with shrubs and vegetables. The sunshine streamed into the room, and
lighted up the queer ornaments on the mantelpiece, the fine old china
hanging upon rows of hooks in a mahogany cabinet, the well-worn
carpet, the velvet sofa, the black bottles and glittering tankards on
the shelves of the sideboard.

The landlord went behind the bar to look after some besmocked gentry
who were drinking in front of it, leaving his wife to attend to
Holdsworth.

“What might you like to order, sir?” she inquired, presenting herself
at a side door.

He asked her to bring him some wine and biscuits, saying that he had
no appetite now, but would dine or sup later on. He looked at her very
attentively as he spoke, with an idea in his mind that he had seen her
before.

She went away, and he left his seat and paced the room with a wild look
of distress on his face, and bitter anxiety and fear in his heart.
Once he snatched up his hat and advanced to the door, but hesitated
and resumed his agitated walk. His feelings were those of a man just
awakened to consciousness from the effects of a blow that had stunned
him. His body trembled, his lips worked, and he held his hands squeezed
tightly together. His sufferings were indeed terrible. He looked back
upon the blank of five years and recoiled before the conjectures his
heart prompted as to the things which had happened in that time.
Sometimes his impulse was to rush forth and cry aloud for Dolly, and
then a deadly chill came over him, and he shut his eyes and beat aside
his thoughts, as though they were something tangible and apart from
him, with his hand.

When the door opened, he bit his lip to control himself, and kept his
back turned upon the woman in feigned inspection of a print upon the
wall. As she was about to withdraw, he looked at her and said:

“Have you lived long in Southbourne?”

“Yes, sir, many years.”

He seated himself and drank a glass of wine.

“How many years?”

“Oh, twelve, thirteen. Ah, more like fifteen years, sir!”

“So long! Then you know all the people here?”

“Yes, sir, I daresay I do,” answered the woman, putting her hands under
her apron, and examining Holdsworth’s face and clothes with great
curiosity.

“Who last lived in that house at the bottom of the street?”

“You mean the one you was askin’ my husband about?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Fairchild, the butcher, after he sold his business about two years
ago.”

“Who before Mr. Fairchild?”

“It stood empty awhile after Mrs. Holdsworth left it.”

“Where is she now?”

“Livin’ at Hanwitch, along with her husband, Mr. Conway, the dentist.”

The woman’s eyes, when she made this answer, were on the garden; when
she looked again at Holdsworth, his face was turned from her.

“Did you know any of the parties, sir, as you’re asking about?” she
inquired.

He did not answer her, and she, thinking that he had not heard her,
continued:

“I was servant along with poor Mr. Newcome before the old gentleman
died, and saw a good deal of Mrs. Holdsworth, as I always call her;
for, somehow, I can never bear to think of her as Mrs. Conway, for
her heart never went with her hand when she married that gentleman, as
I can bear witness to, for I was at the wedding, and never saw a poor
body cry as she did. She and her grandmother, old Mrs. Flemming, was
often at the rectory ... but I beg pardon, sir; you was speaking of the
house. I can’t remember who had it before Mrs. Holdsworth. It’s a long
time ago.”

Holdsworth raised his head.

Up to the moment of her speaking of Dolly he had not known his own
name; all other memories had returned to him, save that. His face was
very white, but there was a strong expression in it. If the woman were
to talk for another twelve hours, she could add nothing more to what
she had already said. Dolly’s death he had expected as he had expected
a hundred other nameless possibilities, when memory swooped upon him
and set him peering over the edge of the chasm that separated the
Then from the Now; but not her marriage. Not that. In all the hours
he had passed in the open boat at sea, beholding death striking down
his companions about him, suffering the exquisite torture of thirst,
the yet more exquisite pang of hopelessness, there was no moment of
agony in all that time comparable to the agony that now wrenched him.
It might be one of those terrible experiences which break the heart or
transform the nature, but it gave to or found in Holdsworth a quality
of endurance that enabled him to front the extremity with a face of
marble.

When next he spoke his voice was low, but without a tremor in it.

“I am interested in Mrs. Conway and her old grandmother. Tell me what
you know about them.”

“Surely, sir, you don’t bring news of Mr. Holdsworth--of the fine young
man that went to sea and was shipwrecked?” inquired the woman with a
face of excitement, and staring hard, as if she were about to receive
some astounding news.

“No, no!” he answered, almost under his breath; and then he added,
“Tell me what you know of the widow.”

“I remember Mr. Holdsworth well,” said the woman, her speech answering
to her mood. “A handsomer young fellow I never saw. He used often to be
at the rectory with his wife, and the love between them was something
beautiful. How she ever had the heart to let him leave her I never
could guess. But he went and was drowned, and left the young thing
without a friend or a shilling in the wide world, God help her; and
though I said it was almost stupid her marrying Mr. Conway, remembering
what love there was between her and Mr. Holdsworth, yet I have always
believed it was for her child’s sake that she married the dentist, for
they were in desperate want when he courted her, and must have starved
for want of help.”

“You are speaking of Holdsworth’s child?”

“Yes, sir. A bright little thing, and fair as a lily. I saw her the
other day when I was over at Hanwitch. She was with her mamma, and I
never see such a likeness as there is between her and her poor drowned
papa. But you’re askin’ about old Mrs. Flemming. Why, she died four
years ago. She was very old, and went off quite peaceful, they said.
What with Mrs. Flemming’s death, and her never getting any news of her
husband, and having a tiny little baby to find food for, I do think
the poor young lady’s heart nearly broke. I never heard exactly how
the money matter was with her, but I believe that when Mrs. Flemming
died she would have nothing to live on but her husband’s pay, which was
stopped when he was given up for lost. Mr. Newcome was very kind, and
paid her rent, and helped her along while he lived; and then Mr. Conway
saw her; but it was a long time before she would marry him, long after
the poor old rector was dead and gone, and she found that taking in
needlework was worse than going on the parish. I often think of her--I
do, indeed, sir--waiting day after day for her husband, who was never
to come home. I’d rather, myself, have married anybody than a sailor.
There’s no telling, when once they go, whether they’ll ever come back
again. They’re worse nor soldiers for that.”

Here the woman, suddenly conceiving that she had talked quite enough,
and perhaps a little too much, dropped a courtesy and left the room;
but came back again to ask two questions--At what hour would the
gentleman please to dine? and would he like to have a bed-room in her
house? She could recommend her bed-rooms. Her linen was clean as snow.

“I will tell you presently,” answered Holdsworth. “I have not yet
decided upon my movements.”

“There’s a nice plump fowl----”

“Yes, cook me that by seven o’clock,” said Holdsworth, who was
feverishly impatient to be left alone.

She closed the door, and Holdsworth leaned his temples on his hands
and fixed his heavy eyes on the bare table, taking the attitude of a
student striving to master some difficult problem.

For many minutes he held this posture, presently lifted his head, and
looked about him; then took his hat and went out.

The landlord behind the bar made him a low bow, and offered his
services to show him over the village. Holdsworth declined his offer
with a “Thank you,” and walked into the road. He glanced over his
shoulder suspiciously as he advanced, disliking the inquisitive stare
with which he had been followed through the bar of the inn by the
people drinking there, but no one watched him. He held a stick, on
which he leaned as he moved, like an infirm man; and often he paused
and gazed around him. The people in the roadway, or in the houses,
eyed him as he passed with the curiosity a stranger seldom fails to
excite in small unfrequented places; but he took no notice of them; his
mind was intent on vivifying the impressions it was receiving with old
memories, and adjusting the ideas which had been restored to him out of
the dark and secret hiding-places of the past.

Few changes had been made in the aspect of the little village to
embarrass the picture which his recovered memory had submitted to him.
Some alterations in the external form of one or two shops, and two
freshly-built houses on the left-hand side facing the blacksmith’s
shed, were the only new features in the familiar scene of this quaint
broad thoroughfare.

His steps grew more reluctant, his face took a sharper expression of
pain, though never losing its characteristic of hardness and severity,
as he drew near to his old home. He forced himself forwards, and, when
abreast, halted and looked at it.

The windows were blindless, the garden showed signs of long neglect,
and a board nailed to a post leaned towards the road, bearing the
announcement, in painted letters, that the house was to let. A row
of cobwebs garnished the woodwork of the gate, and glistened in the
sunshine; the bare rooms, visible through the windows, looked cheerless
and inhospitable; the window-glass was dirty, and some of the panes
in the kitchen window were broken. The grass about the house was tall
and vividly green. That window, looking towards the trees between the
lanes, belonged to Dolly’s room. There were white soft curtains to it
in those days, and the glass was pure and transparent as spring-water.
That room on the left was the sitting-room. There they had taken their
meals; there they had played forfeits, had hunted the slipper, had
made the walls ring with innocent laughter. He remembered the old
grandmother’s placid smile, the rector’s kindly jokes, his Dolly’s
sweet face, throwing a light of purity and beauty about her. And under
the sill were the dead branches of the clematis, still held to the wall
by the pieces of black leather Dolly’s own hand had nailed. Such humble
signs make grief sharper than large memorials.

He stood leaning upon his stick, losing all sense of the present in
this vision of the past. His thoughts, taking their departure from the
time when he first fitted out that house as a home for Dolly, flowed
regularly downwards. He was a bridegroom again, and his wife was at his
side, and her eyes upon his, and their hands clasped. Now the shadow of
separation that was to darken them presently was felt; and then came
the eve of his departure, thronged with the memory of kisses sweet and
bitter, of tears and broken prayers, and brave hopes battling with
sullen misgivings. He was now on board the “Meteor,” and now in the
open boat, surrounded by the dying, and himself suffering tortures it
broke him down to recall; and now he was in Australia, striving with
memory, which would yield no answer to his passionate prayers. But the
finger of God pointed the way to his old home; and now he was returning
to England, with his past still hidden in gloom, but with his heart not
unhopeful of the morning that was to break after the long darkness of
the night. And finally, with the old village of Southbourne before him,
came the rush of memory--the brief exultation--the spasm of fear--the
terror that held him mute--the disclosure that showed him his wife less
his than had he traversed all the desolate miles of water only to kneel
by her grave....

Tears would have relieved him, but he could not weep. He turned and
moved slowly away, stopping again and again to look back at the
little empty house, while sobs convulsed him, and a sense of supreme
desolation and friendlessness weighed him down.

CHAPTER XXIII.

REFLECTIONS.

The fowl dished up by the landlady and served upon fine linen, was
plump, and juicy and aromatic enough to re-excite the appetite of an
alderman after Mansion House dinner; but Holdsworth hardly touched it.
The woman looked vexed as she removed it, for the neglect of such a
dainty was as good as a spoken disparagement of her skill as a cook.
She set a fine cheese, fresh from the farmhouse over the way, upon the
table, and butter from the same dairy, firm and sweet-smelling, as
butter should be; but these were left untasted.

“I don’t know who he may be,” she whispered to her husband, outside,
“but if he don’t make a better dinner than this every day, it’s no
wonder his body’s a shadder.”

The setting sunshine streamed into the little parlour in which
Holdsworth sat, and enriched the room with its vivid crimson light; the
soft evening breeze wafted pleasant perfumes through the open window;
and in the air was the tender and delightful peace which falls with an
appreciable hush over little country villages, where the sinking of the
sun is the signal for rest.

Holdsworth had made up his mind to sleep in Southbourne that night. He
needed the silence and the solitude the little inn promised him, that
he might meditate upon the steps he should now take.

The feverish misery that had been born in him by the landlady’s
story was, in some measure, tranquillised, and he had now the power,
at least, to think with tolerable clearness. And yet he was sorely
perplexed, as he sat with his head resting on his hand and his weary
eyes fixed on the little garden outside. Impulses were governing him
that made his mind incline from side to side like a pendulum. Had Mr.
Newcome been alive--the kind and good old rector, whom he recalled with
love--he would have gone to him, avowed himself, and entreated his
counsel.

He felt that Dolly was dead to him. He felt this, though no words that
he had at his command would have enabled him to explain his ideas. His
own grand sense of honour witnessed this truth, that she had married
another man in full belief that he--John Holdsworth--was dead; and he
recognised and appreciated the force of the overwhelming claims of the
moral obligation imposed on him to leave her belief undisturbed. Why?
Because its disturbance would generate a heavy burden of shame, would
make her practically false to both men, and stain her nature with a sin
whose hue would not be the less dark in the sight of the world because
her conscience had no share in it.

Such instinctive perception of the high needs of the seldom-paralleled
situation his fate had placed him in, could only have possessed a man
of deep honour, great humanity, and rare unselfishness.

But his child!

The child of his own passionate love for Dolly. _There_ was the
magnetic power that drew all his inclinations away from the silent
command of honour.

To see her--to behold himself renewed in a sweet child’s face--to press
his lips _once_ to her cheek--once only, if nevermore!

Oh! not once--not once only! To dwell near her, to have her in his
sight, to watch them both, and live out the years that should be
allotted him in secret contemplation of the joy, the sacred pleasures,
the divine emotions embodied in this woman and her babe; happinesses
which had been broken away from his life--could not this be?

He started up and looked at himself in the glass over the mantel-shelf.
Had suffering wrought in his face to such poor purpose, that even
the eye of love could pierce through the sunken mask? His child knew
him not--and Dolly, deeming him dead, and holding him a thing of the
irreclaimable past, could not behold--could never imagine that she
beheld--in that bowed figure, that bearded face, those hollow eyes,
that hair with patches of gray all over it, the handsome, vigorous,
upright, clear-eyed man whom she had called husband.

Husband! ... and she had left him.

Stop! Passages of the landlady’s story echoed in his ears; how the poor
young lady was starving; how she had a tiny baby to support; how the
workhouse seemed better to her than the hopeless, scanty produce of the
needle; how she held back, reluctant to give her hand to the man who
wished to marry her; how she had wept when her hand was given!

