DERVAL HAMPTON.

A Story of the Sea.

BY

JAMES GRANT,

AUTHOR OF "ROMANCE OF WAR," ETC., ETC.

VOL. I.

LONDON:
W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE,
PALL MALL. S.W.

1881.

(All rights reserved.)

LONDON
W. H. ALLEN AND CO., 13, WATERLOO PLACE S.W.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.—["Playing with Shells upon the Shores of Time"]

CHAPTER II.—["Therefore he loved Gold in special"]

CHAPTER III.—[On board the good ship Amethyst]

CHAPTER IV.—[Under the Southern Cross]

CHAPTER V.—[After Long Years]

DERVAL HAMPTON.

(A STORY OF THE SEA.)

CHAPTER I.
"Playing with shells upon the shores of time."

"I wonder why Heaven sent us into this world to face the mortifications we have to endure?"

"Do not say this, Greville, dearest; it is not for us to judge; we have but to suffer and endure, and be thankful for life, for health, and that we are not worse off than we are."

"Thankful for life!" exclaimed the man, bitterly. "Why should I be thankful for a life of poverty, obscurity, and trouble?"

"Trouble is sent, as the preacher tells us, to make us better and draw us closer to God. It is 'not my will, but Thine be done'; so we ought not to question the mystery of life; and then, husband dear, we have our little boy!"

As she said this, something of a soft smile replaced the angry and far-away expression that filled her husband's dark eyes.

Greville Hampton and his wife Mary—her hands busy with work—were seated in the ivy-clad porch of their little cottage on a bright evening in summer. Before them, at the end of the vista down the dell in which it stood, lay the waters of the English Channel glittering in sunlight, as it rolled away from Rockham Bay to craggy Hartland Point, a sheer precipice 300 feet in height. If humble and small in accommodation, the cottage of Finglecombe was pretty externally, with its wealth of creeping plants, and kept scrupulously neat and clean within, though destitute of every luxury.

Before the cottage lay the pretty garden which Greville Hampton tended with his own hands, and where Mary reared and twined her flowers. There were the ripening strawberries, their fresh green leaves lying lightly on beds of yellow straw, the late asparagus and wonderful cucumbers under glass-shades, mellow-flavoured peas in borders, and wonderful nectarines climbing up the wall. Behind the cottage, on the south, lay Finglecombe, (in old Devonian) "The dell with the hazel boundary," and a lovely dell it was, bordered by gentle slopes, covered with those "apple bowers," for which the district is so famous, in all their luxuriance and greenery. Yet, all this brought no pleasure to the eye or mind of Greville Hampton, a moody and discontented man, one on whom the world and society had smiled in other days, and thus he was ever comparing the present with the irrecoverable past.

There was an air of great refinement in both husband and wife, an air that contrasted strongly and strangely with their plain attire and circumscribed dwelling. Greville Hampton's face was dark in complexion, aquiline in feature, a very handsome face, one quite warranted to claim the unmistakable admiration his wife had for it, and yet it was not a pleasing one. His brow was indicative of intellect and courage; his lip, shaded by a black moustache, was indicative of a resolute will and firm purpose; and his dark hazel eyes, if stern and even gloomy in their normal expression, could soften with a depth of affection when they dwelt on the face of Mary, on the child that was playing at their feet, or at the approach of a friend, and showed that he had a warm heart under the crust in which he was wont to hide it.

Early disappointment, great monetary losses, and a wrong more real than fancied, the loss of a title and patrimony, had much to do with the latter, and hence came the bitter expression that at times stole over his well-formed mouth, and the shadow that clouded a really handsome face.

Mary was indeed a lovely woman, but her slight girlish figure, and the bright tint of colour on her soft, Madonna-like cheek, seemed to speak of a delicacy of constitution, not quite suited for the hardships and trials consequent upon the loss of all to which she had been at one time accustomed. Her dress was coarse and plain, yet arranged so tastefully, that her figure made it look graceful, and it seemed—humble though the material—to repose on her rounded bust and limbs with something suggestive of distinction and placid elegance.

Mary was a brunette, yet with a wonderfully pure complexion, with small hands and feet, large dark eyes, and dark silky braided hair. Like Annie Laurie, of the tender old Scottish song, "her voice was low and sweet,"—soft as the low notes of the stock-dove, and yet men always spoke to her with a strange sensation of timidity. Often did the touch of her cool soft hand soothe Greville Hampton in his times of dejection, and he found hope and sympathy in the earnest light of her unreproaching eyes.

She was fond of dress, and what pretty woman is not? and a time there was when she had indulged to the full in stylish things, and always wore silks of the most delicate colours in the carriage, or in the evening; but she had to content herself with dresses of other material and more sombre tints, that were turned more than once, as she had to do much of her own economical millinery, and darn her gloves again and again; but Mary was always content, and would smile happily when Greville would say, with something of his old lover-like gallantry, "Dearest Mary, it is you who will make any dress seem charming, and not dress that enhances you."

Between them, and at their feet, sat their only child, little Derval, a pretty golden-haired boy of six, intent on playing alternately with a toy ship and building a house of little wooden blocks, which he would rear and carefully construct again and again, each time that the tiny edifice was finished, demolishing it with a shout of laughter to begin his labour anew.

"Come, Derval," said his mamma, after they had been watching him, fondly and silently, for nearly half-an-hour, while the sun sank beyond the sea, "it is time for bed, so put away your toys, darling."

"Oh, I wish the sun wouldn't go down just yet," the little fellow exclaimed; "do let me make one more Pixies' house, mamma."

"Pixies!" said Greville, with one of his bitter laughs. "By Jove! I wish that the Pixies, be they fairies or fiends, would show us where some treasure is buried, or teach me the art of growing rich!"

"God grant, Greville dearest," said Mary, meekly, "that the child may always be as happy and innocent as he is now."

"God grant, I say, that he may be rich—rich as we once were—richer, at least, than we are to-night."

"Wealth does not bring happiness, Greville."

"It brings the nearest approach to it, Mary; a light heart generally goes with a heavy purse. It is not so much for myself, as for the child and you, Mary, that I wish the past could come again—but the past with its experience. 'Twere useless else. You are lost here, with your perfect manner, your sweetness, your talents and high accomplishments."

"Lost when I am with you?"

"Yes, lost; who and what are our immediate neighbours?"

Mary smiled silently, for she knew well that the occupants of Finglecombe village—a village as red as the soil, consisting only of rude cob-cottages as they are called—were only weavers of pillow-lace; and that the homely manners and slip-shod conversation of these, and of the adjacent farmers, with their incessant talk of short-horns and the merits of the Devonshire breed, their cows and "yowes," the weather and the turnip-fly, worried and bored her husband at times, though he was too well-bred to let them see that it did so; and they, on their part, were perfectly aware that there was a vast difference and distance between themselves and the mysterious and lonely gentlefolks who vegetated in the sequestered little cottage of Finglecombe.

And yet, how Greville Hampton envied the contentment of the dwellers in those cob-cottages—people with whom the world seemed to go precisely as they wished it to do; and who deemed that human life out of Finglecombe and beyond the circuit of its interests and apple-orchards, must be a dull affair indeed for the greatest portion of mankind.

