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?