Oh, husband! oh, lover! though to the past only those titles now
belong; by your own sufferings, remember hers! By your own misery,
when, feeling yourself dying alone on the great deep, your physical
torments yielded to the fiercer tortures of your heart when you
thought of your wife praying for him, whom, you said to yourself, she
shall never see again, remember her! pity her! Was his imagination so
poor that he could not find it in him to make, out of the landlady’s
brief tale, a pregnant, bitter picture of his wife’s trials? Not so!
To such a heart as his, one hint of misery would bring with it many
piteous details. There was infinite anguish in the picture his fancy
drew; but he forced himself to contemplate it, that the jealousy, the
disappointment, the despair of unfulfilled hope, might melt out of his
heart, and leave it a fit shrine for the consecration of the two images
which the uncontrollable will of his humanity as a father and a husband
declared should be placed there.

His fingers had stolen over his face as he stood before the
looking-glass. A long time he thus remained, while the sun went down
behind the trees in the far-off fields, and the twilight stole softly
into the room and made his figure visionary. When he withdrew his hands
from his eyes, they were wet; but the one star shining clearly in the
dark blue overhead had dawned out of the light to witness a fairer
sight than the sun had shone upon--a face from which all vestige of
hardness and severity had passed, eyes heavy with tears upturned to
God’s kingdom, and lips whispering a prayer for help, for courage,
for counsel, to aid the resolution of his heart, intent upon a noble
self-sacrifice that should yet not remove it from the sphere of all
that it held dearest on earth.

CHAPTER XXIV.

HANWITCH.

Hanwitch is nowhere seen to greater advantage than from the summit of
the little hill that flanks it on the west. Here, if you are an epicure
in your enjoyment of what is picturesque in scenery, you will take
your stand at sunset, while the splendour still flushes the heavens,
and the country all around is tinted with a delicate crimson haze.
In this fairy light, Hanwitch, from where you stand, will resemble
some architectural dream; for the serene sky gives an ideality to the
proportions which are magnified by the soft combining shadows, and
peace broods in the streets. The noble church dedicated to St. James
towers in the midst of the houses; its spire glows with the red fire,
which a little while before had bathed the whole pile and kindled
brilliant stars in its long and narrow windows; and all about the
church rise and fall the roofs of closely-grouped houses, manifold in
colour, with lines of thin blue smoke mounting straight into the sky.
The town lies backed with wooded scenery, and the picturesque outlines
of the houses take a new detail of beauty from the relief they give to
the soft dark masses of trees and lightlier-coloured fields which make
up the farther landscape. And as you watch, a human interest will be
communicated to the town by the breaking out here and there of little
yellow lights. Darkness soon falls when the crimson flush pales upon
the sky; but where you stand daylight is still around, mellowed into
deepest, richest, beauty of colour, and so lingering ere it fades into
the gray and gloom of twilight.

The town has been enlarged since the days to which this story belongs;
but elderly people are living whose love for the old High Street
scarcely reconciles them to the “improvements” which have been made
in its aspect. Surveyors and local boards press sorely upon gentle
prejudices. These elderly people remember the row of antique houses
where the big bank building now stands. They remember certain primitive
shops, the windows of which were furnished with diamond-shaped panes of
glass that discoloured to the eye the wares exposed for sale within.
They remember the picturesque alley out of the High Street, with a
cottage at the end of it that had a green porch; it looked from its
cool retreat upon the narrow slice of the main thoroughfare with its
passengers flitting like shadows past the brief opening. And I myself
can recall the wonderful effect of light and shadow in that tranquil
embrasure when the evenings lengthened, and as I beheld it once--a
maid-servant, picturesquely attired in a red petticoat, lolling within
the porch, her hand upon her hips, laughing at a dog that stood on its
hind legs begging; the figures shadowed, the windows above burning with
the light of the setting sun, the pavement a deep gray.

In Holdsworth’s time, the vehicles and passengers were in perfect
keeping with the venerable and faded but dignified aspect of the old
street. The townspeople still lingered behind the transition-epoch of
that bygone day, and held for the most part tenaciously to the costumes
and the indolence of their fathers.

The town was about an hour’s walk from Southbourne. After quitting the
handful of houses which formed the village, Hanwitch came upon you as
a metropolis. To describe it in homely guide-book fashion:--It had two
good churches, and a public square full of evergreens, rock-work, and
stone images; several snug inns, one wide street and a quantity of
narrow ones; a town-hall, a market-place, a prison, and a town-crier;
a large number of old ladies and fat poodles, invalids, sedan-chairs,
and camp-stools. In olden times--and now I am talking of the eighteenth
century--it had held some sort of position as a third-rate inland
watering-place; but what had become of the springs which had brought
the gout, the vapours, and the spleen from places as distant as London
to drink, the oldest inhabitant never could remember. But one thing was
certain: there was no lack of water in the place. A river ran close to
it, and from this river meandered some crystal streamlets which ran
right into the town. And where the river was, the scenery was exquisite
in summer--cool, deep, and leafy, with a bridge at each end of the
town, a little landing-stage, a punt or two, and midway between the
bridges, a cluster of trees on either bank, with huge gnarled trunks
and roots which ran naked for many feet along the ground, whilst, high
above, their branches mingled and formed a tunnel for the water to
flow under. Here the trout would leap; here the water-rat would sneak
from its earthy chamber and break the tide into thin ripples as it
noiselessly made for the opposite shore; here the sunshine would fall
in threads through the leaves and gild the black long-legged insects
on the surface of the water.

Ten o’clock was striking when Holdsworth was driven into Hanwitch by
the landlord of the Southbourne inn, who was rich enough to own a horse
and gig. The drive had been a very short one, and in the landlord’s
opinion seven-and-sixpence had never been more easily earned. The gig
was stopped at the door of the “Hanwitch Arms,” and Holdsworth got out.
Then came a porter, who nodded pleasantly to the owner of the gig, and
hoisted the portmanteau on his shoulder.

“My respecks to the governor, Joe. How is he?”

“Pretty middlin’! How’s yourself?”

“Why, I can’t say as I’m quite the thing. The weather’s been rayther
agin my rheumatiz.--Wish you good mornin’, sir.”

And with this farewell to Holdsworth, the landlord drove himself away.

Holdsworth’s plans had been fully settled by him the night before; and
one part of them was that he should put up at some inn at Hanwitch,
while he made inquiries of deep interest to himself, and obtained a
lodging. Having followed the porter into the bar and ordered a bed for
the night, he re-entered the street.

His emotions, as he first began to walk, were conflicting and painful.
He was now in the town where his wife lived; any moment might bring
them face to face, and the wildest anxiety to see her was mixed up with
a sensation of shrinking fear of the encounter. He stared eagerly at
the people, and now and again, when a little child passed, his heart
beat rapidly, and he felt his blood leave his face. But he mastered
himself soon, repeatedly muttering, as a reassuring argument, that,
were they to meet, Dolly would not know him.

He was in the main street, walking slowly, and helping his step with a
stick, not more from habit than from necessity, for he was frequently
seized with a weakness in the legs which would sometimes oblige him to
stop, or seat himself if a seat were at hand. His object now was to
find out where Dolly lived, a question he would not ask the landlady
at Southbourne, lest, added to the inquiries he had already made, it
should excite her suspicion and set her surmising.

He noticed a small chemist’s shop opposite, and, his mind establishing
a friendly connection between drugs and dentistry, he crossed and
entered. A bald-headed man in spectacles received him with a bow.

“Can you tell me where Mr. Conway, the dentist, lives?”

The chemist, who knew perfectly well, scratched his ear and seemed to
reflect. He drew teeth himself, and was not disposed to furnish a rival
with a patient if he could help it.

“I know the name, sir, and----might I ask if you want anything done to
your teeth.”

“No, I merely wish to know where Mr. Conway lives.”

“It’s not for me to speak ill of a brother practitioner, and as I
shan’t mention names, no harm can be done,” said the chemist, with his
eye on Holdsworth’s mouth; “but I do say that it’s a pity people should
start in a business, requiring as much skill as the highest branches
of surgery, without knowing the difference between an eye and a wisdom
tooth, and drinking to that degree that their hands tremble like the
windows of a coach in full tear.”

“Does Mr. Conway drink?”

“I name no names,” replied the chemist, assuming an injured expression
of face. “I should be sorry to take away any man’s character, not to
speak of the bread out of his mouth, though there are some people not
quite so particular as me in that matter, and will start lies which
should make ’em afraid to go to bed. All that I say is, that if I had a
toothache, and wanted to get my jaw broke and my gum tore out, I’d go
to a certain person livin’ not a day’s walk from this shop, and ask him
to look at my tooth.”

Saying which he nodded vigorously, and, taking up a bottle, began to
mould a piece of blue paper over the cork.

“Where does this Mr. Conway live?” inquired Holdsworth, who judged that
there might be a good deal more of professional animus than truth in
the chemist’s observations.

“I believe,” replied the chemist, sulkily vouchsafing the information
which he could scarcely longer evade, “that the party you refer to
lives in the Ellesmere Road. He did yesterday; but some persons in
this world are so dependent on their landlords that there’s no tellin’
what’s going to happen to ’em to-morrow.”

Thanking this very good-natured and remarkably ingenuous chemist for
his direction, Holdsworth quitted the shop and walked up the street.
He asked a butcher-boy the way to Ellesmere Road, and was told to keep
straight on, until he came to a “Methody’s Chapel, ven he’d see a
turnin’, vich ’ud be the road he ast for.”

The Methodist Chapel was a good distance off, and as Holdsworth’s pace
was slow, he had plenty of leisure for reflection, which was bitter
enough; for, strive as he might to waive the chemist’s gossip as mere
trade scandal and jealousy, his mind persisted in fastening on it, and
turning it about, and coining deep anxiety out of it.

If this Mr. Conway _were_ the drunkard the chemist affirmed him to be,
and the pauper too--for the sarcasm about “persons being dependent
on their landlords” had not been lost--what kind of life was Dolly
and _his_ child leading? He frowned, and felt his hand tighten on the
handle of his stick; but a milder persuasion grew in him, and he forced
his mind away from the subject.

So bright a morning as it was would bring forth many people; and the
High Street was tolerably well filled with pedestrians, and old people
in bath-chairs, wheeled along the gutters for fear of the horses, and
nurses dragging children by the hand, and waggons, and tradesmen’s
traps. The early coach from Canterbury came thundering along the
street, the guard blowing his horn and causing house-windows to fly
open, and heads to protrude, and a handkerchief, or, maybe, a duster
here and there, to be waved in coy recognition of the hand-kissing of
certain spruce and finely-attired gentlemen on the top of the vehicle.

But, varied and cheerful as the scene was, Holdsworth had no eyes
but for the women and children he met, at whom he darted quick eager
glances, which must have sent some of the women tripping along with a
sincere conviction that they had met with one admirer, at all events,
that morning.

He passed the market-place with its stalls loaded with garden produce,
and clean little shops submitting a tempting array of plump fowls,
geese, sides of bacon, legs of pork, and strings of sausages; and in
about twenty minutes’ time reached the Methodist Chapel, and turned
into the Ellesmere Road.

A short broad road, with the sun-lighted country beyond; on either
side, small newly-built villas, with now and again a house presenting a
more venerable aspect. There was grass in the roadway, and one or two
of the villas had placards in their windows. In the front garden of one
of the nearer houses an old gentleman, with an inflamed face, and a
white hankerchief over his head, was plying a rake. No other person was
visible; but, when Holdsworth had advanced a few steps, a woman came
out of a gate and approached him. His heart came into his throat, and
he stood stock still. She drew near, but she was not Dolly. She glanced
at him as she passed, struck, maybe, by his pale face, and the singular
mixture of old age and youth which his appearance and figure suggested.

He breathed deeply and walked forward, glancing to right and left of
him.

The last house but one on the left was the house he wanted. A brass
plate inscribed with Conway’s name and calling was fixed to the iron
railings, and over the door was a lamp furnished with blue and red
glass.

Holdsworth dared scarcely glance at it. When his eye encountered the
name he turned cold, and felt the damp perspiration suffusing his
forehead.

He came back hurriedly, with the bare impression on his mind of a small
house with the upper blinds drawn, and with an untended garden in the
front.

He returned to the main entrance of the road, stopped, looked back, and
then slowly retraced his steps.

There was a house of an older fashion than any of the others on the
right-hand side, about midway; one that had evidently taken root there
many years before the little villas had gathered themselves together to
intercept its view and violate its pastoral solitude. Its doorway was
sheltered by a roomy porch, with creepers clambering up its trellised
supporters; its darkling windows had the burnished glitter upon them
that is peculiar to old glass; its eaves were capacious enough to
accommodate a whole colony of swallows, and it had a fair piece of
ground stretching away at its back. The bright brass knocker on the
green door, the white doorsteps, the purity of the window glass, and
the spotlessness of the window drapery, afforded an excellent guarantee
of the housewifely qualities of the inmates. In one of the windows hung
a card. Holdsworth opened the gate and knocked.

“I should like to see your apartments,” he said to the cheerful-faced,
middle-aged woman who had promptly replied to his summons.

“Certainly, sir; please to walk in.”

She threw open the door of a long sitting-room, smelling of lavender
and mignonette, and furnished with worked chairs, old china, a tall
wooden clock with a febrile tick, a hearth-rug decorated with blue
and yellow roses in wool, and a sour squeezed-looking bookcase which
seemed to hold sundry folios under protest, and to threaten the
instant ejection of a number of small books on the top shelves, which
leaned one against another, some of them gaping apparently in the last
extremity of terror.

“For yourself, sir? Or might there be children?”

“For myself.”

“Why, then, sir,” exclaimed the woman, with great alacrity, “I think I
can accommodate you. You can have this room, and a bed-room just over
it, and the use of the pianner in the next room when you see company,
for fourteen shillings a week.”

