“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.