‘Oh! Miss C., sir, undoubtedly,’ she answered.
I lifted my head, and perceived the captain examining me as scrutinisingly as the western light that was now weak and fast waning would permit.
‘Then Miss C.,’ said he, rising slowly, and smiling gravely as he pronounced the name, ‘you will consider yourself the guest of the ship Deal Castle for the present. By-and-by your memory will return to you. We shall then learn all about you, and then, whatever steps I take must certainly result in restoring you to your friends; whereas to tranship you now—— But that is settled,’ he added, with a dignified motion of the hand.
He pulled out his watch, held it to the porthole, and then bidding the stewardess see that I wanted for nothing, gave me a bow and went out. Mrs. Richards produced a box of matches from her pocket, and lighted a bracket lamp.
‘What do you think of Captain Ladmore?’ she asked.
‘He is the soul of goodness, Mrs. Richards.’
‘He is, indeed. Who would suppose him to be a sea-captain? Sea-captains are thought to be a very rough body of men. Before I come upon the water as a stewardess I used to imagine all sea-captains as persons with red faces wrinkled like walnut-shells, and boozy eyes. They all had bandy legs, and used bad language. Since then I have met many sea-captains, and some of them are as I used to think they all were; but some are otherwise, and Captain Ladmore is one of them. On his return home two or three voyages ago he found his wife and only daughter dead. They had died while he was away. The blow was dreadful. He cannot forget it, they say. It changed his nature—it made him a sad, grave man, and thus he will always be. Well, now I must go and attend to my work.’
I opened the door, and she passed out bearing the tray.
The floating swing of the ship was so steady that I was able to walk about my cabin with comfort. I paced round and round it with my hands clasped behind me and my eyes fixed on the floor, thinking over what Captain Ladmore had said. On the whole I was comforted. It startled me, it shocked me, indeed, when I thought that unless my memory returned I was to be carried all the way to Australia. Not that I had any clear ideas as to where Australia was, or its distance from the ship, and, as I have before said, I was unable to grasp the meaning of time as conveyed by the stewardess’s information that the passage out would occupy three months or four months as it might be. But from what Mr. McEwan and Captain Ladmore and Mrs. Richards had said among them, I could in some manner understand that Sydney, whither the ship was bound, was an immense distance off, and though I had not the least idea where my home was—whether it was in England or in America, as the young Frenchman had suggested, or in that very continent of Australia to which the Deal Castle was voyaging—yet the mere notion of being carried a vast distance, and for no other purpose than to give my memory time to revive, with the certainty, moreover, that if my memory had not returned to me at the end of the voyage I should be as lonely, miserable, and helpless as I now was: here were considerations, as I say, to startle and shock me.