"Poor Derval!" he sighed, as he saw the reluctance with which the child at last gathered up his toys; "Dryden was right—'men are but children of a larger growth'; children who often toil a lifetime in rearing fabrics unstable as yours. Kiss papa, darling, and now to bed."

So while Mary bore away her darling, undressed him, smoothed all his golden curls, and tucked him tenderly into his little crib; while she knelt beside it, folded his little pink hands devoutly, and made him repeat after her a simple childish prayer, of love and faith, and that God might bless papa and mamma, and give Derval a good night's rest; while, after this, she had to tell him stories of the flowers in the garden, the birds and the little lambs, and especially of the Pixies, those wonderful Devonshire fairies, who, though invisibly small, ride the farmers' horses nearly to death, steal the fruit and pound their own cider in holes and corners; and while she covered his rosy cheeks with the tenderest kisses ere he coaxed himself to sleep, her moody husband lost in his own thoughts, his briar-root pipe grown cold, had been gazing on the sea, and the wide expanse of Barnstaple Bay shining in the last glow of the set sun.

The beauty of the Devonshire coast, with all its bluffs and rocks, its wonderful verdure and glorious "apple-bowers now mellowing in the moon," had no charms for the soul of Greville Hampton, whose mind at that time was running on the London life from which he was a hopeless exile now, the life in which he once bore a brilliant part.

Well did he know all that was passing, and on the tapis at that identical season! That the club at Sandown was flourishing as it never flourished before; that Prince's was in all its glory; that the meetings of the Coaching Clubs and four-in-hands had all been arranged, without his team of roans being expected at the Serpentine; that Richmond, Hurlingham, and the Orleans Club were all extant, though they knew not him, and that even his name was recalled at none of them now. Already had the attractions of Epsom and Ascot begun, combining those of hospitable country-house life with wild excitement of the race-course and betting-ring; and he knew that the sons and daughters of pleasure were striving to crush as much brilliant amusement as was possible into the interval between flowery Whitsuntide and the epoch of Goodwood in its glory, and the yacht regattas at Cowes.

His mind, we say, was full of all these things—fierce, high, bitter, and regretful thoughts all mingling together—when Mary, full only of the sleeping face of her child, gentle and unrepining, content and hopeful, crept hack to resume her knitting by his side.

Her knitting! How the proud man winced as he saw her white hands so humbly employed.

"Derval is asleep?" said he.

"Yes; and the dear pet lamb, how sweetly he does sleep!" replied Mary, her soft voice almost tremulous with the pleasure of her maternal love; "I remained watching him for a time, and wondering—wondering in my heart—"

"What, Mary?"

"What awaited him in the unseen future," she replied, as she fixed her eyes, not upon the face of her husband, but on the far horizon of the sea, yet tinted with ruddy gold by the sun that had set.

"Were the book of destiny laid before you, Mary, would you have the courage to turn a leaf?" asked her husband in a strange and hard voice.

"I fear, Greville, dear, I should lack the courage," said Mary, as she ceased to knit, and her white hands lay idle in her lap.

"If wealth—if riches—be not written there, I care not what the leaf contains! Not that I entirely believe in destiny; in many instances we make our own, as I, to a certain extent, made ours, by becoming a victim of others; but a destiny over which I have no control deprives me of my birthright; and I, who ought now to be twelfth Lord Oakhampton, and tenth Lord of Wistmanswood, am a poor and needy man. So I say again, Mary, if wealth be not before our little Derval, in the years to come, I care not what may be, with all my love of him!'

"Oh, Greville, do not—do not talk thus!" said Mary, imploringly; "suppose death were to come, and our child, the sole bright star in our otherwise cloudy sky, went out, leaving us in utter darkness!" Her voice broke at the idea of the hopeless desolation she conjured up, and her eyes filled with tears, for she was a sensitive creature. "Suppose this were to happen," she continued, "and you saw me, with fond and lingering hands, folding and putting past, as priceless treasures, the little garments they had made, the tiny socks they had knitted, and the broken toys that would be required no more, while turning away heart-sick from the sight of happy parents, whose little ones were spared to them, and striving to console ourselves with the conviction that all things come from Heaven. I share your hope and wish, Greville, that Derval may be rich, and great too, but I would rather that he were good than either!"

"Rich he shall be, I hope, before I die," exclaimed Greville Hampton; "and I have strange dreams at times, Mary, that seem the harbingers of something to come," he added gravely, and in a lower tone, "Wealth——"

"What need of wealth, dearest? we can save, out of our little pittance for Derval; he is the only chick we have to scrape for," she interrupted him, and took his passive hands caressingly within her own.

"Oh, Mary," he replied bitterly, without heeding her question, "I have in my time feasted at the table of Dives, while Lazarus stood without the gate, and now I seem, in turn, to have taken his place."

"How can you talk thus wildly, dear Greville; have we not every necessary that life requires?"

"True; but not the position and the luxuries to which we were accustomed."

This was but one of many such conversations to which she was accustomed, and Mary sighed wearily at her husband's incessant repining, as she said, while glancing furtively at her plain dress:

"Luxuries can be done without; but you have been having some of your tantalising dreams again."

"I have, indeed, Mary," said he, with his eyes fixed on vacancy, for the visions that haunted his mind in the hours of sleep by night, or when his thoughts were drifting back to the material world in the early hours of morning, showed the tenor of those other dreams that haunted him in the hours of wakefulness by day.

"Was it again of the mysterious treasure ship—the quaint old Argosy stranded in yonder Barnstaple Bay, deserted by her crew and left high and dry by the ebbing sea, with the great golden doubloons flowing in torrents through her gaping seams, and piled like glittering oyster-shells in heaps upon the sand, where you and I were gathering them up in handfuls—for you often have such fancies in your sleep, Greville?" she added, nestling her sweet face lovingly and laughingly on his neck, anxious to soothe and humour him.

"It was not of ships, Mary," he replied, with an arm caressingly around her; "but of a strange and wondrous land—a scene amid stupendous mountain ranges, like what we have heard of, or read of, as being in the Great Basin of California, or the Cordilleras, hemmed in on every side by mighty steeps. It was indeed a strange dream, Mary, and most vivid, distinct and coherent in all its details—painfully so, when the moment of waking came. Falling aslant the mountains the sun's rays struck upon a streak in a mass of volcanic rock, which gave back a yellow gleam. I struck the mass with a hammer—a fragment fell at my feet—it was gold—pure gold! Again and again I struck, and huge nuggets of the precious metal fell down before me, while at every stroke my heart beat painfully yet exultingly, and my breath came thick and fast. I was there, I thought, alone; the land around me was my own, with the conviction that far in the bosom of the mighty mountains rose the strata of precious metal—a wondrous land, where the teeth of the black cattle, of the mules and the goats that grazed upon their grassy sides, were tinted yellow by the gold with which the soil abounded. Could my dreamland have been in California?" he asked, as if talking to himself. "What visions of boundless wealth came before me; and what mighty power would that wealth command! Again and again I wielded my hammer, and the heap before me seemed to increase, till my brain became giddy with the thoughts that swept athwart it. Could my vision have been of California?" he continued dreamily to himself, rather than to Mary; "it must have been—it must have been among the Rocky Mountains that my soul was wandering while my body slept."

"Oh, Greville, darling, don't talk in this wild way."

"I should like to search for that place, Mary; it exists somewhere, and I am sure I should know it again."

