The Project Gutenberg eBook of Derval Hampton, Vol. I, by James Grant

"I wonder why Heaven sent us into this world to face the mortifications we have to endure?"

"Do not say this, Greville, dearest; it is not for us to judge; we have but to suffer and endure, and be thankful for life, for health, and that we are not worse off than we are."

"Thankful for life!" exclaimed the man, bitterly. "Why should I be thankful for a life of poverty, obscurity, and trouble?"

"Trouble is sent, as the preacher tells us, to make us better and draw us closer to God. It is 'not my will, but Thine be done'; so we ought not to question the mystery of life; and then, husband dear, we have our little boy!"

As she said this, something of a soft smile replaced the angry and far-away expression that filled her husband's dark eyes.

Greville Hampton and his wife Mary—her hands busy with work—were seated in the ivy-clad porch of their little cottage on a bright evening in summer. Before them, at the end of the vista down the dell in which it stood, lay the waters of the English Channel glittering in sunlight, as it rolled away from Rockham Bay to craggy Hartland Point, a sheer precipice 300 feet in height. If humble and small in accommodation, the cottage of Finglecombe was pretty externally, with its wealth of creeping plants, and kept scrupulously neat and clean within, though destitute of every luxury.

Before the cottage lay the pretty garden which Greville Hampton tended with his own hands, and where Mary reared and twined her flowers. There were the ripening strawberries, their fresh green leaves lying lightly on beds of yellow straw, the late asparagus and wonderful cucumbers under glass-shades, mellow-flavoured peas in borders, and wonderful nectarines climbing up the wall. Behind the cottage, on the south, lay Finglecombe, (in old Devonian) "The dell with the hazel boundary," and a lovely dell it was, bordered by gentle slopes, covered with those "apple bowers," for which the district is so famous, in all their luxuriance and greenery. Yet, all this brought no pleasure to the eye or mind of Greville Hampton, a moody and discontented man, one on whom the world and society had smiled in other days, and thus he was ever comparing the present with the irrecoverable past.

There was an air of great refinement in both husband and wife, an air that contrasted strongly and strangely with their plain attire and circumscribed dwelling. Greville Hampton's face was dark in complexion, aquiline in feature, a very handsome face, one quite warranted to claim the unmistakable admiration his wife had for it, and yet it was not a pleasing one. His brow was indicative of intellect and courage; his lip, shaded by a black moustache, was indicative of a resolute will and firm purpose; and his dark hazel eyes, if stern and even gloomy in their normal expression, could soften with a depth of affection when they dwelt on the face of Mary, on the child that was playing at their feet, or at the approach of a friend, and showed that he had a warm heart under the crust in which he was wont to hide it.

Early disappointment, great monetary losses, and a wrong more real than fancied, the loss of a title and patrimony, had much to do with the latter, and hence came the bitter expression that at times stole over his well-formed mouth, and the shadow that clouded a really handsome face.

Mary was indeed a lovely woman, but her slight girlish figure, and the bright tint of colour on her soft, Madonna-like cheek, seemed to speak of a delicacy of constitution, not quite suited for the hardships and trials consequent upon the loss of all to which she had been at one time accustomed. Her dress was coarse and plain, yet arranged so tastefully, that her figure made it look graceful, and it seemed—humble though the material—to repose on her rounded bust and limbs with something suggestive of distinction and placid elegance.

Mary was a brunette, yet with a wonderfully pure complexion, with small hands and feet, large dark eyes, and dark silky braided hair. Like Annie Laurie, of the tender old Scottish song, "her voice was low and sweet,"—soft as the low notes of the stock-dove, and yet men always spoke to her with a strange sensation of timidity. Often did the touch of her cool soft hand soothe Greville Hampton in his times of dejection, and he found hope and sympathy in the earnest light of her unreproaching eyes.

She was fond of dress, and what pretty woman is not? and a time there was when she had indulged to the full in stylish things, and always wore silks of the most delicate colours in the carriage, or in the evening; but she had to content herself with dresses of other material and more sombre tints, that were turned more than once, as she had to do much of her own economical millinery, and darn her gloves again and again; but Mary was always content, and would smile happily when Greville would say, with something of his old lover-like gallantry, "Dearest Mary, it is you who will make any dress seem charming, and not dress that enhances you."

Between them, and at their feet, sat their only child, little Derval, a pretty golden-haired boy of six, intent on playing alternately with a toy ship and building a house of little wooden blocks, which he would rear and carefully construct again and again, each time that the tiny edifice was finished, demolishing it with a shout of laughter to begin his labour anew.

"Come, Derval," said his mamma, after they had been watching him, fondly and silently, for nearly half-an-hour, while the sun sank beyond the sea, "it is time for bed, so put away your toys, darling."

"Oh, I wish the sun wouldn't go down just yet," the little fellow exclaimed; "do let me make one more Pixies' house, mamma."

"Pixies!" said Greville, with one of his bitter laughs. "By Jove! I wish that the Pixies, be they fairies or fiends, would show us where some treasure is buried, or teach me the art of growing rich!"

"God grant, Greville dearest," said Mary, meekly, "that the child may always be as happy and innocent as he is now."

"God grant, I say, that he may be rich—rich as we once were—richer, at least, than we are to-night."

"It brings the nearest approach to it, Mary; a light heart generally goes with a heavy purse. It is not so much for myself, as for the child and you, Mary, that I wish the past could come again—but the past with its experience. 'Twere useless else. You are lost here, with your perfect manner, your sweetness, your talents and high accomplishments."

Mary smiled silently, for she knew well that the occupants of Finglecombe village—a village as red as the soil, consisting only of rude cob-cottages as they are called—were only weavers of pillow-lace; and that the homely manners and slip-shod conversation of these, and of the adjacent farmers, with their incessant talk of short-horns and the merits of the Devonshire breed, their cows and "yowes," the weather and the turnip-fly, worried and bored her husband at times, though he was too well-bred to let them see that it did so; and they, on their part, were perfectly aware that there was a vast difference and distance between themselves and the mysterious and lonely gentlefolks who vegetated in the sequestered little cottage of Finglecombe.

And yet, how Greville Hampton envied the contentment of the dwellers in those cob-cottages—people with whom the world seemed to go precisely as they wished it to do; and who deemed that human life out of Finglecombe and beyond the circuit of its interests and apple-orchards, must be a dull affair indeed for the greatest portion of mankind.

"Poor Derval!" he sighed, as he saw the reluctance with which the child at last gathered up his toys; "Dryden was right—'men are but children of a larger growth'; children who often toil a lifetime in rearing fabrics unstable as yours. Kiss papa, darling, and now to bed."

So while Mary bore away her darling, undressed him, smoothed all his golden curls, and tucked him tenderly into his little crib; while she knelt beside it, folded his little pink hands devoutly, and made him repeat after her a simple childish prayer, of love and faith, and that God might bless papa and mamma, and give Derval a good night's rest; while, after this, she had to tell him stories of the flowers in the garden, the birds and the little lambs, and especially of the Pixies, those wonderful Devonshire fairies, who, though invisibly small, ride the farmers' horses nearly to death, steal the fruit and pound their own cider in holes and corners; and while she covered his rosy cheeks with the tenderest kisses ere he coaxed himself to sleep, her moody husband lost in his own thoughts, his briar-root pipe grown cold, had been gazing on the sea, and the wide expanse of Barnstaple Bay shining in the last glow of the set sun.

The beauty of the Devonshire coast, with all its bluffs and rocks, its wonderful verdure and glorious "apple-bowers now mellowing in the moon," had no charms for the soul of Greville Hampton, whose mind at that time was running on the London life from which he was a hopeless exile now, the life in which he once bore a brilliant part.

Well did he know all that was passing, and on the tapis at that identical season! That the club at Sandown was flourishing as it never flourished before; that Prince's was in all its glory; that the meetings of the Coaching Clubs and four-in-hands had all been arranged, without his team of roans being expected at the Serpentine; that Richmond, Hurlingham, and the Orleans Club were all extant, though they knew not him, and that even his name was recalled at none of them now. Already had the attractions of Epsom and Ascot begun, combining those of hospitable country-house life with wild excitement of the race-course and betting-ring; and he knew that the sons and daughters of pleasure were striving to crush as much brilliant amusement as was possible into the interval between flowery Whitsuntide and the epoch of Goodwood in its glory, and the yacht regattas at Cowes.

His mind, we say, was full of all these things—fierce, high, bitter, and regretful thoughts all mingling together—when Mary, full only of the sleeping face of her child, gentle and unrepining, content and hopeful, crept hack to resume her knitting by his side.

Her knitting! How the proud man winced as he saw her white hands so humbly employed.

"Yes; and the dear pet lamb, how sweetly he does sleep!" replied Mary, her soft voice almost tremulous with the pleasure of her maternal love; "I remained watching him for a time, and wondering—wondering in my heart—"

"What awaited him in the unseen future," she replied, as she fixed her eyes, not upon the face of her husband, but on the far horizon of the sea, yet tinted with ruddy gold by the sun that had set.

"Were the book of destiny laid before you, Mary, would you have the courage to turn a leaf?" asked her husband in a strange and hard voice.

"I fear, Greville, dear, I should lack the courage," said Mary, as she ceased to knit, and her white hands lay idle in her lap.

"If wealth—if riches—be not written there, I care not what the leaf contains! Not that I entirely believe in destiny; in many instances we make our own, as I, to a certain extent, made ours, by becoming a victim of others; but a destiny over which I have no control deprives me of my birthright; and I, who ought now to be twelfth Lord Oakhampton, and tenth Lord of Wistmanswood, am a poor and needy man. So I say again, Mary, if wealth be not before our little Derval, in the years to come, I care not what may be, with all my love of him!'

"Oh, Greville, do not—do not talk thus!" said Mary, imploringly; "suppose death were to come, and our child, the sole bright star in our otherwise cloudy sky, went out, leaving us in utter darkness!" Her voice broke at the idea of the hopeless desolation she conjured up, and her eyes filled with tears, for she was a sensitive creature. "Suppose this were to happen," she continued, "and you saw me, with fond and lingering hands, folding and putting past, as priceless treasures, the little garments they had made, the tiny socks they had knitted, and the broken toys that would be required no more, while turning away heart-sick from the sight of happy parents, whose little ones were spared to them, and striving to console ourselves with the conviction that all things come from Heaven. I share your hope and wish, Greville, that Derval may be rich, and great too, but I would rather that he were good than either!"

"Rich he shall be, I hope, before I die," exclaimed Greville Hampton; "and I have strange dreams at times, Mary, that seem the harbingers of something to come," he added gravely, and in a lower tone, "Wealth——"

"What need of wealth, dearest? we can save, out of our little pittance for Derval; he is the only chick we have to scrape for," she interrupted him, and took his passive hands caressingly within her own.

"Oh, Mary," he replied bitterly, without heeding her question, "I have in my time feasted at the table of Dives, while Lazarus stood without the gate, and now I seem, in turn, to have taken his place."

"How can you talk thus wildly, dear Greville; have we not every necessary that life requires?"

This was but one of many such conversations to which she was accustomed, and Mary sighed wearily at her husband's incessant repining, as she said, while glancing furtively at her plain dress:

"Luxuries can be done without; but you have been having some of your tantalising dreams again."

"I have, indeed, Mary," said he, with his eyes fixed on vacancy, for the visions that haunted his mind in the hours of sleep by night, or when his thoughts were drifting back to the material world in the early hours of morning, showed the tenor of those other dreams that haunted him in the hours of wakefulness by day.

"Was it again of the mysterious treasure ship—the quaint old Argosy stranded in yonder Barnstaple Bay, deserted by her crew and left high and dry by the ebbing sea, with the great golden doubloons flowing in torrents through her gaping seams, and piled like glittering oyster-shells in heaps upon the sand, where you and I were gathering them up in handfuls—for you often have such fancies in your sleep, Greville?" she added, nestling her sweet face lovingly and laughingly on his neck, anxious to soothe and humour him.

"It was not of ships, Mary," he replied, with an arm caressingly around her; "but of a strange and wondrous land—a scene amid stupendous mountain ranges, like what we have heard of, or read of, as being in the Great Basin of California, or the Cordilleras, hemmed in on every side by mighty steeps. It was indeed a strange dream, Mary, and most vivid, distinct and coherent in all its details—painfully so, when the moment of waking came. Falling aslant the mountains the sun's rays struck upon a streak in a mass of volcanic rock, which gave back a yellow gleam. I struck the mass with a hammer—a fragment fell at my feet—it was gold—pure gold! Again and again I struck, and huge nuggets of the precious metal fell down before me, while at every stroke my heart beat painfully yet exultingly, and my breath came thick and fast. I was there, I thought, alone; the land around me was my own, with the conviction that far in the bosom of the mighty mountains rose the strata of precious metal—a wondrous land, where the teeth of the black cattle, of the mules and the goats that grazed upon their grassy sides, were tinted yellow by the gold with which the soil abounded. Could my dreamland have been in California?" he asked, as if talking to himself. "What visions of boundless wealth came before me; and what mighty power would that wealth command! Again and again I wielded my hammer, and the heap before me seemed to increase, till my brain became giddy with the thoughts that swept athwart it. Could my vision have been of California?" he continued dreamily to himself, rather than to Mary; "it must have been—it must have been among the Rocky Mountains that my soul was wandering while my body slept."

"I should like to search for that place, Mary; it exists somewhere, and I am sure I should know it again."

"Heavens, Greville, you would not think of going there, and on the strength only of a dream?"

"No, Mary; you are not adapted to the life of a digger's wife," said he with a tender smile.

"As little as you are to be a digger," she replied, while caressing his hand, which, though manly, was a white one.

"The dream seemed a long, long one, Mary, though doubtless short enough in reality, so true it is, a writer tells us, that there is a drowsy state between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open and yourself half conscious of everything passing around you, than you would do in five nights with your eyes fast closed and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness! So it was with me Mary; but the mountains seemed to sink; the scene to change and resolve itself into sweet and peaceful Finglecombe, with all its orchards and the Bay shining in the rising moon, even as it is doing now; but the heap of golden ore was still before me—till I awoke with a start, to find myself again—a beggar!"

"But beside we," said Mary, with a little laugh that ended in a sigh; "and if your dream will bear reading at all, Greville, it must be that your riches lie, not in California, but here in Finglecombe; though what they are, or where they are, unless they be Derval and me," she added, kissing him, "goodness only knows."

But full of his vivid dream, Greville Hampton made no response immediately. He sat lost in thought, passively gazing on the Bay, glittering and rippling beyond the boundary of his garden where a fallen beech of vast dimensions lay, with its end half-hidden in a rose-tree that was a mass of bloom. There was silence in the place—a drowsy summer silence; the sounds of the distant cob-village came faintly mingled with the lap, lap, lapping of the waves upon the shore.

"Supper waits, ma'am," said Patty Fripp, suddenly appearing in the porch, which was a veritable bower of roses and Virginia-creeper, for Patty—a robust and honest countrywoman, who was nurse to Master Derval, cook and housemaid by turns, and all together at times, and had come as a retainer to his father's house in better days, when she was a blooming lass of eighteen—was close on the wrong side of fifty now, but true as steel in their altered fortunes to Greville Hampton and her mistress.

He allowed himself to be led by Mary indoors, where in their snug little parlour, a room made pretty by many a knick-knack, the work of her industrious hands, a plain repast awaited them; the home-brewed ale frothed creamily in a great antique silver tankard, that had served his sire and grandsire before him, and which, nearly the sole family relic, bore the heraldic choughs borne by so many Cornish and Devonshire families; and there were ruddy cheese, snow-white bread, and dainty butter, all prepared by Mary's pretty hands; but there was a shadow upon Greville's brow to-night that even she could not dispel; for while he regretted very bitterly—half savagely, almost—the luxuries to which he had once been accustomed in Belgravian dining-rooms and Pall Mall clubs, the rich entrées and rare wines, Mary—who had also been accustomed to luxury—took her food contentedly, and thought the while of the many men and women and little children—children like her own golden-haired Derval—who had neither dinner nor supper to sit down to.

Her perfect and sublime trust in the conviction that all things were ordered for the best, and her sweet yet strong reliance on God in every way, were certainly touching to Greville, but he failed utterly in falling in with her views, or sharing her content and trustfulness, and when assured by her that thousands and thousands of others were not so well off in worldly matters as themselves, he failed also to find any ground for complacency in any such statistics; and so, whether it was the influence of his golden dream, or of his general discontent, on this night, his broad open brow, his firm lips, and dark eyes, wore that peculiar expression which they did at times, and which we have said was certainly not a pleasing one, when he deemed himself to be haunted by his evil destiny—the Demon of Impecuniosity.

Mary left nothing undone or untried to add to his comforts, and he knew that her beautiful and delicate hands had often done, and had yet to do, rougher work than they were ever intended for, though it was often done in secret, to prevent him from seeing it; but Patty Fripp knew of it well.

"Yes," said Greville Hampton, as if assenting to his own thoughts, after he had drained the antique silver tankard, and fixed his eyes for a moment upon the shield argent, with three choughs, gules, engraved thereon, and the crested chough that surmounted a coronet with the motto Clarior e Tenebris (Brighter from Obscurity), "yes, may the words be ominous of good! If I could but think that Derval would certainly be rich, and should never know the privations we have suffered and the deprivations to which we have been subjected, I think, Mary, I could die happy."

"The same repining thoughts still, Greville!" said Mary, softly and entreatingly.

"Derval," said she, as she resumed her knitting, "has his youth and all his life before him."

"But without some effort on my part it will be a life of half penury and whole obscurity in Finglecombe. But how is that effort to be made? You would not have our boy grow up the associate and companion of these villagers and lace-makers! Among whom else will his lot be cast? I would rather see him in his grave, Mary."

"Do not say so. The misfortunes you have undergone have made you unreasonably bitter; but let us hope, Greville, for the best," she added, running her slender fingers caressingly through his thick dark hair.

"Bitter! unreasonable! Have I not been mulcted of my proper inheritance? Is not the position—the rank which ought to have been mine and my father's before me—now held by another? Have I not been robbed by fashionable gamesters, swindlers, and false friends!"

"It is not so, Mary; what happened once could never happen again. I know better now."

"And who holds the broad lands and stately house that should be mine—knows well, if the world at large knows it not—through a quibble he is a usurper! Oh, my own Mary!" he exclaimed, while tears glittered in his flashing eyes, and he glanced with angry scorn round the tiny apartment, "when I wooed and won you in the happy past time, you who were reared in the lap of luxury, wealth, and refinement. I little foresaw that I would ever bring you, in the end, to a home so humble as this!"

"But I am with you to share it, Greville, and I do not repine—unless, perhaps, for the child's sake. But why do you tell me these things again and again, darling? Is it," she added, with one of her brightest and most witching smiles, "to lure me into repeating how much and how truly I love you, as if I were a girl again in that second London season, which ended so sweetly for us both?"

She would have thrown her soft arms around him, but a spirit of anger filled his heart, and he paced to and fro the little room like a caged lion; and Mary regarded him anxiously, for she had a dread of her husband's crotchets taking some active and dangerous form, especially if he were again to have that Californian dream; for when one's life, as a writer says, is a constant trial, "the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering;" and Mary was indeed far from strong. There was a greater delicacy in her constitution than Greville was the least aware of, a delicacy that, though it alarmed herself, for his sake and their child's she kept her lips sealed on the subject, lest the knowledge thereof might add to the regret of Greville for the past, and his "worry" for the present.

"If this life cannot be endured, it must be cured—to reverse a vulgar saw, Mary," said he, continuing his short promenade; "if I cannot be rich, Derval shall be so, if any scheme of mine can achieve that end; and as soon as he is old enough, I shall teach him how money can make money, and how to keep it hard and fast—hard and fast—when it is made, and not be a fool like his father."

"Teach not the child thus, Greville, I implore you," said Mary, relinquishing her knitting; "of what avail will it be, if I strive to make him virtuous, kind to the poor, prudent and industrious, if you instil precepts so stern, so cold and selfish into his young mind? If you have affection for me, Greville dearest, abandon such cruel ideas and plans, or I will begin to think you a changed man, and the Greville Hampton of to-day is not Greville that won the love of my girlhood—yea, and of my life," she added with great tenderness.

"I am a changed man—I admit it—a sorely changed man, in all things but my love for you, Mary," he replied, as he stooped and kissed her bright little upturned face, and perhaps thought for a moment—but a moment only—that no man could be unhappy who had the smile and love of such a woman as Mary to brighten the path and lighten the burden of his life.

"Riches are good and a godsend," said she, "if employed aright and not as a means of pleasure only."

"Aright?" repeated Greville, who was thinking of the clubs he once frequented, his whilom team of roans, and Ascot perhaps.

