certain small sparks of red, moving in the distance, informed him that the canoes had been ordered back to their duty. Steering by the distant torchlights, he reached his own side of the island without accident, and, guided by the boat’s lantern, anchored under the cliff. He climbed the rocks, advanced to the door of the hut — and was met, to his delight and astonishment, by Aimata on the threshold.

‘I dreamed that the anger of the deities had parted us forever,’ she said; ‘and I came here to see if my dream was true. Oh, how I have been crying, all alone in the hut! Now I have seen you, I am satisfied. Kiss me, and let me go back. No! you must not go back with me. My father has his doubts; my father may be out, looking for me. It is you that are in danger, not I. I know the forest as well by dark as by daylight. You shall see me again at daybreak.’

The captain detained her. ‘Now you
are
here,’ he said, ‘why should I wait to place you in safety until daybreak? I have been to the ship; I have brought back one of the boats. The darkness will befriend us — let us embark while we can.’

She shrank back as he took her hand. ‘My father!’ she said, faintly.

‘Your father is in no danger. The canoes are waiting for him at the cape; I saw the lights as I passed.’

With that reply he drew her out of the hut, and turned his face towards the sea. Not a breath of the breeze was now to be felt. The dead calm had returned — and the boat was too large to be easily managed by one man alone at the oars.

‘The breeze may come again,’ he said to her. ‘Wait here, my angel, for the chance.’

As he spoke, the deep silence of the forest below them was broken by a sound. A harsh, wailing voice was heard, calling ‘Aimata! Aimata!’

‘My father!’ she whispered; ‘he has missed me. If he comes here you are lost.’

She kissed him with passionate fervour; she held him to her for a moment with all her strength.

‘Expect me at daybreak,’ she said, and disappeared down the landward slope of the cliff.

He listened, anxious for her safety. The voices of the father and daughter just reached him from among the trees. The Priest spoke in no angry tones; she had apparently found an acceptable excuse for her absence. Little by little, the failing sound of their voices told him that they were on their way back together to the Temple. The silence fell again. Not a ripple broke on the beach. Not a leaf rustled in the forest. Nothing moved but the reflected flashes of the volcano on the black sky over the main island. It was an airless and an awful calm.

He went into the hut, and laid down on his bed of leaves, not to sleep, but to rest. All his energies might be required to meet the coming events of the morning. After the voyage to and from the ship, and the long watching that had preceded it, strong as he was he stood in need of repose.

For some little time he kept awake, thinking. Insensibly the oppression of the intense heat, aided in its influence by his own fatigue, treacherously closed his eyes. In spite of himself, the weary man fell into a deep sleep.

He was awakened by a roar like the explosion of a park of artillery. The volcano on the main island had burst into a state of eruption. Smoky flame-light overspread the sky, and flashed through the open doorway of the hut. He sprang from his couch — and found himself up to his knees in water.

Had the sea overflowed the land? He waded out of the hut, and the water rose to his middle. He looked round him by the lurid flame-light of the eruption. The one visible object within his range of view was the roof of the hut. In every other direction the waters of the horrid sea, stained blood-red by the flaming sky, spread swirling and rippling strangely in the dead calm. In a moment more, he became conscious that the earth on which he stood was sinking under his feet. The water rose to his neck; the last vestige of the roof of the hut disappeared. He looked round again, and the truth burst on him. The island was sinking — slowly, slowly sinking into volcanic depths, below the utmost depth of the sea! The highest object was the hut, and that had dropped, inch by inch, under water, before his own eyes. Thrown up to the surface by occult volcanic influences, the island had sunk back, under the same influences, to the obscurity from which it had emerged!

A black shadowy object, turning in a wide circle, came slowly near him as the all-destroying ocean washed its bitter waters into his mouth. The buoyant boat, rising on the sea as the earth deserted it, had dragged its anchor, and was floating round in the vortex made by the slowly-sinking island. With a last desperate hope that Aimata might have been saved as
he
had been saved, he swam to the boat, seized the heavy oars with the strength of a giant, and made for the place (so far as he could guess at it now) where the lake and the Temple had once been.

He looked round and round him — he strained his eyes in the vain attempt to penetrate below the surface of the seething dimpling sea. Had the panic-stricken watchers in the canoes deserted their post without an effort to save the father and daughter? Or had they both been suffocated before they could make an attempt to escape from their cavern? He called to her in his misery, as if she could hear him out of the fathomless depths: ‘Aimata! Aimata!’ The roar of the distant eruption answered him. The mounting fires lit the solitary sea far and near over the sinking island. The boat turned slowly and more slowly in the lessening vortex. Never again would those gentle eyes look at him with unutterable love! Never again would those fresh lips touch
his
lips with their fervent kiss! Alone, amid the mighty forces of Nature in conflict, the miserable mortal lifted his hands in frantic supplication — and the burning sky glared down on him in its pitiless grandeur, and struck him to his knees in the boat. His reason sank with his sinking limbs. In the merciful frenzy that succeeded the shock, he saw her afar off, alive again in her white robe, an angel poised on the waters, beckoning him to follow her to the brighter and the better world. He loosened the sail, he seized the oars; and the faster he pursued it, the faster the mocking vision fled from him over the empty and endless sea.

IX.

T
HE
boat was discovered, on the next morning, from the ship. All that the devotion of the officers of the ‘Fortuna’ could do for their unhappy commander was done on the homeward voyage. Restored to his own country, and to skilled medical help, the captain’s mind by slow degrees recovered its balance. He has taken his place in society again — he lives and moves and manages his affairs like the rest of us. But his heart is dead to all new emotions; nothing lives in it but the sacred remembrance of his last love. He neither courts nor avoids the society of women. Their sympathy finds him grateful, but their attractions seem to be lost on him; they pass from his mind as they pass from his eyes — they stir nothing in him but the memory of Aimata.

‘Now you know, ladies, why the captain will never marry, and why (sailor as he is) he hates the sight of the sea.’  

When this present nineteenth century was younger by a good many years than it is now, a certain friend of mine, named Arthur Holliday, happened to arrive in the town of Doncaster exactly in the middle of the race-week, or, in other words, in the middle of the month of September.

He was one of those reckless, rattlepated, openhearted, and open-mouthed young gentlemen who possess the gift of familiarity in its highest perfection, and who scramble carelessly along the journey of life, making friends, as the phrase is, wherever they go. His father was a rich manufacturer, and had bought landed, property enough in one of the midland counties to make all the born squires in his neighbourhood thoroughly envious of him. Arthur was his only son, possessor in prospect of the great estate and the great business after his father’s death; well supplied with money, and not too rigidly looked after, during his father’s lifetime. Report, or scandal, whichever you please, said that the old gentleman had been rather wild in his youthful days, and that, unlike most parents, he was not disposed to be violently indignant when he found that his son took after him. This may be true or not. I myself only knew the elder Mr. Holliday when he was getting on in years, and then he was as quiet and as respectable a gentleman as ever I met with.