"Heavens, Greville, you would not think of going there, and on the strength only of a dream?"

"No, Mary; you are not adapted to the life of a digger's wife," said he with a tender smile.

"As little as you are to be a digger," she replied, while caressing his hand, which, though manly, was a white one.

"The dream seemed a long, long one, Mary, though doubtless short enough in reality, so true it is, a writer tells us, that there is a drowsy state between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open and yourself half conscious of everything passing around you, than you would do in five nights with your eyes fast closed and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness! So it was with me Mary; but the mountains seemed to sink; the scene to change and resolve itself into sweet and peaceful Finglecombe, with all its orchards and the Bay shining in the rising moon, even as it is doing now; but the heap of golden ore was still before me—till I awoke with a start, to find myself again—a beggar!"

"But beside we," said Mary, with a little laugh that ended in a sigh; "and if your dream will bear reading at all, Greville, it must be that your riches lie, not in California, but here in Finglecombe; though what they are, or where they are, unless they be Derval and me," she added, kissing him, "goodness only knows."

But full of his vivid dream, Greville Hampton made no response immediately. He sat lost in thought, passively gazing on the Bay, glittering and rippling beyond the boundary of his garden where a fallen beech of vast dimensions lay, with its end half-hidden in a rose-tree that was a mass of bloom. There was silence in the place—a drowsy summer silence; the sounds of the distant cob-village came faintly mingled with the lap, lap, lapping of the waves upon the shore.

"Supper waits, ma'am," said Patty Fripp, suddenly appearing in the porch, which was a veritable bower of roses and Virginia-creeper, for Patty—a robust and honest countrywoman, who was nurse to Master Derval, cook and housemaid by turns, and all together at times, and had come as a retainer to his father's house in better days, when she was a blooming lass of eighteen—was close on the wrong side of fifty now, but true as steel in their altered fortunes to Greville Hampton and her mistress.

He allowed himself to be led by Mary indoors, where in their snug little parlour, a room made pretty by many a knick-knack, the work of her industrious hands, a plain repast awaited them; the home-brewed ale frothed creamily in a great antique silver tankard, that had served his sire and grandsire before him, and which, nearly the sole family relic, bore the heraldic choughs borne by so many Cornish and Devonshire families; and there were ruddy cheese, snow-white bread, and dainty butter, all prepared by Mary's pretty hands; but there was a shadow upon Greville's brow to-night that even she could not dispel; for while he regretted very bitterly—half savagely, almost—the luxuries to which he had once been accustomed in Belgravian dining-rooms and Pall Mall clubs, the rich entrées and rare wines, Mary—who had also been accustomed to luxury—took her food contentedly, and thought the while of the many men and women and little children—children like her own golden-haired Derval—who had neither dinner nor supper to sit down to.

Her perfect and sublime trust in the conviction that all things were ordered for the best, and her sweet yet strong reliance on God in every way, were certainly touching to Greville, but he failed utterly in falling in with her views, or sharing her content and trustfulness, and when assured by her that thousands and thousands of others were not so well off in worldly matters as themselves, he failed also to find any ground for complacency in any such statistics; and so, whether it was the influence of his golden dream, or of his general discontent, on this night, his broad open brow, his firm lips, and dark eyes, wore that peculiar expression which they did at times, and which we have said was certainly not a pleasing one, when he deemed himself to be haunted by his evil destiny—the Demon of Impecuniosity.

Mary left nothing undone or untried to add to his comforts, and he knew that her beautiful and delicate hands had often done, and had yet to do, rougher work than they were ever intended for, though it was often done in secret, to prevent him from seeing it; but Patty Fripp knew of it well.

"Yes," said Greville Hampton, as if assenting to his own thoughts, after he had drained the antique silver tankard, and fixed his eyes for a moment upon the shield argent, with three choughs, gules, engraved thereon, and the crested chough that surmounted a coronet with the motto Clarior e Tenebris (Brighter from Obscurity), "yes, may the words be ominous of good! If I could but think that Derval would certainly be rich, and should never know the privations we have suffered and the deprivations to which we have been subjected, I think, Mary, I could die happy."

"The same repining thoughts still, Greville!" said Mary, softly and entreatingly.

"Yes, still, Mary."

"Derval," said she, as she resumed her knitting, "has his youth and all his life before him."

"But without some effort on my part it will be a life of half penury and whole obscurity in Finglecombe. But how is that effort to be made? You would not have our boy grow up the associate and companion of these villagers and lace-makers! Among whom else will his lot be cast? I would rather see him in his grave, Mary."

"Do not say so. The misfortunes you have undergone have made you unreasonably bitter; but let us hope, Greville, for the best," she added, running her slender fingers caressingly through his thick dark hair.

"Bitter! unreasonable! Have I not been mulcted of my proper inheritance? Is not the position—the rank which ought to have been mine and my father's before me—now held by another? Have I not been robbed by fashionable gamesters, swindlers, and false friends!"

"Yet it is for such society as those that you repine!"

"It is not so, Mary; what happened once could never happen again. I know better now."

"The man who calls himself Lord Oakhampton——"

"And who holds the broad lands and stately house that should be mine—knows well, if the world at large knows it not—through a quibble he is a usurper! Oh, my own Mary!" he exclaimed, while tears glittered in his flashing eyes, and he glanced with angry scorn round the tiny apartment, "when I wooed and won you in the happy past time, you who were reared in the lap of luxury, wealth, and refinement. I little foresaw that I would ever bring you, in the end, to a home so humble as this!"

"But I am with you to share it, Greville, and I do not repine—unless, perhaps, for the child's sake. But why do you tell me these things again and again, darling? Is it," she added, with one of her brightest and most witching smiles, "to lure me into repeating how much and how truly I love you, as if I were a girl again in that second London season, which ended so sweetly for us both?"

She would have thrown her soft arms around him, but a spirit of anger filled his heart, and he paced to and fro the little room like a caged lion; and Mary regarded him anxiously, for she had a dread of her husband's crotchets taking some active and dangerous form, especially if he were again to have that Californian dream; for when one's life, as a writer says, is a constant trial, "the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering;" and Mary was indeed far from strong. There was a greater delicacy in her constitution than Greville was the least aware of, a delicacy that, though it alarmed herself, for his sake and their child's she kept her lips sealed on the subject, lest the knowledge thereof might add to the regret of Greville for the past, and his "worry" for the present.

"If this life cannot be endured, it must be cured—to reverse a vulgar saw, Mary," said he, continuing his short promenade; "if I cannot be rich, Derval shall be so, if any scheme of mine can achieve that end; and as soon as he is old enough, I shall teach him how money can make money, and how to keep it hard and fast—hard and fast—when it is made, and not be a fool like his father."

"Teach not the child thus, Greville, I implore you," said Mary, relinquishing her knitting; "of what avail will it be, if I strive to make him virtuous, kind to the poor, prudent and industrious, if you instil precepts so stern, so cold and selfish into his young mind? If you have affection for me, Greville dearest, abandon such cruel ideas and plans, or I will begin to think you a changed man, and the Greville Hampton of to-day is not Greville that won the love of my girlhood—yea, and of my life," she added with great tenderness.

