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!