“That will do,” said Holdsworth.

The woman, smiling like clockwork, proceeded to inform him that she was
a widow, and had nobody else in the house but her mother, who was very
aged and silly-like, and only left her room, which was upstairs, once
a week for a turn in the garden; that anything more peaceful than her
house was never known, and that if the gentleman was studious, he would
never be interrupted with noises.

She then led him upstairs to the bedroom, which was as comfortable as
any man could wish.

On their return to the sitting-room, Holdsworth, who was tired,
asked permission to rest himself, and sat down near the window which
overlooked the road, where he could just obtain a glimpse of Mr.
Conway’s house.

He broke away from the overpowering thoughts which the sense of the
near presence of his wife and child forced upon him, and steadying his
voice, turned to the woman who stood at the door, and asked her if she
knew any of the people living around.

“Why, sir, I know most of my neighbours by name, though I can’t say as
e’er a one of ’em are friends of mine.”

“I noticed a dentist’s house just now, over the way. What sort of
business can he do in such a road as this?”

“Oh, you’re speaking of Mr. Conway!” she exclaimed, with a shake of the
head. “It’s his own fault if he don’t do a good business, for I hear
that he’s pretty clever at making teeth and drawing of them, and the
likes of that; but he don’t seem to have no patients, and I know why;
but it’s not for me to meddle in other folks’ concerns.”

“Why?”

“I suppose you’re no friend of his, sir?” she said.

“I never saw the gentleman in my life.”

“Well, then, to speak plainly, he drinks; and it’s pretty well known;
and so there’s no wonder gentlefolks won’t go near him.”

Holdsworth forced a look of unconcern into his face as he asked:

“Is he married?”

“Oh yes, sir; and a sweet dear creature his wife is; Mrs. Holdsworth
as was. Hers is a sad history. She lived at a place called
Southbourne--maybe you know it--it’s an hour’s walk from here; and I
was told her story by Mrs. Campion, as used to keep a greengrocer’s
shop in that village, and served most of the gentry about. She--I’m
speaking of Mrs. Conway--lost her husband at sea, and married the
present gentleman two or three years afterwards. Mrs. Campion said she
was driven to it by want o’ the bare necessaries of life,” added the
woman in a subdued voice.

Holdsworth was silent.

“I don’t think,” continued the woman, “that she leads a very happy
life. We sometimes has a chat together when we meet out o’ doors,
and she’s the civilest, sweetest young thing I ever knew. But,” she
exclaimed, catching herself up, “all this is no business of mine; and
I hope, sir, you’ll think none the worse of me for gossiping about
strangers’ affairs. I was strivin’ to answer your questions, sir.”

“Thank you,” said Holdsworth, rising, but keeping his back to the
window. “Can you receive me to-morrow?”

“Oh yes, sir; at any time you’re pleased to come.”

“My name is Hampden. I shall sleep to-night at the ‘Hanwitch Arms.’
Here are a couple of sovereigns, which will serve you as a security for
my taking your rooms. I leave myself in your hands, and have no doubt
I shall be comfortable.”

The woman took the money with a courtesy, thinking to herself that she
had never met with a more polite and considerate gentleman. Holdsworth
left the house. He cast a swift glance at the villa with the plate upon
the railing, and then hurried towards the town.

CHAPTER XXV.

IN THE ELLESMERE ROAD.

Holdsworth spent the greater part of the evening in writing a letter
to Mr. Sherman. At twelve o’clock next day he was an inmate of Mrs.
Parrot’s house in the Ellesmere Road.

In his walk to the lodgings he had met only strange faces, one or
two of which looked after him, struck, perhaps, by his keen fugitive
glance, his slow pace that stole along the ground, and his depressed
head, as though there were a shame in his heart that made the daylight
painful.

Mrs. Parrot fussed about him for some time, and tired him with an
account of the articles she had purchased for him. Her memory was
slow, and her capacity of reckoning very indifferent; hence it took
her twenty minutes to account for the expenditure of twelve shillings.
Happily, it was her mother’s day for walking in the garden, and
Holdsworth could see the old lady--a mere wisp of a figure, in ancient
black satin reaching to her ankles and clinging to her legs, a nose
like the Duke of Wellington’s, and a chin like Punch’s--hobbling along
a gravel walk, looking with afflicting agitation around her, and
coughing like a rattle, as a signal to her daughter, who, when she had
done with her accounts, hurried out.

The control Holdsworth had kept upon himself, while Mrs. Parrot
remained in the room, he could now put aside; indeed, the suffering
caused him by his pent-up agitation imperatively demanded that the
emotion should have play. Now he would walk hastily to and fro the
room, and then fling himself into a chair, clasping his hands tightly,
and then rise and stand before the window and send glances passionate
and shrinking at the house occupied by the Conways.

Now that he was close to his wife, now that any moment might reveal
her walking past his window with his child, perchance, at her side,
he dreaded lest the unparalleled situation he had forced himself into
would prove too heavily charged with cruel conditions for him to
bear. Never once then, never once afterwards, did the vaguest impulse
possess him to go forth and declare himself and claim her. No! A sense
of honour that was inexorable, since it prohibited the faintest echo
of the soul’s secret passionate yearning to make itself audible, had
decreed his silence and enforced the obedience of inclination.

The only concession granted was the enjoyment of such ghostly and
barren pleasure as his heart could find in the knowledge of the close
neighbourhood of the two who were so dear to him. Oh! bitter waking of
memory, to recall him from the sunny vision of the old times when his
joy was complete, and love a permanent possession to enrich his nature
with all gracious and generous emotions, to thrust him into the gray
and bleak twilight of a loveless and desolate life, which the recovered
power could only embitter by recurrence to the things that were lost!

His eyes wandered ceaselessly and restlessly towards the window. From
time to time people went by with the slow, aimless step of persons
who walk for no other end than exercise. An old gentleman, with a
white moustache and a dark skin, stopped, with another old gentleman,
in high shirt-collars and a tail-coat, opposite Holdsworth’s window,
and argued, with many galvanic flourishes of the arms and grimaces of
the face. There was much political excitement abroad at that time,
owing to the Reform Bill of the Grey Administration, to which the
royal assent had been given; and the dark-skinned old gentleman--whose
age, warmth, and intemperate flourishes were as demonstrative of his
politics as his language--bade his companion take notice that, before
five years were passed, England would be a tenth-rate power, governed
by a mob, with a Jesuit seated on every hearth, a Nuncio preaching at
St. Paul’s, not a Bible to be found in the country, and the gallows
groaning under strings of honest patriots. The old gentleman in the
high shirt-collars, who clearly shared his friend’s opinions, nodded
savagely, asked with his shoulders, “What would you have?” and then
moved on a dozen paces, to be stopped again by the other old gentleman
with prophecies, maybe, more blood-chilling and awful than those he had
already declaimed.

Presently Holdsworth, scarcely conscious of what he was about, left
the window and approached the bookcase. He pulled out a volume,
which proved to be an old copy of Gulliver’s Travels, “adorn’d with
sculptures;” and his eye lighting on that passage in which Gulliver
closes his account of his second voyage,[2] his thoughts trooped off to
his old sea-faring life, the book closed upon his fingers, and he sank
in deep meditation.

[2] “In a little time I and my family and friends came to a right
understanding: but my wife protested ‘I should never go to sea any
more;’ although my evil destiny so ordered, that she had not the power
to hinder me.”

The restoration of his memory was comparatively so recent, that he
had found no leisure to recall those frightful experiences of his
which could not recur without overwhelming him with an unspeakable
horror of the sea. He now understood that it should have been his
duty to call upon the owners of the “Meteor,” and acquaint them with
the circumstances of the wreck of their vessel, and the deaths of the
persons who were in his boat, all whom he clearly remembered. There
were friends, doubtless, both in England and America, who could wish to
receive tidings of the fate of these people, though the long interval
of five years should tell as plain a story as Holdsworth could relate.
He knew not whether the inmates of the other boats had been saved, and
he would have given much to ascertain this; but he understood that any
communication he made to the shipowners would be almost sure to appear
in print, by which his wife would learn that he was alive. “No! let the
world think me dead!” he exclaimed bitterly. He had only to live for
the past now--for that memory which had betrayed him and ruined his
life. His future was bare and barren, and there was nothing in all the
world that could kindle one ray of comfort in his hopeless heart but
the bleak privilege of dwelling near his wife and child.

He restored the book to its place and returned to the window.

In the roadway, a few yards to the right, a little girl was standing,
holding a doll. She was a very little creature, with bright yellow
hair down her back, and she held the doll in motherly fashion on her
arm, and caressed it with her hand.

Her back was towards Holdsworth, whose eyes were rooted upon her.

She turned presently and looked down the road, and Holdsworth saw a
little face upon which God had graven a sign that made the poor father
clutch at the wall to steady himself. For there was his own face in
miniature--the face that Dolly had loved before the sufferings of the
mind, and the anguish of hunger and thirst, had twisted from it all
resemblance it had ever borne to what was manly and beautiful in the
human countenance.

He pressed his hands to his eyes and gazed again, then ran to the
bell-rope and pulled it. But when he had done this he wished it undone.
For would not his agitation excite Mrs. Parrot’s suspicions? What was
there in a stranger’s child that should so interest him?

He bit his lip and controlled himself with desperate will; and, when
Mrs. Parrot opened the door, he said to her in a steady voice and with
a forced smile:

“I am sorry to trouble you. I am very fond of little children. Pray can
you tell me who that child is, there?”

Mrs. Parrot drew to the window, evidently finding nothing odd in the
question, and said:

“Why, that’s little Nelly Holdsworth, Mrs. Conway’s daughter.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Holdsworth.

“She _is_ a dear!” continued Mrs. Parrot. “I am very fond of that
child, Mr. Hampden. She’s the only child i’ the road I allow to come
into my garden, for children are so wilful, there’s no tellin’ what
they’ll do the moment your eyes are off ’em. See what a little lady
she looks, and how prettily she holds her doll! She’s waiting for her
mamma, I suppose.”

Mrs. Parrot rapped with her nails on the window. The child looked
round, and Holdsworth shrank away. Mrs. Parrot beckoned. Holdsworth
would have stopped her, but could find no words.

“She’s coming, Mr. Hampden. I’ll bring her to you, sir, if you’ll wait
a moment.”

And out she went.

In a few seconds she returned, leading by the hand the child, who hung
back when she caught sight of the white-faced, bearded man.

“There, Mr. Hampden, this is my pretty young friend, little Nelly!”
exclaimed Mrs. Parrot, stooping to give the child a kiss. “Go and shake
hands with the gentleman, my dear, and show him your nice doll. I’ll
tell you when I see your mamma.”

“Come, dear, come to me,” said Holdsworth in a low voice.

The child approached him slowly, stopping now and again, and looking
shyly at Mrs. Parrot.

“Tut! tut!” exclaimed that lady. “What are you afraid of, Miss Nelly?
Go and shake hands with the gentleman, like a little lady.”

Holdsworth put out his hand; the child advanced a step nearer; he fell
upon one knee and drew her to him.

For some moments he could not speak; he could only look at her--look
with eyes of all-devouring love absorbing all the sweetness of that
young face, feeling a pang of exquisite joy, but shivering quickly as
his fingers locked themselves upon her tiny hand.

He longed to press the little creature to his heart, to fasten his lips
upon her mouth, to weep over her.

“Tell me your name, little one!”

“Nelly,” replied the child, keeping at arm’s length from him, and
staring into his face.

“Nelly what?”

“Nelly Ho’dwor’t.”

His own name, thus lisped by her, thrilled through him; he caught his
breath, and said:

“May I kiss you?”

She put up her mouth, and he kissed her.

“How pretty your hair is!” he murmured, in a voice of exquisite
tenderness, which made Mrs. Parrot turn suddenly and look at him. He
met her glance with a smile, and said:

“I am very fond of children. Will this little girl come and see me here
sometimes?”

“Ay, that she will, sir. Won’t you, Nelly?”

“Det.”

“How old are you, Nelly?”

“Four.”

“Who gave you that doll?”

“Mamma.”

“You will bring dolly to see me, and we will have tea, all three of us.
What have I got here? A bright shilling! That will buy dolly a parasol!”

No words can describe the tone his voice took as he spoke.

“What do you say to the gentleman for this beautiful present?” cried
Mrs. Parrot.

“Tanks,” said the child, putting the doll on the floor to examine the
money with both hands.

“Oh, here comes your mamma!” said Mrs. Parrot. “Make your reverence to
the gentleman ... there’s a dear; pick up dolly ... that’s right.”

She took Nelly’s hand and ran with her out of the room.

The mother, standing at her gate on the other side of the road, looking
up and down the road, caught sight of Mrs. Parrot and the child, and
crossed over to them.

They remained opposite Holdsworth’s window talking, while he, shrinking
against the wall, peered at them through the muslin curtain.

The five years which had passed since he had seen his wife had worked
but a very little change in her. There was more womanly fulness in
her form; and this was about all those five years had done for her.
Her face was still as youthful as when Holdsworth had last looked on
it, her eyes still possessed their deep and delicate tint, the hair
its richness and lustre, the mouth its sweetness, the whole face that
almost infantine expression, conveyed by soft shadowy lines and the
archness of the pencilled eyebrows, which made it beautiful in repose,
more beautiful yet in sorrow. But, young and fair as she seemed, there
was a deep-rooted care in her face which, without qualifying its
freshness, yet mingled in her smile, and lived in her eyes, and fixed
a wistful look on her, such as would be seen in one who lingers long,
long waiting for the summons to depart which no day brings. Her dress
was shabby, her gloves old; but her beauty made even her faded apparel,
cut after the unbecoming fashion then in vogue, picturesque. She wore a
white crape handkerchief over her bare shoulders, and a bonnet-shaped
hat, ornamented with a dark feather, which, drooping over her back,
imparted a peculiar vividness to the light, sheeny gold of her hair.

