The Project Gutenberg eBook of Derval Hampton, Vol. II, by James Grant

Another long spell of the sea, including several voyages and some stirring adventures, was before Derval now, with a protracted absence from Britain. The ship was not getting ready for sea, so Captain Talbot was on shore, when a hansom cab deposited Derval and his belongings close by the gangway that led on board, where he was warmly welcomed by Joe Grummet and Harry Bowline.

"And what sort of fellow is his successor?" asked Derval as they descended to the cabin.

"He is simply horrid—a cad, a brute!" exclaimed Bowline. "He is in the hold just now, and if a cask fell out of the slings on his head, it would be a good thing for all on board. He is so different from poor Girtline; he looks like an old pirate, and has stopped our promotion; but you see, Hampton, the owners think us rather young for further advancement yet. Steward, a couple of grogs; the sun is over the fore-yard!"

"You'll have enough of him in time, I doubt not. He has already caused much ill-blood on board."

"He plays the tyrant in the Captain's absence; he has stopped the men's grog for next to nothing, though he is seldom quite sober himself; he sent two of the apprentices aloft, and had them lashed to the topgallant shrouds, in sight of all the people; and, like a beast as he is, had the lashings wetted that they might shrink, a trick he must have picked up in the Canton river! He refused Joe Grummet leave, and me too, though there was no duty to do but the anchor-watch," said Bowline, referring to the two or three men appointed to look after a ship while at anchor or in port. "But hush! here he comes lumbering down the companion-ladder—screwed, I have no doubt."

Step by step he came down, his large splay feet, thick legs, the broader part of his person, his great back, short neck, and bullet-like head all appearing in succession. He looked full and scrutinisingly at the new-comer, while Hal, taking off his cap, bowed to each, and said mockingly:

"Mr. Derval Hampton—Mr. Reeve Rudderhead; Mr. Reeve Rudderhead—Mr. Derval Hampton."

The first mate eyed both viciously, particularly Bowline, who finished his grog, and eyeing him defiantly in turn, went slowly on deck, singing as he went a grotesque song:

"We bore away to the Greenland seas till we saw a
            mighty whale,
The tremendous length of which, 'tis said, did reach
            from the head to the tail, brave boys!
The captain on the bowsprit stood, with the mainmast
            in his hand:
'Overhaul, overhaul! let the main-deck fall, and belay
            her to the land, brave boys!'"

Mr. Rudderhead meanwhile seated himself on a locker and leisurely proceeded to fill a clay pipe, while quite as leisurely surveying Derval. He was a piratical, bull-dog looking fellow, about forty years of age, with a broad swollen visage, which, where it was not red by grog blossoms and blotches, was covered by cuts and scars, won in fisticuff battles in the vicinity of Wapping or the docks. His figure was powerful and suggestive of enormous brutal strength. His appearance was repugnant and dirty; he wore the kind of uniform prescribed by Curry & Co. for the officers of their ships, but it was evidently a second-hand suit, and was already greasy, foul, and frayed.

As his eyes met those of Derval, the latter felt, "by instinct swift as light," that he was face to face with an enemy—a worse one than Paul Bitts—who was, moreover, the cousin of his hostile step-mother, and no doubt in frequent communication with her.

"Oho!" said he, scraping a match and lighting his pipe; "so you are Derval Hampton, eh?"

"I am the first, which you'll find out in time, so let us know each other at once. I am a sharp hand at my duty, and stand no nonsense—so keep a bright look-out, I say!" he added, adopting a bullying tone, as he had evidently been drinking; and he interlarded his conversation with many "strange oaths," which we cannot commit to paper.

"You are, I understand, a cousin of my step-mother?" said Derval, not unwilling to try and conciliate this truculent fellow, with whom his lot would be unluckily cast for some time.

"Indeed—very kind of her! But I can look pretty well after myself, and others too."

"I believe you are apt to cut up rough on occasions, and lay out to windward if you can."

"I can do my duty without need of your supervision," said Derval, annoyed still more by the peculiar tone this obnoxious personage adopted.

"And so can I, though I don't belong to the Royal Naval Reserve," said he with a sneer.

"Nor are ever likely to do so, unless you mend your manners and your morals, too."

"What the—what do you know about me or my morals?" demanded Rudderhead, with a black look; "you lubberly haymaker!"

"I can guess much—we guess much about ships that go down, though we may not be certain about them."

"Down—what do you mean by or about down—any particular ship?" asked the other hoarsely, and with a terrible oath, while his face grew pale, all save the pimples and blotches, and his eyes glared like those of a rattlesnake.

"I mean precisely what my words infer," replied Derval disdainfully, as he quitted the cabin and went on deck, convinced that he had, by a random speech, probed some dark secret in this man's life, and stung him in some way; and in the time to come he gained a clue to it.

How a woman so refined and lady-like as Mrs. Hampton—for she was both in appearance, unquestionably—came to have such a remarkable kinsman it was difficult to say; but from that hour there was a declared feud between him and Derval, and both were prepared to carry it out to the bitter end.

Derval's indignation was very keen. Through all the years he had been away from home, the tender home-love had never died in his honest and passionate heart. To Finglecombe he had sent all he could give—letters, presents, and many a token of regard; but all in vain; and now she, who had driven him from that home—a luxurious one now—had found him an enemy, and a dangerous one, in the truculent savage, Reeve Rudderhead.

Derval hailed the return of the Captain on board with right good welcome. He was warmly welcomed by the latter, who said:

"I saw by the London Gazette, and other papers, that Her Majesty had, at the request of Lord Oakhampton, given you the Albert Medal for saving his girl's life! Long may you live to wear it, Derval; but now you must, like me, join the Reserve; you'll just be able to manage your training before we sail."

This was exactly suited to the young man's tastes and ambition; so Derval was duly commissioned as a midshipman on board H.M. training ship President, appeared in his uniform as such, with the Albert Medal on his right breast, and performed twenty-eight days drill, under the Gunnery Lieutenant, messing with the officers in the ward room.

This brief sojourn on board Her Majesty's ship, while so much active and even dirty work (which Derval luckily escaped) was being done in the Amethyst, roused the ready wrath and jealousy of Mr. Reeve Rudderhead to boiling heat against him; and consequently, when Derval again appeared on her deck, he was greeted by that personage in this manner:—

"Now, then, Mister Derval Hampton, as you have done us the honour of coming aboard again, you'll perhaps take off that dandy gold ring of yours, with the three crows—or are they three mudlarks?—on it; and go aloft and see to greasing down the foretop-mast, and setting up the maintopmast backstay."

"A gold ring!" muttered the bully, aside; "I'll warrant him as perfect a cock-pit beau as ever foundered in the lee-scuppers."

"What is the difference between foundering and going down?" asked Derval, as a Parthian shot, remembering how curiously the word had stung his enemy before, and a terrible scowl darkened the face of the latter, as he turned away grumbling one of his deep maledictions.

The cargo was complete now, and the ship was ready for sea; all the running rigging had been examined, and that which was unfit for service removed, and new rigging rove in its place, together with the studding gear, and "the chaffing gear," which consists of roundings or mats, battens, put upon the rigging and spars to prevent their being frayed, was all arranged under the eyes of Joe Grummet, as the ship dropped down the river, and was again taken into the Channel by old Toggle the Deal pilot.

After the two lights on the Lizard Point—the last they saw of England—melted out in distance and the obscurity of a February night, and the Amethyst was altogether clear of the English Channel, the weather became delightful, the water smooth, the skies clear, and as the wind was fair, she ran before it merrily, without tack or sheet being lifted, till the latitudes of balmy breezes and sunny days in long succession were reached.

Every other day vessels were passed, but after a time the seas became more lonely, and for many a day no sail would be in sight; and then a succession of foul winds took the Amethyst considerably out of her course, and to the westward.

The crew of a vessel while at sea is generally divided in two portions, called the starboard and port watches. The former, in a merchant ship, is the captain's watch, but is frequently commanded by the second mate; the other, the larboard or port watch, falls to the chief mate; and the periods of time occupied by each part of the crew alternately, while thus on duty, are also termed watches.

One night, after Fogo—one of the Cape de Vere Islands—had been passed, with its volcano 9,000 feet above the sea, all aflame as it now generally is, after fifty years of silence, Mr. Rudderhead was so long of coming on deck to relieve Captain Talbot, who had the starboard watch from 8 to 12, that he sent Derval below to rouse him up.

Under all circumstances Derval disliked coming in contact with this man, who was a dark and repellent fellow, haunted in his sleep by nightmares and dreams, amid which ever and anon—as sometimes when he was irritated by day—he would mutter horribly of some ship going down with all hands on board.

As Derval entered the cabin, it was lighted only by a swinging lamp in the skylight, where, with the tell-tale compass, it vibrated to and fro with every roll of the ship, and as he made his way towards the berth, where the first mate lay fast asleep with his clothes on, all ready to turn out, he became aware that Rudderhead was in one of his drunken slumbers, for he had a store of spirits in his own baggage, and often imbibed so much as to endanger the ship when in his care.

He lay on his back, his repulsive visage half seen and half sunk in shadow by the partial light of the cabin lamp, and was evidently haunted by one of his peculiar dreams just then, and was muttering about a ship called the North Star.

At first he was actually smiling, and then an expression of intense cunning and gratification stole over his face as he muttered—

"Good, good; I understand ... the Marine Insurance must stump up ... all the boats gone save one, save one," he said, in a husky whisper; "all but mine—mine! ... alongside. Where's the auger? ... here ... now, now, through outer and inner sheathing ... there is one!" and his clenched hands revolved over each other as in fancy he grasped the cross handle of an auger, and in fancy—could Derval doubt it?—was piercing a ship's side. "Three, four, five ... off, off ... now she begins to settle in the water ... they find she is going down ... now to scull for the shore ... four miles ... How they shriek, and cry, and howl ... How pale their faces look in the moonlight ... they threaten, rave, and implore me to return ... no help for them ... down they go ... down, down, down, and now they all come up with their dead faces and white hands out of the green sea. They glare at me on every side ... they grasp the gunwale of my boat—they clutch me ... Merciful Heaven!"

His mutterings terminated in a wail of horror, then came prayers, with maledictions on himself and others, as he writhed on his bed; and in the agony produced by his dream, which seemed to reach a climax of unutterable horror, while a cold and clammy sweat distilled upon his brow, and his muscular limbs shivered like aspen twigs, he awoke and half sprang out of his berth; but the effect of his vision overcame him, and for a moment he sank back on the pillow, panting rather than breathing.

On seeing that Derval was regarding him, and conscious that he must have been muttering though knowing not what he might have said, a sudden expression of alarm, mingled with defiance and malevolence, came into his face, and he staggered up.

"See—what did you hear? I mutter odd things in my sleep, I am told. Those who hear them are not lucky. The last fellow who did so was lost overboard in the night," he added, with a diabolical grin.

"Captain's orders are that you are instantly to relieve the deck; eight bells in the first watch have struck," said Derval, sharply, and went on deck, merely reporting that Mr. Rudderhead was coming, and the new watch was already on deck.

Derval acted with judicious care in not telling the first mate all he had heard; but the latter knew what was too often his use and wont, to mutter in his sleep, and thus a species of dread of Derval was added to his ill-concealed hatred of him.

The latter confided to Harry Bowline and to the boatswain the strange revelations Rudderhead had made in his sleep.

"The North Star, the North Star!" exclaimed Grummet, as he slapped his thigh, and with a gulp of astonishment, by which he nearly swallowed his quid; "why that's the very ship as was said to have foundered four miles off the Scilly Isles, after losing all her boats save one, in which Rudderhead, her second mate, reached St. Mary's, and I don't think the Mercantile Marine Insurance would have 'stumped up,' as he calls it, without a fight for it. I have heard him muttering in his dreams. I wish he was well out of the ship, that I do; good can't come to us with such a thief on board. My eyes! how many a better man has swung in Execution dock, and had his poor bones chained to those stumps, as we may see any day by the Essex marshes. I never liked the cut of his jib."

To Derval it was evident that what he had overheard was no dream or nightmare, simple and pure, but the recollection of a real event—the scuttling of the North Star, and leaving her to sink with all hands on board, the result of some foul scheme between himself and someone else; and now there took possession of him a great horror of this man, with whom he had to sit at table, and to converse and confer incidentally while conducting mutually the duty of the ship.

That the untoward incident of Derval coming upon him in his dream dwelt in the mate's memory, was evident, as the former frequently caught the latter regarding him with a stern and lowering eye when he thought his attention was turned another way; and once, when the mate was partially intoxicated, and had crept into the long-boat amidships to keep out of the captain's sight, Derval, who was busy near the mainmast, heard him muttering—

"Dreams—a curse upon them! Why will they haunt me? Well, well, let him suspect what he likes, but he can prove nothing, and no one can prove anything, and dead men tell no tales, as he may find out one day. She wrote me to serve him out in any fashion to suit her; but (here he uttered a terrible oath) I'll serve him out to suit myself."

She was, Derval never for a moment doubted, Mrs. Hampton. Thus he found that to avoid scrapes, to avoid tyranny, and to escape positive peril, would require all his care, all his caution and perseverance now.

Reeve Rudderhead was, we have said, a man of enormous strength, bulk, and stature; every muscle and fibre in his form had been developed and turned, as it were, to iron and wire. He was decidedly a fellow to fear physically, and to shun morally. He was quite capable of working anyone a fatal mischief whom he disliked, or who crossed him in the least way, and the contingencies of a seafaring life afford such a character many easy chances for doing so with impunity; thus Derval did not forget his hint and threat about the listener who was lost overboard.

Thus, one day, a top-maul, or large iron hammer kept up aloft for driving in or out the fid of the topmasts, came whizzing down from the mizen-top, where Rudderhead was supposed to be busy on something or other. It crashed upon the quarter-deck, close by where Derval was standing, and then followed the cry which always precedes anything being thrown from aloft:—

Derval felt himself grow pale, while a fierce gust of wrath rose in his breast, for this could not have been a chance occurrence, but a deliberate attempt to destroy him accidentally, as it were, in open daylight, and in the face of the crew; and there was an unconcealed grin on the visage of Rudderhead when rebuked by Captain Talbot for carelessness, and while making his sham excuses to Derval.

The latter thought deeply over the correspondence between Mrs. Hampton and her amiable cousin, and recalled the fragments of the letter he traced on the blotting pad, and he now could but construe or connect them thus: that they were to the effect that as he, Derval, was in the way (of whom, Rookleigh?), Rudderhead, for the old love he bore her, and for a good round sum, would rid her of him in any mode he chose, so that they might see him no more.

It was impossible to doubt now that such had been the tenor of that atrocious epistle. It might be, Derval thought in his calmer moments, that she did not mean a deadly crime to be committed to remove him from jarring with her son's interests, and that the affair of the maul was dictated by Reeve Rudderhead's own spirit of malevolence and revenge.

But what could she mean? unless it were that Rudderhead was to contrive to leave him ashore in some place where he might perish or never more be heard of; or if, when some such contingency as a tumble overboard befel him, to be in no hurry to throw him a line or cut away the life-buoy. Anyway, Derval was now completely on his guard.

He remembered how his predecessor, Paul Bitts—an enemy from the hour he joined the ship—by his cruelty, tyranny, and terror, had blotted out the short life of poor little Tom Titford on that terrible night at Fernando Noronha; and he wondered if some such untoward fate might befal himself at the hands of this unscrupulous wretch. But then Tom Tit, as they called him, was but a child compared with what Derval was now, and he resolved, as he said to Harry Bowline, "to keep his weather-eye remarkably wide open."

As for his growing inheritance, sailor like, he set no store on it then, and actually cared little, if he always had a ship, whether every shilling of it went to Rookleigh, the failings in whose disposition and character seemed to soften by time and distance, and often in lone watches of the night did Derval think he would try to love him, when the selfish little Rook of the nursery became, like himself, a man. Was he not his brother, and, moreover, the nearest kinsman he had on earth? They had the same father, though different mothers—oh, so different! Yes, yes, a day would come when Rook would cease to be under his mother's influence, and the bonds of fraternal affection would naturally strengthen between them as years rolled on.

About the time when the Amethyst began to feel the main equatorial current, one evening the sea, which had been as smooth as the Serpentine in Hyde Park on a summer day, suddenly became torn up by a hurricane, which a rapid fall in the barometer indicated, but scarcely in time for preparations to meet it.

The wind seemed to come from all quarters at once, as if contending for mastery, and the spray flew over the ship in blinding clouds. The weightiest blast struck her on the lee bow, and, as the yards were braced that way, she was nearly thrown on her beam ends.

"Hold on!" was the shout that went from stem to stern, and every man grasped something to prevent himself being swept overboard.

For nearly a minute the ship lay in the same position, when she righted a little, and then payed off before the blast, when Joe Grummet joined the man at the wheel.

Darkness came on with more than tropical rapidity. Luckily the royals had not been set, and topsails, close-reefed, were lowered upon the caps, while the vessel drove before her courses and fore-staysail.

"We are in for a rough night," said Mr. Rudderhead grimly, as he tied the strings of a yellow south-wester under his chin. "A night as may make some beggar lose the number of his mess, if it don't send us all to Davy Jones's locker before morning."

Twice during this short speech his eye wandered, perhaps unconsciously, to Derval; but, as the event proved, the night was to have more terror for himself than any man on board.

The sea which, from the commencement of the hurricane, had been roused into boiling surge, dashed over the ship without a moment's cessation, though she must have been going at the rate of twelve knots an hour, but as the light in the binnacle was extinguished by the tempest, no one could tell for some time which way her head lay; and for a time such was the black fury of the hurricane, that the look-out ahead could not see half the vessel's length from her, so thick were the clouds of spray raised by the force of the wind, and meanwhile the whole deck was flooded, and everything loose went washing away to leeward.

From time to time Derval thought of Rudderhead, and while doing his duty kept on his guard. Amid the hubbub and obscurity of such time there was more than one opportunity of working mischief.

