About the beginning of August, I rejoined him at Ben Rhydding. The place suited the Major admirably, and his various baths took up so great a part of each day, that Derrick had more time to himself than usual, and ‘At Strife’ got on rapidly. He much enjoyed, too, the beautiful country round, while the hotel itself, with its huge gathering of all sorts and conditions of people, afforded him endless studies of character. The Major breakfasted in his own room, and, being so much engrossed with his baths, did not generally appear till twelve. Derrick and I breakfasted in the great dining-hall; and one morning, when the meal was over, we, as usual, strolled into the drawing-room to see if there were any letters awaiting us.

“One for you,” I remarked, handing him a thick envelope.

“From Lawrence!” he exclaimed.

“Well, don’t read it in here; the Doctor will be coming to read prayers. Come out in the garden,” I said.

We went out into the beautiful grounds, and he tore open the envelope and began to read his letter as we walked. All at once I felt the arm which was linked in mine give a quick, involuntary movement, and, looking up, saw that Derrick had turned deadly pale.

“What’s up?” I said. But he read on without replying; and, when I paused and sat down on a sheltered rustic seat, he unconsciously followed my example, looking more like a sleep-walker than a man in the possession of all his faculties. At last he finished the letter, and looked up in a dazed, miserable way, letting his eyes wander over the fir-trees and the fragrant shrubs and the flowers by the path.

“Dear old fellow, what is the matter?” I asked.

The words seemed to rouse him.

A dreadful look passed over his face—the look of one stricken to the heart. But his voice was perfectly calm, and full of a ghastly self-control.

“Freda will be my sister-in-law,” he said, rather as if stating the fact to himself than answering my question.

“Impossible!” I said. “What do you mean? How could—”

As if to silence me he thrust the letter into my hand. It ran as follows:

“Dear Derrick,—For the last few days I have been down in the Flemings’ place in Derbyshire, and fortune has favoured me, for the Merrifields are here too. Now prepare yourself for a surprise. Break the news to the governor, and send me your heartiest congratulations by return of post. I am engaged to Freda Merrifield, and am the happiest fellow in the world. They are awfully fastidious sort of people, and I do not believe Sir Richard would have consented to such a match had it not been for that lucky impulse which made me rescue Dick Fleming. It has all been arranged very quickly, as these things should be, but we have seen a good deal of each other—first at Aldershot the year before last, and just lately in town, and now these four days down here—and days in a country house are equal to weeks elsewhere. I enclose a letter to my father—give it to him at a suitable moment—but, after all, he’s sure to approve of a daughter-in-law with such a dowry as Miss Merrifield is likely to have.

“Yours affly.,

“Lawrence Vaughan.”

I gave him back the letter without a word. In dead silence we moved on, took a turning which led to a little narrow gate, and passed out of the grounds to the wild moorland country beyond.

After all, Freda was in no way to blame. As a mere girl she had allowed Derrick to see that she cared for him; then circumstances had entirely separated them; she saw more of the world, met Lawrence, was perhaps first attracted to him by his very likeness to Derrick, and finally fell in love with the hero of the season, whom every one delighted to honour. Nor could one blame Lawrence, who had no notion that he had supplanted his brother. All the blame lay with the Major’s slavery to drink, for if only he had remained out in India I feel sure that matters would have gone quite differently.

We tramped on over heather and ling and springy turf till we reached the old ruin known as the Hunting Tower; then Derrick seemed to awake to the recollection of present things. He looked at his watch.

“I must go back to my father,” he said, for the first time breaking the silence.

“You shall do no such thing!” I cried. “Stay out here and I will see to the Major, and give him the letter too if you like.”

He caught at the suggestion, and as he thanked me I think there were tears in his eyes. So I took the letter and set off for Ben Rhydding, leaving him to get what relief he could from solitude, space, and absolute quiet. Once I just glanced back, and somehow the scene has always lingered in my memory—the great stretch of desolate moor, the dull crimson of the heather, the lowering grey clouds, the Hunting Tower a patch of deeper gloom against the gloomy sky, and Derrick’s figure prostrate, on the turf, the face hidden, the hands grasping at the sprigs of heather growing near.