Strained as his ears were, Holdsworth could not hear her voice, though
Mrs. Parrot’s kindly cackle was audible enough. It was manifest that
they exchanged mere commonplace civilities; and presently Mrs. Parrot
dropped a courtesy, and the mother and child walked slowly away.

Holdsworth watched them with just such a look in his eyes as had been
in them when, racked with torture in the open boat, he had cast glances
full of passionate despair round the horizon for the ship that was to
rescue him. He saw the little girl hold up her shilling, whereupon the
mother stopped and looked back, then continued her walk and passed out
of sight.

CHAPTER XXVI.

OVER THE WAY.

It was natural, after the first liveliness of the emotion which had
been excited in Mrs. Parrot’s breast by the installation of a lodger
worth fourteen shillings a week to her, had in some degree subsided,
that she should begin to wonder who that lodger was.

She had been particularly struck and greatly taken by his behaviour
to the little girl, and inferred, of course, that he was a humane and
tender-hearted man, a conjecture which, although it was true, did no
credit to her sagacity, considering the circumstance on which it was
based; since it is a notorious fact, that great rascals will admire,
pet, and “tip” little children, whose parents they would not scruple to
rob of their very last farthing.

But though Mrs. Parrot had no doubt as to her lodger’s humanity of
character after what she had seen, she could not by any means feel
so sure as to the position he held either in or out of society, the
calling he had followed, if ever he _had_ followed a calling, or the
part of the world he came from. His name was Hampden. That was English.
But had he a Christian name? No initial stood between the Mr. and the
Hampden, on the card affixed to his portmanteau. _Was_ he a Christian?
She hoped he was. She was no judge of other religions; but she must
say, when she let her lodgings to people, that she liked to _feel_ that
they were Christians.

He had ordered dinner at two o’clock; and when she came in to lay the
cloth, for she kept no servant, she found him still at the window,
staring into the empty road as earnestly as if it were filled with a
very beautiful and novel procession. But she could only suppose that he
looked out of the window because he was new to the place.

He smiled softly when he met her glance, but did not speak, nor would
she hazard any remarks herself, for fear of being thought intrusive.
All that he said during dinner was to express himself well pleased with
her cooking; but she noticed, in removing the dishes, that, pleasantly
as he had praised the piece of roast mutton, he had scarcely tasted it,
and that of the four potatoes she had put into the dish, three and a
half remained.

Whilst in the kitchen she heard him leave the house, and, when her
task was done, she went upstairs to her mother’s room, whither she had
conducted the old lady soon after little Nelly’s visit.

“If the gentleman don’t eat more every day than he’s just had for
dinner,” said she, throwing herself back in a chair and fanning her hot
face with the corner of her apron, “I reckon we shall have a funeral
here before long.”

“A what!” gasped the old woman, who sat upright in a cane chair, near
the open window, with an immense Bible on her right hand and her
spectacles on the top of it.

“He’s no more than skin an’ bone as he is,” continued Mrs. Parrot,
“but it was a picter to see him with the child. I never see a man more
soft with a child before.”

“He ain’t likely to make strange nises o’ nights, is he, Sairey?”
exclaimed the old woman, earnestly regarding her daughter with a pair
of eyes from which all expression and light seemed literally washed
out, leaving nothing but two circles of weak, dim blue.

“I don’t think so. He seems to me quiet enough. He’s fond o’ staring
into the road. One might think he’s trying to find out where he is. I
niver see a stranger face. He don’t look English-like, and yet he talks
uncommon well. I can tell by his boots--which is square as square at
the toes, and his clothes, which have an odd twist somehows--that he’s
not from these parts. Maybe, he’s from Ireland.”

“I hope not, Sairey,” ejaculated the old woman, bending forward with
the profoundly confidential air of old age. “I was once fellow-sarvint
with a Ayrish futman as was allus talkin’ of burnin’ down houses, an’
his speech ran on so it were niver to be trusted, for niver was such
lies as he used to tell. You’d best gi’ him notice, Sairey. You can
say I gi’ yer more trouble nor you can well get through, and recommend
Burton’s lodgin’s to him. Burton’s a strong man, and kapes dogs.”

“Tut! I’m not afeard!” said Mrs. Parrot, tossing up her hands and
giving her cap a pull. “There’s no more harm in the man than there
is in you, for didn’t I tell yer how he gave the girl a shillin’
and spoke that soft to it, it made me feel as if I could ha’ cried.
Give him notice, and him not here a day yit! Fourteen shillin’ is
fourteen shillin’ in these scarce times, to say nothin’ of his being
as well-spoken a man as iver you listened to in your life; an’ as for
his face, it is but as God made it, an’ beauty is but skin deep, as t’
parson says, an’ I’m for lettin’ well alone.”

“If he ain’t Ayrish,” said the old woman, stroking the back of her
lean hand, “he may be very well. But sitch talk of invasions from that
nashun as I used to hear when I was a gal, an’ the drink an’ shootin’
as goes on there, is enough to wet your hair with perspiration ...”

“_I_ didn’t say he was Irish. _I_ don’t know what he is. He was askin’
about Mrs. Conway, though she’s unbeknown to him, as any one might tell
who heerd him questionin’. He wants Miss Nelly to bear him company at
tea, and I don’t see why the child can’t come, if the mother ’ull let
it. I won’t take it upon myself to bring the child in. I’ll speak to
the mother when I see her. I like Mrs. Conway. She’s a nice-spoken
lady, but seems to know a deal of grief, poor thing. It ’ud be a mussy
if that husband of hers ’ud take it into his head to pull out all his
own teeth. The cook at Mrs. Short’s was tellin’ me he’s grown that
wicious there’s no wishin’ him a civil good mornin’. An’ drink! Didn’t
I see him pass here yesterday evenin’, staggerin’ on his legs like a
doll which a child tries to teach walkin’ to?”

“The ’pothecaries used to draw teeth in my day; now they must be all
gentlefolks as looks into your mouth,” said the old woman, who had been
three minutes searching in her pocket for the snuff-box that lay open,
with some of its sand-coloured contents spilt, in her lap.

“Pretty gentlefolks!” exclaimed Mrs. Parrot, pulling up the old
woman’s dress and tilting the spilt snuff into the box. “If they’re all
like Mr. Conway, I’d rather carry a toothache to my grave than have it
stopped wi’ the lockjaw, which they tell me he gave to Mr. Timpson;
for drink had taken away the use of his mind, and he pushed the wrong
instrayment into the man’s mouth and nearly choked him, he did, and
then took out two wrong teeth after all; beautiful teeth they was, for
Mr. Timpson showed them to me hisself, with the tears standin’ in his
eyes, wropped up in silver paper.”

“Thank God! he can’t draw none o’ my teeth!” mumbled the old woman,
talking through her nose in rapt enjoyment of the flavour of the snuff.
“They’re all gone.”

“I noticed Mrs. Conway’s gownd to-day. If I was her husband, I’d scorn
to let her appear in sitch a rag. And there was darns in the knees
o’ that child’s stockings as made ’em look forty year old. They’re
always i’ the same dresses, both of ’em. There’s a silk she puts on o’
Sundays, all wore thin over the buzzum, and I remember the bonnet she
had on to-day iver since I’ve known her. Sitch a pretty face as she
has, too! I expect he must ha’ told her some fine lies to get her to
marry him. They say he niver did well, even when he was in the High
Street, wi’ that show-box of his stuck up, filled wi’ gaping gums an’
naked teeth as turned the stomach to see. He must ha’ sold that piece
of ugliness, for I don’t see it nowheres outside his house, which is
a mussy, for I’d as lief see a skiliton on a pole for a sign! Fancy a
doctor settin’ up a death’s-head to show his trade!”

She jumped from her chair with a face and gesture of disgust, and
throwing some knitting with the pins through it into her mother’s lap,
adjusted her cap before the glass, and left the room.

There is always some truth in gossip: and there was a great deal in
what Mrs. Parrot had said of Mr. Conway, who, as we have seen, held
no place at all in her opinion. But then sympathy for Dolly was to be
expected from a woman who, if she did not know what it was to live with
a drunkard, had known what it was to live with a surly man, whose eye
was evil, and whose voice was thick, and whose characteristic method of
expressing discontent was by holding his clenched fist under his wife’s
nose.

Mr. Conway is passing Mrs. Parrot’s door at the very moment that
Mrs. Parrot is leaving her mother’s bedroom; we shall not have an
opportunity of seeing much of him, having the fortunes of a better kind
of hero to deal with; so, while Holdsworth is away from his lodgings,
we’ll step into the road and have a look at the dentist, and follow him
into his house.

He is a man with sandy whiskers and light hair, but by no means
ill-looking. On the contrary, there are materials in his face out of
which a very pleasing countenance could be made; a well-shaped nose, a
well-shaped forehead, a good chin, a facial outline clearly defined and
perfectly symmetrical.

But there never was a better illustration than this man’s face of the
truth, that good features make but a very small portion of beauty.

I want a word to express that middle quality of aspect which is
contrived by the mingling of comely lineaments with bad passions.
Possibly the effect is no more than a neutralisation of nature’s good
intentions, wherein we behold a handsome countenance sunk into a
species of physical negation, by moral qualities tugging it hard in the
direction of repellent ugliness.

A most unstriking face at which you would barely glance, and pass on
absolutely unimpressed. His thin lips might mark both cruelty and
selfishness; his eyes are made heavy by their drooping lids, and the
irids are pale and unintelligent. He is dressed in the style of the
times, of course; pantaloons strapped over his boots, a frock-coat
gaping in a circle round a great quantity of black satin stock (in
which are two pins and a chain). But the pantaloons are frayed at the
heels and bagged at the knees; and the coat is suspiciously polished
at the elbows and the rim of the collar. He walks with a quick, uneasy
step, his hat slightly cocked, and his hands in his breeches pockets,
and arriving at the gate of his house, opens it by giving it a kick
with his foot.

He entered the sitting-room with his hat on, and found the cloth laid
for dinner, but nobody in the room, which was a soiled and dingy
apartment, although the house was a new one, and the paper fresh and
the ceiling white. But no paper and whitewash could qualify the sordid
suggestions of the old drugget imperfectly nailed over the floor,
the old leather sofa and the old leather arm-chair, the mantelpiece
decorated by a pair of plated candlesticks marked with indents, the
dingy red curtains, the _papier mâché_ table in the window, with the
mother-of-pearl dropping out of it.

The subtle magic of feminine fingers which extracts from rubbish itself
what hidden capabilities it may possess of comforting the eye with some
faintest aspect of taste, seemed either never to have been exercised
upon this room, or to have found itself powerless to deal with it. The
only feminine sign was a small bundle of child’s stockings on the top
of an old work-basket on the sofa.

Mr. Conway put his head out of the door and called, “Are you there,
wife?”

“Yes,” replied Dolly’s voice from downstairs.

“How long will dinner be?”

“Five minutes!”

He threw his hat down and walked into the “surgery,” a room at the end
of the passage, furnished with a chest of drawers, a toilet-table and
a looking-glass, an arm-chair, an ugly circular box with a basin let
into it, standing beside the arm-chair; on the toilet-table, some small
hand-glasses, a pair of forceps, and three unfinished false teeth.
Through the window was to be seen a slip of garden of the breadth of
the house, and about fifty feet long--its neglected state, its few
pining shrubs, and a flag-pole with a vane a-top that croaked to every
passage of the wind, showing up very squalidly against the neighbouring
garden, which was richly stocked with wall-fruit and ferns and green
plants.

Little Nelly was in this piece of ground with her doll, seated on the
grass, and at that moment making such a picture as a painter would stop
to study and receive into his mind; her round dark-blue eyes following
the swallows which chased each other high in the air, her mouth pouted
into an expression of exquisite infantine wonder, her bright hair about
her shoulders, and looking, as the breeze stirred the sunshine upon it,
like a falling shower of fine gold.

Mr. Conway stared at the child for a moment, and then turned away and
sauntered towards the door, but came back to open one of the drawers
in the chest and extract a leather-covered bottle, which he shook at
his ear, and put to his mouth.

O God! what contrasts there are in life, lying so close together that
the devil, though his worship be no bigger than a man, might measure
the space between with outstretched hands! Look at Purity and Innocence
in the garden, with its eyes raised to heaven; and the skulking fellow
in the dingy room swallowing brandy as a man steals money; and in the
room below--a darksome, scantily-furnished kitchen--a sweet-faced woman
doing servant’s work, and urging the slattern by her side into quicker
movements, that the gentleman upstairs shall have no occasion to use
bad language.

She comes upstairs presently, this Dolly, her face flushed, and
breathing quickly from the hurry of her movements, and bears with her
own hands a dish that will furnish but a poor repast, though she has
done her best to make what little there is palatable. The slattern,
with wisps of red hair about her forehead, and loose shoes, which beat
a double knock at each step upon the uncarpeted staircase, follows,
armed with a jug and a loaf of bread. Behind comes little Nelly, whom
the mother has summoned before leaving the kitchen, and who has climbed
the staircase with more labour than Mont Blanc is scaled by the Alpine
tourist.

No word is spoken. Nelly is lifted into a chair by her mother, and Mr.
Conway seats himself before the dish and fills a glass from the jug of
ale, taking care--a true connoisseur in such matters--to let the liquor
fall from a height, to secure a froth, into which he dips his mouth and
nose.

The slattern leaves the room; and Dolly cuts up some meat and bread
for the little one, with a whisper in her ear to say grace.

“Did you get the money, Robert?” she asks presently, eating little
herself, and noticing how Robert bribes his appetite with sups of ale.

“No. Davis was out.”

“What shall we do? I have only five and threepence left, and this meat
is not paid for.”