Thunder, lightning, and rain were all in full chorus together for more than an hour, during which very little was said by one man to another, save brief orders, or hurried remarks.

"I think there is a little lull, sir," said Rudderhead to the Captain; "shall we keep our wind?'

"I think you are right—she is a weatherly craft, and makes little leeway. Luff her to, then!" shouted Talbot, through his trumpet.

The words were scarcely out of his mouth when a great black sea came thundering like a mountain over the weather gangway, nearly tearing the long-boat from its chocks, straining and starting the lashing of the weather guns, beating open two of the lee ports, and nearly sweeping away everything movable. The hurricane now abated a little; but the Amethyst had scarcely a stitch of canvas set, yet the yards being braced up sharply, kept her steady, while ever and anon brilliant flashes of green lightning cast a ghastly glare upon the seething water, and appalling booms of thunder hurtled through the sky, to die away in distance.

About three bells, in the middle watch, there came a cry from the look-out man ahead—

She had been revealed by a flash of lightning, and was, Harry Bowline reported, about half a mile off.

In such a tempest it might be necessary to give her as wide a berth as possible, and several night-glasses were in requisition, scanning the quarter indicated; and, among others, Derval, with his left arm round one of the fore-shrouds, kept his binocular intently to his eyes, on the look-out.

Flash after flash came in rapid succession, vivid, green, and ghastly, and with each they could all see the stranger, whom they neared fast, and made out to be a brig with her topmasts gone, her canvas split to ribbons. Bobbing up and down, she was visible only for an instant at a time, and chill fell on all who saw her, for she was evidently an old wreck, with no living being on board of her, though a dead man was seen lashed in the starboard main-shrouds, and three other corpses were dangling from lashings in the foretop.

No sound or cry came from that ghostly craft as the Amethyst swept past her within a few yards of her stern, just as one more than usually vivid flash showed her distinctly, with her torn rigging all hanging in bights and loops, the dead-lights shipped in her cabin windows, and her name painted in white letters underneath them.

"Could any of you make out her name?" asked Captain Talbot, as the flash passed away, and the wreck seemed to vanish, when the thunder burst fearfully overhead.

"You are very clever, Hampton. Did anyone else make it out? I should like to be sure, for the log-book."

There was no reply from anyone else, and Derval was silent, for he had a choking sensation in his throat.

"I should like to have some other warrant for her name, ere I put it in the log, than Mr. Derval Hampton's," sneered Rudderhead.

"What?" roared Rudderhead, in a voice that startled all. "It is a lie—a horrid lie! He could not have made it out in this obscurity."

"I am sure of what I assert, sir," said Derval, careless of how his words affected his enemy; "she is The North Star, of Whitchurch."

Something between a groan and a curse escaped the lips of Rudderhead, whose perplexity Derval really shared, but with much of awe, while the former felt much of rage and hatred, believing, almost hoping, that the name was Derval's invention, and suggested, perhaps, by some remark overheard in the dream, on the night he was too late to relieve the deck.

"The North Star," and "of Whitchurch" too! Was it a reality, or a phantom ship sent to blast the eye-sight and terrify the heart of Reeve Rudderhead?

Any way, it was a strange and startling coincidence, the whole episode; and the perfect similitude of the name with that of the vessel of his dreams, or his crime. This, together with the terrible circumstances under which she had been seen, had, for a time, a calming effect upon the brutal temper and spirit of the first mate, whose entry of the circumstances in the log, together with the details of how the Amethyst was handled in the hurricane, proved nearly illegible, so tremulous and uncertain was the handwriting.

As daylight broke the hurricane passed away, and the clouds cleared; but not a vestige of the wreck was to be seen, so those who swept the horizon with their glasses for her could but conclude that she had gone down, with her dead, in the night.

The sea was still running very high, and the Amethyst, having no canvas set, rolled very heavily. The morning watch, whose duty extends from 4 to 8 A.M., was now on deck.

"Away aloft and cast loose the topsails," was now the Captain's order; "hoist away, lads—up to the cross-trees with them." The courses were then let fall, and pleasantly and steadily the ship bore on, rolling away before the wind.

Derval, who had never mentioned the matter of the first mate's dreams and nocturnal visits to the Captain, had much difficulty in assuring Hal Bowline and Joe Grummet that the name he had given was that which he had really seen; for the boatswain was especially unbelieving. He laughed loudly again and again, slapped his thigh vigorously, and Derval's back too, supposing that the name was all an invention for the purpose of "giving that piratical beggar a dig—hitting him on the raw," and so forth; but the episode elicited, as usual at sea, a number of anything but enlivening or hilarious anecdotes, concerning wrecks and marvels of the deep.

"The last time I saw any dead bodies adrift upon the sea," said Joe, "was just before I shipped aboard this here craft. We had left Sidney in June, bound for Shanghai, and had fair winds till we reached latitude 6, south, when the glass fell low, the sea rose and the wind too, for we lost our fore-topmast, which snapped off at the cap like a clay-pipe. The gale increased, so we hauled to the wind on the port tack, under a close-reefed foresail, main-topsail, and fore-stay sail, and plenty of cormorants were flying about us and perching on the yard-arms. When the gale abated, and all but the watch were thankfully about to turn in, there was a cry of 'Wreck to leeward!' and there came drifting past us a raft made of planks, poles, and spars, on which was a poor wretch, almost naked as he came into the world, famished, starving, and well-nigh raving mad, the last survivor of only four unfortunate fellows who had escaped from a sinking ship. On the second day the ship sank, one of the men fell off the raft into the water, and was devoured by sharks under the eyes of the three survivors, around whom the sea-lawyers began to gather on every side. A second man died from exhaustion, and the other two threw him into the sea, hoping that then the sharks would go and leave them in peace. But the taste of human flesh seemed to increase their longings, and their numbers also, and still more when the third man fell dead on the raft and his mess-mate was too weak to throw him into the sea. They seemed to swarm up out of the deep now on every side; they crowded round the frail raft, which was level with the water, so that every wave rolled over it. Eagerly the sharks watched its only occupant on every hand, their dorsal fins quivering with hungry longings, their rows of awful teeth glittering head over head, side by side, in close ranks. Look which way he might, he saw nothing but eyes and teeth—eyes and teeth—and for well-nigh a week this lasted. He could neither sleep nor lie down, for dread of falling into the sea and being rent piece-meal. The hot sun of these scorching latitudes beat all day long upon his defenceless head; he was without food or water at last, and when we got him aboard was well-nigh a raving lunatic, and he had terrible dreams at night, like our friend in the cabin—dreams of sharp teeth and eyes, sharp teeth and glistening eyes, for long after. Another day of such work and we might have found him like his mess-mate, as the newspapers say, 'with the wital spark extinct.'"

Greatly to the disgust and annoyance of Mr. Rudderhead, Captain Talbot, having as we have said, a proportion of Royal Naval Reserve men on board, when the weather was fine, was fond of training the crew to the guns and small arms, making and shortening sail, reefing topsails, and otherwise manoeuvring the ship; and when she was about the latitude of St. Helena, it would seem as if the skill and mettle of her crew were on the point of being tangibly proved.

Foul winds, as stated, had driven the Amethyst considerably to the westward of her course. One day, in the early part of the morning watch, Derval was regarding with pleasure, as he often did, the strange beauty of the early day-break on the vast and wide expanse of ocean. The first streaks of grey and then yellow light stretched for miles and miles along the horizon eastward, indicating the line where sky and ocean met; throwing a broadening sheet of radiance upon the face of the undulating deep, imparting a weird beauty to it, which, as a writer says, combined with the boundlessness and unknown depth of the sea around you, "gives one a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can give."

Day broke and brightened fast, and the Amethyst was on a wind, with topsails, courses, jib, and spanker set, when suddenly the cry, which always attracts attention on board ship, "Sail ho!" was given by one of the watch.

Derval took the glass from the cleats, where it hung in the companion, and saw a vessel, equal in tonnage evidently to the Amethyst, heading directly after her, with every stitch of canvas spread. She was a great clipper-built brigantine.

"Has lost her reckoning—or is out of water or something else," suggested the first speaker.

"Are you going to shorten sail, and let her come up with us?" asked Harry Bowline.

"Certainly not without orders," said Derval; "go below and report this to the Captain."

In a few minutes Captain Talbot came on deck, and took the glass from Derval's hand. After a time, he said:

"I make her out to be a sharp-bowed or clipper-built barque or brigantine, with a small mast rigged aft, with an enormous fore and aft mainsail; she is about 600 tons or more, and full of men—very full of men, for a merchant vessel."

"Which she would be sure to do if she wished to speak to us; any way, we'll show her ours. Run up the ensign."

No response was made to this, and the blue flag of the Naval Reserve floated out in vain from the gaff; and the silent craft, with its crowded deck, came steadily on, and was overhauling the Amethyst so fast that ere long, as the distance between them lessened, many coloured and even black faces could be seen among her crew.

"She does not require to speak with us, sir," said Joe Grummet; "she would show her colours else."

"Then what the devil does she mean by keeping in our wake in this fashion?" said Captain Talbot testily.

"Her crew crowd her deck as thick as bees," observed Joe, when the whole flush line of the stranger's deck could be seen, as her head went down into the trough of the sea and her stern rose alternately. The whole of the Amethyst's company were on deck now, and the strange craft was an object of undivided attention.

"In these days of steam," said Captain Talbot, with a smile that was not quite a smile, "one may well think that a pirate is as much a thing of the past as a slaver in these seas; but the bearing of this craft is very suspicious, and we must risk nothing with a cargo so valuable."

Joe Grummet, who had been looking at her from the mizen-rigging, now reported that she had portlids partly triced up, and that right amidships she had something covered by a tarpaulin that was certainly not a boat, and, if not a boat, was very probably a long-range gun, and that she had a Chilian or Brazilian look about her, "that with the coloured lot on her deck certainly suggested that it would be as well to give her as wide a berth as possible."

"Cast loose the royal," ordered Captain Talbot, "and set the fore and main studding sails, and the topgallant studding sails."

This was all speedily done, and the ship began to tear through the water, on which the brigantine set her square main topsail, but still did not show her colours.

"It is clearly a case of chase, and had she not such a crowd of men—by Jove! I would lie to and try conclusions with her," said Captain Talbot, whose cheek flushed, and whose eyes sparkled with excitement.

To make the sails draw better, he now ordered water to be thrown on them, and to wet them down by buckets whipped up to the masthead. He then ordered the vessel's course to be changed more than once, but the craft in pursuit changed hers in the same manner, and by noon was drawing nearer and nearer.

Matters were becoming serious now, and the excitement on the Amethyst was increasing. Captain Talbot next ordered the guns to be cast loose, the powder and small arms to be brought on deck, with the cutlasses and revolvers, and a grim expression of something very like satisfaction mingled with defiance became visible on the faces of the men, as they buckled on their waist-belts and filled their cartridge-boxes.

"Hurrah!" cried Joe Grummet, applying the edge of a cutlass to his hard, brown palm; "we'll tip them a twist of the Royal Naval Reserve."

"I hope it won't come to that, Grummet," said the Captain seriously; "she has ten men for each of us evidently."

In the tasks of setting more canvas and wetting it all down from aloft, none had been more active than Mr. Reeve Rudderhead, but his bearing became very nervous and restless when he saw the lines of the guns laid across the deck, the rammers and sponges laid by their sides, the port tackles triced to the lids, and expected every moment to hear Captain Talbot issue an order to throw the ship in the wind.

The latter, however, had no such intention if it could be avoided. He continued dead before the wind with all his yards squared, knowing well that a square-rigged vessel always sailed better so, while fore and aft vessels have most speed on a wind; moreover, as the breeze was light, he spread more canvas than the chase could do, having royals, fourteen studding-sails, and sky-sails fore and aft.

The entire day all hands remained on deck, and what food they had was all taken there. The wind varied a good deal and fell light sometimes on board the Amethyst, while, as if by ill-luck, the chase seemed to have it steadily, and was provokingly enabled to preserve her distance—about two miles.

"Look out!" cried Rudderhead, ducking below the gunnel, as a white puff spirted out from the black bow of the stranger, and a shot, which came ricochetting along the wave-tops, dropped into the water far astern of the Amethyst.

"A hint of what is in store for us," said Captain Talbot; and by sunset she was still coming on, bringing the freshing breeze with her, and the snow-white foam seemed to curl higher and higher round the bright copper that flashed upon her bows.

It was with an emotion of considerable relief that, after a day of such excitement, Captain Talbot saw the sun of the tropics shedding his light like a long level ray of fire from the verge of the horizon, and going down beyond the world of waters which were overspread by a darkness sudden and complete, for luckily there was no moon, and the night was a very gloomy one for those latitudes.

All lights on board were extinguished, the studding-sails and sky-sails were all taken off the ship, the course of which was altered four points; the port-tacks were brought aft, the starboard yard-heads trimmed accordingly, and the Amethyst passed away into the darkness, leaving astern, floating in the water, a ship's lighted lantern attached to a barrel as a decoy—a suggestion of Derval's, and greatly did the Captain compliment him thereon.

This light, which was visible from the deck, continued to bob about on the waves for some time, and no doubt the stranger would continue to steer directly for it, and very probably ran it down, as about an hour after it was set afloat, it suddenly vanished, and by that time the Amethyst was considered safe, all the more so that the wind came more aft for the direction she had taken, and again her yards were squared, but no light was placed in the binnacle; the second mate, Tom Tyeblock, steered her by the light of the stars, and perfect silence was maintained during the night.

When day broke not a vestige of the chase was visible, even from the masthead; the guns were made fast, and the portlids also, the arms and ammunition were all sent below, and the vessel was kept off to her course.

Ere long she reached the 40th degree of southern latitude, and then her prow was pointed to the wide and stormy ocean which divides Africa from Australia; and now gigantic albatrosses—the "man-o'-war bird," as the sailors name them—were seen around the ship, with those graceful little birds which resemble swallows in shape and mode of flying, though smaller—Mother Carey's chickens. "And all the world knows, or ought to know," as a sailor told Derval, "that Mother Carey was an aunt of St. Patrick."

CHAPTER II.

TURTLE ISLAND.

"He didn't like seeing the guns cast loose, and the powder and small arms brought on deck, this precious first mate of ours," said Joe Grummet one day to Derval, when they were up aloft; "cos why? he is a coward, and cowards are always cruel. He was once a captain, but his certificate is suspended—though I don't know for how long, but suspended it is—cos why? He caught a poor stowaway lad on board, half dead with confinement and want of food, and how do you think he treated him? He lashed a ring-bolt with spunyarn athwart his open jaws to prevent his shrieks being heard when he ropes-ended him, and trained a dog to bite him; he headed him up in a cask and rolled him round the deck; and this work went on for days. He made a timber hitch on a line, and hoisted him by the neck three feet from the deck at a time, till his eyes started from their sockets, and blood and froth oozed from his mouth, flogging him day after day, till one came, when the poor boy was found dead under the lee of the long-boat; and then his body, without service or prayer, was chucked overboard.* Now he sails as chief mate, but I wonder our owners took him aboard at all."

This anecdote served to increase Derval's disgust for Rudderhead, who seemed almost to divine that he was the subject of conversation, as he stood on the quarter-deck, with his eyes steadily regarding them in the foretop.

Amid fine weather, and accompanied by steady and pleasant breezes, the Amethyst made the Island of Desolation, or Kerguelen's Land, the abode alone of petrels, albatrosses, gulls, and sea-swallows, on the rifted rocks of which, washed by incessant rains, nothing grows but saxifrage—a lonely and most melancholy place.

After passing it, the ship's log shows that she encountered a gale, and that the watch had to take in the main topgallant-sail and mainsail, with the fourth reef of the topsails; and set the mainstay-sail. In the evening she was under close-reefed topsails, a reefed foresail, and was shipping heavy seas.

Fine weather came again, and one fine forenoon, a week or so after, when Derval had the watch, the cry "Land ahead!" from the look-out men caused every glass to be levelled at a dark-blue streak, that rose like a cloud from the shining sea, upon the lee bow; and a reference to the chart showed that it was one of those sequestered and seldom visited isles in the South Sea, in latitude 60 south, and 110 west longitude, and is known as Turtle Island.

It was rocky, hilly, and seemed to rise fast from the sea, and to loom large, through a kind of white haze, exhaled from the latter by the heat of the sun; thus, by the bearings given, the reader will see that it was a considerable distance south of the regular line from Britain to Australia.

As Captain Talbot was anxious to procure some turtle, he gave orders to stand towards it, and about nightfall came to anchor in seven fathoms water, in a fine sandy bay where the waves rippled on the beach as quietly as those of an island lake, and where groves of trees grow close to the water's edge.

The volcanic rocks at the mouth of the bay were literally covered with sea-hens, gigantic albatrosses, and other feathered tribes; wild boars and wild goats could be seen by the glass ere the sun set, but luckily no sign of inhabitants, on which Talbot rather congratulated himself, as he knew well the isle possessed them, and that, like all other South Sea savages, they were vindictive, cruel, and hostile to all strangers.

By daybreak next morning two boats' crews, under Rudderhead and Derval, taking with them handspikes or capstan bars, pulled in shore to search for turtle. They beached the boats at a place where a number of large turtle were seen, well up on the shore, near some dense brushwood, out of which black cocks flew from time to time, and near which some great seals lay basking in the sun.

In high spirits the boats' crews sprang ashore, and intercepting the retreat of the turtle, some of which were of such a size as to be two or three hundred-weight, they proceeded with the handspikes to turn them on their backs and leave them thus till several were captured, and then tumbled into the boats.

Full of natural interest at treading on new soil, and looking on that which he had never seen before, Derval, penetrating through the brushwood, advanced some hundred yards upward and inshore, and heard with pleasure the tender rustling of the leaves in the morning sea-breeze, while inhaling the perfume of the aromatic plants and myrtle-trees. The brilliant green of the woods that crept up the sides of the hills, which in one place were so lofty that the haze shrouded their summits, were all novel and delightful, after the monotony of the sea and sky during a long voyage.

