CHAPTER XXI

I RETURN TO ENGLAND

And now it is necessary that I should skip a considerable period of time--no less a period of time indeed than ten months--that this story may bring me to a close relation of my own affairs; for the most extraordinary part of my strange adventures yet remains to be unfolded, and no purpose can be served by my keeping you dawdling on shipboard, when everything from this time material befell me on shore.

I will not speak of the grief of Mrs. Lee; her bereavement left her childless, and, indeed, alone in the world, and her loss was as an arrow in her heart. Alice had been left to her when her first child was taken; but now Alice was gone, and loneliness and childlessness rendered the loss of this daughter a far deeper affliction than had been the death of the other. But Mrs. Lee was a woman of strong religious feelings; resignation grew in her with the help of prayer, and with the compassion of God, and through much silent meditation; and, long before we arrived in Australia, she could bear to say and to hear many things concerning Alice which, in the earliest stages of her grief, her faltering tongue could not have pronounced, nor her stricken heart endure to listen to.

I think it was about three weeks after Alice’s death, that Mrs. Lee spoke to me very seriously about my future, repeated her daughter’s wishes, and asked me to live with her as companion whilst my memory continued dark, and whilst I remained homeless. I gladly assented, kissing her, and gratefully thanking her again and again for her offer; and she seemed as glad as I. She had liked me from the beginning of our acquaintance; now she loved me for my association with her lost child, and also because Alice had loved me. And she loved me for myself too, as the dear little woman would often tell me, though all the kindness, all the goodness was on one side. For I could do no more than feel grateful, and thank God for having found me a friend in her, and be with her, and oblige her, and comfort her as fully as my mind, enfeebled by the want of memory, would enable me.

We arrived at Sydney, New South Wales; the passengers bade us farewell and went their ways. Some of them presented me with little gifts of jewellery to remember them by, and the tears stood in Mrs. Webber’s eyes when she said good-bye to me. Had the _Deal Castle_ touched at the Cape of Good Hope, Mrs. Lee would have gone on shore, taking me with her, and proceeded to England direct by one of the fine steamers of the Union Steamship line; but the ship stopped nowhere during the outward passage, and therefore, unless we chose to be transferred to a homeward-bound ship, we were obliged to proceed direct to Sydney. Mrs. Lee made up her mind to return home in the ship. She had paid her cabin fare for two for the ‘round voyage,’ as it is called; she liked Captain Ladmore, and she also liked his ship; and then, again, Mr. McEwan strongly recommended her to remain in the _Deal Castle_, affirming that her health would benefit by such a voyage as a sailing ship provided.

So, for the reasons I have given, together with others which I need not enter into--as, for example, the cost of returning home by steam: a cost that must tax her purse, seeing that she had already paid for the voyage out and home--we returned to England in the _Deal Castle_ living on shore at a hotel during the three months the vessel lay in Sydney harbour.

You will ask whether, in this time, my memory had returned to me--whether, indeed, I was even capable of dimly recollecting? My answer is, _No!_ My memory seemed to grow even more impenetrable as the months went by. There had been times, as I have told you, when the cry of a child, when the gibberish of a gipsy woman would stir the gloom within me as though there were shadows or shapes of memory which moved, eagerly responsive to the cry or the syllables which fell upon my ear, but incapable of determining themselves to my mental vision. My feelings were, indeed, as the poet expresses a like state of mind:--

‘Moreover, something is or seems, That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams. Of something felt, like something here; Of something done, I know not where; Such as no language may declare.’

But time deepened the silence and the darkness. The old yearning grew sick, it languished; curiosity itself, the vulgar, commonplace quality of curiosity, fell mute and closed its eyes and seemed to sleep. The utter inability to penetrate, resulted in a sort of stagnation of soul. My mind lapsed into a condition of absolute passivity. I knew that I had a past; but of it, of all that entered into it, and created it, I was as ignorant as though it had never been. I believed it to be extinguished for ever, and I became resigned to the loss as we become resigned to the loss of those who have died; though a loss it was _not_ to my unremembering brain in the sense that death is a loss to the mourner who has dried her tears; for _she_ can remember; but I, though conscious of a loss, and of a loss that for all I knew might have rendered me a widow and motherless for life, though with a husband and children living and craving for me, could not weep over it, for I knew not what I had lost.

