Her father,
Bernard Huddlestone, had been a private banker in a very large way of
business. Many years before, his affairs becoming disordered, he had been
led to try dangerous, and at last criminal, expedients to retrieve himself
from ruin. All was in vain; he became more and more cruelly involved, and
found his honor lost at the same moment with his fortune. About this
period, Northmour had been courting his daughter with great assiduity,
though with small encouragement; and to him, knowing him thus disposed in
his favor, Bernard Huddlestone turned for help in his extremity. It was
not merely ruin and dishonor, nor merely a legal condemnation, that the
unhappy man had brought upon his head. It seems he could have gone to
prison with a light heart. What he feared, what kept him awake at night or
recalled him from slumber into frenzy, was some secret, sudden, and
unlawful attempt upon his life. Hence, he desired to bury his existence
and escape to one of the islands in the South Pacific, and it was in
Northmour's yacht, the "Red Earl," that he designed to go. The yacht
picked them up clandestinely upon the coast of Wales, and had once more
deposited them at Graden, till she could be refitted and provisioned for
the longer voyage. Nor could Clara doubt that her hand had been stipulated
as the price of passage.
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