Page 533 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

dangerous waiting.
As night came on, and the firelight showed strange shad-
ows waving from the corners of the enormous vault, while
the dismal abysses beneath him murmured and muttered
with uncouth and ghastly utterance, there fell upon the
lonely man the terror of Solitude. Was this marvellous hid-
ing-place that he had discovered to be his sepulchre? Was
he—a monster amongst his fellow-men—to die some mon-
strous death, entombed in this mysterious and terrible
cavern of the sea? He had tried to drive away these gloomy
thoughts by sketching out for himself a plan of action— but
in vain. In vain he strove to picture in its completeness
that —as yet vague—design by which he promised himself
to wrest from the vanished son of the wealthy ship-builder
his name and heritage. His mind, filled with forebodings of
shadowy horror, could not give the subject the calm consid-
eration which it needed. In the midst of his schemes for the
baffling of the jealous love of the woman who was to save
him, and the getting to England, in shipwrecked and for-
eign guise, as the long-lost heir to the fortune of Sir Richard
Devine, there arose ghastly and awesome shapes of death
and horror, with whose terrible unsubstantiality he must
grapple in the lonely recesses of that dismal cavern. He
heaped fresh wood upon his fire, that the bright light might
drive out the gruesome things that lurked above, below, and
around him. He became afraid to look behind him, lest some
shapeless mass of mid-sea birth—some voracious polype,
with far-reaching arms and jellied mouth ever open to de-
vour—might slide up over the edge of the dripping caves

For the Term of His Natural Life