‘Nothing fills a child’s mind like a large old mansion; better if un- or
partially occupied; peopled with the spirits of deceased members of the
county and Justices of the Quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled
solitude of one, with my feelings at seven years old!’--From Letters of
Charles Lamb.
To attempt a formal biography of Derrick Vaughan would be out of the
question, even though he and I have been more or less thrown together
since we were both in the nursery. But I have an odd sort of wish to
note down roughly just a few of my recollections of him, and to show how
his fortunes gradually developed, being perhaps stimulated to make the
attempt by certain irritating remarks which one overhears now often
enough at clubs or in drawing-rooms, or indeed wherever one goes.
“Derrick Vaughan,” say these authorities of the world of small-talk,
with that delightful air of omniscience which invariably characterises
them, “why, he simply leapt into fame. He is one of the favourites of
fortune. Like Byron, he woke one morning and found himself famous.”
Now this sounds well enough, but it is a long way from the truth, and
I--Sydney Wharncliffe, of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-law--desire,
while the past few years are fresh in my mind, to write a true version
of my friend’s career.
Everyone knows his face. Has it not appeared in ‘Noted Men,’
and--gradually deteriorating according to the price of the paper and
the quality of the engraving--in many another illustrated journal? Yet
somehow these works of art don’t satisfy me, and, as I write, I see
before me something very different from the latest photograph by Messrs.
Paul and Reynard.
I see a large-featured, broad-browed English face, a trifle
heavy-looking when in repose, yet a thorough, honest, manly face, with
a complexion neither dark nor fair, with brown hair and moustache, and
with light hazel eyes that look out on the world quietly enough. You
might talk to him for long in an ordinary way and never suspect that he
was a genius; but when you have him to yourself, when some consciousness
of sympathy rouses him, he all at once becomes a different being. His
quiet eyes kindle, his face becomes full of life--you wonder that you
ever thought it heavy or commonplace. Then the world interrupts in some
way, and, just as a hermit-crab draws down its shell with a comically
rapid movement, so Derrick suddenly retires into himself.
Thus much for his outer man.
For the rest, there are of course the neat little accounts of his
birthplace, his parentage, his education, etc., etc., published with the
list of his works in due order, with the engravings in the illustrated
papers. But these tell us little of the real life of the man.
Carlyle, in one of his finest passages, says that ‘A true delineation of
the smallest man and his scene of pilgrimage through life is capable of
interesting the greatest men; that all men are to an unspeakable degree
brothers, each man’s life a strange emblem of every man’s; and that
human portraits faithfully drawn are of all pictures the welcomest on
human walls.’ And though I don’t profess to give a portrait, but merely
a sketch, I will endeavour to sketch faithfully, and possibly in the
future my work may fall into the hands of some of those worthy people
who imagine that my friend leapt into fame at a bound, or of those
comfortable mortals who seem to think that a novel is turned out as
easily as water from a tap.
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:
“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?”
“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.”
“Why?” I asked, a little curious as to this unknown art of novel-making.
“Because,” he replied, “one must be in the heart of things to understand
how Lynwood was affected by them.”
“Lynwood! I believe you are always thinking of him!” (Lynwood was the
hero of his novel.)
“Well, so I am nearly--so I must be, if the book is to be any good.”
“Read me what you have written,” I said, throwing myself back in a
rickety but tolerably comfortable arm-chair which Derrick had inherited
with the rooms.
He hesitated a moment, being always very diffident about his own work;
but presently, having provided me with a cigar and made a good deal of
unnecessary work in arranging the sheets of the manuscript, he began to
read aloud, rather nervously, the opening chapters of the book now so
well known under the title of ‘Lynwood’s Heritage.’
I had heard nothing of his for the last four years, and was amazed at
the gigantic stride he had made in the interval. For, spite of a certain
crudeness, it seemed to me a most powerful story; it rushed straight to
the point with no wavering, no beating about the bush; it flung itself
into the problems of the day with a sort of sublime audacity; it took
hold of one; it whirled one along with its own inherent force, and drew
forth both laughter and tears, for Derrick’s power of pathos had always
been his strongest point.
All at once he stopped reading.
“Go on!” I cried impatiently.
“That is all,” he said, gathering the sheets together.
“You stopped in the middle of a sentence!” I cried in exasperation.
“Yes,” he said quietly, “for six months.”
“You provoking fellow! why, I wonder?”
“Because I didn’t know the end.”
“Good heavens! And do you know it now?”
He looked me full in the face, and there was an expression in his eyes
which puzzled me.
“I believe I do,” he said; and, getting up, he crossed the room, put the
manuscript away in a drawer, and returning, sat down in the window-seat
again, looking out on the narrow, paved street below, and at the grey
buildings opposite.
I knew very well that he would never ask me what I thought of the
story--that was not his way.
“Derrick!” I exclaimed, watching his impassive face, “I believe after
all you are a genius.”
I hardly know why I said “after all,” but till that moment it had
never struck me that Derrick was particularly gifted. He had so far got
through his Oxford career creditably, but then he had worked hard; his
talents were not of a showy order. I had never expected that he would
set the Thames on fire. Even now it seemed to me that he was too dreamy,
too quiet, too devoid of the pushing faculty to succeed in the world.
My remark made him laugh incredulously.
“Define a genius,” he said.
For answer I pulled down his beloved Imperial Dictionary and read
him the following quotation from De Quincey: ‘Genius is that mode of
intellectual power which moves in alliance with the genial nature, i.e.,
with the capacities of pleasure and pain; whereas talent has no
vestige of such an alliance, and is perfectly independent of all human
sensibilities.’
“Let me think! You can certainly enjoy things a hundred times more than
I can--and as for suffering, why you were always a great hand at that.
Now listen to the great Dr. Johnson and see if the cap fits, ‘The true
genius is a mind of large general powers accidentally determined in some
particular direction.’
“‘Large general powers’!--yes, I believe after all you have them with,
alas, poor Derrick! one notable exception--the mathematical faculty. You
were always bad at figures. We will stick to De Quincey’s definition,
and for heaven’s sake, my dear fellow, do get Lynwood out of that awful
plight! No wonder you were depressed when you lived all this age with
such a sentence unfinished!”
“For the matter of that,” said Derrick, “he can’t get out till the end
of the book; but I can begin to go on with him now.”
“And when you leave Oxford?”
“Then I mean to settle down in London--to write leisurely--and possibly
to read for the Bar.”
“We might be together,” I suggested. And Derrick took to this idea,
being a man who detested solitude and crowds about equally. Since his
mother’s death he had been very much alone in the world. To Lawrence he
was always loyal, but the two had nothing in common, and though fond
of his sister he could not get on at all with the manufacturer, his
brother-in-law. But this prospect of life together in London pleased him
amazingly; he began to recover his spirits to a great extent and to look
much more like himself.
It must have been just as he had taken his degree that he received a
telegram to announce that Major Vaughan had been invalided home, and
would arrive at Southampton in three weeks’ time. Derrick knew very
little of his father, but apparently Mrs. Vaughan had done her best to
keep up a sort of memory of his childish days at Aldershot, and in
these the part that his father played was always pleasant. So he looked
forward to the meeting not a little, while I, from the first, had my
doubts as to the felicity it was likely to bring him.
However, it was ordained that before the Major’s ship arrived, his son’s
whole life should change. Even Lynwood was thrust into the background.
As for me, I was nowhere. For Derrick, the quiet, the self-contained,
had fallen passionately in love with a certain Freda Merrifield.