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?”
“Few enough,” I replied moodily. Then, remembering my role,—“But Derrick will get through; he has a thousand things to help him which others have not,—you, for instance. And then I fancy he has a sort of insight which most of us are without.”
“Possibly,” she said. “As for me, it is little that I can do for him. Perhaps you are right, and it is true that once in a life at any rate we all have to go into the wilderness alone.”
That was the last summer I ever saw Derrick’s mother; she took a chill the following Christmas and died after a few days’ illness. But I have always thought her death helped Derrick in a way that her life might have failed to do. For although he never, I fancy, quite recovered from the blow, and to this day cannot speak of her without tears in his eyes, yet when he came back to Oxford he seemed to have found the answer to the riddle, and though older, sadder and graver than before, had quite lost the restless dissatisfaction that for some time had clouded his life. In a few months, moreover, I noticed a fresh sign that he was out of the wood. Coming into his rooms one day I found him sitting in the cushioned window-seat, reading over and correcting some sheets of blue foolscap.
“At it again?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I mean to finish the first volume here. For the rest I must be in London.”