The Major was just ready to be helped into the garden when I reached the hotel. We sat down in the very same place where Derrick had read the news, and, when I judged it politic, I suddenly remembered with apologies the letter that had been entrusted to me. The old man received it with satisfaction, for he was fond of Lawrence and proud of him, and the news of the engagement pleased him greatly. He was still discussing it when, two hours later, Derrick returned.

“Here’s good news!” said the Major, glancing up as his son approached. “Trust Lawrence to fall on his feet! He tells me the girl will have a thousand a year. You know her, don’t you? What’s she like?”

“I have met her,” replied Derrick, with forced composure. “She is very charming.”

“Lawrence has all his wits about him,” growled the Major. “Whereas you—” (several oaths interjected). “It will be a long while before any girl with a dowry will look at you! What women like is a bold man of action; what they despise, mere dabblers in pen and ink, writers of poisonous sensational tales such as yours! I’m quoting your own reviewers, so you needn’t contradict me!”

Of course no one had dreamt of contradicting; it would have been the worst possible policy.

“Shall I help you in?” said Derrick. “It is just dinner time.”

And as I walked beside them to the hotel, listening to the Major’s flood of irritating words, and glancing now and then at Derrick’s grave, resolute face, which successfully masked such bitter suffering, I couldn’t help reflecting that here was courage infinitely more deserving of the Victoria Cross than Lawrence’s impulsive rescue. Very patiently he sat through the long dinner. I doubt if any but an acute observer could have told that he was in trouble; and, luckily, the world in general observes hardly at all. He endured the Major till it was time for him to take a Turkish bath, and then having two hours’ freedom, climbed with me up the rock-covered hill at the back of the hotel. He was very silent. But I remember that, as we watched the sun go down—a glowing crimson ball, half veiled in grey mist—he said abruptly, “If Lawrence makes her happy I can bear it. And of course I always knew that I was not worthy of her.”

Derrick’s room was a large, gaunt, ghostly place in one of the towers of the hotel, and in one corner of it was a winding stair leading to the roof. When I went in next morning I found him writing away at his novel just as usual, but when I looked at him it seemed to me that the night had aged him fearfully. As a rule, he took interruptions as a matter of course, and with perfect sweetness of temper; but to-day he seemed unable to drag himself back to the outer world. He was writing at a desperate pace too, and frowned when I spoke to him. I took up the sheet of foolscap which he had just finished and glanced at the number of the page—evidently he had written an immense quantity since the previous day.

“You will knock yourself up if you go on at this rate!” I exclaimed.

“Nonsense!” he said sharply. “You know it never tires me.”

Yet, all the same, he passed his hand very wearily over his forehead, and stretched himself with the air of one who had been in a cramping position for many hours.

“You have broken your vow!” I cried. “You have been writing at night.”

“No,” he said; “it was morning when I began—three o’clock. And it pays better to get up and write than to lie awake thinking.”

Judging by the speed with which the novel grew in the next few weeks, I could tell that Derrick’s nights were of the worst.

He began, too, to look very thin and haggard, and I more than once noticed that curious ‘sleep-walking’ expression in his eyes; he seemed to me just like a man who has received his death-blow, yet still lingers—half alive, half dead. I had an odd feeling that it was his novel which kept him going, and I began to wonder what would happen when it was finished.

A month later, when I met him again at Bath, he had written the last chapter of ‘At Strife,’ and we read it over the sitting-room fire on Saturday evening. I was very much struck with the book; it seemed to me a great advance on ‘Lynwood’s Heritage,’ and the part which he had written since that day at Ben Rhydding was full of an indescribable power, as if the life of which he had been robbed had flowed into his work. When he had done, he tied up the MS. in his usual prosaic fashion, just as if it had been a bundle of clothes, and put it on a side table.

It was arranged that I should take it to Davison—the publisher of ‘Lynwood’s Heritage’—on Monday, and see what offer he would make for it. Just at that time I felt so sorry for Derrick that if he had asked me to hawk round fifty novels I would have done it.