While observing the brilliant tints and peculiar shadows given by the morning sun to some volcanic rocks rising from the nearest grove of trees, he became suddenly aware that they were swarming with black savages, whose weapons, whatever they were, glittered in the sun, and who from their eyrie were evidently watching the ship in the bay, if not the party in quest of turtle on the beach.

He had scarcely made this discovery, when he became aware that Reeve Rudderhead was by his side, with what intent he could not divine. Curiosity had no doubt prompted him to follow Derval, simply to see what was to be seen, and opportunity made him suddenly avail himself of the time to do the fell crime he subsequently committed.

Enemies though they were, who never spoke but on inevitable matters connected with ship duty, Derval could not refrain from drawing his ungracious messmate's attention to the watching savages and their hostile aspect, adding:

They were already in motion and leaping down the rocks, with yells, brandishing their spears and clubs.

"Retire?" growled Rudderhead with an oath, "I think so, unless we mean to share the fate of Captain Cook; so here goes for one. As for you," he added, with one of his ferocious maledictions, "they may pick your bones, and welcome!" Then whirling the heavy hand-spike he carried, circularly in the air, he struck Derval a blow on the back of the head that felled him bleeding, stunned, and senseless, among the brushwood!

The moment he had accomplished this terrible and atrocious act, he went plunging down to the beach, shouting—

"The savages—the natives are upon us; into the boats with you for your lives, and shove off to the ship!"

Alarmed by this cry, and being unarmed, the party were forced to be content with what turtle they had got—some seven or eight—and leaping into their two boats, pushed off at once from the shore, and shipping their oars pulled away with a will, just as a naked horde of dark-skinned savages, perfectly nude, save in the matter of the bead ornaments that hung about their persons, shrieking, whooping, yelling, and dancing like mad things, came rushing with war-clubs, spears, powerful bows and arrows, close to the edge of the water, and even rushing into it up to their waists.

The boats' crews could see their dark, copper-coloured skins, their hair which was longer and straighter than the wool of the negro, their gleaming eyes and white glistening teeth. An arrow or two whistled past, but wide of the mark, and with laughing shouts of defiance the party brought their boats sheering alongside the ship, when the turtles had ropes hitched round them, and were quickly conveyed on board.

"Hoist in the boats," was now the order of Rudderhead, in his guilty haste anticipating the authority of the captain for doing so.

In the haste and confusion with which they had embarked, the crew of each boat probably thought—if they thought on the subject at all—that Derval was on board the other; nor was it till the boats were being actually hoisted in on each quarter, that he was missed, and Joe Grummet asked, with some asperity and much alarm:

"Left on shore!" said Captain Talbot. "Good heaven! what a fate he must have met by this time!"

"We had not a moment to lose, sir, as you must have seen, if you had been watching us," said Rudderhead sullenly and with averted eyes; "his safety was his own look-out—not mine; and I think the third mate could take jolly good care of himself."

The Captain was silent; the beach was now covered by a dingy horde of savages, yelling and brandishing their weapons in defiance at the ship, and he could not for a moment doubt that Derval Hampton must have perished at their hands.

As for Mr. Reeve Rudderhead, he had not the smallest doubt about it either, believing that the little life he had left, if any, in Derval, would speedily be beaten out of him by the knob-sticks or war-clubs of the islanders.

All on board—save Reeve Rudderhead—sorrowed for Derval, and were loud in their praises and vehement in their regret (for, as an officer, he was active, vigilant, and, if distant, yet most kind), and none, perhaps, more than Captain Talbot, who valued him highly for his gentlemanly bearing, good appearance, skill, and conscientious interest in his duty; and in all this the Captain was joined by old Joe Grummet, who would miss the listener to many a yarn of the sea, and who sighed heavily, Like a head wind through a hawse-hole, slapped his thigh, viciously chewed his quid, and clenched his hard first many times, menacingly, while swearing "strange oaths," and objurgating the eyes, limbs, and blood of some individual unnamed, but who was shrewdly supposed to be the first mate.

Closely did the Captain and his officers question the boats' crews, but nothing could be elicited from them, save the facts that the first and third mates had gone a little way inland together, and the former would seem to have come back alone; but yet that Derval was not specially missed till the boats were hoisted in; so Grummet and Hal Bowline felt sure there must have been some treachery at work, and that the most artful savage on Turtle Island had been Reeve Rudderhead, and the brutal indifference of the latter greatly exasperated them.

"What better could you expect of a fellow who was neither man nor boy, sojer nor sailor?" growled Rudderhead. "A lubber he was—always reading when he should have been knotting, splicing, and learning to box the compass."

Reading was not to the speaker's taste, though grog was, and he drank it at night to keep out the cold, by day to cure the heat, never sipping it, "but shipping it in bulk, at a mouthful," so Joe Grummet said.

But now, regrets for Derval apart, active work was cut out for the crew of the Amethyst.

Thick as bees the dark natives seemed to be swarming around the shores of the bay; the alarm and muster of them seemed to be general, and more than a score of pretty large canoes, full of armed warriors, paddling the water into foam, howling like madmen, and all in a frantic state of activity, shot out of mangrove creeks and other places where they would seem to have been concealed, and very soon the ship was nearly environed with them.

The small arms were all distributed by this time, the guns cast loose and shotted with grape, the ports triced up, and the watch on deck were ordered to prepare for sea. The courses were let fall, the topsails half-hoisted, and the ship was sheered to her anchor, i.e. steered towards it while weighing, so as to keep the wind and current ahead, and thus lessen the friction on the hawse-pipe.

If the intentions of these people were hostile, which Captain Talbot and his crew never doubted, they were not immediately aggressive, but continued to paddle round and round the ship, coming as near as they dared, as they had probably been fired upon by other vessels and knew the effect of cannon and musketry.

The windlass bars were all shipped, but there was a great and altogether unexpected delay in getting the anchor a-trip or even roused. The flukes seemed to hold on to something, and for a time the bars were vainly strained in the grasp of the seamen, but "the main piece," or beam of the windlass, remained immovable on its iron spindles, and the oaths and execrations of Mr. Rudderhead, who, in his anxiety, began to think of slipping the cable, were loud and bitter. The mouth of the bay was becoming well-nigh blocked up by canoes, and the minds of all on board the Amethyst were full of those stories which ever and anon the public prints give, of the wholesale massacre of ships' crews by savages in the isles of the South Sea.

To intimidate them Captain Talbot ordered a 9-pounder, loaded with a blank cartridge, to be fired; but like blank firing on a mob at home, this precisely made matters worse, for even while the echoes of the gun pealed over the water, seeing no effect followed, the savages uttered screams of defiance and pulled closer, with the evident intention of boarding, and arrows began to whizz over the ship, or stick quivering into her sides and deck every instant.

At that instant the clanking of the windlass pawls was heard, a welcome sound; the anchor was roused, "up-torn, reluctant from its oozy bed," and was seen dripping a-cockbill at the cat-head. The topsails were fully hoisted and the courses sheeted home, but there was very little wind, so the ship's progress was slow, and the arrows were flying faster than ever. Captain Talbot had his cheek laid open by one, and three of the crew were more or less wounded, one by a barbed reed, which cost Dr. Strang the greatest trouble to extract, and perceiving that the strangers were taking to flight emboldened the pursuers who came so close that they were endeavouring to reach the side plates and chains.

"Depress the guns to port and starboard, fire wherever these devils are thickest, and blaze away the small-arm men," cried Captain Talbot, whose face was streaming with blood.

The savages, their canoes huddled close together, jostling and crashing side by side, were now nearly all within pistol-range: thus the effect of the double broadside, together with a sputtering fire from the breechloading rifles over the gunnel, had a terrific effect upon them. The simultaneous roar of the 9-pounders burst like thunder over the waters of the bay; for a brief space the vessel was shrouded in smoke, and amid it the crew could hear that the defiant war-yells had given place to those of terror, rage, and agony.

As the light smoke curled up through the rigging, or went ahead with the wind, and the guns were drawn in for reloading, a scene of terrible devastation became visible. Many of the canoes were dashed to pieces and floated in fragments on the water, clutched desperately by hands that had relinquished the bow, the spear, or the war-club. Other canoes were riddled and sinking with all on board. Scores of black heads were bobbing about like fishermen's floats, and all around the Amethyst the clear blue water of the bay was streaked with blood.

The groans and gurglings of the wounded and dying who floated about were somewhat heart-sickening.

"Cease firing the guns," cried the Captain, "but pick off any scoundrel within range of the small arms."

Thus from the waist and quarter on both sides a desultory fire was maintained; most deliberate were the aims taken at any black head that appeared, for the crew had been thoroughly alarmed and exasperated. Just as the ship got clear of the bight or little bay, and the wind began to freshen, a most singular act of retribution took place.

As the guns and ports were being made fast, Reeve Rudderhead chanced—for what reason or by what impulse he knew not—to look over the side, when he perceived just beneath him a savage crouching in the main chains dripping with blood from a wound in his throat, and while hopeless of mercy, fearing to trust himself to the water while the deadly rifles were in activity over his head. Finding himself discovered, quick as thought, with deadly and unerring hand, he launched a spear at the first mate's head, and leaping into the water was seen no more.

The lance, which had a small barbed head, went right through the two cheeks of Mr. Rudderhead, who uttered a howl of rage and anguish, as he rushed back fairly "spritsail-yarded," as the sailor's said, and with his mouth so full of blood that he was soon speechless and well-nigh choked, for a labial artery had been cut, and when Dr. Strang removed the lance, by first sawing off its head, the hæmorrhage was so great that the crew began to think—if they did not precisely hope—that the wounded man would "slip his cable."

The wounds were dressed, a good horn of grog was next given him, and he was tucked into his berth, where, doubtless, his reflections would be of a somewhat mingled character. His visage had received a double wound, which, though he had not much beauty to mar, would render him unpleasant to look upon for the remainder of his life. He had no compunction for his treacherous conduct to Derval, even in the least degree, and he was chiefly occupied in surmising whether he had killed him outright, or if the savages were—like most of the South Sea islanders—cannibals, what they might do if they found him dead or alive; and, lastly, whether Mrs. Hampton would "come down handsomely" on learning that she was—as her letter had it—rid of him; then he savagely cursed his present plight, and lay growling on his pillow, while the breeze freshened and sail was made on the ship, and ere night fell upon the sea Turtle Island was out of sight.

The arrow-wounds of Captain Talbot and others progressed most favourably under Dr. Strang's skilful treatment; but whether it was that the blood of Rudderhead was in an unhealthy state, or that the spearhead had been poisoned, it was difficult to discover, as the hurts he had received, so far from healing, grew daily worse and worse. His agony increased till it drove him to madness; he could neither eat nor drink. His face swelled up and became discoloured until he was something frightful to look upon, and times there were when his groans, prayers, and imprecations rang through the whole ship, and chilled the very souls of the men in the watches of the night.

To Dr. Strang it was soon evident that he was dying; but he had much vitality in him, and died hard, in his latter hours raving of the scuttled ship or the stowaway, of Derval Hampton, and many other persons and events. The wind was blowing a heavy and increasing gale, and the Amethyst was scudding under close-reefed topsails, in a perilous and chopping sea, when Rudderhead passed away, clutching the Captain's hands, as if he could retain him in this world, and passed from it, impenitent for the past, yet hopeless of the future; and the fiat of the doctor was that the ship could not be too soon rid of his remains.

At that crisis the brevity of even a funeral at sea was dispensed with, and he was thrown overboard to leeward, into the trough of an angry midnight sea, with four 9-pound shot at his heels—buried precisely as he had buried the poor stowaway boy, without a prayer, finding a grave "unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown."

As if his departure had been awaited for by the spirit of the storm, the latter lulled rapidly, and, when day broke, the cheerful cry of "Land ahead!" announced that the bold and rocky south-west cape of Tasmania was only ten miles distant, and bearing north-east, with the mountains, snow-capped ate that season, in the back-ground.

Next day saw the Amethyst working through D'Encastreaux's Channel, sixteen miles eastward of it, to her safe anchorage off Hobart Town, from whence the mail took home the intelligence of Derval Hampton's fate on Turtle Island. The fight with the natives there formed a passing newspaper paragraph, and, so far as he was concerned, there was an end of it.

When Greville Hampton—that sorely-changed man, whose god had become gold—heard of his eldest son's miserable fate, "some natural tears he shed," as memory went back to the little golden-haired boy that was wont to nestle at Mary's knee, in the little cottage which was as much a thing of the past as herself. Master Rookleigh Hampton heard of it with perfect philosophy, as became, he thought, a lad of his years; and Mrs. Hampton, as in duty bound, put on, for as brief a period as decency required, a most becoming suit of mourning. But there was one who, when he read of the event while glancing over the newspaper, really sorrowed for Derval—Lord Oakhampton, who, when he looked at his happy little daughter in her budding beauty, and thought of what might have been, and how nearly he lost her, could not but regret the untimely fate of the brave young sailor to whom he owed her life and safety, and said much to her on the subject that made the gentle girl feel deeply.

Four more years passed on, and the name and existence of Derval Hampton became almost forgotten in his father's house, or was, perhaps, remembered chiefly by his nurse, old Patty Fripp.

By that time Rookleigh, strangely precocious, had become—in his sixteenth year—almost a man ere boyhood was past, and during that part of his career, he showed indeed how "the child is the father of the man." Greedy, avaricious, like Mr. Ralph Nickleby (in his youth) he was wont to lend to his companions and schoolfellows halfpence to be repaid by pence, and so forth; and his disposition was further largely leavened with cruelty, which seemed born in him, and bade defiance to all remonstrance. Servants, horses, dogs, and even insects felt its virulence, and when Mr. Asperges Laud spoke reprehensively on the subject, his mother would merely urge that "he was just like other boys," and that all boys are cruel. And already in his sixteenth year, by the influence of companions, though selfish and avaricious to a degree, he, through the medium of billiards, cards, and a betting-book, was utterly wasting the time during which he was waiting for the rent-roll which his mother assured him must one day be his. He was tall, well-made and well-featured, for both his parents were handsome, but the expression of his face, particularly of his shifty green eyes—for they were less golden-hazel in tint than those of his mother—proved unpleasant to all who knew him, and indicated a great latent spirit of evil and malevolence.

In the succession of his tutors, in the society with which he mingled, and in all his surroundings, Rookleigh Hampton had a thousand advantages that the unfortunate Derval had never known, yet with them all he did not eventually make a particular figure amid the circle in which he moved.

Though lavish enough in his expenditure upon himself, and even on those who flattered him, ministered unto him, and made life lively and pleasant by pandering to his weaknesses, the leading features of his character were gross selfishness and avarice or acquisitiveness, all of which he seemed to have inherited from his mother, or through the force of his father's latter thoughts, and were thus, to the manner, born in him.

As when poor Derval sailed on his fatal voyage, Greville Hampton might be found daily in his luxurious library, settling mortgages, signing contracts, adjusting ground-rents, buying up land and old manor-houses to remodel or remove for new ones—up to the eyes among deeds and papers, with old Mr. Stephen De Murrer, the family solicitor, a denizen of Gray's Inn, who about this time began to exert himself anew in the peerage claim of his lucrative employer, and eventually visited Lord Oakhampton, at his house in Tyburnia, on the subject.

Proud and haughty by nature, though a scrupulously well-bred and most aristocratic-like man, his lordship could be very cold and repellent to those he disliked; thus his reception of the stout and deliberate old lawyer, when the latter was ushered into the stately drawing-room overlooking the park, was neither soothing nor encouraging.

"Yes—a bold fellow, sir, to come to me personally on this subject, of which I admit having heard before—a claim to my hereditary peerage by this whilom spendthrift—obscure beggar, and latterly successful speculative builder! Absurd, sir! The matter has no face upon it—won't hold water," continued Lord Oakhampton, scornfully; "and anyway, I beg to refer you to my solicitors at Gray's Inn."

"If, my Lord—if the assumption that your great ancestor was summoned by mistake to the House of Peers, in the reign of Queen Anne, is proved—and it is also proved that the real heir was then in existence—the heir from whom my client is descended—what then, my Lord?"

Mortification, exasperation, and pride made the haughty heart of Lord Oakhampton thrill painfully, and he listened to this, and much more that the little lawyer had to advance, as one in a dream. The flies buzzed about the flowers in a magnificent jardiniere; a French clock ticked monotonously on the mantelpiece; and the busy life of London outside, went on as a ceaseless stream; but he felt as if all this evil were about to happen, not to himself, but to someone else, in the confusion and irritation of his mind.

"We shall suppose this peculiar claim made good and clear in law, Mr.—Mr.——"

"Can you ask me?" said Mr. De Murrer; "most calamitous to your Lordship, I assure you."

"With the title would go lands and estate, plate, pictures—everything, even to your household effects!"

Lord Oakhampton grew pale—very pale, yet less at the thought of himself than of his daughter, for the world was all before her yet. Rallying a little, he said:—

"You cannot think, Mr. De Murrer, that I will yield without a struggle—and a desperate one too!"

"Proofs that must be submitted to the legal acumen and most searching analysis of my law advisers!"

"Your Lordship's great-grandfather Derval, to whom a great mass of the estate came by marriage with the Mohuns, was called to the Upper House in the year of the Union with Scotland, 1707, and sat in the first British House of Lords, as the direct heir of Derval, Lord Oakhampton, who was forfeited under Edward IV., but was restored by Henry VII. for his service against the King of Scotland; yet your great-grandsire was so summoned in ignorance that his eldest brother, who had quarrelled with his family, was not dead, but was married, and settled in Bermuda, where he became ancestor, in the third degree, of Greville Hampton, now of Finglecombe."

"Intolerable dry-as-dust stuff this!" exclaimed Lord Oakhampton, his pride and passion rising again. "Do you imagine that I am an entire committee of privileges, to listen to all this twaddle, and that the title that has come to me, through a long line of stainless ancestors, is to be disturbed by the outrageous pretensions of an obscure colonist's grandson. Moreover, sir, do you think that I am also unaware how men of your trade make it their business to rake up such claims if they can, and assume to guide the destinies of the rich and noble, as the means of bringing money to their own coffers?"