"Pleasure as a means of doing good and protecting the poor, assisting merit and rewarding ingenuity. The rich man who presumes on his wealth, and the poor man who desponds on his poverty are—"

"Oh, don't preach, Mary darling, leave that to our friend Asperges Laud. You are a duck and an angel, but I can't quite agree with you," he added with a sigh as he filled his briar-root with tobacco of a kind he would have disdained to smoke once.

Many emotions combined to fill Mary's eyes with tears, but to conceal them she turned away to seek Patty's aid in the preparation of some jellies for one of her pensioners—for though so poor herself she had several—a deformed girl who was dying of consumption; and in spare times she was wont to read good and amusing books by the bedsides of the old and blind, who were ailing or unable to be abroad. She had even pensioners among the little birds, for whom she daily spread out crumbs, especially in winter, upon her doorstep, whither they would come without fear of Mary's pet cat, which was too well fed to meddle with them.

Greville Hampton was in an unusually bitter mood that night, and long, long he sat abandoned to it after Mary had given a final but lingering look at the little subject of their anxieties, folded in his pretty cot, "like the callow cygnet in its nest," and then sought her pillow.

Evil spirits—envy, anger, and avarice—were struggling in the man's heart, with a keen sense of unmerited wrong inflicted on him, of injustice he had suffered, the black ingratitude of friends, and of his own extravagance and reckless folly in the past; and had there been a close observer present to watch his handsome features, they would have read by the working of these, how each passion prevailed in turn.

Finally, he emptied his cherished briar-root by tapping it on the hearth, put it in its case with an emphatic snap, and muttering, as he sought the side of his sleeping wife,

"Surely God will hear Mary's prayers, if not mine, that Derval may be rich—but never the luckless creature I am to-night."

Derval, a chubby child of six, with rosy dimpled cheeks, his mother's snowy skin, and his father's deep dark eyes, with a wealth of golden curls that rose crisp and in upward spouts from his forehead, grew fast, while the care of his boyish education devolved wholly on the delicate Mary, for Greville, though educated at Eton and finished off at Oxford, was too erratic by nature, and with all his love of their offspring, too impatient to share in the task of tutelage; in which, eventually, she was fully and powerfully, to her great gratitude, assisted by the Reverend Asperges Laud, the only visitor who shed a little light on their humble dwelling, and who was also the only link, as it seemed, that they cared to preserve between their past life and the present.

In his fortieth year, the Curate of Finglecombe—a place in which he was utterly lost, because of its obscurity, and where he subsisted on a mere pittance—was a man of considerable talent, and no small accomplishments. He had gained high academic honours in philosophy and theology, and was already known as author of several celebrated prize essays; he therefore proved a valuable friend to Mary and her little boy.

The Reverend Asperges Laud, M.A., Oxon., belonged not to the days of "nasal clerks and top-booted parsons." He was a man of broad and advanced views, with somewhat stately, yet very soft and gentle manners, who intoned his services, had matins and evensong, wore a coat with remarkably long tails, a Roman collarino and a broad hat of soft felt garnished with a black silk rosette, and was furtively addicted to the flute.

He had little choir boys in white collars and black surplices; called his altar-table "the sanctuary," and had four candles thereon which, in wholesome fear of the Court of Arches and His Grace of Canterbury, he dared not light as yet; and there was much about him that—according to the Methodists in the district—savoured of the City of the Seven Hills, yet, "a man he was to all the country dear."

All the neighbours about Finglecombe, but none more than Mr. Asperges Laud, were delighted with Mary's grave, sweet eyes, her softness of manner, her goodness of heart, her refined and cultivated mind, all of which lent additional charms to a certainly very statuesque little face.

And Greville had won the hearts of the farmers, by riding, controlling and breaking in, for one of them, a dare-devil horse, that no jockey in Devonshire could ride, and had thereby won himself emphatically the reputation of being "a man every inch of him."

But both husband and wife were very reserved, and the few who ventured to call on them when they first dropped from the clouds, as it were, into Finglecombe, could not truthfully assert that, though politely welcomed, they were urged to come again. Whether this came of a sense of shyness, or of haughty exclusiveness, none could precisely decide. Some averred it was the former in the wife and the latter in the husband, and perhaps they were right.

"Both seem only to live for each other and their little boy," said Mr. Asperges Laud, their only and regular visitor in the end, and he was right certainly.

Thanks to the tutelage of the worthy curate, the childish mind of little Derval Hampton began to expand, and he ceased to wonder if the sea he saw rolling in Barnstaple Bay, between craggy Hartland Point and sandy Braunton Burrows, and the uplands that bordered Finglecombe, were all the world contained; for dreams, visions and a distant knowledge of other seas and shores came upon him, and with the knowledge there came in time the usual boyish crave to see and know them.

In Finglecombe, a lonely dell, where the apple groves grew entangled, and a brawling stream, concealed by their foliage from the sunshine, ran between banks of moss-grown stones towards the Bay, was an excavation or cavern in a wooded hill, known as the Pixies Parlour, a place he was wont to explore with fear and excitement, but in the daytime of course; and near it on the shore was a place, never to be visited at any time, for therein were sights to be seen that none could look upon and live—the Horses' Hole, a cavern dark as night, full of pools of water, and running an unknown distance under ground, wherein a horse black as jet had found its way, and came forth with its coat changed to snowy white; but as he grew older the place of deepest interest for him was the ruined Castle of Oakhampton, and the place named Wistmanswood, whence came the titles of that peerage his father deemed his right.

The wood always impressed him with fear and haunted him in his dreams—for it was one of the wonders of Devonshire, and is said to have been unchanged in aspect since the days of the Norman Conquest—a vast grove of dwarf oaks, interspersed with mountain ashes, everywhere covered by masses of fern and parasitical plants, growing amid gigantic blocks of stone,—the clefts of which, and the thorny undergrowth, are swarming with poisonous adders, and form the shelter of innumerable foxes—a strange and weird place, amid the desolation of which the scream of the bittern is yet heard, and the whole appearance of which conveys the idea of the hoary age in the vegetable world of creation; yet here on more than one occasion did the somewhat gloomy Greville Hampton lead his impressionable and shrinking boy by the hand, for to him the old Druid wood in its waste and decay seemed sympathetic with his own fallen condition and impoverished state. And but for the sake of the future of that dear child whose hand he held, and unconsciously almost crushed in the bitter energy of his thoughts at such times, he would have wished himself as dead as one of those hoary trees; for to Greville Hampton often came a strange feeling of weariness of life, and then he longed for that day to come, when failure or success in aught would matter nothing, when the sun would rise, but not for him, and all the world go on as usual while he should be at rest and beyond all care and trouble.

And little Derval in the golden morning of his life, often wondered already what it was clouded his father's brow and made his manner so triste and pre-occupied.

"It is not given to man to choose his own position in this world," said Mr. Asperges Laud gently to Hampton on one occasion; "but it is given to him to feel honestly content, and without useless repining, in the place so assigned."

"Another and better place in the world than that I now occupy, was assigned to me; but—" and Greville Hampton paused, as something very like an imprecation rose to his quivering lips.

Meanwhile Derval, save for his mother's care and Mr. Laud's tuition, would have grown up in rather a rough and scrambling manner; as it was he was a little undisciplined; prone to bird-nesting, seeking the eggs of the choughs and cormorants among the rocks; helping himself to apples in anyone's orchard, and rambling far afield, and clambering up eminences where he could see the variously tinted groves that bordered on the deep blue bay, the distant sea itself—glorious, glittering and far-stretching; the brown boats drawn up on the golden sands; the passing ships under white canvas, or the steamers with volumes of dusky smoke curling far on the ambient air. He was rather addicted, we fear, to playing the truant, and especially of skipping if he could the afternoon class for catechism held by Mr. Laud in his church at Finglecombe, a quaint old fane, concerning which there is a terrible old legend well-known in Devonshire. In 1638 a ball of fire burst into it during time of service, killing and wounding, or scorching, sixty-six persons, and this event took in time a wild form, and we are told how the devil, dressed in black, inquired his way on that identical Sunday of a woman who kept a little ale-house at the end of the Come, and offered her money to become his guide.

But she, distrusting him, offered him a tankard of good Devonshire cyder, which went hissing and steaming down his throat; and her suspicions were confirmed, when, as he rode off towards the church, she saw his cloven foot, and a few minutes after the terrible catastrophe occurred, and Finglecombe church was strewn with dead and dying—a story that often made little Derval cower in his crib in the gusty nights of winter.

What was to be his future, some twelve years hence, was the ever-recurring thought of his parents.

Greville feared he would inevitably grow up a rough country lad, and already, man-like, he shivered at the idea of Derval—his son—becoming such, and in the time to come, getting up "a copse and hedgerow flirtation" with a daughter of some cob-cottager—marrying her it might be, and being thus inevitably dragged down into the mire. At such thoughts his heart used to die within him.

We have said that Mary Hampton's constitution was a peculiarly delicate one, and now an illness fell upon her which was to prove only the beginning of the end.

Mr. Laud averred that at Christmas-time none could decorate his little church, especially "the sanctuary" thereof, so tastefully as Mary, with scarlet hollyberries and green glistening leaves, and so, on one occasion having prolonged her labours in the cold, damp edifice far into the late hours of a winter night, she caught a chill, fevered, and became hopelessly consumptive. Her cheeks grew hollow, her lips pale, and there came into her sweet sad eyes a pathetic and settled intensity of expression.

She was desired by the doctor to cease from exertion, to abstain from all household work, and to drink plenty of good wine, to procure which Greville Hampton deprived himself of many little things to which in his reduced position he had been accustomed—an occasional cigar, or a glass of cheap Marsala; and when he thought of the past, the strong man's tender and loving heart was wrung, when he heard her hacking cough, and he saw her seated, pale and feeble, her delicate hands unable to persevere even in sewing a little jacket for Derval that lay on the table before her.

And now the kind curate, whose threadbare coat covered a noble heart, brought her many a bunch of luxurious grapes, and many a bottle of good wine—port of fabulous antiquity—which had been sent to himself from the Hall, the abode of the Squire, whom Greville had known in other days, but who now knew him not.

To procure comforts for Mary, in his desperation he appealed to his remote kinsman, Lord Oakhampton; but the application was ignored—no answer ever came, and for some time black fury filled the heart of the proud and fiery, but powerless and impoverished man.

Did not Lord Oakhampton know well that in society, on every occasion, he, Greville Hampton, had denounced him as the usurper of his property and title—a denunciation the truth of which, legally, as yet, he could not prove?

"Oh," he would exclaim, "for a little of the wealth I have wasted in the foolish past time—for Mary's sake—for Mary's sake!"

How bitter it was to look back in the light of experience and think of what might be now, had he been wiser than he was! And his whole soul recoiled at the contemplation of the awful loneliness of life without her, if Mary were taken from him.

Her fast failing health drew him from his usual selfish and useless repining over the past, or if he did so, it was for her sake alone now; for that she was failing and passing away from him day by day, became painfully apparent; a cough shook her delicate form, and again and again was her handkerchief soaked in blood. And he could only groan over the poverty that precluded all change of air, or scene, and the employment of greater medical skill than that possessed by the country practitioner. But no skill could have availed Mary; and the frail tenure of her life, despite all his love and anxiety, was only a thing of time.

The consumption that was wasting her delicate form only served to make her beauty seem more tender, alluring, and pathetic to the eyes of her sorrow-stricken husband, to whom she said more than once, with her head reclined on his breast—

"If I am taken from you, Greville darling, I trust you will think of the past less regretfully, of the future more hopefully, and remember that we are, while here, but as 'little children playing with shells upon the shore of time.'"

"You are too good for this rough and bitter world," said he, as his tears fell hotly on her soft and rippling hair, and thought in his heart, "Oh, why does God take her and leave me?"

And he clasped her to his heart, as if by the mere strength of his love, and strength of his arms too, he might protect and keep her with him, and kissed her more tenderly than he had ever done in his lover days, for a holier emotion was in his heart now, and to him it seemed that touches of great sweetness came and went about her lips and into her unusually luminous eyes, though their expression grew more weary day by day, and there came into them also that strange, weird, and far-off look that belongs, not to this world, but to the life that is gradually ebbing away from it, and this expression Greville Hampton saw and read with acute mental agony.

"God is taking me away from you, darlings," she said softly, one evening; "but you will always be true and loving to each other for my sake."

Little Derval clung to his father, unable yet to realise the great sorrow that had come upon both.

Why prolong this part of our story? At last all was over, and Greville, worn out with grief and long watching, was led away like a child by the curate from the chamber of death, where his Mary lay, still rarely beautiful, as a piece of sculpture, in her last repose. All seemed terribly silent in the little cottage now; the buzzing of the flies in the sunshine, and the ticking of a clock alone were heard, unless it might be a sob from old Patty Fripp in the kitchen, where she sat rocking herself to and fro, with her apron over her head, or if she moved about it was with soft and stealthy tread, as if she feared to wake someone.

"Dead—gone—left him—his other self—it could not be!" he whispered in his soul, for he could not believe, in his great sorrow, that it was all happening to him. Surely it was some horrible nightmare, from which he would awake to find his little world going on as before!

But day followed day, each adding fresh details to the calamity, and that of the funeral came inexorably, the closing scene of all.

As one in a dream, Greville Hampton saw the episode like a grim phantasmagoria. He heard the bell tolling, and heard Mr. Laud sob, as he met the few mourners at the churchyard gate, and led the way to the grave, repeating the fine words of the burial service.

Grasping his father's hand, little Derval, with a stunned look and dry eyes, dry with wonder and a great fear, saw the coffin going down—down—till it disappeared, and then a cry burst from him, for he knew that mamma was there—there in that cruel coffin which had left his sight for ever, and he began, child-like, to understand the dire and dreadful reality!

At last the scene closed; the horrible jarring of shovels, gravel, and earth had ceased, and Greville Hampton came back to his broken and desolate home, where he sat like a man turned to stone, twisting fatuously, yet caressingly, a tress of shining dark brown hair, all that remained to him now of Mary, save the little boy, who nestled, with scared and wistful eyes, beside his knee.

The drawn blinds had for some days told all the passers-by that there was death in the cottage at Finglecombe. Strangers hurried past with a momentary glance, and thought no more of it, in the bright sunshine and business of life; but some there were who looked sorrowfully and went by with slower step, and there were the poor who missed the ministering hand of Mary Hampton. Even now the little birds, for whom she was wont to spread out crumbs, were tapping with their beaks at the window.

The blinds were drawn up now, and an unnatural flood of sunny light seemed to fill the place. Everything Greville's haggard glance fell on seemed to have a history of its own, a tender association, connected with her who had passed away. The little womanly trifles her hands had made to brighten this, their latter, humble home, were all there still; the cheap but artistic-looking cretonne with which her pretty and industrious fingers had deftly covered the furniture, brought back to memory the song she sang while doing so; the water-colours on the wall were her work too, scenes associated with the past years and long vanished happiness; and no comfort could be gathered from Tennyson's hackneyed couplet—

The terrible distinctness with which the first clod of earth fell—as it seemed to him—on Mary's tender breast, was yet ringing in Greville's ears, together with the cry that escaped from Derval.

CHAPTER II.

"Therefore he loved gold in special."—Chaucer.

"It is a great calamity, a heavy dispensation!" said a neighbour to Patty Fripp.

"He will get over it in time—the master," said others, especially the women; "all men get over these things—he'll marry again, no doubt; he is too young to live all alone in the world."

"Time tries all, and soothes all," said another gossip; "we shall see by and by—men don't break their hearts for love, look you. And how about the little boy?"

"Poor little soul! he is fretting sorely for his mother," said Patty, polishing her face with her checked apron, after having 'a good cry'; "but that is just human natur, I s'pose."

To the lonely man it seemed strange that Mary was no longer in the cottage at Finglecombe, and it was difficult for him, for a time, to realise the idea that she was gone for ever from her place; that he would never see her again; and that morning and night would come inexorably; the weeks become months, and the months become years; and that no Mary, with all her great love and tenderness, was there to bear a part in the long vista of life that lay before him.

His loneliness became at times insupportable, and he was frequently absent from home—a circumstance which never occurred in Mary's time. On these occasions the long and sleepless hours of night were terrible to little Derval, with his true Devonshire dread of the supernatural, for he had no longer the sweet consciousness of the near presence of his watchful mother.

At such times, till sleep sealed his eyes, he had but one thought—that out there in the dew and darkness of night, as in the sunshine by day, was the grave of one who had loved him and tended him, as no other human being would do, in the little churchyard, where the white tombstones and crosses contrasted so strongly and beautifully with the emerald green of the turf and the darker tint of the vast ancient yew that overshadowed them.

In all the wide earth—the earth of which he had, as yet, so little conception, there was already no spot so dear to little Derval as the turf that covered his mother's grave; and thus in the darkness of the moonless nights he was wont to waken and weep when he heard the cold wind sighing and the rain falling; and he shuddered at the thought that she was out there, exposed to them both, as it seemed to his heated fancy.

Then a great terror would come over him, till he crept softly into bed beside old Patty Fripp.

So the first heart-piercing days of sorrow and unavailing regret began to pass away, and the old craving after wealth, the world, and mammon began to resume its sway in the mind of Greville Hampton, and the dreams of which we have spoken came to his fancy again.

He began to think of Mary with more composure, and could hear, in silence, Mr. Asperges Laud, when urged by him, gently and sweetly, to remember that she had only faded out, as the stars fade, to shine again; had died as the flowers die in autumn, for resurrection in a brighter summer, in which he should meet her again, and there should be neither sorrow nor parting. All this sounded and seemed too remote and vague for the ache, the bitter void made by her departure. Yet though Mr. Laud knew by experience that Father Time was a great consoler, there was another nearer at hand than his Reverence had quite reckoned on.

Over the life of little Derval there was now a change, which he felt, though did not quite understand. The loss of his mother he had become accustomed to; but somehow, though there seemed plenty of happiness in the world, it never came to him. Other children whom he saw, or met at Mr. Laud's classes, seemed all well fed, neatly clad, and joyous, for they had come thither with mothers' kisses on their rosy cheeks, and the same caresses awaited them when they went home; but he had no one to kiss him now, save old Patty Fripp, who, like a genuine maid-of-all-work, was seldom without a smudge on one side of her nose.

Papa seemed for ever absent, for, as the months ran on, he seemed to have found some mysterious occupation elsewhere than at Finglecombe.

There was a time when Greville Hampton used to steal to the bedside of his little boy, and hang over him in his sleep, parting the thick curly hair from his forehead, softly and tenderly, while remarking with fondness, that there still he could see Mary's long eyelashes, Mary's brow and pure sweet profile, and all the loving memory of her would gush up in his heart.

Observant Patty thought that he was wont to do this less and less now, while his absences from the lonely cottage became more frequent and long. She marvelled much at this. Had he fallen in with some schemes by which to amend his shattered fortune—the schemes on which she had again and again heard him descant in times past? But whatever caused the change in his habits and bearing, it was soon to be made apparent to her now.

Patty was startled from her usual propriety, or the even tenor of her way, when Greville Hampton, with some reluctance or hesitation in his manner, as if conscious of the speculation he would excite, announced that three guests were coming to dinner on a certain day; and thereupon great bustle ensued at the cottage of Finglecombe, whither the railway van brought various wines, fruits, and condiments, "even to the last grapes and first cucumbers of the season," as Patty Fripp said, for the expected guests; and Patty had to obtain the aid of a neighbour as a helping hand, and the united wonder and excitement culminated, when two of the guests arrived in a handsome and well-appointed brougham, and proved to be ladies—an old and a young one—a Mrs. Rookleigh (of whom Patty had never heard) and her niece, whom, with all her beauty, she mentally deemed to be hard, bold, and haughty.

It is a strange but true assertion, that anxiety, like misfortune, can lend misgiving and fear to any unwonted occurrence, and now Patty Fripp, for the little boy's sake, began to apprehend—she scarcely knew what!

"When I'm 'urried I'm flurried," said she to her gossip, "and look you, it ain't easy to get this place, a cottage though it be, ready by myself—to sort rooms and toilet-tables, kill chickens and dress 'em, and bake cakes, look you, like the king as burned 'em, lay tables, and all that sort o' thing!"

Mr. Hampton received his guests with great empressement, welcomed them to Finglecombe, with the beautiful surroundings of which they were greatly delighted, and—as Patty's watchful and wondering eyes were upon him—he was not sorry when the Curate arrived, and he desired her to conduct the ladies to a room, and assist them to remove the costumes they had driven in.

About the elder lady there was so little to remark that Patty scarcely noticed her, but her niece, Miss Anne Rookleigh, then nearer her thirtieth than her twentieth year, was brilliantly fair in complexion, with large and languishing eyes of that golden-hazel colour which so often goes with a duplicity of character, a magnificent figure, and masses of light chesnut coloured hair. Save that her bearing and expression were hard and cold, despite the languor in her eyes, the most severe connoisseur in female beauty could have found no fault with her, unless his glance fell upon her hands, which, for a lady so generally refined in aspect, were decidedly large and even coarse-looking.

