Read Ebook: Derval Hampton: A Story of the Sea Volume 1 (of 2) by Grant James

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Ebook has 647 lines and 39467 words, and 13 pages

DERVAL HAMPTON.

"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, "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."

"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.

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!"

"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.

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