"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.