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.