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that boasted of but one porter, who often travelled to and fro per train, and acted as deputy stoker, &c., had now been replaced by one of imposing aspect, with a spacious platform, a staff of officials, and an airy young damsel to superintend its buffet.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.