To this somewhat injurious speech, the little lawyer only shrugged his shoulders, and smiled deprecatingly, as he replied:

"I can easily understand, and well pardon, your Lordship's natural irritation at the prospect all this action-at-law involves; the loss of rank and position—wealth and political influence; your daughter, at her very entry into life and society, reduced, like yourself, to the condition of a commoner; the newspaper comments—the nine days' wonder of London; the sneers of the once servile, and the mockery of the malevolent, and of all who take a cruel delight in strange reverses of fortune; but I would beg of you to think over the matter to be contended; for the mere announcement that not only was your title about to be contested, but your property litigated, would bring any creditors you have, like a swarm of hornets on you."

Mr. De Murrer now took his hat and departed, certain that this Parthian shot was the heaviest and sharpest he had fired; and sooth to say, my Lord Oakhampton felt and knew it to be so!

His alarm, however, and infinite anxiety, rather died away when delays ensued consequent to the disappearance or alleged death of Derval, and still more by the sudden demise of Greville Hampton, who was found lifeless at his desk one afternoon, when at his usual task of calculating and speculating.

The bulk of all his fortune he left by will to Rookleigh, while Mrs. Hampton was handsomely provided for during her life. The sum of £500 per annum was set apart for Derval, in case he was ever heard of; if not within a given time, it reverted to Rookleigh.

So Greville Hampton was dead, and Rookleigh stood at the head of his grave as chief mourner; but he was not laid by Mary's side in the pretty little churchyard where for ages, yea since Saxon times, "the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." No, no; Mrs. Hampton took care of that; so he was deposited in the new and pretentious mausoleum of Cornish granite, in the fashionable cemetery of "the new and rising watering-place of Finglecombe," where a special spot was reserved for herself.

In the matter of the peerage claim, Mrs. Hampton would have left nothing undone, of course, to urge Mr. De Murrer in advancing the interests of her well-beloved son Rookleigh; but just about the time of her husband's death, something occurred which led to a change in her mind, or to indifference on the subject, and this "something" proved to be tidings of—Derval!

CHAPTER III.

H.M.S. "HOLYROOD."

After being struck down by Reeve Rudderhead, in the merciless way we have described, Derval lay long insensible, and when his thoughts began to turn again to earth, he was haunted by a dream of home—of wild grass where the brindled cattle stood knee-deep, of fields studded with the white stars of the dog-daisies, the golden buttercups, and scarlet poppies, of rose-tangled hedges and meadow-sweet; then came the face and figure of Rudderhead—and starting, he staggered up on his hands and knees, weak and giddy with loss of blood, dim of sight, and his head racked with pain by the force of the blow.

What sounds were these? Cannon and musketry and yells in the air, as if the fiends of the lower world had broken loose. He remembered the savages from which the boats' crews were escaping, and with a heart filled by terrible emotions of anxiety and rage—anxiety for himself, and rage to find that he was the victim of a plot between Reeve Rudderhead and Mrs. Hampton—he crept cautiously through the brushwood among which he had been lying, and where a pool of his blood yet lay, till he reached the brow of a little eminence which overlooked the bay, and arrived in time only to see the last of the conflict between the Amethyst and the savages.

The bay was strewed with the floating ruins of many canoes, and the dead bodies of their whilom occupants; others were being paddled away in hot haste; the ship was under weigh, with her topsails sheeted home and her head-sails filled;—under weigh, and he—unable to join her, or make any sign or signal—was left behind!

With all that conviction implied, a great stupor—the stupor of utter horror—fell upon him, and he could have wept tears of rage and despair.

Defenceless, helpless, powerless, almost petrified by the whole situation, he gazed after the ship, on which sail after sail was spread to catch the land breeze, as she already began to lessen in distance upon the blue and shining sea; then sight seemed to pass from him—a blindness to descend upon his eyes; he became faint, and, falling on the earth, with the last effort of sense, crept under some of the gigantic ferns, with which the island abounds, and for a time remembered no more.

When sense again came, and he looked about him, the shadows were falling eastward; the ship had become diminished to a speck upon the ocean, then reddened by the setting sun. He gazed after her as if his soul followed her, and when he could see even the spectrum of her no longer, a groan escaped him, and he burst into tears.

On one hand spread the boundless sea; on the other, a succession of knolls and hills and bluffs, with pine-covered summits, and little grassy vales between them, all glowing under the gleaming west.

He dared not speculate upon it, though whatever was in store for him must be close indeed now!

Dipping his handkerchief in a runnel he bathed the back of his head, thus removing the clotted and extravasated blood, and then bandaged up the wound with his necktie. A deep draught taken in the hollow of his hands from the same pool revived him, and a few wild peaches, figs, and grapes afforded him food; after which hermit-like repast he seated himself against a rock and strove to think—to think, of what? While the lower portion of the western sky assumed a vermilion hue, and the upper was violet braced with gold; sunk in shadow now, the waves rose with a silvery sheen upon the yellow sand, their ripple alone breaking the stillness of the place and time; but the moment the sun, with its tropical rapidity, sank beyond the sea, all these varied and wonderful tints passed away at once.

Derval remembered the picturesque elements of the scene afterwards; at the time, he was certainly not in the mood to appreciate them.

The parrots, pigeons, and straw-necked ibises had all gone to their nests; some kangaroo-rats (about the size of rabbits) and squirrels were flitting about; Derval's first fear was of snakes, but he saw none.

The multitude of savages that in the morning had been swarming on the shore, had all disappeared, and gone inland to their kraals and villages; but how long would he be able to elude them; and as for their habits and nature, he could not doubt that they were in any way less terrible and revolting than those of other South Sea islanders, most of whom are cannibals.

As he thought of the home he had quitted years ago, of his father's changed nature and indifference, his brother's selfishness, his stepmother's unrelenting malevolence, and Reeve Rudderhead's cruel treachery, all culminating in the present catastrophe, leaving him to perish helpless and unavenged, excitement made his wound burst out afresh, and he staunched it again with difficulty.

The southern constellations came out in all their wonderful brilliance, and under their silvery light, he sat lost in thoughts that wrung his heart. How long—even if he found food and concealment—might it be ere a ship passed that way; and if one did, how was he to attract the attention of those on board—how signal to them unseen by the savage inhabitants of the isle?

The memory of much that he had read, of men wrecked or marooned in lonely and desolate places, together with the fancies of a quick and fertile imagination, added greatly to the poignancy of his mental sufferings. For in its desperation his situation was a maddening one, and calculated to blind him with horror and despair.

Was he to perish of starvation and exposure in the groves of the island, or to find a death of torture at the hands of its inhabitants, without obtaining even a grave? for there was a detail in the future after death, that made his blood run cold to think of.

And was this unthought-of fate to be the end of all his once bright day-dreams, his hopes and aspirations! And were all his bright ambitions and little vanities—the vanities and ambitions of ardent youth—to end in less and worse than utter nothingness?

He feared to move about even in search of food, lest the track of his footsteps might be found, for he knew that the aboriginals of such places can follow as blood-hounds do—but by sight, not scent, and in a manner that seems incredible to the European—any track they find, and follow it, too, over grass and rock, even up a tree; thus he knew that were his traces found, he would inevitably be tracked and discovered, wherever he went.

So the long hours of the night went slowly past, and he longed, as a change or relief, for morning. "Poor fools that we are!" says a writer; "our hours are in time so few, and yet we forever wish them shorter, and fling them, scarcely used, behind us roughly, as a child flings his broken toys."

At last exhaustion of the mind and body brought blessed sleep, and on the dewy earth, under the shelter of some black and silver mimosa trees, he slumbered heavily till the noon of the next day was well advanced, and the sun shone in the unclouded sky.

He had a dream of the now defunct cottage at Finglecombe, as it existed when he was wont to play by his mother's knee, or watch with childish wonder his silent father, a moody and discontented man. He started and awoke, recalling an old Devonshire superstition, that to have a dream of one's childhood, when in maturity, was a sure sign that something was about to happen.

"Oh, what may that something be!" was his first despairing, rather than hopeful, mental thought, and with it came a terror of what the long and solitary hunger-stricken day might bring forth.

But he was not left long in doubt. There came distinctly to his ear the familiar sound of an anchor being let go, and the rush of a chain-cable through a hawse-hole, followed by the blowing-off of steam!

A sudden revulsion of thought from despair to keenest joy—a gush of prayer and gratitude to God filled his heart, and a shout escaped his lips—help, succour, escape, were all at hand, and already—already!

Forgetful, oblivious of what savages might be near or might see him, he started to an eminence close by, and saw in the bay, the very place occupied but yesterday morning—a time that seemed ages upon ages ago—by the Amethyst, a stately steam corvette, riding at anchor, and all her snow-white canvas being handed with man-o'-war celerity.

She had no ensign flying, but to Derval's experienced eye, it was evident that she was a British ship. If any of the natives saw her, as there was every reason to suppose they did, the terrible lesson taught them by the guns and small-arms of the Amethyst, made them conceal themselves, for nothing was seen of them when Derval rushed to the beach, and, without attempting to make a signal or waiting for a boat, and heedless or unthinking of whether there might be sharks in the water, plunged into the waves that rippled on the rocks, and swam off at once, through the debris of battered canoes and dead bodies that were still floating about.

"Man overboard—a rope—a rope—stand by!" he heard voices shouting as he cleft the water and neared her fast, for he was a powerful and skilful swimmer, and after a few minutes he found himself, panting, breathless, and faint with excitement, past anxiety and present joy, safe upon the deck of the ship-of-war, where he was of course, supposed by all to be a ship-wrecked man—the last survivor of some unfortunate crew—and found himself overwhelmed with questions.

But none of these could he answer with coherence, until he was taken into the cabin of the captain, who at once ordered him wine and other refreshments. He then told his story, which elicited considerable commiseration, and much more indignation at the foul treachery of which his messmate had been guilty.

He now found that he was on board H.M. corvette Holyrood, of 16 guns, an iron ship, cased with wood, of 5,000 horse-power, commanded by Captain —— who came into these seas with orders to look after any survivors of wrecks, and who had been last at the Crozet Islands, that wild and mountainous group which lies in south latitude 47 and east longitude 46, and the peaks of which, high as Ben Nevis, are covered with eternal snow. He had visited Turtle Island for the same purpose, and meant now to haul up for England, viâ the Cape, St. Helena, and Ascension.

But for the circumstance of this ship's fortuitous visit, it is not difficult to speculate upon what must eventually have been the awful fate of Derval Hampton!

The latter now found himself recognised by the third lieutenant of the Holyrood, who had belonged to the President training ship, and astonished the rescued man by accosting him by name, and they shook hands quite as old friends.

Finding that Derval was a gentleman by education and bearing, and an officer of the Royal Naval Reserve, whose name as such was in the Navy List, the officers of the gun-room at once requested that he would mess with them during the passage home, or till he made some other arrangement.

What other arrangement could he make, but rejoin his ship? and that, as yet, was impossible.

The homeward voyage was a very protracted one, and for several reasons the Holyrood was long detained at the Cape by the Commodore commanding our squadron there.

It was when lying in Table Bay that Derval read in an old number of the Times, that Lord Oakhampton, his meeting with whom he had well-nigh forgotten amid more exciting events, had returned home from Bermuda. Then he thought of Clara, and wondered if the little maid, with the rosebud mouth she had given him so frankly to kiss, remembered the young sailor to whom she owed her life in the Summer Isles.

The paragraph announcing that Lord Oakhampton had resigned his governorship, concluded by stating that strange rumours were abroad, to the effect that his Lordship's return was connected with a new and unexpected claimant to his title and estates, whose pretensions thereto would soon be a knotty matter for a committee of privileges.

Derval read all this with singular indifference. So keen was his disgust of his own family, that he cared little whether his father succeeded in his claim or not. One fact he felt assured of, that it would avail him—Derval—nothing to communicate to him the cruel treachery of which his step-mother, and her kinsman, had made his eldest son their victim. She would simply deny it, and the breach made wide enough now by coldness and indifference, would become more so by solid mistrust and dislike.

Thus he resolved to go no more near his home, and hence the long ignorance of all there as to his movements, and even of his existence.

When the Amethyst returned home, and Derval stepped on board of her in the London docks, old Joe Grummet, who was smoking his pipe in the gangway, thought he saw a ghost, and uttered a roar of absolute terror! Most extravagant was the joy of the worthy old salt on being assured of Derval's identity.

"Of all my yarns, this beats them—beats old Boots!" he exclaimed, as he drew a match across the sole of his shoe and relighted his pipe.

"Just come on board, sir!" said he, reporting himself with comic coolness and gravity.

"Good heavens—can it be—Derval—Derval Hampton!" exclaimed Captain Talbot, springing up from his writing-desk, and scattering his letters over the deck, and he took both Derval's hands in his own, shook them heartily, and mutual explanations at once ensued.

After rejoining the Amethyst, Derval made many voyages with her, and thus four years and more passed on, till, seeing an account of his father's death in a paper some weeks old, a great revulsion of feeling came over him, with much of repentance for the mutual indifference in which he had indulged; and a species of craving came over him to see the home of his childhood, or rather the place thereof, once again, for his father lay there in the great granite mausoleum, and his mother near the yew of other years, in the old church-yard—the true "God's acre" of Finglecombe; and he longed, too, to see old Patty Fripp.

As for his father, his old face came back to memory, as he remembered it in the days of his infancy, out of the long dim vista of the vanished years; and so for a time his whole heart went forth to his father—the father that loved his mother, and her memory so, before that other came!

Derval was now first mate of the Amethyst, Tom Tyeblock having got a ship of his own. He was moreover a sub-lieutenant of the Royal Naval Reserve, had done his gunnery drill again and again on board the training-ship, drawing the pay of his rank, and messing in the gun-room.

Of course he still connected all that had befallen him on Turtle Island, with Mrs. Hampton and her letter to the late Mr. Reeve Rudderhead; thus, after taking the train to Finglecombe, on reaching that place no power could make him take up his abode underneath the roof of his half-brother and Mrs. Hampton. So he took rooms at the hotel, the "Hampton Arms" (the armorial three choughs), where Rookleigh visited him promptly enough; but the meeting between those two who shared the same blood, was a strange and unnatural one, after their long separation, though Derval's heart warmed to Rookleigh, and was more stirred than vanity would have permitted him to own.

"What will people think," said Rookleigh, "of your being here at an hotel, and not at home?"

"Yours—not mine; and as to 'the people,' they may think precisely what they please, my dear Rookleigh."

"And what shall I tell mother is your reason?" asked Rookleigh, who, to do him justice, was ignorant of much that Derval knew.

"Say it is my desire that she should forget her dear and amiable cousin, Reeve Rudderhead, and all connected with him, especially their epistolary correspondence," was the—to Rookleigh—enigmatical, yet bitter reply of Derval.

Save the surrounding hills and woods, he found all the once secluded localities of his childhood so changed by the erection of marine villas, terraces, and formal promenades, that he would soon—in disgust—have gone back to London, but for certain influences that came to bear upon his actions.

CHAPTER IV.

"THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH FOR THE STAR."

"I have never been so far out from the Marine Parade before—so far out at sea, I mean."

"But you are not uneasy—alarmed?" asked the young man, with great tenderness of manner.

"Oh, no; am I not with you?" answered the girl sweetly and simply, as she drew off a glove and let the water slip through her slender white fingers, as the boat, urged by the powerful hands and arms of a handsome and sunburnt young fellow of twenty-two or thereabout, clad in a white flannel boating costume, with canvas shoes and a straw hat, shot through the water of the bay in view of Finglecombe.

It was a summer evening. The sun was setting beyond the Bristol Channel, and seeming to light its waves with fire. The rocks, the gardens and orchards along the shore, and all the villas of "the rising watering-place" were bathed in ruddy light, blended with a misty golden haze; and the warm glow fell on two bright faces in particular. When the oarsman looked with wonder at the changes on the shore, as he sometimes did, the girl looked at him, not in a way she was wont to do, but with a soft expression in her tender eyes that he would have given the world to have seen.

Anon, when at some distance from the shore, he rested on his skulls, leaving them in the rowlocks, while the boat floated idly on the sunlit water.

"This tatooing," said she, pointing with her parasol to his handsome bare arms, on which he had punctured, in sailor fashion, a ship in full sail, three choughs, and other insignia known to himself alone.

"Ah! Joe Grummet did all these one evening, when we were standing off and on under easy sail near Cuba," said Derval, for the speaker was he, and the beautiful girl who sat opposite to him in the stern-sheets, and on the dainty cushions of the pleasure-boat, was Clara, Lord Oakhampton's only daughter.

And now to explain how all this came about, and that these two were so intimate.

Derval was not long in discovering, from the visitors' lists, that Lord Oakhampton had taken, for the summer months, a villa in Bayview Terrace, Finglecombe, but had ignored the existence of the widow of his late namesake.

This was nothing to Derval, who immediately called at the villa and sent up his card, and was warmly received by Lord Oakhampton, who, we have said, was a tall and handsome man, with stately manners. He was elderly now, with silvery hair, but his fine aquiline features were unchanged in noble outline and honesty of expression. After a few mutual remarks and inquiries,

"I called," said Derval, "to do myself the honour of personally thanking your Lordship for the medal for which you so kindly recommended me."

"A medal most deservedly won by you, and my life-long gratitude went with it to you!" replied Lord Oakhampton, as did his daughter, who soon made her appearance, and saw that their visitor was a handsome and manly-looking young fellow. His brown hair was deeper in colour than it had been in Bermuda, and a slight moustache shaded a sensitive mouth. His tall and slender figure had all the strength and grace of manhood in it, and his manners were unexceptionable. His early training had made him grave in manner, thoughtful in expression of eye, courteous to men and deferential to women; in fact, he was all his mother could have wished him to be.

