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.