"I am a changed man—I admit it—a sorely changed man, in all things but my love for you, Mary," he replied, as he stooped and kissed her bright little upturned face, and perhaps thought for a moment—but a moment only—that no man could be unhappy who had the smile and love of such a woman as Mary to brighten the path and lighten the burden of his life.

"Riches are good and a godsend," said she, "if employed aright and not as a means of pleasure only."

"Aright?" repeated Greville, who was thinking of the clubs he once frequented, his whilom team of roans, and Ascot perhaps.

"Pleasure as a means of doing good and protecting the poor, assisting merit and rewarding ingenuity. The rich man who presumes on his wealth, and the poor man who desponds on his poverty are—"

"Oh, don't preach, Mary darling, leave that to our friend Asperges Laud. You are a duck and an angel, but I can't quite agree with you," he added with a sigh as he filled his briar-root with tobacco of a kind he would have disdained to smoke once.

Many emotions combined to fill Mary's eyes with tears, but to conceal them she turned away to seek Patty's aid in the preparation of some jellies for one of her pensioners—for though so poor herself she had several—a deformed girl who was dying of consumption; and in spare times she was wont to read good and amusing books by the bedsides of the old and blind, who were ailing or unable to be abroad. She had even pensioners among the little birds, for whom she daily spread out crumbs, especially in winter, upon her doorstep, whither they would come without fear of Mary's pet cat, which was too well fed to meddle with them.

Greville Hampton was in an unusually bitter mood that night, and long, long he sat abandoned to it after Mary had given a final but lingering look at the little subject of their anxieties, folded in his pretty cot, "like the callow cygnet in its nest," and then sought her pillow.

Evil spirits—envy, anger, and avarice—were struggling in the man's heart, with a keen sense of unmerited wrong inflicted on him, of injustice he had suffered, the black ingratitude of friends, and of his own extravagance and reckless folly in the past; and had there been a close observer present to watch his handsome features, they would have read by the working of these, how each passion prevailed in turn.

Finally, he emptied his cherished briar-root by tapping it on the hearth, put it in its case with an emphatic snap, and muttering, as he sought the side of his sleeping wife,

"Surely God will hear Mary's prayers, if not mine, that Derval may be rich—but never the luckless creature I am to-night."

Derval, a chubby child of six, with rosy dimpled cheeks, his mother's snowy skin, and his father's deep dark eyes, with a wealth of golden curls that rose crisp and in upward spouts from his forehead, grew fast, while the care of his boyish education devolved wholly on the delicate Mary, for Greville, though educated at Eton and finished off at Oxford, was too erratic by nature, and with all his love of their offspring, too impatient to share in the task of tutelage; in which, eventually, she was fully and powerfully, to her great gratitude, assisted by the Reverend Asperges Laud, the only visitor who shed a little light on their humble dwelling, and who was also the only link, as it seemed, that they cared to preserve between their past life and the present.

In his fortieth year, the Curate of Finglecombe—a place in which he was utterly lost, because of its obscurity, and where he subsisted on a mere pittance—was a man of considerable talent, and no small accomplishments. He had gained high academic honours in philosophy and theology, and was already known as author of several celebrated prize essays; he therefore proved a valuable friend to Mary and her little boy.

The Reverend Asperges Laud, M.A., Oxon., belonged not to the days of "nasal clerks and top-booted parsons." He was a man of broad and advanced views, with somewhat stately, yet very soft and gentle manners, who intoned his services, had matins and evensong, wore a coat with remarkably long tails, a Roman collarino and a broad hat of soft felt garnished with a black silk rosette, and was furtively addicted to the flute.

He had little choir boys in white collars and black surplices; called his altar-table "the sanctuary," and had four candles thereon which, in wholesome fear of the Court of Arches and His Grace of Canterbury, he dared not light as yet; and there was much about him that—according to the Methodists in the district—savoured of the City of the Seven Hills, yet, "a man he was to all the country dear."

All the neighbours about Finglecombe, but none more than Mr. Asperges Laud, were delighted with Mary's grave, sweet eyes, her softness of manner, her goodness of heart, her refined and cultivated mind, all of which lent additional charms to a certainly very statuesque little face.

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.

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?

"Oh," he would exclaim, "for a little of the wealth I have wasted in the foolish past time—for Mary's sake—for Mary's sake!"

How bitter it was to look back in the light of experience and think of what might be now, had he been wiser than he was! And his whole soul recoiled at the contemplation of the awful loneliness of life without her, if Mary were taken from him.

Her fast failing health drew him from his usual selfish and useless repining over the past, or if he did so, it was for her sake alone now; for that she was failing and passing away from him day by day, became painfully apparent; a cough shook her delicate form, and again and again was her handkerchief soaked in blood. And he could only groan over the poverty that precluded all change of air, or scene, and the employment of greater medical skill than that possessed by the country practitioner. But no skill could have availed Mary; and the frail tenure of her life, despite all his love and anxiety, was only a thing of time.

The consumption that was wasting her delicate form only served to make her beauty seem more tender, alluring, and pathetic to the eyes of her sorrow-stricken husband, to whom she said more than once, with her head reclined on his breast—

"If I am taken from you, Greville darling, I trust you will think of the past less regretfully, of the future more hopefully, and remember that we are, while here, but as 'little children playing with shells upon the shore of time.'"

"You are too good for this rough and bitter world," said he, as his tears fell hotly on her soft and rippling hair, and thought in his heart, "Oh, why does God take her and leave me?"

And he clasped her to his heart, as if by the mere strength of his love, and strength of his arms too, he might protect and keep her with him, and kissed her more tenderly than he had ever done in his lover days, for a holier emotion was in his heart now, and to him it seemed that touches of great sweetness came and went about her lips and into her unusually luminous eyes, though their expression grew more weary day by day, and there came into them also that strange, weird, and far-off look that belongs, not to this world, but to the life that is gradually ebbing away from it, and this expression Greville Hampton saw and read with acute mental agony.

"God is taking me away from you, darlings," she said softly, one evening; "but you will always be true and loving to each other for my sake."

Little Derval clung to his father, unable yet to realise the great sorrow that had come upon both.

Why prolong this part of our story? At last all was over, and Greville, worn out with grief and long watching, was led away like a child by the curate from the chamber of death, where his Mary lay, still rarely beautiful, as a piece of sculpture, in her last repose. All seemed terribly silent in the little cottage now; the buzzing of the flies in the sunshine, and the ticking of a clock alone were heard, unless it might be a sob from old Patty Fripp in the kitchen, where she sat rocking herself to and fro, with her apron over her head, or if she moved about it was with soft and stealthy tread, as if she feared to wake someone.

"Dead—gone—left him—his other self—it could not be!" he whispered in his soul, for he could not believe, in his great sorrow, that it was all happening to him. Surely it was some horrible nightmare, from which he would awake to find his little world going on as before!

But day followed day, each adding fresh details to the calamity, and that of the funeral came inexorably, the closing scene of all.

As one in a dream, Greville Hampton saw the episode like a grim phantasmagoria. He heard the bell tolling, and heard Mr. Laud sob, as he met the few mourners at the churchyard gate, and led the way to the grave, repeating the fine words of the burial service.

Grasping his father's hand, little Derval, with a stunned look and dry eyes, dry with wonder and a great fear, saw the coffin going down—down—till it disappeared, and then a cry burst from him, for he knew that mamma was there—there in that cruel coffin which had left his sight for ever, and he began, child-like, to understand the dire and dreadful reality!

