John Holdsworth, Chief Mate

by William Clark Russell

Mrs. Parrot was despatched to request Mrs. Conway’s leave that Nelly might stop to tea with Mr. Hampden, and returned to say that “the little gal might, with the greatest of pleasure.”

Again and again Nelly was summoned out of the road by Holdsworth, sometimes of a morning, sometimes of an afternoon, when he could see her. The little creature soon learnt to resist all her mother’s suggestions that she should play in the back garden; she liked the pavement in the road, especially the pavement opposite Holdsworth’s lodgings, and with an air of inscrutable mystery would keep a sharp look-out for Holdsworth, while she feigned to be absorbed in her toy. Ah, the artfulness of some little girls! But then there were always gingerbread and cakes for her in the miraculous cupboard in the corner of Holdsworth’s room; and the temptation to obtain these luxuries, and to evade the slice of bread and cup of thin milk and water which formed her evening meal at home, was sometimes powerful enough to send her toddling out of the back garden, where her mother placed her, into the road, actually unobserved by mamma, who, imagining that she still played in the garden, would be astonished by Mrs. Parrot coming across and saying that Miss Nelly was with Mr. Hampden, and please might she stop to tea.

Often, if Holdsworth had the good fortune to see his little girl in the morning, or early in the afternoon, he would put on his hat, and leaving word with Mrs. Parrot to tell Mrs. Conway, should she ask, that he had taken Nelly for a walk, clasp the child’s hand and stroll with her into the town.

Nelly enjoyed these rambles hugely. Their two figures contrasted strangely, and many a woman’s eyes would follow them, because the measured step, the thoughtful brow, the sunken face of the man, and the golden-haired child at his side, with her bright young face and big eyes drinking in the sights and processions of the streets, and little twinkling feet, tripping so fleetly and dancingly along, that one would say she held his hand to prevent herself flying away, formed a picture which a woman’s heart would love to contemplate for its prettiness.

They would sometimes turn out of the hot streets, when Nelly’s listless glance would show her weary at last of the splendours of the toy-shops (before which they regularly stopped) and wander to the river’s side; and there, in the shadow of trees, Holdsworth would rest himself, while Nelly cleared the space around her of all the daisies and buttercups she could find.

These were hours of deep and calm enjoyment to Holdsworth, who, until the chimes of the town clocks warned him to rise, would lie, with his head supported on his elbow, that his face might be close to Nelly’s that he might catch every fluctuating expression that made her eyes an endless series of sweet signs, that he might hear every faltering syllable that fell from her lips.

Soft and cool were the sounds the river made, as its gentle tide gurgled a secret music among the high rushes, or rippled round stumps of trees or projections of stone lodged in the bank. Winged insects flashed many-coloured lights upon the eye as they swept from shadow to shadow, parted by a rivulet of sunshine falling through the openings in the trees. Now and again a trout leaped with a pleasant and lazy splash. From the shores opposite, behind the trees, came the smell of the warm red clover, mingled with the multitudinous hum of bees. Afar, at a bend of the stream, an angler might stand watching his quill, with his head and shoulders mirrored in the clear water—so exquisite the counterfeit that one might easily make a parable out of it, and sermonise slumberously, as befitted the drowsy influence of the hot day, on those illusions of life which mock the heart they mislead in its search after truth.

Once, when Holdsworth was taking Nelly home, after a long rest on the river’s edge, he met Mr. Conway, who stared very hard, but passed on without addressing the child. Nelly drew close to Holdsworth when she saw the man.

Holdsworth knew Conway perfectly well by sight now. The dentist had repeatedly passed the window at which Holdsworth stationed himself on the look-out for Nelly; and of late, it might have been noticed, he would glance with no unfriendly expression towards Mrs. Parrot’s old-fashioned house.

His walk, when he did not actually reel, as he very often did, might have been studied with some disgust as an illustration of character. It was a species of gliding movement, such as a man might be supposed to adopt, whose self-abasement he himself holds irrevocable, and who has made up his mind no longer to walk, but to sneak through life. The influence of importunate creditors might be marked in the quick, furtive glancing of the eye, that wandered from side to side and challenged every individual it rested upon. One half-dulled perception of his social obligations might yet linger; or perhaps it was an innate love of dress which, from being a vice in prosperity, would degenerate into a kind of sickly virtue in poverty, that gave him an indescribable air of seedy jauntiness, tilting his soiled hat, swathing his neck in a bright kerchief, and furnishing his body with a small-waisted frock-coat.