My condition excited much interest in Sydney; that is to say, amongst a circle of acquaintances whom we had got to know through some of the passengers who had come out in the ship with us. A doctor, whose reputation stood high in Sydney, was introduced to me, questioned me closely, subjected me to all the tests he could devise, carried Mrs. Lee and me here and there with some worthy, kind notion in his head of my memory taking fire from the sight of shops and streets, and gardens of beautiful flowers and the like; but all to no purpose. From nothing he could do, from nothing that I could see, did I get the least hint. I perfectly comprehended everything that I beheld, and everything that I heard; but no images of the past were presented to my mind.

I went by the name of Miss C----, and was thus spoken of by everybody excepting Mrs. Lee, who always referred to me and addressed me by the name of Agnes. Before I left Sydney, however, my appearance had greatly improved. It might have been the change from the sea to the shore; it might have been that condition of passivity which I have mentioned, which had silenced in me to a very large extent the dreadful, wearing, benumbing, blind conflicts of my spirit with my memory; but be the reason what it might, I was looking so much better when Mrs. Lee and I rejoined the ship, when she was about to sail for England, that Mrs. Richards scarcely recognised me. My hair was growing very thick and abundant again; it remained as white as snow, but being very plentiful, it looked as though it were powdered; it contrasted finely with my dark eyes and gave them, as Mrs. Lee would tell me, a very rich and glowing expression. Hair had sprouted, as Mr. McEwan predicted it would, on the brow which had been injured and where the scar was; but, strangely enough, this hair was black, whereas the other eyebrow was as snow-white as the hair of my head. There was but one way to remedy this extreme of hue. I could not make the growing hair white; and therefore, to rescue my face from the odd cast which the differently coloured eyebrows imparted, I purchased some dye at Sydney, and so brought my left eyebrow to look like my right one. That the shape of my nose had been altered by its having been broken or indented above the bridge I very well knew, but I could not know to what extent its shape differed from its form before the accident befell me. It was now, as of course it has ever remained, what might be termed a Roman nose, though scarcely high-bridged enough for that shape; but I easily conceived that the structural change of it, coupled with my snow-white hair, and the scar over my right eye, that gave a somewhat overhanging look to the brow there--these were changes, I say, to make me easily conceive that, however my face may have shown in the past, it could hardly be more changed had I worn a mask. My complexion, however, had wonderfully cleared. Those strange fine lines, the effect, as Mr. McEwan declared, of a terrible shock to the nervous system, were fading out of my cheeks, though they lingered somewhat obstinately about my forehead. I was pale, but no longer sallow; my skin, indeed, had grown very clear; and I was not always pale either, for, being very nervous, and constantly possessed by a painful sense of embarrassment through my not having any memory, and through my being conscious that my intellect was weakened by the want of memory, a very little matter would bring the blood to my cheeks, and often I would turn scarlet when suddenly addressed.

As you will suppose, I presented what may reasonably be called a very striking appearance, what with my white hair and dark eyebrows, and dark shining eyes and clear skin, and youthful well-proportioned figure. Mrs. Richards would tell me that amongst the passengers (during the homeward run) I passed for any age, from five-and-twenty to forty.

But to proceed with my story. It was some time about ten months from the date of my being rescued from the French brig--whose people, more especially the kind young Alphonse, were often in my mind--that the _Deal Castle_ arrived in the River Thames. I stood on the deck with Mrs. Lee, all the canvas was furled, and the ship was being dragged up the river by a small steamboat. We had met with thick blowing weather in the Channel, and I had seen nothing of the English coast; but now we were in the River Thames; the land, with houses and gardens and fields, and blue hills in the far distance, was on either hand. It was a fine summer day; the river was crowded with ships of many kinds; one seemed to feel the beat of the mighty heart of the great metropolis that lay hidden beyond the bends and reaches, in this great artery of its river; and I gazed about me with an impassioned yearning.

