DERVAL HAMPTON.

  A Story of the Sea.



  BY

  JAMES GRANT,

  AUTHOR OF "ROMANCE OF WAR," ETC., ETC.



  VOL. I.



  LONDON:
  W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE,
  PALL MALL. S.W.

  1881.

  (_All rights reserved._)




  LONDON
  W. H. ALLEN AND CO., 13, WATERLOO PLACE S.W.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I.--"Playing with Shells upon the Shores of Time"

CHAPTER II.--"Therefore he loved Gold in special"

CHAPTER III.--On board the good ship _Amethyst_

CHAPTER IV.--Under the Southern Cross

CHAPTER V.--After Long Years




DERVAL HAMPTON.

(A STORY OF THE SEA.)



CHAPTER I.

"Playing with shells upon the shores of time."


"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."

"Wealth does not bring happiness, Greville."

"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."

"Lost when I am with you?"

"Yes, lost; who and what are our immediate neighbours?"

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.

"Derval is asleep?" said he.

"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, Mary?"

"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?"

"True; but not the position and the luxuries to which we were
accustomed."

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."

"Oh, Greville, darling, don't talk in this wild way."

"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.

"Yes, still, Mary."

"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!"

"Yet it is for such society as those that you repine!"

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

"The man who calls himself Lord Oakhampton----"

"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.

Anon he thought, what other treatment could he expect?

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--

  "'Tis better to have loved and lost,
  Than never to have loved at all."


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.

So Mary was gone, and for her the long, long night of the grave had
begun!




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."

Patty was very indignant at this suggestion being made already.

"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.

"You have a piano here, Greville," said Miss Rookleigh with a bright
smile.

"It is locked," said he uneasily.

"But there is a key, of course?"

"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.

In fact, Greville Hampton, the widower, was engaged to Miss Anne
Rookleigh!

"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."

"Take care of what?" asked the niece, haughtily.

"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."

"She is not my mamma," said the child recoiling.

"Go and be kissed by her instantly, sir!"

"I won't, Papa."

"Then leave the room, sir!"

"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?

"His presence shall not annoy you, Anne."

"But, until he gets accustomed to me, Greville?"

"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."

To sea!  Was his future shadowed forth in this idea?

Time will show.

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."

"Why, Anne?"

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

"Of what?"

"That she was as dear to you, perhaps--as near to you, certainly--as
I am."

"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?"

He smoked his old briar-root, but made no reply.

"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?"

"That is no answer.  But were you ever so much in love as you are
now?"

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.

"But you, Greville, are not one of those men."

"No, Anne, most certainly not."

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.

"To the sea-shore," he answered shyly.

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

"I like to watch the waves come in, and listen to what they are
saying."

"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."

"He aggravates me so!" she replied, colouring; but more with anger
than shame.

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

"For what?" she asked sharply.

"Please, I have broken your little china vase."

"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.

"My chair is not put in for me, papa!" he exclaimed; "why is this?"

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."

"Leave the room, Derval; mamma does not want you to-day."

"Oh, papa, you are not angry with me?"

"Yes--no--but go; you are a bad boy to insist on coming to table."

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.

"Fear of what?" she asked curtly.

"The Long Cripples."

"What _do_ you mean?"

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.

"Ask instant pardon of your mamma, sir!" was the command.

"I won't--she is not my mamma."

"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.

"Go to your room, sir, and remain there till you are sent for."

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.

"Do stop, please mum, the little lad is fainting," exclaimed the
groom.

"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."

At last there comes a crisis in the affairs of Derval Hampton.

"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,

"Why, Anne?"

"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.

"Once and for all--no."

"I ask again, why?"

"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."

"Say _ours_, Anne."

"Well, ours, of course, darling."

"I cannot see that poor Derval is all you say."

"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?"

"Derval Hampton, sir."

"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."

"Certainly, sir."

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

"Very well, thank you."

"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."

Then Joe Grummet shook Derval's hand very cordially indeed.

"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'?"

"Your mother, of course."

"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 tow?" queried Derval.

"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.

"Got any sisters, Hampton?" asked Bowline, who thought himself a wag.

