DERVAL HAMPTON

A Story of the Sea.

BY

JAMES GRANT,

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

VOL. II.

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

1881.

(All rights reserved.)

LONDON: PRINTED BY W. H. ALLEN AND CO., 13, WATERLOO PLACE.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.—"A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea"

CHAPTER II.—Turtle Island

CHAPTER III.—H.M.S. Holyrood

CHAPTER IV.—The Desire of the Moth for the Star"

CHAPTER V.—"Deeper than e'en Plummet sounded"

CHAPTER VI.—A Crushed Heart

CHAPTER VII.—Nemesis

DERVAL HAMPTON

(A STORY OF THE SEA.)

CHAPTER I. "A WET SHEET AND A FLOWING SEA."

Another long spell of the sea, including several voyages and some stirring adventures, was before Derval now, with a protracted absence from Britain. The ship was not getting ready for sea, so Captain Talbot was on shore, when a hansom cab deposited Derval and his belongings close by the gangway that led on board, where he was warmly welcomed by Joe Grummet and Harry Bowline.

"So Girtline has left us, Hal?"

"Yes, in bad health."

"And what sort of fellow is his successor?" asked Derval as they descended to the cabin.

"He is simply horrid—a cad, a brute!" exclaimed Bowline. "He is in the hold just now, and if a cask fell out of the slings on his head, it would be a good thing for all on board. He is so different from poor Girtline; he looks like an old pirate, and has stopped our promotion; but you see, Hampton, the owners think us rather young for further advancement yet. Steward, a couple of grogs; the sun is over the fore-yard!"

"When do we sail?"

"I don't exactly know, but I wish we saw Blue Peter up!"

"This Rudderhead—" began Derval, thinking of the mysterious letter.

"You'll have enough of him in time, I doubt not. He has already caused much ill-blood on board."

"How?"

"He plays the tyrant in the Captain's absence; he has stopped the men's grog for next to nothing, though he is seldom quite sober himself; he sent two of the apprentices aloft, and had them lashed to the topgallant shrouds, in sight of all the people; and, like a beast as he is, had the lashings wetted that they might shrink, a trick he must have picked up in the Canton river! He refused Joe Grummet leave, and me too, though there was no duty to do but the anchor-watch," said Bowline, referring to the two or three men appointed to look after a ship while at anchor or in port. "But hush! here he comes lumbering down the companion-ladder—screwed, I have no doubt."

Step by step he came down, his large splay feet, thick legs, the broader part of his person, his great back, short neck, and bullet-like head all appearing in succession. He looked full and scrutinisingly at the new-comer, while Hal, taking off his cap, bowed to each, and said mockingly:

"Mr. Derval Hampton—Mr. Reeve Rudderhead; Mr. Reeve Rudderhead—Mr. Derval Hampton."

The first mate eyed both viciously, particularly Bowline, who finished his grog, and eyeing him defiantly in turn, went slowly on deck, singing as he went a grotesque song:

"We bore away to the Greenland seas till we saw a mighty whale, The tremendous length of which, 'tis said, did reach from the head to the tail, brave boys! The captain on the bowsprit stood, with the mainmast in his hand: 'Overhaul, overhaul! let the main-deck fall, and belay her to the land, brave boys!'"

Mr. Rudderhead meanwhile seated himself on a locker and leisurely proceeded to fill a clay pipe, while quite as leisurely surveying Derval. He was a piratical, bull-dog looking fellow, about forty years of age, with a broad swollen visage, which, where it was not red by grog blossoms and blotches, was covered by cuts and scars, won in fisticuff battles in the vicinity of Wapping or the docks. His figure was powerful and suggestive of enormous brutal strength. His appearance was repugnant and dirty; he wore the kind of uniform prescribed by Curry & Co. for the officers of their ships, but it was evidently a second-hand suit, and was already greasy, foul, and frayed.

As his eyes met those of Derval, the latter felt, "by instinct swift as light," that he was face to face with an enemy—a worse one than Paul Bitts—who was, moreover, the cousin of his hostile step-mother, and no doubt in frequent communication with her.

"Oho!" said he, scraping a match and lighting his pipe; "so you are Derval Hampton, eh?"

"I am, as yet, Mr. Derval Hampton to you, sir," said our hero sharply.

"I beg your pardon, Mister Hampton," said he, lifting his cap impertinently.

"Yes; and I am third mate of this ship."