Pence make a sordid enumeration; but we talk of pence, reader, when we
have only pence to spend.

“We must sell something, that’s all,” says Mr. Conway, with a kind of
defiant recklessness in his manner.

She gives him a quick glance, looks at her child, and then closes the
knife and fork upon her plate.

He does not notice that she has eaten about as much as would serve
a bird for a meal; neither does he appear to remark that she drinks
water. _He_, at all events, keeps the beer-jug at his elbow, from
which, in a very short time, he pours out the last glass.

The child alone continues eating.

“_I_ don’t know what’s to be done!” he exclaims in a voice of
suppressed anger, pushing his chair from the table. “The people have
dropped me for that French quack, in Mornington Street. I saw three
carriages at his door when I passed just now. I ought never to have
left the old shop. I did well there.”

“You would do well here if you gave yourself a chance,” says Dolly.
“The lady who called yesterday evening came again this morning. Martha
told me she looked annoyed when she heard you were out. She will go to
some one else, I suppose, now.”

“Let her!” he calls out. “How am I to know that people are coming to
me after dark? Week after week passes, and they don’t come, and--am
I going to hang about here a whole night, in the hope of a patient
turning up? Why didn’t she leave word at what hour she meant to call
to-day? I went out to collect some money, and you know it, though I can
guess what is in your thoughts. But it’s false--there’s my hand on it!”

He let his hand fall heavily on the table, and stared at his wife. She
slightly turned from him, and looked through the window. He left the
table and began to pace the room. The child, having emptied her plate
and wanting something to play with, had taken the shilling Holdsworth
had given her from her pocket, and tried to make it spin on the cloth.

“What’s that Nelly has got there?” said Mr. Conway.

“A shilling,” answered Dolly.

“Did you give it her?... Look at our dinner!... You would pamper that
child if we were starving. Talk to me of your five and threepence when
you can give your baby a shilling!”

“I did not give it to her.”

“Who then?”

“A gentleman.”

“What gentleman?”

“A gentleman lodging at Mrs. Parrot’s.”

He looked at her with irritable suspicion, and then said:

“Did you see him give it? Did he take you and the child for beggars?...
Confound his impudence!... Send Martha over to him with it.”

He turned to ring the bell.

“Stop!” said Dolly, quietly. “Nelly tells me that Mrs. Parrot tapped
on the window to speak to her, and when she went in, she saw the
gentleman, who kissed her, and gave her the shilling to buy her doll a
parasol. No insult could have been intended by this.”

“Oh, that was it!” exclaimed Mr. Conway, “Well, and why do you let the
child keep the money? She’ll lose it. Take it from her.”

“It belongs to her. She will not lose it.”

“Yes, she will. Nelly, give that money to your mamma.”

But Nelly doubled her fist over it, and hid her hand under the table.

“Do you hear what I say?” cried Mr. Conway.

“Why will you not let her keep it?” asked Dolly.

“Am I master here or not?” shouted Mr. Conway. “Give that money to your
mother, child!”

Nelly began to whimper, terrified by the man’s voice, but loath to
surrender her little treasure. He stepped up to her, whipped the little
hand from under the cloth, and forcing the shilling from it, put it
into his pocket.

“Though I’m a beggar by my own folly,” he exclaimed, walking to the
door, “I’ll not be insulted and defied by the beggars I have brought
about me.”

His fingers were in his pocket, and it seemed as though he would pull
the money out and fling it on the table. But second thoughts prevailed;
he jerked his hat on his head, and marched out of the house, banging
the door after him.

Dolly watched to see if he would step across to Mrs. Parrot’s; but he
walked straight on.

“Hush, my darling, hush!” she exclaimed, catching up the sobbing child.
“Dolly shall have her parasol; I will buy it myself. Hush, my pet!
Nelly’s tears break poor mamma’s heart.... Oh, John! oh, husband!”
she murmured; “why did God take you from me? Why did He lead me and my
little one into this misery?”

Truly, it was misery, of a forlorn and hopeless kind. But you have seen
the man Dolly had married at his worst. The most brutal husband is not
always brutal. The drunkard is not always drunk. More colours than
black and white go to the painting of a man off the stage, where corked
eyebrows strike no horror, and blood-boltered cheeks prove nothing more
than a neglect of soap.

Mr. Conway had his soft hours, when he would shed tears, smite his
breast, and call himself a fiend--having reference, by this flattering
title, to nothing but his behaviour to Dolly.

He was undoubtedly in love with her when he married her; and the sweet
face which had made him haunt Southbourne, to the neglect of his
patients, would still, even after two years, have too much potency
not to occasionally soften and give movement to the humanities which
lay in him, hardened and drowned in drink. Though he had always, as
long as people could remember him in Hanwitch, been what they called
a dissipated man, he had managed somehow or other to get a living, to
keep his landlord civil and wear good clothes. Ladies were not wanting
who called him handsome. His manner, when sober, was courteous; his
language correct; his fingers dexterous in pulling teeth out or putting
teeth in. Those who knew anything of him knew that he never saved a
penny; that were he to make ten thousand a year he would never save a
penny; but they always said that, if he would only take a deep-rooted
dislike to beer and brandy, go to bed at ten and rise at seven, attend
to his business and give up smoking pipes in the streets, he might
obtain enough money to enable him to keep a carriage and live in good
style.

How he met Dolly matters little. She was living in one room at
Southbourne at that time, trying to obtain a livelihood by taking in
needlework. She was miserably poor, with a little baby at her breast.
Old Mr. Newcome, the rector, did his best for her, and allowed her what
little he could afford out of his slender income, which enabled her to
pay her rent. But she had to clothe and feed her child and herself, and
the work she procured was scanty and poorly paid for. God knows how she
managed to struggle through those days! Mr. Conway asked her to marry
him, but she answered “No,” bitterly, for her love for Holdsworth was
a passion. Then her only friend, Mr. Newcome, died; her health broke
down; she was absolutely destitute; and so, for her baby’s sake--but
shrinking from the marriage as one shrinks from the commission of
an evil deed, and with a heart in her so heavy that nothing but her
love for her child seemed to keep her alive--she gave her hand to Mr.
Conway, and went to live with him at Hanwitch.

She had no affection for the man. Her marriage was a bitter necessity,
and she hated it and herself for that. She had no knowledge of Conway’s
habits, though she had had penetration enough to miss certain moral
qualifications which are to be felt and cannot be explained. Now she
discovered that he was an intemperate, improvident man, hasty in his
temper, selfish, and at the same time neglectful of his own interests.

He was some way ahead in his downward career when he married her. The
addition his marriage made to his expenses quickened his pace, as an
object, rolling slowly at first, improves its velocity in proportion to
the increase of its distance from the starting-point. One by one his
patients deserted him. He insulted his landlord, to whom he owed money,
who gave him notice to quit. He then hired the little house in which we
have found him, and was now illustrating one of the great mysteries of
social life--the mystery of living without money, of keeping a house
over his head without a shilling in his pocket, of wearing boots and
coats without the means in his purse to pay off the milkman’s sixpenny
score.

How is this done? There are people doing it every day. They are doing
more: they are keeping men-servants, renting big houses, wearing
fine dresses, frequenting fashionable haunts, on nothing a year. How
Thackeray puzzled over this problem! How Dickens tried to explain it
and failed: for he is always driven to a last moment, when some good
genius steps forward to help. Imagination can’t deal with a feat which
makes nothing do the work of a great deal.

There is no doubt something aggressive, even to good nature, in the
brooding melancholy that goes about its duties lifelessly, which gives
spiritless attention to matters of moment and significance, which looks
complaint without speaking it, and addresses itself to every task of
life with an air of reproachful endurance.

A man possessed of such an inflammable temper as Conway would be
constantly taking fire in the presence of such a melancholy; and it
must be confessed that Dolly embodied the part with some degree of
completeness. Silent and mournful submission to fate was the wrong
attitude to assume towards a man in whom was a good deal of the fool.
A powerful virago, with muscular arms and a venomous tongue, would
have kept him to his work and out of the taverns by the irresistible
influence of words supported by finger-nails.

Dolly, whose heart was never with him, soon learned to despise him. It
is true that she endeavoured, at the beginning of their married life,
to win him from his extravagant and reckless courses by entreaties
and the mild persuasion of caresses; but she soon ceased her appeals
on finding that they took no effect, and only rarely alluded to his
habits, which, having plunged them into poverty, were keeping them
there, and sinking them lower and lower each day.

With an inconsistency not very uncommon, he resented her silence at
the same time that he knew the expression of her thoughts would enrage
him. He was still sufficiently under the control of her beauty to feel
jealous of her love, which he very well knew was with the man they
both thought dead. That truth had leaked out long ago. He once heard
her teaching her child to pray; and presently lift up her own voice in
a prayer which had no name in it but John’s, whom she cried aloud to,
bidding his spirit take witness of the sufferings which had driven her
into an act that made her hateful to herself. Once, when her gentle
sweetness was stirred into passion by him, she declared that she had
never loved him; that she had married him for her child’s sake; that if
God took her babe from her she would kill herself, for her husband was
in heaven, and his voice spoke in her conscience, eternally reproaching
her for forgetting the vow they had made--_that though death should
sunder them, the survivor would be true to love and memory, and live
alone_.

But his petulance, his churlishness, his occasional brutality, indeed,
was not owing to this. She had merely put his own knowledge of her into
language; and since he had married her, fully persuaded that the gift
of her hand had been dictated by pure necessity only, he could scarcely
find himself alienated by the confession of her motive. Poverty and
drink were the two demons that mastered him. And poverty without drink
would have done the work; for his happened to be one of those boneless
natures which give under a very small weight; one of those weak
characters who, if they find themselves in a gutter, are satisfied to
lie there and roll there, and moisten the mud with which they bedaub
those about them with tears, and make their settlements gross with
oaths, and shrieks, and reproaches.

CHAPTER XXVII.

FATHER AND CHILD.

All next morning Holdsworth kept watch for Dolly and his child, but did
not see them. But Mr. Conway had passed when Mrs. Parrot happened to
be in the room laying the cloth for dinner, and the woman had directed
Holdsworth’s attention to him. The glimpse he obtained, however, was
very brief. All that he saw was a sandy-whiskered gentleman, with
a tilted hat, aim with rather uncertain legs for the gate with the
brass plate upon it, and vanish with an alacrity that was painfully
suggestive of a disordered vision.

“There he goes! Drunk as usual!” exclaimed Mrs. Parrot, disgustfully,
giving the table-cloth an angry twitch.

“How does he live? I have seen nobody call at his house yet!”

“No, sir; and I don’t think you’re likely to. Persons as can’t get
served at the other tooth-drawers are too sensible to walk all this way
to get their jaws broke.”

“Are they _very_ poor, do you think?”

“Why, sir, I suppose he must pay his rent somehow, but I don’t know as
he does anything more. I’m told that they owe money all over the town,
but the tradespeople make no fuss, because, as Mr. Jairing the butcher
says to me, ‘It’s all very fine, Mrs. Parrot,’ he says, ‘talkin’ of
hexecutions, but what’s the use o’ going to the expense of a distress
when there’s nothing to seize?’ There’s a deal in that, sir.”

“God help them!” muttered Holdsworth to himself. Then looking up he
said, “Do you think Mrs. Conway would let her little girl come and have
tea with me this afternoon?”

“I should think she would, sir, and feel honoured by the askin’.”

“I have not seen the child to-day.”

“No, sir! Mrs. Conway don’t often come out. She kapes a bit of a wench
as does her arrands, and I’ve told the slut times out o’ mind to put
her bonnet on, an’ not go flyin’ down the road as though a orficer was
arter her, disgracin’ of our neighbourhood, and frightening away any
respectable person as might be comin’ wi’ a bad tooth. I don’t think of
_him_, sir. If I could put a sixpence in his way I would, for the sake
of his wife an’ the little one.”

“How shall I invite little Nelly if I do not see her?”

“I’ll run across, if you like, when I’ve got your dinner ready, and ask
Mrs. Conway if she’ll let the child come. Perhaps you’ll just watch,
sir, and tell me when the husband leaves the house. I don’t want to
meet him if I can help it.”

An hour elapsed before Holdsworth saw Mr. Conway pass on his way to the
High Street, on which he rang the bell and informed Mrs. Parrot that
she might now call on Mrs. Conway in safety.

His anxiety to have the child impressed his landlady as a very odd
thing. She could understand his admiration of Nelly; she could also
understand his calling her in and giving her a kiss and a present. No
man’s heart, she considered, could fail to be warmed by the sight of so
pretty a little girl. But she could not understand him posting himself
at the window, and looking troubled because he did not see the child,
and showing himself as anxious to have her to tea as if she was a grown
woman, and he was courting her.

She sailed across the road (watched by Holdsworth), her cap-strings
streaming over her shoulders, and walked up to the door of the Conways’
house, and gave a single knock. She was kept waiting so long, that when
the door was at last opened by the “bit of a slut,” who, to judge by
her complexion, appeared to have been devoting the last hour or two to
black-leading her face, Mrs. Parrot, instead of asking for Mrs. Conway,
began storming at her for “kaping respectable folks on the doorsteps
while she sat readin’ ha’porths o’ bad fiction by the kitchen fire.”

“I wasn’t readin’. I didn’t hear yer. Who do you want--missus?” said
the girl sulkily.

“Why, Mrs. Conway, of course. Show me in, and go an’ tell her at once
that I’m here,” replied Mrs. Parrot, not waiting to be shown in, but
pushing into the middle of the passage.

The girl shambled off, and presently Mrs. Conway came up the kitchen
stairs. The skirt of her dress was pinned up at the waist, and her
arm-sleeves were above her elbows, displaying the whiteness and
fineness of the skin, though the arms were very thin.

“How do you do, Mrs. Parrot? You will excuse my wretched untidy
appearance. I am doing a little washing downstairs, and would not keep
you waiting whilst I made myself presentable.”