Since his mother had been borne away—it seemed so long ago now—in that grim funeral car with its black plumes, no ladies had ever been under their roof, till these two came, and now to Derval it seemed that his papa was far less gloomy than he had been—indeed, was quite gay; one of these ladies, Derval thought, eyed him curiously, even hostilely through her gold glass, and he, grasping the while his top and whip, looked steadily up in her proud face with a reconnoitring gaze that piqued her.

The dinner passed over like any other. Greville Hampton was scrupulously attentive to both aunt and niece, but was so delicate and guarded in his manner, that Patty, who knew not the language of the eyes, could, as yet, obtain no clue to her suspicions; but, for the first time in his short life, the child was conscious of a something undefinable, he knew not what, in the manner of his father to himself, and felt that if the former did not quite repel his advances and wished-for caresses, he failed completely to respond to them, while under the golden hazel eyes of Miss Anne Rookleigh.

Derval then drew to the side of her aunt, who was intently conversing with Mr. Asperges Laud, and whom he utterly failed to interest, on the subject of his pet canary, and the big Dorking hen, that had been mamma's, and laid so many eggs.

At last the ladies rose, and quitting the table resolved to seek the garden, leaving their host and the curate to their wine and cigars.

"I have lost it," said he evasively; for the piano had been Mary's, and he could not yet have a stranger's fingers running over the keys where hers had brought forth the familiar notes.

So the ladies swept forth into the little garden, where they found a rustic chair under the shadow of a golden laburnham tree, and where the roses that Mary's hands had tended were now in all the beauty and luxuriance of midsummer; and ere long, Patty Fripp, who was not above eaves-dropping, while collecting fresh salad for supper, and unobserved was close by listening to all the two visitors said, obtained a clue to the whole matter.

"Yes," said the latter, leisurely fanning herself, "that child of his will be a great bore!"

"A greater bore if you have any little ones of your own," said the aunt, laughing; "but don't begin with this spirit in your breast, Anne—take care."

"I mean of abusing the great power you so evidently possess over your intended."

"I little thought, aunt, when I was only amusing myself with him at Ilfracombe, rambling among the Tors, sketching the Lover's Leap, talking, playing chess with him, singing to him, accepting his flowers and all that, I would come to love him as I do, and end at last by finding this engagement ring on my finger!"

("So-so!" muttered Patty, under her breath, with a vicious sniff; "my old gossip was right—men don't break their hearts and die of love—for their wives at all events, look you!")

"Yes, I love him for himself alone," resumed Miss Rookleigh, after a pause, "not his fortune certainly," she added with a mocking laugh; "he is so handsome and winning. But I know, aunt, that though you are a widow, you deem it impossible that there can be any romance in a second marriage; and yet in such, a man may learn that his first was a mistake, and that now he only loves for the first time," and with a dreamy smile in her bright hazel eyes she swayed her fan to and fro.

"No one looks for romance in a second marriage—at least, I should not," replied her practical aunt; "I have always deemed them, like most first marriages, matters of convenience or of calculation, now-a-days. At all events you must admit, Anne, that all freshness of the heart must be gone?"

"Aunt, you are very unpleasant! I believe a man is quite capable of loving twice, and the second time more than the first; because he must know his own mind better. If I thought that Greville had only the shadow of love to offer me—but I shall not canvas the idea! Greville's first marriage must seem like a dream to him now, and, if otherwise, it will go hard with me if I do not soon obliterate all memory of a former affection. He married his first wife for her beauty, I believe; but she was a poor namby-pamby little thing. He'll soon forget her, nay, he must have forgotten her now!" And a flash came into her eyes, of subtle colour, as she spoke.

"Hush, Anne, how would you like to be spoken of thus? Besides, his child—her child—will be a perpetual reminder."

"It is aggravating! I believe the little brat already views me as an interloper; and though I knew his age, he is on a larger scale than I expected, and certainly looks old for the child of a man so youthful as Greville; and then he speaks with the odious Devonshire patois!"

"One lucky thing is that your engagement will not be a long one, if you are satisfied for the time with this poor—though certainly pretty—place."

"It satisfied her," thought Patty, glancing at the distant spire, the shadow of which was falling on Mary's grave; and the old woman crept away, as she had heard more than enough, muttering, "after all these years I'd give him warning this very hour, but for the sake of the child. Poor Derval! from this day, I fear me, his life will be a blighted one! Dear, dear! but the master has soon begun to sweeten the hay again!" she added, referring to an old Cornish practice common among lovers in haymaking time.

So barely a year had elapsed, since the woman who clung to him so tenderly and truly in poverty, as in wealth, and whose heart had been for years against his own, had been laid in the silent grave, when Greville Hampton brought another—but not a fairer—wife to share his cottage home.

That home he had spared no expense his means permitted to decorate for the new idol, who had certainly not come to him undowered. Many old and familiar objects had been removed—there were cogent reasons why—and gave place to newer fancies.

While Derval and Patty had been the sole occupants of the cottage at Finglecombe, the wedded pair had been spending their honeymoon on the continent; they had seen Antwerp with its cathedral and the art treasures of its galleries; Cologne and Coblentz, the precipitous Kolandseck with its baronial ruin and mouldering arch; hill-encircled Ems, the banks of the picturesque Lake, wooded Nassau and merry Wiesbaden; Greville the while judiciously silent that he had gone all that bridal tour once before. But now he thoroughly believed in his second election; and it has been said that, at few times, or at no time, of his life, is a man such a true believer in faith and love as when he plunges into matrimony; and we must suppose that it was so with Greville Hampton.

The arrival of the bride at Finglecombe, with all her boxes and that "particular baggage," as Patty thought, her own maid, was a source of sore worry to the former, who could no longer pursue the even tenor of her way under the new state of things.

Greville kissed his little boy, who clung fondly to him; but the bride gave the latter her gloved hand coldly, and scanned him through her glass, while he eyed her with mistrust and wonder, and with a strange shrinking, for somehow her eye chilled him, and thus, at the very home-coming there was a petty contretemps.

"Kiss him, Anne dearest," said Greville; "go and be kissed by your mamma, Derval."

"He gives me a cold reception, certainly," said Mrs. Hampton, her golden-coloured eyes sparkling dangerously under their rather white lashes, as she threw off some of her travelling wraps and appeared to Patty's wondering eyes in a rich and handsome dress, that accorded well with the stately character of her beauty; and Derval slunk away, doubtful and fearing, whether he had done right or wrong; but then, what did papa mean by calling this strange woman his mamma?

"I shall compel him to stay in his own room, or in the kitchen with Patty, till he knows how to treat you."

So on this day the troubles of Derval really began. He felt that he could never be even confident in the presence of this stranger who had so suddenly taken a high place in their little household. There was everything in her manner and bearing to repel him, and when she spoke to him his large eyes dilated under her stony gaze, as those of a bird are said to do when a serpent begins its charm of fear; and when rated for some trifle, he said sullenly:

"I want my own mamma. Why did papa bring you here, and set you in her place at table?"

"Dare you say so; you are a very bold child!" she exclaimed with some heat, and in her hard constrained voice, when a more generous woman would have smiled and resorted to caresses; "you ought to learn to love me."

"Never!" said the chubby Derval stoutly; "I shall only love my own mamma; she allowed me to climb on papa's knee and kiss him, but you won't."

"This brat, Derval," she thought, "must certainly remind him of that woman he loved, or fancied he loved, in the days of his youth and folly! Derval must be sent from this—out of this, somehow—anyhow! I would that he were old enough to go to sea."

And already she began to hate the child, all the more that her husband in his dreams—for he was as great a dreamer as ever—more than once, in her hearing, muttered or whispered to himself, softly and sadly, as to one near him, the name of "Mary," when doubtless the present was forgotten, and the days of the past came back in the visions of the night.

"He is thinking of his boyish fancies and his wax doll," Anne would mutter; "how shall I have patience to endure this if it occurs often?"

Tall, proud, haughty, and imperious in her secret nature, she was in all things the reverse of the mignonne, gentle and affectionate "wax doll," she thought of so contemptuously.

The poor for miles around felt a change now. Mary had ever but little to spare from her own slender store, and that little was given freely with kind words to all; yet the new bride that had come to Finglecombe, though wealthier far than ever poor Mary hoped to be, even amid all Greville's brilliant schemes and aspirations, gave not a crumb of broken victuals to the passing mendicant; and as for the sick and needy in the adjacent lanes, and little cob-villages, she knew not of their existence.

She had brought him a round sum of money, which, perhaps, more than even her beauty and unmistakable advances, had lured Greville Hampton into this second alliance; and with this he had speedily begun to speculate successfully in the purchase of land at Finglecombe, and to see, in prospect, the possible realisation of his golden dreams!

Had anyone ventured to hint to Greville Hampton that he had now forgotten Mary, he would have repelled the accusation with anger. But he had been lonely—he felt the want of companionship; this woman was handsome, and had been bent on winning him, for he was possessed of much manly beauty, with a fine presence; and the dowry she had, roused in him anew that craving thirst, that eager longing for "the gold that perisheth."

But in her love for him, and jealousy of the dead, she was somewhat exacting, and tried him considerably at times.

"You loved your first wife, of course, Greville, because it is your nature to be tender and loving," said she on one occasion; "but do, please, put her portrait away."

"Because the eyes of it seem to follow me everywhere, to watch me; and I can never see it without thinking—thinking—"

"Your ideas are foolish, Anne," said he; but the portrait was removed eventually, and one of her aunt, Mrs. Rookleigh, took its place.

Sometimes she went further than this, and would test his veracity a little unwarrantably, in her inordinate vanity, and with ineffably bad taste.

"Tell me, dearest Greville," she said, hanging over him, and caressing him with great empressement, "did you ever love before as you love me now?"

"Tell me—tell me," she persisted, while playfully pulling his ear; but his heart felt a pang, and his eye wandered involuntarily to where poor Mary's portrait used to hang.

"Why so inquisitive?" said he; "you know that I was married before. Do you think I am so vile as to marry without loving?"

Wishing to evade the inquiry, he smoked rather doggedly on; so she questioned him again.

"Some fellows are in love a score of times, with every pretty girl they meet, in fact," said he.

So she could extract no more from him. He was weak in her hands, but to have said what she wished, he felt would he coarse treason to the dead, and thought, "why could she not be content?"

And when she sang—but in a style Mary never sang—she indulged in high fantastic flourishes, running her hands heavily over the same keys that Mary's pretty fingers had been wont to touch so lightly. For a time Greville Hampton winced at the familiar sound of the instrument, as if a spirit was conjured up by it; but ere long he became hardened—accustomed to it.

Soon her piano, almost every immediate relic of Mary, disappeared; and times there were when her successor spoke—but never in Greville's hearing—of her memory in a sneering manner, that stung the sensitive Derval, and as he grew older, maddened and infuriated him. However, he was but a child yet, and barely understood the tithe of what she said.

To her he was a perpetual eyesore; and in the round of her daily life—especially in the absence of Greville—she found a hundred petty means of venting her groundless dislike upon him.

"Get out of the way—leave the room, boy—go and play in the garden—you are not wanted here!" Such were hourly the greetings to the child now—no kisses, no caresses as of old. All his sweet childish impulses were crushed or checked, and thrust back upon himself, and distrust and dislike of her, the typical rather than the real stepmother (fortunately for humanity's sake), grew strong in his heart—his little yearning heart, that felt half broken at times by neglect, for he had no one now, save old Patty, to whom he could tell all the wondrous secrets, and deep, tender confidences of child-life.

And even Patty he might not have long, as in Mrs. Hampton's mind she contrasted unfavourably with her own maid; she deemed her gauche, for Patty was a stout, broad, and short-necked woman, with a clumsy gait, a ruddy complexion, red sandy hair, eyes rather green than grey, and with a resolute mouth and chin that came of her Cornish blood.

"Poor little Master Derval, poor darling!" said Patty once to Greville. "She has never said a kind word to him since she came to the house; and look you, sir, he would think she was mocking him if she said one now—yah!" and she ground her teeth.

"Silence, Patty; I cannot permit you to speak thus of Mrs. Hampton," said he angrily.

"Missus Hampton, indeed!" grumbled Patty, but under her breath, however. But one day Greville overheard a remark which gave him a pang.

"Derval, where are you going, sir?" demanded Mrs. Hampton imperiously, as he was taking his little cap.

"Again? You are never anywhere else, and always come back with wet and sandy shoes. What takes you there?"

"You are a little fool; I say you shall not go!" and seizing him with hands, which we have said were not small ones, she shook him violently, and tears sprang to his eyes.

"Oh," he wailed, "that my own mamma would come out of the ground, and help her little boy!"

"Ah, but your mamma can't," she said spitefully; "she is deep enough down, thank Heaven!"

"Hush, Anne," said Greville, suddenly appearing; "for Heaven's sake don't speak to the child in that manner."

"Oh, I do beg your pardon," said Derval one day, approaching in great tribulation, with his little hands pressed tremblingly together.

"The vase that dear Aunt Rookleigh gave me! Oh you clumsy, obnoxious brat!" she exclaimed, while her eyes gleamed with anger; and as no one was near she punished him severely.

"Mother, mother! mamma, mamma!" he cried, panting in her grasp, "oh, come back to your little boy, and save him from this terrible woman!"

"Woman, indeed, you fractious imp; I'll teach you what your mamma, as you call her, never did—manners!" and she continued to beat him till he, and herself, were quite breathless, and then she flung him in a heap into a corner, to sob himself into sullen composure.

In the lust of her cruelty she, by the pursuance of a system all her own, succeeded in actually weaning much of the regard of his father from him, and had him excluded from the dining-room when dessert—to which he had always been admitted—was on the table.

Banishment from dessert seemed to Derval the acme of ill-usage; and, apart from the loss of the good things thereat, he never forgot the day he found himself thus banished.

He had come into the room when he knew "papa was there," and rushed, breathless and laughing, up to his side.

Seizing one, he began to drag it across the room towards the table, and to his father's side. Mrs. Hampton looked at him darkly (she was rather an Epicurean and did not like to be worried at meals), and Greville did so silently and uneasily, for he was not unmoved just then by the tender and pleading expression he read in the child's eyes.

"I thought you said, my dear, that we were not to be disturbed in this way by that gauche boy?" said Mrs. Hampton; "and you know the nervous condition to which he reduces me—just now, at least."

And so Derval never sat at that table again till the day came when he was to leave the house for ever.

As he was peremptorily forbidden to go near the sea-shore, he frequently went to the churchyard of Finglecombe and spent hours there, weaving chaplets of daisies and wild flowers.

"What brings you here so often, my poor child?" asked Mr. Asperges Laud (patting him on the head) the curate, in his long-tailed coat, gaiters, and Roman collarino.

"To be near mamma's grave," said Derval, gulping down a sob. "Besides, it is a quiet place for a good cry," he added, as the kind curate took him into his little thatched parsonage.

In the dark nights of winter he could recal how tenderly mamma put him to bed, and watched beside him till he slept. It was old Patty Fripp who did so now, who tucked him cosily into his little crib and kissed him some twenty times ere she bade him "good-night," but, by order of Mrs. Hampton, was not permitted to linger beside him.

"The child tells you, ma'm, that he can't sleep in the dark alone, from fear," urged Patty on one occasion.

Patty then told her that snakes in Devonshire were called "long cripples," and Derval had heard of the one at Manaton, that was as big as a human body, and had legs as well as wings, and uttered a hiss that could be heard for miles around.

"The boy is a fool, and you are another; leave him to sleep, or wake, as he chooses," was the mandate. So Derval was left to sob himself asleep in the dark, cowering under his coverlet, fearing "the Long Cripple" was coming when the wind moaned in the chimney, or the ivy-leaves pattered on the window-panes.

Apart from the comments of Patty, the remarks of schoolfellows and neighbours were not wanting to foster the growing animosity of Derval to his stepmother. Curious eyes watched him, and the inquisitive questioned him, extracting answers, to which they gave suggestions all calculated to inflame his impotent wrath; and now a day came when the cottage at Finglecombe was turned topsy-turvy, and Derval, to his utter bewilderment, was banished for some time to the parsonage.

The real Lord of Finglecombe had come in the shape of a baby-brother to him—a baby whom the Rev. Asperges Laud made a little Christian by the name of Rookleigh Greville Hampton.

And now, more than ever, as this little one had come, did the father bless his increasing prospects in the acquisition of land, and in the profits thereon, as, like the man in the Canterbury Tales, "therefore loved he gold in special."

New hopes sprang up in the heart of Greville, and with the wealth he seemed likely to acquire, he ceased to regret that which he had lost, and to repine about the title of which his father and grandsire had been, as he believed, illegally deprived.

But in the years to come this baby-brother was fated to have a terrible and calamitous influence upon the destiny of Derval Hampton.

Greville Hampton was so successful in his speculations that he actually hoped, in time, to make quite an estate of Finglecombe. Money makes money, and thus he became a wealthy man; for true it is, "that the thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never in the way we have imagined it."

His dreams of an El Dorado, and Mary's reading thereof, came back to his memory, when he saw house after house being built in the little dell that overlooked the sea; and he recalled her words, "Your riches lie, not in California, but here in Finglecombe." How prophetic were her words!

Now that he was becoming wealthy, many persons who had held somewhat aloof from him began to discover a hundred good qualities in him they had never dreamed of before. Ladies had always admitted that he was a more than ordinarily handsome man; their husbands—county men—praised his seat on horseback, his manner and bearing, remarked the cheerfulness and good nature expressed in his face, and began to extol the great frankness of his manner, though, sooth to say, they saw little of him; for he, remembering how they had ignored his existence in the past, ignored theirs in the present time.

He steadily added acre to acre. A small, but pretty village, approaching the dignity of a watering-place, had sprung up in the lovely dell where the little cottage of Finglecombe stood, for it had now given place to an imposing brick villa, which seemed to look haughtily down on the humbler dwellings around, with its plate-glass oriels, ogee gables, its handsome oaken porch of fanciful design, and its sweeping approaches, rolled and gravelled between beautiful shrubberies.

As wealth flowed in and brought back wonted luxuries with it, he ceased to remember poor Mary's pathetic attempts at a little ornament and refinement amid the humility of her later surroundings, for Greville Hampton became a sorely changed man to all, and to Derval especially.

Could Mary have dreamed that a day would ever come when her child would pine for his father's love, as Derval pined in secret? But under the cruel influence of the second wife and her little boy it was so. Much of this, perhaps, arose from Hampton's absorption in his own pursuits, so fearful was he of losing any time that might add to his increasing store. Thus no word of endearment, of praise for studious conduct, no caress cheered the lonely little boy, who saw all such as his father could spare exacted by Mrs. Hampton for his baby-brother, while her petty tyranny and aversion to himself grew daily together, and a woman so petty, weak-minded, and jealous—jealous even of the dead—found much to inflict in the round of home life.

Once, during a protracted absence of his father—not that his presence perhaps would have mattered much—his little pet dog was taken from him, and sent away he knew not where, and when he wept and clamoured for it, she beat him and pulled his ears till his head ached. On another occasion she deprived him of his canary, as its seed and chickweed "made a mess"; and then he felt—as when she sent "mamma's big Dorking" to the spit—something like murder in his little heart.

He rushed at her and contrived to inflict sundry kicks about her ankles, which made her scream, and in a moment the strong and athletic hand of his father was upon him.

"I tell you, sir, she is," and the blows fell like a hailstorm about the head and shoulders of Derval. But not a tear came from his eyes now; his lips were firmly compressed, his face was deadly pale, and he regarded his father with a steady and unflinching eye.

Under this unjust treatment the boy became sullen and resentful; thus, when a little pool he had constructed in the garden, to hold a shoal of minnows, by her order was emptied and filled up, he revenged himself by poodling her favourite Persian cat, the gift of her aunt, Mrs. Rookleigh, and for this she resolved to inflict condign punishment, with great form and ceremony.

She armed herself with her riding switch (for Greville now kept a pretty pad for her) and desired the groom to bring Master Derval to the stable, and as she did so, in her silly malignity, her very handsome face had a very tiger-like expression, and she grasped the jewelled handle of the switch resolutely in her large white hand.

"Lock the door on the inside," said she when Derval was brought before her. "Off with his jacket and tie up his hands to the knob on that heelpost."

And almost before Derval could realise the situation, he found himself a prisoner, denuded of his jacket, a halter-rope looped round his wrists, and himself "seized up," for deliberate punishment, standing almost on tip-toe, and with considerable tension.

"Will that do, mum?" asked the groom, who thought the situation an amusing one, "a rum start," as he afterwards said in the kitchen, adding that he never thought so "handsome a lady could be so downright savage."

Derval turned his head half round with an appealing expression on his sweet boyish face—a look that reminded her of the expression of Mary's eyes in her banished portrait,—but at that instant she swung the elastic switch round, and it fell with a smart and stinging thud upon his shoulders, which had no protection now save his little shirt. Derval winced, but set his teeth firmly together, determined to die rather than give her the satisfaction of hearing him cry out or supplicate for mercy.

With steady and regular sweep the switch descended on Derval's quivering shoulders again and again; but not a cry escaped him, and enraged anew by his fortitude, or "obstinacy," as she deemed it, Mrs. Hampton exerted herself afresh, and Derval, while clenching his teeth and breathing hard, boy-like, thought of the cruel enchantress who used to whip the bare back of the helpless young king of the Black Isles in the Arabian Nights, and longed for some such punishment to fall on his tormentor as fell on that remarkable lady.

We know not how many strokes were administered, but Mrs. Hampton was becoming somewhat breathless, and the tension of the rope that bound her victim to the heelpost seemed as if dragging his arms out of their sockets.

"Nonsense, he is shamming, he is as cunning as a fox!' she exclaimed; but it was as the groom said, for Derval's head drooped on his breast and he hung on the rope like a dead weight, while no motion was made by him.

"Untie him; dear me, I had no idea of this," said Mrs. Hampton, becoming suddenly alarmed, while the groom released the passive hands of Derval, and tenderly carried him into the stable-yard, where the fresh air fanned his face, which was now bathed with cold water from a fountain into which Mrs. Hampton dipped her cambric handkerchief.

"He will revive in a few minutes," said she, becoming certainly still more alarmed at the pallor of his face and seeing that his eyes remained closed.

"Lord, mum," said the groom, who rather enjoyed her growing terror, "I hope we won't be having a crowner's 'quest in the house!"

"Fool!" said she, darting an angry look at the speaker, and then applying her little bottle of aromatic vinegar to Derval's nostrils. He revived, however, rapidly, put his jacket on, and walked sullenly but unsteadily away.

For the first time in her life she feared her husband—was glad of his absence, and hoped that Derval's back, which she anointed when he was sound asleep, would bear no trace of what he had undergone when Greville Hampton returned.

"Flogged like a black nigger for poodling a dirty cat—my eyes!" was the comment of the groom, when relating the episode in the kitchen; and poor old Patty Fripp wept tears of rage when she heard of it.

Derval's back was still stiff and painful, and his tender wrists were excoriated, when his father returned a day or two after, but the idea of complaining about what he had undergone never occurred to him; in fact, he was too much accustomed to systematic ill-usage now.

He longed to be old enough to run away and be a soldier or a sailor—he cared not which—and he would sit by his mother's grave brooding over such thoughts, till led away by Mr. Asperges Laud, or found by Patty Fripp.

As he grew older he became painfully conscious, however, of the different treatment of his younger brother and himself; he saw how he was permitted to go threadbare and shabby, with tattered cap and seamy boots, while little Rookleigh—or Rook as he called him—was kept like a princeling in purple and fine linen, and all the while their father seemed careless or oblivious of the difference.

"I'll not stay here, Patty," said Derval one day in great soreness of heart, while smarting under some new affront; "I'll run away."

"Run away, child, and let the Pixies or the Long Cripple get thee!" exclaimed his old nurse.

But Derval had nearly ceased to fear these things now, and he had no dread of any created thing, though he did shrink from the malice and the severe and vindictive eyes of his stepmother, and from contending with the low forces of her small and narrow mind.

Had Greville Hampton shown more, or even any remarkable preference for his first-born than for little Rookleigh, there might have been some reason for her jealousy though none for her cruelty; but so absorbed was he, as we have said, in the novel and pleasant task of money-making, that he never gave a thought at all to Derval.

As the latter approached boyhood, and Rookleigh childhood from mere infancy, the continued difference in the treatment of both, in food, raiment, and even in toys, was perceptible to all. Derval shunned alike the dining-room and drawing-room, for she was sure to be in either one or other. He lurked in the stable, the gardens, on the sea-shore, anywhere to be away from her, and his father never missed him apparently.

Rookleigh, petted, master, and more than master of the establishment, grew up a froward, petulant, sullen and cunning child—a greedy one too, who ate his cakes and sweetmeats in secrecy and haste, sharing none and nothing with his elder brother or anyone else; and in many ways, as her own peculiar rearing, he was becoming the counterpart of his mother.

Again and again had the latter hinted at sending Derval away somewhere, to hoard or be bound apprentice, she cared not to what; but time passed on, till he attained his fourteenth year, and his half-brother was seven years old, with his mother's chestnut hair and her cunning yellow-hazel eyes, but with a strange shifty expression in them.

At home in his father's house, Derval was beginning to feel homeless now. Though impulsive and enthusiastic, what to him were now the leafy rustle of the woods and apple-orchards of Finglecombe; the trill of the lark above his head, the white-flecked azure of the summer sky, the cornfields ripe for the sickle, the glare of the golden sunshine, the soft curve of the distant hills, the bold rocky coast of Devon, and the sea that lapped it?

He only longed to be far away from them all and from "that woman," for Finglecombe was no longer home to him; no welcome was there, and love had departed.

Often did the boy visit the ruins of the old castle of Oakhampton, and wander there, as he had been wont to do in happier times, when led by his father's hand, longing to be the lord of it, or of some such place—but of it more than all. For he had been told it was theirs by right, and the coat of arms above the mouldering portal, the shield with its three choughs, and the motto Clarior e Tenebris, was theirs also.

The grim stone vaults, the dimly-lighted chamber, the roofless hall, he peopled in imagination with mail-clad soldiers, their pikes glittering and banners waving, as his mind filled with feudal fancies and monastic longings, and he loved the old walls, which had been the cradle of his race, especially when they, and the masses of dark-green ivy that clothed them, were steeped in the redness of the setting sun, and the gathering shadows of evening added to their melancholy, their stillness, and gloom.

He felt his heart swell with romance and pride, as he recalled all his father and even Patty Fripp had told him of the Hamptons of other days, and of the rights he had lost, and bold and daring were the fancies that filled the mind of the brave boy at times, for he was now at the age when all life is illusion.

The sea-shore was his other favourite resort, and he spent hours there listening to the lap, lapping of the waves upon the shingle, and marvelling of other lands that were far, far away; and there was one morning, the excitement of which he never forgot, when a nameless and unknown wreck was found floating in the bay, a mastless and battered hulk—battered by the fury of some great storm, in which the water had contended with the spirits of the air, till all on board had perished.

Another haunt was a ruined and unused mill at Mill-brook, where the old wheel, covered with green moss and grey lichens, looked so picturesque, while the brook foamed and boiled unheeded beneath it, and some ancient trees with drooping branches cast a shadow over the ivied walls, where all, so busy once, was now silent, and made up a picture of which Derval never wearied in his childish rambles, though the pixies were said to grind their corn there at night, when the old wheel, so silent and still by day, was seen revolving furiously in the light of the moon.

Thus, a strange and shadowy expression—induced by his loneliness—began to come into the boy's eyes, as if he had thoughts no one understood, or cared to understand, and as if by day he dreamed of things unthought of by others. Mr. Asperges Laud saw all this in his face, and longed to see the little lad away from Finglecombe and its influence, and the wish was likely to be soon gratified.

CHAPTER III.

ON BOARD THE GOOD SHIP "AMETHYST."

"How often am I to urge that this boy of yours should be sent to a boarding school or—to sea, dearest Greville," he heard his step-mother say decisively, but in a suave manner she was cunning enough to adopt with his father, when she had some important end in view, just as he took his seat at a side-table for breakfast to which he had been permanently banished, while little Rookleigh perched in a baby-chair (held in by a cross-bar) sat by his mamma's side and got tiny bits of the best of everything from her own hands.

As her husband made no immediate reply, but sat immersed in the "money article" of the Times, she repeated her observation or suggestion in a louder key, when he said,

"Because I cannot have him at home here any longer, and what is more, dear Greville, I shall not!"

"You will not?" said he, laying down his paper, while Derval listened with a quick-beating heart.

"He is so unfinished—worse—unmannerly—a mere Devonshire lout, I am sorry to say, and will corrupt my darling little Rookleigh if they grow up together."

"But I do, and to sea let him go; we can't have him growing up to manhood an idle, hulking fellow here."

"Everyone thinks Derval a very well-bred boy, and Mr. Asperges says he is the best behaved of all his choir."

"He poodled the cat, however, steals the fruit and the jam, and is so full of tricks and strange eccentric ways, that he should be permanently banished to the kitchen," continued Mrs. Hampton, forgetting her suavity and warming up with her subject; "but here is the very thing we want!" she exclaimed, turning to an advertisement in the Times, as if her eye had only caught it for the first time.

"The Sea.—Introduction given—free of all charge—to one of the oldest ship-owning firms in the city requiring respectable youths on board of three splendid ships just launched, for the West Indian and Colonial trades. Midshipman's uniform worn. Apply, Dugald Curry & Co," &c. "I think you should lose no time in writing, love," she added coaxingly.

"Would you like this, Derval?" asked Greville Hampton, with a little softer cadence in his voice than usual.

Of course he liked it; and a great flush of happiness and longing rose up in his heart, the ideas of the "splendid ship" and "middy's uniform," combined with a young Briton's in-born tastes and visions of the sea—the sea, with its perils, glories, and wonders; of Robinson Crusoe, and lonely isles full of fruits and flowers and coral caves, of gold to find and savages to fight—now filled the whole mind of Derval; and all that the lives of adventurous voyagers and intrepid seamen—all that the stories contained in naval history and the novels of Marryat and others have sown in the souls of our schoolboys, were there to rouse his native enthusiasm.

So the matter was soon accomplished, and a correspondence with Messrs. Dugald Curry & Co. ended in Derval finding himself elected to seek his bread upon the waters as middy on board the good ship Amethyst of London, 700 tons register, Captain Philip Talbot commander, bound for Rio Janeiro.

From this we may fully gather that the once tender husband that loved so well the gentle Mary, and whose whole thought was the future welfare of their only child, was a sorely changed man now, under the influence of another woman and his new surroundings.

With the removal of the picturesque little cottage of Finglecombe and the erection of a florid and pretentious villa in its place, the old life had passed away, and with it many a memory of the innocent and loving, if anxious, past. Greville Hampton had become almost callous in his worldliness; a slave to chance impulses, to gratified avarice, to feverish acquisitiveness, and the love that had whilom been absorbed by the son of Mary, was now shared, and more than shared, yea, usurped, by the younger born of Anne Rookleigh.

Derval, whom he was sending forth into the cold and bitter world so early in life, in his tender years, as a poor sailor boy, was the same son for whom, in the days of his more limited means, he had longed for wealth, and now—now when wealth was coming upon him—he could look on Anne's face, and into her false eyes of golden hazel, and thrust back the thoughts that at times reproached him.

Could it really be that he—Greville Hampton—was doing this without a necessity therefor? But true it is, that "one's memory is apt to grow rusty with respect to one's old self, and we nearly always look upon ourselves as the products of certain causes, setting down anything unsatisfactory to the charge of training and circumstances." Yet, as in every parting there is an image of death, in the departure of Derval it seemed for a time to Greville Hampton as if Mary was dying again.

The day before he was to leave, Derval went alone to her grave, to read again the words—how well he knew them!—on the little cross at the head of the dear mound, and to take farewell of her, as it were—that turfy mound, to him the most hallowed spot on earth, yea, hallowed as that on which the Angel of God once alighted; and waves of feeling seemed to swell painfully up in his little heart as he turned slowly to leave the spot, for years—perhaps for ever.

Often in the lonely watches of the night, under the glory of the southern skies, or in dark and stormy hours, when the bleak wind blustered aloft and bellied out the close-reefed topsails, when giant waves came thundering from windward to wash the deck and gorge the lee-scuppers, making the stout ship reel like a toy in the perilous trough of the sea, did the sailor boy's thoughts fly back to that peaceful grave and his farewell visit there.

And now the last night came that Derval was to spend under the roof of his father, and for a time the heart of the latter really did go forth to him; the present wife was almost forgotten; dead Mary came back to his soul, and seemed to take her place again. Fain would he have gone with his boy to London, to have seen him off, or into safe hands on board his future home; but Mrs. Hampton said no—she could not and would not be left alone just then.

How tenderly old Patty wept over her "darling's things," and folded them carefully and neatly for the last time, and packed his little portmanteau, yearningly as his own mother would have done, and thought truly, with a great sob, that had she lived he would not now have been "going into the world as a sailor boy." And for that dead mother's sake she kissed him many times, and with her old scissors snipped off a lock of his once golden curls, that were gradually turning to rich dark brown like his father's; but Derval had the crisp hair that indicates character, firmness, and decision of purpose. As he was to depart in the early morning, he kissed and hung over his brother, "little Rook," as he called him, whom he was not permitted to waken; and the episode of the lonely boy doing this moved the heart of his father; but Mrs. Hampton looked coldly on, for hers was hard as flint to him and cold as iron.

At last it was all over, and in the early hours of the next morning he found himself, as one in a dream, in the train for London, and leaving fast behind every feature of the landscape with which he had been familiar from infancy. Already Finglecombe, with all its groves and little church tower had vanished, and now Bideford, with its wide and airy streets that shelve towards the water, came and went as the train swept on, and after that, all his wistful eyes looked on was new to him.

It was an inauspicious morning on which to begin the world, being a dull and raw one in February; the rain fell aslant the grey sky, and reedy fens and lonesome marshes, where the bittern boomed, were full of water, and the rooks were cawing in the leafless elms as they built their nests. The orchards were leafless, and the furrows in the ploughed fields were like long narrow runnels filled with water; but despite all this, the novelty of Derval's situation, a certain sense of freedom, and being the lord of his own proper person, kept up his spirits for a time.

The last hand in which his hand had lingered was that of Mr. Asperges Laud, and in fancy he seemed still to see his kind and earnest face, his Roman collarino, broad hat, and long-skirted coat, as he stood on the platform and gave a farewell wave, like a wafted blessing, after the departing train.

The railway journey was precisely like any other; he saw many places new to him, Taunton, with all its pleasant villages and beautiful orchards, and Salisbury with its wonderful spire, among others, and after a run of two hundred and twenty miles his train ran clanking into Waterloo Station. After traversing miles of streets (which he thought would never come to an end), about ten at night, and with a heart beating almost painfully with excitement, young Derval found himself in the mighty wilderness of London, and surrounded by more people than he thought the world contained, and an appalling bustle, strange lights and sights and sounds, and where all men seemed to be engaged in a race with time and for bare existence.

By the guard who had him in charge he was taken to an hotel; excitement rendered him incapable of eating, and weary with intense thinking he went supperless to bed. Sooth to say, he felt very friendless and miserable. He dearly loved his father, despite his later abstraction and coldness, and already he was longing to see his face again, and the face, too, of Patty Fripp, who had been a mother to him. He had left home but that morning, and already ages seemed to have lapsed since then.

The thoughts of Robinson Crusoe, Captain Cook, Peter Simple, and so forth, failed now to keep up his spirits in the unutterable loneliness of his condition; already he wept for the home he had so lately quitted and loathed, and from which he had been literally driven; but he had no anger at any one there now—not even Mrs. Hampton; and folding his hands, he repeated the prayers, from which mockery was soon to make him refrain when on board the good ship Amethyst.

George Eliot says truly that "daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else, for the night presses on our imagination—the forms it takes are false, fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary persistence of measurable reality."

The day that dawned was scarcely one calculated to rouse the ardour or spirits even of a lad, as it was one of the Cimmerian darkness, a London fog, when the omnibuses ceased to ply, and not even the boldest cabby would undertake to convey Derval to the West India Docks, a state of things which greatly perplexed him, as the yellow opaqueness that now surrounded him was so different from the thin white mists that came at times from the Bristol Channel.

It was one of those horrible fogs peculiar to London and to London only, when there is a doubly blinding nature in it, which puts the thrust-down smoke into a state of atmospheric solution, obscuring all things, and causes the oppressed eyes to tingle, smart, and fill with irrepressible tears, and blinds them to the dim objects that might perchance otherwise be visible; that compels at midday, and often all day long, a vast consumption of candles and lamp oil, gas and torches, and nearly all locomotion is brought to a standstill; when the trees and railings become white as if snowed upon, carriages are relinquished and links and lanterns resorted to at the West End, and the street perils of the East are fearfully increased, and many a vehicle is found half-wrecked by the kerb-stone; and when the terrible poisonous smoke-fog in its descent from the very sky, as it were, penetrates houses, and makes dark and obscure, damp and comfortless, even the cosiest and brightest of rooms.

The mind is usually affected by external circumstances. Thus, never more than now in this dark and apparently awful day, did Derval, cowering in the corner of a coffee-room, sigh in heart for the touch of the loving hand and the sound of the caressing voice that the grave had closed over for ever.

At last, as evening drew near, the tiresome fog lifted a little, and a cab was brought for him. To Derval's timidly expressed "hope that he knew the way," the bloated visage of the Jehu of the "four-wheeler" responded by a smile of half amusement, half contempt; and to the inquiry if the fog was often like this, he was told that it was "ever so, from year's end to year's end."

After traversing a mighty labyrinth of streets, narrow, dirty, and of most repellent aspect, the cabman drew up, descended, and opened the door; though aware that he had to deal with "a precious green 'un," he was actually content with thrice his legal fare, and depositing Derval at a gate of the Dock—a wilderness of kegs, masts, and ships, and all manner of strange things to him—left him with his portmanteau to find out the Amethyst—his future home—as best he could.

By the assistance of a good-natured porter, after great delay and trouble, he found her, and by a gangway proceeded on board in the mist and damp, unnoticed and bewildered to whom to address himself.

A prodigious noise and bustle prevailed everywhere, but to Derval's excited imagination they seemed to culminate on board the Amethyst. Several black gaping hatches were open, and a mighty multitude of casks, boxes, bales, and filled sacks, were descending into them, by ropes and chain run through the blocks shipped on derricks (in spars supported by stays, and used for slinging up or lowering down goods), with a terrible creaking and rattling, amid much expenditure of breath in the way of "yo-heave-oing" by gangs of peculiarly dirty-looking fellows, with jersey-sleeves rolled up, and who looked like gipsies or vagrants, but were simply unwashed and unkempt dock-labourers and porters.

The deck and the entire ship seemed, to lad's unprofessional eyes, a mass of irremediable confusion. The former was encumbered with casks and cases, and the mud brought from the shore by the feet of dock-people and visitors had not added to its comfort or cleanness. Everybody seemed bustling about, with some distinct object in view; but Derval stood aside with his little portmanteau and a travelling-bag, pushed to and fro by every passer, lost, bewildered, and not unfrequently sworn at.

At last he took courage to address a young man, tall, surly, and saucy in aspect, who was smoking a short pipe, but who wore a naval cap, and though he had his shirt-sleeves rolled up as if he had been at work, seemed in some authority, for Derval heard him spoken of as the third mate, and he was greatly shocked to find such an official attired thus, while superintending cargo going into the open hold.

"Please, sir," said Derval, "I have come to join the ship as a midshipman—where shall I put these things of mine?"

"Don't chuck them down here, youngster, whatever you do," was the somewhat surly response, while he gave Derval a casual yet critical glance. "You are young—young—what the devil is your name?"

"Oh, ah—yes," replied the other, touching the peak of his cap in mockery, and for a moment taking his short pipe from his mouth. "I am Paul Bitts, the third mate; we have been looking for you for ever so long; you'll excuse the ship not being decorated to receive you."

"That is very good of you. I hope you left your esteemed papa and mamma very well?"

"A very greenhorn, by Jove!" muttered this would-be witty young gentleman. "Is your wife coming to see you off? I hope not, as I can't stand women's tears—lovely woman in distress and all that sort of thing."

"Who's this?" asked a smart-looking seaman with a fringe of curly brown whiskers, and a good-natured face—a man about forty-five—as he came forward. The new-comer had the cut of a genuine seaman, and wore his clothes as no landsman could ever wear them. His trousers were loose and round at the feet but tight at the waist; he wore a well-varnished and low-crowned black hat, with a long blue ribbon hanging over the left eye, a black silk handkerchief peculiarly knotted round his bare brown throat, that had been tanned by the sun of many a land and sea; a jack-knife hanging by a lanyard thread was his only ornament, unless we except a clumsy gold ring, and he displayed a superabundance of check shirt. He had a wide step, a rolling gait, and half-open hands that seemed always ready to tally on to anything. "Who is this?' he repeated, eyeing Derval.

"A greenhorn—a land-crab—come with the owner's compliments," said Mr. Paul Bitts, bowing low ironically; "allow me to introduce Mr. Derval Hampton—Mr. Joe Grummet, our boatswain; Mr. Joe Grummet—Mr. Derval——"

"Stow that 'ere nonsense," said the other bluntly; "welcome aboard, my little lad, and if any man in the Amethyst can make a sailor of you, I am he."

"Take him aft to the captain," said Mr. Bitts; "but before you go, youngster, hand over all the cakes and jam-pots the old woman at home gave you."

