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

"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.

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.

"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."

"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.

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.

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