"How oft Fate's sharpest blow shall leave thee strong, With some re-risen ecstacy of song."
F. W. H. Myers.
As the autumn wore on, we heard now and then from old Mackrill the doctor. His reports of the Major were pretty uniform. Derrick used to hand them over to me when he had read them; but, by tacit consent, the Major's name was never mentioned.
Meantime, besides re-writing 'At Strife,' he was accumulating material for his next book and working to very good purpose. Not a minute of his day was idle; he read much, saw various phases of life hitherto unknown to him, studied, observed, gained experience, and contrived, I believe, to think very little and very guardedly of Freda.
But, on Christmas Eve, I noticed a change in him--and that very night he spoke to me. For such an impressionable fellow, he had really extraordinary tenacity, and, spite of the course of Herbert Spencer that I had put him through, he retained his unshaken faith in many things which to me were at that time the merest legends. I remember very well the arguments we used to have on the vexed question of 'Free-will,' and being myself more or less of a fatalist, it annoyed me that I never could in the very slightest degree shake his convictions on that point. Moreover, when I plagued him too much with Herbert Spencer, he had a way of retaliating, and would foist upon me his favourite authors. He was never a worshipper of any one writer, but always had at least a dozen prophets in whose praise he was enthusiastic.
Well, on this Christmas Eve, we had been to see dear old Ravenscroft and his grand-daughter, and we were walking back through the quiet precincts of the Temple, when he said abruptly:
"I have decided to go back to Bath to-morrow."
"Have you had a worse account?" I asked, much startled at this sudden announcement.
"No," he replied, "but the one I had a week ago was far from good if you remember, and I have a feeling that I ought to be there."
At that moment we emerged into the confusion of Fleet Street; but when we had crossed the road I began to remonstrate with him, and argued the folly of the idea all the way down Chancery Lane.
However, there was no shaking his purpose; Christmas and its associations had made his life in town no longer possible for him.
"I must at any rate try it again and see how it works," he said.
And all I could do was to persuade him to leave the bulk of his possessions in London, "in case," as he remarked, "the Major would not have him."
So the next day I was left to myself again with nothing to remind me of Derrick's stay but his pictures which still hung on the wall of our sitting-room. I made him promise to write a full, true, and particular account of his return, a bona-fide old-fashioned letter, not the half-dozen lines of these degenerate days; and about a week later I received the following budget:
"Dear Sydney,--I got down to Bath all right, and, thanks to your 'Study of Sociology,' endured a slow, and cold, and dull, and depressing journey with the thermometer down to zero, and spirits to correspond, with the country a monotonous white, and the sky a monotonous grey, and a companion who smoked the vilest tobacco you can conceive. The old place looks as beautiful as ever, and to my great satisfaction the hills round about are green. Snow, save in pictures, is an abomination. Milsom Street looked asleep, and Gay Street decidedly dreary, but the inhabitants were roused by my knock, and the old landlady nearly shook my hand off. My father has an attack of jaundice and is in a miserable state. He was asleep when I got here, and the good old landlady, thinking the front sitting-room would be free, had invited 'company,' i.e., two or three married daughters and their belongings; one of the children beats Magnay's 'Carina' as to beauty--he ought to paint her. Happy thought, send him and pretty Mrs. Esperance down here on spec. He can paint the child for the next Academy, and meantime I could enjoy his company. Well, all these good folks being just set-to at roast beef, I naturally wouldn't hear of disturbing them, and in the end was obliged to sit down too and eat at that hour of the day the hugest dinner you ever saw--anything but voracious appetites offended the hostess. Magnay's future model, for all its angelic face, 'ate to repletion,' like the fair American in the story. Then I went into my father's room, and shortly after he woke up and asked me to give him some Friedrichshall water, making no comment at all on my return, but just behaving as though I had been here all the autumn, so that I felt as if the whole affair were a dream. Except for this attack of jaundice, he has been much as usual, and when you next come down you will find us settled into our old groove. The quiet of it after London is extraordinary. But I believe it suits the book, which gets on pretty fast. This afternoon I went up Lansdowne and right on past the Grand Stand to Prospect Stile, which is at the edge of a high bit of tableland, and looks over a splendid stretch of country, with the Bristol Channel and the Welsh hills in the distance. While I was there the sun most considerately set in gorgeous array. You never saw anything like it. It was worth the journey from London to Bath, I can assure you. Tell Magnay, and may it lure him down; also name the model aforementioned.