Sunday morning proved wet and dismal; as a rule the Major, who was fond of music, attended service at the Abbey, but the weather forced him now to stay at home. I myself was at that time no church-goer, but Derrick would, I verily believe, as soon have fasted a week as have given up a Sunday morning service; and having no mind to be left to the Major’s company, and a sort of wish to be near my friend, I went with him. I believe it is not correct to admire Bath Abbey, but for all that ‘the lantern of the west’ has always seemed to me a grand place; as for Derrick, he had a horror of a ‘dim religious light,’ and always stuck up for his huge windows, and I believe he loved the Abbey with all his heart. Indeed, taking it only from a sensuous point of view, I could quite imagine what a relief he found his weekly attendance here; by contrast with his home the place was Heaven itself.

As we walked back, I asked a question that had long been in my mind: “Have you seen anything of Lawrence?”

“He saw us across London on our way from Ben Rhydding,” said Derrick, steadily. “Freda came with him, and my father was delighted with her.”

I wondered how they had got through the meeting, but of course my curiosity had to go unsatisfied. Of one thing I might be certain, namely, that Derrick had gone through with it like a Trojan, that he had smiled and congratulated in his quiet way, and had done the best to efface himself and think only of Freda. But as everyone knows:

and he looked now even more worn and old than he had done at Ben Rhydding in the first days of his trouble.

However, he turned resolutely away from the subject I had introduced and began to discuss titles for his novel.

“It’s impossible to find anything new,” he said, “absolutely impossible. I declare I shall take to numbers.”

I laughed at this prosaic notion, and we were still discussing the title when we reached home.

“Don’t say anything about it at lunch,” he said as we entered. “My father detests my writing.”

I nodded assent and opened the sitting-room door—a strong smell of brandy instantly became apparent; the Major sat in the green velvet chair, which had been wheeled close to the hearth. He was drunk.

Derrick gave an ejaculation of utter hopelessness.

“This will undo all the good of Ben Rhydding!” he said. “How on earth has he managed to get it?”

The Major, however, was not so far gone as he looked; he caught up the remark and turned towards us with a hideous laugh.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “that’s the question. But the old man has still some brains, you see. I’ll be even with you yet, Derrick. You needn’t think you’re to have it all your own way. It’s my turn now. You’ve deprived me all this time of the only thing I care for in life, and now I turn the tables on you. Tit for tat. Oh! yes, I’ve turned your d——d scribblings to a useful purpose, so you needn’t complain!”

All this had been shouted out at the top of his voice and freely interlarded with expressions which I will not repeat; at the end he broke again into a laugh, and with a look, half idiotic, half devilish, pointed towards the grate.

“Good Heavens!” I said, “what have you done?”

By the side of the chair I saw a piece of brown paper, and, catching it up, read the address—“Messrs. Davison, Paternoster Row”; in the fireplace was a huge charred mass. Derrick caught his breath; he stooped down and snatched from the fender a fragment of paper slightly burned, but still not charred beyond recognition like the rest. The writing was quite legible—it was his own writing—the description of the Royalists’ attack and Paul Wharncliffe’s defence of the bridge. I looked from the half-burnt scrap of paper to the side table where, only the previous night, we had placed the novel, and then, realising as far as any but an author could realise the frightful thing that had happened, I looked in Derrick’s face. Its white fury appalled me. What he had borne hitherto from the Major, God only knows, but this was the last drop in the cup. Daily insults, ceaseless provocation, even the humiliations of personal violence he had borne with superhuman patience; but this last injury, this wantonly cruel outrage, this deliberate destruction of an amount of thought, and labour, and suffering which only the writer himself could fully estimate—this was intolerable.

What might have happened had the Major been sober and in the possession of ordinary physical strength I hardly care to think. As it was, his weakness protected him. Derrick’s wrath was speechless; with one look of loathing and contempt at the drunken man, he strode out of the room, caught up his hat, and hurried from the house.

The Major sat chuckling to himself for a minute or two, but soon he grew drowsy, and before long was snoring like a grampus. The old landlady brought in lunch, saw the state of things pretty quickly, shook her head and commiserated Derrick. Then, when she had left the room, seeing no prospect that either of my companions would be in a fit state for lunch, I made a solitary meal, and had just finished when a cab stopped at the door and out sprang Derrick. I went into the passage to meet him.