At last the scene closed; the horrible jarring of shovels, gravel, and earth had ceased, and Greville Hampton came back to his broken and desolate home, where he sat like a man turned to stone, twisting fatuously, yet caressingly, a tress of shining dark brown hair, all that remained to him now of Mary, save the little boy, who nestled, with scared and wistful eyes, beside his knee.

The drawn blinds had for some days told all the passers-by that there was death in the cottage at Finglecombe. Strangers hurried past with a momentary glance, and thought no more of it, in the bright sunshine and business of life; but some there were who looked sorrowfully and went by with slower step, and there were the poor who missed the ministering hand of Mary Hampton. Even now the little birds, for whom she was wont to spread out crumbs, were tapping with their beaks at the window.

The blinds were drawn up now, and an unnatural flood of sunny light seemed to fill the place. Everything Greville's haggard glance fell on seemed to have a history of its own, a tender association, connected with her who had passed away. The little womanly trifles her hands had made to brighten this, their latter, humble home, were all there still; the cheap but artistic-looking cretonne with which her pretty and industrious fingers had deftly covered the furniture, brought back to memory the song she sang while doing so; the water-colours on the wall were her work too, scenes associated with the past years and long vanished happiness; and no comfort could be gathered from Tennyson's hackneyed couplet—

"'Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all."

The terrible distinctness with which the first clod of earth fell—as it seemed to him—on Mary's tender breast, was yet ringing in Greville's ears, together with the cry that escaped from Derval.

So Mary was gone, and for her the long, long night of the grave had begun!

CHAPTER II.
"Therefore he loved gold in special."—Chaucer.

"It is a great calamity, a heavy dispensation!" said a neighbour to Patty Fripp.

"He will get over it in time—the master," said others, especially the women; "all men get over these things—he'll marry again, no doubt; he is too young to live all alone in the world."

Patty was very indignant at this suggestion being made already.

"Time tries all, and soothes all," said another gossip; "we shall see by and by—men don't break their hearts for love, look you. And how about the little boy?"

"Poor little soul! he is fretting sorely for his mother," said Patty, polishing her face with her checked apron, after having 'a good cry'; "but that is just human natur, I s'pose."

To the lonely man it seemed strange that Mary was no longer in the cottage at Finglecombe, and it was difficult for him, for a time, to realise the idea that she was gone for ever from her place; that he would never see her again; and that morning and night would come inexorably; the weeks become months, and the months become years; and that no Mary, with all her great love and tenderness, was there to bear a part in the long vista of life that lay before him.

His loneliness became at times insupportable, and he was frequently absent from home—a circumstance which never occurred in Mary's time. On these occasions the long and sleepless hours of night were terrible to little Derval, with his true Devonshire dread of the supernatural, for he had no longer the sweet consciousness of the near presence of his watchful mother.

At such times, till sleep sealed his eyes, he had but one thought—that out there in the dew and darkness of night, as in the sunshine by day, was the grave of one who had loved him and tended him, as no other human being would do, in the little churchyard, where the white tombstones and crosses contrasted so strongly and beautifully with the emerald green of the turf and the darker tint of the vast ancient yew that overshadowed them.

In all the wide earth—the earth of which he had, as yet, so little conception, there was already no spot so dear to little Derval as the turf that covered his mother's grave; and thus in the darkness of the moonless nights he was wont to waken and weep when he heard the cold wind sighing and the rain falling; and he shuddered at the thought that she was out there, exposed to them both, as it seemed to his heated fancy.

Then a great terror would come over him, till he crept softly into bed beside old Patty Fripp.

So the first heart-piercing days of sorrow and unavailing regret began to pass away, and the old craving after wealth, the world, and mammon began to resume its sway in the mind of Greville Hampton, and the dreams of which we have spoken came to his fancy again.

He began to think of Mary with more composure, and could hear, in silence, Mr. Asperges Laud, when urged by him, gently and sweetly, to remember that she had only faded out, as the stars fade, to shine again; had died as the flowers die in autumn, for resurrection in a brighter summer, in which he should meet her again, and there should be neither sorrow nor parting. All this sounded and seemed too remote and vague for the ache, the bitter void made by her departure. Yet though Mr. Laud knew by experience that Father Time was a great consoler, there was another nearer at hand than his Reverence had quite reckoned on.

Over the life of little Derval there was now a change, which he felt, though did not quite understand. The loss of his mother he had become accustomed to; but somehow, though there seemed plenty of happiness in the world, it never came to him. Other children whom he saw, or met at Mr. Laud's classes, seemed all well fed, neatly clad, and joyous, for they had come thither with mothers' kisses on their rosy cheeks, and the same caresses awaited them when they went home; but he had no one to kiss him now, save old Patty Fripp, who, like a genuine maid-of-all-work, was seldom without a smudge on one side of her nose.

Papa seemed for ever absent, for, as the months ran on, he seemed to have found some mysterious occupation elsewhere than at Finglecombe.

There was a time when Greville Hampton used to steal to the bedside of his little boy, and hang over him in his sleep, parting the thick curly hair from his forehead, softly and tenderly, while remarking with fondness, that there still he could see Mary's long eyelashes, Mary's brow and pure sweet profile, and all the loving memory of her would gush up in his heart.

Observant Patty thought that he was wont to do this less and less now, while his absences from the lonely cottage became more frequent and long. She marvelled much at this. Had he fallen in with some schemes by which to amend his shattered fortune—the schemes on which she had again and again heard him descant in times past? But whatever caused the change in his habits and bearing, it was soon to be made apparent to her now.

Patty was startled from her usual propriety, or the even tenor of her way, when Greville Hampton, with some reluctance or hesitation in his manner, as if conscious of the speculation he would excite, announced that three guests were coming to dinner on a certain day; and thereupon great bustle ensued at the cottage of Finglecombe, whither the railway van brought various wines, fruits, and condiments, "even to the last grapes and first cucumbers of the season," as Patty Fripp said, for the expected guests; and Patty had to obtain the aid of a neighbour as a helping hand, and the united wonder and excitement culminated, when two of the guests arrived in a handsome and well-appointed brougham, and proved to be ladies—an old and a young one—a Mrs. Rookleigh (of whom Patty had never heard) and her niece, whom, with all her beauty, she mentally deemed to be hard, bold, and haughty.

It is a strange but true assertion, that anxiety, like misfortune, can lend misgiving and fear to any unwonted occurrence, and now Patty Fripp, for the little boy's sake, began to apprehend—she scarcely knew what!

"When I'm 'urried I'm flurried," said she to her gossip, "and look you, it ain't easy to get this place, a cottage though it be, ready by myself—to sort rooms and toilet-tables, kill chickens and dress 'em, and bake cakes, look you, like the king as burned 'em, lay tables, and all that sort o' thing!"

Mr. Hampton received his guests with great empressement, welcomed them to Finglecombe, with the beautiful surroundings of which they were greatly delighted, and—as Patty's watchful and wondering eyes were upon him—he was not sorry when the Curate arrived, and he desired her to conduct the ladies to a room, and assist them to remove the costumes they had driven in.