"I have none, and if I have, why should I give them to you?" asked Derval, beginning to resent the other's offensive tone.

"Because you might be a naughty boy and get so sea-sick—so hand them over, and I'll find fellows to eat them for you."

"I have none, I tell you," replied Derval, with sparkling eyes; "and who do you mean by the 'old woman'?"

"I have—none!" replied Derval, in a changed voice that Joe Grummet was not slow to detect, and taking up Derval's portmanteau and bag, he desired him to follow, whispering as they went:

"Look 'ee, Hampton lad, there isn't a saucier fellow in the ship than Paul Bitts, but he is senior to you, and you won't gain anything by running foul of his hawse, so give him a wide berth always."

And now, by a very handsome companion-way and mahogany stair, they descended to the cabin of the ship, which was plainly and neatly furnished, the chief features, to Derval's eyes, being a rack or two of arms and a brass tell-tale compass, that swung in the square skylight.

"Mr. Hampton—just come aboard, sir," said Joe Grummet, removing his hat; and Derval found himself kindly welcomed by Captain Talbot, a man about thirty, with a handsome open countenance, a bright cheerful expression, and a stout well-set figure, and his two other mates, Mr. Girtline and Mr. Tyeblock, who pressed him to join them in a glass of sherry and a biscuit, of which they were partaking before going on shore.

Captain Talbot questioned him kindly about his parents and home as if to acquire his confidence and inspire him therewith; about his education, and if he had a genuine liking for the sea, or if it was only a flight of boyish fancy born of story books; but Derval, unable to tell that anywhere was better than home to him, answered with great reserve and much shyness, while sooth to say, as he had never heard of the Royal Naval Reserve, to which Captain Talbot and his two mates belonged, their costumes puzzled him very much.

They wore gold epaulettes, and half-inch gold lace in wavy lines around the cuffs, laced trousers, sword and belts like naval officers, Captain Talbot having two medals glittering on his broad chest for saving human life; and he and his two mates were now departing in "full fig," as Joe Grummet informed him, to a great entertainment given by the Lord Mayor, and ere they left the ship, the captain, who knew probably the proclivities of Mr. Paul Bitts, who was left in charge there, specially directed the boatswain to have an eye to the comforts of the new-comer.

So while showing him his berth and where to stow his things, Joe solved to him the mystery of the handsome uniforms, and fired his enthusiasm thereby. He told him that no less a personage than the Prince of Wales was at the head of the Royal Naval Reserve; that Captain Talbot had the rank of Lieutenant there, and Mr. Girtline and Mr. Tyeblock that of sub-lieutenants among the officers, who among their number included several marquises and lords, as the Navy List showed; and that in consequence of the Amethyst having among her crew, which consisted of twenty-five all told (exclusive of officers), ten seamen of the Royal Naval Reserve (of whom he, Joe, was one), she was entitled to carry at her gaff-peak, the blue ensign of Her Majesty's fleet, prior to first hoisting of which, she was duly provided with an Admiralty warrant.

The uniform which he had now unpacked and the contemplation of six brass 9-pounders on deck, polished like jeweller's gold, with black tompions in their muzzles and canvas-covered lashings white as snow, afforded Derval as much delight as the rifles with sword-bayonets, the cutlasses and pistols that were racked round the mizenmast in the cabin and against the rudder case; for in the seas the Amethyst might have to traverse, were risks to be run that rendered lethal weapons necessary at times; and he longed, with all an enthusiastic lad's longing, for the day when he, like Joe Grummet and the rest, would be qualified to have his turn of drill and gunnery practice on board H.M.S. President in the West India Docks. And he hoped too, that in time to come he might be captain of just such another fine and stately ship as the Amethyst of 700 tons register, A.1 at Lloyds, perfect in the grace of her rigging, beautiful in mould, and made for fast sailing—for slipping through the sea "a-head of her reckoning."

Her rigging was beautifully fitted, every rope lying in the chafe of another, her decks were flush and level, and when at sea any loose rope was neatly coiled away and laid down in a regular man-of-war fashion that came of the recent training of Joe Grummet and others on board H.M.S. President.

"The skipper has specially requested me to take you in tow, Mr. Hampton," said the boatswain.

"In charge, don't you know; so there is one piece of advice I'll give you, keep to windward if you can of Mr. Paul Bitts; he is often crank, and over-fond of colting the youngster, and who yaws a bit in way of doing duty."

To this mysteriously worded advice, Derval replied that he should endeavour to please that gentleman in all things.

"The captain, of course, will take care that you are not put upon, but then he is not always at hand. He is a fine fellow, Phil Talbot, who can crack his joke and his biscuit on the same head," continued the boatswain manipulating a quid between the hard palms of his hands prior to inserting it in the back recesses of his mouth. "Many a lunar he and I have worked together when mere ship-boys long ago—for there wer'nt no middies—no reefers—in the merchant service in those days, and many who sailed with us then have gone aloft for ever. But come lad—supper waits," he exclaimed as a bell was heard to jingle; "a jolly British leg of mutton with caper sauce—gad boy, I have eaten capers off the bushes many a time on the shore of the Black Sea."

At supper were Dr. Strang, the young Scotch surgeon, who in despair of a practice ashore was fain to ship as a "medico" in the Amethyst; and two middies, Harry or Hal Bowline, a frank fair-haired and cherry-cheeked young fellow with a confident and often defiant air; and little Tommy Titford,—usually called Tom Tit—a quiet, dark-eyed, and gentle lad about Derval's age, and who was the peculiar object of the malevolence of Mr. Paul Bitts, then busily engaged in slicing down the mutton, of which he reserved all the best cuts for himself.

He gruffly told Derval to make haste and finish his supper, as he had a message for him to execute; and Derval, anxious to make himself useful, and also to conciliate this personage, bolted his food, and nearly choked himself with a can of ale handed to him by the good-natured boatswain.

"Sorry for that; because we would have stuck their photos all over the place, and set them up to auction now and then."

"He is as big a gull as ever picked up a bit of biscuit!" said Bitts with a horse-laugh in which the others joined, especially young Bowline, and after some time Derval returned looking rather tired, flushed, and confused, to say he had been all over the ship, inquired of everyone, and could find neither the person nor the place referred to, at which there was a fresh burst of laughter; for by some he had been informed that the cook's shifter had gone on shore to be married, by others that he was busy polishing the chain cable, and that the starboard binnacle was at present in the captain's hat-box, and so forth.

Many similar, and many silly jokes against which the boatswain failed to protect him, and perhaps was not disinclined to join in, were perpetrated on Derval, ere, thoroughly weary with a long and, to him, exciting day, he retired to his berth, which he thought had a moist and musty odour, and certainly its sheets had not the dried lavender and camphor scents of Patty Fripp's store presses at Finglecombe.

Betimes came the morrow with its troubles, and the tyranny of Mr. Bitts among them.

"By Jingo, I'll soon let you know, through the medium of a good colt. Rouse—that is all!"

Now that gentleman was in charge of the deck, and when Derval came upon it, at 6 A.M., Bitts was again in his shirt-sleeves, and still superintending the stowage of cargo, swearing at the dock labourers, until the appearance of Derval gave a turn to his thoughts.

"On deck at last, Hampton. By Jove, you look as if you had been cooked and stewed up again!" he exclaimed; "now, away aloft and get the fresh air about you. The sooner you learn to sit astride the main cross-trees, the better for yourself."

And to Derval's dismay the speaker indicated two little spars, that looked as slender as walking-canes, resting on the trestle-trees, where the topmast and topgallantmast are connected.

"Into the maintop then," continued the bully; "away aloft youngster, and hold on with your eyelids if your hands fail you. By Jove, you'll soon find that you are like a young bear, with all your sorrows to come! Here you, Tom Tit, show this son of a shotten herring how to mount the rigging."

In obedience to these orders the boys began to ascend the main rattlins at once, little Titford leading the way and saying many pleasant things to give Derval courage and confidence.

"Not through the lubber's hole," shouted Paul Bitts; "up by the futtock shrouds!"

Derval knew well that the sooner he mastered all this kind of work the better for himself. He had climbed many a tall elm when seeking rooks' eggs at Finglecombe, and many a taller cliff when after those of the cormorants, choughs, and gannets; but this was very different work, even though the ship, moored beside the quay, was motionless as St. Pauls; and he thought of what this task would be at sea, in a storm perhaps, when the ship became the fulcrum of the swaying masts, and his heart stood still at the terrible anticipation; yet he mounted bravely up, step for step with young Titford, encouraged by the latter's voice, and the clapping of hard horny palms below.

But now they had reached the top of the long shrouds, to where the futtock-shrouds come down from the top and are bound to the mast by a hoop of iron.

"Up you go now—if you go through the lubber's hole, I'll be the death of you!" cried Bitts from below, for as the captain and other two mates were still on shore, he was in all the plenitude of his power.

"Hold on fast and follow me," cried little Titford, and active as a squirrel, with his body bent backward at an angle of forty-five from the mast, he continued mounting until he found himself in the maintop—i.e. the platform placed over the head of the lower must.

Panting, and perspiring at every pore, with agitation, exertion, and an emotion of no small dismay to see the deck and the men thereon seem so small and so far down below, Derval, with tingling fingers, while a prayer rose to his lips, grasped the futtock-shrouds, surmounted them as one in a dream, and found himself safe beside Titford. There came a time when this task was as easy to him as sitting down to table, but the novelty of it filled him with great alarm then, and when the descent began, despite his terror of Mr. Paul Bitts, he deliberately left the top through the lubber's hole—an aperture in the top grating—as an easier mode of progression while Titford went down by the futtock-shrouds.

On seeing this Paul Bitts grinned with delight, and produced from his pocket a colt—a piece of rope eighteen inches long, knotted at one end and whipped at the other—which he was wont to carry for the benefit of the ship-boys.

Derval perceived this; a spirit of mischief, caused by revulsion of feeling, rose within him, and the moment he reached the deck, all encumbered as it was by boxes, barrels, bales, and gangways, dock labourers and porters, he gave Mr. Bitts a chase that excited the laughter of all and roused the fury of that personage, by darting hither and thither, with all a boy's agility, round the masts and hatchways till he reached the quarter-deck, at a part of which the side-netting was being repaired; consequently a portion of it was open and the moulded plankshere (a plank which runs all round the timber heads) was hinged up.

While Derval stood here irresolute, and thinking of capitulation, Bitts made a dart at him, on which the latter instantly shrank aside, and his tormentor, in his blind fury failing to perceive the gap in the bulwark, went head foremost overboard and into the water.

Amid shouts of laughter he came to the surface, black as a negro, with the filthy mud and ooze of the harbour bottom, into which he must have been wedged to the shoulders.

"Oh, my eye!" shouted Harry Bowline, who danced a few steps of a hornpipe, "here's a lark—Bitts in the water—man overboard—rope, rope! cut away the life-buoy—man a boat!"

Puffing like a grampus and half choked, the third mate scrambled on board by the mizen chains, minus his colt, and rather more than crestfallen, and while he went below to alter his costume, Derval, after paying his "footing" to the crew—their perquisites for his first going aloft—was sent into a part of the hold where a gang of men were stowing away cases, and where, as it was very dark, his duty consisted in holding a candle to show a light when required.

In an atmosphere and amid features and occupations so new and strange, perhaps Derval thought as little now of the Oakhampton title, the ruined castle, and Wistmanswood, as his father did amid his fast growing wealth; but the time might come for both to lay such matters to heart, and this the future will show.

It was somewhat of a red-letter day for Derval when he first donned his uniform—a gold-laced cap and blue Oxford jacket with gilt anchor buttons, gold anchors on the collars, and ditto lace upon the cuffs—and went on shore, bearer of a letter to Messrs. Dugald Curry & Co., and feeling indifferent to the anxious inquiries of Mr. Bitts, as to whether he thought he resembled Lord Nelson, K.C.B., whether his mamma knew he was absent from home, and at what church he was to meet his intended, and much more to the same purpose.

In time the cargo was all on board, the hatches battened down, the boats secured and inspected, the bills of lading signed—documents whereby the captain of a vessel acknowledges receipt of goods shipped on board, and binds himself ("dangers of accidents, the seas, fire, enemies, &c., excepted") to deliver them in good order to those to whom they are addressed, on payment of the stipulated freight.

The Amethyst was hauled out of dock, and with the blue ensign of the Royal Naval Reserve flying at her gaff-peak, and Blue Peter at the foremast-head, was taken by tug down the river, and came to anchor off Tilbury Fort. Next day began the bustle of preparing for sea; the canvas was fully bent, the royal yards crossed, the studding sail gear rove, the powder brought on board; and in many ways Derval made himself so active, even up aloft, that he quite won the heart of Joe Grummet.

"I knew you would drop into your place in a day or two, youngster," said he, "and you've already done it."

"To-morrow a tug will take us to the Nore, and next day will find us in the Channel—and here comes old Toggle the Pilot," said Grummet, as a stout personage, enveloped in many coats and wraps, came tumbling over the side, with a rubicund and weatherbeaten face, and made his way direct for the grog, which as a preliminary to everything, waited him, as he knew, in the cabin.

It is not an uncommon thing for the captain of a sea-going ship, calling the roll, to find several of his men absent, having been either too intoxicated to sail, or having broken their articles and disappeared, and such deficiencies are then made up by the crimps at Gravesend, as no vessel can go to sea short-handed; but this was never the case with Phil Talbot, who was one of the most popular merchant commanders belonging to the mighty Port of London.

Ere long the Nore was left behind, and Derval had his first instalment of the odious mal-du-mer amid the heavy seas of the English Channel, and with a longing and somewhat of an envious heart, he saw old Toggle the Pilot quit the ship and go off to Deal in his boat, waving a farewell with his tarpaulin hat—the last link with old England.

Even the glorious sea is becoming somewhat prosaic now in these our days of steam, telegraphy, and extreme colonisation; yet it was the fortune of Derval Hampton to see much that was stirring, perilous and even terrible, ere he had the down of manhood on his upper lip.

The family at Finglecombe knew that the Amethyst, had sailed for Rio de Janeiro. Greville Hampton, who was neither destitute of humanity nor of natural interest in his first-born, duly announced the fact, as seen among the "Shipping Intelligence" in his morning paper, and it set Mrs. Hampton thinking—thinking—as she fondled her rather cross-tempered little Rookleigh.

She thought on the contingencies consequent to a sailor's life, separated from death by a six-inch plank, as Juvenal has it—an idea reproduced by Dr. Samuel Johnson—the collisions, fires, founderings, the chances of lee-shores, of floating hulls and icebergs in the dark; the countless chances too of drowning or dying by climate and disease. She had read too in the papers that "in the five years ending June last, 5,028 ships had gone to the bottom with every man on board, making 6,469 souls," and she thought there were a good many chances against Derval Hampton—the eldest born—ever darkening his father's door again.

But there was one chance, or mischance rather, on which she had not calculated, and which startled the soul of Greville to its inmost depth, when he read on another morning a paragraph worded thus:—

"The ship Amethyst of London, outward bound, spoken with in Latitude 13° 17' S. and Longitude 33° 27' W., by Curry & Co.'s ship Wanderer, all well, save that a death had happened. A boy had fallen from aloft and perished."

CHAPTER IV.

UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS.

The voyage of the Amethyst towards tropical seas and shores was far from monotonous, and more than one startling event occurred during its progress. With her snowy canvas spread, her rigging all a-taut (to use a cant nautical phrase), and her deck, whilom so wet, slippery, and foul in dock, well holystoned and swabbed till it was—as Joe Grummet said—white as a lady's hand, the Amethyst was in all her beauty now—all the more so to Derval, who got rid of his sea-sickness ere she cleared the Channel.

"Well, my little man," said Captain Talbot one day, when Joe Grummet was teaching him the use of the quadrant, "how do you feel on your sea legs—eh?"

"Happy, sir—very happy," replied Derval, turning his bright young face, which was flushed by the keen breeze, laden by the iodine of many thousand miles of the fresh, glorious, and open ocean.

"I have not been so happy for many a year past," said Derval, thinking, perhaps, of his mother.

"Come, come, youngster, it is rather early in life for you to talk of many years, and of happiness in the past tense," said the Captain, amused by a quaintness in the manner of Derval—a manner born of the kind of isolation in which he had lived in his father's house; and save for the annoyance occasionally given to him by the wasp-like nature of Paul Bitts, he would have had nothing to complain of, for the good example and gentlemanly bearing of Captain Talbot and the first and second mates, affected all the ship's company advantageously.

As for the self-won ducking in the West India Dock, Derval hoped Mr. Bitts would forget that and get over it in time; but he never did, and in many ways pursued the feud which he had declared, apparently, on the day Derval first joined the ship.

One morning, when he and Derval were in the middle watch (i.e. from 12 to 4 A.M., as the ship was nearing the Azores), the latter, overcome by the heavy saline atmosphere of the sea, by youth and the lateness of the hour, began insensibly to doze, with his head resting on the gunnel of the quarter-deck, and in a kind of half-waking dream he thought himself at Finglecombe: young rabbits scudded past in the grass; the hum of the wind in the rigging aloft, suggested that of bees and insects in the sunshine, and the air seemed to become laden with the familiar fragrance of the apple orchards and garden flowers, till a heavy thwack from the new colt of the inevitable Mr. Paul Bitts awoke him with a nervous start.

"Sleeping are you—on your watch, too! You'll come to the gallows, you young villain!" exclaimed his senior officer, with a malicious gleam in his closely set and serpent-like eyes; "that will teach you to snore like one of Circe's swine. Now go to windward—keep a bright look-out for the revolving light on Cape Flyaway, and if you see the great sea-serpent, don't forget to call the morning watch."

"Keep your weather-eye open," he added in a bullying tone; "and don't let me catch you, in the dark, stealing eggs out of the hen-coops!"

Under the special tutelage of Joe Grummet, who conceived a great regard for him, Derval, in conjunction with little Tom Titford, learned to hand, reef and steer, to mount away aloft with ease and confidence, and with both to lie out on the arms of a topgallant yard; to use the marling-spike, to splice and knot, and make a grummet. He knew the name of every part of the ship, of every spar and of all the standing and running rigging; for he had great aptitude, and proved a smart scholar at this kind of work; thus, in a little time, it was evident that he would be able to take sights, work a reckoning by log and compass, and calculate variation and leeway. He was taught how to be ready for any emergency of wind or weather; to consider nothing too trivial for consideration, and to remember, as Joe said, "how a little leak may sink a great ship."

Yet his sweet boyish nature still remained; and now, when far away at sea, he thought, in the warmth of his affection, of the handsome pipe he would "bring home for papa"; of the beautiful shells for his little half-brother; and he had visions, too, of a wonderful cap, all over ribbons, for old Patty Fripp.

Overhead the sky was now of the cerulean blue that England never knew, and never will know.

Captain Talbot made his men strictly observe the "clean-shirt-days," as the sailors call Thursday and Sunday; on the latter he always read prayers at the capstan-head to his crew, who were sure to be neatly dressed, and there was much of that silence which prevails in a man-of-war on that day.

On one of these occasions, just after prayers, Mr. Bitts, to Derval's great surprise, approached under the lee of the long-boat, amidship, and said, "Come, youngster—here is a glass of grog for you—just a thimble-full; the sun is over the fore-yard long ago."

Derval shrank from the beverage, which was proffered in a tumbler, but seeing Mr. Bitts' hand in his pocket wherein the colt was coiled, he drank it off, though nearly choked by the effort, and after that, his perceptions of everything were very vague indeed.

The ship seemed to be sailing round and round upon an axis; he tried to speak, but the difficulty of articulation became great, and the half-uttered nonsense he talked hung upon his lips; he felt alternately maudlin and defiant, especially with young Harry Bowline, who greeted him with shouts of laughter, yet good-naturedly endeavoured to get him below, and a struggle ensued between them.

"What is the matter there, forward?" cried the Captain, in surprise, from the quarterdeck.

The young Scots doctor went amidships, and returned laughing, to report that which was really the case, "Young Hampton as screwed as an owl!"

"The deuce he is!" exclaimed the Captain with great annoyance; "how came this to pass?"

"The grog as Mr. Bitts gave him has been too strong for him, sir," said Joe Grummet, who took in the whole situation and resented it accordingly; "riglar thumb-grog it must have been, to my mind."

Bitts furtively darted a vicious glance at the boatswain, who received it with perfect equanimity.

"How to get jolly drunk on it apparently," replied the unabashed Paul Bitts; "he is rather a greenhorn yet."

"Shame on you, sir! this is your fault, not his; and mark me, if it ever happens again, it will be the worse for you and your certificate!"

It may be safely recorded that this never happened again, and Derval, full of shame for the occurrence, did all in his power, by proper and zealous behaviour, to wipe off the stain, for such he deemed it, brought upon him by the malevolence of the third mate.

