CHAPTER XV.

“NO LIGHT, BUT RATHER DARKNESS, VISIBLE.”

Holdsworth regained his strength slowly, and on the fourth day Mr. Sherman, who attended him with the gentle and unobtrusive solicitude of a perfectly benevolent mind, suggested that a visit on deck might freshen him up and contribute to his recovery.

To this Holdsworth had been looking forward with indescribable eagerness, believing that the sight of the boat of which Mr. Sherman had spoken would recall his memory. His mind, indeed, presented a phenomenon. He remembered nothing--literally _nothing_. His actual life, as he was then living it, practically dated from the moment of the return of his consciousness. All that had gone before was pitch darkness. That the faculty of memory was not _dead_, was proved by his capacity to remember his thoughts and feelings, the offices and faces of those who waited on him, the food he had eaten, the names of those he conversed with, during the time he had been in the cabin of the barque. But behind this was impenetrable gloom, every glance at which tortured him, so inexplicable was his helplessness to penetrate it.

The mind of an infant has been likened to a sheet of blank paper; we may extend the image in Holdsworth’s case by conceiving that all the characters which experience had written upon his mind had been effaced, and that, what new characters there were upon it, were the impressions only which he had received since he had been awakened from the deadly stupor that had conquered him a few hours before his rescue.

Mr. Sherman was fully persuaded that Holdsworth’s memory would return with his strength; and had therefore foreborne from making any experiments by questions or allusions until the time should come when the renewal of health would enable the sufferer to sustain the fatigue of thought. He was impressed and touched by the poor fellow’s docility, his sweetness of temper, and his gratitude, which moved him to tears as often as he attempted to express it. But no clue was to be obtained from his conversation as to the profession he had followed. There was not a shoppish expletive in his language. He named things after the established prescription of Johnson’s Dictionary, and might as well have been a clerk, a dentist, a builder, a Member of Parliament, or even an attorney, as a sailor.

The “Jessie Maxwell” was now in the hot latitudes. The fourth day was lovely, with a north-east breeze on the port quarter, and a burning sun, from which an awning protected the deck. An easy chair was placed near the skylight for Holdsworth, who gained the deck, leaning on Mr. Sherman’s arm. He halted on the last step of the companion-ladder, and clung to his friend with a look of mingled surprise and fear in his face.

Had there been any one, among those who watched him with curiosity, who had known him as the chief mate of the “Meteor,” he could scarcely have contemplated this wreck of a man without deep emotion. Conceive, if you can, a face with every characteristic that had once contributed to give it manly beauty, wrung out of it by sufferings which had left ineffaceable marks on every inch of the whole surface of the countenance. Conceive a stooped and trembling figure, the shoulders forward so as to hollow the chest, and the back bowed like an old man’s, the arms lengthened by the abnormal attitude and defeating every faint suggestion of symmetry which the eye might still hope to find. But this expresses nothing of the real transformation that had been wrought; of that subtle modification of expression, of the spiritual conditions of the face, of changes achieved by the most delicate strokes, but which were as effectual as a recasting of the whole figure and countenance could have been. He was dressed partly in his own clothes, partly in some of the clothes belonging to the second mate, who was a slight man, but whose garments hung loosely on Holdsworth. He wore his own coat, which formerly had buttoned tight across his chest, and which his muscular arms had filled out, as the fingers a glove; and he could now have buttoned it nearly twice around him. The ring that he had worn on his left hand had slipped from his skeleton finger long ago, when he had been splashing the sea-water over his face in vain endeavour to quench the burning agony in his head and throat. He might have worn Dolly’s wedding-ring on his middle finger now, for his hands were indeed scarcely more than bone.

Mr. Sherman eyed him anxiously as he stood tottering at the companion-hatchway. It seemed as if the long-desired revelation had come to the suffering man, and that he could now remember.

“Look about you,” he said, “and tell me if there is anything you see that recalls old impressions.”

“I see nothing that does this,” replied Holdsworth in a low voice. “Where is the boat I was taken from?”

“On the main-deck yonder.”

“I should like to see her,” said Holdsworth eagerly. “_One_ idea may light up all.”

They walked slowly forward. Here and there a seaman repairing a sail, or working in the lower shrouds, or doing one of the endless jobs of splicing, whipping, tarring, cleaning, which are so many conditions of the maritime life, looked at Holdsworth earnestly, but never intrusively; and when he was at the boat some of the hands came up to him with a spokesman, a middle-aged sailor in ear-rings, who said:

“Beg pardon, sir, but all hands wishes to say as they’re werry glad to see you up and doing; and if there’s e’er a thing any man among us can do in helping to make you comfortable while you’re with us, they’ll do it and welcome; and no liberty is intended.”

“Thank you, and God bless you!” answered Holdsworth, greatly moved by this speech, and with an expression on his face that could hardly fail to let the honest seamen know that their goodwill was not the less appreciated because it provoked no lengthened reply. The men retired, saying among themselves that, “though the gentleman warn’t a sailor, he ought to be one; and though he was nothing but a skeleting, he had as honest a face on him as ever they seed.”

“This is the boat,” said Mr. Sherman.