About the elder lady there was so little to remark that Patty scarcely noticed her, but her niece, Miss Anne Rookleigh, then nearer her thirtieth than her twentieth year, was brilliantly fair in complexion, with large and languishing eyes of that golden-hazel colour which so often goes with a duplicity of character, a magnificent figure, and masses of light chesnut coloured hair. Save that her bearing and expression were hard and cold, despite the languor in her eyes, the most severe connoisseur in female beauty could have found no fault with her, unless his glance fell upon her hands, which, for a lady so generally refined in aspect, were decidedly large and even coarse-looking.

Since his mother had been borne away—it seemed so long ago now—in that grim funeral car with its black plumes, no ladies had ever been under their roof, till these two came, and now to Derval it seemed that his papa was far less gloomy than he had been—indeed, was quite gay; one of these ladies, Derval thought, eyed him curiously, even hostilely through her gold glass, and he, grasping the while his top and whip, looked steadily up in her proud face with a reconnoitring gaze that piqued her.

The dinner passed over like any other. Greville Hampton was scrupulously attentive to both aunt and niece, but was so delicate and guarded in his manner, that Patty, who knew not the language of the eyes, could, as yet, obtain no clue to her suspicions; but, for the first time in his short life, the child was conscious of a something undefinable, he knew not what, in the manner of his father to himself, and felt that if the former did not quite repel his advances and wished-for caresses, he failed completely to respond to them, while under the golden hazel eyes of Miss Anne Rookleigh.

Derval then drew to the side of her aunt, who was intently conversing with Mr. Asperges Laud, and whom he utterly failed to interest, on the subject of his pet canary, and the big Dorking hen, that had been mamma's, and laid so many eggs.

At last the ladies rose, and quitting the table resolved to seek the garden, leaving their host and the curate to their wine and cigars.

"You have a piano here, Greville," said Miss Rookleigh with a bright smile.

"It is locked," said he uneasily.

"But there is a key, of course?"

"I have lost it," said he evasively; for the piano had been Mary's, and he could not yet have a stranger's fingers running over the keys where hers had brought forth the familiar notes.

So the ladies swept forth into the little garden, where they found a rustic chair under the shadow of a golden laburnham tree, and where the roses that Mary's hands had tended were now in all the beauty and luxuriance of midsummer; and ere long, Patty Fripp, who was not above eaves-dropping, while collecting fresh salad for supper, and unobserved was close by listening to all the two visitors said, obtained a clue to the whole matter.

In fact, Greville Hampton, the widower, was engaged to Miss Anne Rookleigh!

"Yes," said the latter, leisurely fanning herself, "that child of his will be a great bore!"

"A greater bore if you have any little ones of your own," said the aunt, laughing; "but don't begin with this spirit in your breast, Anne—take care."

"Take care of what?" asked the niece, haughtily.

"I mean of abusing the great power you so evidently possess over your intended."

"I little thought, aunt, when I was only amusing myself with him at Ilfracombe, rambling among the Tors, sketching the Lover's Leap, talking, playing chess with him, singing to him, accepting his flowers and all that, I would come to love him as I do, and end at last by finding this engagement ring on my finger!"

("So-so!" muttered Patty, under her breath, with a vicious sniff; "my old gossip was right—men don't break their hearts and die of love—for their wives at all events, look you!")

"Yes, I love him for himself alone," resumed Miss Rookleigh, after a pause, "not his fortune certainly," she added with a mocking laugh; "he is so handsome and winning. But I know, aunt, that though you are a widow, you deem it impossible that there can be any romance in a second marriage; and yet in such, a man may learn that his first was a mistake, and that now he only loves for the first time," and with a dreamy smile in her bright hazel eyes she swayed her fan to and fro.

"No one looks for romance in a second marriage—at least, I should not," replied her practical aunt; "I have always deemed them, like most first marriages, matters of convenience or of calculation, now-a-days. At all events you must admit, Anne, that all freshness of the heart must be gone?"

"Aunt, you are very unpleasant! I believe a man is quite capable of loving twice, and the second time more than the first; because he must know his own mind better. If I thought that Greville had only the shadow of love to offer me—but I shall not canvas the idea! Greville's first marriage must seem like a dream to him now, and, if otherwise, it will go hard with me if I do not soon obliterate all memory of a former affection. He married his first wife for her beauty, I believe; but she was a poor namby-pamby little thing. He'll soon forget her, nay, he must have forgotten her now!" And a flash came into her eyes, of subtle colour, as she spoke.

"Hush, Anne, how would you like to be spoken of thus? Besides, his child—her child—will be a perpetual reminder."

"It is aggravating! I believe the little brat already views me as an interloper; and though I knew his age, he is on a larger scale than I expected, and certainly looks old for the child of a man so youthful as Greville; and then he speaks with the odious Devonshire patois!"

"One lucky thing is that your engagement will not be a long one, if you are satisfied for the time with this poor—though certainly pretty—place."

"It satisfied her," thought Patty, glancing at the distant spire, the shadow of which was falling on Mary's grave; and the old woman crept away, as she had heard more than enough, muttering, "after all these years I'd give him warning this very hour, but for the sake of the child. Poor Derval! from this day, I fear me, his life will be a blighted one! Dear, dear! but the master has soon begun to sweeten the hay again!" she added, referring to an old Cornish practice common among lovers in haymaking time.

So barely a year had elapsed, since the woman who clung to him so tenderly and truly in poverty, as in wealth, and whose heart had been for years against his own, had been laid in the silent grave, when Greville Hampton brought another—but not a fairer—wife to share his cottage home.

That home he had spared no expense his means permitted to decorate for the new idol, who had certainly not come to him undowered. Many old and familiar objects had been removed—there were cogent reasons why—and gave place to newer fancies.

While Derval and Patty had been the sole occupants of the cottage at Finglecombe, the wedded pair had been spending their honeymoon on the continent; they had seen Antwerp with its cathedral and the art treasures of its galleries; Cologne and Coblentz, the precipitous Kolandseck with its baronial ruin and mouldering arch; hill-encircled Ems, the banks of the picturesque Lake, wooded Nassau and merry Wiesbaden; Greville the while judiciously silent that he had gone all that bridal tour once before. But now he thoroughly believed in his second election; and it has been said that, at few times, or at no time, of his life, is a man such a true believer in faith and love as when he plunges into matrimony; and we must suppose that it was so with Greville Hampton.

The arrival of the bride at Finglecombe, with all her boxes and that "particular baggage," as Patty thought, her own maid, was a source of sore worry to the former, who could no longer pursue the even tenor of her way under the new state of things.

Greville kissed his little boy, who clung fondly to him; but the bride gave the latter her gloved hand coldly, and scanned him through her glass, while he eyed her with mistrust and wonder, and with a strange shrinking, for somehow her eye chilled him, and thus, at the very home-coming there was a petty contretemps.

"Kiss him, Anne dearest," said Greville; "go and be kissed by your mamma, Derval."

"She is not my mamma," said the child recoiling.

"Go and be kissed by her instantly, sir!"

"I won't, Papa."

"Then leave the room, sir!"

"He gives me a cold reception, certainly," said Mrs. Hampton, her golden-coloured eyes sparkling dangerously under their rather white lashes, as she threw off some of her travelling wraps and appeared to Patty's wondering eyes in a rich and handsome dress, that accorded well with the stately character of her beauty; and Derval slunk away, doubtful and fearing, whether he had done right or wrong; but then, what did papa mean by calling this strange woman his mamma?

