“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?”