There is, however, one thing I can never do:—I am quite unable to put into words my friend’s intensely strong feeling with regard to the sacredness of his profession. It seemed to me not unlike the feeling of Isaiah when, in the vision, his mouth had been touched with the celestial fire. And I can only hope that something of this may be read between my very inadequate lines.
Looking back, I fancy Derrick must have been a clever child. But he was not precocious, and in some respects was even decidedly backward. I can see him now—it is my first clear recollection of him—leaning back in the corner of my father’s carriage as we drove from the Newmarket station to our summer home at Mondisfield. He and I were small boys of eight, and Derrick had been invited for the holidays, while his twin brother—if I remember right—indulged in typhoid fever at Kensington. He was shy and silent, and the ice was not broken until we passed Silvery Steeple.
“That,” said my father, “is a ruined church; it was destroyed by Cromwell in the Civil Wars.”
In an instant the small quiet boy sitting beside me was transformed. His eyes shone; he sprang forward and thrust his head far out of the window, gazing at the old ivy-covered tower as long as it remained in sight.
“Was Cromwell really once there?” he asked with breathless interest.
“So they say,” replied my father, looking with an amused smile at the face of the questioner, in which eagerness, delight, and reverence were mingled. “Are you an admirer of the Lord Protector?”
“He is my greatest hero of all,” said Derrick fervently. “Do you think—oh, do you think he possibly can ever have come to Mondisfield?”
My father thought not, but said there was an old tradition that the Hall had been attacked by the Royalists, and the bridge over the moat defended by the owner of the house; but he had no great belief in the story, for which, indeed, there seemed no evidence.
Derrick’s eyes during this conversation were something wonderful to see, and long after, when we were not actually playing at anything, I used often to notice the same expression stealing over him, and would cry out, “There is the man defending the bridge again; I can see him in your eyes! Tell me what happened to him next!”
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: