Derrick Vaughan - Novelist | Page 4

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