CHAPTER XXV. — A PERIOD OF TWENTY-THREE YEARS
It took hours for the overjoyed wife and mother and the long-lost husband and father to tell their stories. Alice's was told first, and was followed by young Quincy's recital of his life at Fernborough, his four years at Harvard, and the story of the returned bill of exchange leading him to Europe, and his search for his mother in Vienna which ended with such happiness for all. Finally, the father began:
“On the night of the collision, after seeing you safely started in the life-boat with the last of the passengers, Captain Hawkins thought of a small boat on the upper deck which had been overlooked in the general scramble to get away from the doomed Altonia. Shouting to me to follow him, the Captain rushed up the ladder to the railing, and together we started to lower the boat. It was raised about three feet above the deck, being held in position by two supports shaped like a letter X. I had already loosened the ropes on my side, and then tried to kick out the support nearest me. It stuck, and finally I got down on my hands and knees thinking I could force it out better in that position. The water was steadily pouring in at the ship's side, and it was only a question of a few minutes before the Altonia would founder. Finally I gave one mighty push, the support gave away, the boat came down upon me like a ton weight,—and that was the last I knew until I awoke in a large room full of single beds, and a kindly faced old priest told me I was in the Hospital of San Marco, Palermo, Sicily.
“My God, the shock when I found that my sleep,—for such it was to me,—had lasted over twenty-three years! What thoughts went through my mind! Had you, Alice, been saved or lost? If saved, were you still living, and my son, whom I had never seen, was he living? Were Aunt Ella and my father and mother and my sisters still alive? I was roused from my revery by the good Father Paolo.
“He told me that the week before he had been summoned to the death-bed of an old seaman, Captain Vando, who had confessed that over twenty years before, while sailing from Boston to Palermo, two days after a very bad fog, he had picked up at sea a small open boat in which were two men, both of whom at first seemed dead. One, it was Captain Hawkins, was beyond all help; he was frozen to death,—frozen to death, Alice, in an effort to save my life, for, besides my own coat, his was found tucked around me.
“After hours of work, I was brought back to life,—but a life worse than death. The Captain told Father Paolo that my mind was a blank, I could remember nothing of my past, I did not know my name. Then temptation came to Captain Vando. He took from me my belt, in which I had some English gold, a few English bank-notes, and the five bills of exchange, each for a thousand pounds. The latter he did not dare to dispose of, but the money he appropriated to his own use. He soon found I could be of no use to him on ship-board, so, on his arrival at Palermo, he sold me to a rich planter, for a hundred lire, and I was put to work in the orange groves.
“Captain Vando in his confession told Father Paolo that he still had my belt containing the bills of exchange, and before his death he delivered these over to the priest. After the Captain's death, Father Paolo went to Signor Matrosa, who, when confronted with the facts, admitted I had been sold to him, and that I was known under the name of Alessandro Nondra, but he told him that I had been mixed up in a fight, and had received such a bad wound that I had been sent to the hospital. One of his managers, an Italian, had married an English girl, and they had a daughter with light hair, and blue eyes. It seems I had been sent to his house one day with a message, and when I saw his daughter, I cried out, 'Alice, Alice,' and caught the girl in my arms. Her father was so enraged that he picked up a gun lying near at hand, and gave me such a terrific blow on the head that I was knocked senseless. I remember nothing of it, but mistaking Anita for you was, undoubtedly, my first approach to my former consciousness. That scene was probably the one which you saw in your dream, Alice, and to think that afterwards you should be so near me in Palermo, and neither of us know it!
“At the hospital the doctors found that the blow on my head had caused but a comparatively unimportant scalp wound, but, in dressing it, they found that at some earlier time my skull had been crushed. They performed the delicate operation of trepanning the skull, and when I came out from the effects of the ether, my mind was in the same state as it had been twenty-three years before.