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."

"Where is that, Joe?"

"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?"

"How, Joe?"

"Why--all the fun and cheeriness are quite gone out of you."

"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."

"Ah! Joe," said Derval, laughing, "I fear you don't know what love is."

"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.

What had happened? What did this cruel mystery mean?

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.

"You sent him all mine?" asked Clara in a breathless voice.

"All--and I have one here for you--whether a reply, or not, I cannot say."

"Only one!"

"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.

"Read it," said she, haughtily.

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

"How cold this letter is! but in it there lurks some mystery," said he.

"What mystery, Sir?"

"I know not--I only know that above all things the human heart is deceitful!"

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.

"I do not know that we are," she replied coldly.

"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:

"It is rather remote."

"It would not be thought so, in Scotland."

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.