"No," replied Derval.

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

"Your message, please sir?" said Derval.

"The harbour watch is set, so go forward and send the cook's shifter
to me."

"Where shall I find him?"

"In the starboard binnacle."

"Very good, sir."  And Derval vanished.

"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.

"Come youngster, tumble up," shouted that individual, "it is six
bells."

"What have bells to do with me, sir?" asked Derval timidly.

"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.

"Please, sir, I cannot do that just yet," urged Derval, turning very
white.

"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."

"When shall we reach the ocean?"

"Oh, very soon--a deuced deal too soon for you," said Mr. Bitts.

"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.

"That's right, my lad."

"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."

And, with a chuckle, he coiled away the colt in a pocket of his
pea-jacket.

"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!"

"Please, sir," said Derval, rubbing his shoulders, "I never was a
thief."

"But thieving begins sometimes, and opportunity is the devil's game."

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.

"Mr. Hampton taken suddenly ill, sir," replied Mr. Bitts with a
gratified grin.

"Strang, see what is the matter."

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.

"What can that boy know about grog?" said the Captain angrily.

"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!"

With this threat, the Captain turned and walked aft.

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.

What a vast time seemed to have elapsed since he left all these
behind him!

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.

"I should like to try, sir," replied Derval, colouring.

"Oho! the deuce you would!  Why, you young----"

"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.

"Trim the yards anew, Mr. Tyeblock," said he; "the wind is getting
more ahead."

"Very good, sir," and the tacks and sheets were promptly attended to.

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:

"All hands, ahoy! all hands, ahoy! tumble up and take in sail!"

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.

"Breakers ahead! breakers on _both_ bows!"

"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.

Great were the changes which time and circumstances had effected
there.

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.

The crew crowded round Derval, and Captain Talbot shook him warmly by
the hand.

"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.*


* This story is told in the _Atlas Geographus_, 1717, vol. v.


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."

"Stay, I insist upon it," said the lady.

"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."

"And who was the lady with you--your mamma?"

"Oh no; my dear mamma is dead."

"Who, then?"

"My governess, Miss Sampler.  Do you live near this?" she asked.

"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."

"It is a garrison, then?"

"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."

"Where?"

"In England, far, far away--in Devonshire."

"I know Devonshire well!" exclaimed Derval with growing interest.

"Do you?" she asked, while her earnest eyes dilated.

"May I ask your name?"

"Clara."

"A pretty name!  Clara what?"

"Hampton.  And yours?"

"Hampton too."

"How very, very odd!"

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?"

"That gentleman saved me, Papa; saved me, saved me!" was the sobbing
reply.

"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.

Derval briefly and modestly related all that had occurred.

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:

"Do you belong to a ship of war, sir?"

"No, sir."

"To what, then?" asked the other, glancing at the uniform.

"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:

"May I ask whom I have the honour of addressing?"

"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?"

"My name, like yours, my lord, is Hampton--Derval Hampton."

"Are you a Devonshire man?"

"Yes, my Lord; my father lives at Finglecombe."

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."

"For you, sir," said the aide-de-camp.

"From whom, sir?"

"His Excellency the Governor."

Captain Talbot was rather, as he afterwards told, "taken aback," but
he said:

"Won't you have a glass of sherry and a biscuit, sir?"

"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 have come to bid adieu to your papa and yourself," said Derval.

"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.

After a little pause, he placed the locket in her hand.

"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."

"I am sorry that the memory of me should be combined with a thought
of horror."

"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:

"Now, does it not look pretty?'

"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."

"What?"

"A tiny lock of your hair, as a souvenir when I am far away from
Bermuda."

"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."

"Bad form, I deem it--very."

"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!"

Still stronger grew this desire, when one day he overheard his
step-mother say:

"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."

He inquired of Mrs. Hampton who this Rudderhead was.

"He has succeeded Mr. Girtline in your ship."

"As first mate?"

"Yes."

"Who told you of this?"

"My aunt Rookleigh, by letter."

"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.



London: Printed by W. H. Allen & Co., 13, Waterloo Place, S.W.