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.