A Traveller in Little Things

by W. H. Hudson

The others in their turn laughed at him, despising his ideal, and then we set off once more.

They had not thought to put the question to me, because I was only a boy while they were grown men; but I had listened with such intense interest to that colloquy that when I recall the scene now I can see the very expressions of their sun-burnt faces and listen to the very sound of their speech and laughter. For they were all intimately known to me and I knew they were telling openly just what their several notions of a happy life were, caring nothing for the laughter of the others. I was mightily pleased that they, too, had felt the attractions of my Dovecot House as a place where a man, whatsoever his individual taste, might find a happy abiding-place.

Time rolled on, as the slow-going old storybooks written before we were born used to say, and I still preserved the old habit of pulling up my horse on coming abreast of each one of the two houses on every journey to and from town. Then one afternoon when walking my horse past the Cannon House I saw an old man dressed in black with snow-white hair and side-whiskers in the old, old style, and an ashen grey face, standing motionless by the side of one of the guns and gazing out at the distance. His eyes were blue—the dim weary blue of a tired old man's eyes, and he appeared not to see me as I walked slowly by him within a few yards, but to be gazing at something beyond, very far away. I took him to be a resident, perhaps the owner of the house, and this was the first time I had seen any person there. So strongly did the sight of that old man impress me that I could not get his image out of my mind, and I spoke to those I knew in the city, and before long I met with one who was able to satisfy my curiosity about him. The old man I had seen, he told me, was Admiral Brown, an Englishman who many years before had taken service with the Dictator Rosas at the time when Rosas was at war with the neighbouring Republic of Uruguay, and had laid siege to the city of Montevideo. Garibaldi, who was spending the years of his exile from Italy in South America, fighting as usual wherever there was any fighting to be had, flew to the help of Uruguay, and having acquired great fame as a sea-fighter was placed in command of the naval forces, such as they were, of the little Republic. But Brown was a better fighter, and he soon captured and destroyed his enemies' ships, Garibaldi himself escaping shortly afterwards to come back to the old world to renew the old fight against Austria.

When old Admiral Brown retired he built this house, or had it given to him by Rosas who, I was told, had a great affection for him, and he then had the two cannons he had taken from one of the captured ships planted at his front gate.

Shortly after that one glimpse I had had of the old Admiral, he died. And I think that when I saw him standing at his gate gazing past me at the distance, he was looking out for an expected messenger—a figure in black moving swiftly towards him with a drawn sword in his hand.

Oddly enough it was but a short time after seeing the old man at his gate that I had my first sight of an inmate of Dovecot House. While slowly riding by it I saw a lady come out from the front door—young, good-looking, very pale and dressed in the deepest mourning. She had a bowl in her hand, and going a little distance from the house she called the pigeons and down they flew in a crowd to her feet to be fed.

A few months later when passing I saw this same lady once more, and on this occasion she was coming to the gate as I rode by, and I saw her closely, for she turned and looked at me, not unseeingly like the old man, and her face was perfectly colourless and her large dark eyes the most sorrowful I had ever seen.

That was my last sight of her, nor did I see any human creature about the house after that for about two years. Then one hot summer day I caught sight of three persons who looked like servants or caretakers, sitting in the shade some distance from the house and drinking maté, the tea of the country.

Here, thought I, is an opportunity not to be lost—one long waited for! Leaving my horse at the gate I went to them, and addressing a large woman, the most important-looking person of the three, as politely as I could, I said I was not, as they perhaps imagined, a long absent friend or relation returned from the wars, but a perfect stranger, a traveller on the great south road; that I was hot and thirsty, and the sight of them refreshing themselves in that pleasant shade had tempted me to intrude myself upon them.

She received me with smiles and a torrent of welcoming words, and the expected invitation to sit down and drink maté with them. She was a very large woman, very fat and very dark, of that reddish or mahogany colour which, taken with the black eyes and coarse black hair, is commonly seen in persons of mixed blood—Iberian with aboriginal. I took her age to be about fifty years. And she was as voluble as she was fat and dark, and poured out such a stream of talk on or rather over me like warm greasy water, and so forcing me to keep my eyes on her, that it was almost impossible to give any attention to the other two. One was her husband, Spanish and dark too, but with a different sort of darkness; a skeleton of a man with a bony ghastly face, in old frayed workman's clothes and dust-covered boots; his hands very grimy. And the third person was their daughter, as they called her, a girl of fifteen with a clear white and pink skin, regular features, beautiful grey eyes and light brown hair. A perfect type of a nice looking English girl such as one finds in any village, in almost any cottage, in the Midlands or anywhere else in this island.