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.