“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?