Holdsworth steadied himself by holding on to the gunwale and looked into it. The bags of bread lay under the aftermost thwart; there was the open locker which the sea had filled with water; there were the empty kegs, whose hollow rollings, as the boat had swayed to and fro, had formed such suggestive notes of torture, as one might think would nevermore depart from the ear that had received the echo. If there were impressions like red-hot brands to sear the mind with burning transcripts of the ugly agonising facts they counterfeited, one, if any of them, would surely be the impression conveyed by the scenes of which the interior of the boat had been the theatre. Here the widow had died, with her arm hanging over the side, yonder the General had expired, pointing to the phantom of his native town, which dying memory had evoked from the air; from that spot the actor had leaped; and on that seat the boy had died, holding out his hands to the sinking sun. The little arena should have been vital with memory, so small was the space in which infinite human misery had been packed. But to Holdsworth it conveyed no ideas. Not the faintest illumination entered his face in surveying it. To Mr. Sherman it was a thousandfold more significant than to Holdsworth, who was the chief actor in the heart-breaking tragedy that had been enacted in it. Yet he knew that it _ought_ to have an interest for him; and he stood clutching and staring at it, with a frowning forehead, wrestling wildly with his mind, in which the corpse of memory lay deep and hidden.

After a long interval he passed his hand across his eyes, and turned to Mr. Sherman.

“It will not come,” he said.

Mr. Sherman was both disappointed and astonished; disappointed by the fruitless result of an inspection, the good effect of which he had counted upon, and astonished by this phenomenon of the utter extinction of the most life-giving faculty of the mind.

He drew him to the boat again, and said:

“See now; you were found there, lying under that seat, and beside the mast lay another man, a dark-faced man, dressed in sailor’s clothes. Do you remember?”

“No.”

“Look at those bags of biscuit. They were found soaking in the locker. Those bags contained all the food you had on board. You must have suffered horribly from the dread of starvation when you found the biscuit spoilt by the salt water. Recall your thoughts on making the discovery. Can you?”

“No,” replied Holdsworth, pressing his hand to his head.

“There was a black flag--a piece of stuff, a portion of a woman’s dress it seemed--fastened to the mast-head. Do you remember?”

Holdsworth said “No.”

“Had you a woman with you?”

“I cannot tell.”

“See if you can go farther back. Try to recollect where your ship sailed from. Was it England?”

“England? Yes--I know England--but I do not remember if I came from England,” Holdsworth replied, with profound anxiety in his eyes.

“Come! you remember England! Did you sail from Liverpool?”

“I know Liverpool!” he exclaimed quickly.

“And London?”

“Yes! yes!”

“And what was the name of your ship?”

Holdsworth thought and thought without avail.

Herein was the deception that misled Mr. Sherman: Holdsworth could perfectly remember familiar names, but they had to be pronounced in his hearing before he could recall them. In like manner he could tell the names and discourse of the things he beheld, _because he saw them_. Had Johnson lived, he would have known and called him Johnson. Had Mr. Sherman spoken of Dolly, of Southbourne, of the London Docks, of the “Meteor,” of any of the incidents connected with the “Meteor’s” loss, Holdsworth would have remembered exactly as much as he heard. But, in the absence of suggestion, his memory was powerless--absolutely helpless--to generate independent conclusions as to the impressions his mind had received previous to his rescue.

The real miracle lay in _this_ contradiction--in the death of memory, dating _up to_ the moment of the swoon in the boat; in its resurrection to health and vigour, dating _from_ the moment of his recovery.

He returned to the chair that had been placed for him near the skylight, and Mr. Sherman, still not despairing of arousing this dormant faculty, went below and returned with the parcel of things that had been taken from Holdsworth’s pockets. These were given him one by one, but he handled them without recognition.

“But you know their names?” said Mr. Sherman.

“Yes. This is a knife. This is a watch.”

“They are yours; found in your pockets.”

His hand trembled, and he gazed at them with devouring eyes; but no other idea was conveyed to him by Mr. Sherman’s assurance than the bare fact that they were his property. He could not remember having purchased or owned them.

“It’s only a question of time, my man,” said Captain Duff, who stood by looking on at these strange ineffectual experiments.

No mere effort of imagination can do justice to Holdsworth’s suffering. The feeling that he _ought_ to remember, coupled with his incapacity and the sense of the past holding, perhaps, memories of vital consequence to him to recall, created a mental torture more afflicting than it is in the power of any man, who has not suffered in this way, to conceive. Loss of memory, even in trifling matters, always partakes of the nature of pain. The fruitless effort to recall a name, a date, begets uneasiness, and is soon converted into a positive torment. But figure your mind haunted with a sense of the significance of the past, not one faintest glimpse of which it is permitted to you to obtain. Figure yourself groping in a dense gloom, saying: “There are things here which I _feel_ are precious to me, which are of deep consequence to my happiness and to the happiness of others, but I cannot recall their names or their aspect!” and meanwhile the subtlest of your instincts is driving you mad with importunities to prosecute your search and lay the store of memory open to the light! This is worse than blindness; it is death in life. The years that you have lived are cut away from your existence, and with them all the precious accumulations of experience--love, sorrow, and thought itself. God preserve us all from such an affliction!