"Clara, my dear," said Lord Oakhampton bowing, with much of the old-fashioned courtesy which certainly did distinguish his manner when addressing her, or, indeed, any female of his household, "may I introduce an old friend to you—one to whom, indeed, you owe much!"

Clara Hampton looked up with something of surprise, and saw only a young man like a naval officer—but a very handsome one certainly—who answered her inquiring gaze by a bow and a smile.

"Forgotten—oh, no, no," she exclaimed as sudden recognition flashed upon her, and lightened all her features; "I remember you perfectly, and the sharks' pool and the coral cavern in Bermuda—you are our namesake, Mr. Derval Hampton?"

"She will be eighteen on her next birthday," said her father; "but women are by nature older than men," he added laughingly.

Every detail of a beauty that seemed to have no peer, in his eyes at least, did Derval take in by one swift glance. In all the bloom of her age, the girl was radiantly bright and fresh. Her rich brown hair was darker now, and more luxuriant than ever; but the violet eyes were softer and more shy than in the girlish time, when she accorded to Derval that kiss over which he fondly pondered now. But perhaps she was remembering it too. On her delicate cheeks there was a soft flush, as of the rose-leaf; her mouth was perfect in shape, and sweet. Refined, proud, and lovely, and she looked—birth stamped on every feature—a peer's daughter every inch, and in every way a picture fair to look upon; and so thought Derval. Never before had he dreamed that a woman could be so fair.

He was invited to stay to dinner; the invitation was repeated for a second occasion and a third. Lord Oakhampton had evidently few friends in that part of the world, was the modest thought of Derval, and the Bermuda Isles formed a safe and easy topic for general conversation when other subjects failed; and the usually haughty peer thawed fast and easily towards his young friend—little dreaming that the latter was learning faster to love his daughter, and not the less that he deemed this love a midsummer madness, and too surely might be only like the desire of the moth for the star!

They met on the marine parade, on the shingly beach, and singularly enough in some of the shady green lanes, that had escaped recent improvements; but Miss Sampler was always with her, a companion now. Derval felt his heart leap when he saw her, and it trembled as she drew near him, and as it had never trembled under human influence before. He showed her the locket she had given him at Bermuda. She laughed at first, and then coloured deeply to find that he wore it attached to his neck by a ribbon.

Yet after this she neither avoided him, nor made any change in her demeanour towards him. What could he deduce from that, but that she favoured him, or received him as a means of passing the time in a stupid watering-place. It was bitter for him to think that she—secure in a position so far above him in many respects—might be doing thus; but from the soft, shy gentleness of her manner, it was impossible to adopt such a conviction.

Twice, when escorting her to the dinner-table, he thought that her hand—how little it was!—leant rather fondly on his arm, and the idea made his heart thrill. Is it a marvel that his head was turned and intoxicated by the opportunities offered by propinquity, and that the secret of his heart was daily trembling on his lips?

Was she luring him on to his own destruction? Her calm, gentle eye, and perfect quietude of manner, repelled this idea. Could he but have looked into the girl's heart! At that very time she was asking herself, what was this young sailor to her? Why should she feel so deeply interested in him, for such was indeed the case! Cold reason replied that he ought to be as nothing to her; yet her heart already told her that he was something, and more than something to dream of—to ponder on fondly—to be sorely missed when he departed—as if his life were already mysteriously linked with her own.

"His life linked with hers? What folly!" she whispered to herself, as she thought of her proud father and "society."

So now they had taken them to boating on the bay; but Miss Sampler who usually played propriety in their apparently casual walks, disliked aquatic excursions, and generally sat reading on the beach, while Derval pulled far enough out to be beyond the ken of anything but a powerful lorgnette, and of this Clara generally possessed herself "to see the coast."

On the evening mentioned, when Clara referred to the tatooing, and made Derval promise to disfigure his arms no more in that remarkable way, it may be inferred that their intimacy had made considerable progress—the result of the somewhat untrammelled life they led at Finglecombe—and seldom does the evening sun fall upon a pair of more attractive-looking lovers—for lovers they were undoubtedly—though no distinct word of love had passed between them.

It lingered, softly as Derval's own eyes, on Clara's graceful figure, her creamy dress and soft laces, on her shining hair, and pretty little feet encased in hose of bright cardinal silk and tiny bottines, the most perfect that Paris could produce—bottines which the folds of her dress had kindly revealed for a time.

Seeing that Derval was resting, as we left him—resting dreamily on his sculls, and letting the boat drift with the current, while his soul was full of her beauty, and his heart seemed at his lips, she said:

"Of you," he replied, and he saw that she grew pale at the idea of what might follow, and the conviction that she had drawn it on herself; "I was thinking that you could be a friend good and true, if you chose; and heaven knows," he added with a sigh, and timidly fencing as he thought, "I want one."

"Have you not Rookleigh, your brother of whom I have heard, but, oddly, never seen?"

"Ever and always. Think of all I owe you—that I am here to-day, alive and in the world, listening to you, and spared to Papa."

Bright ardour filled his eyes, and stooping he pressed her hand to his lips; but she snatched it away.

"I do not mean friendship of that kind!" said she, blushing with anger at herself for taking, as she thought, the initiative; then he too reddened, and a pause ensued.

Clara had not the least idea of flirting; and yet the most consummate coquette could not have been more fascinating in her charming frankness of manner.

"Of what are you thinking now?" he asked, as her white fingers played with the shining ripples.

"God knows, I do—perhaps," said he, sadly; "it is pleasant to dream for the present, and to forget the coming future, for all this sweet companionship must end, and when I return to England again, you will be no longer Clara Hampton."

All this was pointed enough; but both were fencing—he dreading a repulse, and she thinking of her father's pride. Yet both were very pale, and their hearts beat violently.

"You must not call me Clara. Rich? You think, then, that no one would love me for myself alone?" she asked a little bitterly.

"That you were as humble and as poor as the beggar-maid whom King Cophetua loved."

"Oh, do not mock me!" he exclaimed bitterly—for no lover likes his heroics to be made a jest of; but no mockery was in the girl's heart; she felt as if dreaming; she only felt and knew that her lover was beside her, looking more manly and handsome, and more fascinating, than the first day they met; but she thought of her father and his lofty pride, and said with apparent firmness, yet with a gasp in her slender white throat,—

"I do not mock you—oh, never, never think that of me; but for pity's sake, talk no more in this strain; and do pull the boat in shore, for I see Miss Sampler is making signals of impatience."

Though her long lashes imparted a dreamy depth to the young girl's eyes, there were in the low, broad brow, firm lips, and clearly-cut nostrils, evidence of force of character and strength of resolution.

Derval understood the situation; he sighed, shipped his sculls, and pulled in silently, feeling that he had said enough to show that he loved her, and that she chid him not, he resigned her to her chaperone, and betook him, full of anxious thoughts, to the solitude of his room at the hotel; yet each felt that they must meet again, or that henceforward life would be a blank to them; and eye said this to eye as they parted on the shore.

It was rather a source of exasperation to Mrs. Hampton in her stately villa, that Derval should be so intimate with Lord Oakhampton and his daughter, while she and her son were not—were ignored, in fact; and this, with Derval's protracted residence at the hotel, caused no speculation among her friends and the gossips of the new settlement or watering-place; and, incited to mischief by his mother, Rookleigh Hampton began to scheme revenge; nor were Patty Fripp's ample and exulting expatiations on the rare beauty of Miss Hampton, and the great glory of Derval's boating expeditions with her, wanting as a spur on this occasion.

Lord Oakhampton remarked to himself that neither by word, act, nor hint, did Derval ever refer to his late father's dreaded claim to the coronet. This pleased with him with his young friend, yet it was not without annoyance and alarm that he discovered and viewed the growing intimacy between him and his daughter, and painfully, indeed, did the latter blush when he began to remonstrate with her upon the subject; and her pain was all the deeper by a knowledge that she had brought it upon herself.

Seated together with her father in an oriel window overlooking the bay, her mind, as evening darkened and the moonlight came upon the water, was full of what had passed between herself and Derval but a very short time before, and after a silence of some minutes she said, with the irrepressible desire to talk of what was nearest her heart and uppermost in her thoughts,—

Lord Oakhampton started quickly, and looked at her, but Clara's face was hidden in shadow.

"Of course I have observed it," he replied; "he is not only handsome, but distinguished-looking, for a man of his class. He comes of a good family."

"Has he ever said so—does he talk of such a matter?" asked Lord Oakhampton, in a changed tone.

Lord Oakhampton was silent for a minute; then he said, with some asperity of manner,—

"Extreme intimacy, Papa!" said Clara, in a tone of dismay, and colouring deeply in the twilight.

"I have known him since the day he sent up his card, and renewed the intimacy that began at Bermuda."

"That was but a casual, but very important episode; but what passed then, under the circumstances, temporarily, when you were but a child, cannot be continued or tolerated now. He is but a merchant seaman!"

"That is doubtful, Clara; his brother is the heir. I know there is much common sense in that little head of yours, and I wish you to bring it to bear upon the present question. This intimacy is unseemly. Good heaven! what would society say of it?"

"Indeed! You are young and inexperienced, and it is for me to consider that which may become insolence on his part, and folly on yours."

Never before had her father spoken with such severity of tone, and the soft eyes of Clara filled with unseen tears.

"Ours is a levelling age certainly; but this intimacy carries the game rather far. It is outrageous!" he continued, nursing his annoyance, and warming with it.

"Kinsman!" exclaimed her father, with growing anger, as he recalled the visit of Mr. De Murrer; "the devil! don't speak thus; and as for the mere matter of a name, one would think you were an old Scotsman of a hundred years ago, rather than an English girl of the nineteenth century!"

"I only think of what I owe him, Papa," urged Clara, greatly apprehensive that Derval's name would now be struck off the visitor's list—but prudence forbade such an order as yet.

"It is possible you may think too much," continued Lord Oakhampton, greatly ruffled; "but remember, Clara, that this young man is as much out of your world as one of yonder boatmen in the bay!"

"Do not suppose, dear Papa, that I will ever do aught unbecoming your daughter. I have always done my best to please you," she added, as her graceful figure bent over him, and a white arm stole round his neck, while her sweet face grew almost softer in expression, as she caressed him.

But she now discovered the truth of the German proverb, "Speech is silver, silence is gold," and knew to her infinite mortification, that by her first remark on Derval's appearance, and her attempted defence of their friendship, she had thoroughly awakened the suspicions of her father, of whose old hostility to the Hamptons of Finglecombe she knew nothing; and the results were that her liberty was much more circumscribed than it had been. There was no more boating on the bay, and Miss Sampler was for ever on duty now. Forbidden to think of him, she cherished the idea all the more. To her, Derval, honest, manly, straightforward, and single-hearted, seemed worth all "the white-handed glittering youth" she had yet met with; and thus it was in vain that her father urged that he did not and never would belong to her class in society—even by thought, culture, and education; but, in some of the latter premises, his lordship was in error. Yet, too keenly aware of what the claims were that Derval, or interfering friends for him, might urge to the title he held, he could neither forbid him his house nor request that he would cease to address Miss Hampton.

To Derval the idea of these claims never occurred; he felt that there was a change now, that he saw Clara more seldom, and never alone. Whether this was her own desire, or that of her father, he could not tell; he only knew that the first stirrings of a deeply-absorbing love were quickening his pulses and thrilling in his veins. He had heard of the desire of the moth for the star, and felt himself somewhat akin to that foolish insect indeed. She was the daughter of a peer, and in the fulness of that thought, and the greatness of his passion, he forgot that he might yet be a peer himself!

Time was passing on—day followed day, and he missed the sweet companionship sorely. Her face was ever before him in all its soft beauty and variety of expression; her voice seemed ever in his ear, as he conned over her utterances, and recalled her attractive and pretty little modes of manner. He was never weary of watching the roof that covered her, the windows she might be looking from, or the walks where he might chance to meet, even to see her; and he resolved, that come what might, he would not go away without declaring how he loved her, without telling her the old, old story, that was first told in Eden; and that he would never forget her, and never love another.

The time for his departure was drawing near now, and thus he was a prey to the most terrible anxiety.

He felt that the relief of words he must have, or his heart would sink. So much had this strong passion become a part of himself, that he felt and thought that he would rather be dead and buried with her, than that she should become the wife of another. And yet such separations come to pass every day, and no one dies of them, so far as the world knows.

He had gathered courage from what he could read in her eyes, more than once, when he had met her and her chaperone, and they had lingered together, talking the merest commonplaces, but with their hearts very full indeed, and Miss Sampler keenly observant of their words and actions. Thus he had resolved that there should be no mistake when the opportunity came, and come it did one day, most unexpectedly, when he met her suddenly, alone too, and then, all the world seemed to stand still!

It was in one of the last places where he would have thought to meet her unattended—at the Nutcracking Rock, an ancient logan-stone, which rests, as it were, upon a keel, so that a push rolls it from side to side, at each vibration being arrested by a stone, against which it knocks. Hence its name, and it stands in a wooded and solitary place, near the shore of the bay, covered with golden moss and surrounded by dwarf oak-trees and hawthorns.

She was seated on a camp-stool, and so intent on her work of sketching it, that he drew near her unperceived, with his heart beating almost painfully, and every fibre tingling with love and joy. His step aroused her, she looked round; a faint exclamation escaped her, and she dropped her pencil.

"Thank heaven that I find you as I do, alone, Clara," said he, picking up the fallen pencil, and kneeling on one knee by her side after he did so. They were eye to eye now, and both were greatly agitated.

"And what were the wild waves saying?" she asked, smiling honestly and fondly down on his upturned face.

"They seemed to sing to me of love and you, Clara," he answered, in the same joyous manner, and drawing her towards him he kissed her tenderly, passionately, and there was no need for declaring the love that filled his heart and trembled on his lips, and yet he did so in words that filled her heart with mingled joy and fear—joy, for they were such as no young girl could have heard unmoved when addressed to herself—and a great fear, as she thought of her father, and all his words flashed on her memory. She grew pale, and even when Derval's kisses were pressed upon her cheek in that sequestered place, she glanced round her fearfully.

"And you love me in return, Clara, my own Clara?" he murmured, caressing her tenderly after their first incoherences were over.

"It is said to be fortunate for us, that the future is a sealed book," said he, drawing her head and face caressingly into his neck and his breast, "yet I should like to have known that the little girl whose life I saved in Bermuda was to be my wife—my own darling wife—in the years to come!"

The sweet assumption made her tears flow fast, and hot and bitter tears they were. The intensity of his love had touched her, and delighted her heart; but these words recalled her father's remarks and injunctions, and even while Derval spoke and she responded, while joining with him in the delirious joy of the present, she had the chilling and terrible fear, that this great love and his suit would prove—all nonsense in the future, and never come to anything!

I was an awful conviction or fear to have at such a moment, and the intensity of her agitation, her sobs and tears, attracted the attention of Derval.

"You dread his opposition—so do I; but I would not have him ashamed of me, if you are not—my own love!"

"Derval—we leave this for Paris to-morrow morning. In the joy of seeing you, I almost forgot it," she continued, sobbing heavily.

"To-morrow—oh heavens, Clara! And I! next day for a ship—a few days whole seas will be between us! We sail for the Cape."

"It is awful to think, Derval, that we may pass out of each others' lives, and be as if we never met—never known each other!"

"What can such a secret and forbidden love as ours, with such a separation, lead to? a separation without a place or period for meeting again, and without a means of hearing of each others' lives, safety, or happiness."

As she spake her pearly teeth were set, and there came into her face something of the expression that Derval had seen it wear in the boat on the last occasion, force of character and strength of resolution, young though she was.

As the reader may conjecture, the sketch of the famous Nutcracking rock was never finished.

"I shall ever thank heaven for the impulse that sent me to meet you to-day, darling Clara," said he, as they reached the spot at which they would be compelled to separate. "We must, and shall, meet again when I return, for I shall seek you out, wherever you are, and we must think of each other every day and every hour. Till then—oh, my love, till then!"

Much more was said, brokenly and incoherently, and they lingered so long, that at last she had to leave him, blinded in tears, and with one long and clinging kiss they parted, as so many lovers have done before, and will do so again.

They had exchanged rings and locks of hair in the most orthodox fashion. It was arranged that Rookleigh should be the medium through which their correspondence should be conducted, their letters being mutually, if necessary, sent under cover to him. There could be no harm in their hearing of each other secretly, they thought, and deemed such an institution necessary for their happiness—their very existence, indeed; for both were rash, young, loving, and enthusiastic, and both, too, were somewhat ignorant of the conventional ways of the world; and to Rookleigh now they both mutually looked for succour in the great love that bound their hearts together.

Though his heart was weary with the keen sorrow of their separation, Derval felt full of bright hope for the future—that hope which furnishes all our Chateaux in Espagne, or in the air—"hope that lends us alabaster bricks and golden mortar to build these castles withal; hope that turns the hue of the stalest loaf into the richest plum-cake, and the smallest of beer into the mellowest of Burgundy."

As if chance were already beginning to favour him, Derval, who did not, and never would visit the villa at Finglecombe, on returning to the hotel found his brother Rookleigh awaiting him there.

"You asked me the other day if I would do you a favour, Rook," said he, "and I promised to do it—though I was in a great hurry."

"You must in turn do a favour for me—and I am sure you will, old fellow!" added Derval, and he placed a hand affectionately on his brother's shoulder, feeling at that moment, in the great joy of being loved by Clara, that he forgave him everything, and could love him too.

He then related to Rookleigh much that had passed between himself and Clara—told of their secret engagement—secret, at least, as yet; showed her engagement-ring, but failed to see the sneer of Rookleigh's lip, as he kissed it with what the latter deemed idiotic ardour; and in the end, begged him to be the medium through whom their correspondence was to be conducted; and to this Rookleigh, affecting demurrage, ultimately consented, for which he was extravagantly thanked and well-nigh embraced by Derval, who said:

"And now, Rook, dear old boy, what is the favour you wanted of me—in what can I serve you?"

