Then, generally pacing to and fro in the apple walk, or sitting astride the bridge itself, Derrick would tell me of the adventures of my ancestor, Paul Wharncliffe, who performed incredible feats of valour, and who was to both of us a most real person. On wet days he wrote his story in a copy-book, and would have worked at it for hours had my mother allowed him, though of the manual part of the work he had, and has always retained, the greatest dislike. I remember well the comical ending of this first story of his. He skipped over an interval of ten years, represented on the page by ten laboriously made stars, and did for his hero in the following lines:
"And now, reader, let us come into Mondisfield churchyard. There are three tombstones. On one is written, 'Mr. Paul Wharncliffe.'"
The story was no better than the productions of most eight-year-old children, the written story at least. But, curiously enough, it proved to be the germ of the celebrated romance, 'At Strife,' which Derrick wrote in after years; and he himself maintains that his picture of life during the Civil War would have been much less graphic had he not lived so much in the past during his various visits to Mondisfield.
It was at his second visit, when we were nine, that I remember his announcing his intention of being an author when he was grown up.
My mother still delights in telling the story. She was sitting at work in the south parlour one day, when I dashed into the room calling out:
"Derrick's head is stuck between the banisters in the gallery; come quick, mother, come quick!"
She ran up the little winding staircase, and there, sure enough, in the musician's gallery, was poor Derrick, his manuscript and pen on the floor and his head in durance vile.
"You silly boy!" said my mother, a little frightened when she found that to get the head back was no easy matter, "What made you put it through?"
"You look like King Charles at Carisbrooke," I cried, forgetting how much Derrick would resent the speech.
And being released at that moment he took me by the shoulders and gave me an angry shake or two, as he said vehemently, "I'm not like King Charles! King Charles was a liar."
I saw my mother smile a little as she separated us.
"Come, boys, don't quarrel," she said. "And Derrick will tell me the truth, for indeed I am curious to know why he thrust his head in such a place."
"I wanted to make sure," said Derrick, "whether Paul Wharncliffe could see Lady Lettice, when she took the falcon on her wrist below in the passage. I mustn't say he saw her if it's impossible, you know. Authors have to be quite true in little things, and I mean to be an author."
"But," said my mother, laughing at the great earnestness of the hazel eyes, "could not your hero look over the top of the rail?"
"Well, yes," said Derrick. "He would have done that, but you see it's so dreadfully high and I couldn't get up. But I tell you what, Mrs. Wharncliffe, if it wouldn't be giving you a great deal of trouble--I'm sorry you were troubled to get my head back again--but if you would just look over, since you are so tall, and I'll run down and act Lady Lettice."
"Why couldn't Paul go downstairs and look at the lady in comfort?" asked my mother.
Derrick mused a little.
"He might look at her through a crack in the door at the foot of the stairs, perhaps, but that would seem mean, somehow. It would be a pity, too, not to use the gallery; galleries are uncommon, you see, and you can get cracked doors anywhere. And, you know, he was obliged to look at her when she couldn't see him, because their fathers were on different sides in the war, and dreadful enemies."
When school-days came, matters went on much in the same way; there was always an abominably scribbled tale stowed away in Derrick's desk, and he worked infinitely harder than I did, because there was always before him this determination to be an author and to prepare himself for the life. But he wrote merely from love of it, and with no idea of publication until the beginning of our last year at Oxford, when, having reached the ripe age of one-and-twenty, he determined to delay no longer, but to plunge boldly into his first novel.
He was seldom able to get more than six or eight hours a week for it, because he was reading rather hard, so that the novel progressed but slowly. Finally, to my astonishment, it came to a dead stand-still.
I have never made out exactly what was wrong with Derrick then, though I know that he passed through a terrible time of doubt and despair. I spent part of the Long with him down at Ventnor, where his mother had been ordered for her health. She was devoted to Derrick, and as far as I can understand, he was her chief comfort in life. Major Vaughan, the husband, had been out in India for years; the only daughter was married to a rich manufacturer at Birmingham, who had a constitutional dislike to mothers-in-law, and as far as possible eschewed their company; while Lawrence, Derrick's twin brother, was for ever getting into scrapes, and was into the bargain the most unblushingly selfish fellow I ever had the pleasure of meeting.
"Sydney," said Mrs. Vaughan to me one afternoon when we were in the garden, "Derrick seems to me unlike himself, there is a division between us which I never felt before. Can you tell me what is troubling him?"
She was not at all a good-looking woman, but she had a very sweet, wistful face, and I never looked at her sad eyes without feeling ready to go through fire and water for her. I tried now to make light of Derrick's depression.
"He is only going through what we all of us go through," I said, assuming a cheerful tone. "He has suddenly discovered that life is a great riddle, and that the things he has accepted in blind faith are, after all, not so sure."
She sighed.
"Do all go through it?" she said thoughtfully. "And how many, I wonder, get beyond?"
