The unexpected visitor descended at once.
"Just come on board, sir!" said he, reporting himself with comic coolness and gravity.
"Good heavens—can it be—Derval—Derval Hampton!" exclaimed Captain Talbot, springing up from his writing-desk, and scattering his letters over the deck, and he took both Derval's hands in his own, shook them heartily, and mutual explanations at once ensued.
After rejoining the Amethyst, Derval made many voyages with her, and thus four years and more passed on, till, seeing an account of his father's death in a paper some weeks old, a great revulsion of feeling came over him, with much of repentance for the mutual indifference in which he had indulged; and a species of craving came over him to see the home of his childhood, or rather the place thereof, once again, for his father lay there in the great granite mausoleum, and his mother near the yew of other years, in the old church-yard—the true "God's acre" of Finglecombe; and he longed, too, to see old Patty Fripp.
As for his father, his old face came back to memory, as he remembered it in the days of his infancy, out of the long dim vista of the vanished years; and so for a time his whole heart went forth to his father—the father that loved his mother, and her memory so, before that other came!
Derval was now first mate of the Amethyst, Tom Tyeblock having got a ship of his own. He was moreover a sub-lieutenant of the Royal Naval Reserve, had done his gunnery drill again and again on board the training-ship, drawing the pay of his rank, and messing in the gun-room.
Of course he still connected all that had befallen him on Turtle Island, with Mrs. Hampton and her letter to the late Mr. Reeve Rudderhead; thus, after taking the train to Finglecombe, on reaching that place no power could make him take up his abode underneath the roof of his half-brother and Mrs. Hampton. So he took rooms at the hotel, the "Hampton Arms" (the armorial three choughs), where Rookleigh visited him promptly enough; but the meeting between those two who shared the same blood, was a strange and unnatural one, after their long separation, though Derval's heart warmed to Rookleigh, and was more stirred than vanity would have permitted him to own.
"What will people think," said Rookleigh, "of your being here at an hotel, and not at home?"
"Home!" exclaimed Derval, with a bitter laugh.
"Yes—it is home."