On the watch by night, under skies where new constellations—new to his eyes at least—were studding heaven, he always felt to the full the awful impressiveness, the utter silence of the sea! Then his thoughts fled home—to that which had latterly been no home to him—and again, in fancy, he saw the lovely dell of Finglecombe, the bay glittering in the sunny distance, the grim rocky portal of the Horses' Hole, the Pixies Parlour, the stately ruins of Oakhampton, the lone waste of Wistmanswood, the cob-cottages, and the old haunted mill at the Mill brook, with its silent and mossy wheel.

One day, when the Amethyst was near the tropic of Cancer, and ploughing the Sargasso Sea, about daybreak, Tom Tyeblock, the second mate, who had the morning watch, reported a sail, with a signal flying on the lee-bow, so the Amethyst was edged down towards her.

She was a large brig, with her sails in considerable disorder. The peak halyards of the spanker gaff had given way, and the sail lay flapping against the mainmast; her spars were topped about in various ways; the maintopsail was full, but the foretopsail lay in the wind; not a soul was to be seen on board, and yet she had signals flying, that said, "Can you send a boat on board?"

When near her, the Amethyst lay to, and Captain Talbot ordered Mr. Bitts to take a brace of revolvers with him and go off to the stranger, with Derval and six men, who hazarded all manner of conjectures as to the vessel.

Had her crew all perished of some terrible disease, or been poisoned by a rascally black cook? If so, terrible sights would await them, of corpses lying about, or festering in bunks and berths. Had there been a mutiny, and had she been scuttled, to sink in time? She did look rather deep in the water, Paul Bitts remarked, adding that she might sink suddenly when they were on board, or alongside, and so carry them down in the vortex she made. Had some dreadful crime compelled her crew to abandon her?

As they neared her, stroke by stroke, the silent, voiceless, and crewless craft, floating in utter silence upon the glassy tropical sea, became an object calculated to impose awe and a solemn sense of great mystery on the boat's crew. At last they were alongside, and as it might have been dangerous to hook on the painter to any part of her, the coxswain held on by boat-hook to the forechains, while with their pulses accelerated by excitement, Paul Bitts and Derval clambered up and leaped on board, the soul of the latter already recoiling within him at anticipation of some sight of horror.

The deck was deserted, but ropes, &c. lay about everywhere in confusion. The longboat was missing, but its chocks remained over the main hatch. The quarter-boat, too, was gone, and the fall-tackles swung idly at the davit-heads.

They descended to the cabin: it was empty; but a fixed lamp was burning on the table, and a clock ticked at the bulkhead; some books, wine-glasses, and a couple of decanters had evidently slipped off the table, and lay in a heap to leeward. A paroquet, in a gilt cage, hung in the skylight. Save this bird, there was no living thing on board.

The cabin berths had not been slept in, and they, as well as the forecastle bunks, were empty. There was no appearance of corpses, no blood, no weapons, or sign of outrage anywhere. No ship's papers could be found, but her name was the Bonnie Jean of ... and the rest was painted out!

After making certain that there was no one on board the derelict, as the weather was becoming squally, and Captain Talbot had a signal flying "to return," Mr. Bitts quitted the brig, and shoved off. Boy-like, Derval had possessed himself of the paroquet—a beautiful little love-bird, half green and scarlet—in its pretty cage, thinking of it as a gift for his little brother at home; but with a malediction, Paul Bitts told him to "let it alone," and as he delayed, he took it out of the cage and tossed it away to leeward, when it soon disappeared.

What could the emergency have been that caused the still flying signal, now answered too late, "Can you send a boat?" to be hoisted, and to what ship had it been exhibited? It could have been to no town or fort in that latitude and longitude. Moreover, the burning lamp showed that the desertion had been most recent. Where, then, were her crew?

Conjectures were endless; a sharp look-out was kept from aloft, but no boats were seen, and as the Amethyst hauled her wind and pursued her course, every eye was turned ever and anon to the floating derelict till she was hull down, and even till her topsails sank beneath the dim and blue horizon astern.

Derval recalled to memory the old and sea-worn wreck he had seen floating in Barnstaple Bay, and the mysterious interest it had excited in his childish mind, when he never thought that a day would come and find him a sailor and far away on tropical waters.

The episode was duly recorded in the ship's log, and it formed the staple object for comment in the forecastle for the next twenty-four hours, eliciting the narration of many a quaint personal adventure from the seamen, and one of these, a somewhat ghastly one, was told by Joe Grummet.

"You must know, Mates," said he, "that when I was a foremastman aboard the Boomerang of Liverpool, bound from Newfoundland to Waterford, in latitude 47 north and longitude 45 west, the look-out men reported a boat in sight, on a dark-grey squally day in April, and bearing about half a mile on the lee-bow, and in the stern-sheets of that identical boat, far out in mid-ocean, sat a man, steering it with an oar! There warn't no vessels in sight, but an iceberg or two, for we were leaving the floes astern going north with the Gulf stream, so the air, you may believe, was bitterly keen and cold. We edged down towards him, but as he seemed to take no notice of us, or heeded a shout or two, I was sent off with three hands in the quarter-boat to overhaul him. My eye! we found as that 'ere boat was steered by a corpse! In her stern-sheets he sat stiff, motionless, lifeless, frozen hard as a rock, but with his head drooping a little forward. He was rigidly upright, with the oar over the back-board of the stern, as if he had been a-sculling, and so hard were his hands frozen to it, that we failed to get it from the death-grasp. The boat had been half full of water that had turned to ice, in which he was wedged to his knees. Over his head and shoulders the spray and spoon-drift of the sea had been washing again and again, freezing as it came. How long he must have been dead, or whence or how he came there, there was nothing to tell us. We held the water with our oars, and held our breath too, as the boat with its terrible occupant, on a current and before the impetus of the wind, went bobbing past us, and we struck out for the ship, anxious only to see the last of that ghastly boatman."

Clear, warm, and sunny was the weather as the Amethyst ploughed the tropical seas, when Derval saw in the sky the wonderful constellation of six stars named the Southern Cross, which, though coeval with the universe, was first seen with awe by Christian eyes in the fifteenth century, when Cada Mosto, the Venetian, steered his caravel into the Southern Sea.

One fine day Captain Talbot and his three mates were amusing themselves with revolver practice, at a quart-bottle slung from the foreyard-arm, at which they fired from the quarterdeck, but as the motion of the ship was considerable, as she was then going before the wind with all her yards square, and consequently rolled heavily, such was the oscillation of the object, that after some twenty shots it was only broken by Mr. Paul Bitts, who was greatly inflated by the circumstance and the applause it won him and now ensued thereon, an event somewhat illustrative of the strange doctrine of chances—a thing happening by luck, without expectation or prevision.

As Mr. Bitts was dropping fresh cartridges into the chambers of his breech-loading pistol, with the air of a candle-snuffer at twenty paces, his eyes fell on Derval, who, with the other two middies, was regarding him with some interest, if it was not a very warm one.

"Well, young fellow, do you think you could do that—eh?" he asked with a grin.

"Give him a shot," said Captain Talbot, interrupting some abusive epithet; "take my revolver, Hampton. Grummet, run up another bottle to the yard-arm."

"It will save trouble to let him have a shy at the neck—that is enough for such a marksman!" sneered Paul Bitts.

Derval nervously took the Captain's pistol, for he had never had such an implement in his hand before, raised it, aimed, and while thinking the report was all he would make, fired, and, by a most astounding "fluke," smashed the bottle-neck which was yet dangling from the yard-arm!

A burst of astonishment escaped the crew, while the Captain, who evidently knew how it all came to pass, laughed heartily; but not so Mr. Bitts, who felt in this a fresh cause for hatred, and retired aft, sulkily muttering:

"A sly young beggar, who, I believe, knows more of the world, the flesh, and the devil, than the ship's crew all told, for all that his face and manner are so devilish meek!"

But resting on the reputation so suddenly won, Derval did not, for a long time, indulge in any more pistol-shooting.

Now came the time for crossing the line, and from all he had heard of the rough jokes perpetrated on that occasion Derval had a genuine terror of Mr. Bitts, for the absurdities practised often became insulting and cruel. But such is the improvement now wrought among seamen by the spread of education and general progress of refinement, that these coarse sports are decidedly on the wane, and Captain Talbot contenting himself with ordering extra grog to all to drink the health of Neptune, the equator was passed quietly, and many schemes formed secretly by Mr. Paul Bitts for shaving and sousing in slush both Derval and his chum Tom Titford, ended in nothing, to the great relief of both.

After the Amethyst was some days' sail beyond the equator and running on a wind, with her topsails set and starboard tacks on board, the weather became peculiarly gloomy and squally, and one day, when it was Derval's watch with Mr. Tyeblock, the Captain, who had been studying the barometer below, came suddenly on deck, and looked aloft and at the sky.

Joe Grummet and other old seamen were now seen looking occasionally to windward, for they knew well by the dark clouds that were coming banking up from the horizon that they had foul weather to prepare for; but it came slowly. Two or three days of sunless gloom followed, during which no sights could be had or reckoning properly worked, and the doubts concerning the latter were fated to have a perilous solution.

Night was closing amid mist and obscurity, the sea was rising, the vessel rolling heavily, and all was in considerable confusion in the cabin below, where everything that was not made fast fetched away, and went crashing to leeward and got jammed or broken.

Coiled on a chest in the companion-way, Derval had been courting a little sleep, when he heard the hoarse voice of Joe Grummet shouting:

Thick and fast the rain-drops were now pouring on the deck, gorging the foaming scuppers, rushing as they only do in the tropics; and rolling from side to side, as if she would dip her yard-arms in the mountain-like billows that ran towards her, the Amethyst, with her courses set and topsails nearly close-reefed, was ploughing before the wind through a black and midnight sea. Loud and repeated orders rang confusedly on the rising blast, together with the trampling of feet, the creaking of blocks, the bellowing of the wind through the strained rigging, where loose ropes were flying wildly about, and there were the roar, the wash, and fierce incessant gurgle of the sea as it burst over the bows and boiled away beneath the counter.

"Close-reef topsails!" cried Captain Talbot, while the storm deepened; and with others, Derval and Tom Titford, under Mr. Bitts, ascended, to do their part of this task, by the fore-rigging, often as they went embracing the shrouds with their legs and arms; and the ill-conditioned third mate was heard using terrible language as he urged them all up to the cross-trees and out upon the yard.

"Out you go to the starboard ear-ring, you wretched little biscuit-nibbler, and don't look as if you had joined the Shakers!" he exclaimed, administering a blow with his clenched hand to poor Tom Tit, who turned his little white face upbraidingly towards him, and then lay out manfully on one yard-arm as Derval did on the other, and aided by the strong hands of the seamen at the centre of the spar, got the heavy wet canvas tied hard and fast with the reef points.

Poor Tom "lay out" on the yard with a will, above the black and seething deep, with all his strength; but in the fury of the wind it began to fail him, or it might be that in the force of the gale he lost his presence of mind, and when the men began their descent he remained, with his hands convulsively clutching the yard, and his feet on the slippery foot-ropes or in the stirrups thereof.

"Now then, stupid! are you going to sleep there?" cried Paul Bitts from the crosstrees, "or must I rouse you with my colt, and make you dance the binnacle hornpipe when I get you on deck?"

"Mother—oh, Mother!" the boy was heard to shriek, his small voice sounding weirdly on the skirt of the howling blast, as he slipped from the yard-arm, and vanishing into the wrack and obscurity below, was seen no more!

Derval felt his blood grow cold; and as one in a dreadful dream, from which he must waken to find Tom Tit by his side, he made his way, he knew not how, but mechanically, to the deck, where the tragedy was reported to the Captain. But there was not a moment now, either for comment, explanation, or regret, for there came aft a terrible cry from the look-out man at the bowsprit.

"In the name of heaven, how came breakers here!" exclaimed Captain Talbot, for a moment forgetting that for many hours past he had been unable to verify his whereabouts. Proceeding forward in haste, the Captain went out to the cap of the bowsprit. In peril he was a man whose nerves became as iron! Steadily he looked around him, but even his cheek blanched then, though none could perceive it.

Through the black gloom, a blacker barrier of mighty rocks was rising right ahead. Boiling fiercely before a northern blast, the sea was breaking on them wildly, dashing its white spray as high as the maintop, and, as the waves receded, the sable fronts of two particular or insulated masses were plainly visible from time to time, with a mass of froth between them; while accelerated by the wind astern, and no doubt by the indraught in the reef, for a reef it appeared to be, the stately Amethyst seemed to increase her speed from ten knots an hour to something far beyond it.

Clinging to a belaying pin on the port side, as the ship rushed on, there came into Derval's uninitiated mind only the fear of immediate death, with a quickened circulation of the blood and a painful tightness of the chest, and in this emotion men far his seniors shared, at that dreadful crisis; but now the voice of Captain Talbot, who had obtained his trumpet, was heard even amid the roar of the breakers, and a clear and manly voice it was.

In that tropical region the water and spray that swept over the ship were warm nearly as new milk, and by this time the poultry and pigs were all washed overboard and drowned.

"There is an opening in the reef, three points before the port beam," said the Captain; "Mr. Tyeblock, take the wheel and steer for it—three points, remember! There may be water there to carry us through. Hands to the braces; brace the yards, forward!"

Then, as the Amethyst sprang to the blast, the waves boiled over her lee gunnel; but finding a terrible strain aloft,—

"Let fly the topsail sheets!" was now the order of Captain Talbot, and then, as the canvas flew to ribbons that cracked like thunder in the gale, the topmasts were saved.

"Hard up with the helm now, Tyeblock! Hands to the braces and square away the yards."

Headlong careered the ship on her way through the narrow passage which Talbot's eye had detected, and splendidly was she steered in the skilful hands of Tyeblock, who exultingly declared that he could turn her on a sixpence.

"The reef is astern, we are safe, thanks be to God!" exclaimed Captain Talbot, whose emotion of prayerful gratitude was shared by all who heard him.

Deep water ahead, was reported by Girtline, the second mate, who was in the bows with the hand-lead.

"Heave to, till dawn comes!" was now the Captain's order, and the ship was accordingly hove to, about two miles to leeward of the reef, and a keen look-out was kept in every direction for breakers.

On sounding the well, Joe Grummet reported that the ship had sprung a leak, and the water was rising at the rate of two feet an hour; so the chain pumps were rigged, and all idlers—such as the carpenter, cook, steward, and others—took the first spell thereat, to be immediately followed by a fresh gang, so that the leak made little way.

The gale abated as day came in with its tropical rapidity and splendour, and Captain Talbot knew instantly that the reef they had so nearly perished on, was one of those between the numerous rocky and barren little islets that stud the whole coast around the island of Fernando-de-Noronha, which lies about seventy leagues north-east from the Cabo de San Roque, on the coast of Brazil.

In the full glory of the morning sun, towered up the Campanario (or Belfry), a steep mountain of the isle, a thousand feet in height, and of a form so remarkable, that on one side the upper portion overhangs its base. The Portuguese flag was hoisted on Fort Remedios, as the Amethyst passed on the north-west side of the island, with a soft and pleasant breeze, while the hands were aloft, bending a new set of topsails, or attending to the leak and other damages of the eventful night.

While sent aloft, for practice, to assist in bending on the new foretopsail, Derval had not much time either for reflection on the catastrophe of the past sleepless night, or observing the wonderful multitude of turtle's eggs which cover all the rocks and shore thereabout between the months of December and April; but when excitement and work were over, he, like others, had leisure to think over poor Tom Titford, whose maritime career, to which he had looked forward in all the delight of youth, was thus ended ere it had well begun.

His empty berth and vacant place at table, his uniform cap hanging on a peg, and his little trunk with all his worldly goods remained; but his soft smiling face and his earnest honest eyes were gone from human gaze for ever, and Derval and Hal Bowline were very sad on the subject of his sudden loss, which made them somehow closer friends, while each felt that the victim might have been himself or the other; and both instinctively clenched their fists when they heard Bitts say, with a silent laugh, that "even if the body were found, there would be no coroner's inquest in the latitude of Pedro-de-Noronha, and that young lubbers when they went aloft should remember the maxim of 'one hand for myself, and one for my owners.'"

So the middy, of whose death the passing ship brought tidings, was not Derval Hampton, but little Tom Titford. Had it been himself, he thought, who would have sorrowed for him? and it cannot seem strange that the image of old Patty Fripp occurred to the lonely lad even before that of his own father.

For days after the storm, he felt his legs and arms stiff from the effect of bruises and abrasions sustained in clasping the shrouds when going aloft to reef the topsails.

Days of light breezes and bright weather followed each other now, and on a fine morning in March the cheerful cry of "Land in sight," passed from mouth to mouth on board the Amethyst. To Derval's eye, the faint blue mass that rose west-north-west about four miles distant, seemed an island; but to Talbot and many of the crew it was familiar as Cape Frio, a promontory on the Brazilian coast, sixty-four miles eastward of their destination; and with all that interest and curiosity excited by the appearance of a new and strange country, he watched the oval-shaped mass of granite cliff that terminates a long range of mountains, and all its features were distinct by five in the evening, when it was only seven miles distant.

With midnight came squally weather, with thunder and red flashes of lightning, against which, "instant seen and instant lost," rose the black outline of the heavy waves, serrated like the teeth of a saw; but when day came in, the Amethyst was standing in for the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, under full sail, with a steady breeze from the sea. Long ere this, the watch on deck had been busy getting the cables out of the tier, laying them in French-fake on the deck, a peculiar method adopted to let them run out freely, precluding all danger of the links getting foul. They were then bent to the anchors, which were hoisted over the bows and hung by the ring ready for use.

The flag of the Royal Naval Reserve was now run up in a round ball to the gaff, where it was shaken loose, and then "the blessed bit o' bunting," as Joe Grummet admiringly and affectionately called it, floated gallantly on the breeze.

By noon Captain Talbot gave the order to shorten sail; the courses were hauled up; the warm breeze swept through the open rigging; the anchor was let go—the cable swept with a roar through the hawse-hole, and the ship rode at her moorings, in eight fathoms water, while the hands and apprentices went aloft to furl everything fore and aft.

Around was now the noble bay of Rio, studded by fully eighty islets, with the city and all its shipping in the foreground; and the high range of beautiful mountains, clothed with wood to their summits, called the Corcovado, that bound its western plain, in the background. Along the beach lies the main street, called the Rua Dirieta, from which all the others branch off and form a city of palaces, for such it is; and high over all its edifices, conspicuous on a hill that juts into the sea between it and the Praya de Flamingo, towers Nossa Senhora da Gloria, the greatest of the sixty churches in Rio, where eternal spring and summer reign together.

But we do not mean to "do Guide Book," and dwell on the beauties and wonders of Rio de Janeiro; neither do we mean to linger on the debût of Derval or his probationary life as a sailor, for we have much to relate of his future career. Suffice it now, that "bulk" was soon broken on board the Amethyst; the cargo started and sent ashore, to be replaced by another for Van Dieman's Land, and by the labour of slaves, who in Rio are made veritable beasts of burden, and are to be seen with iron collars about their necks, and often with masks of tin, that conceal the lower portion of their faces and are secured behind by a common padlock; and the last day of March saw the Amethyst standing out of the bay, with a land breeze, under a press of sail, once more to plough the world of waters.

Ere the vessel sailed Derval felt, but for the last time, the colt of Mr. Paul Bitts, who called him "the lazy scum of a fish-pond," and who delighted in malignant cruelty and the torture of his own species, and highly resented the circumstance of the lad being a little absorbed in a letter from home, brought by the mail steamer. His father had heard of his safety, through the owners, Curry & Co., and no doubt the fright he had received caused him to reproach himself, for a time—but a time only—with his coldness and neglect of his firstborn, and lack of that affection which latterly he had denied him and bestowed entirely on the other son; and poor Derval's honest heart grew very, very full indeed, as he read and re-read the lines his father's hand had traced, and which he valued more than the twenty-pound note he enclosed to him, and which could not be of much use while on the waters of the Southern Sea.

Fortunately he had been well grounded in Euclid and algebra, by the kind tutelage of Mr. Asperges Laud, to whom his thoughts ever went home gratefully; and in the knowledge of his profession he made rapid progress under Joe Grummet, a tutor of a very different kind; while his mind, as active as his body, required and delighted in scientific research. He became a prime favourite with the seamen, knew and understood their characters, and was all the more in favour that he quickly knew the whole parts of the ship from stem to stern, and could act by turns cooper and carpenter, sailmaker and ropemaker, so clever was his head and so skilful was he with his hands.

CHAPTER V.

AFTER LONG YEARS.

Four years have elapsed since we last saw Derval, and since then the Amethyst had been freighted to so many parts of the world, that he had seen a vast deal of it and won much skill and experience, but had never once been near his home.

From the hour Greville Hampton began to speculate, it seemed as if everything he touched turned to gold. He had bought and sold, sold and bought, and speculated, till he was becoming one of the richest men in Devonshire or Cornwall, and all this growing good fortune he somehow insensibly connected with his second marriage, and poor Mary was as completely forgotten, apparently, as if she had never existed.

