Page 680 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

of delight that went up, and pressed again the welcoming
hands which greeted the rescued castaways. The deck was
crowded. All the folk he had ever known were there. He
saw the white hair and stern features of Sir Richard Devine,
and beside him stood, wringing her thin hands, his weep-
ing mother. Then Frere strode forward, and after him John
Rex, the convict, who, roughly elbowing through the crowd
of prisoners and gaolers, would have reached the spot where
stood Sir Richard Devine, but that the corpse of the mur-
dered Lord Bellasis arose and thrust him back. How the
hammers clattered in the shipbuilder’s yard! Was it a coffin
they were making? Not for Sylvia—surely not for her! The
air grows heavy, lurid with flame, and black with smoke.
The Hydaspes is on fire! Sylvia clings to her husband. Base
wretch, would you shake her off! Look up; the midnight
heaven is glittering with stars; above the smoke the air
breathes delicately! One step—another! Fix your eyes on
mine—so—to my heart! Alas! she turns; he catches at her
dress. What! It is a priest—a priest—who, smiling with in-
fernal joy, would drag her to the flaming gulf that yawns for
him. The dreamer leaps at the wretch’s throat, and crying,
‘Villain, was it for this fate I saved her?’—and awakes to find
himself struggling with the monster of his dream, the idol
of his waking senses—‘Mr. North.’
North, paralysed no less by the suddenness of the attack
than by the words with which it was accompanied, let fall
his cloak, and stood trembling before the prophetic accusa-
tion of the man whose curses he had come to earn.
‘I was dreaming,’ said Rufus Dawes. ‘A terrible dream!