An unfathomable expression stole over the face of Rookleigh at that moment, and his pale green shifty hazel eyes perhaps never looked so shifty. Skilfully veiled hatred, malice, and anticipated triumph were mingling there; but Derval, whose heart and thoughts were utterly strangers to passions such as these, could little have conceived they were so near him.

We have said that both Mrs. Hampton and Rookleigh resented Derval's intimacy with Lord Oakhampton, and the revengeful feeling of the half-brother eventually took a very remarkable form.

Seeing that Rookleigh seemed embarrassed, Derval pressed him to say what favour he required of him.

"I want a thousand pounds sorely on loan just now," said Rookleigh, in a very measured voice, while avoiding his brother's eye; "I know you have more than double that sum lying at your bankers, as you have scarcely drawn a penny of what our good father left you."

"He left me so little and you so much, Rook, that I marvel greatly you can want any more, especially from a poor devil like me; but you are heartily welcome to the thousand; and as for dear Clara's letters—"

"They will be fully attended to. Thank you, dear Derval, I knew you would assist me if you could. My monetary annoyance is a very temporary one indeed."

"There you are—and welcome!" exclaimed Derval, as with a dart of his pen he filled up a cheque and handed it to his brother, who, after carefully placing it in his pocketbook, drew forth a document of somewhat portentous aspect.

"Knowing that you would give me the money, and that it would be necessary to give you some admission or receipt for it, I had this prepared, as time is short."

"True, I must be off in twenty-four hours. But what is the meaning of all this, Rook? The cheque is a crossed one—and I can trust you—can you not trust yourself?"

"We never know what may happen, and if you are to marry Clara Hampton, as I hope you will, all the money you can scrape together will be necessary."

"But, man alive! what is all this you have written here?" exclaimed Derval; "it looks like a title-deed—a marriage settlement—or a bill in chancery. Surely all this raggabash is not necessary between you and me!"

"For legal purposes it is—you, as a sailor, are ignorant of the ridiculous tautology of legal composition; but if you will affix your ordinary signature, witnessed by me, in these two places, without troubling you to read it, we shall post it to old De Murrer for security in his hands."

"All right, old fellow, I'll do anything you like but read over all that rigmarole," replied Derval, who dashed off his signature at the places indicated, and the document was enclosed in an envelope, addressed to their mutual agent at Gray's Inn for preservation, and placed in the usual receptacle at the hotel for letters to be posted.

There is no doubt that it was extremely culpable and negligent of Derval to sign that document as he did, without once troubling himself by an examination of its contents and nature—all the more so was he culpable, from the past knowledge he had of Rookleigh's general character; but his correspondence with Clara was uppermost then in his thoughts; and when the half-brothers parted for the night, there came into Rookleigh's face a diabolical smile, and he laughed, as he took his homeward way muttering to himself—

"How easily that fool allowed himself to be chiselled out of everything; but he is a sailor, ignorant of land life, for sailors go round and round the world but never into it!"

On the morrow, the pretty villa at Bayview was tenantless; the shrine was empty, so Derval gladly welcomed the hour that took him from Finglecombe, and the change of scene and occupation that came with it.

Lord Oakhampton had seen of late the preoccupation of his daughter's thoughts, and knew the cause thereof. Hence this sudden Parisian trip; after which a season in London would, he hoped, find another whose presence might obliterate what he deemed to be a foolish, a girlish, and outré fancy for Derval Hampton.

Ere the Amethyst sailed, the latter wrote to her under cover to Rookleigh, who was to discover Lord Oakhampton's address, and contrive some means of having it delivered.

The letter, full of passionate love and longing, of the tender little incoherences in which all lovers indulge, and many prayerful hopes for the future, duly reached the hands of his brother; but it was fortunate for Derval's peace of mind that he did not see the strange and horrible smile that crept over the face of Rookleigh as he perused it, and then tossed it into the fire.

CHAPTER V.

"DEEPER THAN E'EN PLUMMET SOUNDED."

Derval was back to his old work on the sea, but now it had lost all zest, and even the love for and hope of adventure had gone out of him. His whole soul and existence seemed to centre in the image of Clara, and his mind was never weary of dwelling upon it, and all the minutiæ of his late sojourn at Finglecombe, and all that had come of it.

She loved him; he had the dearest and sweetest assurance of that, and they were engaged—solemnly engaged; but how, and when was the end to be? Their future was painfully vague! He could scarcely hope for her father's consent, and without it he feared that he would never win Clara for his wife, as he knew, but too well, that though the name and blood were the same, their relative positions in life—in that "society" in which she moved—were different, far apart, and that—as yet—he had no place therein.

His imagination was fertile in the art of self-torment; and still more did it become so, as time and distance increased between him and their parting hour and parting place; and, after skirting the Bay of Biscay, that turbulent corner of the seas where, at times, all their storms seem gathered together, the Amethyst shaped her course towards Madeira.

On the lone sea by day and in the silent watches of the starry night of what could he think but her, and the new and hitherto unknown emotion she had kindled in his heart!

He hailed with joy and anxiety the Pico Ruivo as it rose from the sea, and the Amethyst ran into the roads of Funchal, where she lay-to while Joe Grummet went ashore for any ship letters that might have come ahead of them by the steam-packet.

Letters there were for the Captain, Harry Bowline, and others on board, but not one for him, and his spirit began to fall. He strove hard to console himself with the doctrine of chances and mischance, and hoped letters might await him at Ascension or the Cape of Good Hope.

Rough old Joe Grummet, a shrewd observer, especially of those for whom he had a regard, saw how his countenance changed when the letters were distributed and none appeared for him.

"I was sorry to see you so disappointed, sir," said Joe, as they walked the deck together that night, after the Pico Ruivo had sunk into the sea, "but I think it is often better not to get letters when in blue water, for we can't amend evil things then, as we might when ashore; and I had a shipmate, who lost his life through getting one—and out of the smallest post-office in the whole world."

"It is a barrel that swings from the outermost rock of the sheer mountains that overhang the Straits of Magellan, right opposite to La Tierra del Fuego. Every ship passing opens it to place in letters or take them out, and undertakes their transit, if possible. It hangs there at an iron chain, washed, beaten, and battered by wind and storm; but no post-office, even in London, is more secure from robbers. Well, this poor fellow laid well out on the foretopsail yard, while the ship was thrown in the wind, to see what letters were in the barrel. There was but one, and it was for himself. It was from his wife, but was sealed with black. Sitting outside the yard he read it; then a cry escaped him, and falling into the sea between the ship and the rocks he was seen no more. The letter fluttered aft to where I stood near the taffrail. It told poor Bill of his mother's death, months and months before, and the shock had been too much for him. But you have come back to the Amethyst sorely changed, surely Mr. Hampton?"

"They should not, Joe, as there is no reason therefor. But were you ever in love, Joe?"

"Bless my heart, many and many times, as long as my pay lasted, and I had to come aboard again."

"Don't I, though!" exclaimed old Grummet, as he bit a quid off the twist of pigtail that was always in his right-hand pocket. "I often boast myself as one of the not-to-be-done squadron of the Royal Naval Reserve, Mr. Hampton; yet I am always done brown when I am on shore, which is the reason I generally stick close to the ship, as one can't fall in love when in blue water and the anchor's catted."

"Joe, the love I mean is the merging of your whole existence in that of another; placing every hope and wish on the will of another; living a glad, wild, feverish dream, with the strange sense that without that other all life is worthless."

"Well, I'm blessed! On that other, as you call her, I have too often spent every 'tarnal penny, and come to grief in the end, and found myself toeing a line before the beak. No, no! love ain't for me now; and for you, perhaps, it as well you didn't get any letters, for perhaps your girl may have slipped from her moorings and gone foreign with some other fellow."

Derval laughed at Joe's phraseology, but said, "This is perhaps my last trip, Joe, and if I leave the ship I hope to see you a mate of her."

"Mate—no, no, Mr. Hampton; I ain't used to the luxuriance of a cabin, where knives and forks and tea-cups is used; and where the grog-tot, the bread-barge, and the mess-kid ain't known."

The wind was fair, the weather delightful, and the Amethyst in due time crossed the equator.

"Let me be patient, let me be patient!" sighed Derval, when the volcanic peaks of Ascension, the rendezvous of our African squadron, came in sight; and the Amethyst, having sprung one of her topmasts, ran in to refit. Letters for her came off in a Government boat. There were some for nearly every man on board save Derval, whose anxiety was fast becoming painful.

As at Madeira, he wrote and left a passionate and appealing letter to Clara, under cover to his brother, and sailed in hope for the Cape. Hope; he could not abandon that! Was Clara ill? had Rookleigh mismanaged their correspondence? or had Lord Oakhampton discovered and intercepted all their letters? Clara could address letters to the ship—letters which would follow him all over the world; but he remembered that his movements were somewhat unknown to her, and gathered a little mental relief from the idea. But from what did the silence of Rookleigh arise? He might at least write and state that he had no letters to enclose!

Why did she never write to him? he was incessantly asking himself. Where were the fondly promised letters that Rookleigh was to transmit to him, in exchange for those transmitted to him for her—passionate letters, expressing all the complete and wild abandonment of his heart and soul to an earthly love, to which he had given up all that God had given him.

Times there were when already he began to have strange and terrible doubts of her. Yet, why had she been so sweet, so kind, so loving in her manner to him, if she was but luring him into misery and disappointment? She could not be so cruel—his very life was in those little white hands of hers—hands that he had so often covered with kisses. Then he thrust these aching thoughts aside, and hoped and trusted that time would unravel and explain all; but as yet a black cloud, a pall, seemed to have come between him, his past existence, and Clara!

In the life he knew she must lead in the gay world, where she participated in all that fashion, wealth, and rank could surround her with, was she forgetting him? would be his tormenting thought anon; and had what he deemed a mutual love been to her but a sea-side romance, a summer flirtation? Oh! what was he, he would mutter, that she, a peer's daughter, in her beauty and her bloom, should remember him?

If true to him, at all risks and hazards, even of her father's anger, she should have written to him; and passing over Rookleigh, at the same risks and hazards, he should have written direct to her, and ended his cruel anxiety if possible; but he knew not her address, or whether she had returned from Paris to England.

"I thought that I had too many reasons for being happy," said he, "a sure sign of grief to come—of sorrow close at hand."

At last, after a voyage (including her delay at Ascension) of more than two months, the Amethyst hauled up for Table Bay, came to anchor, and the boats came off from Cape Town.

"At last, at last—surely now!" exclaimed Derval as a letter was given him, and he opened it with trembling hands. It was from Rookleigh, in answer to one he had written from Madeira, saying that "Miss Hampton had never sent a single letter for transmission," and nothing more.

He wrote her one cold and brief letter, almost a farewell, under cover to Rookleigh, and then an illness and fever came upon him while the ship lay at Cape Town, and through the long days and nights there, he lay in his little cabin, almost mad with his mental misery—a misery athwart which there came no gleam of light or hope; and when next he came on deck, after many weeks of illness, he found that the Amethyst, instead of returning to England, had been freighted for Batavia under Captain Talbot, and was working out of Table Bay, and heading eastward for the Indian Ocean!

Thus it would be long before he should see or hear of Clara again, and learn the worst that fate had in store for him.

How little could he imagine, that all he was suffering—the keenest pangs of doubt, anxiety, sorrow, and disappointment—were suffered by Clara. Ignorant of his precise address and whereabouts, the poor girl wrote to him in secrecy again and again—wrote to him lovingly, then despondently, and anon with surprise and upbraiding, under cover to Rookleigh, posting her epistles with her own hand, and trusting none other—posting them with a prayer on her lips; and to the recipient—the supposed medium of their love affair—the mutual correspondence proved a source of supreme merriment, and even to his mother too; and in the end the fire received it all.

At last Clara knew not what to think; she could but wait and hope, but ceased to use her pen. The conviction that she had stooped—actually condescended—in the acceptance of his love, added to the poignancy of what felt, and filled her, at times, with indignation at conduct so singular and unwarrantable.

Fear of Derval's vengeance, if his duplicity ever came to light, the malevolent Rookleigh had none; but he laughed curiously when he thought of the folly of which his sailor brother had been guilty in signing the unread document! And as for the loss of his lady-love, "Derval," he thought with a chuckle, "will no doubt take to poetry, and writing sonnets on female inconstancy."

A somewhat unexpected turn was given to the then state of the affair, by Lord Oakhampton once more taking up his abode temporarily at Bayview, in Finglecombe, the saline air of which he rightly or wrongly—for our story it matters little which—conceived to be beneficial to his health. This to Clara was most distasteful, as the entire locality was—for her—full of associations of the past, that the sooner she forgot the better for her own happiness.

It was about this time that Derval's last letter from Clara, written before his illness at the Cape, came to the hands of Rookleigh, and conceiving, from the animus of that in which it was enclosed, it might seem to widen the breach between the lovers, he, by the assistance of little hot water to moisten the envelope, made himself master of the contents, and adding a bitter postscript in imitation of Derval's writing, he reclosed it, and, aware that Lord Oakhampton was absent in London, resolved to deliver it in person, and thus achieve, perhaps, an introduction to Clara.

Inspired by a new and very remarkable scheme, he repaired to Bayview Villa, and sending up his card, was ushered into the drawing-room.

The apartment was a double one, divided by an archway, in which hung curtains of blue silk, edged with silver lace, and festooned partly with white silk cord and tassels. There was a sound, the rustling of a dress in the inner room; but at first Rookleigh saw only a white hand and arm—an arm so taper round and marvellously beautiful that he had never before seen anything like it. A diamond bracelet clasped the wrist. The hand slightly parted the curtains—for Clara was there, with his card in her hand, striving to still the painful beating of her heart.

Then her whole figure appeared: a girl tall, slender, perfect in grace and symmetry, her dark violet eyes full of earnest inquiry, the sweet lips and mignonne face, all expressive of it too. Lovely, dainty, and refined, Clara Hampton stood before him.

Would she offer him that lovely hand, permit him to touch it? was his first thought; but in a second more it was placed confidingly within his own; while Clara, who blushed deeply at first, now grew pale as the new-fallen snow.

Never before had he stood in the presence of a girl so quietly patrician in bearing and appearance.

"Mr. Rookleigh Hampton?" said she, glancing at the card, and with enforced calmness of tone and manner.

"Derval's brother," replied the traitor, and no other introduction was necessary, though at the mention of Derval's name, he could see how anxiety mingled with hauteur in her sensitive lips and eyes.

"You are, of course, aware of the arrangement my brother made about—about your letters?" said Rookleigh.

"The first and only one," replied Rookleigh, who, with all his effrontery and duplicity, felt that he never before stood in such a presence, and could scarcely remember how he answered her; for his mind was filling fast with admiration, his heart beat fast, and his brain seemed to burn.

"A letter from Derval at last! His first letter too—yet it would explain!" were her first ideas. "Be seated, Sir, and for a moment or two, pray do excuse me."

She retired back beyond the silk hangings, and rapidly made herself, more than once, mistress of the contents of that letter, one of coldness, brevity, and farewell—farewell without further explanation—a letter the strange tenor of which startled and bewildered her.

Clara's agitation and confusion were excessive; but sorrow succeeded to surprise in her heart, and indignation to sorrow.

"All is over and ended between your brother and myself, Mr. Rookleigh," said she, with a painful swelling in her slender white throat.

"His letter displeases you?" asked Rookleigh, scarcely knowing what to say, and feeling his heart for a moment fail him.

He scarcely required to do so, yet he affected to peruse it, and then knit his narrow brows.

After a pause, during which both remained silent, and Clara had nervously, half unconsciously, crushed and crumpled up the odious and disappointing note—for it was scarcely even a letter—in her small and tremulous hand, Rookleigh proceeded to make apologies for the strange conduct of his unworthy brother, and to express his own pain, shame, sorrow, and so forth, in terms well chosen and uttered.

"He is peculiar," he added, "always was so; thus his oddity of disposition caused him to be sent to sea. I can assure you, my dear Miss Hampton, that he never got on well with the mother or me, or with anyone else, in fact. Then, sailors will be sailors, Miss Hampton, and are said to have loves in every port."

He continued to linger and utter his regrets, till the silence of Clara indicated that she was weary of his presence and desired to be left alone—alone to her own reflections and misery—and the young squire of Finglecombe bowed himself out, well pleased with his morning's work, and resolved that this should not be his last visit to Bayview Villa.

He was well aware that Clara Hampton, though just turned eighteen, had been the queen of the last season in London, and that though other queens were there as proud and pure and marvellously fair, yet there was none who apparently had remained so unspoiled by the homage offered. Flattery left her untouched; and beautiful and nobly born though she was, no weekly journal yet dared to make her portrait an inducement to purchasers, and no photo of her appeared in any London shop-window to court the comments, admiration, or ribaldry of every passing "cad" or ruffian.

It has been said—with what truth we know not—that no idle man can resist the temptation of seeking to fascinate a handsome girl, while at the same time eclipsing another man. Thus, could Rookleigh have any compunction about eclipsing that half-brother of whose proper position in the family he was so jealous, and whom he had been so studiously reared by his mother to view with a rancorous and most unholy hate?

Certainly not, and to this amiable end, Rookleigh resolved to leave no means untried to introduce himself to Lord Oakhampton.

Chance meetings—chance apparently—in the railway train, and elaborate civilities proffered by Rookleigh, the offers of cigars, periodicals, and so forth, led to an exchange of words; and though the peer was unpleasantly struck by the young man's name, and then knew precisely who he was, for certain cogent legal reasons he deemed it wise and well to be civil to him, and an invitation to Bayview followed—an invitation which Rookleigh was not slow to accept; and soon, by making himself useful in fifty different ways, he became then a regular sea-side visitor; though, as the brother of Derval, his welcome was of a somewhat mingled kind by both father and daughter.

Mrs. Hampton was intensely gratified by this unexpected intimacy, of which, however, by failing health, she was, perhaps luckily, unable to avail herself.

To Rookleigh the idea did occur at times, as to how he was to account to Derval for the non-transmission of Clara's letters for him to the ship, the owners, or their agents abroad?

