For the Term of His Natural Life | Page 6

your name; you never by word or deed make claim on me or mine. No matter what strait or poverty you plead--if even your life should hang upon the issue--the instant I hear that there exists on earth one who calls himself Richard Devine, that instant shall your mother's shame become a public scandal. You know me. I keep my word. I return in an hour, madam; let me find him gone."
He passed them, upright, as if upborne by passion, strode down the garden with the vigour that anger lends, and took the road to London.
"Richard!" cried the poor mother. "Forgive me, my son! I have ruined you."
Richard Devine tossed his black hair from his brow in sudden passion of love and grief.
"Mother, dear mother, do not weep," he said. "I am not worthy of your tears. Forgive! It is I--impetuous and ungrateful during all your years of sorrow--who most need forgiveness. Let me share your burden that I may lighten it. He is just. It is fitting that I go. I can earn a name--a name that I need not blush to bear nor you to hear. I am strong. I can work. The world is wide. Farewell! my own mother!"
"Not yet, not yet! Ah! see he has taken the Belsize Road. Oh, Richard, pray Heaven they may not meet."
"Tush! They will not meet! You are pale, you faint!"
"A terror of I know not what coming evil overpowers me. I tremble for the future. Oh, Richard, Richard! Forgive me! Pray for me."
"Hush, dearest! Come, let me lead you in. I will write. I will send you news of me once at least, ere I depart. So--you are calmer, mother!"
* * * * * *
Sir Richard Devine, knight, shipbuilder, naval contractor, and millionaire, was the son of a Harwich boat carpenter. Early left an orphan with a sister to support, he soon reduced his sole aim in life to the accumulation of money. In the Harwich boat-shed, nearly fifty years before, he had contracted--in defiance of prophesied failure--to build the Hastings sloop of war for His Majesty King George the Third's Lords of the Admiralty. This contract was the thin end of that wedge which eventually split the mighty oak block of Government patronage into three-deckers and ships of the line; which did good service under Pellew, Parker, Nelson, Hood; which exfoliated and ramified into huge dockyards at Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Sheerness, and bore, as its buds and flowers, countless barrels of measly pork and maggoty biscuit. The sole aim of the coarse, pushing and hard-headed son of Dick Devine was to make money. He had cringed and crawled and fluttered and blustered, had licked the dust off great men's shoes, and danced attendance in great men's ante-chambers. Nothing was too low, nothing too high for him. A shrewd man of business, a thorough master of his trade, troubled with no scruples of honour or of delicacy, he made money rapidly, and saved it when made. The first hint that the public received of his wealth was in 1796, when Mr. Devine, one of the shipwrights to the Government, and a comparatively young man of forty-four or thereabouts, subscribed five thousand pounds to the Loyalty Loan raised to prosecute the French war. In 1805, after doing good, and it was hinted not unprofitable, service in the trial of Lord Melville, the Treasurer of the Navy, he married his sister to a wealthy Bristol merchant, one Anthony Frere, and married himself to Ellinor Wade, the eldest daughter of Colonel Wotton Wade, a boon companion of the Regent, and uncle by marriage of a remarkable scamp and dandy, Lord Bellasis. At that time, what with lucky speculations in the Funds--assisted, it was whispered, by secret intelligence from France during the stormy years of '13, '14, and '15--and the legitimate profit on his Government contracts, he had accumulated a princely fortune, and could afford to live in princely magnificence. But the old-man-of-the-sea burden of parsimony and avarice which he had voluntarily taken upon him was not to be shaken off, and the only show he made of his wealth was by purchasing, on his knighthood, the rambling but comfortable house at Hampstead, and ostensibly retiring from active business.
His retirement was not a happy one. He was a stern father and a severe master. His servants hated, and his wife feared him. His only son Richard appeared to inherit his father's strong will and imperious manner. Under careful supervision and a just rule he might have been guided to good; but left to his own devices outside, and galled by the iron yoke of parental discipline at home, he became reckless and prodigal. The mother--poor, timid Ellinor, who had been rudely torn from the love of her youth, her cousin, Lord Bellasis--tried to restrain