There was no detail of the busy, shining scene at which I did not thirstily stare--from the half-embowered church-spire ashore--from the windmill languidly revolving--from the white cloud of a locomotive speeding through a cutting--from the tall factory chimney soiling the pure azure with its dingy feathering of smoke; from these and from scores of such things as these, to the barge with chocolate-coloured sails lazily stemming the stream, to the stately ship towing past, to the great steamer whose destination might be the land whence we were newly returned, to the little wherry doggedly impelled by its lonely occupant in a tall hat.

I gazed with a passion of anxiety and expectation, kindled afresh in me by the sight of the land--by the sight of what I had again and again been told was the land of my birth, the unremembered land in which my home was; but to no purpose. Nothing came back to me.

‘We shall pass through London,’ said Mrs. Lee, ‘and your memory may return at the sight of the streets; for rest assured, even supposing your home is not in London, that you have visited the great city, perhaps very often. And if London gives you nothing, and there is still the journey to Newcastle, then there will be Newcastle itself. And if all remains blank, there is my home for you to share; and though I should rejoice, even as my angel daughter would, over the recovery of your memory, you have become so necessary to me, dear Agnes, as a companion, that parting with you would be almost like losing another child.’

Before we arrived at the Docks where the ship was to be berthed, and where we proposed to land, Captain Ladmore invited Mrs. Lee and myself to his cabin; for his ship was now in the hands of the pilot, and the captain was, so to speak, a free man. First of all he asked Mrs. Lee for her address at Newcastle-on-Tyne, to enable the owners of the _Deal Castle_ to communicate with her, should any inquiries concerning me be made at their office. He informed us that it would be his duty to report the circumstance of his ship having been in collision with a French brig, on board of which there was found a single person, a woman, whose memory was gone--that is to say, who was unable to give any particulars of herself prior to her having been picked up by the French brig. This report, he said, would be printed in the shipping papers, and it would find its way into the London daily newspapers, and be copied by most of the provincial sheets; so that if I had friends in England, or, indeed, in any part of the United Kingdom, it would be strange indeed if the newspaper paragraph did not lead to the discovery of my identity.

He then advised Mrs. Lee to send my case to the London police, and solicit such help as they would have it in their power to render by advertisements and by communicating with the provincial police; and he also recommended Mrs. Lee to repeat the paragraph in the newspapers--the paragraph I mean about his ship having found me in a brig--after a few weeks should elapse, that is to say, supposing the report which he himself would make, and which would be published, should lead to nothing.

I bade farewell to this upright, worthy, humane captain with tears and expressions of gratitude again and again repeated. He had befriended me; he had protected me; his ship had been my home; he had done me a hundred kindnesses; and when I put my hand in his and said good-bye my heart was very full.

And equally full was my heart when I said good-bye to Mrs. Richards, for she, too, had proved a true friend to me at a time when I was without friends, at a time when I was destitute, helpless, hopeless, and broken-hearted, and when sympathy and friendship were precious indeed to me. I gave her of what the passengers had given to me on our arrival at Sydney. I could not part from her without a gift. I possessed nothing but the trifles of jewellery which had been given to me by the passengers, and of these I chose the best, and when I put them into her hand I kissed her and blessed her for her kindness to me.

Mr. Harris I did not see; Mr. McEwan I warmly thanked for his attention and interest in me, and then Mrs. Lee and I left the ship and drove to a hotel close to the railway station, whence we were to depart on the following morning for the north.

On our way to this hotel I spoke little, so busy was I with looking. The sight of the streets and houses, however, did nothing for me but keep me bewildered. So profound had been the sense of loneliness occasioned by my loss of memory, that I felt as one who had been shipwrecked upon an uninhabited island, where I had lived solitary, hearing nothing but the cry of tropic birds, the noise of the wind in trees, the dull thunder of the gigantic breakers bursting upon the desolate shore. I was in a manner dazed by the crowds and the throng of vehicles, by the uproar of locomotion, by the seemingly endless complication of streets. No, assuredly, it was not in London that I was to find my memory.

