"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.
But there were other risks to run on which he did not calculate.
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:—
"Stand from under," sang out Rudderhead.
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.