“No,” he replied, “but the one I had a week ago was far from good if you remember, and I have a feeling that I ought to be there.”
At that moment we emerged into the confusion of Fleet Street; but when we had crossed the road I began to remonstrate with him, and argued the folly of the idea all the way down Chancery Lane.
However, there was no shaking his purpose; Christmas and its associations had made his life in town no longer possible for him.
“I must at any rate try it again and see how it works,” he said.
And all I could do was to persuade him to leave the bulk of his possessions in London, “in case,” as he remarked, “the Major would not have him.”
So the next day I was left to myself again with nothing to remind me of Derrick’s stay but his pictures which still hung on the wall of our sitting-room. I made him promise to write a full, true, and particular account of his return, a bona-fide old-fashioned letter, not the half-dozen lines of these degenerate days; and about a week later I received the following budget:
“Dear Sydney,—I got down to Bath all right, and, thanks to your ‘Study of Sociology,’ endured a slow, and cold, and dull, and depressing journey with the thermometer down to zero, and spirits to correspond, with the country a monotonous white, and the sky a monotonous grey, and a companion who smoked the vilest tobacco you can conceive. The old place looks as beautiful as ever, and to my great satisfaction the hills round about are green. Snow, save in pictures, is an abomination. Milsom Street looked asleep, and Gay Street decidedly dreary, but the inhabitants were roused by my knock, and the old landlady nearly shook my hand off. My father has an attack of jaundice and is in a miserable state. He was asleep when I got here, and the good old landlady, thinking the front sitting-room would be free, had invited ‘company,’ i.e., two or three married daughters and their belongings; one of the children beats Magnay’s ‘Carina’ as to beauty—he ought to paint her. Happy thought, send him and pretty Mrs. Esperance down here on spec. He can paint the child for the next Academy, and meantime I could enjoy his company. Well, all these good folks being just set-to at roast beef, I naturally wouldn’t hear of disturbing them, and in the end was obliged to sit down too and eat at that hour of the day the hugest dinner you ever saw—anything but voracious appetites offended the hostess. Magnay’s future model, for all its angelic face, ‘ate to repletion,’ like the fair American in the story. Then I went into my father’s room, and shortly after he woke up and asked me to give him some Friedrichshall water, making no comment at all on my return, but just behaving as though I had been here all the autumn, so that I felt as if the whole affair were a dream. Except for this attack of jaundice, he has been much as usual, and when you next come down you will find us settled into our old groove. The quiet of it after London is extraordinary. But I believe it suits the book, which gets on pretty fast. This afternoon I went up Lansdowne and right on past the Grand Stand to Prospect Stile, which is at the edge of a high bit of tableland, and looks over a splendid stretch of country, with the Bristol Channel and the Welsh hills in the distance. While I was there the sun most considerately set in gorgeous array. You never saw anything like it. It was worth the journey from London to Bath, I can assure you. Tell Magnay, and may it lure him down; also name the model aforementioned.
“How is the old Q.C. and his pretty grandchild? That quaint old room of theirs in the Temple somehow took my fancy, and the child was divine. Do you remember my showing you, in a gloomy narrow street here, a jolly old watchmaker who sits in his shop-window and is for ever bending over sick clocks and watches? Well, he’s still sitting there, as if he had never moved since we saw him that Saturday months ago. I mean to study him for a portrait; his sallow, clean-shaved, wrinkled face has a whole story in it. I believe he is married to a Xantippe who throws cold water over him, both literally and metaphorically; but he is a philosopher—I’ll stake my reputation as an observer on that—he just shrugs his sturdy old shoulders, and goes on mending clocks and watches. On dark days he works by a gas jet—and then Rembrandt would enjoy painting him. I look at him whenever my world is particularly awry, and find him highly beneficial. Davison has forwarded me to-day two letters from readers of ‘Lynwood.’ The first is from an irate female who takes me to task for the dangerous tendency of the story, and insists that I have drawn impossible circumstances and impossible characters. The second is from an old clergyman, who writes a pathetic letter of thanks, and tells me that it is almost word for word the story of a son of his who died five years ago. Query: shall I send the irate female the old man’s letter, and save myself the trouble of writing? But on the whole I think not; it would be pearls before swine. I will write to her myself. Glad to see you whenever you can run down.
“Yours ever,
“D. V.”