Mrs. Lee watched me as we sat in the cab, and when we had arrived at the hotel and were conversing in a quiet sitting-room she told me she was now certain I had never before been in London, and that, as it was impossible for her to imagine that any Englishwoman who belonged to such a station of life as was indicated by my manner and speech was never in London, her conviction was my home was not in England.

We left for the north by an early train on the following morning, and arrived at Newcastle at about five o’clock in the afternoon. Throughout the long journey my eyes and my thoughts were as busy as they had been in the drive from the docks to the hotel. I gazed, half maddened by my passionate anxiety to recollect, at every little village or town we flew past; and whenever the engine’s whistle signalled that we were approaching a station at which we were to stop my head was out of the window and my heart beat furiously, whilst I kept crying to myself, Will _this_ be the town? Will _this_ be the place where my home is? and shall I know it when I see it?

I had often heard dear Alice Lee talk of her home at Jesmond, and I could have made a sketch of the house without seeing it from her loving description. It was a pretty little house indeed, standing in about half-an-acre of garden. The house was removed from the road, very sheltered and retired. It had been left in charge of an old servant, a respectable Newcastle woman, now somewhat stricken in years, who had been in Mrs. Lee’s service almost throughout my dear friend’s married life. To this honest old housekeeper Mrs. Lee had written on the ship’s arrival at Gravesend; servants were engaged and the house thoroughly prepared to receive us.

Mrs. Lee bore up bravely throughout the journey and down to the moment of her entering her home; but when the house-door was opened and she saw the old housekeeper standing within dressed in black--for she had written the news of Alice’s death from Sydney--she broke down.

‘Oh, my child! my child!’ she cried, and went with a blind step into the parlour and sank into a chair, weeping bitterly. Ay, it is on such occasions as this that death is most terribly felt; when you go forth with someone beloved by you and return _alone_, then is the house desolate and every familiar object a pang and every sound will make you start as though the dear one were at hand and about to enter, and whatever your gaze rests on bristles with bitter-sweet memories. I knelt beside Mrs. Lee; the old servant stood in the doorway crying and looking at her mistress, but not offering to say a word of comfort--perhaps because of a little natural feeling of jealousy, for I cannot be certain that Mrs. Lee had made any reference to me in her letter, beyond saying that she was bringing a friend home with her. The poor old woman in the doorway might suppose, from my familiar manner of kneeling and speaking to Mrs. Lee and holding her hand and soothing her, that her mistress had adopted me as a daughter in the place of Alice.

The room that Alice had occupied was to be mine. The old housekeeper, whose name was Sarah, conducted me to it at the request of Mrs. Lee, and left me to return to her mistress, who would now explain all about me and win the old thing’s sympathy for me.

I stood in the room that had been Alice Lee’s and looked around. It was sacred ground to me--consecrated by love, death, and memory. Often had she spoken of this little room, of the view from the window, of the weeks during which she would lie ill in yonder bed, and she seemed to stand before me as I gazed; I saw her sweet, pale, wasted face, her gentle, touching, prayerful eyes, and the last smile she had given me--a smile that had lain like God’s glory upon her countenance as she put her hand into her mother’s and turned her face to the ship’s side. Often to amuse me she had, girl-like, spoken of her little possessions, and many of them I now saw and remembered as though I had seen them before. There was a little white marble cross; there was her Bible, lying at the foot of the steps of the cross; there were pencil-sketches and water-colours by her own hand, all dealing with subjects which showed that her heart was for ever with her God. Many more trifles of decoration could I name, such things as a sweet young soul, a tender girl, would love to collect and cherish as embellishments for her bedroom.

I stepped to the window, that stood wide open, and I looked forth. The prospect was a fair English scene, clothed just now with summer evening beauty. For Jesmond, where Mrs. Lee’s house was situated, is universally considered the prettiest part of the neighbourhood of Newcastle-on-Tyne. The effect largely lies in contrast; for you come out of Newcastle, whose atmosphere is tinged with smoke and often poisonous with the fumes of the chemical works--you come from that great noisy town, or city as it now is, with its hard stony streets over which every vehicle roars, with its crowds upon the pavements, its horned cattle newly arrived from some Scandinavian port and thrashed bellowing through the throng, its tumult of newspaper urchins, its distracting cry of hawkers, its dark tide of Tyne smearing as though the mud of the banks through which it flows were tar--from all this you come into a country of gentle and sometimes of romantic beauty when you arrive at Jesmond, whose Dene, as it is called, lives in the memory of those who view it as one of the sweetest pictures that our garden-land of England has to offer.