"I am the first, which you'll find out in time, so let us know each other at once. I am a sharp hand at my duty, and stand no nonsense—so keep a bright look-out, I say!" he added, adopting a bullying tone, as he had evidently been drinking; and he interlarded his conversation with many "strange oaths," which we cannot commit to paper.

"You are, I understand, a cousin of my step-mother?" said Derval, not unwilling to try and conciliate this truculent fellow, with whom his lot would be unluckily cast for some time.

"Yes, first cousin; and she told me to look very particularly after you."

"Indeed—very kind of her! But I can look pretty well after myself, and others too."

"I believe you are apt to cut up rough on occasions, and lay out to windward if you can."

"Indeed!" said Derval, his choler rising.

"And I was to see that you did your duty well, to ship and owners."

"I can do my duty without need of your supervision," said Derval, annoyed still more by the peculiar tone this obnoxious personage adopted.

"And so can I, though I don't belong to the Royal Naval Reserve," said he with a sneer.

"Nor are ever likely to do so, unless you mend your manners and your morals, too."

"What the—what do you know about me or my morals?" demanded Rudderhead, with a black look; "you lubberly haymaker!"

"I can guess much—we guess much about ships that go down, though we may not be certain about them."

"Down—what do you mean by or about down—any particular ship?" asked the other hoarsely, and with a terrible oath, while his face grew pale, all save the pimples and blotches, and his eyes glared like those of a rattlesnake.

"I mean precisely what my words infer," replied Derval disdainfully, as he quitted the cabin and went on deck, convinced that he had, by a random speech, probed some dark secret in this man's life, and stung him in some way; and in the time to come he gained a clue to it.

How a woman so refined and lady-like as Mrs. Hampton—for she was both in appearance, unquestionably—came to have such a remarkable kinsman it was difficult to say; but from that hour there was a declared feud between him and Derval, and both were prepared to carry it out to the bitter end.

Derval's indignation was very keen. Through all the years he had been away from home, the tender home-love had never died in his honest and passionate heart. To Finglecombe he had sent all he could give—letters, presents, and many a token of regard; but all in vain; and now she, who had driven him from that home—a luxurious one now—had found him an enemy, and a dangerous one, in the truculent savage, Reeve Rudderhead.

Derval hailed the return of the Captain on board with right good welcome. He was warmly welcomed by the latter, who said:

"I saw by the London Gazette, and other papers, that Her Majesty had, at the request of Lord Oakhampton, given you the Albert Medal for saving his girl's life! Long may you live to wear it, Derval; but now you must, like me, join the Reserve; you'll just be able to manage your training before we sail."

This was exactly suited to the young man's tastes and ambition; so Derval was duly commissioned as a midshipman on board H.M. training ship President, appeared in his uniform as such, with the Albert Medal on his right breast, and performed twenty-eight days drill, under the Gunnery Lieutenant, messing with the officers in the ward room.

This brief sojourn on board Her Majesty's ship, while so much active and even dirty work (which Derval luckily escaped) was being done in the Amethyst, roused the ready wrath and jealousy of Mr. Reeve Rudderhead to boiling heat against him; and consequently, when Derval again appeared on her deck, he was greeted by that personage in this manner:—

"Now, then, Mister Derval Hampton, as you have done us the honour of coming aboard again, you'll perhaps take off that dandy gold ring of yours, with the three crows—or are they three mudlarks?—on it; and go aloft and see to greasing down the foretop-mast, and setting up the maintopmast backstay."

"Very good, sir," said Derval, passing on.

"A gold ring!" muttered the bully, aside; "I'll warrant him as perfect a cock-pit beau as ever foundered in the lee-scuppers."

"What is the difference between foundering and going down?" asked Derval, as a Parthian shot, remembering how curiously the word had stung his enemy before, and a terrible scowl darkened the face of the latter, as he turned away grumbling one of his deep maledictions.

The cargo was complete now, and the ship was ready for sea; all the running rigging had been examined, and that which was unfit for service removed, and new rigging rove in its place, together with the studding gear, and "the chaffing gear," which consists of roundings or mats, battens, put upon the rigging and spars to prevent their being frayed, was all arranged under the eyes of Joe Grummet, as the ship dropped down the river, and was again taken into the Channel by old Toggle the Deal pilot.

After the two lights on the Lizard Point—the last they saw of England—melted out in distance and the obscurity of a February night, and the Amethyst was altogether clear of the English Channel, the weather became delightful, the water smooth, the skies clear, and as the wind was fair, she ran before it merrily, without tack or sheet being lifted, till the latitudes of balmy breezes and sunny days in long succession were reached.

Every other day vessels were passed, but after a time the seas became more lonely, and for many a day no sail would be in sight; and then a succession of foul winds took the Amethyst considerably out of her course, and to the westward.

The crew of a vessel while at sea is generally divided in two portions, called the starboard and port watches. The former, in a merchant ship, is the captain's watch, but is frequently commanded by the second mate; the other, the larboard or port watch, falls to the chief mate; and the periods of time occupied by each part of the crew alternately, while thus on duty, are also termed watches.

One night, after Fogo—one of the Cape de Vere Islands—had been passed, with its volcano 9,000 feet above the sea, all aflame as it now generally is, after fifty years of silence, Mr. Rudderhead was so long of coming on deck to relieve Captain Talbot, who had the starboard watch from 8 to 12, that he sent Derval below to rouse him up.

Under all circumstances Derval disliked coming in contact with this man, who was a dark and repellent fellow, haunted in his sleep by nightmares and dreams, amid which ever and anon—as sometimes when he was irritated by day—he would mutter horribly of some ship going down with all hands on board.

As Derval entered the cabin, it was lighted only by a swinging lamp in the skylight, where, with the tell-tale compass, it vibrated to and fro with every roll of the ship, and as he made his way towards the berth, where the first mate lay fast asleep with his clothes on, all ready to turn out, he became aware that Rudderhead was in one of his drunken slumbers, for he had a store of spirits in his own baggage, and often imbibed so much as to endanger the ship when in his care.

He lay on his back, his repulsive visage half seen and half sunk in shadow by the partial light of the cabin lamp, and was evidently haunted by one of his peculiar dreams just then, and was muttering about a ship called the North Star.

At first he was actually smiling, and then an expression of intense cunning and gratification stole over his face as he muttered—

"Good, good; I understand ... the Marine Insurance must stump up ... all the boats gone save one, save one," he said, in a husky whisper; "all but mine—mine! ... alongside. Where's the auger? ... here ... now, now, through outer and inner sheathing ... there is one!" and his clenched hands revolved over each other as in fancy he grasped the cross handle of an auger, and in fancy—could Derval doubt it?—was piercing a ship's side. "Three, four, five ... off, off ... now she begins to settle in the water ... they find she is going down ... now to scull for the shore ... four miles ... How they shriek, and cry, and howl ... How pale their faces look in the moonlight ... they threaten, rave, and implore me to return ... no help for them ... down they go ... down, down, down, and now they all come up with their dead faces and white hands out of the green sea. They glare at me on every side ... they grasp the gunwale of my boat—they clutch me ... Merciful Heaven!"

His mutterings terminated in a wail of horror, then came prayers, with maledictions on himself and others, as he writhed on his bed; and in the agony produced by his dream, which seemed to reach a climax of unutterable horror, while a cold and clammy sweat distilled upon his brow, and his muscular limbs shivered like aspen twigs, he awoke and half sprang out of his berth; but the effect of his vision overcame him, and for a moment he sank back on the pillow, panting rather than breathing.

On seeing that Derval was regarding him, and conscious that he must have been muttering though knowing not what he might have said, a sudden expression of alarm, mingled with defiance and malevolence, came into his face, and he staggered up.

"I have been dreaming," said he.

"So I see," observed Derval.

"See—what did you hear? I mutter odd things in my sleep, I am told. Those who hear them are not lucky. The last fellow who did so was lost overboard in the night," he added, with a diabolical grin.

Derval was silent.

"Speak, I tell you," bullied the other.

"Captain's orders are that you are instantly to relieve the deck; eight bells in the first watch have struck," said Derval, sharply, and went on deck, merely reporting that Mr. Rudderhead was coming, and the new watch was already on deck.

Derval acted with judicious care in not telling the first mate all he had heard; but the latter knew what was too often his use and wont, to mutter in his sleep, and thus a species of dread of Derval was added to his ill-concealed hatred of him.

The latter confided to Harry Bowline and to the boatswain the strange revelations Rudderhead had made in his sleep.