“Niver mention it, ma’am,” answered Mrs. Parrot, looking with pleasure,
mingled with pain, at the sweet face, in which, now that there was no
hat to shadow it the sorrow and care were clearly seen. Her prettiness
was but enhanced by the looped-up skirt, showing the little feet and
small firm ankles. Her bright hair was in disorder, and there was the
little flush of recent exertion on her cheeks.

“I’ve called wi’ a message from my gentleman lodger. He wants Miss
Nelly to drink tea with him, and sent me across to ask you to let her
come.”

“The same gentleman who gave Nelly a shilling yesterday?” asked Dolly,
looking half surprised and half pleased.

“Yes, ma’am. He’s a very nice person, and seems uncommon partial to
children. He’s been all the morning on the look-out for your little
gal, and I hope you’ll let her come, ma’am, and bring her doll wi’ her,
for I think he’ll take it to heart if you refuse.”

“Oh, I will certainly send her. Will half-past three do? I shall have
to dress her. Pray give my compliments to the gentleman, and thank him
for his kindness. You have not told me his name.”

“Hampden, ma’am; Mr. Hampden.”

“I have not yet seen him. Is he an old man? Few young men care for
children.”

“To tell you the truth, ma’am, I’ve got no more idea of his age, than
I have of the age of my house. He’s got a deal o’ gray hair on his
head, and yet he isn’t an old man either, although to see him walk,
leanin’ on his stick, you’d take him to be sixty. I think he means to
make friends wi’ your little gal, if you’ll let him, just for want o’
company. He don’t seem to know anybody in Hanwitch, nor to follow any
callin’ like. I doubt he’s a bit rich; but you see, ma’am, he only took
my lodgin’s the day before yesterday, and I’ve not had time to make him
quite out yit.”

Saying this, Mrs. Parrot dropped a courtesy, and turned to depart,
taking a quick comprehensive glance at the dingy little parlour as she
passed, and mentally comparing it with her own rooms.

Holdsworth was at the window when she returned, and she could hardly
forbear laughing, so tickled was she by his expectant face.

“Mrs. Conway’s compliments, sir, and she says that her little gal will
be with you at half-past three, thankin’ you for your kindness,” said
she, her eyes twinkling with her suppressed but perfectly good-natured
mirth.

“Thank you, Mrs. Parrot, for taking so much trouble,” exclaimed
Holdsworth gleefully. “What time is it now? A quarter to three. I shall
just have time to walk into the High Street and buy a cake. She will
like a cake--a plum-cake I think; and shall I get some marmalade? Yes,
she will enjoy marmalade--and what else? Tell me, Mrs. Parrot; what do
little children like?”

“Why, mostly sweet things, sir. I guess the marmalade’ll take Miss
Nelly’s fancy. But don’t you trouble, sir; I can run out and buy you
what you want.”

“No--I am obliged to you. There are other things she might like which I
shouldn’t be able to remember without seeing them. We will have tea at
four, Mrs. Parrot. I shall be back in twenty minutes.”

Mrs. Parrot watched him leave the house and walk down the road as
swiftly as he could, leaning on his stick. “Well, if iver I saw the
like of this!” she exclaimed aloud. “I’ll not tell mother; it might
scare her. There’s something downright sing’ler in the notion of a
stranger takin’ all this trouble, and goin’ almost wild-like all along
of a little gal he never saw before yisterday. Some folks ’ud call it
alarmin’.”

_Her_ nerves, however, were equal to the occasion; for whilst
Holdsworth was away, she journeyed upstairs and unlocked a little
glass-fronted cupboard, screwed into a corner of her bedroom, from
which she took a teapot, a cream-jug, and two cups and saucers of
brilliantly-coloured china; likewise from an open box under her bed a
tray magnificently decorated with mother-of-pearl birds of paradise
seated on pink trees, and surrounded by a prospect not to be paralleled
on this side the moon.

She returned to the kitchen with these things, and then entered the
garden and picked a bouquet of sweet-scented flowers, with which she
furnished the tray. Then she set to work upon a loaf of bread, and
produced in no time a number of thin and appetising slices; which done,
and the tray being arranged, she fell back a step to admire the effect.

At a quarter-past three Holdsworth returned, followed by a boy with
his arms full of bags. He called to Mrs. Parrot, who came out and took
the bags from the boy, and placed them upon the dining-room table.
More things than edibles had been purchased; though of these there
was enough to give an evening party upon--fruit, cakes, pots of jam,
gingerbread-nuts, sweetmeats, tarts; there was a doll; there was also
a horse and cart; and there was an immense box of bricks.

Mrs. Parrot turned pale, and was much too astonished to speak, as
Holdsworth thrust the bags and pots, the buns and the tarts, into
her arms, and requested her to take them at once into the kitchen,
and display them on plates to the very best advantage, ready for the
little one when the bell should ring for tea. He then hid the toys in
a closet, and stationed himself at the window to watch for Nelly.

Punctual to the moment, she came out of the house, led by the hand by
the servant, who looked horribly grimy. Holdsworth ran to the door and
opened it, and when the child came timidly up to him, snatched her up
in his arms, and hastened with her into the sitting-room, kissing her
all the way.

“There’s a good little pet,” he said sitting down and keeping her on
his knee. “Let me take off your hat. Nelly mustn’t be afraid of me.”

“My own! my own!” he murmured, as his lingering fingers caressed her
soft hair, and he gazed with passionate love at her big eyes, roving
with a half-scared expression from his face around the room.

“Me dot dolly,” she said, producing the old toy from under her cloak.

“Ay, that’s right; and dolly shall have a slice of cake all to herself.
Here she is!” he exclaimed, seeing Mrs. Parrot peeping in at the door.
“Will you take her hat and this little cape?”

“How do you do, dear?” said Mrs. Parrot, giving the child a kiss.

“Look at my frock!” exclaimed Nelly, holding up her dress, which had a
little embroidery work upon it, and which bore marks of much patient
mending and darning.

“Beautiful! beautiful!” cried Mrs. Parrot. “I’ve set the kettle on to
bile, sir, and tea’ll be ready whiniver you’re pleased to want it.”

So saying, she dropped a courtesy, being greatly impressed by Mr.
Hampden’s undoubted wealth, illustrated by his prodigal purchases, and
withdrew.

Father and child! A lonely man, gentle, honourable, faithful, as any
whom God in His wisdom has chosen to afflict, opening his heart to
receive and fold up the sweetness and innocence of his own little baby!

Ah! I think even Mrs. Parrot might have guessed the strange mystery
of this man’s desire for the child, had she but watched him from some
secret hiding-place when the door had closed upon her.

He surrendered himself to his emotion when he felt himself alone with
the little girl, and for many moments could not speak to her, could do
no more than look at her, searching her fairy lineaments with something
almost of a woman’s ecstasy, reading his brief history of hopeful,
beautiful love in her fresh deep eyes, and drinking in greedily the
memories of the days that were no more, which thronged from the face
that mirrored his as it was when Dolly knew him, as the dew-drop
mirrors the sun.

But he was recalled to himself by the gathering expression of fear
in Nelly. Indeed, there was something alarming enough to her in the
concentrated passion, all soft and holy as it was, that shone in his
fixed regard.

Such abandonment to feeling would not do, if the part he was to play
was to be complete.

He placed her gently on the floor, and, going to the cupboard, brought
out the doll.

“See, Nelly! here is a little lady I invited expressly to drink tea
with you. She told me that she had often seen you pass her shop in the
High Street, and that she wanted to live with you. You must take her
home when you leave me, will you?”

Nelly stood for a moment transfixed by the spectacle of this
gorgeously-dressed creature, resplendent in blue gauze, bronzed
boots, gilt sash, and flowing red feather. Then--so permanent is
human affection--she threw down her old doll and ran forward, with
outstretched arms, to welcome and hug the stranger.

But the sum of her amazement was not yet made out. Once more Holdsworth
dived into the mysterious cupboard and produced the horse and cart,
which, he told Nelly, was the chariot that had brought the young lady
to his house, and without which she never condescended to take the
air, being much too fine a lady to walk. The box of bricks followed;
and presently Nelly was on the floor, taking up the three toys one
after the other in quick succession, her avariciousness of enjoyment
perplexed by the number of the objects that ministered to it.

Holdsworth knelt by her side and watched her face.

A man need not be a father to find something elevating and purifying
in the contemplation of a child’s countenance, varied by tiny innocent
emotions, reflecting the little play of her small passions, as her eyes
reflect the objects that surround her. But that subtle and sacred bond,
which unites a child’s life to a parent’s heart, creates an impulse to
such contemplation which makes the pleasure sweeter than any other kind
of pleasure, by the infusion of an exquisite pathos, mingled with the
only kind of pride to which vanity seems to contribute nothing.

The natural bitterness which Holdsworth felt in thinking that his
little girl did not know him, that misfortune had thrust his love
out of the sphere of her own and his wife’s life, was converted into
tender melancholy by the emotions Nelly’s presence excited, and left
his pleasure unalloyed by pain. Here was a little being who was his
at least; his by a right no sin, no folly, no error could challenge;
indisputably his, to survive, if God permitted, into his future, when
the time should come for him to call himself aloud by the name of
Father, and ask her love as some recompense for that present sacrifice
of his which was enforced by grand obedience to the high laws of
morality.

How hard it was to be thus true to himself, thus true to his wife,
thus true to the little one who must needs share some portion of that
obligation of shame which would befall them all, were he to confess
himself--Judge! for you see him kneeling by his child’s side; you may
behold his love in his eyes; you may know that no upturned luminous
glance of hers but thrills along the chords of his passion, and makes
his heart gush forth its overfull tenderness, even until his sight
grows humid, and he turns his thoughts in a piteous aside to God for
courage and will, so to sustain this strange, pathetic happiness, that
no sorrow shall follow it.

“Nelly, we will have tea now,” he says; and he rings the bell, and
then comes up to the child again, and, turns her face up, kisses her
suddenly, and seats himself at a distance with his chin upon his hand.

Then Mrs. Parrot came in, armed with the tray, which she placed upon
the table, while she challenged her lodger’s admiration by lightly
lifting her gray eyes and smirking.

Yes, it was very beautiful. The bouquet made the room odoriferous at
once; the birds of paradise looked splendid; the cups were elegant
enough to induce one to go on drinking tea with stubborn disregard
of the nervous system, for hours and hours together, if only for an
excuse to handle them and have them under the eye. In order to bring
little Nelly’s head a little above the level of the table, Holdsworth
piled three or four of the folios on a chair, on which he seated her;
and that the two dolls might be seen to advantage, he very ingeniously
tied them together, and set them on a chair, leaning against the table,
with a plate and a slice of bread-and-butter before them; whereat Nelly
laughed rapturously, clapping her hands and filling the room with sweet
sounds.

It was all Fairyland, these cups and toys and cakes and what not, to
the little girl, whose tea at home was often no more than a slice of
dry bread, when her step-father had drunk away the money he should
have given to his wife, and left her without the means to purchase an
ounce of butter. The sun was at the back of the house, and its rules
of yellow light flooded the floor at the extremity of the apartment,
and flung a golden haze over that portion of the room where the table
stood. There was something so charming in the scene thus delicately
lighted, that Mrs. Parrot, who had been struggling with her modesty for
some minutes, while she fidgeted over the plates and dishes, suddenly
exclaimed:

“I humbly beg parding for the liberty, sir, but would you mind mother
just takin’ one peep? She came into the kitchen while I was dressin’
the tray, an’ I told her what was goin’ forward, an’ I think it ’ud do
her heart good to see this beautiful show.”

“Let her come by all means,” replied Holdsworth, touched and diverted
by the perfect simplicity of these people.

Presently fell a respectful knock, and Mrs. Parrot re-entered, followed
by a Roman nose that came and vanished like an optical delusion near
the handle of the door.

“Come in, mother; the gentleman’s kind enough to say you may,” said
Mrs. Parrot; and in faltered the old woman, dropping an aged courtesy,
and making her spectacles chatter in their wooden case as she strove to
withdraw them.

“Ain’t this a picter, mother?”

“Niver see anything to aquil it,” replied the old lady, putting on her
spectacles and gazing around her with many a convulsive motion of the
head. “Why, Sairey, them’s our best cups!”

“Yes, I told you I was usin’ them. Don’t you see the little gal,
mother?”

“See her? Yes,--of course I do. But she don’t want an old ’ooman like
me to kiss her, eh, my pretty? I’m very much obleeged, sir,” dropping
a creaking courtesy, “for the sight o’ this table.”

“Would your mother like one of these cakes for her tea?” said
Holdsworth.

“Oh, sir, you’re very good.--Mother, the gentleman wants to know if
you’ll accept of one of these cakes for your tea?”

“Thank ye, sir. I relish a bit o’ somethin’ sweet now and agin,”
replied the old lady, dropping another courtesy as she received the
cake. “I was cook to Squire Harrowden, lar’ bless yer! I dessay it were
years afore you was born, and they did say as there niver was my aquil
i’ the makin’ o’ pie-crust. I’ve cooked for as many as a hundred and
tin persons, ay, that I have,” with intense earnestness, “as Sairey’ll
bear me witness, for she’s heerd the story from her own father, as was
gamekeeper to the Squire, an’ a more likely man you niver see, sir. His
name was Cramp, which he was a Croydon man, as you may happen to know
the name if you was iver in them parts.”

“Come, mother, we have stopped long enough,” exclaimed Mrs. Parrot,
putting her hand upon the old lady’s arm.

They both courtesied; and then the old woman let fall the cake, which
rolled under the table. Holdsworth recovered it for her, which act of
condescension was so overwhelming that she let the cake fall again; on
which Mrs. Parrot lost her temper, and hurried the old dame through the
door at a velocity to which her legs were quite unused, and possibly
quite unequal. She might be heard feebly remonstrating in a voice
similar to the sound a key makes when turned in a rusty lock; and then
the door was closed, and Holdsworth and Nelly were left alone.