For some days we lived very retired. Nobody appeared to know that Mrs. Lee had returned, and this she had provided for by bidding the old housekeeper Sarah and the other servants hold their peace. She desired time to battle with the deep grief which visited her with the sight of the home in which she was now to live childless as she had before lived a widow; and when at last we made an excursion our first walk was to Jesmond cemetery, there to view the grave of Alice’s twin sister.

The mother wept as she looked upon the grave. It had been carefully tended during her absence; it was rich with flowers, and the cross at the head of it was as white as the foam of the sea, and the gilt letters upon it burned in the sun. The mother wept, for her thoughts were with that other blessed child whose grave was the mighty deep.

‘Oh,’ she cried to me, ‘if I could but have laid my darling by the side of her sister here!’

As we returned home from this visit to the cemetery Mrs. Lee met the wife of the clergyman of the parish church, and after that there were many callers--for it seemed that the Lees had lived for the greater part of their lives at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and had a number of friends in the district. But she denied herself to most of the visitors; she received but a few and they had been Alice’s most valued friends.

Five days had not passed since our arrival at Newcastle when the postman brought a newspaper addressed to Mrs. Lee. The wrapper was initialled ‘F. L.,’ and when she opened the paper her eye lighted upon a paragraph with a cross of red ink against it, under which were the initials ‘F. L.,’ so we might be sure that this newspaper had been sent to us by Captain Frederick Ladmore. The newspaper was the _Shipping and Mercantile Gazette_, and the paragraph indicated by the red mark was buried in a half column of shipping intelligence. It ran thus:--

‘The ship _Deal Castle_, Ladmore, arrived in the Thames on ----. Her master reports that on such and such a date, when in latitude -- N. and longitude -- W., she was in collision with the French brig _Notre Dame de Boulogne_. The night was dark and squally, and a moderate sea was running. The _Deal Castle_ hove to within a mile of the vessel she had run into and for some time continued to burn flares and to send up rockets. At daybreak the French brig was found to be still afloat, and a boat was sent in charge of the third officer of the _Deal Castle_, who discovered that all hands of the Frenchman had left the brig, leaving behind them a woman who was imprisoned in her berth owing to a cask having been dislodged and rolled against the door. When this woman was brought aboard the _Deal Castle_ she was found to be without memory, and could give no further account of herself than saying that she had been fallen in with by the French brig, in an insensible condition, drifting about in a boat. It is supposed that she is the survivor of a wreck. She was landed in London, and those interested may obtain her present address on application to Messrs ----, etc.’

Mrs. Lee read this paragraph aloud, and when she had ended it she said:--

‘I fear this will not help us, Agnes.’

‘Yet what more could be said?’ I asked. ‘It is the whole story so far as Captain Ladmore--so far as any of us could relate it.’

‘Oh, but there is more to be said,’ she exclaimed: ‘the newspaper notices of your rescue should contain conjectures as to how it happened that you were drifting about in an open boat. And a description of you should be given--a description of those points, I mean, which could not be changed, such as your height, complexion, colour of eyes, and so forth.’

She rose and paced about the room; then, stopping and gazing at me earnestly, with a look which reminded me of Alice, she said, ‘I am acquainted with a gentleman who is connected with the Newcastle press. His name is Francis Roddam. He was formerly a clerk in my poor husband’s office. I will write to him and ask him to sup with us to-morrow evening. He will be able to put together such a newspaper notice as is sure to attract attention; he will also advise us how best to place it. Indeed, I dare say he will himself send it to the newspapers. As to writing to the London police, as Captain Ladmore suggested’--she shook her head and added, ‘I fear they will not trouble themselves. Had you been the victim of a crime--but even supposing a representative of the police should call upon you, what can you say that will enable him to help you better than we are able to help ourselves?’