His success was great; it astonished himself and others too; and, after the fashion of the toadying world, he was greatly looked up by many who, at one period of his life, knew him not.

The last of the humble cob-cottages had disappeared, and with it the last of the aboriginal inhabitants of Finglecombe; the villa residences of Bayview Terrace were in great request, and a handsome sea-wall, called the Grand Promenade, occupied the shingly shore on which the ocean had freely rolled for ages.

Finglecombe was now inhabited by a circle of families who dined and tea-ed each other, and, moreover, closely criticised each other, for "pig-iron always looks down on tenpenny nails"; who attended church and, frequently uninvited, each others' marriages, baptisms, and funerals; and more than all, a great hotel was built, with a gin-palace as an adjunct, and the once secluded Combe began rapidly to approach the dignity of a cockney watering-place, in every way, however, a source of wealth to its lord and proprietor.

The thatched parsonage and the little church of the middle ages alone remained unchanged, though Mr. Asperges Laud was more silver-haired, and he had, under the influences of surrounding gentility, ventured to light two candles on his altar.

The wayside booth, dignified by the name of a railway station, that boasted of but one porter, who often travelled to and fro per train, and acted as deputy stoker, &c., had now been replaced by one of imposing aspect, with a spacious platform, a staff of officials, and an airy young damsel to superintend its buffet.

Mrs. Hampton's carriage was one of the features of the new settlement, but though to the poor of Finglecombe, or its vicinity rather, she was, as ever, no friend, her name appeared often in print as a patron of local charities.

Of all these wonderful changes the toiler of the sea knew little, if anything at all; his half-brother Rookleigh was now a pampered and very precocious boy of eleven, and already, under his mother's influence, he was beginning to be infected by an idea that if Derval—the fact of whose existence was referred to occasionally—ever did return, he could not but view him, elder though he was, as an interloper and intruder where he was not wanted, all the more as the family lawyers had begun to foster her pride by some confident surmises concerning ousting the Lord Oakhampton out of his title in her husband's favour.

The perils of the sea, the chances of climate, and many chances militated (thought Mrs. Hampton) against Derval ever returning again; and she comfortably, with a view to her pet's interests, made up her mind that too probably he never would return, and that all his father had made and was yet amassing, would eventually go to her own and only son Rookleigh.

Towards the end of the fourth year of her absence from home, the Amethyst was running from Rio de Janeiro to Bermuda; and time had seen some changes in her. Many of the old hands had shipped on board other craft; but Captain Talbot still held his post, as did Joe Grummet and Mr. Gritline; but Harry Bowline had been promoted as second mate, and Derval, now past his eighteenth year, was third, vice the ill-conditioned Mr. Paul Bitts, who had come to an untimely end, when Derval nearly lost his life in trying to save him.

While in the act of endeavouring to stimulate with his inevitable colt an apprentice boy, who was at work greasing the sheaves of the starboard catblock, Bitts fell overboard. The ship, which was going before an easy breeze, was promptly thrown in the wind, and, aware that Bitts was unable to swim, Derval, without a thought or consideration, threw off his jacket, and plunged in to save or assist him.

This occurred within a day's sail of Tristan d'Acunha. The height from which he leaped—the top-gallant forecastle, as the short upper deck forward is named—made him go very deep into the water, and when he came to the surface a cry of horror escaped him, for he could see only one of the man's hands above it, while all around was crimsoned with blood!

In a moment he knew that a shark had taken him, and every instant he expected the same fate. The breath seemed to leave his body at the terrible anticipation, and thus he sank more than once, nearly paralysed.

Promptly though the mainyard had been backed, the Amethyst had forged some distance ahead, and Derval gave himself up for lost, though he heard the clamour on board each time he rose to the surface, and the rattle of the fall-tackles, with the splash, as a quarter-boat was being lowered and shoved off towards him.

As if to add to his horror he saw—or thought he saw—the black dorsal fin of the monster standing steadily above the water about twenty yards distant.

"God help me! God spare me!" escaped his lips, for death in an awful shape seemed terribly close indeed, and every action of his past life seemed to come in memory vividly before him, compressed into the narrow space of a minute or two.

Half senseless with actual fear, he was dragged into the boat, and he was barely on board the ship when no less than four sharks, all seeking for prey, were seen under the starboard counter, where they continued to follow her for some time after the yard-heads were filled, and she once more stood on her course.

"You are a brave, good lad!" said he, "and had you saved the poor fellow, should have had such a medal as I now wear. I have twice saved human life at sea, but never in the face of peril such as this. Poor Paul Bitts! he was never a friend of yours, certainly; but he has come to a most awful end, with all his imperfections on his head."

After a little time the Captain decided that on getting a certificate he should be his successor.

For many a day and night after this did Derval shudder at the thought of what he had gone through, and recal the acute agony of his emotions in the water; but other events came to pass, and gradually the horror lessened in his memory.

Now past eighteen years of age, Derval's face was decidedly of a handsome cast, inherited, like his well-knit figure, from his father, and he had the soft, gentle, and earnest eyes of his mother—the tender Mary, whose grave was under the shadow of Finglecombe Church, but on which no loving hand laid a chaplet now. He was intelligent and experienced far beyond his years, and had, in the opinion of Joe Grummet, only one defect as a sailor—a fancy for sedulously cultivating on his upper lip something that Joe stigmatised as "fluff"; but it was certainly adding fast to the character of a very fine cast of features.

So it was as third mate, and as such keeping a bright look-out ahead, while assisting Mr. Girtline to conn, or direct the steerage, that, on a brilliant afternoon in autumn—though there is no autumn in those isles of eternal summer—Derval saw the Bermudas, to all appearance like a range of low sterile hills, at the base of which the ocean is dashed into a line of white foam, rise gradually on the lee-bow, while cheerily the afternoon watch were singing, as they got the "ground tackle" ready and bent to the anchors.

These isles are so numerous that there is said to be one for every day in the year—some writers say four hundred and more—and as the ship neared them the short greensward that covers them, their dark cedar-trees, and pretty, but low, white dwellings, rapidly became visible, together with the masts of several vessels of war, as the group serves as a summer station for some of our American squadron, and also as a rendezvous for the great steamers of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company; but the whole of these isles, which are formed by the zoophyte, or coral worm, are so completely hemmed in by perilous rocks, that it is only with extreme caution that a vessel of even ten tons burden can enter the roads. The water, however, is so beautifully clear and pellucid that the pilots can make their way with considerable facility between the coral reefs.

There is but one channel for large vessels into the principal anchorage, and through that the Amethyst was guided by a native pilot at flood-tide, for at low-water the whole of the rocks are nearly dry.

After the cargo was out, there was some delay about getting a freight for England, as the main dependence of the colony is upon the naval and military establishments that have been formed there, and on the shipyards and saltworks; and now there had been a falling off in onions and whale oil, which are among the chief exports of the "vexed Bermoothes."

To this delay was added another. The Amethyst had sprung her maintopmast in a sudden gale of wind, one of those "Bermuda squalls" so dreaded by all navigators of those seas, and she had suffered other damages, which compelled the Captain to place her in the hands of the dockyard people; thus, as there was plenty of leave-going, Derval was frequently on shore, and on one of these occasions a rather curious adventure befel him.

Joe Grummet had prepared Derval for seeing much that was novel in these Summer Isles, as they were not inaptly named from Sir George Summers, who was driven there in a storm in 1609, and whose heart is buried in one of them; but Joe could not prevail upon him to accept the genuine old nautical idea that the land and the coral crust composing it is so thin as to be easily broken, even by a stroke of the foot. But so many wrecks took place among their shoals, that the Spaniards of old named them Devils Isles, and Joe knew by tradition the strange story regarding a mighty multitude of rats, that came, no one knew from where, and, multiplying exceedingly, swarmed over all the isles, and ate up the corn, the fruit, and all green things for a period of five years, after which came a cloud of ravens out of the sky and destroyed them in turn, since when no raven has been seen in the Bermudas.*

Derval saw whales trapped and harpooned among the coral reefs, while the very sharks contended with the natives for the blubber in the warm shoal water, and more than once he had climbed Tibbs Hill, the highest elevation there, only a hundred and eighty feet in altitude; and he had seen the gangs of natives toiling at the cisterns in which rain-water is preserved for the shipping, for there are few wells and no fresh-water streams, but the dew-point ranges very high indeed.

One day, in his rambles, Derval came upon a little spot of remarkable beauty near the sea-shore. Many caverns, the roofs of which sparkle with brilliant spars, and having fantastic stalactites formed of the dripping water—genuine coral caverns, beautiful as the transformation scene in a pantomime, with their reflected lights, colours, shadows and uncertainties—are to be found in many parts of these isles, having in them pools of cool water delicious to bathe in.

Through one of these from the sea-shore—one in which it is said the poet Waller wrote a portion of his poetical description of Bermuda, when in exile there he penned his insipid "Battle of the Summer Isles,"—Derval wandered to where its inner end opened on a beautiful little dell, an amphitheatre of coral cliffs and verdure, at the bottom of which lay a salt pool filled always by the sea at each flood tide, and therein he was certain that more than once he saw a stealthy shark gliding.

Bordering it were the palmetto palms, with luscious fruit like plums in colour, and those enormous leaves, each of which are of such amazing length that they are used to roof houses; the oak, the ash, bananas, orange, lemon, mahogany and caoutchouc trees all growing in luxuriance together, and the coffee plant flourishing wild under the lofty cedars.

Delighted with the beauty of the cool and shady place, Derval stretched himself at length upon the velvet sward, and proceeded to enjoy a cigar, while watching, high above his head, the struggles of a small bird which was caught in the web of a spider—one of those spiders there so remarkable for their size and a peculiar kind of beauty, and the webs of which are, in colour and substance, a veritable raw silk.

His attention was next attracted by the appearance of a lady and a young girl walking slowly on the summit of a coral rock, or cliff, that overhung the salt pool. The lady, who carried a large white sunshade, was proceeding leisurely, reading a book, while the girl went hither and thither gathering flowers.

"Take care, Clara darling," he heard the lady say; "keep back from the edge of the rocks."

"Do let me gather these flowers," was the entreating reply, "and I shall make you such a lovely bouquet."

"Oh, I shall be so very careful," replied the sweet little English voice, which sounded so pleasantly to the ears of the listener,—but a shriek closed the sentence.

When venturing to the verge to gather the coveted trifle, the girl had fallen over, and vanished from the eyes of her horrified companion—her governess, as she eventually proved to be—who fled, uttering wild and breathless cries for assistance, for she knew that the little one had fallen from a height of nearly a hundred feet.

At the same moment a half stifled cry escaped Derval, who, with the keenest alarm, saw that in her descent a stump of laurel projecting from the cliff had caught a portion of the girl's dress, a species of muslin scarf that went round her waist, and there she hung, blind with terror and silent in her agony, some fifty feet above the rocks that shelved steeply downward to the pool or salt-water tarn.

"Keep still, girl, keep still!" cried Derval, who saw that already her frail protection was beginning to rend, while he instantly commenced to climb towards her, and as only a British sailor can climb, finding footing and things to grasp where a landsman would have found none.

At last he reached her, but not without incredible difficulty and great peril, at the very instant when the delicate scarf had nearly parted, and she must have perished miserably on the rocks or in the water below. To make assurance doubly sure, he grasped one part of her dress with his teeth, another with his left hand, winding it at the same time round his arm, and holding her thus, while she clutched his neck, he began his descent to the base, breathless and silent; for to ascend, though the way was shorter, proved impossible, as the rock over which she had fallen was an impending one.

The base at last was reached, when Derval could scarcely respire, and was trembling in every fibre with exertion and anxiety; and intent on conveying his half-senseless charge to her friends without delay, as he knew that their grief would be intolerable, he deemed his quickest way would be through the cavern to the sea-shore; but he had not proceeded, far, when he found the flood tide was already coming in so fast, that to pass or repass was impossible, and he could but clamber up into a recess, and place her there on a dry shelf of the coral formation till the tide ebbed again; and in that strange shelter there was a reflected light from the rising water at both ends, that while it produced some very curious and picturesque effects of colour and shadow, enabled them to see distinctly around them.

"Thank you, thank you, sir,—oh so much, so very much!" sobbed the child (she did not seem to be yet in her teens), and after the terror and prolonged shock she had undergone, she wept bitterly and hysterically, with her beautiful little head on Derval's shoulder, while his arm yet encircled her; but his voice and manner were so kind, tender, and reassuring, that after a time she became soothed, and "disengaging" herself from him, as the novels have it, so shyly, so prettily, and like a little lady, said:

"Oh, what a fright my poor papa will be in, when Miss Sampler tells him of my fall! How will he ever be able to thank you, sir!"

"Thank Heaven, thank Heaven—not me—that you are safe," said Derval, earnestly. "Poor child! what a fate you have escaped!" he added with a shudder as he looked at the tender and delicate form, the soft violet eyes, the rich brown hair, and mignonne face, flushed with excitement, and thought of what might have been, had he not been there—had he been too late, or failed in his courageous attempt!

He gazed on her with all the interest the great service he had rendered, her great beauty, and her present helplessness all seemed to excite, and he said, half to himself:

"Had you fallen to the base, you had been instantly killed; if into the water, the sharks——" and shudderingly he thought of his recent episode near Tristan d'Acunha. "I shall ever bless heaven I was so near you, child!"

"I am not a child," said she with a pout on her rosy lip, as her colour came back; "I am twelve years old."

"I am a sailor, and live in my ship. She is now in the dockyard. And you—you must, of course, live near this?" he added, seeing that she was without a head-dress.

"Yes; in the large white house that has great cannons in front of it, and where a pretty flag is always flying till sunset, when boom! goes one of the cannon, and down it comes."

"Oh no; it is papa's house. Oh, how papa will thank you for saving his little girl—he loves me so much!" Her voice trembled and her soft eyes filled as she said this, and added prettily, "I am the only one he has now; all my sisters are buried beside mamma."

Derval laughed, as the little "situation" began to have "its charm," in one way, but not quite in another. In their hiding-place, the whole floor of which was now a stretch of deep and shining water, the sound of excited voices reached them, as from a distance, from time to time—the voices of those who, no doubt, were in search of the lost one, and with whom Derval could not communicate, for there—either brought in by the flood-tide from the sea, or by it out of the pool—he could see, at no great distance from the perch occupied by himself and his shrinking companion, the back or dorsal fin of a great shark above the surface of the smooth dead water, while the whole of its awful length was visible beneath it.

The monster swam slowly to and fro—Derval, sailor-like, never doubting but it heard their voices, and was only waiting if opportunity served, or the water rose, to make a mouthful of each of them; but he felt safe and secure, as they were above high-water mark, as he could see by the colour of the coral walls; and when, ultimately, the tide did begin to ebb, Jack Shark passed out with it, and eventually disappeared.

Before this came to pass, Derval and the rescued had conversed on many things; and he found that, young though she was, there was a sweet, womanly sympathy about her, that led him, unconsciously, to tell her much concerning himself and his affairs, and how and why he left pleasant Devonshire to become a sailor; how quickly he had risen to be third mate of a handsome ship, what a fine fellow Captain Talbot was, and so forth, and as the little lady listened to him, her soft eyes filled with interest and wonder.

At last the ebbing tide left the floor of the cavern, and the shingly beach without it, completely dry, when the red sinking sun was nearly level with the sea, all crimsoned now; and giving his hand to his pretty namesake, he led her forth, and she at once indicated a path that led from the shore to her home. Ascending this, and passing through a grove of Palmetto palms, they found themselves on the plateau of the rock from whence she had fallen, and the appearance of the place made her shrink to Derval's side, while his arm went kindly and instinctively round her. But they had not proceeded far when they came upon a group of excited searchers, perhaps the same whose voices Derval had heard, and among them were officers in undress, soldiers from the garrison, seamen from the ships, planters, clerks, and blacks, their white teeth and eyes gleaming, screaming, hallooing, and all bearing ladders, ropes, poles, drags, and even lanterns, for the darkness was close at hand now.

"Papa, Papa!" suddenly exclaimed the young lady, and snatching her hand from that of Derval, she sprang like an antelope into the open arms of a careworn and haggard, but tall and distinguished-looking man, who had a decided air of good birth and breeding his planter-like costume, of a broad straw hat and white linen coat and trousers, failed to mask; and in his close embrace she sobbed hysterically.

"Safe, Clara—safe, my child!" said he in a broken voice; and then there was a minute's pause, during which the haggard lines grief and alarm had suddenly drawn on his face began already to fade out. "Oh, my darling, my darling!—what miracle is this?"

"But how is she harmless after such a fall?" asked her father shudderingly of those around him, and as if unable to believe the evidence of his own senses, while the crowd closed round.

Then the father of the rescued girl wept as he pressed and retained Derval's hands in his; but failed to find language in which to thank him coherently. After a time he asked:

"To the ship Amethyst, of London, carrying the flag of the Royal Naval Reserve," replied Derval, touching his cap, for somehow the bearing of him he addressed bore the impress of one in no small authority.

The latter drew a handsome ring from his finger, and presented it to Derval, saying:

"I beg that you will accept of this, and wear it in remembrance of one whose gratitude you have won for life."

The stone was a magnificent onyx, and Derval saw, with a start, how that it bore a shield with three choughs, and the motto Clarior e Tenebris. He bowed, and placed it on his finger, saying:

"This," said an officer (an aide-de-camp apparently), who stood near, "is Lord Oakhampton, Governor of the Bermudas."

His remote kinsman and his father's enemy! Confusion, astonishment, and then something of gratification filled the heart of Derval by turns, and all together.

"I am deeply grateful to you, young gentleman, for the great service you have rendered to me; but may I, in turn, ask your name, that I may never forget it?"

Lord Oakhampton coloured, and a cloud came over his decidedly handsome face, as he was well aware who Greville Hampton was, and what his pretensions were; and now, with a little more of hauteur that hospitality in his manner, he said:

"Dine with me at Government House to-morrow; eight is the hour, and I shall be glad to see you then."

Derval muttered his thanks, and lifted his cap, but ere he retired Lord Oakhampton shook his hand, Clara gave him hers confidently and pleasantly, and the interview terminated, for the night had fallen and Derval had to make his way back to the ship.

The episode in all its details gave him much food for thought, as he proceeded slowly homeward. He knew not, till then, that Lord Oakhampton was in the Colonial Service at all; neither did he know that by extravagance the peer had found the salary of Governor of the "vexed Bermoothes," some thousands per annum, a comfortable addition to a shattered income, while his estates were at dry-nurse. Derval knew now, however, that he had done an act demanding a supreme amount of gratitude, from a proud and rather repellent man, who would, perhaps, rather have been indebted therefor to any other person in the world, than the son of Greville Hampton; while, on the other hand, Derval had been taught to view his lordship as his hereditary enemy, the usurper of his father's rights, though why, or how, Derval could not define; and that, more than all, in the days of his father's unexpected penury and obscurity at Finglecombe, he had sedulously withheld all countenance and assistance from him.

"By Jove!" thought he; "sharks, sea-lawyers, the sailor's natural foes, seem to be my friends! One gets me promotion, vice poor Paul Bitts, and I have the honour of saving a peer's daughter from another—my little kinswoman, too. I wonder in what degree she is so—a charming little creature, too!"

His father seemed of late to have taken but little interest in his movements or his success; but perhaps this startling episode might kindle some emotion of revengeful triumph that great good had been rendered for evil done.

Derval duly presented himself at Government House next evening, and was received by Lord Oakhampton with considerable impressment, and by him was presented, as the rescuer of his child from a dreadful peril—all Hamilton now rang with the story, though none knew precisely who the hero was—to a select circle, composed of the heads of departments, civil and military, the Chief Justice, the two puisne judges, and so forth; and as Derval was a gentleman by birth, education, and breeding, all were agreeably impressed by his appearance, for added thereto, he had now that easy and perfectly self-possessed manner which is only to be acquired by intercourse with the world, by travel, and some experience of life; and there were many things combined, which made Derval Hampton, in expression and bearing, older than his years.

Modest and reserved by nature and habit, he was, for a time, rather abashed to find himself somewhat the lion of the evening, and was glad when a little change was made in the current of the conversation, by the appearance of Clara Hampton and her governess with the dessert; and wonderfully bright and brilliant the little lady looked, all trace of yesterday's alarm and shock having passed away; but, though she accorded him her pretty hand very frankly, and with a wonderful smile of pleasure and welcome, she was very shy with him now, as contrasted with the mutual confidences they had exchanged in the cavern, "while Jack Shark was swimming to and fro, keeping a species of blockade upon them," as Derval laughingly said.

After a time she drew close to his side, and with great, yet childlike gracefulness, presented him with a flower from her dress, saying:

"I made this bouquet for you. Papa says no one can make a button-hole—why he calls it so, I don't know—like me."

So Derval gallantly kissed the little bouquet, and placed it in the lapelle of his naval coat.