If Mrs. Parrot had dared, she would have been glad to advise Holdsworth
“not to let the little gal eat too much, there bein’ nothing worse nor
sweetstuff for young stomachs, which finds milk-and-water sometimes
too much for ’em.” But, happily, Nelly was not a glutton; besides, the
majority of human beings at her age eat only as much as they want, and
no more; we wait until our judgment is matured, until life is precious,
until we have experienced most of the distempers which arise from
an overloaded stomach, before making ourselves thoroughly ill with
over-feeding!

By this time the child was perfectly at home with Holdsworth, and
enjoying herself immensely, varying a bite at a slice of cake with a
bite at some bread covered with jam, sipping the good milk Holdsworth
had obtained for her with great gravity, and staring at the dolls, and
then bending to make sure that her bricks had not taken to their heels
while she was looking at the horse and cart, and that the horse had not
bolted with the cart while she was looking at her bricks.

Holdsworth scarcely removed his eyes from her face. When he spoke to
her there was a softness in his voice that melted like music on the ear.

At last she pushed her plate away, and Holdsworth rang the bell, and
giving Mrs. Parrot private instructions to make up a parcel of the
remainder of the cakes, etc., ready for Nelly to take home with her, he
clasped the child’s hand and went with her into the garden, she holding
the new doll, he dragging the horse and cart after him.

There was a square of grass in this garden, and a bench on it; and here
Holdsworth sat, while Nelly played with her toys.

It was a roomy, old-fashioned garden, with aged walls, full of rusty
nails and rotten ligatures, and a few tall pear-trees sheltering a
small circumference of ground at their feet; and many fruit-trees
sprawling wildly against the walls. The moss was like a carpet on the
flint walk, and the box at the side of the bed was high and thick;
and at the top of the garden was an old hencoop, hedged about with
wirework, behind which some dozen hens scratched the soil for worms,
and made the air drowsy with their odd, half-suppressed mutterings.

Moods possess us, sometimes, which such a scene as this will affect
more pleasurably than a garden bursting with exotics, and tended with
the highest artistic judgment. There is something very calming in
homely shrubs, and old fruit-trees with their roots hidden by the long,
vivid grass, and uncouth weeds thrusting their rude shapes among violet
beds; and the solemn chatter of barn-door hens sunning themselves in
hot spaces, or lying like dead things with a wing half-buried in sand
and dirt, will sometimes impart a more agreeable tranquillity to the
mind than the choicest songs of nightingales warbled in groves under a
full moon.

Holdsworth suffered the child to have her full sportive will for some
time, and then, thinking her tired, called her to him.

She ran to him at once, and he perched her on his knee.

“Is Nelly afraid of me now?”

“No. Nelly dot afraid. Nelly loves ’oo.”

In proof whereof she put her mouth up for a kiss.

“Will Nelly come to see me every day?”

“Det.”

“Does Nelly’s papa love her?”

He believed that she had been taught to regard Mr. Conway as her papa.
It was a sore tax upon the gentle mood then on him to put the question
in that form, but he wished to learn if his child were well treated by
her step-father.

The question puzzled her. Indeed, she was a very little thing, and
backward in her speech. It was delicious to see her knit her tiny
brows, and gaze with her full, deep, earnest eyes on Holdsworth, with
a half-intelligence in her face, and all the rest child-sweetness.

Like all children, who cannot answer a question, she remained silent;
a hint parents would sometimes do well to take.

“Does Nelly get plenty to eat?”

“Det.”

This was not quite true; but then Holdsworth, who knew nothing of
children, was ignorant that little infants will borrow their answers
from your voice or face, so that to get an affirmative from them you
have only to speak or look affirmatively.

“Does mamma teach Nelly to pray?”

“Det. Nelly pray.”

And, to prove how well she could pray, she put her two hands together,
hung down her head, and whispered:

“Dod bless dear mamma and Nelly. Dod bless little Nelly’s dear papa.”

She looked up coyly, as though ashamed.

Dear reader, smile not at these simple words, nor think them puerile.
When we behold a little child praying, we know how the angels worship
God.

A sob broke from Holdsworth as she ceased. Who was little Nelly’s dear
papa but he? His wife’s love had dictated that prayer, and it was
their child who told him of her love. Ah! God had deigned to hear that
prayer, whispered by a wife’s heart through the lips of her infant, and
had blessed him with this knowledge of her devotion, and had brought
him from afar to know it.

No; not want of love had made her faithless to his memory. Faithless
she was not--she could not be if her heart nightly spoke to God of him
through her child.

Let him look at the little girl now; let him feel the fulness of
the love she inspired in him; let him imagine that he was desolate
and friendless, and in want, and that this frail flower, this tender
little lamb, pined and grew wan and ragged for food and raiment; let
him mingle with his own emotion the pain and torment which a mother’s
heart would feel in the presence of this baby’s sufferings; and then
let him condemn his wife, if he could, for sacrificing her memories and
accepting food and shelter from any hand that offered them under any
honourable conditions.

He could not speak again for some time; and Nelly, growing tired of
sitting, slipped from his knee, and betook herself to her toys.

Then his eyes kindled anew, and he watched her eagerly. He longed to
ask her questions--to hear her lisp him sweet assurances of his Dolly’s
love--to learn from her little lips that her mother was his, had
been, would always be his, though separated from him by a barrier as
formidable as death. But there was no question he could put which the
child might not repeat again; for, backward as she was in speech, her
small imperfect language would be intelligible enough to the mother.
His curiosity would be too unnatural in a stranger not to excite
Dolly’s suspicions; and if they should not even lead to the discovery
of his secret, they might be the means of breaking off all intercourse
between him and his child.

And so he remained silent; and presently, as he sat watching the
little creature pushing her doll to and fro in the cart and talking
to herself, a calm came upon his heart--a sense of exquisite repose
and security. You would have said, to look upon him and remark the
placid sweetness that reigned in his face, that the child’s prayer had
veritably done its office--that God had blessed him indeed.

A long hour passed. The garden was fresh and cool; the declining sun
mellowed the gray walls and kindled many little suns in the vine-draped
windows; the sparrows flitted quickly with short chirrups from tree to
tree; and the crooning of the hens added completeness to the peace and
tenderness that breathed in the air.

Once again Nelly was on Holdsworth’s knee, fetching vague replies from
her struggling perceptions for his questions, when Mrs. Parrot came out
of the house and said that Mrs. Conway was in the sitting-room, waiting
to take her little girl home.

Holdsworth glanced quickly at the window of the room, but did not see
her. He put the child down hurriedly, and said:

“There, my little pet, run along with Mrs. Parrot.”

“Won’t you come and speak to Mrs. Conway, sir?” asked Mrs. Parrot. “She
wants to thank you for your kindness.”

“No--no--pray don’t let her call it kindness,” stammered Holdsworth,
who was very pale.

“I’m sure she’ll take it unkind if you won’t let her thank you, sir,”
said Mrs. Parrot earnestly. “She’s been watching you both through the
window for the last five minutes, an’ I couldn’t help tellin’ her what
a fine treat you have given Miss Nelly. Besides, she’s seen them toys,”
she added, looking at Nelly’s presents.

A whole lifetime of nervous pain was in that moment’s pause. Could he
meet her, speak to her, and remain unknown? His desire was to hide.
It seemed inconceivable that in five years such a change should be
wrought in him as to render him unrecognisable by his wife.

But the pressing necessity of immediate action was too sudden to give
his imagination time to alarm his judgment. He must dare the encounter,
since it was not to be obviated by any means which might not prove more
productive of suspicion than bold confrontment.

He laid the utmost tyranny of his will upon his feelings, and saying:

“Perhaps you are right, Mrs. Parrot. Mrs. Conway will think me rude if
I do not see her,” took Nelly’s hand and walked with her to the house.

Dolly was seated in an arm-chair near the fireplace, leaning her cheek
on her hand. Her attitude showed that she had been watching the group
in the garden.

She stood up when Holdsworth entered and bowed to him.

Nelly ran to her, holding up her doll.

“Look, mamma!”

The action was timely; it enabled Holdsworth to walk to the side of the
window, where the shadow lay darkest, and there he stood.

This he had sense enough to do; but for a moment or two the room swam
round him, and he grasped the back of a chair.

_Would she know him?_

That thought swept like a galvanic shock through him, and made his
blood tingle.

It brought hope with it and fear; a wild paradoxical emotion of
yearning love and the blighting sense of the sorrow and dishonour
recognition would involve.

“I have to thank you very much, Mr. Hampden, for your attention to my
little girl,” she said in a low sweet voice--how remembered!

“Her society gives me great happiness,” he replied, with the faintest
tremor in his tone.

It might have been that sign of agitation which made her look at him
suddenly.

His gaze sank. But he felt her eyes upon his face, and the eager,
restless scrutiny that filled them.

But if ever a memory of something infinitely beloved to her had been
renewed by his reply, it melted upon her conviction of the death of him
whom Holdsworth’s voice had recalled to her, as snow upon water.

Could it have been otherwise?

Not five years--not twenty years--not a lifetime, maybe, of ordinary
sufferings could have so transformed his face but that her love could
have pierced the mask.

But the unnatural misery of those ten days in the open boat--the hunger
that had wasted, the agonising thirst that had twisted his face out of
all likeness to what it had been, the growth of beard and moustache
that hid the lower part of the countenance, the gray hair, the bare
forehead, the deformed eyebrows, the rugged indent between the brows,
the stooped form!--

Here was a transformation that would have defied a mother’s
instincts--that would have offered an impenetrable front to perception
barbed into keenness by the profoundest love that ever warmed the heart.

And yet, looking at this woman attentively--looking at her gazing at
yonder man, cowering, it might almost seem, in the friendly shadow
of the wall--there was something in her eyes, something in her face,
something in her whole manner, that would have quickened your pulse
with a moment of breathless suspense.

In such matters, as in the loss of memory, we must recognise the
existence of a deep spiritual insight having no reference to the
revelations of the mind. There are convictions which do not satisfy,
though cemented by logic and acted on by their possessor with sincere
conscience. Against such convictions instincts will surge as waves
break upon a shore. Echoes are awakened, but are thought purposeless.
And the conviction is still maintained, while the secret truth rolls at
its base.

The voice of Holdsworth, but not his face, had set Dolly’s instincts in
motion.

But then her conviction that Holdsworth was dead was a permanent one;
and under it her instincts subsided into uneasy sleep, though there was
a shadow of melancholy on her face when she removed her eyes, which had
not been there before Holdsworth spoke.

“I hope Nelly has been good, Mr. Hampden.”

“Very good, indeed.”

He seemed to know that the crisis was passed, for he breathed more
freely, looked at her, and removed his hand from the chair.

“These toys are very beautiful. I really feel unable to express my
gratitude to you.”

“You owe me no thanks. My gratitude is due to you for allowing your
sweet little girl to come and see me.”

“Mrs. Parrot tells me you are very fond of children?”

“Very. I hope little Nelly will often be here. I am quite alone, and
she cheers me with her pretty prattle.”

She glanced at him quickly and sympathetically, as he said he was
alone, and sighed.

Holdsworth noticed that her dress was very shabby; but her beauty lost
nothing by her apparel. He thought her looking sweeter than when he had
left her five years before. Her riper charms were made touching by an
under colouring of sadness, and there was languor in her movements and
speech--sign of heart-weariness.

“It is time for us to get home, Nelly,” she said, looking uneasily
towards the window. “Go and give Mr. Hampden a kiss, and thank him
prettily for his beautiful presents.”

The child approached Holdsworth, who kissed her gently, repressing the
passionate emotion that, had he been alone, would have prompted him to
raise her in his arms and press her to his breast.

“Here are some little cakes,” he said, taking the parcel Mrs. Parrot
had prepared, and giving them to the child, but addressing Dolly,
“which will amuse her to play with. When may she come again, Mrs.
Conway?”

“Oh, she must not intrude ...”

“No, no! she cannot come too often. Pray let me make a companion
of her. She has completely won my heart. May she not walk with me
sometimes? I promise to take as much care of her as if she were my own
child.”

He had advanced a step and spoke eagerly, bending forward; but meeting
her full eyes fixed on him with a little frown of mingled fear and
amazement, he turned pale, fell back a step, and forcing a smile, said
hurriedly:

“I am sometimes--sometimes laughed at for--for my love of children.”

She did not answer him for some moments, but stood watching him with a
startled expression, suggesting both fascination and terror. Then she
averted her eyes slowly, the colour went out of her cheeks, and she
murmured something under her breath.

“You remind me of one who was very dear to me ... I beg your pardon ...
there is often a strange resemblance in the tones of voices.”

She took the child’s hand, and was mechanically walking to the door.

“Me want dolly and horse,” said Nelly, holding back.

Holdsworth picked up the toys, and went into the passage to open
the door. They bowed to each other, and Holdsworth returned to the
sitting-room.

The moment he had dreaded had come and was gone. He had met his wife,
spoken with her, and she did not know him.

He had noticed the sudden surprise and fear that had come into her
face; he had noticed the deeply thoughtful mood in which she had
quitted the house. But these things proved no more than this: that a
note, familiar to her ear, still lived in the tones of his voice, and
had aroused for awhile the memory which rarely disturbed her now, save
in dreams at night.

Well! what he wished had happened. Suffering had deformed him, time had
changed him, to some purpose. He could play the game of life anew, as
one freshly come upon the stage. His paradise was closed to him, but he
could stand at the gate and be a looker-on at the sphere in which his
most sacred interests played their parts; he could respect and uphold,
by his withdrawal and secrecy, her, whose vows to him his imagined
death had cancelled; he could have his child for a playmate, and sow in
her heart those seeds of love, which, if God should ever suffer her
to know her father, would, in the fulness of time, bless him with an
abundant harvest of happiness.

