"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.
