"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.