"Sheet home and hoist away—up with the yards to the caps; let fall the courses."
Some of the head sails were now roused out of their nettings, the foretopmast, staysail, and spanker were set, and then she was fully under weigh. She went through the water "like a thing of life," and the flat Batavian shore began to sink.
"Home to England at last—home!" thought Derval as he looked over the side and saw the waves running under the counter, while he began to reckon for the thousandth time the probable period the homeward voyage might consume.
And now to take another homeward glance while that long voyage is in progress.
It was quite natural now, seeing so much as he did of a girl so beautiful as Clara, that in Rookleigh, though as yet he had never dared to attempt to caress her, or do more than take her passive or unwilling hand in his, the admiration of her person and inclination for her should increase, as a sense of propriety in her grew upon him; and also, that the opposition and indifference, with which he knew her heart was filled, should invite him to stronger efforts to reach, to win, and control it.
An illness that fell upon her delayed the marriage, which Rookleigh had duly paragraphed in the papers as forthcoming. He knew now, that the ship which had perished near the Straits of Sunda was not the Amethyst; and he knew, moreover, from a visit he paid to her owners, that she was now on her homeward way, and that there was no time to be lost!
Yet the season of spring was nearly over before Clara, who had recovered slowly, at her father's pleasant house in the western suburbs of London, could face in any way the fate before her,—a fate that seemed terribly close now, and from which there was no escape but her own death, or the degradation of her father.
She saw, as part of a terrible phantasmagoria, her wedding dress, and other dresses, her nuptial trousseau, strewed all over her room, on her bed, on the chairs, reflected over and over again in the pier-glasses; her toilet-table littered with ornaments which, though rare and beautiful, she loathed to wear.
Guests were, of course, invited—a few only, however, as her father wished the sacrifice (for such he deemed it too) completed very quietly; the bridesmaids were selected—only four, all in the same costume, with ornaments the gift of the bridegroom; and to Clara, their flippant gossip, their conversation for ever on one topic—the marriage—girls whom she only knew as having met them "in society," or little more,—were a source of perpetual worry and irritation to her.
Rookleigh's mother, now in all her glory, came and went at will, quite en famille at Lord Oakhampton's house; and she too, with her pale hazel eyes (the golden tint had faded out of them now), was another source of irritation to Clara, who looked so white, so wild-eyed and nervous, that her father, poor man, was crushed in heart and soul at the sight of her.