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