Helen woke with a start just as the boat disappeared round the curve at
the end of the reach, and her first movement was towards where her
companion had lain down.
At first she could not believe that she was alone, but sat waiting for
the girl's return, believing that she had awakened first, and had gone
for a short distance to try for a better path; but as the minutes sped,
and the darkness would, as she well knew, soon return, a strange
sensation of horror began to trouble her, and she started to her feet,
and began to search around in various directions, even going so far as
to call in a low voice.
She dare not go far for fear that her companion should return and find
her absent, so she kept making little excursions here and there where
the denseness of the jungle was not so great, and then returned to where
she had slept.
Parting the boughs on either side, she then crept as near to the river
as she could, so as to look up and down stream, for what purpose she
could not tell, though it seemed as if an instinct led her to gaze at
the highway by which her companion had departed.
It was now rapidly growing dark, and the feeling of depression and alarm
rapidly increased. So thoroughly frightened did she become at last that
she would gladly have called for help, but her common-sense warned her
that such a proceeding would only bring down her enemies upon her if
they were in hearing; and at last, with her horror of her loneliness
increasing fast, and a feeling of dread that some savage beast of prey
had seized upon the Malay girl gradually overmastering her, she sank
upon the earth, weeping bitterly, helpless as a child, and asking
herself if she dared face all those she knew again, and whether she had
not better die.
How that night passed Helen never knew. Sometimes she sank into a weary
kind of stupor, full of troublous dreams, from which she started awake
with a sense of horror, and a full belief that some terrible creature
was about to spring upon her. At times too, as if to carry out this
illusion, she listened with beating heart to the distant howl of some
wandering beast, or to one or other of the mysterious noises heard
during the night in the primeval wilds.
The darkness seemed as if it would never end, and the rushing river, as
it sped on like a stream of ink full of stars' reflections, hissed and
writhed, and at times lapped the bank upon which she sat as if it were a
huge serpent seeking to make her its prey.
This idea suggested the loathsome monsters that she knew would haunt the
hot, steamy jungle close to the river side; and with starting eyes, when
some low rustle was heard amongst the leaves, she tried to pierce the
darkness, believing over and over again that she saw some lithe,
undulating reptile gradually approaching her; and at such times it
required all her strength of mind to determine that it was but a mere
fancy, and as unreal as the images of fierce creatures that she more
than once believed that she saw coming out of the jungle.
Then her busy brain reminded her of other and more real perils of her
position--the more dangerous from their insidious nature and approach.
Depressed in spirit as she was, she could not help recalling the
accounts she had heard of the deadly fevers, and the certainty of their
attacking anyone who passed the night upon the bare earth.
Still, it would only mean death at the worst, she thought, in a weary,
despondent way; and her misery was so great now that she felt ready to
give up her very life sooner than fall again into Murad's hands.
Then her thoughts flew to Harley, with whom she seemed to associate any
hope that she might have of the future; and for a time she would
brighten up, and contrast her present position with that of some few
hours back. She was a prisoner then, and in terrible peril; now she was
free, and the chances were, she hopefully told herself, that she might
fall in with some party sent in search of her, for she would not believe
Murad's version of her disappearance to be true.
It seemed to her as if the morning would never come, and the first
herald of its approach was a dank, chilling breath that came to her
laden with the mist of the river; and as she sat and shivered she felt
that her clothes were saturated with the heavy dew, and longed now for
the coming of the sun with its warm, inspiring beams and hopeful light.
Her teeth chattered, and her limbs ached as the day broke. She had been
awake for quite a couple of hours; and the weariness and oppression that
troubled her was now supplemented by a throbbing headache, which was at
times almost more than she could bear.
As the sun sent his beams glancing through the jungle, Helen rose
painfully to her feet, gladly seizing the bough of a tree to cling to
and support herself till the giddy sensation that oppressed her wore
off.
And now, in place of the chill from which she had suffered, she began to
burn; hands, cheeks, temples seemed as if they were on fire; there was a
misty unreality in the waving branches of the tree as it overhung the
river; and as she stood there, trying to master the giddiness that
oppressed her, she felt as if this were only the continuance of one of
the disturbed dreams that had haunted her during the darkness.
