"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.