“The Major is asleep,” I remarked.

He took no more notice than if I had spoken of the cat.

“I’m going to London,” he said, making for the stairs. “Can you get your bag ready? There’s a train at 2.5.”

Somehow the suddenness and the self-control with which he made this announcement carried me back to the hotel at Southampton, where, after listening to the account of the ship’s doctor, he had announced his intention of living with his father. For more than two years he had borne this awful life; he had lost pretty nearly all that there was to be lost and he had gained the Major’s vindictive hatred. Now, half maddened by pain, and having, as he thought, so hopelessly failed, he saw nothing for it but to go—and that at once.

I packed my bag, and then went to help him. He was cramming all his possessions into portmanteaux and boxes; the Hoffman was already packed, and the wall looked curiously bare without it. Clearly this was no visit to London—he was leaving Bath for good, and who could wonder at it?

“I have arranged for the attendant from the hospital to come in at night as well as in the morning,” he said, as he locked a portmanteau that was stuffed almost to bursting. “What’s the time? We must make haste or we shall lose the train. Do, like a good fellow, cram that heap of things into the carpet-bag while I speak to the landlady.”

At last we were off, rattling through the quiet streets of Bath, and reaching the station barely in time to rush up the long flight of stairs and spring into an empty carriage. Never shall I forget that journey. The train stopped at every single station, and sometimes in between; we were five mortal hours on the road, and more than once I thought Derrick would have fainted. However, he was not of the fainting order, he only grew more and more ghastly in colour and rigid in expression.

I felt very anxious about him, for the shock and the sudden anger following on the trouble about Freda seemed to me enough to unhinge even a less sensitive nature. ‘At Strife’ was the novel which had, I firmly believe, kept him alive through that awful time at Ben Rhydding, and I began to fear that the Major’s fit of drunken malice might prove the destruction of the author as well as of the book. Everything had, as it were, come at once on poor Derrick; yet I don’t know that he fared worse than other people in this respect.

Life, unfortunately, is for most of us no well-arranged story with a happy termination; it is a chequered affair of shade and sun, and for one beam of light there come very often wide patches of shadow. Men seem to have known this so far back as Shakespeare’s time, and to have observed that one woe trod on another’s heels, to have battled not with a single wave, but with a ‘sea of troubles,’ and to have remarked that ‘sorrows come not singly, but in battalions.’

However, owing I believe chiefly to his own self-command, and to his untiring faculty for taking infinite pains over his work, Derrick did not break down, but pleasantly cheated my expectations. I was not called on to nurse him through a fever, and consumption did not mark him for her own. In fact, in the matter of illness, he was always a most prosaic, unromantic fellow, and never indulged in any of the euphonious and interesting ailments. In all his life, I believe, he never went in for anything but the mumps—of all complaints the least interesting—and, may be, an occasional headache.

However, all this is a digression. We at length reached London, and Derrick took a room above mine, now and then disturbing me with nocturnal pacings over the creaking boards, but, on the whole, proving himself the best of companions.

If I wrote till Doomsday, I could never make you understand how the burning of his novel affected him—to this day it is a subject I instinctively avoid with him—though the re-written ‘At Strife’ has been such a grand success. For he did re-write the story, and that at once. He said little; but the very next morning, in one of the windows of our quiet sitting-room, often enough looking despairingly at the grey monotony of Montague Street, he began at ‘Page I, Chapter I,’ and so worked patiently on for many months to re-make as far as he could what his drunken father had maliciously destroyed. Beyond the unburnt paragraph about the attack on Mondisfield, he had nothing except a few hastily scribbled ideas in his note-book, and of course the very elaborate and careful historical notes which he had made on the Civil War during many years of reading and research—for this period had always been a favourite study with him.

But, as any author will understand, the effort of re-writing was immense, and this, combined with all the other troubles, tried Derrick to the utmost. However, he toiled on, and I have always thought that his resolute, unyielding conduct with regard to that book proved what a man he was.