Ere he left, Lord Oakhampton, thawing considerably in his somewhat measured manner—a manner born, as Derval knew, of circumstances far remote from Bermuda—assured him, that if he could do aught for him in anyway, to command his services. Very pleasant all this, thought Derval, who supposed he had no true friends in the world save his shipmates on board the Amethyst; but remembering his father's feud and claims, he returned thanks very reservedly and took his departure.

For certain reasons, chiefly family considerations, and his own dislike of all fuss and speculation, Derval said nothing of his adventure, or his visit to Government House, on board the Amethyst, which lay at Ireland Island, the chief place there for shipping; thus, great was the astonishment of his "skipper," when an officer in undress military uniform arrived from Hamilton, the chief town of these isles, with an official letter addressed to "Captain Talbot, H.M. Royal Naval Reserve."

"Thanks, very much—no," replied the other, and stepped on shore, while the surprise of Talbot increased very much when he read the letter twice over, and then starting up, ordered Joe Grummet to "pipe all hands," and bring them aft, "and run the ensign up to the gaff."

"Hats off, my lads," said the Captain, his face glowing with pleasure; "for this comes from the Queen's representative."

The letter, of which we only give an outline, proved to be from "His Excellency Lord Oakhampton, K.C.B., Governor of the Bermuda Islands, &c. &c.," warmly recommending Mr. Derval Hampton to his captain and owners for his gallant conduct, which was fully detailed therein; and congratulating Captain Talbot on having such an officer under him in the Amethyst.

Whereupon Joe Grummet took off his old battered tarpauline hat, from a head that was getting grey now, and led the van of three stentorian cheers for the third mate; and Derval heard them, as he had heard the letter, with cheeks flushing scarlet, like those of a school-girl, and a wildly beating heart.

And in honour of the whole event, which Hal Bowline duly engrossed on the ship's log, Joe Grummet's whistle was next heard, summoning all hands to "splice the main-brace," an invitation never unattended to by sailors, as they are ever ready for a glass of grog.

The ship was now getting ready for sea, the hatches were being battened down, the boats hoisted in, the studding-sail gear rove, the royal yards crossed, &c., and Derval was compelled to spend much of his time on board of the Amethyst; and now came the last day he could pass, perhaps, on shore.

Unconsciously he wandered to the little dell of the palmetto and other trees, the coral cliff and the salt pool, all of which impressed him so deeply as the scene of a startling adventure. A fragment of Clara's muslin dress yet fluttered from the laurel stump by which her fall had been arrested, either on the rocks below or into the pool, where sharks were as usual swimming whenever the flood tide floated them in; and as Derval surveyed the cliff up which he had clambered to her assistance, now, when he had not the impetus of excitement, he thought himself a very clever fellow, but doubted whether he could achieve the same feat again.

Something glittering at the foot of the cliff caught his eye. It was a locket of gold, the size of a florin, with the name Clara in pearls on one side—an ornament doubtless lost by Miss Hampton on the day in question, and he speedily possessed himself of it. Opening it, he found that it was empty, but prepared at once to restore it, and do what the rules of society required, to leave with it a farewell card at Government House.

On going thither he was informed that Lord Oakhampton had gone to open the Assembly of Representatives (consisting of thirty-six in number, four of whom are elected by each parish), so he inquired if he could see Miss Clara Hampton.

The valets, who knew the service he had rendered her, ushered him at once into the drawing-room, where he found her, with all her rich brown hair loose for coolness, and fanning herself with a large circular fan, composed of the snow-white feathers of some rare tropical bird, and intently conning some task set her by Miss Sampler.

"I am so sorry he is from home," she replied, as she gave him her hand, and with more self-possession than she might have had, if a few years older, invited him at once to be seated. The soft mignonne face seemed to Derval's eyes more beautiful than ever in its childlike purity, and her violet eyes with their long lashes were full of a bright and earnest expression.

"This, of course, is yours; I found it to-day at the place where—where—I first had the pleasure of meeting you," said he, seeing that she shivered and half closed her eyes.

"Oh, do not speak of that place!" she exclaimed, lifting up her hands; "I shall never, never forget you or it either."

"Do not imagine I shall think of you in that way," she said very earnestly; "and as for the locket—will you accept it—will you permit me to give it to you? Pray do. Papa will be so pleased!"

And springing to his side, the engaging creature, with rapid and deft little fingers, attached it to his watch-chain, exclaiming gleefully:

"Thanks, my dear Miss Clara," said Derval, looking almost tenderly into her bright upturned face; "but there is something that would make it look prettier and enhance its value to me."

"Oh—is that all!" she exclaimed, and with the scissors that lay near her she snipped off a tress and coiled it into the locket, laughing merrily the while. "You will come and see Papa again to-morrow, and let him thank you for me again," said she, interrupting Derval's thanks, and seeing that he had risen from his chair.

"For me there is no to-morrow, of leave at least—we must sail ere the tide ebbs, and make a good offing by sunset. And now," he added, yet lingeringly, "I must say good-bye."

"Bon voyage, Miss Sampler would say; but a pleasant voyage home to England I wish you with—with all my heart, Mr. Hampton," she said, as her smile died away, for recalling the episode which made them acquainted, the young girl's heart grew very full, and her beautiful eyes too.

"Will you give me one kiss ere I go?" said Derval, considering she was but a child he addressed.

"Oh yes!" was the frank response, as she innocently held up her mouth, and the memory of the kiss given by those sweet rosebud-like lips, haunted Derval pleasantly for many a month to come, when many a league of ocean lay between him and the Summer Isles.

Next day saw the Amethyst in the pilot's hands, working out of the tortuous channel between the reefs, her yards being braced up sharp, and her tacks being carried far aft to port and starboard alternately. As she passed in view of Government House the ports were triced up and she fired nineteen rounds from her brass nine-pounders in honour of Lord Oakhampton, the flag on whose residence was dipped to her three times in farewell.

By that time she was clear of all the rocks; her yards were squared, and with a fair wind she bore away north-eastward into the evening sea, the watery highway to "Old England."

Some two months after this found Derval, after quitting the Amethyst at the West India Dock—ever in his mind associated with the awful day of London fog in which he first saw it—hastening homeward on a few weeks' leave, and having with him, sailor-like, presents for all there: a tiger-skin from the Cape for his father's study; furs of the platypus, soft and grey, from Australia, to make muffs and cuffs for Mrs. Hampton, and a shawl for her too; a shark's skull for Mr. Asperges Laud; a model junk for little Rookleigh; several cosy things for old Patty Fripp; and, moreover, he had shells, horns, idols, queer ornaments, and all the curious omnium gatherum which sailors usually pick up—the gathered spoil of years of wandering and affection.

He disliked to carry the locket where Clara's hands had hung it. A day might come—nay, surely would come—when he might have to discard the gift, lest treasuring a woman's locket, with her name upon it and her hair within it, might alarm some one dearer to him than life, and lead to serious complications, although he had not met her yet—or thought so; thus the locket was consigned to one of his secret repositories.

"Home—home!" he exclaimed to himself, and clapped his hands with glee as the swift express train went tearing on through North Devon, and the vale of Taunton, with its foliaged slopes, Coddon Hill and St. Peter's ancient spire, came in sight; on and on yet, and ere long he should be at Finglecombe!

Breathlessly he stood at the window of the carriage, in his eagerness hailing each successive familiar feature in the view. It was the close of a summer day, and his heart felt full as when he had knelt at his mother's knee to lisp the prayers she taught him. There seemed to be something in the white clouds flecking the blue sky; in the sweet fresh breath of the land breeze, laden with the perfume of the orchards, the green leaves, and the flowers; in the joyous song of the birds; in the pretty farms, in field after field as he saw them, like great green seas of grass, studded with golden buttercups and snow-white daisies; in the groups of children, in the herds of cattle going to the pools to drink; in the voice of the lark soaring aloft; in the familiar peal of the old church bell, like the voice of an early friend: that all spoke to his brimming heart of England and of home!

At last the train went clanking into the station, where porters and passengers were hurrying to and fro, and in their hot haste jostling each other. Could this be Finglecombe? Changes were being effected, and in progress, when he left; but he was by no means prepared for all he saw now. There was no one to receive him on the platform, about which he looked as one in a dream. He arrived, as he had departed, unseen by the eye of a kinsman; and now, for the first time, something of the old chill he had felt so often years ago, fell upon his heart.

A flaring placard, with views of Finglecombe, its terraces, villas, sea-wall, and various projected improvements then caught his eye. It was described as one of the most rising places on the western coast, in a beautiful district, commanding a view of the Bristol Channel; for yachtsmen and canoeists possessing an unrivalled field, and attractive walks and drives for the excursionist or pedestrian; a hotel, telegraph, and railway station, "advantages showing that, as a centre or head-quarters for the tourist, Finglecombe was unrivalled indeed; combining, as it did, cheapness of transit, and every means for amusement, with great natural beauty of situation."

Had his father found the lamp of Aladdin to produce all this? thought Derval, as memory went back to the solitary little cottage in the Combe, where a slice of brown bread, a pat of golden butter, and a foaming jug of beer, were once deemed a luxurious supper.

The Hampton family had a carriage now; but Derval, though expected, was left to make his way home, how he chose or how he could.

A porter put his portmanteaus on a truck, and, when desired to follow him to Mr. Hampton's house, received the order with profound respect. He was a stranger, and knew not Derval, whose own mother might not have recognised him now—tall, developed in every muscle, brown and manly in visage, with a dark, if slight, moustache; but amid the "improvements" at the Combe he became so bewildered, that he was fain to "drop astern" and let the porter pilot him.

The handsome entrance gates were reached, and through the sweeping approach, gravelled to perfection, and bordered by shrubbery and flower-beds in all their splendour, Derval proceeded till he found himself, as one in a dream, before the beautiful villa; and as a portion of that dream, too, he found himself face to face with his father, who grasped his hand, yet gazed upon him with an expression in which astonishment at the change in his appearance, too evidently exceeded the emotion of welcome; nor was it till Patty Fripp threw her arms round his neck, weeping over and kissing him, in an obstreperous fashion all her own, that the spell seemed broken, and that tears sprang to his own eyes, as the ready flood-gates of affection opened.

"His mother's darling! his mother's darling and mine!" she continued to exclaim. "Oh, Master Derval, Master Derval, how glad we are to have you safe home again!"

Derval felt a sense of mortification and disappointment. Of all the sudden and wonderful changes around him, he, the wandering sailor, had been kept in utter ignorance! Why was this? As a surprise for him, perhaps, hope suggested.

He found his father grayer, but less lined in visage than he could remember him, for prosperity had smoothed out many a line that Mary had seen growing, to her sorrow. Derval thought his manner nervous, and that he welcomed him, perhaps with affection, but certainly with outward constraint, especially when under the cold and observant eyes of Mrs. Hampton; and when the latter put her large, if white and shapely, hand into that of Derval, there flashed back upon his memory that which he had long forgotten—how viciously she flogged him in the stable with her riding-switch for poodling the cat.

She seemed quite unchanged since then, as young and handsome as ever, for no thought, care, or consideration would ever write a line on her smooth forehead and certainly brilliant face.

"This is your younger brother, Derval," said his father, as Rookleigh came to take his place at the late dinner table. He had his mother's expression of face; her light hazel eyes, only a little more green in tint and shifty in expression, with short white lashes. Derval went to him cordially, though he was no longer like the sleeping baby over whom he had wept on the morning he left home, but a big hulking boy of eleven years old.

Rook, as they named him, eyed his elder brother sullenly, distrustfully, and even malevolently, for already had his mother contrived to implant in his dawning mind, that this tall sailor was a species of natural enemy; but his face lighted up and his manner softened, when this enemy put a handful of silver in his hand, and produced the model junk, some packets of sweetmeats, a jack-knife, shells, and many knick-knacks, brought specially for him from far beyond the sea; and eventually Master Rook, who coveted everything that Derval had to give, contrived to "screw" loose change out of him on every available occasion.

Greville Hampton listened with a curiously mingled expression in his face—disdain of, and indignation at, Lord Oakhampton, when Derval related the episode at Bermuda; and then something of real gratification stole into his features on thinking that the peer's daughter should owe her life and existence to the skill and prowess of his son! While, to anything in which Derval shone with credit, Mrs. Hampton listened coldly, with disdain nearly expressed in her light-coloured eyes, and had no word of womanly or well-bred approbation for the feat he had performed, and of which the only trophy he chose to show, was the signet ring of Lord Oakhampton, with the three choughs under a coronet, at which Greville gave an angry grimace, and sat slowly stroking a huge beard he had cultivated since Derval last saw him.

"And so you like Captain Talbot and your ship, my boy?" said he, when Mrs. Hampton and her peculiar care had betaken them to the drawing-room, and to change the subject of the astounding alterations at Finglecombe, on which Derval had naturally been expatiating.

"Like the Captain? He is a genuine brick!" said Derval; "and as for our ship, no better sails the sea!"

"Fill your glass, Derval—that Burgundy is better than any we used to have long ago."

"Thanks, Papa—'Governor,' I suppose I should call you in the parlance of the present day—even Rook, I perceive, has adopted it."

"Whatever I call you, you will ever be the same dear old man to me!" exclaimed Derval, as his eyes filled, and he wrung his father's hand. "But I should like you to see the Amethyst under full sail before the wind, or even close hauled with her tacks aboard!" he added, with all a seaman's genuine enthusiasm in a really good craft. "She does indeed skim the waves, as if she were the work of magic. I have often watched her, as Scott describes the Mertouns watching Cleveland's vessel, as 'that rare masterpiece by which human genius aspires to surmount the waves and contend with the winds,' and you must know that we sailors think that a ship, like a woman, has a will of her own, yet knows what the helmsman wants of her; so right was he who said 'she walks the waters like a thing of life'—and this is precisely what the Amethyst does. Buoyant as a duck, when before the wind, I have seen her yard-arms nearly touch the great rollers on each side alternately."

So multifarious were his father's engagements, and so much was he pre-occupied by his schemes, that Derval soon found his own society could be spared, and one of his first acts was to visit the quaint old parsonage of the Tudor times, and present to Mr. Asperges Laud the grim natural curiosity he had for him—the head of a shark caught by Joe Grummet off Tristan d'Acunha, and which he had scraped and polished till he had rendered it, as he thought, a very high work of art indeed.

To reach the parsonage, he had to pass his mother's grave, and as he approached the well-known spot, with his head uncovered, he experienced somewhat of a shock, it seemed so neglected and forgotten; when under the Southern Cross, and far beyond the equator, how often had his prayerful thoughts come here, and how did he find it now?

The tiny, but pretty monumental cross, erected by his father in the days of their limited means—then almost penury—had fallen down, and the little patch of grass under which she lay was choked with weeds!

Even Mr. Asperges Laud had failed in the work of clearing and weeding it again and again—often with his own hands. But Derval resolved that not another day should pass, ere this desecration should end.

The kind old curate received him warmly and affectionately, as if he had been his own father, and with tears in his eyes, held up his hand to bless him.

Incidentally, he told him of the growing wealth of Finglecombe, and of the great fortune his father was amassing. Derval, who had naturally inferred that such was the case, now heard it distinctly for the first time, though he had been kept in ignorance of it; and, as naturally, he again asked of himself, why was this the case?

He strove to crush down the unpleasant suspicions of—he knew not what—that would occur to him again and again, and sought to enjoy to the full the brief term of his leave of absence. He sought all his old haunts, but only to find changes; the shingly shore, which he had been wont to seek for hours, and whence he saw the old weedy hull floating silently in the bay, was now giving place to a sea-wall and marine parade; the Druidical stones that formed the Pixies Parlour had become road metal, and the new hotel occupied its site; the haunted mill with its moss-grown wheel had given place to a new villa of astounding design; and he found nothing unchanged but the Tiws-stone, or rock, named after the Saxon god (of the third day of the week), on the summit of a hill, where in the deep snows of winter, it is said, that on certain nights are traced the marks of a naked human foot, and of a cloven hoof, while the shrieks of the "whist hounds" are heard with the winding of unearthly horns, in the hollow below the hill.

So for a time, a very little time, he gave himself up to the full enjoyment of the sleepy country life, which was so unlike what he had been leading for fully four years past.

Yet in his father's house he felt singularly homeless; by the side of him whose blood he inherited and of the brother whose blood he partly shared, he felt as one without kindred, and ever and anon the thought occurred to him, "What brought me here? I had no pressing invitation certainly; let me get back to the Amethyst again!"

"Greville dear, we must not have him with us long—with his sea manners and ways; his oaths, no doubt, will come in time, and the mode of treating the servant-maids too; for even they, and the ladies he may meet, are so different to all he is accustomed to."

"Who sent him to sea?" asked her husband curtly, for her remarks were alike unjust and untrue; but though they had a circle of rather fashionable friends now, Derval was conscious that none were invited to meet him; and thus coldness on the part of those who should have made him welcome, requests often refused, and lectures from Mrs. Hampton, in a tone unsuited to a lad past eighteen years, provoked a certain spirit of resistance in Derval. So far were slights carried, that one day during his father's absence young Rookleigh was placed at the head of the table. To see a boy of eleven years of age there, made Derval laugh; but, as Selden says, "you may see by a straw which way the wind is," and the preference was only a part and parcel of her whole system.

One morning, shortly before the time for his departure came, there occurred two events—or one, we should say, as each was but a part of the other—which gave Derval some food for reflection.

Among the letters for post on the hall-table, he saw one in Mrs. Hampton's handwriting, addressed to "Reeve Rudderhead, Esq., Mate, Ship Amethyst, West India Dock, London."

"Who the dickens is he?" thought Derval; "we have no such man, and it is improbable that there are two ships of the same name in the same dock."

"And about what are you writing to him?" asked Derval, so abruptly or suspiciously, that she coloured with annoyance and said:

"That is my business; besides, he is my cousin-german, and was an admirer of mine in my girlish days," she added, and left the room.

Soon after Derval was in the library, penning a letter to Hal Bowline, and while doing so, the appearance of his own name on the blotting-pad, several times, in Mrs. Hampton's handwriting, attracted his attention, and very naturally excited his curiosity. The blotting-paper was new, yellow tinted, and clean otherwise, and anxious to know in what way she was interested in his affairs, he deemed himself quite entitled to examine into the matter; and he could make out, by the address which was thereto, that the fragments he could decipher were part of his step-mother's letter to her nautical cousin, Mr. Reeve Rudderhead, and though unconnected, they ran thus:—

"... so Derval, you see, is ... y, and for the old love you bore me ... good round sum, rid ... him in any way ... lad and evil ... see him no more, again ...."

Derval read these strange fragments between him and the light again and again, till he fairly committed them to memory. He could not make out the mystery, or why she should be writing about him in any way. He quite failed to understand it, nor could he exactly speak of it; but he had good reason to remember it when several degrees of latitude lay between him and Finglecombe.

He felt that his visit there had been a mistake; that his father was all but alienated from him by a step-mother who wickedly hated him; that his step-brother was a greedy, sullen, and most unlikeable youth. Thus, more than ever, was his loving heart thrust back upon itself. Why was all this? What had he done beyond the crime of being the eldest son of his father, that his own flesh and blood should treat him thus?

He had but one unalloyed satisfaction during his visit. He received the Albert Medal for saving the life of Lord Oakhampton's daughter, and as he looked on it, his heart reverted again to the bright little maid in that isle of "Vexed Bermoothes," and he wished that the Amethyst had been bound for that region again, instead of Van Dieman's Land, or Tasmania as we name it now.

So the hour of his departure came, and with heedlessness and mortification curiously mingling in his heart, he once more quitted his home, on the very day preceding one which Mrs. Hampton had fixed for a brilliant dinner-party, and when she knew that Derval must, without fail, be on board his ship.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Derval Hampton: A Story of the Sea, Volume 1 (of 2)

DERVAL HAMPTON.

CHAPTER I.

"Playing with shells upon the shores of time."

CHAPTER II.

"Therefore he loved gold in special."—Chaucer.

CHAPTER III.

ON BOARD THE GOOD SHIP "AMETHYST."

CHAPTER IV.

UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS.

CHAPTER V.

AFTER LONG YEARS.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Derval Hampton: A Story of the Sea, Volume 1 (of 2)

DERVAL HAMPTON.

CHAPTER I. "Playing with shells upon the shores of time."

CHAPTER II. "Therefore he loved gold in special."—Chaucer.

CHAPTER III. ON BOARD THE GOOD SHIP "AMETHYST."

CHAPTER IV. UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS.

CHAPTER V. AFTER LONG YEARS.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

CHAPTER I.

"Playing with shells upon the shores of time."

CHAPTER II.

"Therefore he loved gold in special."—Chaucer.

CHAPTER III.

ON BOARD THE GOOD SHIP "AMETHYST."

CHAPTER IV.

UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS.

CHAPTER V.

AFTER LONG YEARS.