"The North Star, the North Star!" exclaimed Grummet, as he slapped his thigh, and with a gulp of astonishment, by which he nearly swallowed his quid; "why that's the very ship as was said to have foundered four miles off the Scilly Isles, after losing all her boats save one, in which Rudderhead, her second mate, reached St. Mary's, and I don't think the Mercantile Marine Insurance would have 'stumped up,' as he calls it, without a fight for it. I have heard him muttering in his dreams. I wish he was well out of the ship, that I do; good can't come to us with such a thief on board. My eyes! how many a better man has swung in Execution dock, and had his poor bones chained to those stumps, as we may see any day by the Essex marshes. I never liked the cut of his jib."

To Derval it was evident that what he had overheard was no dream or nightmare, simple and pure, but the recollection of a real event—the scuttling of the North Star, and leaving her to sink with all hands on board, the result of some foul scheme between himself and someone else; and now there took possession of him a great horror of this man, with whom he had to sit at table, and to converse and confer incidentally while conducting mutually the duty of the ship.

That the untoward incident of Derval coming upon him in his dream dwelt in the mate's memory, was evident, as the former frequently caught the latter regarding him with a stern and lowering eye when he thought his attention was turned another way; and once, when the mate was partially intoxicated, and had crept into the long-boat amidships to keep out of the captain's sight, Derval, who was busy near the mainmast, heard him muttering—

"Dreams—a curse upon them! Why will they haunt me? Well, well, let him suspect what he likes, but he can prove nothing, and no one can prove anything, and dead men tell no tales, as he may find out one day. She wrote me to serve him out in any fashion to suit her; but (here he uttered a terrible oath) I'll serve him out to suit myself."

She was, Derval never for a moment doubted, Mrs. Hampton. Thus he found that to avoid scrapes, to avoid tyranny, and to escape positive peril, would require all his care, all his caution and perseverance now.

Reeve Rudderhead was, we have said, a man of enormous strength, bulk, and stature; every muscle and fibre in his form had been developed and turned, as it were, to iron and wire. He was decidedly a fellow to fear physically, and to shun morally. He was quite capable of working anyone a fatal mischief whom he disliked, or who crossed him in the least way, and the contingencies of a seafaring life afford such a character many easy chances for doing so with impunity; thus Derval did not forget his hint and threat about the listener who was lost overboard.

But there were other risks to run on which he did not calculate.

Thus, one day, a top-maul, or large iron hammer kept up aloft for driving in or out the fid of the topmasts, came whizzing down from the mizen-top, where Rudderhead was supposed to be busy on something or other. It crashed upon the quarter-deck, close by where Derval was standing, and then followed the cry which always precedes anything being thrown from aloft:—

"Stand from under," sang out Rudderhead.

Derval felt himself grow pale, while a fierce gust of wrath rose in his breast, for this could not have been a chance occurrence, but a deliberate attempt to destroy him accidentally, as it were, in open daylight, and in the face of the crew; and there was an unconcealed grin on the visage of Rudderhead when rebuked by Captain Talbot for carelessness, and while making his sham excuses to Derval.

The latter thought deeply over the correspondence between Mrs. Hampton and her amiable cousin, and recalled the fragments of the letter he traced on the blotting pad, and he now could but construe or connect them thus: that they were to the effect that as he, Derval, was in the way (of whom, Rookleigh?), Rudderhead, for the old love he bore her, and for a good round sum, would rid her of him in any mode he chose, so that they might see him no more.

It was impossible to doubt now that such had been the tenor of that atrocious epistle. It might be, Derval thought in his calmer moments, that she did not mean a deadly crime to be committed to remove him from jarring with her son's interests, and that the affair of the maul was dictated by Reeve Rudderhead's own spirit of malevolence and revenge.

But what could she mean? unless it were that Rudderhead was to contrive to leave him ashore in some place where he might perish or never more be heard of; or if, when some such contingency as a tumble overboard befel him, to be in no hurry to throw him a line or cut away the life-buoy. Anyway, Derval was now completely on his guard.

He remembered how his predecessor, Paul Bitts—an enemy from the hour he joined the ship—by his cruelty, tyranny, and terror, had blotted out the short life of poor little Tom Titford on that terrible night at Fernando Noronha; and he wondered if some such untoward fate might befal himself at the hands of this unscrupulous wretch. But then Tom Tit, as they called him, was but a child compared with what Derval was now, and he resolved, as he said to Harry Bowline, "to keep his weather-eye remarkably wide open."