But, though he would not, for the worth of his life, have had things
otherwise than they were, yet, as he stood in the room from which the
light had departed with his child’s sweet face, the tears rose to his
eyes and sobs convulsed him.

Oh, it was hard to look back upon his sufferings, and feel that nothing
but suffering yet remained; hard and bitter to behold those whom he
loved, those whose love would spring to meet him were he to make but
one little sign, and to know that he was as dead to them as if the
great desolate sea rolled over his body.

But here was a noble self-sacrificing heart that could not long mourn
its own afflictions. High virtues are always pregnant with high
consolations, and a good man’s grief for himself is short because he
carries many tender ministers to it in his bosom. There was no triumph
now to complete, for his conquest over impulse had been achieved at
Southbourne. He drew to the open window at the back, where the air was
fragrant with the smell of hay from the meadows beyond, and the cool
evening perfumes of flowers hidden amid the shrubbery in the garden,
and watched the sun sinking, whilst his thoughts followed it to the
distant deep, whose breast it overhung, and on whose lonely surface he
had watched it rising and setting with a despair the memory of which
filled him with thoughts too deep for tears.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

DOLLY’S THOUGHTS.

Three days passed before Holdsworth saw Nelly again. He then, from his
window, beheld her playing on the pavement opposite with the horse and
cart he had given her.

He called, and she came running over to him gleefully at once.

Mrs. Parrot was despatched to request Mrs. Conway’s leave that Nelly
might stop to tea with Mr. Hampden, and returned to say that “the
little gal might, with the greatest of pleasure.”

Again and again Nelly was summoned out of the road by Holdsworth,
sometimes of a morning, sometimes of an afternoon, when he could
see her. The little creature soon learnt to resist all her mother’s
suggestions that she should play in the back garden; she liked the
pavement in the road, especially the pavement opposite Holdsworth’s
lodgings, and with an air of inscrutable mystery would keep a sharp
look-out for Holdsworth, while she feigned to be absorbed in her toy.
Ah, the artfulness of some little girls! But then there were always
gingerbread and cakes for her in the miraculous cupboard in the corner
of Holdsworth’s room; and the temptation to obtain these luxuries,
and to evade the slice of bread and cup of thin milk and water which
formed her evening meal at home, was sometimes powerful enough to send
her toddling out of the back garden, where her mother placed her, into
the road, actually unobserved by mamma, who, imagining that she still
played in the garden, would be astonished by Mrs. Parrot coming across
and saying that Miss Nelly was with Mr. Hampden, and please might she
stop to tea.

Often, if Holdsworth had the good fortune to see his little girl in
the morning, or early in the afternoon, he would put on his hat, and
leaving word with Mrs. Parrot to tell Mrs. Conway, should she ask, that
he had taken Nelly for a walk, clasp the child’s hand and stroll with
her into the town.

Nelly enjoyed these rambles hugely. Their two figures contrasted
strangely, and many a woman’s eyes would follow them, because the
measured step, the thoughtful brow, the sunken face of the man, and the
golden-haired child at his side, with her bright young face and big
eyes drinking in the sights and processions of the streets, and little
twinkling feet, tripping so fleetly and dancingly along, that one would
say she held his hand to prevent herself flying away, formed a picture
which a woman’s heart would love to contemplate for its prettiness.

They would sometimes turn out of the hot streets, when Nelly’s listless
glance would show her weary at last of the splendours of the toy-shops
(before which they regularly stopped) and wander to the river’s side;
and there, in the shadow of trees, Holdsworth would rest himself, while
Nelly cleared the space around her of all the daisies and buttercups
she could find.

These were hours of deep and calm enjoyment to Holdsworth, who, until
the chimes of the town clocks warned him to rise, would lie, with his
head supported on his elbow, that his face might be close to Nelly’s
that he might catch every fluctuating expression that made her eyes
an endless series of sweet signs, that he might hear every faltering
syllable that fell from her lips.

Soft and cool were the sounds the river made, as its gentle tide
gurgled a secret music among the high rushes, or rippled round stumps
of trees or projections of stone lodged in the bank. Winged insects
flashed many-coloured lights upon the eye as they swept from shadow to
shadow, parted by a rivulet of sunshine falling through the openings
in the trees. Now and again a trout leaped with a pleasant and lazy
splash. From the shores opposite, behind the trees, came the smell of
the warm red clover, mingled with the multitudinous hum of bees. Afar,
at a bend of the stream, an angler might stand watching his quill,
with his head and shoulders mirrored in the clear water--so exquisite
the counterfeit that one might easily make a parable out of it, and
sermonise slumberously, as befitted the drowsy influence of the hot
day, on those illusions of life which mock the heart they mislead in
its search after truth.

Once, when Holdsworth was taking Nelly home, after a long rest on the
river’s edge, he met Mr. Conway, who stared very hard, but passed on
without addressing the child. Nelly drew close to Holdsworth when she
saw the man.

Holdsworth knew Conway perfectly well by sight now. The dentist had
repeatedly passed the window at which Holdsworth stationed himself
on the look-out for Nelly; and of late, it might have been noticed,
he would glance with no unfriendly expression towards Mrs. Parrot’s
old-fashioned house.

His walk, when he did not actually reel, as he very often did, might
have been studied with some disgust as an illustration of character.
It was a species of gliding movement, such as a man might be supposed
to adopt, whose self-abasement he himself holds irrevocable, and who
has made up his mind no longer to walk, but to sneak through life.
The influence of importunate creditors might be marked in the quick,
furtive glancing of the eye, that wandered from side to side and
challenged every individual it rested upon. One half-dulled perception
of his social obligations might yet linger; or perhaps it was an innate
love of dress which, from being a vice in prosperity, would degenerate
into a kind of sickly virtue in poverty, that gave him an indescribable
air of seedy jauntiness, tilting his soiled hat, swathing his neck
in a bright kerchief, and furnishing his body with a small-waisted
frock-coat.

It was very natural that Mrs. Parrot’s lodger should be somewhat of
a mystery to him. Having no liking for children himself, but, on the
contrary, a rather decided aversion to them, he could not understand
what this Mr. Hampden saw in Nelly to make him so prodigal in his
gifts, so eager for her society.

Who _was_ he? As Mrs. Parrot made a point of avoiding him, he could not
very well question her about her lodger; but since she was the only
person in Hanwitch who was likely to know anything about him, he got
one of her tradesmen to cross-examine her. But this _ruse_ resulted in
little. All that Mrs. Parrot could tell was, that her lodger’s name was
Hampden, that he was a gentleman with rather queer habits, and that he
seemed to have lots of money.

It was something to find out that he had lots of money.

On the strength of this Mr. Conway suddenly discovered Nelly to be a
very interesting child, and never seemed more pleased than when she was
over the way at Mrs. Parrot’s.

The fact was, the dentist had an idea. It was a small, contemptible,
tricky idea, such as poverty and drink would beget between them. He
kept it to himself and waited.

Dolly, of course, was deeply gratified by Mr. Hampden’s affection for
her child. At first her curiosity had been morbidly excited by this
stranger. Something there had been in his voice which stirred memory to
its centre: and the strange, baffling, elusive thoughts it had induced
kept her spiritless and nervous for some days after the interview
between them. Twice she dreamed of the husband she believed dead. The
dream, in both instances, was perplexed, and left no determinable
impression; but its iteration increased her melancholy, and made memory
painful and importunate.

She accounted for her feelings by referring them to the recollections
which had been abruptly renewed--dragged, so to say, from the grave in
which they lay hidden; and this clue being put into her hand, left her
easy as to the _raison d’être_ of her depression.

Indeed, no suspicion of this stranger’s identity with Holdsworth could
have entered her mind without being instantly followed by conviction.
The thought never occurred to her: how _could_ it? She believed him
dead, and the permanent habit of this belief took the quality of
established proof of his death.

But even if she had doubted his death; if ever she had cherished the
hope that he would one day return to her--a hope that she had held to
passionately for awhile, but which had dropped dead out of her heart
when she gave her hand to Mr. Conway--no memory that she had of him
would admit the possibility of the change that had been wrought in him.

There was a sign to be made--a look, a smile, a whisper--which would
flash perception into her, knit into compact form the thoughts
which his voice had troubled, and confess him her HUSBAND, though
hollow-faced and wan; though stricken as with age; though presenting
the ineffaceable memorials of grievous torture.

But, until this sign should be made, he must be a stranger to her; a
puzzle, perhaps; a man of eccentric habits, and of an odd and striking
aspect--but not her husband.

Nor, strange as his suddenly-acquired affection for Nelly might seem to
others, could it come to her as a surprise. The mother’s vanity would
easily account for the pleasure her little daughter gave to the lonely
man.

Once, when Mrs. Parrot, meeting her in the road, said that “It did seem
strange that a man an’ a child, as had niver set eyes on each other
before, should love each other in the way Mr. Hampden and Miss Nelly
did:” Dolly answered, “Yes; but though I am her mother, yet I must say
that Nelly is a pretty and very winning child, and there is nothing
uncommon in strangers taking a fancy to children.”

No; that was quite true, Mrs. Parrot answered; and told a story of a
rich lady admiring a little beggar girl in the street; and how the rich
lady took the wench into her carrich, and got the parients’ leaf to
adopt her; and how the beggar girl came into the rich lady’s fortin,
and grew up into a stately an’ ’aughty woman, an’ married a lord, she
did, as was beknown to many.

“It ’ud be a comfortin’ thing to you, ma’am, don’t you think, if Mr.
Hampden was to adopt your little gal. It ’ud be a relief to your
feelings, wouldn’t it?” Mrs. Parrot said.

If some half-formed thought, bearing a resemblance to Mrs. Parrot’s
view, had flitted across Dolly’s mind, let us not marvel. Never was her
mood sadder, never was her secret grief sharper, than when her child’s
future formed the subject of her thoughts. Who would give Nelly a home
if she died? Who would love the little thing; rear her in the knowledge
of God, of her broken-hearted mother, of her poor drowned father?

“I could not part with her, Mrs. Parrot; she is the only link that
binds me to bygone happy days. I could not spare her. My life would be
_too_ lonely for me to support it. But I often pray to God that she
may find a friend--such a friend as I am sure Mr. Hampden would make
her--when I am dead.”

This hope--that Mr. Hampden _would_ prove that friend--was the real
source of the comfort that filled her heart each time she saw her
little girl trip across to Mrs. Parrot’s house.

She seldom saw Holdsworth. Sometimes she thought he avoided her. Twice,
when she was leaving or returning to her house, she saw him in the
porch, and each time he hastily withdrew, when she would have crossed
over to speak to him. On rare occasions she met him coming from the
town. Once he raised his hat and passed on: once she went up to him
to thank him for his kindness to Nelly. He answered her hurriedly,
speaking with an effort, and terminated the interview almost abruptly
by bowing and leaving her. Then, again, his voice affected her
powerfully. She stopped and looked after him; and went on her way,
brooding, with a little frown of anxious, painful thought.

On his part, the weight of his secret, when they thus met, face
to face, was insupportable. The wild rush of impulse combated by
inflexible resolution, created a conflict in his breast beyond his
capacity of endurance. He could not have prolonged a conversation with
her. It was shocking to feel himself unknown; it was shocking to feel
that he might betray himself. But he could watch her from his window.
He knew now her hours of going and coming, and would station himself
behind the curtain, and follow her with exquisite tenderness in his
eyes, and sadness, crueller than words can tell, in his heart.

How was this all to end?

Here was the thought that now tormented him. Six weeks had passed since
he came to Hanwitch. He was living frugally, indeed; and of the money
he had brought with him from Australia a large portion still remained.
But his few hundred pounds made a very slender capital; and when they
were spent what then?

He knew very well that he could return to Sydney, that Mr. Sherman
would welcome him back, and reinstate him in his old post. But the
mere thought of leaving England was misery to him. Suppose, under any
plea, he obtained Dolly’s leave to take Nelly with him, could he part
from Dolly? He might never see her again. Then let him think of her
companion; of the sordid, hungry life he _knew_ she was leading--knew,
though he could devise no expedient for relieving her, that might not
be resented as an affront and lose him Nelly’s companionship.

He would rather have her in her grave than leave her as she was.

If urgent distress should ever come upon her, he would be at hand to
succour and support her. And that such urgent distress _must_ come
sooner or later--that the day sooner or later _must_ arrive when
she and her child would be without a home, he had but to watch the
maundering man who passed his windows backwards and forwards day after
day, aimless, sodden, and growing shabbier and shabbier every week in
his appearance, to know.

CHAPTER XXIX.

A VISIT.

How was Holdsworth to get a living? For what was he fit? He was a
good clerk; Mr. Sherman had called him so, at least; Hanwitch was a
tolerably large place, and he ought to find no difficulty in obtaining
employment. At any rate, he must try.

One morning he put on his hat and walked into the town.

When he reached the High Street, he stopped and considered.

There was a bank; he could apply there. Then there was a brewery. If
these failed, there remained an insurance office.

These represented polite avocations.

There were shops in abundance, where men, better looking than he,
smiled over counters, and carried parcels, and stood bare-headed on
the pavement at carriage-doors. But Holdsworth was still too much the
sailor at heart to tolerate the notion of shop-serving. He would start
a little school rather than do that. And indeed school-keeping seemed
more feasible than anything else. Mrs. Parrot’s lodgings would serve
him there; boys would assemble by degrees; and he could set and hear
lessons, and teach writing and mathematics, as well as any university
man.

Meanwhile, let him try the bank.

It faced the market-place in the High Street, had a well-worn door-step
and stout, noisy swinging doors. Holdsworth entered, and found himself
in a badly-lighted office, with a counter across it, behind which were