She wrote to Mr. Roddam, and on the following evening he arrived to supper, and spent a couple of hours in discourse with us. He was a slow-minded but shrewd man, whose light-blue eyes seemed to bore deep into me as they pierced the spectacles he wore. He listened with the interest of a born journalist to my story, and, remarkable as he doubtless found it, I believe he thought it mainly so because of the opportunity it offered him of making stories and newspaper paragraphs out of it.

He questioned me with great sagacity. Never since the hour of my rescue from the French vessel had my dead or slumbering memory been so critically ‘overhauled.’ To express my sensations by a material image: some of his inquiries flashed with the dazzle of the lightning brand upon the closed doors of a temple or sanctuary; but the midnight darkness within remained impenetrable. Sometimes I seemed to recollect; but when with a trembling heart and a white face, believing at such moments that my memory was astir--when, I say, I endeavoured to _realise_, I found that what I imagined to be recollection was no more than the effect of fancy acting upon what Mr. Roddam had, by his own inquiries and suggestions, put into my head.

However, he took many notes, and told me he would send my story to several newspapers for which he acted as correspondent, one of them being a London daily paper and another a widely read influential journal published in Liverpool.

‘The paragraph,’ he said, ‘will run the whole round of the British press, and, to ensure your hearing of your friends, should the paragraph meet their eye and lead to their inquiring after you, I will take care to give the address of the owners of the _Deal Castle_.’

He was as good as his word, and in a day or two called upon us with a printed slip of the paragraph he had written and proposed to send. It was something more than a paragraph; it ran to the length of a short story, was very well written, and bore a title of a sort to catch the eye of the most indolent reader. In it he introduced the conjectures which Mrs. Lee considered needful, since one of them alone might serve to clear up the mystery of my identity. He put it that it was supposed either that I had formed one of a yachting party; or that I had been blown away from a French port whilst making an excursion in a small boat; or that I was the sole survivor of a shipwreck, the particulars of which might never be known unless my memory returned to me; or that I had been the victim of some great outrage at the hands of the captain or crew of the _Notre Dame de Boulogne_, the effects of which had lost me my memory and turned my hair white.

This last was a guess of his own, and he insisted upon including it, though I pointed out to him that I had met with the humanest treatment it is possible to imagine on board the French vessel, and that there could be no doubt whatever that the young man Alphonse’s story of my being found drifting about in an open boat was absolutely true.

‘Ay, that may be,’ he exclaimed with a knowing look at Mrs. Lee; ‘but I fully agree with those of your fellow-passengers who hold that _before_ your disaster, whatever it may have been, you wore jewellery, and that your being found without rings, without a watch, with nothing of value upon you saving a few shillings in a purse, signifies robbery and more than robbery.’

But to end this. The paragraph was published. I read it in the _Newcastle Chronicle_ and in five other journals sent to us by Mr. Roddam, who assured me that it had been reprinted in a hundred different directions; but nothing came of it--that is to say, nothing in any way material. About twenty letters reached me through the owners of the _Deal Castle_; but they contained nothing but idle inquiries; a few of them were impertinently curious, and the contents of them all were wretchedly purposeless. One was from a quack who offered to recover my memory for a certain sum; three were from people who desired to write an account of my adventures; another was evidently from a poor lunatic, who, writing as a mother, said that her daughter had perished by shipwreck twenty years before, and that she expected I was her child who had been restored to life by her prayers. She asked me for my private address that she might visit me.

How can I express the passionate eagerness with which I awaited the arrival of the post, the recurring little pangs of disappointment as the man would go by time after time without knocking, the torment of hope with which I would tear open an envelope when a letter reached me at last, the cold despair that took possession of me when the weeks rolled by yielding me nothing!

‘It must be, Agnes, as I have all along thought,’ exclaimed Mrs. Lee, ‘your home is not in England, and you have no friends in this country. But let us be patient, my dear. Mr. Roddam’s paragraph will find its way to the Colonies, to India, to distant countries, and when _that_ has happened, any day may bring glad tidings to you. But you must wait, and meanwhile you must make yourself as happy as you can with your poor bereaved friend.’