"His presence shall not annoy you, Anne."

"But, until he gets accustomed to me, Greville?"

"I shall compel him to stay in his own room, or in the kitchen with Patty, till he knows how to treat you."

So on this day the troubles of Derval really began. He felt that he could never be even confident in the presence of this stranger who had so suddenly taken a high place in their little household. There was everything in her manner and bearing to repel him, and when she spoke to him his large eyes dilated under her stony gaze, as those of a bird are said to do when a serpent begins its charm of fear; and when rated for some trifle, he said sullenly:

"I want my own mamma. Why did papa bring you here, and set you in her place at table?"

"Dare you say so; you are a very bold child!" she exclaimed with some heat, and in her hard constrained voice, when a more generous woman would have smiled and resorted to caresses; "you ought to learn to love me."

"Never!" said the chubby Derval stoutly; "I shall only love my own mamma; she allowed me to climb on papa's knee and kiss him, but you won't."

"This brat, Derval," she thought, "must certainly remind him of that woman he loved, or fancied he loved, in the days of his youth and folly! Derval must be sent from this—out of this, somehow—anyhow! I would that he were old enough to go to sea."

To sea! Was his future shadowed forth in this idea?

Time will show.

And already she began to hate the child, all the more that her husband in his dreams—for he was as great a dreamer as ever—more than once, in her hearing, muttered or whispered to himself, softly and sadly, as to one near him, the name of "Mary," when doubtless the present was forgotten, and the days of the past came back in the visions of the night.

"He is thinking of his boyish fancies and his wax doll," Anne would mutter; "how shall I have patience to endure this if it occurs often?"

Tall, proud, haughty, and imperious in her secret nature, she was in all things the reverse of the mignonne, gentle and affectionate "wax doll," she thought of so contemptuously.

The poor for miles around felt a change now. Mary had ever but little to spare from her own slender store, and that little was given freely with kind words to all; yet the new bride that had come to Finglecombe, though wealthier far than ever poor Mary hoped to be, even amid all Greville's brilliant schemes and aspirations, gave not a crumb of broken victuals to the passing mendicant; and as for the sick and needy in the adjacent lanes, and little cob-villages, she knew not of their existence.

She had brought him a round sum of money, which, perhaps, more than even her beauty and unmistakable advances, had lured Greville Hampton into this second alliance; and with this he had speedily begun to speculate successfully in the purchase of land at Finglecombe, and to see, in prospect, the possible realisation of his golden dreams!

Had anyone ventured to hint to Greville Hampton that he had now forgotten Mary, he would have repelled the accusation with anger. But he had been lonely—he felt the want of companionship; this woman was handsome, and had been bent on winning him, for he was possessed of much manly beauty, with a fine presence; and the dowry she had, roused in him anew that craving thirst, that eager longing for "the gold that perisheth."

But in her love for him, and jealousy of the dead, she was somewhat exacting, and tried him considerably at times.

"You loved your first wife, of course, Greville, because it is your nature to be tender and loving," said she on one occasion; "but do, please, put her portrait away."

"Why, Anne?"

"Because the eyes of it seem to follow me everywhere, to watch me; and I can never see it without thinking—thinking—"

"Of what?"

"That she was as dear to you, perhaps—as near to you, certainly—as I am."

"Your ideas are foolish, Anne," said he; but the portrait was removed eventually, and one of her aunt, Mrs. Rookleigh, took its place.

Sometimes she went further than this, and would test his veracity a little unwarrantably, in her inordinate vanity, and with ineffably bad taste.

"Tell me, dearest Greville," she said, hanging over him, and caressing him with great empressement, "did you ever love before as you love me now?"

He smoked his old briar-root, but made no reply.

"Tell me—tell me," she persisted, while playfully pulling his ear; but his heart felt a pang, and his eye wandered involuntarily to where poor Mary's portrait used to hang.

"Why so inquisitive?" said he; "you know that I was married before. Do you think I am so vile as to marry without loving?"

"That is no answer. But were you ever so much in love as you are now?"

Wishing to evade the inquiry, he smoked rather doggedly on; so she questioned him again.

"Some fellows are in love a score of times, with every pretty girl they meet, in fact," said he.

"But you, Greville, are not one of those men."

"No, Anne, most certainly not."

So she could extract no more from him. He was weak in her hands, but to have said what she wished, he felt would he coarse treason to the dead, and thought, "why could she not be content?"

And when she sang—but in a style Mary never sang—she indulged in high fantastic flourishes, running her hands heavily over the same keys that Mary's pretty fingers had been wont to touch so lightly. For a time Greville Hampton winced at the familiar sound of the instrument, as if a spirit was conjured up by it; but ere long he became hardened—accustomed to it.

Soon her piano, almost every immediate relic of Mary, disappeared; and times there were when her successor spoke—but never in Greville's hearing—of her memory in a sneering manner, that stung the sensitive Derval, and as he grew older, maddened and infuriated him. However, he was but a child yet, and barely understood the tithe of what she said.

To her he was a perpetual eyesore; and in the round of her daily life—especially in the absence of Greville—she found a hundred petty means of venting her groundless dislike upon him.

"Get out of the way—leave the room, boy—go and play in the garden—you are not wanted here!" Such were hourly the greetings to the child now—no kisses, no caresses as of old. All his sweet childish impulses were crushed or checked, and thrust back upon himself, and distrust and dislike of her, the typical rather than the real stepmother (fortunately for humanity's sake), grew strong in his heart—his little yearning heart, that felt half broken at times by neglect, for he had no one now, save old Patty, to whom he could tell all the wondrous secrets, and deep, tender confidences of child-life.

And even Patty he might not have long, as in Mrs. Hampton's mind she contrasted unfavourably with her own maid; she deemed her gauche, for Patty was a stout, broad, and short-necked woman, with a clumsy gait, a ruddy complexion, red sandy hair, eyes rather green than grey, and with a resolute mouth and chin that came of her Cornish blood.

"Poor little Master Derval, poor darling!" said Patty once to Greville. "She has never said a kind word to him since she came to the house; and look you, sir, he would think she was mocking him if she said one now—yah!" and she ground her teeth.

"Silence, Patty; I cannot permit you to speak thus of Mrs. Hampton," said he angrily.

"Missus Hampton, indeed!" grumbled Patty, but under her breath, however. But one day Greville overheard a remark which gave him a pang.

"Derval, where are you going, sir?" demanded Mrs. Hampton imperiously, as he was taking his little cap.

"To the sea-shore," he answered shyly.

"Again? You are never anywhere else, and always come back with wet and sandy shoes. What takes you there?"

"I like to watch the waves come in, and listen to what they are saying."

"You are a little fool; I say you shall not go!" and seizing him with hands, which we have said were not small ones, she shook him violently, and tears sprang to his eyes.

"Oh," he wailed, "that my own mamma would come out of the ground, and help her little boy!"

"Ah, but your mamma can't," she said spitefully; "she is deep enough down, thank Heaven!"

"Hush, Anne," said Greville, suddenly appearing; "for Heaven's sake don't speak to the child in that manner."

"He aggravates me so!" she replied, colouring; but more with anger than shame.

"Oh, I do beg your pardon," said Derval one day, approaching in great tribulation, with his little hands pressed tremblingly together.