Well—that was a matter for future consideration; meantime he had the signed bond, and that laid Derval at his mercy!

The lovers were meanwhile beginning to think—nay, to be assured—that their worst fears were becoming realised; Clara deeming that Derval, as his brother had alleged, was "a very sailor"; and he, that Clara was only true to the instincts of her cold-blooded class, and had already forgotten him, or cast him off, for some new, richer, and titled object; and Rookleigh rubbed his long lean hands, and puckered up his green eyes with quaint delight, as the plot seemed to thicken.

Clara had never striven even to like him, though the brother of that Derval she had loved so well—nay, loved in secret still. She saw the base metal in his composition, and always detected a something in the tone of his voice, and in the expression of his face, that roused an undefinable emotion of distrust, as belying in some way the ease and nonchalance of manner he affected.

"We are a kind of cousins, you know, Miss Hampton," said he one day, as he hung over her at the piano.

"Permit me to explain to you the degree," and he proceeded to do so with extreme accuracy, as he had just been studying the matter with Mr. De Murrer, affecting to act in the interest of his absent brother, but in reality for his own selfish purposes. But she only laughed aloud, and said:

She remembered her father's reply on a similar occasion, and merely shrugged her shoulders. Had Derval claimed the kindred blood, her view of it might have been different.

The poor girl's heart was ever beating with "a vague unrest" she could well understand, but had a difficulty in concealing and acting a part to those around her, to the watchful eyes of her father especially, and he began to wonder whether he had acted wisely in opening his house to Rookleigh Hampton.

The latter now learned that the Amethyst had sailed for Batavia, which would ensure, even if she returned direct to England, an absence of at least eight months on the part of Derval—eight months, of which Rookleigh made, as we shall show, a terrible use.

"Sailed for Batavia—sailed for Batavia!" he repeated. Fate was playing into his hands indeed, for long ere Derval could return, the game would be his own!

So "deeper than ever plummet sounded," was the deep villany of Rookleigh Hampton.

CHAPTER VI.

A CRUSHED HEART.

In detailing plot and counterplot, cunning and selfishness, doubt, despair, and no small agony of spirit, we have much to compress in the latter pages of this our history.

As the squire of Finglecombe, Rookleigh was, in every way, a more eligible parti than his sailor brother; thus, confident in having eventually the countenance of Lord Oakhampton, the former cared very little about the opposition of Clara, his whole anxiety being to play his cards well, and have her completely in his power, ere the return of Derval upset his plans, and this unexpected voyage to Batavia gave him far more time to do so than he could at first have hoped for.

Into his nefarious schemes his mother entered con amore. Derval removed or circumvented in any way, her son would marry the heiress of Lord Oakhampton, and eventually might succeed to the title. Every scruple died in her heart!

"Do you make any progress with her, Rookleigh?" that amiable lady asked one day.

"Yes; but I have plenty of time, however, before he returns—if he returns at all."

"Not a bad idea, Mother; anyway I shall be sure to succeed," replied Rookleigh, laughing, with something of the contemptuous confidence of youth, and ignorance of the world.

Unaware of the secret impulses that were working, Clara disliked the apparent intimacy between her father and young Rookleigh Hampton. She disliked his constant visits and something in the bearing he was assuming towards herself. The little toleration she had for him at first, as Derval's brother, passed away with the hope of ever hearing of Derval more, and she had—she knew not why—a secret antipathy to Rookleigh.

The latter felt this, and all his attempts to gain her confidence, even to engage her in a pleasant conversation came to nothing.

Coming upon her one day as she sat on the beach, she seemed so unconscious of his approach, that he came close to her side quite unnoticed.

Then she looked up at him and bowed, but her face scarcely wore the semblance of a smile as she did so.

"Of what were you thinking?" he asked, as he lay down on the pebbles by her feet.

"How smooth and pleasant the water looks—will you let me row you out a little way?"

"You may—but not me," replied the girl, almost sharply, for his manner worried her, and she rose up.

He grew pale with anger, love, and even hate, curiously mingled, and thought, as he started to his feet, and walked on by her side, "I'll crush you yet, my proud damsel!"

"Whatever you think of me, Miss Hampton, I trust you do not deem me a worshipper of Mammon?"

Now, as this was precisely what she did think of him, young though he was, she laughed and replied:

"The conversation is becoming, to say the least of it, peculiar and personal. What can it possibly matter to you, how or what I think of you?"

"It matters much, indeed; all would wish to stand well in your estimation—and I more than all, Miss Hampton."

"I know nothing of either—I have lived only some eighteen years in the world, Mr. Hampton. But why do you cross-question me?" she added impetuously.

"Pardon me; because to me all your thoughts are of the deepest interest, and I——"

"I do not understand all this," interrupted Clara, with increasing annoyance; "but here is our gate, and I must wish you good morning, Mr. Hampton."

"Good morning." He lifted his hat and turned away, with a baffled and angry emotion in his mind, and an expression in his eyes, that, had Clara seen it, would certainly have startled her; but so far as she was concerned, sorrow, annoyance, and evil were fated to come thick and fast now.

Rookleigh's law agents were meanwhile perfecting the evidences of his own and his brother's claims successively to the title held then by Lord Oakhampton. We have already detailed the angry interview between his lordship and Mr. De Murrer, and the alarm with which it inspired him; and this emotion was renewed when, from that gentleman, acting ostensibly in the interest of the absent Derval, but in reality under the secret pressure of Rookleigh, came a terrifying legal missive, to the effect that the whole chain of evidence was now complete and would shortly be laid before the world!

"There is but one way of compromising with the absent heir," wrote Mr. De Murrer, good-naturedly: "your lordship has no direct heir; Mr. Derval Hampton, and then his brother, are the next in succession; thus, if you do not marry again, the claim may take its course after your demise, if the heirs assent thereto."

"Marry again—and at my years!" thought Lord Oakhampton, bitterly; "of that there is no danger"; but as he thought of his daughter, the beads of perspiration started on his brow. He thought of the mutual regard his daughter and Derval had for each other; he saw a means of compromise the lawyer did not think of, and wrote him to that effect, begging him not to move in the matter until the return of Derval; but kept his own counsel, and said nothing to Clara on what he deemed their impending ruin; and his natural hauteur made him shrink from speaking on the matter, as yet, to Rookleigh Hampton.

The latter continued his visits as usual—the whole impending suit being supposed to be Derval's; but Clara kept so sedulously out of his way, that he could not use the opportunities he had, of urging his regard for her; thus, he left no means untried to win over Lord Oakhampton to his side.

Old, far beyond his years, in calculating villany, Rookleigh knew well, that though he might persuade Clara, by a false newspaper notice, that Derval was dead, the truth or falsity thereof would soon be proved; he thought it would be better to assure her in some manner of his supposed perfidy, and hence make her more open to the proposals of a new suitor, and the dedication of that time to revenge, which otherwise might be naturally dedicated to grief; and at Bideford he was not long in discovering one to be his accomplice in this deceit—a broken-down actress, or rather a dancing-girl belonging to a travelling troupe, whose acquaintance he had made with considerable facility about this time.

The girl was pretty, clever, and attractive in appearance, while destitute of nearly every scruple—so far as conscience was concerned.

"You will do this for me, my dear Sally?" said Rookleigh, as he sat toying with her over some wine, in one of the inn windows that overlooked the river and beautiful valley at Bideford.

"Of course I will—like a bird, old fellow, if you pay me," was the confident reply.

"Pay you—that I will, my pet—and well, too! You will have to act the dear, dear little devoted but deserted wife."

"Then a hundred pounds shall be yours," said Rookleigh, with something like a groan, as he deeply loved his money, and the girl had flatly refused to be his accomplice for less, and received half the sum in the first instance.

"Then give me a kiss, you dear old fellow, and I will soon earn the other instalment," said the young lady airily, as she got a vehicle and drove off at once to Finglecombe, kissing her hand to Rookleigh as long as he was in view.

It was autumn now, the fields were no longer yellow with billows of golden grain, as the breeze swept over the uplands; the white cups of the water-lilies had disappeared from pool and pond; the beeches changed their hue from green to russet, and the oak leaves were turning red; the evening sun had sunk beyond the waters of the bay, and Clara, seated alone, in the recess of a window, with an unread book in her lap, and her eyes fixed dreamily on the deepening shadows of the land and sea, felt more than usually depressed, when she was startled by a servant announcing "Mrs. Hampton," and a girl of somewhat attractive appearance, though rather flippant and nervous in manner, and somewhat shabbily clad, was ushered in.

Clara's first thought was of Rookleigh's mother, but the years of the visitor showed she was mistaken.

"You gave the name of Hampton?" said Clara, inquiringly, as her visitor remained silent.

"But you soon will," replied the girl, affecting to sob; "if I might take a seat, Miss—I am weary and faint and ill, and very sick at heart, too."

Clara trembled very much, though unaware of what all this was to lead to, but pointed to a chair, on the extreme edge of which the visitor seated herself, and seemed very far from being at ease. She was a little awed by her surroundings; then came an emotion of envy and anger at Clara for her perfect costume and beauty, her superior position and supreme purity of aspect, manner, and character; but no emotion of compunction for the pain she was about to inflict, or of shame for the deliberate falsehood she was about to tell, came to the soul of Miss Sally Trix.

"Only to know, Miss, if you have heard of late from my husband, as he has ceased to write to me?"

Clara felt herself grow sick and pale at this degrading question; but she asked with much apparent calmness:

"Mr. Derval Hampton of the ship Amethyst, who, I understand, engaged himself to you, while knowing well that I—his lawful wife, whom he left to starve—was living! I don't blame you, Miss," she continued, weeping to all appearance, for she could act her part well and professionally, "for you knew no better; but, thank heaven, I come in time to save you and unmask him!"

There ensued a pause now—but a pause in which Clara could hear the beating of her heart, and then she asked:

"In London, Miss, and just after his last voyage; Captain Talbot knows me well, and so does his brother Mr. Rookleigh."

"Because I am poor; he despised me as soon as he knew you, and used to go off with you in a boat on the bay, and leave me to break my heart weeping on the shore; for many a time I saw you both. For what was I but a toy to be played with, and cast aside when he was tired of me; but I am his wedded wife, as this ring and the register can testify!"

The stroller played her part to perfection, with every word planting a knife in the heart of the shrinking listener; and deeming that now she had said and done enough by the few details she threw in to convince the latter that she had been cruelly deceived, Miss Trix sobbed heavily, bowed herself out, and quitted Bayview Villa with all speed, considering that the character she had taken in this "cast" was—in a monetary sense—the best engagement she had ever made.

Clara sat long in the dusk as if turned to stone, but not a tear escaped her. This sudden revelation of Derval's supposed perfidy could not give her now the pain it might have done in time past; his conduct had partly prepared her for some such catastrophe as this; and yet how antagonistic—how unlike his open, gentle, candid, and earnest outward character, did this accumulation of secret perfidy seem!

She recalled the time when that word, as a term of endearment to herself, had fallen so sweetly on her startled ear; then a bitter, bitter sense of having been insulted and degraded, was added to her still more keen sense of utter disappointment in Derval; and to her guileless and innocent mind, no doubt, no thought of suspicion that she might be deluded, ever occurred.

"You have had an unexpected visitor, Miss Hampton?" said Rookleigh, eyeing her pale face keenly next day.

"A perfidy for which I blush! You see that it has been as I suggested, sailors have entanglements everywhere; but this is rather more than that—a legal marriage."

"Oh, how dared he—how dared he!" she exclaimed, as she clenched her little white hands, and the look of firm resolve she would assume at times stole swiftly into her sweet face.

Some weeks passed on; Rookleigh became impatient for action, and during these weeks a thoughtful and shadowy expression deepened in the once bright face of Clara, till it became one of such woeful fear, that the heart of the father alternately bled with sorrow for her, and swelled with indignation against Derval.

Every way Clara was a desirable wife, one of whose beauty, at least, any man might well be proud. She had inflamed the senses and fired the vanity of Rookleigh Hampton—not touched his heart, for he had none, in the way of a lover, to touch; thus, in the pursuit of his scheme he could think, speak, and act, with consummate coolness of head and demeanour.

He was well-pleased to find that—thanks to the hints of his mother—the gossips of Finglecombe, to whom all his actions and motives were objects of interest, already coupled his name seriously with that of Clara Hampton.

"Self-contained and well-balanced as she deems herself, this appearance of Derval's wife has knocked her off her perch!" thought Rookleigh, with a chuckle, when one day his eye fell on her white hand, as it rested on the arm of a sofa, and he remarked that the ring, which he knew Derval had given to her, was no longer on her engaged finger. She had removed it—relinquished it—and Rookleigh took this as an infallible sign that she now concluded all was over between the absent one and herself.

And with a coolness and confidence far beyond his years, he, with the greatest deliberation, took the earliest opportunity of obtaining Lord Oakhampton's permission to address his daughter.

"I should like to repair, if I possibly can do so, the evil my brother has done her, my lord. I do not understand how it is," said he, "that I have gone on so far with her without the least encouragement; but a love for her has grown rapidly upon me, and this love has become a part of my life—my very existence."

"If she would but care for me!" sighed Rookleigh, assuming humility and timidity.

"Yes," said Lord Oakhampton, huskily, as he thought of his last communication from Mr. De Murrer of Gray's Inn, and felt himself, for the first time, the slave of circumstances, and between the horns of a dilemma. Indeed, life—save for the few monetary troubles that sent him to Bermuda—had gone so smoothly with his lordship that, until now, when the claim to his coronet began to take a tangible and legal form, he had no reason to suspect Fate of having the least intention of treating him scurvily.

And with that invincible effrontery and coolness which were a part of his nature, Rookleigh, feeling that to a certain extent both father and daughter were in his power, went at once to the latter, whom he found in the drawing-room alone; and, no longer abashed as he had been at first by her rare beauty and stately presence—for stately and patrician was the presence of Clara, even in her girlhood—he seated himself by her side, and endeavouring to take and retain her hand, said, with a nervousness which we thoroughly believe was assumed:

"Miss Hampton, I have your father's permission to drop the mask I have worn so long.

"The fate of the love I bear you. Miss Hampton—Clara, I love you, as you must have known ere now—I love you; and in return for mine will you give me back truth for truth, love for love, trust for trust, your heart, your life, as fully and freely as I give you mine?"

How glibly he rattled it all out! He had, probably, learned it out of some novel, for one might have thought he was in the habit of proposing every day.

Clara was, at first, astonished and startled, and a thousand things that she had taken no heed of, or entirely misunderstood, rushed clearly on her memory now. Already insulted, mocked, and deluded by one brother, was she to endure the deliberate and insolent lovemaking of another?

She rose and looked at him in silence, and with an expression of eye not favourable to his suit, at all events; but Rookleigh was by no means abashed, for he was one of those men to whom the apparently unattainable has a peculiar fascination. Clara, with difficulty, restrained her tears.

"That you never dare address me in this manner again, and never intrude upon me more!"

"Miss Hampton, you had better think twice over this," said he, coarsely; "you may not disdain the hand of a man of wealth and position some day."

"Show this gentleman out," said she to the servant who appeared; and Rookleigh, baffled for the time, retired, with his heart swollen by passion and resentment.

When next he appeared before Clara, his manner was changed, and her appearance too.

Her father had set before the astounded girl the claim these brothers, Derval and Rookleigh Hampton, could advance to his title, his estates, and all that he possessed. That with them lay the power, or alternative, of waiting till his death gave them the means of quiet accession, or now declaring open war, and sweeping away wealth, position, rank, influence in Church, in State, and in society, by degrading him in his old age to the state of the merest commoner, and having him laughed at as a sham and interloper; and the gentle heart of Clara died within her, as she beheld her father's agony, and read some of the communications that had lately come from Gray's Inn.

"To save me, darling—oh, my darling, you will consent to marry the young fellow," urged Lord Oakhampton, piteously.

"Yes, Papa," she replied in a whisper, as he withdrew, saying, "God bless you, darling!" and Rookleigh took his place.

"Your father has placed all this matter plainly before you," said he, and triumph and passion glittered together in his eyes, as he surveyed the beauty of the crushed girl, who stood before him now with downcast face; "there is but one way to escape the evils that may—nay, must—come upon you and him, and that is a refuge under the shelter of my name."

"I do not quite understand you, Sir," she replied, with a dazed look in her eyes.

The words fell distinctly enough upon her ear—distinctly and deliberately were they uttered. She did not stir, moan, or weep, but every drop of blood left her face and lips—even the delicate hands he grasped so daringly in his; and a strange hunted and desperate yet defiant expression stole into her beautiful face and remained there.

"Speak, Clara; is your answer that which I venture now to hope and have a right to expect?"

Endearment was unnatural to him, and his tone and manner were more those of authority.

Still more deathly pale she grew; but her voiceless lips moved, and she sunk on the sofa insensible; but from that moment the arrangements for the wedding were carried forward without delay.

Still more did Fate seem to be playing into the hands of Rookleigh, when in the shipping intelligence appeared a notice to the effect that the Amethyst had perished in a storm in the Indian Ocean, and that a vessel answering her description, with the flag of the Royal Naval Reserve flying at her gaff-peak, upside down in token of distress, had been seen to founder; and Rookleigh knew that in the fulness of time he would be Lord Oakhampton, if he had the grace to be patient and wait. Of this catastrophe Rookleigh made no mention to Clara, whose spirit seemed so low now that nothing could depress it further.

"Child, child," her father would often say, while caressing her fondly and with great commiseration, "by your marriage with one or other of these men I may die in possession of my title undegraded—undegraded, and at my death, it will go to one or the other."

Old Patty Fripp was gone now to God's Acre, and with her ended another of "the innumerable simple and honest lives of pain and love, that are swept away like the dead leaves by the winds of autumn," and there was no one in Finglecombe now, save Mr. Asperges Laud, to lament for Derval Hampton, and, aware of Rookleigh's hatred of the latter, he bewailed his sorrowful destiny in strong language.

