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.
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