On the arrival of the “Jessie Maxwell” at Sydney, Holdsworth had
accompanied Mr. Sherman to his house, and been then and there
established as an inmate as long as he chose to remain. He was also
given a clerkship in Mr. Sherman’s office, worth £250 a year, which was
by no means an out-of-the-way price for a man’s labour in Australia in
those days, though in Holdsworth’s case the salary was rendered nearly
worth as much again by his friend providing him with board and lodging
free. The truth was (1) Mr. Sherman wanted an honest man in his office;
(2) Holdsworth’s sufferings, friendlessness, and perfect amiability,
coupled with his deprivation of memory, which affected all whom he
conversed with as something worse even than blindness, had obtained a
permanent hold for him on his generous patron’s sympathy long before
the “Jessie Maxwell” had sighted the Australian shore.
Mr. Sherman was a widower and childless. A maiden sister of his lived
with him, a woman whose character and face were as like his as an egg
is to an egg. Not knowing Holdsworth’s name, they agreed to call him
Mr. Hampden, which would serve as well as any other, and which had at
least the merit of beginning with the letter of his real name.
As Mr. Hampden he was introduced to Mr. Sherman’s friends, who took
a very great interest in him. Indeed, some of these people went to
the extent of giving dinner-parties in his honour, and for a time he
was a lion. All this attention, meant in perfect kindness, greatly
disturbed him, for his loss of memory made him singularly sensitive,
and his nervous system had entirely given way under the extraordinary
sufferings he had endured. Mr. Sherman would have kept his secret, but
Captain Duff and the officers and men of the “Jessie Maxwell” went and
talked of him all over the city, and then the tale of his discovery and
rescue was published in a newspaper and made the property of the public.
But the public soon forgot him. The colony was young, and the New
Hollander had too many mines to sink, and houses to build, and acres
to clear, and convicts to protest against, and home oppressions of
every species to deal with, to keep his mind long fixed on one object.
Holdsworth settled into a regular clerkly routine, and every day
improved himself in Mr. Sherman’s opinion, by the peculiar sweetness of
his amiability, and by his gratitude expressed in every delicate form
that could vehicle the emotion of his full heart.
There was an able doctor at that time practising in Sydney, and Mr.
Sherman invited him to his house, and introduced him to Holdsworth,
believing that, by skilful handling, it was possible to restore the
poor fellow’s memory. But the doctor after a few weeks shook his head,
and pronounced the case hopeless, or at least beyond the reach of human
skill.
Indeed, rarely had a more curious and baffling problem been submitted,
than Holdsworth’s mind in those days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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