Again and again when alone in my berth I took down the little mirror, as I had been used to do in the earlier passages of this experience, and sitting with it in my hands in a posture that brought the light flowing through the port-hole on to my face, so that the reflection of my countenance lay brilliantly in the mirror, I would peruse my lineaments, search mine own eyes, dwell upon the turn of my lips, and all the while I would be asking myself with a soft whisper, but with a heart racked with the anguish of hopeless inquiry—‘Who am I? Can it be that I am a wife? Oh God! what is it which seems to assure me that Mrs. Lee’s belief that I am a wife is true?’ And then I would say to myself, whilst I sat gazing at my face in the mirror, ‘If I am a wife I may have children. Can it be that there are children of my own in the unknown home in the unknown country from which God has banished me in blindness—that there are children there whose mother I am, who call me mother, who have cried for me in the day and in the night as their mother who has gone from them? Can it be so?’ I would ask myself. And then I would bend the ear of my mind to the mute lips of my dead or sleeping memory, and imagination would strain within me to catch some echo of a child’s voice, of a child’s cry or laugh, that would remind me and give me back the image of what, since I now believed myself a wife, I imagined that I had lost.
CHAPTER XIX
I CONVERSE WITH THE GIPSY
A few days of sultry oppressive calm were followed by a violent storm. I was sitting with Alice Lee in her cabin when her mother entered and said:
‘Such a marvellous sunset everybody declares never was seen. Go and look at it, Agnes; I will sit with Alice.’
‘I will go with Agnes,’ said her daughter.
She arose, but her cough obliged her to sit. When her cough had ceased she arose again, but slowly and painfully, with a heart-rending suggestion of weakness and exhaustion in her whole manner.
‘Do not go on deck, dearest,’ said her mother; ‘the cabin steps will try you.’
‘Oh, mother! let me go and let me go quickly,’ exclaimed Alice. ‘I love to look at a glorious sunset, and the sunsets here are soon gone.’
Mrs. Lee gazed at her child with a pleading face, but made no further objection, and the three of us went on deck, the girl supported by her mother and me. Twice whilst ascending the short flight of cabin stairs Alice paused for breath. There is much that I have cause to remember in this time, but nothing do I see after all these years more clearly than the anguish in the mother’s eyes, as she looked at me on her child pausing for a second time during the ascent of that short flight of steps.