‘A good many will starve, I daresay, and wish themselves home. The colonies are full. There is plenty of land, but people when they arrive will not leave the towns. They will not do what those who created the colonies did—dig and build new places—and there is no room in the towns.’
‘There are a great many people down there,’ said I, running my eye over the groups. ‘I wonder if any one of them has lost his memory.’
‘It would be a blessed thing,’ said Mrs. Lee, ‘for most of them, perhaps for all of them, if they had left their memories behind them. What have they to remember? Years of toil, of famine, of hardship, years of heart-breaking, struggles for what?—for this! How big is this world!’ she exclaimed, casting her eyes round the sea, ‘yet there is no room for these people in it. How abundant are the goodly fruits of the earth! And yet those people there represent hundreds and thousands who cannot find a root in all the soil to provide a meal for themselves and the children. Yet though we all say there is something wrong, who is to set it right? Do you observe how that strange, fierce, dark woman is staring at you?’
‘Yes. She is one of two wild-looking women who pressed forward to view me when I came on board.’
‘What is her nation?’ exclaimed Mrs. Lee. ‘She looks like a gipsy.’
The woman sat upon the corner of the great square of hatch within easy distance of the sight. Her complexion was tawny, her nose flat. Thick rings, apparently of silver, trembled in her ears, and her head was covered with a sort of red hood. The stare of her gleaming black eyes was fierce and fixed. I had observed her without giving her close attention, but now that my mind was directed to her, her unwinking fiery gaze made me feel uneasy.
‘Let us walk,’ said Mrs. Lee.
We turned our faces towards the stern of the ship and paced the deck, but every time we approached the edge of the poop I encountered the cat-like stare of the toad-coloured woman’s eyeballs.
Our conversation almost wholly concerned Alice Lee. The mother’s heart was full of her sweet daughter. When she began to speak of her she could talk of nothing else. She hoped that the voyage would benefit the girl, but the note of a deep misgiving trembled in the expression of her hope, and I could not doubt that secretly within herself she thought of her child as lost to her. Do you wonder that I should have found such a warm-hearted sympathetic friend as Mrs. Lee in so short a time? When I look back I believe I can understand how it was: she was a woman with a heart heavy with sorrow, but in me she beheld a person far more deeply afflicted than she was in her fears for her child, or could be in her loss of her. Her daughter was dying—she might die; but the memory of the girl’s sweetness, her purity, her angelic character would be the mother’s whilst she drew breath. But what had gone out of my life? She could not imagine—but she would guess that love—love not less precious nor less holy than hers for her child lay black, and, perhaps, extinguished for ever in my past. It might be the love of a parent, of a sister, nay of a sweetheart: thus she would reason; not dimly for an instant conceiving me to be a married woman with children; but some sort of love, not less precious and holy than her own, might have passed out of my life by the eclipse of my mind. This she would conjecture, and the sympathy of her own deep affliction would be mine in a sense of friendship that association might easily ripen into affection. In a word, she pitied me with a heart that asked pity for herself, and she pitied me the more lovingly because of her daughter’s tender touching interest in me.
We paced the deck for something less than an hour, during which we were occasionally addressed by the passengers, and once joined by one of the ladies who had contributed to what I may call my outfit. But this was towards the end of our stroll, after we had talked long and deeply of Alice Lee, and after Mrs. Lee had opened her heart to me in many little memories of her life before God had widowed her.