"For what?" she asked sharply.

"Please, I have broken your little china vase."

"The vase that dear Aunt Rookleigh gave me! Oh you clumsy, obnoxious brat!" she exclaimed, while her eyes gleamed with anger; and as no one was near she punished him severely.

"Mother, mother! mamma, mamma!" he cried, panting in her grasp, "oh, come back to your little boy, and save him from this terrible woman!"

"Woman, indeed, you fractious imp; I'll teach you what your mamma, as you call her, never did—manners!" and she continued to beat him till he, and herself, were quite breathless, and then she flung him in a heap into a corner, to sob himself into sullen composure.

In the lust of her cruelty she, by the pursuance of a system all her own, succeeded in actually weaning much of the regard of his father from him, and had him excluded from the dining-room when dessert—to which he had always been admitted—was on the table.

Banishment from dessert seemed to Derval the acme of ill-usage; and, apart from the loss of the good things thereat, he never forgot the day he found himself thus banished.

He had come into the room when he knew "papa was there," and rushed, breathless and laughing, up to his side.

"My chair is not put in for me, papa!" he exclaimed; "why is this?"

Seizing one, he began to drag it across the room towards the table, and to his father's side. Mrs. Hampton looked at him darkly (she was rather an Epicurean and did not like to be worried at meals), and Greville did so silently and uneasily, for he was not unmoved just then by the tender and pleading expression he read in the child's eyes.

"I thought you said, my dear, that we were not to be disturbed in this way by that gauche boy?" said Mrs. Hampton; "and you know the nervous condition to which he reduces me—just now, at least."

"Leave the room, Derval; mamma does not want you to-day."

"Oh, papa, you are not angry with me?"

"Yes—no—but go; you are a bad boy to insist on coming to table."

And so Derval never sat at that table again till the day came when he was to leave the house for ever.

As he was peremptorily forbidden to go near the sea-shore, he frequently went to the churchyard of Finglecombe and spent hours there, weaving chaplets of daisies and wild flowers.

"What brings you here so often, my poor child?" asked Mr. Asperges Laud (patting him on the head) the curate, in his long-tailed coat, gaiters, and Roman collarino.

"To be near mamma's grave," said Derval, gulping down a sob. "Besides, it is a quiet place for a good cry," he added, as the kind curate took him into his little thatched parsonage.

In the dark nights of winter he could recal how tenderly mamma put him to bed, and watched beside him till he slept. It was old Patty Fripp who did so now, who tucked him cosily into his little crib and kissed him some twenty times ere she bade him "good-night," but, by order of Mrs. Hampton, was not permitted to linger beside him.

"The child tells you, ma'm, that he can't sleep in the dark alone, from fear," urged Patty on one occasion.

"Fear of what?" she asked curtly.

"The Long Cripples."

"What do you mean?"

Patty then told her that snakes in Devonshire were called "long cripples," and Derval had heard of the one at Manaton, that was as big as a human body, and had legs as well as wings, and uttered a hiss that could be heard for miles around.

"The boy is a fool, and you are another; leave him to sleep, or wake, as he chooses," was the mandate. So Derval was left to sob himself asleep in the dark, cowering under his coverlet, fearing "the Long Cripple" was coming when the wind moaned in the chimney, or the ivy-leaves pattered on the window-panes.

Apart from the comments of Patty, the remarks of schoolfellows and neighbours were not wanting to foster the growing animosity of Derval to his stepmother. Curious eyes watched him, and the inquisitive questioned him, extracting answers, to which they gave suggestions all calculated to inflame his impotent wrath; and now a day came when the cottage at Finglecombe was turned topsy-turvy, and Derval, to his utter bewilderment, was banished for some time to the parsonage.

The real Lord of Finglecombe had come in the shape of a baby-brother to him—a baby whom the Rev. Asperges Laud made a little Christian by the name of Rookleigh Greville Hampton.

And now, more than ever, as this little one had come, did the father bless his increasing prospects in the acquisition of land, and in the profits thereon, as, like the man in the Canterbury Tales, "therefore loved he gold in special."

New hopes sprang up in the heart of Greville, and with the wealth he seemed likely to acquire, he ceased to regret that which he had lost, and to repine about the title of which his father and grandsire had been, as he believed, illegally deprived.

But in the years to come this baby-brother was fated to have a terrible and calamitous influence upon the destiny of Derval Hampton.

Greville Hampton was so successful in his speculations that he actually hoped, in time, to make quite an estate of Finglecombe. Money makes money, and thus he became a wealthy man; for true it is, "that the thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never in the way we have imagined it."

His dreams of an El Dorado, and Mary's reading thereof, came back to his memory, when he saw house after house being built in the little dell that overlooked the sea; and he recalled her words, "Your riches lie, not in California, but here in Finglecombe." How prophetic were her words!

Now that he was becoming wealthy, many persons who had held somewhat aloof from him began to discover a hundred good qualities in him they had never dreamed of before. Ladies had always admitted that he was a more than ordinarily handsome man; their husbands—county men—praised his seat on horseback, his manner and bearing, remarked the cheerfulness and good nature expressed in his face, and began to extol the great frankness of his manner, though, sooth to say, they saw little of him; for he, remembering how they had ignored his existence in the past, ignored theirs in the present time.

He steadily added acre to acre. A small, but pretty village, approaching the dignity of a watering-place, had sprung up in the lovely dell where the little cottage of Finglecombe stood, for it had now given place to an imposing brick villa, which seemed to look haughtily down on the humbler dwellings around, with its plate-glass oriels, ogee gables, its handsome oaken porch of fanciful design, and its sweeping approaches, rolled and gravelled between beautiful shrubberies.

As wealth flowed in and brought back wonted luxuries with it, he ceased to remember poor Mary's pathetic attempts at a little ornament and refinement amid the humility of her later surroundings, for Greville Hampton became a sorely changed man to all, and to Derval especially.

Could Mary have dreamed that a day would ever come when her child would pine for his father's love, as Derval pined in secret? But under the cruel influence of the second wife and her little boy it was so. Much of this, perhaps, arose from Hampton's absorption in his own pursuits, so fearful was he of losing any time that might add to his increasing store. Thus no word of endearment, of praise for studious conduct, no caress cheered the lonely little boy, who saw all such as his father could spare exacted by Mrs. Hampton for his baby-brother, while her petty tyranny and aversion to himself grew daily together, and a woman so petty, weak-minded, and jealous—jealous even of the dead—found much to inflict in the round of home life.

Once, during a protracted absence of his father—not that his presence perhaps would have mattered much—his little pet dog was taken from him, and sent away he knew not where, and when he wept and clamoured for it, she beat him and pulled his ears till his head ached. On another occasion she deprived him of his canary, as its seed and chickweed "made a mess"; and then he felt—as when she sent "mamma's big Dorking" to the spit—something like murder in his little heart.

He rushed at her and contrived to inflict sundry kicks about her ankles, which made her scream, and in a moment the strong and athletic hand of his father was upon him.

"Ask instant pardon of your mamma, sir!" was the command.

"I won't—she is not my mamma."

"I tell you, sir, she is," and the blows fell like a hailstorm about the head and shoulders of Derval. But not a tear came from his eyes now; his lips were firmly compressed, his face was deadly pale, and he regarded his father with a steady and unflinching eye.