Then the fit passed away almost as suddenly as it had come; and trying
to shake off the wearisome lassitude that oppressed her, she began to
move forward along the slightly-beaten track that ran onward a few yards
from the edge of the river, one evidently made by the wild creatures
that from time to time came down to drink, or made the banks of the
river their home.
It was an arduous journey, for she had constantly to stoop down to
enable her to pass beneath the interlacing boughs and parasites that
crossed the path in all directions; but still she progressed, sometimes
strong, and hopeful, more often wearied by lassitude, and at times
compelled to cling to the branches as she struggled on, her head
reeling, her eyes blinded by pain, and the feeling of unreality coming
on more strongly with each attack; till at last she went on, forcing her
way through the jungle in a state of wild delirium, muttering
incoherently as she staggered on.
A blind kind of instinct seemed to keep her to the savage track near the
bank of the river, and the same strange instinct led her from time to
time to lie down in some convenient place to lap the cool, fresh water
from her hand, and bathe her burning cheeks and brow.
As the day wore on and the heat increased, Helen's journey became to her
a blind kind of dream. She had a sort of instinct as guide that she
must get farther away--struggle on at any cost, in spite of heat,
weariness, and the delirium that robbed her of her reason; and
staggering forward with the hands bleeding that beat back the thorns and
parasites enlacing her path, sunset still found her at the task.
How long this lasted Helen could not tell. She had a sort of memory of
always hearing the rushing liver, and of sometimes lying down to bathe
her face and drink. She knew, too, that she was in pain, and that the
thorns cut her feet and tore her clothes; but pain and suffering were as
nothing so long as she could struggle on.
Then a feeling of anger came over her at the Malay girl's desertion, for
this was a new light in which she viewed her absence; and at last she
toiled on till the trees seemed to come to an end, and it was only her
weary torn feet now that were hindered by low, thorny, interlacing
bushes. These, too, at last almost came to an end; and she seemed to be
climbing, slipping, and falling over rocks that sloped rapidly down to
the river. Sometimes she had to clamber right away, because the rocks
towered up above her head and became impassable.
Then once more she would be slipping and falling lower and lower towards
where the river foamed, and flashed, and gurgled, plashing over stones,
rushing over masses of rock, but ever singing a pleasant kind of music
to her ear, for it seemed to be her friend and guide.
It never seemed to occur to her confused brain that in place of going
down the river towards civilisation, she was painfully climbing up
towards the mountains, where the river had its rise in the wildest
parts, in a district only inhabited by the Sakais--the aborigines of the
country--or as they were generally called, the hill-men.
This was nothing to her, for her blind instinct led her to struggle on
till, as in a dream, she saw the help that she had believed would come.
Her brain was more beclouded than ever, but she had some instinct of
what she ought to do, and that was to make signals.
Then she blindly struggled on towards that help, grew faint, and her
power left her. She fell, and lay moaning on the rocky earth; struggled
up once more to continue her efforts to reach friends, but in vain; her
power seemed to leave her now for good, and she sank down unable to rise
again, her next recollection being that she was lying back upon a rough
couch, with a familiar face bending over her, and then all was mist.
Then she was back at the old school, and in trouble with her
instructresses for insisting upon going out upon a hot day with
insufficient protection to her head. She was feverish and slightly
delirious, and the doctor had been sent for. How familiar his voice
sounded and how cool and pleasant his hands were to her heated brow; and
she lay back there wondering why Grey Stuart did not come; why it was so
long before a letter came from her father in the Malay peninsula; and
then her head began to throb, for she had had, she felt, a terrible
dream about having joined him there and been seized and carried off, as
she had read in books of hapless maidens being abducted from their
homes. It seemed so real that terrible dream, that she could picture
the face of the man who had dragged her away.
Then mist once more, and a sort of awakening, as if sunlight had come
through the mist, and she was in the garden with the Reverend Arthur
Rosebury, who looked strange in his long coat, as he stooped to pick her
flowers, and handed one to her that had a shape like a cup; and he said
to her "Drink--drink!" and in her dream she seemed to drink, expecting
to find that out of that flower-cup she would drink honey, while this
was intensely bitter; and it was not a flower-cup, but metal, and it was
not the Reverend Arthur Rosebury who offered the cup to her, but someone
else; and while she was trying to listen who it was, for she could not
see, all became silent once again, and blank, and she knew no more.