"Destiny brings stranger things to pass than ever you dream of," said Rookleigh, with a grimace of triumph.

"This bearing of yours is shameful!" exclaimed the old curate; "yea, it is indecent! What says the gospel of St. John?"

"Listen, ingrate! 'He that loveth not, abideth in death. Whoso hateth his brother is a murderer. And you know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in himself.'"

But Rookleigh only laughed, and shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, at St. John and his gospel too.

CHAPTER VII.

NEMESIS.

During the long voyage of nearly three thousand miles to Batavia, Derval's health and strength came back, but not his old elasticity of spirit. He had ever one thought—Clara! and the disappointment and mortification he endured were keen and bitter.

Now the once happy time of love and lingering at Finglecombe seemed, indeed, as an unreal mirage, a vanished oasis in the dull grey desert of his existence. He ceased now to seek for such explanations of her silence as his imagination might suggest; though times there were, when a great terror came over him, that she was dead; yet it was passing strange, that it was amid the mighty waste of the Indian ocean he was fated to hear some tidings of her—tidings that were, certainly, somewhat bewildering.

In latitude 12° south and longitude 100° west, the Amethyst spoke with a large steamer, from the Red Sea, bound to Australia, and from which Captain Talbot obtained some London papers, which proved of keen interest, when so far from home, though they were a month or two old.

In one of these Derval saw, among fashionable gossip, a marriage as being on the tapis between "the only daughter of Lord Oakhampton and young Mr. Hampton of Finglecombe, Devonshire."

Derval could scarcely believe his eyes, as he read this strange notice again and again. What did the mystery mean—or to what or whom did it point? Could it be some mistake with regard to himself? Had Lord Oakhampton given to Clara his consent to their engagement. If so, whence her mysterious silence? That his half-brother, Rookleigh, was the person to whom the printed piece of gossip referred, never once occurred to honest Derval; but whatever it meant, the date of the paper, some six weeks old; assured him that she must have been at that period alive and well. This episode gave him much food for reflection, and his mind was full of it when the Amethyst encountered that terrible gale, in which she did not founder, though another vessel did so within sight of her.

The tornado, for such it was, struck her suddenly, at a time when, luckily for the ship and all on board, she was running about ten knots an hour, with all her sails close-reefed, through haze that thickened fast to warm rain. The rise of the whirlwind was instantaneous, and the fore and main topsails were blown clean out of the bolt-ropes, while a sea was shipped that rolled aft leaving all on deck knee-deep in water.

The wind was not blowing steadily, but, strange to say, came in a series of rapid and dreadful gusts, tearing up the sea in such a fashion that the whole air was a mass of foam as high as the mainyard. The Amethyst careened heavily over to her port side, with her gunnel in the water, and her whole deck afloat with fragments of sail, ropes, spars, and blocks flying about. The masts bent like willow wands, and overhead all the loose rigging flew wildly about in loops and bights.

In addition to the thunder of the sea, and the deep hoarse bellowing of the gusty wind, was the crackling and crashing of blocks and ropes, of sails and of all loose objects, dashed hither and thither, as wave after wave deluged the deck.

Amid this hurly-burly of the elements, the mysterious paragraph was ever in Derval's mind, and he thought how hard it would be to perish now, and never know the meaning of it, or learn whether happiness or misery were awaiting him at home.

Home! how mighty was the waste of waters he had to traverse ere he could see its white cliffs again.

So violent was the fury of the storm, that to see the hands aloft endeavouring to furl or secure the fragments of the topsails, was calculated to strike terror, as momentarily they seemed in danger of being whirled off into the air.

Half a mile distant a partly dismasted ship, with the flag of the Royal Naval Reserve flying reversed at her gaff-peak, could be seen rising and falling beautifully on the long waves, at one time showing all her bows and nearly all her side, anon the whole line of her deck swept of everything from stem to stern, with her drenched crew clinging to the lower rigging or belaying pins. One moment she seemed lifted as if on the summit of a green hill, and the next seemed sunk in the deep dark valley; but it soon became evident to the eyes of Captain Talbot, and of all on board the Amethyst, that the buoyancy of the stranger was gone—that she must have sprung a leak and was settling down in the water with terrible rapidity.

Even if boats could have been hoisted out, it would have been impossible to have succoured her in such a sea, and ere long, while a cry came across from her crew, to be echoed by another from that of the Amethyst, she went down by the stern and vanished from sight with every man on board of her.

The tempest passed away to tear up other oceans, but so agitated was the water, that the Amethyst pitched and lurched heavily, while a new set of topsails were bent upon her; all damages made so far good, and with a steady breeze she began to enter the straits of Sunda. By noon next day the south-east point of the Isle of Lombock, with its great conical peak, eight thousand feet in height, bore S.S.W. on the starboard bow, and Captain Talbot steered for the strait of Allas, passed the isle to the westward and that of Sumbawa to the westward, which is reckoned the best and safest way to the eastward of Java; and at the beginning of the end of his pilgrimage, after running along the shore of Madura—the land of cotton, rice, and edible nests—Derval heard, with a sigh of satisfaction, the anchor let go in the roads of Batavia, as the ship swung at her moorings, with thirty-five fathoms and the small bower out, and the hands went aloft to furl the sails.

In his anxiety to return, to be off again as soon as possible, no man in the ship equalled Derval in his activity, with regard to getting the cargo out and another in, and daily he counted the hours while watching from the deck the lovely low green isles that stud the beautiful bay, the white-walled city, with its two-and-twenty bastions—"the Queen of the East," with all her palaces, villas, and trees, for there the Dutch, true to their national taste, have covered every available spot with verdure, flowers, and the brightest foliage.

Finally, the ballast and the last casks of sugar and turmeric were on board, the hatches battened down, and the boats hoisted in, and after a month's sojourn, in which he did not spend an idle hour, with a glow of joy he heard the orders given that were to take the ship out of the roadstead of Batavia.

"Mr. Grummet," cried the captain, "weather bit the chain forward, man the windlass, heave and haul! Mr. Hampton, get the topsails loose—I see they are furled with reefs."

"Sheet home and hoist away—up with the yards to the caps; let fall the courses."

Some of the head sails were now roused out of their nettings, the foretopmast, staysail, and spanker were set, and then she was fully under weigh. She went through the water "like a thing of life," and the flat Batavian shore began to sink.

"Home to England at last—home!" thought Derval as he looked over the side and saw the waves running under the counter, while he began to reckon for the thousandth time the probable period the homeward voyage might consume.

It was quite natural now, seeing so much as he did of a girl so beautiful as Clara, that in Rookleigh, though as yet he had never dared to attempt to caress her, or do more than take her passive or unwilling hand in his, the admiration of her person and inclination for her should increase, as a sense of propriety in her grew upon him; and also, that the opposition and indifference, with which he knew her heart was filled, should invite him to stronger efforts to reach, to win, and control it.

An illness that fell upon her delayed the marriage, which Rookleigh had duly paragraphed in the papers as forthcoming. He knew now, that the ship which had perished near the Straits of Sunda was not the Amethyst; and he knew, moreover, from a visit he paid to her owners, that she was now on her homeward way, and that there was no time to be lost!

Yet the season of spring was nearly over before Clara, who had recovered slowly, at her father's pleasant house in the western suburbs of London, could face in any way the fate before her,—a fate that seemed terribly close now, and from which there was no escape but her own death, or the degradation of her father.

She saw, as part of a terrible phantasmagoria, her wedding dress, and other dresses, her nuptial trousseau, strewed all over her room, on her bed, on the chairs, reflected over and over again in the pier-glasses; her toilet-table littered with ornaments which, though rare and beautiful, she loathed to wear.

Guests were, of course, invited—a few only, however, as her father wished the sacrifice (for such he deemed it too) completed very quietly; the bridesmaids were selected—only four, all in the same costume, with ornaments the gift of the bridegroom; and to Clara, their flippant gossip, their conversation for ever on one topic—the marriage—girls whom she only knew as having met them "in society," or little more,—were a source of perpetual worry and irritation to her.

Rookleigh's mother, now in all her glory, came and went at will, quite en famille at Lord Oakhampton's house; and she too, with her pale hazel eyes (the golden tint had faded out of them now), was another source of irritation to Clara, who looked so white, so wild-eyed and nervous, that her father, poor man, was crushed in heart and soul at the sight of her.

She felt like a poor little fly in the toils of some enormous spider. Never before did she think it was in her gentle nature to loathe any human being as she loathed this young man, whom she was so shortly to promise to love, honour, and obey, and with whom she was to go through the long weary years of the life that lay between to-morrow and the grave.

And in these years that would inexorably come, what might not his conduct become, and his treatment of her be, if, in the first flush of his own youth and of her beauty, he would be thus so unyieldingly cruel as to make her hand, freedom, and happiness the price of her father's title and honour, for the little that remained to him of a long, blameless, and honourable life—for Rookleigh still had the trump card of playing to win the coronet for his absent brother.

Then a wild gust of horror and dismay would come over her, ever and anon, when she thought of the coming hour when she must inevitably and irrevocably become the wife of Rookleigh, and there could be no escape from him but by death—and she felt that she dared and could not die—or by flight—a flight that "society" would speedily twist into a terrible scandal!

The afternoon was drawing into evening—one Clara would never forget, for Mr. De Murrer was to arrive with the marriage settlements and contract for signature, and Clara, who had begged to be left for a little time to herself—her miserable self—was seated in a bay window lost in bitter thought, looking at the flowers of spring, and wondering how all would be with her when the time came that they had faded away and been replaced by those of summer.

Already soft showers had expanded the buds that but a week ago were closed, the foliage of the brightest green was hiding the dark branches of the trees. On all hands she heard the notes of the birds, and with that tendency which we have to note trifles when in great tribulation, she found herself watching with curious interest the bees and the butterflies among the bright parterres of flowers where the geranium, the heliotrope, the light green leaves of the echevaria and the cups of the tulips mingled.

All nature looked sweet; but the spring suggested nothing of hope to Clara, and she was past weeping now, in the bitter conviction that it availed her nothing; but a shiver passed over her, when she found that Rookleigh, claiming a bridegroom's privilege, had come upon her unannounced, and was bending smilingly over her—could he do otherwise, for the girl was adorably beautiful, and was so nearly now his own!

"To-morrow, Clara, my darling," said he in a voice of more tenderness than it was quite his nature or his habit to assume, for true tenderness was not in him, "think of to-morrow, for long ere this hour we shall be united for life, and far away together!"

What she replied she never precisely knew, or cared perhaps to remember, so quickly did certain events come to pass just then.

The stoppage of a vehicle at the front porch, an important ring at the door bell, was followed by steps in the entrance-hall, and then a servant announced that "Mr. De Murrer was in the library, where Lord Oakhampton awaited Miss Hampton and Mr. Rookleigh."

"We are to sign the contract, and so forth, so take courage, Clara," said Rookleigh, taking her by the hand, but she shrank on hearing voices below.

"Oh, only some fellow he has brought, no doubt, to witness our signatures; he has delayed unaccountably long, so come, darling."

Clara entered the half-darkened library, pale as snow, and trembling very much, and saw her father and Mr. De Murrer mutually shaking hands, and then with—Derval Hampton!

On reaching London, the latter was doubtful at first what to do to obtain information of Lord Oakhampton's movements, of Clara, of his brother, and how to gain a clue to all that must have transpired during his protracted absence. As money was necessary for him, in the first place, he drove from the docks to Gray's Inn in quest of Mr. De Murrer, and at his chambers found that dapper little gentleman leisurely tying up with red tape a bundle of very legal-looking documents, which proved to be the contract and marriage settlements of "Rookleigh Hampton, Esquire, of Finglecombe, and the Honourable Clara Hampton," and thereby hung a wondrous tale!

It was with something of a sigh in his breast that the worthy little lawyer tied up these documents, for he disliked and mistrusted the bridegroom, and was astonished and grieved by the bearing of the luckless and too evidently repugnant bride. In all his legal experience he had met nothing like this.

"And—and—" stammered Derval, as the newspaper paragraph flashed upon his memory.

"Miss Clara Hampton—a good marriage indeed; a strange, but very good way of compromising the claim to the coronet—a consolidation of mutual interests, I take it to be; a family compact, quite."

With his eyes fixed alternately on the speaker's face, and then, as one in a dream, surveying the great square of the Inn, with its monotonous brick walls and uniform rows of windows, Derval heard all this with equal astonishment and dismay.

"I am just about to take these papers to Lord Oakhampton's; you will go with me, of course, and sign them as witness."

"Clara false—so fair, yet so false!" was Derval's bitter thought, as he threw himself into a chair.

A very few words served to enlighten him as to the conspiracy of which they had both been the victims—as to the pressure which must have been put upon the unhappy Clara to save her father's title, during his life at least, by the sacrifice of herself; and more exasperating to him was the knowledge that this pressure had been put upon her by Rookleigh, while acting nominally in the interests of an absent brother; and he knew in a moment that Rookleigh—the medium of their correspondence—must, for his own nefarious ends, have effectually suppressed it!

"And now, as we are on this unpleasant subject," said the lawyer, opening a drawer and taking therefrom a paper, "what was the meaning of this mysterious document that Rookleigh framed and you signed?"

"Of what folly you were guilty! he should have signed an acknowledgment to you. Good heavens! you sailors are strange fellows."

"Merely that you make over to your brother the whole of the £500 per annum left you by your father, with all your right, title, and interest therein."

Derval was astounded and bewildered not at his own folly and simplicity, but by the systematic baseness of his brother.

"Oh, wretch!" he exclaimed; "was it not enough to rob me of all, even my poor patrimony? but to seek to rob me too of Clara, my affianced wife!"

For a few moments his emotions were stifling, and he gasped rather than breathed.

"I must own," said Mr. De Murrer, "that when the post brought this singular document, signed by you, and witnessed by Rookleigh, the framer of it, illegally expressed and on unstamped paper, I was sorely puzzled; but, luckily, it is every way valueless."

"Save in so far as revealing the perfidy of which he is capable—the double villain!"

"While searching your father's papers for documents in connection with the peerage affair, I came upon one which completely alters all your affairs, and that I shall show you in time," said Mr. De Murrer.

"He need no longer now pretend to act in my interests in pressing on the peerage case, and not a moment must be lost in freeing my poor Clara from the trammels—the evil of mental misery—by which he has surrounded her."

"Good, good!" said the little lawyer, rubbing his hands. "The contract and the settlements won't be signed, after all, and may go with Rookleigh's document into the waste-paper basket. But I was due with them at Lord Oakhampton's an hour ago—a hansom will take us there in half that time; and now, my dear Derval, let us be off!"

To the confusion of Rookleigh, the mystery of the letters was all unfolded now, and when the cheques he had paid Miss Sally Trix came to be known, through Mr. De Murrer, a light was thrown upon his transactions with her, and the use to which he had put her with Clara; thus link after link was found, and the chain of his cruelty and duplicity was complete!

Rookleigh did not wait for the elucidation of all the reader knows. His brother's sudden appearance in the library was more than enough for him; he evacuated Lord Oakhampton's house with all speed, and even quitted London that night, a prey to baffled spite, ambition, and treachery.

"Oh, Derval, Derval," said Clara, as she reclined upon his breast, "may God forgive that man for all he has made me suffer!"

If Derval's blood boiled at his half-brother's perfidy, it boiled still more when he thought of how a head-wind in the channel or elsewhere might, by delay, have affected the fortune of all who figured in the tableau in Lord Oakhampton's library. But the good ship Amethyst had brought the wind with her, bravely and splendidly had she run, and scarcely sheet or tack were lifted, "for," as Joe Grummet said, "the girls at home were tallying on to the tow-rope."

The document which the lawyer had found among Greville Hampton's papers proved to be nothing less than a will, dated subsequent to one on which they had all acted, and which reversed its terms, for £500 yearly were all that accrued to Rookleigh, while all else he possessed was bequeathed to Derval; so the hand of Nemesis fell heavily on the former.

So the wedding dresses, the wedding cake and breakfast, and the bridesmaids too were all required eventually; but a different bridegroom knelt by Clara's side before the altar rails at St. George's, Hanover Square, while Rookleigh and his amiable mother were left at Finglecombe "to chew the cud of sweet and bitter fancy."

Captain Talbot was groomsman, and old Joe Grummet, who with difficulty was restrained from hoisting a flag of the Royal Naval Reserve out of the drawing-room window, as a prelude to the rice and slippers, got disreputably tipsy in the butler's pantry, and pulled all the housemaids about, in the exuberance of his joy, making quite a riot in the servants' hall.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Derval Hampton: A Story of the Sea, Volume 2 (of 2)

DERVAL HAMPTON

CHAPTER I.

"A WET SHEET AND A FLOWING SEA."

CHAPTER II.

TURTLE ISLAND.

CHAPTER III.

H.M.S. "HOLYROOD."

CHAPTER IV.

"THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH FOR THE STAR."

CHAPTER V.

"DEEPER THAN E'EN PLUMMET SOUNDED."

CHAPTER VI.

A CRUSHED HEART.

CHAPTER VII.

NEMESIS.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Derval Hampton: A Story of the Sea, Volume 2 (of 2)

DERVAL HAMPTON

CHAPTER I. "A WET SHEET AND A FLOWING SEA."

CHAPTER II. TURTLE ISLAND.

CHAPTER III. H.M.S. "HOLYROOD."

CHAPTER IV. "THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH FOR THE STAR."

CHAPTER V. "DEEPER THAN E'EN PLUMMET SOUNDED."

CHAPTER VI. A CRUSHED HEART.

CHAPTER VII. NEMESIS.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

CHAPTER I.

"A WET SHEET AND A FLOWING SEA."

CHAPTER II.

TURTLE ISLAND.

CHAPTER III.

H.M.S. "HOLYROOD."

CHAPTER IV.

"THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH FOR THE STAR."

CHAPTER V.

"DEEPER THAN E'EN PLUMMET SOUNDED."

CHAPTER VI.

A CRUSHED HEART.

CHAPTER VII.

NEMESIS.