‘The captain tells me,’ said he, plunging his hands into his trousers pockets and leaning against the edge of the upper bedstead, ‘that he means to keep you on board, trusting that your memory will return meanwhile, when he’ll be able to put you in the way of reaching your friends. He cannot do better.’
‘But my memory may continue dark even to the end of the voyage,’ I exclaimed.
‘True, but you’re better here meanwhile. You might be consigned to the keeping of a captain who, on his arrival in England, would set you on shore without considering what is to become of you. How then, Miss C——, for that is to be your name, I hear. But if Captain Ladmore carries you round the world there’ll be ten months of time before ye, and it will be strange if you aren’t able to recollect in ten months. And now tell me—have ye never a sensation as of memory? What’s the feeling in you when you try to look back?’
‘As though it were a pitch-dark night, and I was groping with my hands over a stone wall.’
‘Good! Try now to think if ye have any other sensations.’
‘Yes, there is one; but how am I to express it?’
‘Try.’
‘When,’ I exclaimed, after a pause, ‘I endeavour to pierce the past, I seem to be sensible as of the presence of waves of darkness, thick folds of inky gloom swaying and revolving in black confusion, and dripping wet.’
He kept his eyes fastened upon me, lost in reflection. My words seemed to have struck him. Then, telling me it was a fine morning, and that I must come on deck and get all the air and sunshine possible, he went away.
I took up a book, but I could not fix my attention. I was able to read—that is to say, the printed characters were familiar to me, and the words intelligible—but I could not keep my mind fastened to the page. Growing weary of aimlessly sitting or wandering about in my berth, I opened the door and peeped out. As I did so I heard the fat, chuckling laugh of a baby tickled or amused. A young woman sat at the table that was nearest to my cabin, and in front of her, on the table, she held a baby who shook and crowed with laughter as she made faces at it. There was nobody else to be seen. At the forward end, all about the steps was a haze of sunshine, floating through the open hatch there from the front windows of the saloon; otherwise the atmosphere was somewhat gloomy.